Then, as he and his squad looked on, light poured down from the thing onto the buildings below, obliterating everything it fell upon.
Stephen stepped back, cold, horrified. Russ’s death had been bad; this was way worse. He’d known people in New York. He’d spoken with them many times, on the radio, on the net . . . and . . .
He turned and left the room, first walking, then breaking into a run.
“Jefe?” Angel called after him. “Where you going?”
Stephen didn’t answer. He hurled himself upstairs, back to the room where Angel and Hanna had found him. It was small and dark, the windows boarded over. Another computer sat on a desk there, its screen shining in the dim. On the monitor was an image of a bedroom—the messy lair of a thirteen-year-old boy whose dad was waiting for him to play chess.
“God damn it,” he muttered and ran to the computer. There was a headset beside it, and a controller—twins to the ones he used in that other world, the ones on the screen.
He slammed on the headset, picked up the controller, and thumbed START.
He lay very still, his head spinning. The house was eerily quiet, the only sound the distant clunk-hum of the fridge downstairs. No noise came from the living room or from outside.
He should have been able to hear more. The neighbor and his eight-year-old son had been playing catch in their yard when Steve was doing his homework and not that much time had passed, really. He glanced at his bedside table, where the clock’s digits glowed an ominous red. They read 7:51. It had been 7:29 when he last looked.
Swallowing, he got up off the bed and went to the window. The blinds were shut; they crinked as he bent them open to peer between the horizontal slats. The sound pierced the silence like a gunshot, and he winced. He looked toward the neighbors’ yard.
They lay motionless on the new-mown grass, the scuffed baseball discarded near the kid’s gloved left hand. Jason, his name was—had been. Now he and his dad lay in heaps, mouths open, eyes staring at the reddening, twilight sky. Dead, or gone, or whatever you called it. Jason’s Sox cap had fallen off, revealing a shock of copper-red hair.
“Shit,” Steve said, and turned and ran from the room.
He hadn’t known that Jason and his dad were in New York. Why would he? He’d spoken maybe six words to the two of them.
Then, as he slammed out into the hall and hurled himself downstairs three steps at a time, he put them out of his mind entirely. Because there was someone else, someone he thought he did know lived in New York. And yet, he hoped he was wrong. He hoped he was mis remembering, or that that someone had moved, or had gotten out of the city somehow . . .
He hit the ground floor, stumbled into the living room, and his hopes disappeared.
Steve’s dad sat in his easy chair in the living room, pulled up to the coffee table across from the couch, where Steve had sat many times before. The chessboard sat on the table, its Arthurian pieces set into opening formation for a game that, now, would never be played. Steve’s dad was dead, too, slumped sideways in the chair, his head hanging low. A glass of beer lay overturned on the floor next to him, an amber puddle soaking into the rug. A soda can rested on a coaster on Steve’s side of the table, the side with the white pieces. The cola in the can fizzed and hissed.
Steve shook his head, the room swaying around him. His dad—or the guy who played his dad, anyway—must have been in the city when the Klathi burned it. How many hundreds—thousands?—of people sat or lay lifeless like him, like the neighbors? How many had been plugged in when the white light scorched New York off the map?
Numb, he walked to the couch and sat down. He ignored the soda, ignored the pieces, the Excalibur-shaped king’s pawn begging to be moved two squares forward to begin the game. He just stared at the empty shell of his dad, cut off from the real world and left hollow here in the game.
He’d first come to Otherworld three years ago, one of the first to join the game. Before he played for the first time, he’d thought it a ridiculous and stupid thing when the Klathi had turned the real world into something so much like one of the first-person shooters or squad combat games he’d played when he was a kid. Russ had been the one who coaxed him into plugging in, and Stephen had played as Steve-o for just an hour before he got hooked.
