by Atkins, Dawn
Rena noticed the monitor and saw that Lifers had begun to drop to the floor or slump over their consoles. Her heart burned and each breath hurt.
She had to finish the story for the tape recording she was making. “You murdered Cassie and Gage’s sister in Seattle. You sent Watchers to inject them with drugs.”
“We released them from their agony. Our medicine was no longer effective. We offered them a slide into pleasure and then the long night.”
“Our fault is ambition,” Nigel moaned. “Humility in all things.”
“Enough, Nigel. Self-flagellate on your own time,” Maya snapped.
“You won’t get away. The police know. Gage told them what you’re up to. He showed them evidence.” She hoped that were true. Maybe, just maybe, Gage had reached the police and laid out what they knew of the Blackstones’ crimes. Maybe the police were even now putting together a warrant to search the Lounge, the health center, all of it.
“Sorry, dear. Your friend never made it to the police,” Maya said.
Rena’s heart stopped. Had they killed him? Had someone reported his death to Maya?
Maybe she was bluffing…guessing. Rena fought tears, trying to think of an argument that would stop this from happening.
“And anyway, the evidence will be gone along with the Lifers,” Maya finished smugly.
Except for this recording I’m making of your confession. The recorder would be found on her body, and the truth would be known. Rena kept her expression neutral as Maya looked into her eyes.
“You could come with us, Rena,” Maya said abruptly, her eyes swirling with hope like her mood ring. “Mason can get you a fresh identity, too. He’s been through a witch hunt of his own, so he knows the procedures.”
If she went along with them, was there a chance she could get help? “You would do that for me? Let me come with you?” She tried to sound eager, but Maya’s face fell.
“You are so transparent, Rena. That is your Achilles’ heel.” She gave Rena a bitter, twisted smile.
“And you are pure evil,” Rena said, fury in every syllable.
Maya’s head snapped back as if she’d been slapped. “That’s quite enough from you. Take her downstairs,” she said to the Watchers. “Have Roland put her to sleep by injection. Tell the others ten minutes. We still have to prepare our stand-ins.”
The guards hustled Rena to the elevator. Rena’s mind raced. If she could break way from these two long enough to disable the misters, she’d buy some time at least.
Never give up, never give in. Adrenaline pumped through her, as if for a Dome battle. When the elevator landed, Rena lunged forward, kicking the knee of the lighter guard—likely a faster runner. When he folded, she took off, managing twenty feet into the arena before the slower guard tackled her. She banged onto the floor, tasting blood.
“Now!” The shout from the arena startled her. All around the Lounge, Lifers sprang to their feet, awake and ready to fight. They weren’t unconscious. How? They’d believed her and hadn’t drunk the Electrique.
Her tackler was distracted enough by the sight that Rena was able to elbow him in the eye, then push out from under him to her feet. With the first guard limping closer, she raced for the control room, feeling as if rays of heat burst from her body, Astra in the flesh, flaming with hot light.
Nearly there, she spotted Zeke kneeling on a Watcher. Blood oozed from a cut on Zeke’s cheekbone. “I have to stop the misters,” she yelled as she ran by. “Get everyone outside.”
She took the stairs two at a time. Halfway up, she had to back-kick a Watcher, who fell away, but another was right behind him.
“Got him!” The familiar voice made her look back.
His arm in a sling, blood soaking a bandage on his shoulder, Gage swung a chain from the Dome arsenal around his head, then wrapped it around the guy’s legs, dragging him down the stairs.
“You’re alive,” Rena said, her heart nearly exploding with relief.
“So far.” He shot her a grin.
Below and beyond him, Rena could see the battle raging. Zeke’s Watchers fought Mason’s assassins all over the arena. She spotted her Recruits teaming up to smash two Watchers using props and moves from their battle routines, this time with deadly intent. Pride flared in her chest, but she had a mission to perform. “Keep them away from here until I disable the mist machine. They planned to pump poison into the air.”
“You got it.”
