by Natalie Grey
Gracie nodded. “I know how that feels,” she offered.
“You’re, ah…you’re one year out of college?” Jamie asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I may not be as old as you,” Gracie said, nettled, “but I do get what it’s like to feel like you’re on the wrong track and the ‘right’ track is still somewhere you don’t want to be.”
Jamie gave her a look of appreciation. “That’s actually…a really good way to put it. I feel like I should have built something by now—you know, have a house, a wife, kids.” Again, he looked uncomfortable. “But I don’t want that. It just feels like losing not to have it?”
“Yeah.” Gracie nodded. “No, I totally get that. I’m supposed to be in grad school or working for some Fortune 500 company, dating a preppy guy on the management track, getting ready for that same whole schtick—marriage, kids, pretty Christmas cards.”
Jamie laughed. “You don’t look like you want it any more than I do.”
“Yeah.” Gracie shrugged. “That’s the way of it, huh? And that’s the problem with charting your own course. You know you don’t want to go the way people are telling you to go, but that doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re actually going for. It’s all uncharted territory.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, with feeling. “Yeah,” he added again, quietly. “Yeah, that’s about the way of it.”
“Jamie…” Gracie shook her head. “Cas. Sorry, I can’t call you anything but Cas.”
He gave her a tired smile.
“Are you okay?” Gracie asked. “You look happy, and then you look so sad.”
She had said the wrong thing. Jamie’s face closed off entirely. He swallowed.
“It’s nothing,” he said finally. “Really. Honestly.”
Yeah, that sounds real. But Gracie knew better than to say that. Humor wasn’t going to make him feel any better, so she bit her lip and nodded. “Sure. Well, glad to hear it.”
“Yeah.” Jamie stood. “I should get some sleep.”
He left without another word, and when the door had closed, Jay came out into the main room with a speculative look on his face.
“Any idea what that was about?”
“Not the first thought,” Gracie said, troubled. She got up and began to put away the boxes of takeout food. There wasn’t much left, but it might make a good snack for someone later.
Plus, it gave her something to do.
Jay came to help her in silence, so they were both working when there was a knock at the door. Jay went to get it and came back with Dan and Dhruv at his heels.
“Hey,” Gracie said, looking up. Then she saw their expressions. “What’s wrong?”
To her surprise, it was Dan who answered, his tone direct. “It’s not just you who’ll be fighting winner-takes-all,” he said flatly. “Anyone who dies in the fight, and anyone who’s on the losing team? They’re out of the game too. Forever.”
There was a pause, and then Gracie said simply, “No.”
Dan and Dhruv exchanged looks.
“There could be benefits,” Dan said quietly. “As you mentioned, this is a way to get Harry out of the game.”
“No. Collateral. Damage.” Gracie shook her head. “I didn’t fly these people out here for the possibility that they’d never be part of the game again, and—” She broke off and swallowed. “Even the Demon Syndicate doesn’t deserve this.”
“They probably don’t know,” Jay said. When everyone looked at him, he shrugged. “Come on, you think the whole guild just decided, ‘Hey, let’s take the chance of getting banned from the game forever’?”
Gracie nodded. It was a good point. They probably didn’t know.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, it’s even more important, then. They literally don’t know it’s life or death.”
“If we take that part out,” Dan said, “it means Harry won’t get banned. There won’t be any reason to go through with this.”
“Find a way,” Gracie said bluntly.
“Now, wait a second,” Jay argued. “If it’s winner-takes-all, even for you two, that means there’s a chance that you—”
“I know.” Gracie looked at him. “I do. But that’s what monarchs are, Jay. What leaders are. They’re the ones who do the things that…” She swallowed. “They stand in the way,” she said. “And they take the risks.”
Dan waited, his gaze assessing both of them. Even Dhruv was uncharacteristically quiet.
Gracie tried to smile. “If we don’t take him out now, it’s just going to keep going like this forever—new ways, new cheat codes, new hacks. As long as we don’t deal with him, he’s going to hold the game back. Enough.” She looked at Dan. “Also, I’m a big believer in poetic justice. His quest should be how he gets shut out of the game. Just figure it out so the teams are safe.”
Dan gave a nod. “I’ll do what I can. No one from your team is to log on until I do. We’ll push a server update and tell you when it’s done.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Your warrior is a problem,” Yesuan said bluntly to Thad later. “His DPS isn’t up to par, and he’s easily distracted. He took too many runs to get a rhythm down for getting across the oasis.”
“And?” Thad asked.
Yesuan gave him a look.
They were standing in the oasis by moonlight. The rest of the guild had teleported home; only Yesuan and Thad were left. Birds called in the night, and the wind in the trees and shifting moonlight lent an eerie feel to the place.
It was easy to see how ghost stories had gotten started. Even knowing that none of the people involved were real, Thad found himself wondering why this keep was abandoned.
Yesuan said nothing, so Thad dragged his thoughts back to the matter at hand.
“You wanted us to run the scenario within certain parameters,” he said. “We did.” He shrugged. “Our acquaintance is likely to be brief. Why does it matter to you now if it took too many runs for Grok to come up to par?”
