But something had changed. A second ago he’d been content to creep up the stairs and await a chance to ambush her. Now, he was climbing them two at a time, the powerful automatic rifle in his hands in a firing position.
I rushed past him. I had the advantage of not having to worry about catching a bullet to the face or a bat to the throat, and the fact that I didn’t have to be that cautious meant that I made it back to the top floor before he did. I heard the grind of metal on metal and saw a flash of movement off to the right, near the elevators.
What was she doing? The power was out, and she didn’t have time to make her escape down the shaft. Maybe she was strong enough to get the door open before this guy ventilated her with a well-placed burst of armor-piercing rounds, but all that would only mean that she put herself into a narrow, metal kill box with her pursuer hot on her heels.
Shit. I couldn’t just stand here and watch, but I was already so used to drifting through this world without being able to influence it that I almost accepted that I was destined to be nothing more than a spectator.
But I had just changed that, hadn’t I? I’d been stunned when I found that I could reach out and touch him just now. The way my hand had slipped through his armor like it wasn’t even there, like that gate downstairs at the desk. I’d tried to hurt him, but I hadn’t been able to. Still, I had been able to tap into what the game knew about him, and I wasn’t about to let him use all those advantages on Sasha without at least giving her a chance to fight back first.
If I couldn’t attack him physically, maybe I could at least distract him. It was worth a try?
There wasn’t much time to formulate a plan, so I let my lizard brain lose for a moment. It helped that I wasn’t afraid for myself. All last week the first and foremost thing on my mind had been survival. I’d done my best not to take risks without doing the calculations first, but now that I was confident that I was pretty much untouchable I was amazed at how bold that knowledge made me.
Last week I’d played so much of Headshot that it was a part of me now and so when I attacked the Diver, it was instinctive to trigger Lunge and let my body propel itself forward in a whirlwind of slashing claws and gnashing teeth.
It was one of the first abilities I’d learned as a Zombie, and it had served me well for a long time. Better yet, it didn’t let me down now.
I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping for blood. I was pretty good at being a zombie, and I was scared by how disappointed I was that my mouth wasn’t suddenly full of gristle and my hands weren’t wrist deep in rib cage.
Instead, I staggered him. I know he felt the weight of me, and as I wrapped my arms around him and snarled in his face, I had a sickeningly transitory feeling of being in two places at once. I was still stuck in Sasha’s head, tethered like a dog on a leash, but the same time part of my consciousness slipped into this guy’s frontal cortex.
I didn’t get the gout of blood down my throat I’d been hoping for I ended up with a hot torrent of information.
His name is Mark. Mark Stringer. He’s twenty-three. Graduated from MIT in half the time it took everybody else. He has a reputation as a bad ass when it comes to crafting Absolute Reality worlds but his first love, the thing he really prides himself on, is that he’s a gamer. Before the money of Silicon Valley sang its siren song in his ear he’d been contemplating going Pro on the gaming circuit.
He knows how the game is made and he knows how to play it. The fear and trepidation that a lot of people take so long to get over once they are immersed in a thing like Headshot is completely absent from him since he knows both sides of the experience. In the same way that you can’t impress a magician with a magic trick, Mark Stringer is beyond being seduced by any of Blake Redhook’s clever sleight-of-hand. They call themselves Divers, and they’re judge, jury, and executioner in this place.
This Diver is fearless, but he’s screaming uncontrollably now. And that isn’t even the strangest thing.
It’s the things that he’s saying, and the fact that the things he’s saying are coming from both his mouth and a disembodied voice crackling over the radio at the same time. “Move your ass, Sasha! He’s at the top of the stairs, and he knows where you are. You can’t hide from him, so you’ve got to run like hell!”
They aren’t his words, though.
They’re mine.
Chapter 13
I felt Mark dig down deep. It took a tremendous force of will, but this guy was no slouch. He gritted his teeth, got his shit together, and mentally threw off whatever influence I’d been able to impose on him a moment before. His radio blasted the room with a huge burst of deafening static before dying into stark silence.
I don’t know how I got there, but suddenly I realized that I was on the ground when the Diver was stepping unsteadily over me. When I swiped at his ankle, my brain was too rattled, and my reflexes were too slow to give me a chance to latch on to him before he was out of reach.
I yelled for Sasha again, but this time whatever I’d been able to do just now didn’t happen. I was screaming into the wind, useless.
For his part, the Diver was doing a remarkable job of pushing through whatever trauma had been caused by contact with me. I liked to think that it would be more than a little unsettling to feel someone else’s mind pressed down on yours, and I knew that I’d forced him to accept my thoughts as his own, if only for a split second. But as I rolled all fours and scrambled to my feet I saw that he was already marching steadily toward the elevator, a man on a mission.
I heard a thump, easily enough to be a body from inside the shaft. At least she was smart enough to use the time I’d given her.
The metal doors had already been pried apart. Sasha had done a good job to get them open before he’d gotten to her, and even though I knew that I could pat myself on the back for at least giving her a few extra seconds that little nagging voice in the back of my head reminded me that it wouldn’t matter.
