The Immortal Game (book 1) Read Free

of him.
    She wondered what might come next. He acted like a man who could easily start punching a wall. The outline of muscle beneath his T-shirt told her that he had the strength to do some damage.
    Instead his hand came up and rubbed at the dark stubble along his jaw.
    What she saw made her stomach lurch. She stopped worrying about his temper and stared at his hand sliding back and forth.
    Had it been that hand? The left? She knew it had. It had the same ring, dark and pitted, old looking. But where was the wound? It was gone.
    There was nothing but a faint shiny line where the gash had been.

TWO
    A cool breeze rustled the gold and crimson leaves in the trees that lined the campus walkway and Ruby caught the woody scents of autumn. She unwrapped her half eaten Ambrosia Bar and ate it in two big bites as she walked. The chewy brown outside was the perfect contrast to the gooey golden filling and she was disappointed when it was gone. She consoled herself with a sip of her latte but it tasted flat and ordinary in comparison.
    Extra police and security guards had patrolled the quads and the corridors since the telephone bombings, but the grip of panic had loosened as days went by without another attack. Now the wide concrete path became busier the closer Ruby got to the science quad.
    Mendeleev Hall buzzed with people comparing notes about the bombing. Ruby picked up her graded exam from the pile at the front of the room and found her seat in the stadium-style lecture hall.
    She put the quiz facedown on the desk and watched Dr. Reed, in his signature tartan sport coat, take a thick pile of papers out of his briefcase and ready himself for the lecture.
    She drummed her pencil on the tabletop and told herself that this grade wasn’t that important. It was just a quiz, a preface to the weightier exam at the end of the week. But she knew she needed a ninety. She needed at least a three-point-five GPA.
    She took a deep breath.
    In a fit of courage she flipped the paper over and looked for the red number she knew would be neatly written in the upper left hand corner. Her face fell. She blinked. Seventy ? She checked for her name at the top of the paper. This couldn’t be her test. She must have picked up the wrong one. But it was hers.
    She looked down at the questions, then at her answers. She had studied for days. How could she not know this stuff?
    There was little time to dwell. Dr. Reed’s tartan coat now hung from the back of a chair near the front of the room and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He wrote a series of molecules on the whiteboard. Ruby folded her quiz in half and jammed it between the pages of her textbook. She opened her notes and scrawled the complex shapes of the molecules as fast as she could.
    After the lecture Mark caught her eye as she flexed her cramped right hand. He slipped out of the space between the desktop and the molded plastic chair and waved. “Hey, Ruby, wait up.”
    “How’d you do?” he asked as he pulled out his copy of the quiz in the crowded hall. “I got a ninety-five.”
    She had met Mark at her study group. His hair was gelled into a frenzy of short blond spikes and he had a painful looking pimple by his right ear. He rubbed the back of his neck and scanned his paper. “I can’t believe I missed one. What did you get for number six?”
    “I’d have to look,” she said, avoiding eye contact. They passed the microbiology lab and she caught a sharp whiff of ripe bacteria, a cross between sweaty socks and moist cheese.
    “I forgot to finish balancing my equation,” he said. “Too many hydrogens in my product. I’ll need to be careful on the exam Friday. Are you coming to the study group?”
    “Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I?” She glanced at him, wondering if maybe she wasn’t invited.
    “You want to get a coffee or something before?” he said, a little too quickly.
    “Nah.” She looked down at the glossy grey- and brown-flecked floor. “I’ll