But the mister controls looked undisturbed. There were no canisters of gas or new wiring. Puzzled, she looked out at the arena, where she saw Mason’s Watchers leaving the fight, running for the exit. Why?
Then she saw Roland at one of the monitor towers. He turned on a fan, put a fallen fireworks tube back in place, then tucked the spiderweb of magnetic tape beneath it—the move that Baker had warned her might cause a bonfire. Why the hell was Roland fixing the decorations?
Maya had said something about Roland starting the show after Lifers were dreaming.
It came to her in a flash. “It’s the fireworks!” she shouted to Gage as she raced after Roland, now loping for the fireworks circuit board.
The spiderweb of tape would burn, giving off cyanide gas, as she’d learned from Maya’s story of Nigel’s arson attempt. One breath and you’re out cold. Two breaths and you’re dead. Spread by fans, the gas would reach Lifers in seconds. The police wouldn’t investigate because the deaths would be caused by smoke inhalation due to the unsafe use of fireworks around flammable decorations. Instead of a mass murder, it would be seen as a tragic accident, as Maya had said. It wouldn’t even be investigated as arson.
“Get out! Go! Save yourselves!” she yelled to any conscious Lifer she passed. The fighters were helping one another to their feet, examining injuries, moving slowly.
She flew, fast as Astra, aiming for Roland, who had reached his goal. He stretched for the switch…
Rena took a flying leap and slammed him against the circuit board. Gage wrapped his chain around Roland’s legs and yanked, groaning with pain from his own injuries.
“You’re done!” Rena punched Roland in the jaw, pain zinging from her knuckles up her arm, gratified when he collapsed, knocked out cold. No wonder he’d been afraid to fight her during practice. He had a glass jaw.
“You okay?” Gage asked her.
“I’m good.” She shook her punching hand, hoping she hadn’t broken a knuckle. “Disable the fireworks, call 911. The Blackstones and Mason are escaping in a limo. I’m going after them.”
She ran off, threw herself out the back door, her gaze strafing the lot. No limo. No luck. They’d escaped, unless law enforcement could stop them at the airport.
Back inside, she headed for Gage. He could tell Detective Warner to stop the Blackstones. He stood with Ji Jin and Leland. They all looked worried.
“The game’s about to go live,” Leland said, “but the Scrip Banque’s been messed with.”
“In what way?”
“I did a dummy sale as one last test, but the Banque took an automatic second withdrawal, then a third.”
“What does this mean?” Rena asked.
“That seven million subscribers are about to pay three times for EverLife II. That hacker who patched the Scrip Banque must have set this up.”
That must have been what Mason had been finishing while Maya told Rena her terrible story. Mason had attempted a far larger theft than blackmailing a few banished players. “Can you fix it, Ji Jin?” Rena asked.
“Not time enough. Back door has been already sealed.” Programmers left access points—back doors—in systems they set up for emergency repairs, but Mason’s hacker had shut down the K men’s access route.
Her mind raced. “Maybe we can use the game to stop them. The difficulty levels are set high due to server demands when players change the world, right?”
Ji Jin nodded. “This is true.”
“So if you set a bunch of us up at the top level, we can try to crash the servers before the
game goes public.”
“It is…possible,” Ji Jin said. “But there are so few…” He nodded out at the arena, full of sleeping Lifers.
“I’ll text my top-level clan members with my pass code. That should be more than enough to overload the system.”
“Let’s do it,” Leland said.
Sirens sounded nearby.
“Police and ambulance are here,” Gage said. “I’ll coordinate with them.”
“Tell them they can stop the Blackstones at the airport.”
“If they believe me. It’s a pretty far-fetched story we’ve telling.”
“It’s worse than you know. I’ll tell you later.” She gave her ear-piercing whistle and waved all the conscious Lifers toward a gamer station. She explained the situation, then said, “Work as fast as you can. Build towns, blow up castles, start wars, create new powers, whatever you can think of to tax the servers. Our first EverLife II quest will be to crash the game.”
