“You should talk,” said Yuxia, looking at James’s monitor. James had also been playing T’Rain. Csongor was interested to note that James’s character seemed to be tromping around in an environment very similar to the Torgai Foothills. As a matter of fact, the mountain peak in the background looked awfully familiar; James’s character was within a few kilometers of Marlon’s.
“You’re following us,” he said, “in two worlds at the same time.”
James nodded. “I cannot tell a lie. I been doing it for a few hours.”
“Do you want some of the gold?” Yuxia asked.
“Fuck the gold,” said James. “I want to know anything you might know about Abdallah Jones.”
“YOU ASKED ME to tell you when he got over the one-million-dollar mark,” Clover mentioned, “and I think it just happened.”
“You think!?”
“It fluctuates up and down as raiding parties steal money from him. He has got a lot of raiding parties coming after him right now.”
“Anything major?”
“No, nothing as big as the party we put together. There hasn’t been time. But I’d say that word is getting around that something big is happening in the Torgai. Within an hour I’d expect to see some fairly well-organized hundred-man raids homing in on him.”
“I think that’s actually a good thing,” Egdod said, after thinking about it for a while. Richard had been playing T’Rain for something like fourteen consecutive hours, and his conversational skills weren’t everything that they could be. “I think it gives him more incentive to get it done now. He’s unHidden a million bucks’ worth of gold…”
“One point one million,” Clover corrected him. “He just raked in a big score.”
“Anyway, the point is that for him to re-Hide all of it now, with so many people watching him, would be difficult. Easier to make his strike tonight.”
“So what does that mean for us? Or for you, rather, since I am about as puissant as a bacterium living in Chuck Norris’s bowels.”
“It means that the time has come.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Are you wearing headphones?”
“Yeah.”
“I suggest you take them off.”
“I WAS EXPECTING one Chinese virus-writer kid, alone,” said the man calling himself James, with a nod in Marlon’s direction. “I didn’t realize he’d have a girlfriend, and a Hungarian bodyguard with a pistol in his pocket.”
They had withdrawn to a corner of the Internet café where they could speak privately and google things. The place was filling up with mongers.
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Yuxia said. “I don’t think he likes tomboys.”
“De gustibus non est disputandem,” said the man.
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s a fucking idiot.”
Csongor, a bit taken aback to realize that James and Yuxia were flirting with each other, felt himself receding to the periphery of relevance.
“I like him,” Yuxia said, “like a brother. But…” and she held out her hand, fingers splayed, and wiggled it in the air.
“Gotcha,” said James, looking at her fascinatedly. But then he seemed to remember his manners, and his gaze strayed to Csongor. “What’s your story, big guy? Fish out of water, huh?”
While not immune to James’s insouciant charm, Csongor could only think of Zula, so he broke eye contact and looked out the window in a way that must have seemed brooding. He noticed that he was drumming his fingers on the counter, each calloused, sun-dried tip bashing the Formica like a ball-peen hammer.
“I shot him in the head,” he said finally.
He turned to look at James, who had shut up for once. “I. Shot. Him. In. The. Head.”
“Hold on a sec, are you talking about Jones?”
“Yeah. But it was only, what do you call it?” Csongor pantomimed a bullet caroming off the side of his head.
“A graze,” James said. “I fucking hate that.” He pondered it for a few moments. “You shot Abdallah Jones in the head.”
“Yeah. With this.” Csongor slapped the heavy thing in his pocket.
“From how far away?”
“Too close.” And Csongor related the story. This ended up taking a while. He got the impression that this was the longest span of time that “James” had gone without saying anything since he had obtained the power of speech as a toddler.
But before James could follow up on some of the story’s very remarkable features—which was something that he clearly wanted to do in the worst way—they were interrupted by a sharp exclamation from Marlon: “Aiyaa!”
It was the first time since all of this had begun that Marlon had expressed even mild concern about anything. But this was more than that: it was a pang of dismay. He had taken both hands off the keyboard—a completely unprecedented lapse—and clapped them to the sides of his head, and was staring at the screen in astonishment.
