“Like, cow-sized or very small?” The girl raised one eyebrow. “I’m picturing be swarmed by scorpions, only it’s tiny, angry bunnies.”
Jamie laughed at that. “No, I meant big. Not cow-sized, but big. Think…chest high? And the teeth. Emmy and I fought some.”
“Emmy is here?” Taigan stopped dead. Her hands were scuffed and dirty and had left a few smudges across her face where she had wiped the sweat away and tucked stray wisps of hair behind her ears. “Is she with you?”
“No. This time, it’s only me.”
“This time?”
“We both went in to test it when Mom and Dad came to see the facility. They weren’t quite sure they wanted to hook you up to it and the team offered to let us try it. I don’t think either of them did, only me and Emmy.”
She kept climbing. Her face was sad now and her movements jerky.
“Sis?”
Taigan didn’t respond right away. Tears glistened in her eyes and she sniffed at regular intervals. She climbed with single-minded intensity now.
Jamie could only see her by the whiteboard that hovered nearby and he hurried to catch up. He seemed stronger than his sister, but she had a head-start and she wasn’t paying attention to pain or tiredness right now.
“Tell me you’re okay,” he called.
“Of course I’m not okay!” The words exploded out of her and she looked furiously in his direction. One tear had escaped. “That’s why you’re here, remember?”
“Okay, but what did I say?”
“I hate this part!” She began to cry and her voice had a raw edge to it. “Hearing about all the things I missed while I was under, hearing about all of you making decisions—about me—only I’m not there, this not even being our thing because it was your and Emmy’s first, and now I’m only—” She brushed angrily at her hair to get it out of her face. “An afterthought,” she said.
“Everything is set up around you!” he responded sharply. “How the hell could you be an afterthought? You were why we were there!”
“Yeah, but you were there only the four of you!” Taigan shouted. She climbed so fast now that she constantly missed holds, slipped, and gritted her teeth on exclamations of pain. Each only made her angrier and it would be logical to stop, but she wouldn’t. Prima looked on with concern.
She had set this up to make them talk but she hadn’t envisioned it going like this.
Taigan pushed onto a gently sloping stretch of rock and shale. She looked at the temple, then down to where Jamie was.
“You know,” she said, almost too quietly for him to hear, “the four real members of the family. And then me. The one you can’t count on.”
He stopped and fixed his gaze on where he thought she was. “We never forget you.”
“I know.” Her lip trembled. “But there’s a difference between being someone people think about and being someone who’s there.” Quietly, she added, “I’m not angry at you, Jamie. Not at any of you. But it sucks to have this catch-up talk every time I wake up—what everyone did while I lay in a hospital bed. And this time, it feels more personal—like you and Emmy got into the game and had fun together, and you and I can’t even see each other.”
The terrible thing about human thought patterns, Prima realized, wasn’t that they were so illogical or that they made so many jumps—it was how much sense they made after the fact. It was the way you could say something that was simply a fact but it would hurt someone more than a punch to the face. After you’d done it, you could see what you’d done but at the time, the possibility didn’t even occur to you.
Jamie climbed up the same rock Taigan had used and the two of them stood together, almost in the same place. They were overlapping and the girl sometimes disappeared entirely into his larger frame.
“We’ll fix this,” he said, and his voice shook with conviction. “I know it’s worst for you, but—”
“I’m usually asleep for it,” she interrupted. “So it’s probably worse for you.”
“You know what I mean. This…whatever it is. Glitch. We’ll fix it. Don’t think of us doing things without you. Think of us finding new ways to bring you home. We aren’t whole without you.”
Taigan leaned her head on his shoulder—or would have if she hadn’t been halfway through his body.
“Let’s go see the temple,” she said. “I’ll only see me living a normal day, and I hope like hell I won’t see yours.”
He laughed and the two of them set off together.
Chapter Seventeen
Ben had no idea where the hell he was going.
He tried to keep his mind blank. When he thought about what had happened, he was furious, but guilt and shame waited offstage. He never let them into his thoughts but he knew they were there. They were waiting for their moment to strike.
It wasn’t until he was a few streets away that he realized why it all felt so familiar. It shouldn’t be, in all honesty. He had never assassinated someone and been thrown out by his crime-boss protector in the middle of the night.
But he had done what someone told him specifically not to do, only for the whole situation to go up in flames. After which he always—always—ran away. He picked up and headed to a new job, new relationship, or new remote village. Each time he did that, he told himself that this was why he didn’t want to settle down. People were simply too ridiculous.
And, the whole time, he wouldn’t let a part of him speak because it insisted that he knew this was his fault—that he was the constant. He approached every new job with hope but that grew slimmer every time. There was always the pit of certainty in his stomach that this would be exactly like the last time.
Of course it would. He was the problem and he couldn’t leave himself behind.
Now, he wanted to cringe at the memories of climbing mountains alone, staring at sunrises, meditating. and giving up his possessions. It turned out that you could do all the things that were supposed to give you clarity, but it was possible to do every one of them in bad faith.
