by Danny Tobey
Fuming, Charlie went to his shitty old car, prayed for it to start, and when it did, he went straight to fucking where the Game had told him. Let’s just see what I earned, he thought.
25 DROP BOX
Relax. I just need a favor.
Vanhi went to the house, as instructed. She couldn’t believe she was following the commands of an anonymous host that might just be a malicious algorithm. Her parents had sacrificed everything for her, leaving their friends and family and moving halfway around the world so she could grow up in the land of opportunity. The thought of some game blowing that now was unbearable.
So she followed the directions the Game sent to her map and wound to a house on Tremont Street, in a suburban area in another school district. She had no idea who lived there.
Just as she wondered what to do next, her phone said:
Knock on the door
She looked both ways to see if she was being followed. The neighborhood was quiet. Not a soul on the street. Blinds were drawn. Dogs barked behind fences. She went to the front door and knocked.
No answer.
The Game texted:
Go around back.
Vanhi had the distinct feeling she was being toyed with. She looked around again. No one was watching her. She went to the side gate and closed her eyes. Was she really going to do this? I know your secret. Yes, she was.
She lifted the handle, but the gate was locked from the inside. She peeked through the gap in the fence and saw the padlock hanging. “Shit.”
Looking around one last time, she slipped around the side of the yard, where horizontal slats ran along the outside of the fence. She put her foot on one and climbed up. It was an eight-foot privacy fence, and she had to jump down because the inside was smooth. She took a breath and leaped. It was farther than it looked and she landed hard on one leg and had to stumble to break the impact. As she stood up and dusted herself off, a dog came bounding at her.
She fell backward but it just leaped and licked her face until she started laughing and pet its ears. “Okay. Okay, fella. We’re friends. Thank you for not mauling me.”
He rolled over and showed his belly for her to pet.
Vanhi looked at her phone. There was a new text:
Pick it up.
She didn’t have to ask what.
Sitting in the middle of the patio, standing out like a sore thumb, was a cardboard box, wrapped a dozen times over with packing tape.
Something hissed, and she looked at the window of the house, where a cat stared back at her, not nearly as friendly as the dog, eyes yellow.
* * *
A cell phone rang in the school newspaper’s office. It belonged to Eddie Ramirez, the editor in chief. Or, as he liked to call himself, the EIC.
Kenny was there for their lunchtime staff meeting. He kept stealing glances at Candace Reed, his lovely coassistant editor. Eddie had edged them both out for EIC. Kenny kept telling himself that at least that meant he and Candace had something in common, but Candace was far more intrigued by Eddie’s victory than Kenny’s loserdom.
He wanted to get back to the Game. How could a school paper compete with animated gods moving through realspace?
That changed when the phone rang and Eddie Ramirez’s eyes lit up. “Uh-huh.… Yeah.… Sure.… Okay.”
He looked at them. “Hot tip.”
Kenny glanced at Candace and rolled his eyes. Eddie was always looking for some major scoop to turn the Tiger Claw from a puff-piece machine on football wins to a launching pad for his journalism career. And he didn’t care whom he stepped on in the process.
“Forget everything we were just talking about,” Eddie said.
“How could we forget about sloppy joes on Friday?” Candace said sarcastically.
“I just got a lead.”
“New story?” Kenny asked.
“Yeah. And not some bullshit homecoming piece either.” Eddie leaned in. “Satanic graffiti on school property.”
Kenny did a double take. His hand was in his lap, Band-Aids on two fingers. He was reminded just now how much they hurt. It was under the table, out of view.
“Really?” Candace’s last story was “Whiz Quiz Team Takes Westbrook.”
“What do you mean satanic?” Kenny asked, trying to sound casual.
“They didn’t say.”
“Where?” Kenny asked.
“Boiler room, in the basement.”
Kenny tried to keep his face neutral. “Who called?”
“I don’t know. Anonymous tip.”
“What did they sound like?”
Eddie shrugged, annoyed. “Who cares?”
“Man, woman, old, young?”
“Man. Young. Bland. Whatever. Are you kind of missing the headline? ‘Satanic Graffiti on School Campus.’ This could actually get us real attention. Right in time for college apps.”
Kenny’s mind was racing. Who called it in? Why? The Vindicators had done what the Game wanted. Why was someone using it against them?
He had to think fast. “What if it’s a hoax?”
“Why would someone call in a hoax?”
“To embarrass us. To cause a stir. Fake news.”
“That’s why we investigate. That’s what we do.” Eddie was always so pompous.
“Yeah,” Candace said. “Why wouldn’t we just check it out?”
