by Kody Boye
This land—this city that is unlike any I could have comprehended—reminds me too much of the very game I will soon return to.
I am just about to close my eyes and push back the doubt in my mind when the sound of an approaching car enters my ears.
In moments, a sleek black vehicle with a golden crown on its side appears.
Its driver’s side door opens.
A person steps out. “Sophia Garza,” Victor Crew’s unmistakable voice says.
“Yes?” I ask, lifting my eyes to face the man.
“Please enter the back of the vehicle.”
There is nothing I can do but obey.
As I settle into the back seat, and as Victor Crew begins to drive us away from the hospital, I turn to look back at the massive building and watch while it slowly disappears into the fog.
A brief flash of the city—post-apocalyptic and resembling nothing of its former self—appears in my mind. Instead of ash, there is fog; and instead of people walking alongside the road, hands in their pockets and heads down, there are Ashen, eyes glowing and arms reaching forward.
Instantly, the panic begins to return.
Calm down, I think. It’s not real. You know it isn’t.
Still—it doesn’t stop the paranoia from growing.
Leaning back, I close my eyes, trying my hardest not to succumb to anxiety, but to no avail.
The car drives on—and with it, my sense of security is left behind.
Kingsman Online Headquarters looms like a monster waiting to devour me. Its titanic figure horrifying, its shadow like an apparition in the night, I find myself drawing my jacket more tightly around me as we stop at a red light, dreading each and every moment that is to come.
You survived once, I think. You can do it again.
Can I, though? It seems unlikely given what happened to Leon. We’d gone through so much, and endured so many horrors throughout, only for him to end up being trapped in the game. How fair is that?
I tremble as the light turns green and the car rolls through the intersection—feeling, deep down, that same anger boiling deep inside me. Like a claw it reaches from my gut, extending up my esophagus and into my mouth.
I want to scream.
Somehow, I keep from doing so, and instead ball my hand into a fist.
Anger is an emotion that runs red. Across your vision, across your brain, across your tongue and lips and teeth, it blinds with an intensity that no dagger ever could, and leaves you in a state of mind that can either save or doom you.
What, I wonder, will it do to me?
I can’t know, but as we turn into Kingsman Online’s guarded parking garage, I feel, deep down, that it may destroy me.
“Just get into the game,” I whisper as we enter the depths of the parking garage. “Just get into the game…”
Within minutes we are parking.
In moments Victor Crew is opening the vehicle’s back door.
And in seconds we are heading back toward the elevator that will take us into the building.
“Do you know what’s going to happen?” I ask.
“I’m not allowed to speak of it,” Victor Crew replies.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from responding.
It makes sense, I suppose, that he wouldn’t be able to tell me what is going on, but that does nothing to stem the fear that courses through my veins.
As we enter the elevator, and as we begin to ascend to a destination I cannot know, I begin to wonder if I’ll even be able to get Leon out of the game.
He could be trapped there, my conscience offers, forever.
No. He can’t be. Won’t be. Not if I have it my way.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath as the elevator rises.
“We’ll be there shortly,” Victor Crew says. “Don’t panic.”
“Am I supposed to?”
He sinks his teeth into his lower lip, but he keeps his silence. It is obvious, by his body language, he has spoken out of turn.
Just what could they have planned for me?
I don’t have time to question it further.
Soon, the door opens.
Soon, Victor Crew leads me into the hallway.
And soon, I will arrive to what I know will be a fresh new hell.
The anticipation could kill me.
As we advance through the blindingly-white halls whose interiors are so sterile I could eat off them, my heart begins to drum to the tune of my nerves.
I am just about to open my mouth and ask how much further we have to go before he stops at a single, lonely door with a missing placard.
“Is this—” I start to ask.
“Yes,” Victor interrupts. “It is.”
He scans his key card, knocks on the door, then opens it.
The inside of the room is chaotic.
There are people everywhere—running around, talking to one another, viewing screens with diagnostic information—there are cords running from one end of the room to the other. I find a series of bulbous tubes wrapped together like a DNA strand, and for a moment, follow their trajectory along the floor.
That is when I see him. Leon: lying in a stretcher, his head embraced by a wicked machine, his body still attached to various wires and tubes and electrodes.
A Portal Pod rests beside him.
“What’s happening?” I ask. “Why is he—”
A figure appears out my peripheral.
I spin, only to find Rudolph Kingsman looking at me. He is dressed in a blood-red suit that matches his eyes.
Swallowing, I growl only one word: “You.”
“Hello, Sophia,” Rudolph Kingsman replies. “How are you?”
“A bit pissed that I was tracked to the hospital because of the card you gave me, but I guess I can’t complain.”
“You’re here. That’s all that matters.” He turns his head to look at a monitor displaying a black screen. “Now we can begin our rescue attempt.”
“Attempt?” I ask, stunned. “I thought you said—”
“We found a way to get Mister Gray out of the game. Yes. We did.”
