by Rick Ellrod
Dana was relieved. Wasn’t she? She swallowed and firmed her voice. “Okay. You get first chance at the bathroom.” She pointed.
When Dana in her turn emerged from the bathroom, Jeff was testing the locks on the room’s door. “Security’s all right. Lock and both deadbolts are on. In this neighborhood, caution seems to be indicated.”
“Good.” She marched around to the other side of the bed, hoping she wasn’t blushing as deeply as she feared she was. “Now turn around.”
“Come again?”
“If I sleep in these clothes, they won’t be fit to be seen in tomorrow.”
“Oh. Of course.”
Jeff turned his back. Moving quickly so embarrassment would not entirely overcome her, Dana slipped out of her jeans and red blouse, folded them neatly on the dresser, and slid into the bed. “Coast is clear.”
She lay on her side, turned away from him. Closing her eyes, she carefully ignored the slight creaking and rustling behind her as he followed suit. As far as she could tell without looking, he was positioning himself carefully at the opposite side of the bed.
The lamp snapped off. “ ’Night,” he said.
“Sleep well.”
****
It was somewhere in the middle of the night when Jeff woke to realize Dana was shivering. “Chilly?” he whispered.
“No.”
He turned toward her, though he could see nothing in the darkness. “Are you okay?”
“ ’M all right.” Her voice was sleepy. “Just a—a bad dream. Not used to being attacked in the street.”
Very cautiously Jeff reached his arm around her. She was still facing away from him. When she didn’t object, he drew her carefully back against him. “It’s okay now.” Her skin was very soft in the darkness, but he could feel the underlying tension.
She didn’t resist, but turned her head to whisper over her shoulder, “Don’t intend to be attacked here either, mind you.”
He chuckled a little. “I promise.” Having said so, he hoped he could keep his word. Her warmth against him, the faint, heady girl-scent, even the slight difference in texture that made him aware of her underclothing, brought him an intense tenderness not unmixed with desire. Carefully he kept himself still and steady.
He felt her muscles relax, little by little. After a moment she murmured, “It’s different in real life.”
“Yes, it is.”
Chapter 8
There was no place to have breakfast at the tiny hotel, but they found an unpretentious diner down the way. The weather had cleared and sunlight was abroad in the sky, though it had not yet touched the streets.
Having missed dinner, they ordered a massive breakfast. Neither of them spoke at first, though there were many quick glances. Jeff felt rather shy of her after the night they had spent together, but he didn’t quite know what to say about it. To all appearances, Dana felt the same way. The arrival of the first installment of their breakfast gave them an excuse to break the ice, exchanging salt and pepper and similar inconsequentialities.
“How did you get involved with Heroes’ Calling, then?” asked Dana, between mouthfuls. “It seems like an unusual game for a professor.”
“Remember, I’m in history,” Jeff said, buttering a biscuit. “Medieval-style worldscapes are second nature to history buffs.”
“You’re not going to tell me you got into this to check out the historical accuracy, or to do research.” Dana narrowed her eyes at him and grinned. “Come clean.”
He smiled back. She looked remarkably fresh considering the circumstances, her brown hair gleaming richly with highlights in the sunlight through the louvered window. He did wish she had left one more button open at the neck of her blouse. He wondered—leave that aside. “You’re right. I got hooked on this through my brother Frank. And he was dragged into it by a former girlfriend. Frank was always talking about this raid and that adventure. It got to be hard to follow his conversation without knowing what DPS stood for, or the pros and cons of different druid specs.”
“Did he get too wound up in the game? I’ve known some people who never go offline except to sleep.”
“No—that was one of the things that interested me. You hear these stories about fanatical gamers, but the folks he played with sounded like normal people with a hobby. Grown-ups.” Jeff accepted an orange juice refill from the waitress, with thanks. “I was also interested in what he said about staying in touch with people at a distance. Did I mention Frank is all the way out in Maine? We don’t have a chance to get together much. And my sister Sue is up in Oregon, working on some big IT project. I thought it might actually be a good way of doing things with them.”