The game had been a virtual-world simulator, a new generation being developed at the media labs at MIT when the Klathi came. The MIT kids had managed to keep the thing going all these years, running encoded on the net, its servers squirreled away God knew where. Its popularity exploded quickly among the survivors and fighters because the sim was built in the image of Earth before the Klathi. It contained numerous cities, but Boston-Cambridge was the most prominent because that was what the MIT kids knew best. You could log in as a kid, a teenager, a college student, an adult, even an elderly codger if you wanted to. Everyone had their needs: some wanted to re-create their childhood as they remembered it, others to live out their years as if the Klathi had never come. People made friends, formed families, escaped from the blighted, ruined hulk of the real world.
Stephen didn’t know his “parents” real names; he only knew that his “dad” had been a fighter in Manhattan, and his “mom” was in San Francisco. Most people outside the game thought it was a little unsavory that he’d interact with them they way he did in Otherworld, pretending to be their kid, but they didn’t get it. Steve’s dad wanted his old life back, including the son who’d died when the Klathi first attacked. His mom needed to let out the stress of the real world and to feel in control.
And Stephen . . . well, he just wanted to feel safe for a while.
But now his virtual father was dead. The neighbors lay lifeless on their lawn. All over Otherworld, bodies must be sprawled in heaps, more like discarded puppets than actual corpses. The Klathi had made their mark on this place now, just as they had in the real world. Stephen wanted to escape, but there was no such thing at all.
He sat in the living room, staring across the chessboard at his father’s husk, for quite a while. He wasn’t sure how long, but night had fallen outside when a crash roused him from his stupor.
It was a huge noise, loud and jarring, the atonal blare of a car horn grating the air at its end. He leaped up, knocking the coffeetable aside and scattering Arthur and his knights onto the carpet, and ran to the front window. Parting the curtains, he saw mayhem on Lagrange Street. An SUV—they still drove them here, where people didn’t prize every drop of gasoline—had veered off the road, taken out a mailbox and a fire hydrant, and smashed through the bay windows of the house across the street. Its driver and passenger were slumped over, and Steve knew they were both dead.
Not just from the crash.
He looked up and down the street and saw more bodies. Half a dozen of them, strewn on the sidewalk and in the road. In the distance, he heard another loud bang as someone’s car hit someone else’s car a couple blocks away. Birds sang in the bushes and squirrels darted from tree to tree, but he didn’t see another living person.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, turning away from the window—then yelled and jumped back, stumbling against the wall.
He wasn’t alone. Three other people were in the living room, staring at him. One was a cop in uniform; another, a college student who lived down the street, whom he had a crush on in this world, though he wasn’t sure what her name was. Susan? Sarah?
The third was his mom. Only she didn’t look like his mom anymore, somehow. The clothes were the same, and the face, and the hair—but something was different about her eyes. They’d lost the glimmer of scorn and judgment he knew so well. Now she looked at him with a keen attention he found a bit unnerving.
She’s looking at me like I’m an adult, he thought. Like I’m Stephen, not Steve.
“This the one, Sam?” asked the cop. He was a big guy, brawny and tall, but his voice was a woman’s. Stephen might have laughed if he hadn’t been so freaked out.
Steve’s mom nodded. “That’s him,” she said, and he
r voice was different too. Deeper, younger, with the slightest touch of a Japanese accent. “Hello, Steve-o.”
“What the hell is going on?” Steve asked.
“We’re short on time,” his mother replied. Sam, the cop had called her, not Ellen, her Otherworld name. “They’ve already hit a lot of cities, and they’re still going.”
Steve thought of the light, blazing white-hot as it consumed Manhattan. The Klathi hadn’t just stopped at New York. That was why there were so many bodies outside, why cars were smashing up with dead people at the wheel. “Where?” he asked.
“L.A.,” said the college girl, speaking in the voice of a fifty-year-old man. Any vestige of lust Steve felt for her died immediately. “Chicago. Philly. Toronto. Houston.”
“London,” added the cop. “Moscow. Shanghai. New Del—”
“You get the idea,” Steve’s mom interrupted. “This is something we’ve been expecting. The fighting’s been stalemated too long in too many places. The Klathi got tired of losing bodies and equipment, so they . . . stepped things up.”