His face was illuminated by flickering white light.
“James” was on his feet. He ran around to where he could see the screen. “Holy crap,” he exclaimed. “This could only be one spell. But I don’t think it’s ever been used before.”
“One time,” Marlon said, “it was used to kill a whole dynasty of Titans.”
“Who used it?”
“Egdod.”
“I’m going to Yank you,” said James, running over toward the terminal where his T’Rain session was still open.
“I have wards and spoilers in effect,” Marlon warned him. “You can’t Yank me.”
“Turn them all off and let me do it. My name is Thorakks.”
By now Csongor and Yuxia had edged into the space vacated, moments earlier, by James, and were looking over Marlon’s shoulder. Marlon had pushed all the little chat windows and status displays to the periphery of his screen, so they were seeing the world of T’Rain over the shoulder of Reamde, which was to say that they were now looking over two shoulders, Marlon’s and the Troll’s. The latter was standing on open ground in the floodplain of a river, with the tail end of a mountain range visible on the right, giving way to rolling bottomlands tiled with green fields and speckled with villages. He had, in other words, almost made it out of the Torgai Foothills and seemed to be well on his way to reaching some inhabited place where amenities such as moneychangers and ley line intersections could be found. Csongor, who by now had learned how to make sense of the user interface, observed that Reamde was carrying on his person 9 pieces of Indigold, 767 pieces of Blue Gold, 32,198 pieces of Red Gold, and 198,564 of plain old yellow gold pieces: numbers that boggled the T’Rainian mind, since even a few hundred pieces of yellow gold was rated a considerable fortune and well worth fighting over. This absolutely had to be the largest amount of money ever carried by a single T’Rain character at one time. At a quick calculation it was well over a million dollars in real money, probably closer to two million.
Accordingly, Reamde was surrounded by a phalanx of other characters, too numerous for Csongor to count or even to see. The entire formation was marching across the plain as a bloc, so tightly coordinated in its maneuvers that Csongor reckoned they must all be linked together by some sort of computer algorithm; the other players must have slaved their characters to Reamde’s movements and taken their hands from the controls, allowing Marlon to drive the entire formation.
These things alone—the vast amount of money in play, the colossal size of the formation—would have absorbed the attention of even the most experienced and hard-core T’Rain player. And yet the scene was visually dominated by something even huger and more attention-getting: an incoming comet. At its core it was as bright as the screen of Marlon’s computer was capable of shining, and its brilliance was lighting up all that faced it with ghastly white brilliance while casting everything else into impenetrable shadow. An interesting psychological phenomenon kicked in here, having to do with perception of light and color. They were looking at a monitor screen in a
dimly illuminated room. The monitor was a tray of black plastic with some fluorescent tubes in its back and a window covering its front. The window was etched with a few million microscopic light valves, made of liquid crystals, that could be turned on or off, or to various gradations in between. If every single one of those valves was opened up to let 100 percent of the light through, then they would simply be looking at a tray with some fluorescent tubes in the back, and it wouldn’t be all that bright. It would be like staring up at a light fixture in the ceiling of an office: certainly an ample amount of illumination, but nothing compared to the amount of light that the sun shed on the ground, even on the most heavily overcast day. Anyone walking indoors and staring at that tray of light going full blast would not perceive it as bright. They might not even be able to tell whether it was turned on.
And yet Marlon and Csongor and Yuxia were all squinting and averting their gazes and even holding up hands to shield their retinas from the light of the imaginary comet being depicted on the screen of this computer monitor. They perceived it as intolerably bright. Admittedly, this was partly because they were in a dark room and so their pupils were dilated. But beyond that, there was a psychological factor at work. They had been habituated to avert their gaze from extremely bright objects that did what the light in this fictional scene was doing, that is, shining out of the sky and casting deep shadows on the ground, and these instincts were kicking in as the comet drew closer. Moreover, the subwoofer attached to Marlon’s computer had gone into some kind of serious overdrive and was causing visible nervousness among the porn-watching clientele of the café, who had probably been warned that there were lots of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis in the Philippines. One of them even jumped up from his monitor and made a run for the door, fearing he might in the next moment be buried in a lahar. Csongor, snapping out of suspended-disbelief mode, stepped forward and twiddled a knob on the speaker, cutting the bass to a more manageable level.