“ ‘The family that slays together, stays together’?”
“Right.” Jeff grinned. “Though we haven’t managed to persuade Sue to join up yet. So I got hold of the software and tried it out. Had to get one of my students to coach me through the first couple of levels—it’s a lot easier to learn when you have an experienced person who can see what you’re doing and show you how things work.”
Dana nodded. “I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use the combat controls well until Lindy walked me through some quests in Narresken.”
“I got word Pendragen was forming Northern Lights from the Pumpkineer—we’d been in college together. Frank’s group was breaking up about that time, and Pen’s style seemed about right for a good guild. So Frank and I parted ways and I brought Badon over to the Lights.”
“Oh, a founding member. I should be honored. So is your brother in the guild also?”
Jeff shook his head. “He went into Red Advent. Enkenosis is his main’s name.”
“Hey, I’ve heard of him. They’re a big-time raiding guild.”
“Right. Above my touch.” Jeff smiled. “I wouldn’t be good enough for the Advent.”
“As long as you’ve brought up Pen,” Dana said, “I guess we better start thinking about how to find Renee.”
There was a pause. “Well, we can continue wandering around at random,” Jeff advanced dubiously. “Let’s label that strategy Last Resort.”
“We could try asking around, see if anyone has seen her. We can go back to the car, get those posters.”
“Maybe our best bet is to go back to Garth and tell him what we’re thinking. Unless we can come up with a better lead right here.”
Dana leaned back and stared out the window. “Is there any place somebody in her position would likely turn up? Laundry… Groceries… Pawn shop… Cosmetics…”
“Maybe. We’d still have to ask some pretty vague questions. Might be quite a few of those places, too.”
“All right, Mr. Rebuttal, why don’t you try an idea?”
“Touché.” That was Rosmara’s sly teasing, all right. Jeff grinned. He wondered if the corner of her mouth quirked up in just that way when she did it online. “Let’s go back to where we started. If we’ve got anything useful here, it’s our common history in the game. Anything about our experiences that tells us where she might have gone?”
Dana twirled a strand of hair around her finger, inspected it. “The Thalemanni lived in a port area. We’re in a port area. They were edgy. We’re edgy. I mean, we’re among the edgy.”
“How did that quest go? We were on the run from, ah, somebody or other. We came to Crystalsport.”
“We got the Thalemanni to hide us. We…wait a minute. Remember the Dancing Fire quest?”
“Yes…”
“We were searching for a place to go to ground. There was a big argument about picking a place.”
Jeff nodded. “I remember. You wanted to hide in the ruins.”
“But Renee kept insisting we pick a spot near an escape by water and also near a major road out.”
“Uh-huh.” He felt the rush that came with being on the track of a good clue. “She thought we needed two escape routes, in case one got cut off.”
“Wouldn’t she think the same way here?”
“So we ough
t to start right down by the river…”
“And maybe near the highway. The bridge over the river, yeah.”
“It’s worth a try.” Jeff craned his neck to spot their server. “Check, please.”
****
Dana stood on the cracked walkway that ran along the river, Jeff beside her, fresh morning air moving about them. Along the riverbank loomed tiers of apartments, curved fronts of off-white concrete seamed with windows. Beyond the apartments loomed the bridge carrying the highway over the Tobago.
“Cliff dwellers,” said Jeff. “The Thalemanni lived in cliff dwellings along the banks of the river. Renee’s found the twenty-first-century substitute.”
“And there is a walkway on the bridge. She could cross on foot if she had to.”
“Where now?” He glanced about. Dana gazed up through her eyelashes at him. He looked good, when you came right down to it. Clean lines, smoothly muscled arms. He hadn’t shaved, which lent him a slightly rakish air, not unbecoming.