Eddie looked at Kenny carefully. “Why are you so against this?”
“I’m not. Just trying to be objective.”
That was a magic word in journalism. It could usually win an argument.
“Right,” Eddie said. “Fair enough. Candace and I will cover it.”
“No,” Kenny scrambled. It was better to stick with them. “I’ll go, too.”
“We don’t need three people on it.”
“You can have the byline, don’t worry.”
That seemed to satisfy Eddie.
Kenny warned himself to stay calm. Already his parents’ faces were flashing in his mind, fingers pointing, judgmental stares. It was just a joke! he’d say. A game! I’m not really a devil worshipper, honest! They would stare at him and say, You got suspended and lost Columbia for a game? It would almost be better if he were a bona fide devil worshipper. At least then he’d have convictions.
“The boiler room’s locked,” Candace said. “We’ll have to get in.”
“Leave that to me.” Eddie was almost salivating. “This could be our Friends of the Crypt.” His eyes were hungry. “That’s what the caller said. ‘This is just like that horrible Friends of the Crypt.’”
“That was like twenty years ago,” Kenny said.
“Satan’s back on campus, baby,” Eddie said. “That was national news.”
“Didn’t one of them die?” Candace asked.
“Yup.” Eddie made a whistling noise. He used his fingers to do a swan dive off an imaginary school.
“We link the stories,” Candace said. “Backwards records, black magic, teens in peril. This kind of stuff sells.”
“Then again,” Eddie said generously, “Kenny could be right. Could be a prank.” Eddie snapped his fingers theatrically. “Oh, except for one thing I forgot to mention.”
Eddie leaned in conspiratorially, but Kenny already knew what was coming.
“On the phone, the guy said it looks like it’s written in blood.”
* * *
Alex was mesmerized.
Fantasy had always given him a way out. From the bullies. From the belt at home. But this was beyond tabletop dice games. It was even beyond the websites he liked to visit. The ones he didn’t talk about, that let him explore his darker curiosities.
This was something new. The real world and the augmented one fused.
He skipped two periods and went deeper into the game.
He found the Temple in the hidden space on the third floor of the school, but he couldn’t get in. He kept exploring throughout the day, just walking with his head down in his phone, which would look crazy except
that’s how everyone walked. Nobody had to know he was looking through it, at a whole other world.
He was further along than all his friends in the Game. He was good at this. It kept telling him that. He was a natural.
He just wished he didn’t have the phone between him and the gameworld. It was distracting. But that’s what he was about to fix.
He was alone in the hall, everyone else in class.
But on his phone the hallway was a dense souk, with stalls where various avatars were hawking goods.
To the dark-eyed man in the shadows of a stall, he typed:
How much?
50,000 Goldz.
I don’t have it.
The character didn’t answer. He just stood there, breathing slowly, waiting for input. Alex was nervous, but excited. He typed a question:
What do I have to do?
* * *
Charlie drove slowly through the declining neighborhood. It wasn’t rough, just old. And empty. The strip mall was fairly abandoned in the middle of the day. The stores were open but quiet. There was no foot traffic. He watched the addresses tick down.
8716.
8714.
8712.
As he came to 8710, he stopped.
Charlie parked his car and got out.
It was a local branch office of a bank. The sign on the door said it closed at noon. An ATM was in the wall outside.
Charlie looked all around him.
No one.
He glanced at the ATM.
Just a normal welcome screen.
He almost got back in his car and drove away. But then he was curious to see what the ATM might look like through his phone.
Nothing. It looked exactly the same as in real life.
He looked over his shoulders again, but still no one was there, much less watching him.
On a lark, he swung his phone around the view about him.
A man was standing in the distance watching him. He lowered his phone, and no one was there. He raised it again, and the figure was in the same place, across the street.
His face looked like a shiny white mask, almost porcelain.
Charlie felt a shiver run through him.
He swung the phone around in the other direction.
No one else.
No. Wait. He swept back a little. At the far end of the strip mall, where it dead-ended and turned left, was another man, partially behind a column. His face was also blank and smooth. A thin line of a mouth. Neutral.
When Charlie locked eyes, the figure stared back.
Charlie swung back to the first man, but he was gone.
The ATM lit up.
Not on his phone, but in real life.
Buttons started flashing on the screen automatically.
Then money started spitting out of the machine. Twenties. Too many to stay in the little plastic mouth, so they started pushing out onto the pavement. The day was windless. They fluttered onto the sidewalk around him.
It was time to go. He knew that. The last thing he should do was pick up one of the bills. Picking one up might lead to taking one. Taking one might lead to taking more.