They all grabbed headsets from passed-out Lifers, shifting them gently out of the way, so they could take their places. Ji Jin gave out codes and everyone got busy.
A few minutes later, Rena glanced around the arena to see how it was going. Every Lifer face held intense focus. This was her Family, working together on a mission, a quest like no other, on which so much depended. These people had trusted her and believed in her. Not because she was golden, but because they knew she was a good Lifer.
The Life was about Lifers, not Quests or Quarters or the fake love of a conniving mother and a weak father. She would hold that thought in her heart for the hard times to come.
They all worked feverishly for a half hour as the worldwide launch inched ever closer. EverLife II’s servers hummed bravely onward, slowed, but not stopped.
“What now, Rena?” Baker said over voice chat. “We’re stalled.”
Rena glanced over at Gage, who was talking to a paramedic. She remembered that Lifer Monday Quest he’d helped with. “Let’s try a Trojan horse trick. Load every avatar, every innocent-looking built object, with explosives and set them off on my count.”
Without hesitation, the players set to work, slamming down keystroke after keystroke, fingers flying. When they’d all clocked in with their builds, Rena began the countdown. “Five…four…three…two…one… Blow!” She watched forests, buildings, ships, and highways burst into flame on screens all over the arena.
Suddenly, her screen froze. An error message shot up. Around the room the same image appeared on every monitor.
“We did it,” she yelled. “Quest achieved.”
The players burst into shouts and whistles, slapping each other’s backs, high-fiving and knuckle-bumping everywhere. Maybe she hadn’t kept the Blackstones from escaping, but she’d kept them from stealing from loyal EverLife players. That counted for something.
She looked around the arena, now crowded with emergency personnel assisting the Lifers as they awoke from their drugged sleep, giving them oxygen, water, offering them plastic bowls to throw up in. Some were crying, most looked dazed, as if they’d just emerged from anesthesia.
She’d helped save their lives—Lifers from every Lounge in the U.S.—and she was so grateful and so relieved. Her body trembled from the aftereffects of adrenaline, but she shook it off. She had to speak to them all, tell them the truth, ease their fears and clear the confusion from their minds.
“Meet me in the Dome!” she called to the Lifers who’d gamed with her, waving them in that direction. She spotted Gage near Blood Electric where the EMTs had set up a care station. He was talking to a man in a shirt and tie with a badge clipped to his pants. When he saw her, he smiled and his whole face seemed lit up.
She felt that way, too, at just the sight of him. “Rena, this is Detective Warner. Detective, this is Rena Wingate, who engineered the entire rescue.”
“Novo,” she corrected. “Rena Novo. And I had help. Plenty of it.” She shot him a look of gratitude.
“Gage has filled me in on most of what happened, but I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I’m happy to answer them, but first I need to talk to everyone. Gage, we’re meeting in the Dome if you’d help me get everyone there.”
“Absolutely.”
She wove among the recovering Lifers, smiling, touching a hand, a shoulder, a back, giving Lifer salutes and words of encouragement, accepting the thanks of those who’d heard what had happened.
They all trailed after her to the Dome. Gage helped Rena climb onto one of the speaker stands to be seen and heard by all. She was relieved that everyone was safe, but her heart was heavy. The story would be tough for them to hear.
Rena looked out at the faces of the people who filled the seats and most of the floor. They looked troubled and shaky, shocked and scared, many still shaking off the drugged haze. She loved these people, and she would give her life to make things right for them all.
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she began. “The Life is not what we believed and the Blackstones are not who they seemed.” She fought a wash of despair, making herself speak as Astra would. “But I swear to you we will make a new life together, a better one—one based on truth, on sharing and caring.”
She told them the story, bit by bit. As she did, she watched emotions fill their faces—grief, horror, disbelief, anger, and gradually, a grim determination to move on from here.
“Are there any questions I haven’t answered?” she called out when she’d finished.
