Jace the gamer

  Jace entered the cube and held Luri’s ID card toward the door. The lighting in the cube brightened, and the arms started moving. Divided into several segments, different levels of the robotic cylinder pivoted independently. As some of the attack arms came his way wielding padded weapons, Jace ran diagonally and reached for the bag of nuts. The arm holding the treats raised them out of reach, and an arm with a padded bat struck Jace on the shoulder. He stumbled into a second club that whacked him in the chest and should have knocked him down, but Jace grabbed hold of it just long enough to regain his balance. After releasing the club, he darted forward and snatched a candy bar from a mechanical hand.

  “Not pretty,” Luri said. “But he kept his feet.”

  An instant after he claimed the candy, a padded bat whacked Jace in the back of the head. He staggered but ducked another swing, then jumped a swift swipe at his shins. Lunging, he ripped a stuffed rabbit from a robotic grasp,
then spun away from a blow to his side, barely staying on his feet.

  “He should just go down,” Luri said.

  Cole thought the arms sped up a little. Jace tossed aside the stuffed animal and the candy bar. He dodged and weaved, reaching for prizes and barely missing them. He got battered by three padded weapons in a row and hung on to the third to keep from falling. It lifted him off his feet as two more cushioned bats swung at him. Jace dropped and crouched low just in time, holding his hands out for balance but keeping them off the ground.

  “He’s going to get hurt,” Luri said.

  Jace waded in toward the cylinder where the arms were thickest. He danced and twisted to turn some attacks from the arms into glancing blows and snagged a small, golden disk covered in shrink-wrap. Cole wondered if it might be a little CD or DVD.

  As he stood near the cylinder, a bat hit Jace on the shoulder while another swept his legs from the other direction. He flopped to the floor, and the lights dimmed. Getting up, the little golden disk still in hand, Jace collected the candy bar and the stuffed rabbit from the floor, then exited.

Chapter 8