This made it possible to hear James, who was hollering from across the café: “Dude. It is Comet Rider. And it is targeted on your ass. You are going to die. Let me Yank you.”
Marlon’s hands flickered like firelight over the keyboard, changing some of the interface settings. Csongor was familiar with what he was doing, since he’d been forced to learn similar tricks in order to perceive all the warding spells that were permanently installed around the trading pit at the Carthinias Exchange. These suddenly became visible—though badly washed out by comet-light—around Reamde and his phalanx: at least a dozen concentric layers of colored force fields, some dome shaped, some conical, some open-topped cylinders, all depicted in different hues and shimmering with various textures. Spells for turning aside projectile weapons, for stopping magical fireballs, for making hidden characters visible, and for inflicting damage automatically on any foes who tried to penetrate to the center.
And for preventing the beneficiary from being Yanked. Yanking was a spell, normally used with hostile intent, that abducted the target character and sucked him across space at unthinkable velocity and deposited him at the feet of the spell caster.
Marlon began bringing down the curtains of protective spells. In doing so, he was exposing himself and the members of his army to attack; but his army was dissolving anyway, fleeing on a menagerie of winged, four-footed, and six-footed mounts, magic carpets, numinous motorcycles, and magical currents of air, trying to put as much space as possible between themselves and him upon whom the comet was unmistakably crosshaired.
Just as the screen was going completely white and the subwoofer trying to turn itself inside out, a translucent image of Thorakks appeared square in the middle, reaching toward him with one gloved and mailed fist. The screen became considerably darker, and they were treated to an animation that made it seem as though they were being vomited up an esophagus of eerily colored smoke and twining tendrils.
And then they were on a rocky ledge on the side of a mountain somewhere, looking at Thorakks, who was lit up a blinding white on one side and completely black on the other.
Marlon spun the point of view around so that they were looking in the same direction as Thorakks, that is, into the valley below them. A fireball the size of Staten Island was just that second slamming into the ground. Marlon had to turn the subwoofer totally off.
They stood there for a minute or so just to enjoy the spectacle: a shock wave spreading out from the middle like a ripple in a pond, eventually freezing to create the rim of a crater. Columns of steam rising up from the vaporized river. Rocks and trees raining down (both Thorakks and Reamde cast warding spells to keep from getting crushed by falling debris). The vast bubble of light and smoke gradually focusing into a column, the column resolving into a bipedal figure: a man with a long white beard, gazing about the crater somewhat in the manner of someone who has just turned on the light in his pantry and is looking for cockroaches. For—as Csongor now understood—this being had literally rode in on the comet, like a child descending a hill on a trash can lid.
“Egdod,” Marlon said in an interesting combination of reverence, disbelief, and pants-pissing fear.
“Never thought I’d see him in-game,” said James indistinctly from across the room. A moment later the words were repeated, in a harsh metallic voice, and with a different accent, by Thorakks.
Marlon was busy invoking new spells, trying to rebuild the defenses he had shut down in order to allow himself to be Yanked and trying, Csongor suspected, to make himself invisible. Noting this, Thorakks said, with mild amusement: “Seriously? You’re going to put up a fight?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to go on the lam from Egdod.”
“I have no choice.”
“Do you know who his player is?”
“Of course I know.”
“Do you know he’s the uncle of your friend Zula?”
Marlon froze for a moment, and Csongor imagined that, in Marlon’s mind’s eye, he was seeing the image he had described to them during the voyage: a moment, just after Ivanov had been shot and Csongor knocked out, when Zula’s face had met Marlon’s through a dirty windowpane, and their eyes had connected for a few moments.
Then his eyes refocused on the screen.
