by Natalie Grey
He’d gone to Las Vegas to find Callista, and when he met her and realized she would never be his ally, he’d had nowhere to go back to. He might as well go somewhere no one could track him. All he needed was the internet. The cost of living hardly mattered after the buyout Dan and Dhruv had forced on him.
His cabin was surrounded by trees, the sky often cloudy, and the sound of the birds constant. He still wasn’t used to that…or the utter silence at night. No cars passing, no people walking outside.
He stood in the tiny living space and swept his eyes over the boxes he hadn’t yet bothered to unpack. There had been no time for that; he’d planned his drive here in tiny hops, always close to high-speed internet, always ready to jump into the game if he needed to do so.
But in the end, even though he’d been there and waiting, it hadn’t been enough.
He wasn’t made for real-time strategy, he thought sullenly. He specialized in thinking ahead. In understanding how people would interact on a grand scale. How they would strengthen or warp one another’s characters.
This imposter, this usurper, was a good strategist one-on-one, even if she was a coward.
She should have fought him. If she believed she was meant to hold the throne, she should have been willing to fight him. Honor had demanded it. Who was she to come after him with a whole team at her back and then claim she had a right to rule? Who was she to taunt him that she had a team with her and he did not have one with him?
A ruler should be alone. She could not rule if she was not willing to do so without a team behind her.
Of course, he had always believed, somewhere inside himself, that Dan and Dhruv would be there with him. That they would come around and see that he was right. He’d really believed that.
Perhaps it could still happen.
Harry hesitated, then opened the door and went out into the dark night. An owl’s hoot nearby made his heart leap. He still wasn’t used to the wildlife. He’d seen deer not too long ago and was glad of it…and then he saw a pack of coyotes the next day, and was viscerally reminded of how little nature cared for his survival.
It didn’t matter that he was the only one who understood human nature, who understood what humanity needed in this new era. A coyote would tear his throat out without thinking twice—or thinking at all.
Perhaps that was the problem, he mused. His mind drifted to the opening scenes of one of his favorite science fiction novels, to the Gom Jabbar. The Bene Gesserit had known that not all who looked human were human. Some were animals, never rising above their base desires.
He was asking too much of them.
Harry took a deep breath of the night air and tried to calm himself. He had known they were going to rise against him, he told himself. People did not like being ruled, even when it was for their own good. He had known they would fight him. This would not be the only challenge he faced.
He was smarter than this upstart, and he certainly knew more about Metamorphosis Online. While she did this out of some misplaced desire to give people choices, he understood the way the world truly was.
He would win in the end.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped off his porch and into the grass around his house. Claws and teeth aside, most wildlife wasn’t going to try their chances with a human. This was a time when facts and logic went against primal instinct, and Harry was not going to let the dregs of his animal brain hold him back.
He made his way through the trees, eyes adjusting to the darkness, and steeled himself to look inward.
Thinking of his eventual triumph hadn’t calmed him, and he knew why.
He just didn’t want to think about it.
But this was his Gom Jabbar, and he was not going to flinch. He was going to face the truth: he could not do this alone. He needed others to support him. What Callista had said was true in its own way, even if she didn’t understand.
That last thought made him stop in his tracks. Yes. Callista had spoken the truth, even though she did not understand. That was the key. She believed that a team of knowing allies was the only way to win. She believed in leading from the front, in being an ideal.
Harry knew better. He did not intend to let his allies understand his true aims. Some, perhaps, might not even know they were on his team.
Yes.
He turned around and headed back to the house. All it had taken was a few moments in the peace of the outdoors, and he was already refreshed, filled with purpose. In the city, surrounded by people living their meaningless lives, he would have been distracted by their petty concerns. Coming here had been the correct choice.
In the house, he left the door open to catch the sounds of the forest at night and pulled a pad of paper out of one of the boxes. Even when he’d worked all day on programming, his desk had been littered with pieces of paper. He planned best in ink.
It was not long until he had a full list of potential allies, both knowing and unknowing.
His confidence was restored. It was the nature of kingship that people would attempt to overthrow you. That was something Callista would find out soon enough. This had simply been his first test, and he fully intended to pass it.
After all, if he could not rule, if he could not ensure that this game was a force for good, there was only one choice left.
To destroy it.
Chapter Three
The dark-haired human nodded to Gracie. “I’m Dhruv.”
Where the air above his head should indicate a name, there was nothing. His skin was a deep brown, and he wore the leather armor of a low-level melee fighter.
“And I’m Dan,” said the Aosi summoner. Unlike most male characters in the game, he wore his hair long, and it blew in a magical breeze.
Gracie had to admit, she’d love a world where long hair always blew around glamorously while somehow never getting in the way. She’d bet it didn’t tangle, either. Real life really needed to step up its game.
She sighed. “Well, I suppose I can appreciate you showing up here instead of at my apartment.” She blinked and considered. “Actually, I don’t like this any better.”
Dan said nothing but she thought she heard a snicker from Dhruv. She got the sense that he preferred blunt honesty and a screaming fight to carefully-chosen words.
