by S. W. Clarke
“Did they let you read books in clone formatory? Like fantasy books?”
“A few,” Veda said, “It helped us become more efficient to know how to read well, and to understand the concepts of—“
“Books with dragons and knights and that kind of thing?”
She paused, her mind retracing. It had been years. “Yes, I’ve read three of them. That was how I knew what the orcs were before I saw their nameplates.”
“The types in this game are based on the archetypes you probably read about: wizards, knights, clerics, druids, rogues. I’m a guardian, which is a hybrid of a knight and a cleric. I’m something of a healer type, which means I use wisdom to cast spells.”
“What spells?”
“Well, none yet—I haven’t been sorted. But once we get through this world, you’ll see some sparks.”
Her gaze went half-lidded, her mind working through the logic. “So if pure casters only cast spells, then a wizard would be intelligence-based?”
He nodded, and for the first time he seemed to set real eyes on her. “More or less,” he said, flattening his hand and rocking it like an unsteady boat. “It’s all fluid. Flexible.”
She watched his hand. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,”—and here he bent to the forest floor, picked up a long, cracked length of wood—“if you end up whacking people with this a lot, then you’ll probably become pretty capable with it. And if you keep ripping off your shirt sleeves to make tourniquets, you may end up being a healer. But someone else may just make tourniquets off without whacking anyone—and they would be a different kind of healer. Understand?”
She stared at the branch whose end he’d now stood upright. “That’s not a staff.”
He sighed, pressed it out to her. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Powell.”
She accepted the staff, her eyes following him as he started again through the trees. Holding the old piece of wood for the first time, her hands seemed to grip it with ease; she could almost feel unique grooves for her fingers. She lifted it into both hands, staring until a window appeared in her interface:
ITEM: Cracked Staff
QUALITY: Common
ATK/DLY: 5-7 dmg/2.5 secs
STATS: None.
EFFECTS: None.
It really was awful, much worse than the orc’s bow on her back. But she had the sense that she preferred holding the piece of wood to not holding it, and she hadn’t felt at all comfortable with the bow. She set the end of it to the ground, found it sturdy and bolstering; for now, this would be her walking stick. She had never been the aggressive type—far from it—but as she looked after Galen, she knew he was right.
Veda Powell had a lot to learn.
Seven
In the first hour Galen said little. Veda followed at three paces behind, observing him. He stood a little taller than her, still with the lanky muscles of adolescence even though he must have been at least twenty-two or three. His blue-black hair sat tight to his head, and the dark green eyes surveyed everything.
Veda suspected she knew why Galen and Amy weren’t forthcoming with her. Both of them had allied with Prairie during that trial, and now both were here. They wanted to keep Veda alive. Maybe they, too, knew about the fake Prairie. Most of all, Veda had the sense they meant well, that they were after the same thing she was. At least, she hoped.
But someone had put a fear in them; they wouldn’t talk about her because they couldn’t. Especially not on Pyro’s campus, and not inside this game. If knowledge of “Dairy” the replacement clone got out, it might respark the justice movement that had shrunk to an ember over 20 years ago.
Veda came to Galen’s side. “Where are we going?”
“Into the forest.”
“Right—we’ve managed that.”
“We’re going further.”
“How far?”
“Until we can’t hear that anymore.” His hand went up, one finger pointing back the way they’d come. As he said it, metal clanged through the trees, though this time it came soft and tinny. They’d covered at least a few miles since the meadow. “Once we’re safe, we can stop, think, prepare.”
“Prepare for what?” She had a tendency to probe people this way, even when Veda had a sense for what they meant. She liked to whittle down to an exact meaning.
“Whatever it is we need to do to survive this level, and maybe even figure out how to beat it.”
“Those are different things.”
“Right. You can survive without winning, and you can win without surviving. Ideally we’d do both, but at the very least, we’re going to live.”
Veda observed him in profile. His lips were set, and she took a mental note: he hadn’t said if, or that he hoped they would live. They were going to live. “What’s the best way to do that?”
The green eyes turned to her, and he stopped. “By being smart. Back there, the tourniquet you made for Amy was smart. Shooting that orc with the bow was smart. Wanting to run out into the field to help the others? Not smart.”
She stopped with him, planted her staff in the ground. “Okay. Be smart. Does that mean if you’re in mortal peril I shouldn’t try to help you if I’d be risking my own skin?”
An almost-smile appeared at the corners of his lips, disappeared just as fast. “Use your judgement. For now, the first things we need to learn are survival skills. Fighting, climbing, perception, sneaking, hunting and foraging.”
She nodded; Veda would learn everything she could from Galen. She knew that she could just as easily end up alone, and she needed to glean everything she could from him in the time she had. “Can we start with fighting?”
He had started them walking again. “We’re going to learn a few at once. Perception will be the simplest, once I explain it. Just...be observant. Take in everything. If you see an NPC or a player, observe them until their nameplate appears. If you pick something up off the ground, inspect it end to end. The higher your perception is, the more you’ll know going into a situation. Soon you’ll be able to see someone’s level, health, and mana just by looking at them.”
“Yours must be high already.”