She was trapped. Even if Sasha could manage to make her way down the shaft, there wouldn’t be time to pry open the other set of doors down there before a hail of bullets ripped her open. The best she could hope for was some type of emergency access to the fire escape, but all that would do would be to put her back on the other side of the thick metal door she’d been trying to open when the sniper had first taken a shot at her.
And I knew now that this was all part of the plan. That sniper hadn’t gone anywhere. Right now he was staring down his sights, lining up the perfect shot and waiting for her to step outside. The whole thing had been a trap, and while she’d been grabbing the books contemplating how to use them, Deep Dive Studios had been tightening the noose.
The Diver was at the elevator shaft now. Contact with me had made him even more cautious than he had been before, and I could hear his voice waver as he took one hand off his rifle and keyed the radio. “Diver Three to Dive Master. The suspect headed for you. She’s ditched some books down here to remain mobile. Stay sharp.”
Diver Three? I had a sick twist in my gut as I realized that probably meant there were another couple of these guys out there at least, not counting the sniper. At least Sasha had the good sense not to be trying to make her way out of the building while she was still carrying half of the library around in cheap, Hessian bags.
I felt like I was moving in slow motion. Whatever I’d done to him had taken a lot out of me, and that was only exacerbated by the way that Diver had ejected me from his space. I staggered after him, feeling as slow and unsteady as I had when I’d first started the game as a level one Zombie.
He thumbed the button on his gun, and the flashlight attachment on the barrel threw a sharp cone of light into the elevator shaft. I didn’t see the elevator itself, and since the library itself was only two stories that meant that as the Diver leaned in and played the light down that, he was looking at the top of the elevator car.
“She’s popped the hatch,” he said into the radio. “Be ready. The rabbit is in the bolt ho
le.”
The Diver took one hand off of his rifle and used it to steady himself against the door of the shaft as he shifted his weight to peer even deeper into the empty space below. I could see that he was trying to find an angle where he could look through the trapdoor in the car’s ceiling and see into the corners.
He was playing it smart. He knew as well as I did that there was every chance that she was pressed against the wall of the elevator below him, ready to hop out and squeeze off a shot in his direction. It would be a desperate display, but Sasha had a better chance of taking out him out than she did of getting past that sniper a second time, especially when he was dialed in and ready for her to exit through the fire escape.
Something was bothering me, some little niggle in the back of my mind that I was only now able to let into my consciousness enough to hear it. How had she gotten the elevator door open in the first place? I knew that she was strong enough to be able to make use of the tool she had one, but I’d been with Sasha the whole time, and I hadn’t seen her pick up a crowbar or anything else to use as a lever…
If she were down there, she’d know from his radio communication that she was trapped. The Diver was baiting her, and I knew that he was putting more trust in his reflexes than in her ears. If she did try something, he was ready.
At least, that’s what he thought. I was halfway in his direction, ready to try and lunge onto his back and somehow force him to tumble headfirst into the shaft when I saw Sasha deal with her pursuer.
It happened so fast. One second I was trying to coax my wobbly legs into charging in his direction. I was fighting a losing battle, and all I could do was stare at his back and hope that the daggers I was glaring at him had some effect. I saw a long box set into the wall. The door was open, and the interior was empty.
The words stenciled above it read simply - Fire Ax.
Mark Stringer had overplayed his hand. Even as he leaned too far into the shaft, aiming the rifle down through the trapdoor at his feet Sasha, the ax braced against her body and the added weight of her overloaded backpack compounding the impact as she slammed into his upper body and sent him careening head over heels beneath her form.
There was a sickening crunch as his body no doubt smashed against the top of the elevator car, and I saw a bright red splash of arterial blood paint the walls of the shaft. That ax had done its work. Sasha was playing for keeps.
I was impressed. For all of the Divers’ military precision and tactical ability, not to mention the tremendous advantages they had because of the way they were gaming the system, she found a way to take him out. The thump I’d heard must’ve been her dropping the books through the shaft, a simple enough ploy that had fooled him into thinking that she was down there too. After that, all that was left to do was to get the ax ready, and bide her time as the overconfident Diver walked right into her trap.
By now enough time has passed that I could get to the elevator too, and when I looked over the edge, I saw her standing over his body. Maybe she was underpowered before, but as she bent down beside him, I practically chuckled at the thought of how much gear she was about to get. The Diver’s rifle was a godsend, not to mention the armor. Even if the game didn’t let her use it yet, she could certainly hold onto it until she could. If that seemed a long way off Sasha could salvage some of the pieces and craft something new.
And the radio! If she could hack that thing, reverse engineer the frequencies of the Divers were using; she’d have a huge boost to her ability to stay one step ahead of them. And that was just the stuff I could see. Who knew what was in his pockets, or the flat tactical backpack strapped to his corpse?