The cop put a hand to his ear and scowled. “Tokyo just went.”
“Crap,” said the college girl. “Never did get over there for sushi.”
Steve shook his head. “Boston?”
“Still standing,” Sam replied and nodded at Steve’s dad. “Else you’d be dead as him. But it won’t be long.”
A lump formed in Steve’s throat.
“You don’t have much time, kid,” growled the college girl, who was clearly neither Susan nor Sarah. “A few hours, tops. And we’ve got to get moving soon. You’re not the only one on our list.”
“List?” Steve asked. “What list?”
His mom stepped forward. “Have a seat.”
Steve was going to argue, but there was something in her tone that told him not to. He sat down on the couch, his eyes never leaving her.
“All right,” Sam said. “This is how it is. Some of us are traveling around Otherworld, trying to find people who will join us before it all burns. You’re one of those people.”
“Join you? But you just said I’ve got a few hours to live,” Steve said.
“Your body, pal,” said the college girl. “Not you.”
Sam held up a hand. “Back off, Roger. Let me handle this. He’s my kid, after all.”
The college girl shrugged. The cop chuckled. Steve’s brows lowered.
“What—” he began, but his mom interrupted him mid-question.
“Shut up and listen. You may or may not know it, Stephen, but you’ve earned a bit of a reputation in the resistance. Certain people think you’ve got potential for what comes next, after the cities have all burned.”
“After?” Steve asked. “How can there be an after?”
“Some people in the real world will survive,” Sam went on. “In the country, mostly. Maybe enough to keep the human race going in the long term. There were billions of us, once. There’ll still be a few million, even after the Klathi scorch everything. And there’ll be us . . . those few of us who hid in Otherworld.”
“Ticktock, Sam,” said the cop. “São Paulo and Melbourne just burned while you were making that speech. We gotta get moving—if the kid doesn’t get it, we have to let him go.”
Let me die, he means, Steve thought.
His mom reached into a pocket and pulled out . . . something. It was gold and green and seemed to be made of light. It shifted shape as she held it up—now a star, now a pentagon, now an amorphous mass.
“Otherworld is our home now,” she said. “Our bodies are all dead. Mine was in San Fran, which burned an hour ago, but I’m here because I cut myself off from it. With this.”
She held out the green-gold thing. It became triangular. Steve recoiled from it, understanding why she’d asked him to sit. He felt woozy and shut his eyes.
“I think he gets it now,” said Roger the college girl.
“Stephen. Look at me.”
He took a deep breath and looked up. “You want me to . . . live in the game?”
Sam nodded.
“How is that even possible?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “I’m not one of the ones who wrote the code. It’s like driving a car—most people don’t understand how it works, but it does anyway, doesn’t it?”
“Won’t the game be destroyed too?” Steve asked. “By the burning?”
“Nope,” said the college girl. “The servers are all hidden away. It’d take the Klathi a hundred years to find and destroy them all. By then, with any luck, we’ll have driven them off our world—the surviving resistance fighters . . . and us, hidden away in here.”
“Rome just got torched,” said the cop. “That’s it, Sam. We’ve wasted too much time here. Leave the mod and come on.”
Steve’s mom stared at him a long moment, then set the glowing shape-shifting thing on the table, next to the upended form of Merlin. “Use it, Stephen,” she said. “Use it and join us. Otherwise—”
Shrugging, she turned and left the room. Steve barely saw her go, or the other two either. He was staring at the green-gold box-sphere-doughnut. He started to reach for it, then stopped. The thing scared him. It was made of computer code, he was sure. If he picked it up, it would become part of him. And it would sever his link to his body.
His real body, back in the real world.
He took a deep breath, let it out. Then he stood and left the mod there, on the coffee table. He went upstairs, to his room.
