by S. W. Clarke
She didn’t have time to contemplate her fear. Her instincts started her over the bluff, lowering her body until only her hands remained, unwilling to let go. Galen clasped her ankles, helped her down until she was able to drop only a few feet to the slope, pebbles and dirt raining over the both of them.
She crouched with Galen behind the scrub. “If those orcs look left, we’re done,” she whispered.
He put a finger to his mouth, pressed her head low.
That was when she heard the noise, a hiss or a psst. They both turned, found wide blue eyes staring back, a dirty hand pressing the overgrowth aside to reveal a crevice in the rock. “Come on.”
Veda and Galen met eyes. They pressed themselves into the overhang, their bodies molded flat by the low ceiling. It wasn’t an easy fit: Galen’s shield scraped the rock before he got himself low enough, and Veda could feel the girl’s body pressed to hers as she reoriented herself to have a view out onto the slope. Sheer need allowed all three to jigsaw themselves into the crevice, their bodies tight to the rock.
They waited, and Veda fought the urge to escape the spot. It was a fear she’d never known she carried, but now, seeing the wide open that lay beyond this overhang, the claustrophobia came fierce and potent. She closed her eyes, listened for Sarai. She hardly allowed her lungs to move.
Sarai and two others came with spider-thread vibrations through the slender layer of rock above them, roots and dirt flurrying over the opening. They climbed right to the bluff’s edge, their heavy breathing confirming their numbers. Veda lifted her left hand, fingers upright, and pressed the thumb over the pinky. Galen nodded, and beside her, the girl breathed hard.
As soon as they’d crested the hill, Sarai cursed. A male voice followed—”no way,” and Veda put him at about twenty-two years old—before the guttural call rose from the camp below.
They’d been spotted.
Sarai and the two others doubled back at a run, their footfalls loud overhead, disappearing with a spray of pebbles over the bluff. Galen set a hand over his mouth to keep from breathing the dust, and Veda realized that her engineering applied in Sicora, too: her lungs filtered the particles that entered her throat, and she felt no urge to cough.
Beside her, the blue-eyed girl shook with what Veda knew was adrenaline; she felt it, too. “They’re all coming,” the girl whispered, and through the vines and brush Veda spied the orcs in furious motion, pouring past the trees in a cluster.
“Not because of us,” Galen whispered. “Just don’t move.”
They didn’t. As he’d predicted, the orcs pooled into the forest, came up the slope—Veda wondered then why they hadn’t built their campfire on the bluff—and swept aside them like water.
When they had passed, Galen made to pull himself from under the crevice. But the girl’s hand went out to him. “No,” she said, “They’ve left one behind, watching. We have to wait until night.” And Veda sensed that those blue eyes carried no tricks, no challenges.
Her gaze flicked to the camp, surveying. She didn’t see anything except the roasting boar and the flickering flame.
“There,” the girl said, one finger going out. The orc stood right where she pointed, a long club resting in the palm of one hand. He was nearly obscured behind a tree on the other side of the campfire. Left as a watcher, perhaps.
“Let’s wait, Galen,” Veda said.
And it was under the bluff they came to know the rook called Eli Rose.
While they waited for night, Veda and Galen learned that Eli was eighteen, a mathematical genius with a love of VR. Her parents had made her promise she’d graduate college before she dove into testing. And she had: graduated that spring, kept her promise. Eli Rose explained this in her soft, breathy voice while they lay on their stomachs and the sky deepened to blue and then black. Three of the orcs had returned at sunfall, torches flickering off the rock of the bluff from below.
Above them, the moon rose fat and gibbous. Veda couldn’t stop staring. “It’s so white,” she said.
“Oh wow,” Eli said, “That’s right: you’re the blind one. I really thought you’d be offed by now.”
Veda’s eyes flicked to Eli, studying her face in the low light; this person reminded her a little bit of Prairie. “So did I.”
“You know, I’ve never been in a world without our moon,” Galen said. “Funny thing: I guess players don’t do well without a sun and moon.”
“How did you end up in here?” Veda asked Eli.
“I had a sense this world wasn’t very big, based on the curvature of the forest and the size of the field,” Eli said. “And I knew the field was the worst place to be. Too open, too vulnerable. I took a straight line to the world’s edge—and it just so happened my straight line took me to the camp. I got to hiding before they spotted me.”
“She’s right,” Galen said, his pointer finger turning a circle in the air. “This world is a dome. Forested around the edges, a big open field at the center, and a whole lot of orcs.”
Two pieces clicked together in Veda’s mind. “That explains the way the world curves at the edges.”
“How do you know it’s a dome?” Eli asked.
“I’ve seen this before,” Galen said, “except with a tundra and centaurs. Sicora keeps her sorting world simple.” He started to elbow-knee his way out of the crevice.
“Wait,” Eli said.
Galen climbed out, lowered his head to stare back in at them. “For what? The sun to come back up?”
Veda shrugged; he was right. She pressed her way out, and the three of them escaped the bluff on cat’s feet, the white moon lighting their way.