“You don’t care about quality?” Yesuan asked.
Thad’s temper broke. “I don’t care if you’re happy with my guild, beyond the very simple metric of whether or not we completed your task. You wanted results, and that’s what you’ll get.”
Yesuan looked at the lake. Thad followed his eyes and spotted a small shimmer in the air. Was he imagining it?
No. Yesuan had been looking at it this whole time. Interesting.
“Why are you even here?” Thad asked.
Yesuan gave him another look.
“I think I deserve an answer,” Thad said, “if you can’t do this without us.”
“No.” Yesuan sounded bored. “You don’t. You deserve what you bargained for, which was to win the next Month First you run.”
Thad was done with this. “Fine. Then maybe I don’t like the bargain. Maybe I walk.”
Yesuan rounded on him. It was ridiculous to see from a Piskie, and Thad laughed. That was the wrong choice, however.
“You have nothing if you walk away,” Yesuan spat at him. “Brightstar will decide to oust you to convince their investors they’re making a good return, your team will crumble, and people will remember you as the figurehead of a doomed experiment.”
“You’re so ridiculous!” Thad clenched his hands and tried not to scream. “You are insane! Everything is a matter of life and death to you!”
“Everything is a matter of life and death,” Yesuan hissed. “No decision comes without hurting someone, no wrongdoing or failure is without cost. You are sloppy. You care about your own prestige at the cost of everything else. You are—” He broke off and turned away.
Thad stood frozen, shaking. “I am what?” he asked finally. “What am I?”
Yesuan said nothing for a long time. His character was so still, in fact, that Thad wondered if he had disconnected.
“You are someone who has much to achieve,” Yesuan said. He sounded almost like he was reciting something. “With your guidance, your team could achieve so much m
ore. Isn’t that what you want to show your sponsors? Isn’t that the team you promised them?”
Thad frowned. This was so much nicer than Yesuan’s words had been before. It seemed out of place with the rest of the conversation.
But his pride swelled up at that. Perhaps Yesuan was right. Thad had been preoccupied with his own ranking, with snapping orders. But the team looked up to him. Perhaps, if he were to make each of them feel as though he truly cared, as though they were a special piece of the Demon Syndicate—
That sounded exhausting, and he rolled his eyes in the real world.
But perhaps it would work. The team would come together, they would win the Month First, and when Yesuan left, they would attract another healer easily.
Their conversation was interrupted by a bright purple message that flashed across the screen.
SERVER MAINTENANCE IN 2:00
SERVER MAINTENANCE IN 1:59
SERVER MAINTENANCE IN 1:58
“What the hell?” Yesuan spat. His caring tone was gone in an instant. “What do they know? What are they doing?”
“What do you mean?” Thad’s face settled into a frown. Something about this seemed…off.
Yesuan was cursing. “The challenge against Callista. She’ll be called here when she logs on, which has been far longer than it should have been, and now unexpected maintenance? They know something.”
“Who is they?” Thad demanded.
Yesuan ignored him. “Would they help her? No. And they haven’t banned this account—”
“What are we doing?” Thad asked suddenly. “Will they ban our accounts for this?”
Yesuan gave him a look. “No,” he said very precisely, in a way that was somehow not reassuring at all. “They will not. Keep your team ready. If this is really unconnected to everything else, I want them all online and ready as soon as the servers come back up. We need to be ready.”
“I didn’t know it was going to be tonight—”
Yesuan had run across the oasis, and now he was doing something complicated by the shimmering patch of air. “We’ll have to hope it’s enough,” he said to himself. To Thad, he said, “Yes, tonight. The longer we give her to prepare, the more dangerous she’ll be.”
Dan settled back in his chair. “I don’t like this.”
“Why not?” Dhruv shrugged. “It’s very low-risk from our end.”
“What if she loses?” Dan demanded.
Dhruv stared at him for a long moment. “Then we find another way to deal with him.” His eyes focused over Dan’s shoulder on the progress flashing across the screen as the update pushed to the servers. “I don’t see the problem.”
“If she loses, she’ll be gone.” Dan didn’t seem happy with his explanation, but neither did he offer another one.
Dhruv frowned, and then took a chair. He leaned his elbows on his knees. “So, now you don’t want her gone? Because I’d think it would be a nice, tidy solution.”
“It would leave us with Harry, but without the one person who might have been a check on him.”
“We pull the servers down if she loses, then, and remove the first stage of the quest.” Dhruv shrugged.
“It’s already removed in this update.” Dan gave a tight smile. “No one else can get at it, I made sure of that.”
“Well, aren’t you clever?” Dhruv sat back. “So what’s the problem? Honestly?”
Dan thought about it. He went over to the mini fridge in the corner and took out one of the bottled waters he drank. Dan only drank one brand of bottled water, and no one else in the office was allowed to touch his mini-fridge on pain of death.
He sat back down and stared at the screen for a while, tracking progress.
“I’d feel bad for her if she was thrown out of the game because she got caught up in someone else’s fight,” he said finally. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
Dhruv gave a shrug. “Nothing’s fair. Or…there’s always the chance. It’s the price you pay for being alive. Life is full of random chance.”