“I will talk to the uncle of Zula when I have the money,” Marlon said, “and have given it to my friends. Their home has been exploded and they are running from the police and from everyone else, and they are depending on me to finish this.”
“Then let’s haul ass,” James suggested.
Marlon poised his fingers on the keyboard, then glanced up at Csongor. “Are you ready?”
“I will be,” Csongor said, “by the time you get there.”
“HEY, BIGFOOT,” CORVALLIS said. “You are rearranging the planet faster than our servers can update the caches.”
“It’s good for you,” Richard muttered. “Call it a stress test and get on with it.”
“It doesn’t help that you’re doing it at one in the morning when most of our senior staff are asleep.”
“It’s Saturday. They’re partying. What do you think phones are for?”
“I’ll try to reach them but—”
“Before you do that, tell me where the little fucker is.”
“So he’s back to being a little fucker now?”
“There are a lot of crushed and incinerated remains underfoot … but he should have survived … I cast a protective ward on him immediately before impact.”
After a lot of typing, C-plus answered: “He’s not there. He got Yanked just in time by one Thorakks. I can give you general coordinates, but they are moving fast and the database is going to lag.”
“Just give me a place to start tracking them,” said Richard, sounding more and more like Egdod himself with every moment. “No, scratch that.”
“Come again?”
“They have to be heading for an LLI,” Richard said, using the ingame jargon for ley line intersection. “There’s only one place they can
move this amount of gold.”
AS LONG AS Zula kept herself busy cleaning up the aftermath of dinner, she was able to avoid thinking about keys and padlocks. They had eaten the food from disposable plastic plates, which she collected and stacked, scraping any residue into a garbage bag. She placed the stack of scraped plates into a second garbage bag. The cooking pots she washed using water that she heated up on the camp stove. She left those out to dry. The chain, naturally, confined her to a circular area, and she’d already made up her mind that she would sleep as far away as possible from where she put the garbage, in case it drew vermin or worse. For now, she placed the garbage bags—which were not yet very bulky—into a cooler, just to keep them safe from small critters such as mice. She considered explaining to the men that they should hang their food from tree limbs, then thought better of it. Instead she dragged the cooler as far as she could go in the direction of the tents where the men were sleeping and left it there. Let them deal with the local wildlife. At worst it would give her some entertainment; at best it might cover her escape. Moving as far as she could go in the opposite direction, 180 degrees around the circle from the food dump, she began to arrange her own little campsite. This consisted of a tiny one-person camp shelter, just large enough to house a sleeping bag.
They hadn’t said anything about toilet facilities. As far as she could make out, they were just wandering off into the woods when they needed to eliminate. Does a terrorist shit in the woods? Apparently. But Zula did not have that option. They had equipped her with a large steel serving spoon. She went to a place at the end of her chain, equidistant from the garbage place and the sleeping place, and used the spoon to dig out a shallow pit. The going was easy at first, but then she came to a depth, only a few inches below the surface, where interlocking roots of trees and shrubs made it impossible to go any deeper. She stood above it and wrapped a green plastic tarp around herself for privacy, then dropped her pants and squatted over it, creating a little tent lit up on the inside by her flashlight. She hunched her shoulders and drew the tarp over her head so that she could see what she was doing. The pill of damp cotton came out first, and she was able to pluck it clear before the rest came. When she was finished, she pulled the key out and placed it in a zippered pocket on the leg of her trousers before standing up, getting fully reclothed, and tossing the tarp to one side. Then she used the shovel to fill the hole back in and kicked some more loose pine needles and pebbles over the top for good measure. The men had all long since gone into their tents, the only exception being the sniper Jahandar, who had retreated up into the trees after dinner to, she assumed, keep watch while the others slept. Since Zula was the only person moving in the camp, she had to assume that he was watching her. If so, he was seeing her as a little blob of light bobbing around and tending to chores. After she had finished going to the toilet, she kicked off her Crocs—still the only footwear she was allowed to have—and climbed into her sleeping bag fully clothed and zipped the tiny tent closed, except for a gap down at the bottom where the chain emerged.
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