“Then why isn’t he out?”
“It requires someone go back into the game.”
So, my conscience offers in the silence that follows. This is it.
I steel myself for the flood of emotions that are to come, but find that, surprisingly, I feel little fear, even less hesitation, and no doubt about my abilities. Instead, I feel ready—ready to go into this wicked world and pull Leon from its depths.
“How are we doing this?”
“You will be placed within the Pod as you previously were,” a man in a set of white scrubs says, “and we will attempt to plant you in the location closest to what we are calling The Nest.”
“The Nest?” I ask. “What is that?”
“The location where Mister Gray’s avatar has been spotted on the map.”
“Wait. What?” I step toward the man. “Show me.”
He pulls up the most concrete map I have ever seen of Dystopia.
“Is this a current map?”
“Yes,” he replies. “We were able to salvage data from the 49 other contestants, yourself included, and create this. As you can see, there is a substantial ‘fog of war’ effect on the map, which prevents us from seeing beyond what most of the players experienced in the most recent game. However—a spike of activity occurred from Mister Gray’s avatar that alerted us to… this location.”
The man taps on a place far beyond the mountains to the north of the Ashen City. There, a single red dot—marked by a computer program as a ‘most recent blip’—rests in a dark area of the map.
“You’re calling this The Nest. Why?”
“Because we believe this is where the Moth Men are holding him.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“We’re almost positive.”
“How, though?”
“Because,” Rudolph Kingsman says, “we saw activity on his monitor.”
“Wait. What?”
Rudolph Kingsman turns toward a television set on the wall beside Leon’s bed. “Play the footage.”
A young woman presses a button on the television set.
At first, I’m unsure if the television is even on.
Then, slowly, a pair of red eyes appear.
“Wha—” a faint voice, distinctly Leon’s, says. “Where am I?”
The trilling begins shortly thereafter.
The tape then ends abruptly.
“This is all you got?” I ask, stunned.
“It’s all that our sensors picked up,” the young woman says.
“He is obviously trapped somewhere,” the lab technician says.
“Which is why we are sending you in to get him,” Rudolph Kingsman replies.
“I’m ready,” I say. “Hook me up. Let’s get him out of there.”
“There’s only one problem,” the technician says.
I turn my eyes to face him. “What is it?”
“The Moth’s Nest has been… spontaneously generated.”
“Spontaneously?” I frown.
“It means,” Rudolph Kingsman says, “we had no control over this.”
“I gathered that. But how? Why?”
“We’re not sure, Sophia. Perhaps it’s simply evolved into its own self-contained universe. We certainly have the technological prowess to maintain something like this. It’s… fascinating to say the least.”
“Fascinating?” I ask. “My friend is trapped within your game, and it’s his life at stake, not yours.”
“This is why we have to warn you of the dangers you are facing,” the technician says. “We hypothesize that, if you get captured by the Moth Men like Mister Gray did, and you somehow ‘glitch’ through the game…”
“What?” I ask, fear catching my heart and attempting to take hold of my tongue. “Tell me.”
“You may end up trapped just like him.”
“And we’ll have no choice but to shut the simulation down,” Rudolph Kingsman adds.
There it is—the final straw: the needle in the haystack that no one has been wanting to find. To know I could end up trapped like Leon—and, as a result, leave my family behind forever—is the greatest torture anyone has ever inflicted upon me.
No coming back home, I think, no seeing Diego off to school.
No seeing my mother get better, or resolving the issues I have with my father…
Everything could end in a moment.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and allow this to process through my mind for several long moments.
“Okay.”
“Oh… kay?” the lab technician asks, and cautiously at that.
“Okay. Hook me up. Send me into the game.”
“You’re sure about this?” the man questions. “The game is evolving beyond its normal parameters. We do not know what will happen the longer it goes on.”
“I have to get my friend out, sir. I owe it to him for helping me save my mother’s life.”
“All right then… let’s set everything up.”
The flurry of activity begins anew.
Men move left, women move right, technicians settle down before computers, assistants rush to move cords and prepare monitors. The whole while, Rudolph Kingsman watches, and soon, turns his eyes on me. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “But I have one question.”
“What is that?”
“How will I get out?”
“We will monitor your activity within the game as we did before. Once you retrieve Mister Gray and flee the Nest, we will initiate a victory sequence that will pull you from the game as it did before.”
“So… I just have to get him out of the Moth’s Nest?”
“Yes, Miss Garza. That’s all you need to do.”
“Sir,” the same man in the lab coat says, lifting his eyes from his place at a series of computers. “We are ready to plant Miss Garza into the simulation.”
“We’ll do everything in our power to make sure you get out alive,” Rudolph Kingsman says, guiding me toward the Portal Pod.
Though I want to believe him, I really don’t.
As I step forward, and as I turn to settle into the Pod, I am once again struck with terror unlike any I have ever experienced.