“Why are you here?” Gracie asked them flatly.
They looked at one another for a moment, and she had the sense they might be speaking on a private channel. When they looked back, it was Dhruv who spoke first.
“To meet you,” he said. Behind the minimal voice filters of a human character, his tone was quite brusque. “You’re a fixture of the game now whether we like it or not.”
The Aosi looked at him sharply, then back at Gracie. “What he means is—” Dan started to say.
“No, I get what he means,” Gracie shot back. “He means you two don’t like that I’m a fixture of the game. And, like him, I would much rather we just said what we meant—because, frankly? It’s been too long with you two sneaking around and doing things behind my back when I goddamned tried to make things right from the get-go. You’re the ones who turned this into a battle, not me.”
For a very long moment, neither of them said anything. At least, they didn’t say anything to her. What they might be saying to one another, she didn’t know. They stared each other down through the tall grass, Gracie’s golden armor shining, the Aosi’s hair blowing in the imaginary wind, heroes and villains in some sort of cinematic showdown.
It was enough to make her wonder if every showdown was this way. When generals met on a battlefield with their armies behind them, did they feel swelling, epic camaraderie and purpose, or did they feel this utter annoyance that the other side couldn’t just behave reasonably?
She was beginning to think it was the latter.
“So?” she said, finally. “Anything to say?”
“We prioritized the game over you,” Dan said finally. “We have spent over a decade creating Metamorphosis Online. Thousands o
f people play it—”
“Yeah, I get that.” Gracie couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I really, really do. Which is why I tried to fix it from the start. You had options—”
Dan cut her off with a small gesture, one green-blue hand moving slightly. “This isn’t about that anymore.”
“Oh?” It was a pity they couldn’t see her expression because she was pretty sure her eyebrows had shot off her face entirely.
“This is about moving forward,” Dan said. From the way he spoke, she guessed he was used to being very businesslike and crisp. Unfortunately, his voice now sounded echoey due to the Aosi voice filters. “This is about what we do in the future.”
In Gracie’s opinion, that was awfully convenient. After someone trampled all over you, it was certainly more advantageous to them to say that you shouldn’t focus on all the bad things they’d done. That you should just move on and focus on the future.
Some quiet part of her, though, wanted to see what they would say if they thought she was agreeable. She wanted to know where their heads were, after all.
Because she intended to drive a very hard bargain.
So she crossed her arms and waited. She didn’t quite have it in her to simper.
Dhruv, however, had her number. “What do you want?” he asked her bluntly.
I want to be able to play the damned game in peace. I want to be able to have a place where my friends and I can meet and help one another and feel a little bit like the world is a nice place.
She wasn’t going to say that, of course. And, as she tried to figure out what she would say, inspiration came to her in a flash.
“I want you to keep Harry off my back, for one thing.”
She was pretty sure that was the last condition they wanted her to put on things. For another, she was sure they would actually try. It meshed with their own goals, after all. They didn’t want Harry in the game any more than she did. They certainly didn’t want the ghost of corporate blunders past to come around and harass their players.
She felt—as much as one could feel something like that—Dan’s desire to say she could have given the quest back to Harry. But he wouldn’t want Harry to be where she was standing now, and they both knew it.
He wisely kept his mouth shut.
That was when she realized it: they didn’t want to be here, either. They had no idea what they were doing. They weren’t masterminds, running the whole game like puppet masters. Instead, they were scrambling to keep up with a situation that had blindsided them.
She wasn’t as out of her depth as she’d thought.
“As you’ll have noticed,” Dhruv said, “Harry isn’t exactly easily controlled.”
“Yeah, well,” Gracie shot back, “that’s the bargain you took on when you started a company with him, isn’t it?”
“Are you holding us responsible for his behavior?” Dhruv was shifting angrily.
“You’re the ones who helped make him who he was,” Gracie snapped. “I know the stories you tell yourself. You say that Metamorphosis Online was his idea, but you two built it, don’t you? You say that. Well, if he couldn’t have made it without you, then you had a hand in giving him that power. I’ll bet he used some of your code to work himself into the game.”
There was ringing, icy silence. She was fairly sure they weren’t talking to each other. She could practically feel the fury rippling off them in waves.
“Harry’s choices,” Dhruv said finally, “are his own. You would say the same if we blamed you for what he’s done.”
“Mmm.” Gracie smiled. Anger warmed her, heating her blood. “If you really believed that, you’d have been open with everyone about what was happening. You would have issued a press release about how Harry was interfering in the game. You would have told your sponsored teams what was happening. But you didn’t.”
Dan and Dhruv looked at each other now. They were talking, she could tell.
“I tried to help,” Gracie said again. She couldn’t get past this part, no matter how she tried. “I sent you a message as soon as I got into the Top 10. I said it was a mistake.”
“So you do think it was a mistake,” Dan said quietly, and she had the sense that she’d stepped unknowingly into a trap.