“Yes, but since we’re in charge of this one, shouldn’t we try to make it fair?” Dan demanded. “Shouldn’t we?”
Dhruv opened his mouth, then waved his hands and sat back in his chair moodily.
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Exactly.”
“You know, you could have just kept that to yourself.” Dhruv picked at an imaginary speck of dust on his pants.
“Rather than trouble your delicate conscience?” Dan asked sweetly. He took a sip of water.
Dhruv glared at him. “You know what I meant.”
“Yes, I just said it.” Dan raised his eyebrows. “So, what do we do?”
There was a long pause while Dhruv looked into the middle distance with a surly expression. Then he smiled.
“We do what Harry would do,” he said.
Harry stared at the webpage, unblinking. It had been twenty minutes since the servers went down, and it might be hours.
But if he missed this, if he was offline when Callista logged on, he didn’t know what would happen to the challenge. If she had a chance to prepare, or log out and make a new character, or—
There was no knowing what she would do. He had meant what he said to Thad: Callista was dangerous.
His lip curled. Thad was a fool. By now, any reasonable person should have seen that Harry had no intentions of following through on his end of the bargain. He wouldn’t have to if Thad died, and his help would hardly matter if most of Thad’s team was lost.
And it would be. Players never expected death in a video game to be permanent. They would run headlong into danger without a thought. It would be a valuable lesson for everyone else.
If, of course, the challenge still existed. He wanted to snarl. To come so close, only to have the opportunity yanked away now.
Because there was nothing left. If he lost this, if he wasn’t able to bring Callista down and take the crown that way, there was no further recourse. The very thought of losing made his blood turn icy.
He told himself that it was impossible for him to lose. This quest had been made for him, by him, as an expression of reality.
He was meant to have it.
The server light blinked green, and his throat caught. He texted Thad with shaking fingers and went to get his VR headset on. He was about to find out if all of his work had been undone.
But when he logged on, the challenge still showed in the corner of his screen, unanswered and unclaimed.
Harry sagged in relief. He was meant to win this, he told himself. He was born for this—to be this king, in this era, in this world. That was why he was here.
He created a party and ordered them to get ready. Almost, he told them to pray. For many, this was the last fight of their time here. That deserved some sort of recognition. But he said nothing, in the end.
Some people were born to be pawns.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The map on the table was printed out on glossy paper, far superior to anything Gracie could have drawn on her own. She had to admit that.
On the other hand, she had a soft spot for maps hand-drawn on sheets of taped-together graph paper. It was how she’d built the earliest worlds she played in, and it was how she still liked to organize her thoughts.
Regardless, this was what they had: a custom-made board to plan their strategy in Saladin’s Keep. Rosalie, the receptionist at Dragon Soul, had come over to the hotel with all of the materials. She had remembered every single one of their names and inquired as to relevant details of each person’s flight.
Gracie would bet good money that Rosalie would be running some company or other within the next few years if she wanted to.
Gracie planted her hands on the map and looked down.
“The east hallway is better if they don’t know we’re there,” Ushanas said. She crossed her arms over her chest. “There are more places to hide that are invisible from both ends of the corridor, so we can set up ambushes that just keep going. They think they’ve gotten away
from one, then they run into another one. Their team comes to help, and they get ambushed.”
Gracie nodded.
“But there’s no flag,” Dathok clarified. “Right?” Of all of them, he almost resembled his character. He was tall, with incredibly broad shoulders and decisive features.
“No flag,” Gracie confirmed. “Just a weird sort of battle royale. Anyone on a team can attack the other team’s leader, and if either leader dies…” She met Jay’s eyes across the table. “The fight is over,” she finished.
Jay opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off with a tiny shake of her head. She didn’t want anyone on the team to know the stakes. She wanted them to go into this fight with their heads on straight and their focus razor-sharp. She didn’t want them worrying.
Alex had clearly noticed what had passed between them, but he said nothing. His girlfriend, Sydney, was curled up on the other side of the room with a book and was slowly falling asleep.
Kevin was tapping his fingers on the side of his face as he stared down at the map. He and Alan had been murmuring together, and Gracie remembered that they’d been playing video games together for years.
Her heart ached at the idea of having a sibling she was that close with. She looked around the table and saw Jamie watching them, his face drawn. She frowned and kept scanning. Freon was about as unremarkable a person as it was possible to be, with the sort of face you forgot very easily. He should, Gracie thought vaguely, be a spy. Lakhesis had curly brown hair that was escaping the multitude of clips and hair ties she had used, and a smile that always had an edge of sadness to it.
Gracie looked down at her phone when it buzzed. It was a message from Dhruv, telling her that the servers were online, Harry was online, and—
She frowned.
“All right, get ready to go, people. We’re getting a shuttle over to the building.”
Alex went over to kneel by the couch. Gracie heard him say something to Sydney, and she murmured something back sleepily. Her hand emerged from her blanket to clasp his, and Gracie made out the words, “Good luck.”