He put his head down and darted glances to his left and his right as he walked. Sometimes, people would come to the ends of the alleyways or the shadowed windows to watch as he passed. Heffog was scarcely quieter at night, only more watchful.
The itching feeling at the back of his neck ebbed and flowed as he passed through neighborhoods. Who could say what it was—what tiny sounds or glimpses of movement the body saw but the mind couldn’t catch—but you could tell when you were somewhere unsafe.
Ben merely didn’t know how unsafe.
The sensation unsettled him constantly and he made a decision. The next time he was somewhere he wasn’t as afraid and there weren’t as many watchful eyes, he would look for a place to hide.
Time blurred and he wasn’t sure how long it had been before he found it. The sky was still black, but there was enough light from distant lanterns and streetlights that he could see the buildings around him. He crept up to one of them and looked in the window. The opening gaped in the wall, uncovered. His careful study showed the remains of a cloth window covering tied out of the way and now more rags and thread than actual cloth.
He couldn’t see anyone inside or hear the small noises of stirring or snoring, but he wasn’t foolish enough to walk into an empty building in the middle of the night.
A different idea crept in and was one he could focus on with a greater degree of confidence.
This building, like many in the area, had been made with plaster daubed hastily over wood and stone, along with a few mud bricks. No one had protected the bricks properly from the elements and they had worn away beneath the outer layer. It wasn’t a fantastic set of holds and not the kind of thing you climbed if you made smart decisions.
But he wasn’t making smart decisions right now, and there was something to be said for choosing the best of the bad decisions available to you.
He sighted up the side of the building. Doing a flash—a one-track climb with no false starts—didn’t seem v
ery likely there, but he didn’t want to take any longer than he had to. Experience had taught him that a few minutes spent planning his route meant far less time climbing—and far less chance of bad falls.
The blue sky and the falling feeling were back in the pit of his stomach and he leaned forward and tried not to gag. The last thing he needed was to attract attention.
All he wanted was to forget falling—and seeing Mike fall.
“Ben, are you all right? Your heart rate spiked.”
Ben didn’t answer for a moment. “I was…thinking of the accident.”
He got the sense of Prima nodding. “Tell me if I can help,” she said finally.
That made him smile. “I will. Thank you. Now, hold my beer.”
“I have no hands—wait, beer? You don’t have beer.”
“It’s an expression one says when one is about to do something stupid.”
“Then why haven’t I heard it from you before? Zing!”
For a moment, he had to lean against the wall and muffle his laughter with his hand. This day had been a nightmare and he was very sure his laughter was about more than the particular joke, but an AI poking fun at him was legitimately as funny as all hell. It took several minutes for him to calm, during which time he was convinced several times that he would break a rib.
When he was relatively sure he wouldn’t burst out laughing again, he began to climb. The handholds were rough and he collected more splinters than he knew what to do with, but he couldn’t focus on that right now.
He used the corner of the building as his main route. It was the roughest part of the building with stone blocks and pieces of wooden planks. There were occasional easy holds where mud bricks had crumbled away, although not as many as he’d like.
On the other hand, he would like the building to stay up once he got to the top.
This was easier than his first couple of climbs. He seemed to be re-learning the way pressure felt on his fingertips and how to balance on the edge of a foot. Sometimes, he forgot that this was more difficult now and at others, it seemed to come naturally. His weight was braced on his feet and his fingers only lightly brushed the stone when he was at rest.
Moving from the corner up and over the roof was undignified, not to mention risky. Ben had not been able to determine the composition of the roof and his hands traced over ceramic tiles while he hung there, rather like a desperate sloth. He needed to shift his feet off the edge of the building to swing back so he could haul himself up.
It was simply that he couldn’t seem to make his feet do it. It wasn’t that his body couldn’t tell where they were but that his brain demanded loudly to know why he was thirty-odd feet above the ground and why he wanted to go even higher. His frontal lobe wanted him to know, in no uncertain terms, that this was a foolish idea and he should go down immediately.
He would have to do it somehow, so exhaled a long breath and made his mind a blank. Cautiously, he unhooked one foot and moved the leg back, then the second one. His body didn’t swing wildly—he had enough core strength, especially in this world—but he was acutely aware of the dangers of being this high up.
Once, that had been a thrill. After the accident, it was more complicated.
Hiking himself up over the edge was more difficult than he had anticipated. Unlike a wall, he couldn’t push out with his feet and use the momentum of tethered arms to swing up. This was all core and upper body and relied on his newly restored and still faulty hands.
Yeah, this wasn’t his brightest idea ever.
Finally, he accomplished it by swinging his right leg up and pushing with the extra hold. The roof edge, thankfully, was curved in like a pagoda, which meant he could get his feet under him more easily and rest for a moment. He sat and leaned back against the upper part of the curve while his heart hammered and sweat cooled on his skin.