The sound of a gong filled the air. That had always meant the Blackstones were watching from their control room. There was a crackle overhead and the monitor flashed Nigel’s pale face. “My family,” he whispered. He seemed to be in pain.
The crowd gasped in surprise.
“You have survived our wrongs,” he panted, grimacing. “I am content. Forgive us.” He slid away from the screen and they heard him hit the floor. Rena jumped from her makeshift podium. “Get paramedics,” she said to Gage, running for the elevator, where Ji Jin was punching the button, tears in his eyes.
They found Nigel on the floor of the control room, barely conscious.
“Father!” Ji Jin kneeled beside him, Rena close by.
Nigel touched Ji Jin’s arm. “Is it selfish to be glad to see you?”
“What pills did you take? How many?” Rena asked, pricked by a ridiculous sadness as she watched the man fade before their eyes.
“Enough to finish me. I am long lost, my children. Naomi has been too fervent and Mason has been a cancer.”
“I will get the paramedics,” Ji Jin said, holding up his passkey, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Can you forgive me?” Nigel said. His feathery hair floated above his head, airy as the dandelion fluff Maya had compared him to.
When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “Perhaps you should not.” He winced again. “Lead our Family in grace, Genevieve. Be certain to bring Ji Jin’s sisters to him. He is too lonely. Far too lonely. You are my hope.” Nigel closed his eyes and died. It was strange, but as he passed Rena felt a quiet wind move through her, carrying the tinkle of chimes and a whisper of sandalwood, and she felt strangely blessed.
Later, after Lifers had retired to their Quarters or settled into sleeping bags wherever they could find space, Gage and Rena sat alone in the silent dimness of Blood Electric. “Are you okay?” Gage asked, his gaze probing and personal, as it had been from the beginning. She was starting not to mind.
“Not really,” she admitted. “You look worse than I feel.” The paramedics had cleaned his fresh scrapes, but his sling was filthy and his face was swollen, the red places beginning to bruise deeply purple.
“Worth every scrape.” Gage had dropped his phone, as it turned out, running from his attackers. He’d managed to climb a fence, but jumping to the ground he’d finished breaking a rib and passed out from the pain. A Good Samaritan found him and took him to a hospital, where they patched him up again. He’d headed to the police, but by then Wa
rner was out on a case. The detective he’d talked to took a statement, but was more concerned about finding his attackers than checking out the Lounge, where as far as he knew, all that was going on was the launch party.
“If I’d had any idea what was really happening, I’d have stolen a Glock and taken a cop hostage to get them here. I called you a bunch of times—from a pay phone, from borrowed cell phones, but always got voice mail. I figured you’d shut it down for the show.”
“I shot my battery trying to call you.”
“I gave up on the police, but I had to get you out of there, so I nabbed Nardo, the Electrique delivery guy, who knew the pass code.”
“I’m just glad you’re alive,” she said softly.
“Me, too.” He held her with his eyes. They were tied together by a thread, invisible, yet tough enough to hold them if one of them dangled from a cliff. I’m sticking, Gage had said. And so would Rena. At least until they figured out what this feeling meant in the real world.
“I’m just sorry Mason and Maya got away,” Rena said.
“They’ll be caught,” Gage said, his jaw muscle twitching. “Count on it.”
She looked out over the darkened arena, her heart heavy, her insides feeling as bruised as Gage’s poor body. “It hurts…what happened to us.”
“Yeah.”
“The Life was good. It made sense.” She studied his face, read the message in his eyes. “I know you think it was a cheat. You have to make sense of life on your own, battle it alone.”
“Not alone. I don’t think alone is the way. You do it with people you trust.” He squeezed her hand. “You know, Lifers will look to you now, Rena.”
“And I’ll be there for them.” She swallowed hard.
“You’re stronger than you think you are. You always have been. You didn’t need the Life for that.”
“Maybe you’re right.” She just might be ready to believe her Astra battle cry—that she had all the power she needed, that she stood strong and free, that she was more than enough.
As Rena, this time. “Guess it’s time to tap into my inner Astra.”