I am unsure how they are going to connect me to the simulation—do not know what science or mechanisms they will use to immerse my conscience in the same world Leon is trapped within—but regardless, it does not matter.
In minutes, electrodes are being placed on my temples.
In moments, the metal clasps that will bind me in place snap across my wrists and ankles.
And in the span of a second, the same needle that placed me into the game before is injected into my neck.
Five, I can imagine the game saying as the anesthetic begins to kick in. Four…
“Three,” I whisper. “Two…”
One—
Then, everything goes dark.
5
I curl my fingers.
Gravel bites into my palms.
I feel unnaturally cold.
Then I open my eyes, and for a moment, wonder what is happening.
I realize, soon after, what has occurred.
I am no longer in Kingsman Online Headquarters. I am in the world of Dystopia—and not only that: I am exactly where I was when I was lifted from the game upon my first win.
The mountains.
The wind skirts about my prone body as I lie here, on the ground, trying my hardest to gather up the nerve to rise and begin what will undoubtedly be my most hellish journey yet.
Before, we knew there was a chance we could make it out alive.
Now?
I shiver as I press my palms to the earth, then grimace as I push myself to my hands and knees.
Rising, I push my hair behind my ears and consider the world for what it is.
The gray sun is out. The birds are chirping. Chipmunks chatting. I feel a pair of eyes on me and spin to scan my surroundings, only to scare a deer who’d been grazing nearby.
I’d forgotten how real this place felt.
Now you know, my conscience offers.
I take a few moments to allow my body to acclimate to my surroundings—to breathe the air, to smell the smells, to feel the impressions of the gravel that are slowly disappearing from my fingers.
Then, slowly, I begin to walk.
Muscle memory is what compels me to make my way around the mountain and continue to the northeastern wilds of the map. Unsure what I will face in a world that appears to be constantly changing of its own influence, but knowing I cannot afford to slow in the slightest, I tighten my hold on my jacket and trespass along the rigid mountainside.
A thought hits me before I can make it five feet from my original destination.
What will I do if I’m attacked? How will I defend myself?
The thought, chilling as it happens to be, is not without merit. Given the volatile nature of this world, anything could be around any corner.
Ashen—
Lobo—
Screechers—
I swallow.
The Devil.
I’m just about to stop and take a moment to compose myself when my foot hits, and nearly trips me over, something.
I look down, only to find that a short, thick branch almost sent me tumbling to my knees.
“Stupid—” I start to say, then stop before I can finish.
Frowning, I consider it for several long moments, then crouch to take hold of it.
Its weight is ample, its length not in the least bit cumbersome. With a little bit of work, it could serve as the perfect weapon.
I swing it a few times to ensure it won’t impede my progress, then stoop to grab a rock.
Thus begins my work to fashion the item into a weapon.
It takes only a short amount of time, and a meager amount of banging the rock against the end of the
branch, to fashion a point.
Come time I’ve finished, I’ve created a makeshift spear—which will not only serve as a perfect weapon, but also a handy walking stick.
Thank God, I think, then frown as I lift my head skyward.
Clouds are beginning to roll in from the distance. Thick, bloated, and likely filled with rain, they will only serve to add further discomfort if I don’t find shelter soon.
With that in mind, I continue onward.
I do not find shelter by the time the rain comes, but thankfully it is just a drizzle, and it only brings with it moderate discomfort. Cold, though, and nervous now that it’s getting harder to hear the world around me, I trudge through the mountains knowing anything could happen, holding my makeshift spear steadily before me.
To think that I have returned here, and willingly at that, is almost impossible to comprehend.
You’re doing it for him, I think. Remember that.
How could I not?
To see him there, on that stretcher, with all those tubes and electrodes and wires hooked up to him—
I tremble, though not because of the temperature.
No.
I tremble because of what could come if I am not successful.
A life cut short. A family ruined. A future destroyed. This is what I am fighting to prevent—what I strive to reclaim in this cruel and twisted world.
Leon is the only thing that matters right now, and the only person I have to worry about.
Shivering, I lift my eyes from the fog that has begun to develop along the far edges of my vision and trail my gaze along the mountainside—hoping, praying that something, anything, will offer me respite.
Come on. There has to be something here to help me.
But there isn’t. This I know, because in the real world, the people are merely watching; and though they will likely try to intervene in any way they can in an attempt to save themselves, there is a very real chance that any tampering from the outside world will bring about chaos I can only begin to imagine.
Thankfully, I am shielded to the west, so feel little fear from that direction. My north, south and east, however, offer little in the way of relief.
Stay calm, Sophia. Everything’s going to be just—
“Fine,” I whisper, and I stop before I can think or speak further.
The mountainous pass has been tapering off for the past hour or so. This is not what surprises me though. What brings me great apprehension is the fact that, through the woods, there appears to be a pathway which has been carved, not by animals, but…