His head dropped an almost imperceptible degree. “I’ve just gained it. That one doesn’t level very fast for me.”
“Why?”
“We all have natural abilities. Sicora senses what we’re good at, what we’re not. My shield skill is already at 2.”
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. What else?”
“Sneaking. Do you see how I’m walking right now? My foot goes straight up, toes down so I don’t catch on anything. The outside of my foot hits the ground first, and then rolls in toward the ball. I bring down my heel last, and then shift my weight to that foot.”
Veda stopped, staring as he continued on. She realized she’d hardly heard much sound at all from him in the hour they’d been together. He even managed to keep the shield from making much noise. She mimicked him, each foot going up and set down with care. It was slower going, and he went faster than her, but she definitely made less noise.
“Have you gained that skill already?” she asked.
“Not yet. I’m no natural at sneaking, but if you can at least get it to level one or two, you’re a lot quieter than you’d otherwise be.”
As he spoke, a notification appeared minimized in her interface. She opened it:
SKILL GAINED: Sneaking, Lvl. 1. What’s that noise? Oh, it’s just your feet. Keep stepping light and sticking to the shadows, and soon you’ll be practically invisible.
Veda closed the prompt, said nothing; he probably wouldn’t let on, but she doubted Galen would be happy to know a blind girl had learned sneaking faster than him. She kept behind him, observing everything, each step taken with care.
The edge of the world wasn’t a drop—it was more a strong wind. The forest continued on for hundreds of feet, but every time Veda tried to continue a gale force pressed her back.
“You’re wasting your time,” Galen said.
He was preparing to climb a great old tree, its trunk as thick around as ten of him. This had been Amy’s strategy, too: get out of the fray, get to high ground. Let them come to her. It made sense, except that they hadn’t seen an orc in hours and Veda had grown restless, curious after their basic weapon training. First they’d practiced on a tree, she taking swipes with the staff, he testing the crossbow until she had gained the Staves skill and he had gained Archery. Then they’d done light sparring; every block with the kite shield had jarred her to the bones, but Veda hadn’t complained.
“This isn’t a straight line,” she said, lifting one hand, pressing it into the wind. She took a few steps left, a few right, hand outstretched. “It curves.”
Galen groaned. “Of course. You’d think a dynamic AI would be a little more creative with the levels.”
“What do you mean?” Veda asked, turning back.
Galen was searching out footholds in the massive trunk. As usual, he didn’t answer.
She surveyed their spot, cast her eyes up to the canopy. The sun hit her skin from a much lowered angle; she estimated three hours had passed since they had entered this world. That was just a few minutes in the capsule.
It had been a three hour walk from the treeline to the zone line. She wasn’t yet sure about much of anything when it came to the game or the world, but she tucked this information away along with everything else she’d learned. Foremost of which was: listen to Amy and Galen. At least, that was what they wanted her to do.
“Powell,” he rasped from a high branch—how had he climbed so fast?—“get up here.”
“I’m coming,” she said. She’d wrapped her bloodied hands in the remaining cloth from her other sleeve, set them now to the tree.
“You’d better be flying,” he said, “there’s someone on the way.”
She paused, listening. A single leaf cracked some two hundred feet off, and she knew from eighteen years of blindness the difference between a human foot and a critter’s. This wasn’t any squirrel.
Veda didn’t yet have a brace for carrying the staff, so she dropped it, kicked a few leaves over. She climbed the tree—faster this time, though her hands sent needles of pain through her every time she set them on the old bark—and sat up on the high branch with Galen in under a minute.
“Get your bow ready,” he said. He had the orc’s crossbow out, a pair of bolts ready.
Veda straddled the branch, gripping with her thighs. She pulled the bow off her shoulder, slid one arrow from the quiver. What had sounded before like a human’s steps now came to her as female: softer, uncertain, like a deer.
As she listened, a prompt stacked in her interface:
SKILL GAINED: Perception, Lvl. 1. Way to go, adventurer: you’ve started to look around! At this level, you can make out basic details about people, creatures, and the world.
And there it was. It had only taken a few hours, though that made sense: in the real world, blind dupes poured all their attention into the four senses available to them. She could probably excel at this one.
Galen lifted the crossbow to his face, braced the underside with his left hand. “It’s not an orc,” he whispered.
So he’d gathered as much, too. Veda nocked the arrow, pulling the string taut. Her swollen fingers objected, but she ignored them. She kept the arrow steady. Nock, draw, loose.
But she nearly lost the string’s tension when she heard the voice.
“Hello?” A female after all, and what she’d said wasn’t so much a greeting as a desperate, ragged question—one asked many times. Veda knew that voice.
She started, half lowered her bow. “She’s one of the players.”
“Even worse,” Galen whispered; he kept the crossbow leveled. They sat this way for minutes while the voice called again and again, and Veda struggled every time to stay silent, to keep her seat.
Another minute passed before she emerged into view with a limp. Her fingers sat over what appeared to be a great gash at the thigh of her pants, and she trickled blood through the bracing hand. At some point she had smeared it over her face and the blood adorned her brown hair like a ribbon.
Galen sucked air through his teeth. “Sarai.”