They stayed to the forest’s edge, cutting around the radius of the zone. Galen thought it would be safer that way, and he was right: they hadn’t seen a single orc or player in the night. Galen took the lead, marking the way they’d come with the tip of his sword, etching a cross-hatch into the trees. He wasn’t comfortable with conversation until they had passed the point where they’d encountered Sarai and Wilt; he was convinced they would circle around, scour their tracks. But the forest offered up only hoot-hooting owls and the scuffling of tiny critters—nothing that would raise the hair on Veda’s back. Still, she watched, squinted into the forest. She found it strange and novel to have functional eyes with which to see into the darkness, and after an hour, her perception skill rose to two.
Eli stayed by Veda’s side. She was much shorter, waifish beneath all that dirt. Her hair held a pale blonde in the moonlight penetrating the canopy, and it seemed almost to float around her head as she walked, as she spoke in whispers. “What do they give you to eat, though?” she asked, and Veda was feeling dubious about Amy’s claim that Eli Rose—all of them, she’d said—could be a cutthroat.
“Hydro-bars. They’re packed with all the nutrients clones need to keep us healthy,” Veda said, her eyes on Galen. He walked with his left hand out, testing their closeness to the zone’s edge at all times.
“Aren’t those the same nutrients any human would need?” Eli asked.
“I guess. We’re different, though.”
“How?”
Veda was about to state the very obvious: she had no mother and father. She’d been grown and born in a lab, but Galen interjected. “They’re physically and mentally engineered for certain tasks,” he said, surprising Veda. She heard recitation and resentment in that sentence. “At least, that’s what society tells us.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t mean you’re any different from a human. My parents filtered certain troublesome genetic tendencies out with me. And I bet yours did too, Galen.”
“The green eyes. They wanted those most of all,” Galen said.
“We have different emotional capacities, too. My model tends to be more passive and docile. We don’t feel emotional extremes,” Veda said, though she doubted her own words. She was only repeating what she’d been told in formatory, and by Mother. But the last year had tested the truth of that; if she was capable only of passivity
and docility, she wouldn’t have used her one request. She wouldn’t be here at all.
“Have you ever gotten really upset, Veda?” Eli said.
Veda pressed the staff into the ground as she walked; she enjoyed the feeling of it sinking into the soft grass. And she realized she was still practicing the soft walking that Galen had taught her. “Yes. During the preliminary.”
“What did you see?” Eli asked.
“Well, nothing—I was blind.” Veda wasn’t ready to talk about the experience yet, not even with Amy or Galen. Especially not in the night.
“What she experienced during the preliminary is personal,” Galen said, turning to them. He walked backward. “Asking that is like me inspecting you, Eli.”
Her hands went protectively over her body. “You can do that?”
“Oh sure,” Galen said, stopping. His hands went up before him, the fingers curling in an unsettling way. “It’s like having your intestines explored—from the inside.”
Eli stopped, one hand gone out toward Veda, who came up to Galen. She narrowed her eyes at him, and a prompt appeared in her interface:
YOU ARE ABOUT TO INSPECT GALEN COLE. CONTINUE?
Veda smiled faintly; she continued. Just as Galen’s mostly-empty gear slots and inventory appeared around his rotating model, he danced away, the zone’s edge deflecting him back toward her. “Woah, I wasn’t going to actually do it, Veda.”
“How do your intestines feel?”
“Cold and man-handled,” he said, stepping aside her to continue on.
“Don’t worry—I won’t tell Eli what’s under the gear.”
Galen didn’t answer, but Veda spotted his head shaking up ahead. She knew his cheeks were red.
Eli approached from behind, her face turned up with Veda with something like reverence. “You don’t mess around.”
Veda shrugged, planted her staff in the ground as they fell into a walk. “I did have 98% efficiency before.” And for the first time since she’d entered Sicora Online, she thought she might be capable of something else: pure, childlike mischief.
They came to the stream exhausted. The three knelt in the grey morning light with cupped hands, draining what little they could pool into their fingers. Eli washed the grime from her face and hair until her true, pale coloring came clear, and she looked eighteen again.
That was when Veda noticed it. “Stop,” she said, jerking her hands out of the water.
Galen raised his face, water streaming from his hair. “What?”
“Look." She pointed into the water. They had been so desperate they hadn’t noticed the bobbing brown clumps, the helixes slipping through the current, past them and away. The stream was littered with excrement.
Eli fell onto her backside, shaking the water from her face and hair, wiping her hands. “The orcs shat in the water.”
“Seriously?” Galen said, squeezing the water from his hair with both hands.
“That sure isn’t human,” Veda said.
The three went silent, drying themselves as the spoiled water trickled past. Veda sat on her feet, her eyes on the water. Her hands were so dirty above the wrists it was as though she wore gloves. Upstream, the water was so dark it hardly looked blue. It cut right through the forest into the field where Veda had first spawned, had first died.
The thought percolated to the surface just as Eli let a gasp.
A minute later they sat circled under a tree, Eli’s finger drawing in the dirt. “You two said this world is circular. The field is also circular, with trees at the fringes. We’ve walked from the field to the trees, so we know that distance. We also know that the stream bisects the entire world.”
She had drawn a circle inside a circle and a straight line through the center.
Galen stared at her. “Who are you?”