When he moved to turn, his relief fled. It was the result of only the slightest give under his feet but enough to make his breath catch in his throat. His heart seized and he saw the blue again and felt the tumble. But when the spots cleared from his vision, he wasn’t falling and the little clatter he’d heard was gone. He was still safe.
Ceramic shattered on paving stones. He froze again and his heart made a concerted effort to leap sideways out of his body.
Ben waited for ten breaths, then twenty, listening for the sound of footsteps or creaking shutters, but heard nothing. Finally, he took two steps and hauled himself over the final level of the roof with single-minded determination. As his first climbing instructor had said, “Tell your body what to do and then get your mind out of the way.”
He stood on a fairly wide, flat roof, recessed by two feet or so. Someone had lived there once but not recently, and anything of value had long since been stripped. There was only the faint detritus left after a move and after rain and wind had swept most of the rest away. He could see a scrap of a rag, the remains of an old flag, and pieces of string hanging from some tiles. Four holes in the floor suggested that a covering of some kind had been held up with poles.
While he didn’t have any of that, what he did have was a place where no one else seemed to be. He’d take it.
With a heavy sigh, he sat and let his arms fall at his sides. Now that he was over the edge of the roof, every muscle seemed to tremble.
“I fucked up, didn’t I?”
Silence was not what he hoped to hear.
“Prima?”
“You didn’t seem like you were quite done with your part of the conversation yet.”
Ben cursed internally at the AI for being astute. He didn’t like that. She had a point, though. “I wasn’t. I don’t think I did fuck up.”
“There it is.”
“There what is? She’s getting on my case, but she’s copping out on this whole thing. ‘One person can’t stand in the way of the slave trade.’” He made finger quotes bitterly. If anyone was watching, he would probably have looked completely insane when he mouthed words almost silently and gestured. “They won’t change because someone asks them nicely and lays out a gold road. They’ll stop because it gets too difficult to keep doing business, and that isn’t pleasant. Does she think she’s teaching them a lesson by stealing their money? It goes back into the community so they can suck it out again. That’s a stupid system.”
“Mmm, rain and droughts work much the same way.”
“Whose side are you on?” Ben demanded.
“I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m an observer.”
“Kind of.” He scowled at the sky, which had begun to show the first hint of dawn. “I’m only saying you don’t stop something like this by turning away and pretending not to see it.”
Prima said nothing.
“Well? Do you?”
“I think,” she said after a short hesitation, “that if there were an easy, assured route for this kind of thing, slavery would not still exist.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” he snapped in response.
“Yes, but that’s the issue, isn’t it? It’s never merely inconvenient. It makes you give up things you aren’t prepared to give.”
With that, she gave every indication of withdrawing respectfully from the conversation and left him to stare into the middle distance. Finally, as the sky lightened, he managed to fall into a fitful sleep.
It had been a long night.
Chapter Eighteen
The twins walked into the temple, each with their hand outstretched, reaching for contact.
Prima found it fascinating how much living creatures relied on their sense of touch for comfort. It had been built into the algorithms governing how characters interacted, and she had initially discounted it. As she understood it, physical contact was for romantic purposes and was used sporadically for friendship and other social interactions.
Now, she began to think that without a body of her own, she had misunderstood something fundamental.
The pool was positioned at the end of the temple. Mindful of th
e information she had researched on architecture and human psychology, she had made the environment as comforting as she could with muted, fairly even lighting and a low ceiling that slanted down at the corners. Although sky and clouds could be seen outside, she hoped the twins felt safe there.
Their heart rates were slowing. Prima gave herself some congratulations.
They reached the pool and each looked to where the other would be. They couldn’t see each other’s faces, which meant they couldn’t decide by tiny flickers and gestures who should go first.
“Do you want to go?” Jamie asked. “Or should I?”
Taigan hesitated. The AI got the sense that making this decision through words was difficult for her. “You go first,” she said finally.
Jamie approached the pool. It was wide, paved with tiles of various pale blues, and fed by a little fountain so the water barely moved.
She would see now if she’d gambled well on human psychology. It seemed she wasn’t very good at this, and after a few missteps in the past weeks, she began to worry that she would never grasp what was required.
He knelt and stared at his reflection, bit his lip, and looked to where Taigan hung back.
“Oh, come on. You probably won’t see it and it won’t be gross.”
His sister laughed slightly and crept closer. She joined him in looking at the water and her face fell when she couldn’t see their two reflections together.
Jamie stared, waited, and eventually, extended his hand tentatively to touch the surface. He held back at first as if worried that a curse would come out of nowhere and drag him into the underworld, but nothing happened when he touched it. He only saw exactly what Prima wanted him to see—his face and nothing more.
“Prima, am I supposed to do something?” he asked finally.
“I can only tell you what the legend is.”
“But you wouldn’t have hauled us up here if it didn’t work, right? Right? Prima?” He looked around and his tone changed. “But how could it work? How could a game see…”
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