“We search for a sign, I guess.” They set off down the walk, scanning the buildings across the way. Concrete walls were interrupted by boards and plywood, the latter plastered with ancient posters, largely illegible, and spray-painted with graffiti. A number of the ground-floor windows were boarded up as well.
“Not a real inspiring sight,” Jeff observed. “Wonder why Renee chose to come down here, of all places?”
“She probably didn’t have much choice. If her acid friends had a place to live, and it happened to be down here …”
A block farther along, Jeff stopped and pointed. “See there? Sketch with a kind of curved arch shape, crossed by squiggles…Doesn’t it look like one of the Thalemanni’s clan signs?”
“Yeah!” They trotted across the street to examine the graffiti-covered building wall more closely. “Yes, that’s right.” Dana traced the lines, excited. “It’s a pretty good version of one of the clan symbols. Wonder if she’s considered going into graphic design?”
She headed for the entrance, Jeff right behind. She said, “Y’know, this whole trail of breadcrumbs is convenient for us, but why is it here? If she doesn’t want to be found, why is she leaving clues?”
“Are we sure she doesn’t?”
Dana turned back to him. “You can’t mean she’s expecting us to come along and find her.”
“Not exactly.” Jeff’s gaze was unfocused, distant. “Not consciously, I suppose. At one level she may just be marking her territory, asserting who she is.”
“But at the same time, she might kind of want to be found—or hope someone will find her.”
“I’ve seen more conflicted reactions.”
“I’ve had more conflicted reactions.” Dana pushed open the double doors. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when you said you were Badon the warrior.”
“Well, being knocked down with a feather doesn’t sound much like either Rosmara or Dana Roland. Which may only prove we weren’t quite ourselves yesterday.”
“Weren’t we?”
Chapter 9
They stopped at a third-floor door when Dana pointed at another variation on the guild emblem, woven into the wall graffiti. “Ready check,” she murmured.
“Ready.” Jeff grinned. He knocked briskly.
The thin young man who opened the door was perhaps in his early twenties. Lank black hair straggled across his scalp, as if a Mohawk had died and collapsed where it stood. His eyes were unnaturally hollow. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt covered with white scribbles like more graffiti, and a scowl. “What do you want?”
“We’d like to talk with Renee Rogan,” Jeff announced, a little louder than necessary. “Is she in?”
“Who told you she was here?”
“Figured it out for ourselves,” Dana said. “We’re friends of hers.”
“We’re her friends, and we don’t know you,” he snapped back. “You look like fleebs to me.”
“I’d hate to think that,” said Jeff affably. Dana doubted he had any better idea what the expression meant than she did. “Would you call Renee, please?”
“Clear out, you two.” The man made to shove the door closed, but Jeff’s foot and leg were already casually braced against it.
“Who are they, Kyle?” Through the half-open door they saw Renee come into the room, frowning. Too much make-up and eye shadow gave her a pallid appearance. She peered past Kyle at Jeff and Dana. “I’ve never seen them before.”
Jeff executed an elaborate bow, a neat trick with one foot still braced against the door. “I am Badon the Brave. But you can call me Jeff.”
“Badon!” Astonishment replaced Renee’s scowl. “From–”
“Of Averroa, yes, milady. I believe I have the honor of addressing the wizard Evanesce.”
“Oh!” The girl turned to Dana. “Then you would be–”
“Rosmara the Rogue”–Dana doffed her cap—“at your service.”
Faced with the unexpected, Renee seemed to have difficulty slipping back into causeless-rebel mode. “I guess—if you—you came to talk to me?”
“Exactly.” Jeff nodded. “If you can convince your friend here to let us by, perhaps we can come in?”
“Let them in, Kyle,” Renee said.
Kyle glowered, but stepped reluctantly back from the door. Jeff and Dana entered, carefully casual but poised for quick movement if necessary. The living room was about as cluttered and squalid as the average college dorm. Jeff nodded to two more young men and an unfriendly-looking young woman with dark hair.