Eli ignored him. “I’ve already done those calculations. This is a bit rough, but I’d say the field is about a mile across, and from the treeline to the edge of the map is another half mile.”
“Six miles,” Veda murmured.
Eli glanced up at Veda, smiled. “Exactly.”
Galen stared between the two of them. “What am I missing?”
Veda set her finger at the center of the circle, traced the line of the stream to the edge. “This is the radius. One mile. Multiply that by two and by pi.” Her finger traced around the outer edge of the circle. “That makes the map six miles all the way around.”
Galen’s eyes widened. “That’s not very big.”
Eli shook her head. “Not at all. And if the orcs have lived in this world for any time at all—which they do, since they have gear and food—they must have a stronghold bigger than the temporary camp we saw, or at least a place where they usually sleep.”
The other two nodded. It seemed logical.
“And we all saw what was in that field. Nothing. Plus, it doesn’t make sense for their hideout to be in the open. They would keep it in the trees.”
“Okay, so we keep walking until we find the stronghold,” Galen said.
“And then we hit it tonight,” Veda said, her finger stabbing a point between the two circles, “while they’re sleeping.”
“Well, come on.” Eli was already on her feet. “We’ve only got eight hours of daylight.”
“Hold up," Galen said, "we're useless if we don't sleep a few hours."
As he said it, Veda felt the fatigue sweep over her. It surprised her: she didn't normally feel tired, given her reduced need for sleep. This was probably induced by the stress, the lack of sustenance, the decapitation—all of it together. She nodded, stood. "Okay. Up in that pine?" She pointed to a fat-bottomed stunner of a tree some ten feet from where they sat.
Galen's face lifted, his eyes crinkling. "You're starting to get it, rook."
Nine
They slept three hours in the high branches of a pine tree. When Veda woke, the midday sun pierced her eyes through the canopy, and her stomach wrenched. She was starved. Ahead, Galen straddled the branch, turned as she woke. “Ready to learn how to catch your food?”
Ten minutes later they were on the ground, Veda pulling her bow’s string to her cheek with one closed eye. Archery was coming just a little easier to her now; after the first ten shots—one of which had driven right into the ground—her skill had risen to 2.
“Slow, slow,” Galen whispered. During the last trial, he claimed to have taken his archery skill to 7. Of course, he only worked from memory now—he was effectively a new character. “Just wait.”
“Yeah, what he said,” Eli whispered. “I’m hungry.”
Veda breathed in, exhaled.
The arrow was merciful: their rabbit fell sidelong, the shaft jutting from its head. She lowered the bow, and Eli took off toward the creature.
“Wait,” Galen called, but she was too quick. She scrambled to it and knelt, pressing its head down as she yanked the arrow free. She lifted the rabbit by its neck, carrying it to their spot near the edge of the map; they had stuck close to the fringe for miles, not wanting to veer too close to the field.
“How do we eat it?” Eli asked, depositing the rabbit in front of Galen and Veda.
Galen unsheathed his sword. “First, we don’t run out like that—ever. Next, we skin it. Then we try to cook it.”
“The smoke won’t attract them?” Veda said.
“We’ll keep it small, quick,” he said, cutting away at the fur. Veda looked away, but the sounds were almost worse. “Veda, try to get the fire going.”
In fifteen minutes she and Eli had gathered the pine needles, the cones, the little sticks for kindling and the larger pieces of wood. Veda had found a dry flat piece for drilling into. But it was all still theory to her.
“Just like that,” Galen said. He had nearly finished skinning the rabbit, and it was a gory sight. Veda kept her eyes on the stick she twi
rled between her palms into the flat wood and the needles she’d piled around. “Be patient.”
More patience, more waiting. They still hadn’t even found the orc camp, but all three were acutely hungry after a day of not eating in Sicora. She drilled the stick so fast her palms began to chafe. And she smelled the fire before the smoke rose.
“You did it,” Eli whispered, as though if she raised her voice the tiny thread of smoke would disappear.
“Push the tinder in closer,” Veda said.
“Stop,” came a female voice. Veda recognized it immediately: Sarai, echoing from somewhere in the trees. “Quit your moving. Get your hands off your weapons.”
Veda’s eyes went to Galen, whose hand had been on the pommel of his sword. He shook his head, and both let their hands fall to their sides.
“Sarai?” Eli said. She stepped away from where they stood, her eyes searching the trees.
“I said,” Sarai came again, “stop moving.”
“Do you know her?” Veda whispered. Eli wasn’t in their dorm.
Eli nodded. “It sounds like Sarai. We met at the San Jose station.” She raised her hands, cupped them around her mouth. “Sarai, it’s Eli!”
“If you yell again, I will take you down with this bow,” came a male voice, his tenor tinged with cruelty. This was the companion who had been with Sarai on the bluff last night.
Eli froze, her hands going up by her head.
Veda had pinpointed the spot the voices came from: a pine about forty feet off. As confirmation, a few needles dislodged, fell to the ground under the branches.
“They can’t kill you, Eli—they can only take you down to a single hitpoint,” Galen said. He raised his voice. “Isn’t that right, Wilt?”
“You know him?” Eli asked.