Her nameplate appeared:
Sarai’s shirt sported a great tear up the hem, and she folded one arm to her chest.
Veda’s body jerked with the impulse to shimmy herself off the branch, but she resisted: Sarai wasn’t to be trusted. Ahead, Galen swayed with her motion. “What are you doing?” he asked. He hadn’t lowered the crossbow, but he turned his head a few degrees to meet eyes.
“Sorry,” she whispered, “clones are trained to help any human in danger.”
“Sarai isn’t exactly human,” he murmured, turning back around. “Just stay quiet.”
Veda stared at Galen’s back, stayed silent as he’d instructed. But Sarai had already heard the rustled leaves, the creak of the swaying branch. Her face lifted, dark eyes searching the trees. “Is someone there?”
The call came then, a whistle like birdcall—not the guttural cry of the orcs, not at all—and Veda held her breath. Galen repositioned the crossbow, following Sarai’s path before them. Was he going to shoot her? By instinct her hand went out to him, but his finger was already inside the trigger guard, already depressing the mechanism.
The twin bolts flew, caught in the bark of the tree Sarai had just passed. She yelped, fell forward to her hands. And then her eyes went up to Veda and Galen in the tree. “Cole, it’s me. I’m injured.”
Galen was already loading another pair of bolts. “We’ve got three arrows set on you, Sarai.” He lifted the bow, aimed it just beneath the blood that streaked her forehead. “So I want to hear you whistling.”
“Whistling?” she said.
“Back to him,” Galen said. “In the next five seconds, you’d better be the best songbird that ever lit up this canopy.”
Veda sat, watched. She knew Galen understood what she didn’t, that this wasn’t a time for talking. She kept the bowstring taut at her cheek.
“I escaped the orcs—” Sarai began.
“Five,” Galen said.
Her hands went to the gash on her leg. “One of them cut me—“
“Four.”
“Listen, Galen, I’m alone.”
“Three.”
She got up on her knees, hands in the air. “Hey, I recognize you. Veda Powell, right?”
Veda’s stomach cinched. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Waters,” Galen said. “Two.”
“Maybe she’s not lying, Galen,” Veda said, lowering the bow an inch.
“One,” Galen said. As he did, something whirred past Veda’s head and bit crisply into the tree’s trunk. She whipped her face around: a metal star sat half-buried in the bark.
Sarai’s noise wasn’t a whistle. Veda turned back, barely tracked her wild speed—uninjured speed—as she let a feral howl. A coyote howl, a wolf howl. Galen’s bolts followed her shadow, burying their heads in the ground.
“Shit,” he said, hitching the crossbow onto its strap. “We need to go.”
They came down hard, Veda’s fingers touching the ground as she landed. She took hold of the staff, swung it under her arm. Sarai had vanished, and silence spread around them. “Where is she?”
“That way. She’s bringing them to us,” Galen said, and he spun with surprising agility away from the direction he’d indicated. “Run. Just run.”
They ran. Galen followed the sweep of the world’s edge, quickly pulling to a distance. Veda struggled after; it was only the fifth time she’d run anywhere. Blind girls didn’t move too fast, and she found her feet resorting again to the awkwa
rd and stolid steps she remembered. Her limbs and eyes responded to this strange pace with a sort of defiant jerkiness. And she wasn’t used to using her lungs this way, to the air that burned through her throat. Behind them, the howl came again—a couple hundred feet off at most. Another returned, this one deep-throated.
She didn’t stop. She was good at persisting—maybe better at that one thing than all else—and soon a buttery feeling washed through her, evened out her stride. Her arms became pistons at her side, and because she was tall, her legs carried her far and fast. This kind of movement was probably adrenaline, and she knew it wouldn’t last.
They ran for minutes, started up a rise, the earth and trees angling them toward a point that Veda couldn’t see past. Ahead of her, Galen breathed hard, fast—with five stamina, neither of them would last long—and they came to the crest agonized.
Before and below the bluff they stood on, shrubs had been cleared in a swath for a blackened encampment, smoke rising in a cloud from the campfire.
And because there were no trees, Veda could pick out the four orcs seated around the spitted boar. Black-haired, green-skinned—maybe even the one that had chopped her head off, his axe still painted red.
Galen doubled, hands on his knees. “Right into the pan,” he breathed.
Eight
The howl sounded again—a promise. Sarai was still on them.
Veda and Galen pressed themselves to the ground at the bluff’s edge. “Just four orcs, but they’d demolish us,” Galen said, and Veda—who’d already met an axe blade with her neck—had no doubt he was right.
Beyond, a sheer drop to a short slope peppered with scrub and bushes to their temporary camp. They had no way forward: the camp lay ahead, the world’s edge kept them from veering right, the open swath of forest sat left, and behind was—
Veda turned her head; Sarai hadn’t yet emerged. But she was coming, crackling over the leaves. “What now?”
Galen pitched his head over the edge of the bluff, swung his face left and right, came back up with red cheeks. “We drop.” And he slipped over the edge, his hands going last before he dropped with a thud and a grunt below. Veda peered after, spotted him crouched behind a thatch of scrub. He hadn’t been spotted; Amy had said the orcs were dumb. “Drop down.”