He felt the old, familiar rush, like falling in a dream. Then he was back in the real world, in the dingy old brownstone that reeked of smoke and garbage and long-unwashed bodies. Nothing smelled this foul in Otherworld. It was hard to say if anything smelled like anything there.
Stephen sat, blinking at the image of Steve-o’s bedroom, back in that remembered Boston, Boston rebuilt by game designers. Soon it would be the only Boston, if Sam and the others were right. It was hard to imagine, an entire city seared off the map, but he’d seen it happen to New York. It was happening all over the world right now. The thought made his eyes sting.
A sound jolted him out of his stupor: a loud, insistent banging. He’d locked the door before going into the game, and someone was hammering on it with his fist.
“Jefe!”
Angel. Stephen pulled off the headset, put down the controller, got up. Went to the door. Opened it. The kid stood outside, pale and panicky, glancing over his shoulder, licking his lips. He looked young, a frightened teenager with no idea what to do.
“What is it?” Stephen asked, already knowing the answer.
Angel’s eyes were wild, the whites showing all around. “Boss. It’s happening, like everywhere else. Like New York.”
Stephen sighed. “Show me.”
They were in the comm room, all of them. Some had turned away from the TV, tired of watching one murderous firestorm after another. Hanna was one of those; she’d checked out, couldn’t do it anymore. On the screen, in multiple panels like an insect’s eye, cities raged with fire. Some he recognized from their burning skylines: Paris, Seattle, Kuala Lumpur. Others could have been anywhere the pictures were so snowy and terrible. Steve nodded, then heard voices crackle over the radio.
“Cambridge, do you read? This is East Boston Command. Over.”
“We hear you, Eastie. What’s your status? Any sign of the Klathi? Over.”
“Nothing. Not one of them, for half an hour now. Over.”
A long pause.
“Us too, Eastie. Roxbury and Allston commands report the same thing. Over.”
Another pause.
“Shit, Sanjeev,” said the comm guy in Eastie, breaking protocol and using a real name. He sounded terrified. “They’ve pulled out, haven’t they? It’s our turn. Over.”
“Looks like it, Marco,” said the voice from Cambridge. He sounded tired. “It’s been fun. Over.”
Eyes were turning toward Stephen. He hated the hope in them, the expectation, like he cou
ld save them from what was coming. Don’t you get it? he thought. The world is ending.
“Jefe?” Angel asked. “What do we do?”
Bend over. Kiss your ass good-bye.
But he couldn’t say it, couldn’t betray their faith in him. He took a deep breath, let it out, and swept the fighters with his gaze.
“You’ve got five minutes,” he said. “Grab what you can. Meet up in the street out front. When time’s up, you get moving. Don’t wait for anyone. Anyone. Head south, down Huntington. Don’t worry about cover—the Klathi aren’t coming back. Just run, as far and fast as you can. Got it?”
They nodded. Some looked dazed, but they heard him.
“Five minutes,” he repeated. “Move.”
They scrambled, running to gather their gear, food, prized possessions. Someone knocked over the radio, and it squawked and went dead. Soon it was just him and Angel in the room.
“You ain’t coming,” the kid said. Not a question.
Stephen shook his head. “Command’s yours now, Ange. Get these people to safety. If it looks like you’re short on time, take them to Jamaica Pond. Maybe the water’ll protect you from the fire.”
“Jefe—”
“Just go. Get them out.”
It worked: he saw Angel’s fear ease, saw resolve replace it. He looked older, all of a sudden. His eyes grim, he raised his hand to salute.
Stephen laughed and shoved him toward the door. “Fuck that. We’re not military. Get going.”
Then Angel was gone too, yelling at the others as he pounded up the stairs. Taking command. Stephen listened to them for a couple minutes, then glanced one more time at the cities burning on TV—half the panels were just snow now, and the others were fading out—and walked out the door too. The others ignored him, grabbing their stuff and bolting for the exit. He walked past them all, back up to the bedroom.
The computer was still on, Steve-o’s room still on the screen. Stephen walked in, shut the door, flipped the lock.
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