“Not anymore,” she told him simply. “Now I know it was part of the game’s rules, because it was. I did quests no one else did, and I fought bosses no one else fought. I made a gesture no one else made to end a war between two non-playing races. And I don’t think—”
She bit off the words.
“You don’t think what?” Dan asked silkily.
Gracie gave him an unfriendly look and wished he could somehow see it. He couldn’t, of course. He just saw the blank, distant expression of her Aosi avatar.
“I may not agree with everything Harry believes,” Gracie said, “but I don’t disagree with all of it either.”
“You should.” Now Dhruv sounded angry. “He wants to be a dictator. He wants to hold people back from things they need to be allowed to do.”
“Oh, come on.” Gracie rolled her eyes. “There weren’t video games until a couple of decades ago. If people needed to be able to do this, the human race wouldn’t have survived without it.”
Dhruv made an inarticulate noise of anger.
“I’m not saying there should be a dictator,” Gracie told him fiercely. “Harry didn’t think of anyone else as real people. When it came down to it, there was a reason he didn’t have anyone fighting with him. He’d never have been a good leader because he would never have listened to what people actually needed instead of what he thought they needed. He thought he was different from everyone, but he was still the only one who could see how they needed to live their lives. I get that.”
“Then let them live their damned lives!” Dhruv yelled finally. “If you know you can’t decide for them, let them decide for themselves! This isn’t life or death. It isn’t some fucking apocalypse.”
“Dhruv.” Dan’s voice was shaking, and Gracie could feel his tension rising. Dan didn’t like confrontation. He didn’t want to be here.
She had zero sympathy.
“If you weren’t willing to have this out,” she told him sharply, “you shouldn’t have come. You don’t really want to talk about moving forward, you just want—”
The Aosi staggered forward and sprawled onto the ground. Behind him, a wolf bared its teeth and then threw back its head to howl. It was huge, its fur mottled blood-red and rippling in the wind. A hovering sigil over its head identified it as a rare spawn.
“Shit.” Gracie charged into action. “Dan, up! Move!”
Dan sprinted away, and the wolf pursued. Dhruv sprang into motion and landed one punch on it, but he was Level 2, so the damage was laughably low.
Gracie slammed sideways into the wolf, relishing the jolt through her haptics, and drew her sword in one smooth motion. She spun and hacked, her teeth bared in a feral grin.
“Listen up, you fucking psychopath, you lost! This is over!”
“Uh, Callista—” Dan started.
“I will not—” Gracie gritted out, landing a shield bash “—spend the rest of my fucking life—” she landed a less satisfying slash “—looking over my shoulder for you to show up in a dungeon run—” a much more satisfying slash this time “—a random-ass wolf mob—” another shield bash “—OR MY FUCKING APARTMENT!”
The wolf never really stood a chance. She was at a level to be able to take it down, and she was angry as hell. Her health bar was down to one-third and she was panting, but she was still alive when it sprawled at her feet, dead.
Gracie leaned down. “Can you still hear me, motherfucker?”
“Uh. Er.” Dan cleared his throat. “Callista—er, Grace.”
“Gracie,” Gracie said absently.
“Mmm. That’s not Harry.”
Gracie froze. Her head came up, and she looked at the two of them. “What?” she asked finally.
“That’s just…one
of the rare wandering spawns,” Dan told her.
“Oh,” Gracie said faintly.
There was a pause, then Dhruv gave a muffled snort of laughter. Gracie felt a bit of annoyance mixed with her hurt pride, but the amusement hit her in the same moment—and it was far stronger. She choked on a laugh of her own, coughed, and pounded her chest.
“Well, then,” she said, after a moment. She knelt to loot the corpse and came up with a single bloody tooth.
“ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED,” announced the pleasant female voice. “WOLF-SLAYER. Ranking points have been added.”
And then all of them were laughing, and they couldn’t stop. It was just too much, Gracie thought, a bit helplessly. She hadn’t even wanted to be here, and every random chance seemed to be pushing her forward. She seized the chances as they came, of course, but it seemed like she couldn’t turn around without tripping over some ranking boost or other.
When they finally stopped laughing, Gracie sighed and looked at the sky. The sun was already dropping again.
“Is that why you brought up the fact that we found you here, not at your house?” Dhruv asked. “Did he actually show up at your place?”
“Yeah.” Gracie gazed at them.
“That, we truly never intended.” Dan’s voice was grave.
“I know.” Gracie hadn’t even considered that possibility.
“I feel like we should have guessed,” Dan said to Dhruv.
“Don’t try to anticipate crazy people,” Gracie advised. “It’ll make you just as crazy.” She shrugged. “Look, I don’t hate you, and I don’t want this to be a fight. But I’m not willing to just forget the past because you want to move forward now. So, how about this: you think about what you want, then come tell me. Until then, I’m going to hold onto this quest.”
She didn’t know how to give it up anyway, but they didn’t have to know that.
They watched her quietly.
“I am not,” Gracie told them starkly, “going to let anyone destroy this game.”
She logged out without waiting for their response.