“Maybe we could talk in your room?” Dana asked Renee. The girl hesitated, then nodded. A short hallway ran from the living room past a kitchen, then four open doors. Renee led them to the last of these and waved them into a small room with a narrow bed, a battered dresser, hanging mirror, and a simple chair.
When Kyle presented himself at the door behind them, Dana drew the door closed, saying without emphasis, “We’d like to talk privately, please.”
“Don’t let them push you around, Renee.” Kyle gave Jeff and Dana a dark glance. “You want to talk to them ‘in private’?”
“Oh, all right. Leave us alone,” Renee said fretfully. She waved her hand at the chair.
Dana took the chair; Jeff leaned against the wall next to her. The bedroom was a little cleaner and considerably neater than the living room.
“You want to talk to me? Why did you come?” Renee was not quite hostile, but certainly not at ease. She settled onto the very edge of the bed.
“Wanted to see if you were all right.” Dana spread her hands. “We haven’t seen you online for a while, Ev. I mean, Renee.”
Jeff nodded. “We were getting worried about you. Pendragen thought we ought to make sure you were okay.”
“Pendragen,” Renee said blankly. “But—how did you find me?”
“Well, you’ve been leaving guild symbols all over the area,” Dana pointed out.
Renee blushed a little. “But how did you get here in the first place?”
“Came by car,” Jeff said blithely. “We shared a ride.”
“No, no, I mean why here?”
“We heard you were staying with the Thalemanni. When Dana saw the exit for Crystalsport, we figured we’d better stop.”
“But if you…You’ve been talking to my father.” A scowl of revulsion spread over her face.
Dana raised her eyebrows. “It’s the only contact we had. You didn’t leave a forwarding address with us.”
“Did he tell you to look for me?” Renee lifted her chin. Her mouth set in mulish firmness.
“Actually, no.”
Renee did not seem to know quite what to think of this.
Jeff added, “He already had the police out, and he didn’t think we could do anything they couldn’t.”
“He was pretty devastated. He’s worried about you—and not knowing what to do is eating him up.” Dana held Renee’s eyes with her gaze.
“Anyway, you’ve gotta understand why I can’t
go back there,” Renee burst out. “It’s total slag. It’s just boring and more boring. And then you die. When do you have a chance to live?”
“Boring may not always be bad…” Jeff began.
Renee was shaking her head. “You go to school. You do your homework. You eat healthy foods. You apply to the right colleges. None of it means anything. None of it goes anywhere except to more of the same.” She waved at them. “You must feel it, too. Why else do you go to Averroa? It’s the only chance to do anything really exciting I’ve ever had. Until I came here, I mean,” she added hastily.
“You’re not all wrong.” Dana leaned back in the chair and crossed one ankle over the other knee. “Sure. I like being somebody else. Doing something different. Meeting interesting people.” She cast a sly glance toward Jeff. “But at the end of the quest, I come back.”
“At least what these people are doing means something. It breaks loose. It starts something new.”
“Does it?” Dana glanced around the room. “What have your friends here built? What have they made? Since I came in here I’ve seen four different things that need to be fixed. Any of ’em lifted a hand to do it? They haven’t even made much of this dingy apartment.”
“A new way of life, maybe?” Jeff’s gaze was steady. “So far I haven’t seen much I haven’t seen before.”
“They have feelings. They have passion. They don’t just sleepwalk through life like most people.” But Renee’s eyes were uneasy.
Jeff shifted position against the wall. “I don’t call it passion to be angry all the time. Not much variety there. And angry about what? Life isn’t lively enough for ’em? What are they doing to make it any more interesting, for themselves or for anybody else?”
“You must understand, Rosmara. Don’t you just want to break out sometime?”
Dana crossed to sit on the bed next to the girl. “That’s not something you get by just pushing away what you’re handed. You need to add something to the mix. What you bring to something is what makes it interesting.”