Deep Dive Studios had made a huge mistake. It underestimated her, and by only sending one guy into the building to take her out all they’d done was deliver her a pile of gear that would have taken her the better part of the rest of the week to assemble on her own.
And if I knew Sasha Redhook, she could to make them regret it. Fast.
“Come on. You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she growled, and for a second I had no idea what she was talking about. What was wrong?
Then I saw it. She’d reached for the gun in his hand and gone right through it and over the course of the next few moments Mark Stringer and everything he brought into the game faded out and vanished.
It was like a kick to the head, watching all of that good stuff get taken away like that. It made sense. Headshot didn’t exist. None of this shit in here did, and who better to be able to decide what remained and what disappeared then the people who were running the game? No wonder they weren’t too concerned about the possible advantage they had almost handed to Sasha. They knew full well that they could yank the rug out from under her feet whenever they wanted.
Or could they? If they wanted Sasha gone, surely they would just run a trace on her connection to the game. They could block her from ever logging in again if they so desired, and I was sure that if push came to shove they would know exactly where she was connecting from. A quick call to the feds, a couple of black helicopters in the sky above her house and a no-knock raid in the wee hours of the morning would put a stop to whatever shenanigans she had planned.
My gut told me that the only reason that hadn’t happened yet was because they couldn’t make it happen yet. I was struck by the fact that they’d never used her name. They knew they were chasing someone, even knew she was a female, but I got the impression that something was blocking at least some of their attempts to pinpoint her identity.
I didn’t know what was stopping them, but I bet every dollar I had in the bank it had something to do with Blake Redhook and his influence in the game, and that made me think of the brick that Sasha had been so desperate for me to return to her.
Her father had made it. She’d told me herself that it was special. And a couple of hours ago I’d found a loophole in the game and locked myself into an odd little pocket universe with what may very well be the most powerful object in Headshot.
Fuck…
Chapter 14
I had to hand it to her. A lot of strangeness had gone down the last couple of minutes, but instead of sitting down there and feeling sorry for herself for going to pieces trying to work out why so much had changed, she made a few fast, confident decisions. She did what I would’ve done, which automatically endeared her to me even more.
Firstly, she didn’t bother with the bags that she dropped down the trap door. Getting down there to retrieve them would take too long, and now that she knew that the back door was still sitting squarely in the sniper’s sights she’d just have to wrestle them back up the shaft.
That was a fool’s errand, and I was glad she recognized it as such. Instead, she chucked the fire ax up onto the ground beside me. It clattered against the hard floor, and I found that I was already so used to being impervious to damage that I didn’t even bother to dodge.
As she hauled herself up, I saw that her entire demeanor had changed. She might have been cocky before, but now Sasha was a fox in more ways than one. She was cunning, her eyes taking in every detail as she crept down the stairs once more.
I’d always found her strikingly beautiful, but those things are cheap and easy in a world where you can craft your avatar from scratch. I’d seen a picture of her as a kid in the Museum exhibition, and I’d watched her make her character. I knew that she had kept her appearance fairly close to what he actually looked like. Now that the developers of Deep Dive Studios had decided to take matters into their own hands and hunt her down, I was worried it was going to turn into an arrogant decision that she wouldn’t have time to regret before it bit her in the ass.
After all, if you’re trying to take down your dad’s ex-company and you’ve got a chance to easily alter your appearance you should damn well take it. It was another sign of the strange arrogance that someone as otherwise careful as her insisted on displaying. I knew that I didn’t have the whole story, but I figured that the answers came back to that damn brick again.
<
br /> She wasn’t an idiot, and the fact that she hadn’t seen a need to conceal her identity meant that they couldn’t discern it. Whether that was still the case, I didn’t know, and I didn’t think that she did either.
Now that we were on the ground floor of the library again she picked her way through the worst of the broken glass and moved to one of the intact windows. As she scanned the street for enemies, I couldn’t help but remember how the Diver had moved. He’d been like a jungle cat. If they needed stats the way the rest of the players did, I knew without a doubt that his had been cranked to the max.
What the hell are you doing just standing here? I asked myself. I was still trying to get a handle on what I could and couldn’t do in my new form, but if I just spent my time traveling around behind Sasha, then I was wasting a rare opportunity.
I stepped through the glass like it wasn’t even there and kept right on going, striding across the barren lawn of the library without bothering to conceal myself. I didn’t fear prying eyes. Now that I knew I could affect enemies in the game I was determined to make myself into an asset, something as close to a guardian angel as Sasha was going to get in Headshot.
Crossing the street was out of the question because it would mean that I was too far from Sasha and so I stood at the curb and willed the shadows away. Nothing happened. I didn’t give up, instead throwing my willpower against the darkness, imagining the veil of lightless night to be something I was capable of peeling away layer by layer.
Black became gray. Void became shadow. The library itself protected us from the sniper at the rear, and after thirty long seconds of studying the street in front of it, I didn’t see any threats. If there were other Divers out there, they weren’t yet in position.
Which meant we had to get out of here. Now.
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