He thought of his mind-numbing job at the copy shop. The one he started when the deductibles and co-pays broke his family. He thought of his dad’s insane new loan. Tim’s shiny new truck and Kurt Ellers’s new new phone.
Charlie looked in both directions and grabbed a handful of twenties off the ground. They stuffed nicely into his pockets. He grabbed some more, then scooped up all of them, wondering how many thousands of dollars he had just acquired.
He was ready to get the fuck out of there when the screen changed, and the old-fashioned ATM showed him a crude picture, a jerky circle, in green font on black.
Below that, it said:
One Ring to Rule them all
Charlie knew exactly what it meant.
God help me, he thought, I’m starting to understand this game.
26 THE EYE OF GOD
Peter thought about power.
His dad had never had power. He was a fly-by-night salesman who put himself through law school by going part-time over five years. The law school was barely accredited. The white-shoe firms wouldn’t touch him. So he started suing companies and shaking them down. He was good at it. He made a ton of money, lost it all, then made it again.
Peter’s mom was a devout, strange woman who always thought she deserved better. She had run off when his dad was still a salesman with his dad’s manager, humiliating Peter and his father.
Peter was a fat kid, geeky and awkward, something he never told anyone. This was in Arizona, and he was teased mercilessly, coming home with bloody noses and scraped palms from where the kids knocked him onto the ground. He could still remember the taste and feel of gravel in his mouth. When his mom left, marking them both Peter and his dad as losers, his dad had decided they would reinvent themselves. Peter’s dad enrolled in his shitty law school for the night program. He told Peter to lose twenty pounds by his tenth birthday or he’d sell all Peter’s things. He put a mirror up on Peter’s wall with a sign that said FAT. Peter’s dad had come to see their issues as a symptom of the same problem: the world was cruel, and you could reach inside and rip the loser out, or you could drown. Better to learn that early.
By the time they moved to Texas, Peter was lean and his dad was rich. Girls found Peter mysterious and charming. His dad invented a new background for their new life: a dead wife and an always-thin son and an always-rich life.
It was exhausting, making everyone think you didn’t care.
Even today, Peter knew how to cut his food in half and stir it around on the plate so no one would notice.
People thought he chose not to fit in, but the truth was, he never did.
Even Caitlyn, Mary Clark’s dark double, found Peter intriguing. That’s why she hooked up with him in private, while dating Kurt Ellers in public.
But what Peter saw now cut him more than he’d ever let on.
He was on the Embankment, skipping lunch to explore the Game.
Charlie was supposed to meet him, but he’d run off in a huff somewhere, driving off campus. Peter knew that Charlie and Vanhi didn’t believe him about not blowing up Kurt’s phone in his pocket. But how could he blame them for being suspicious when his whole life was a lie? True, he hadn’t concocted the lie, but he’d lived it so long he didn’t know how else to be.
He clicked on his inventory.
With all his Goldz, he’d bought something called the Eye of God. It was just the intro version, texts only, but still, having the power to read anyone’s texts sounded like fun. But now, reading the messages he intercepted with it, he wasn’t so sure.
Earlier that day, Caitlyn had asked to meet him in an empty, darkened classroom. She’d pushed him back against a table and slipped a hand under his shirt. If Mary was sunshine and roses, Caitlyn was arsenic and quince. Peter loved how tough she was, how she always went for exactly what she wanted, even if that meant two-timing Kurt and keeping Peter hidden, which burned. What he didn’t know was that Caitlyn had learned how to navigate the world early, going to Home Depot when she was twelve to buy a lock and install it on her bedroom door. Sometimes the bad guys lived inside the house.
“Do you like this?” she whispered now, biting his ear.
He pushed her gently back. Always aloof. Always above it all.
He shrugged and smiled slightly.
An act. But a good one.
“You want to have sex at school?” he asked.
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“I’m tired.”
“I’ll change your mind.” She put a hand on his belt.
He was tired of being used. He stopped her. “I came by your house yesterday. You weren’t there. Were you with him?”
The truth was, she’d been at Careloft, something she did once a week without telling anyone. Being a do-gooder was Mary’s thing. She had a lock on it. If anyone knew where Caitlyn went every Tu
esday, they’d think she was just copying her socially superior friend. But she’d been volunteering there for years, learning how to talk to survivors, and it made her feel whole. But it was terribly off-brand because she was the bitchy one, everyone knew it and fell into line around her, and you could lose your place in a second. You could disappear. So she said, “Yeah, I was with him. So what?”
Peter shook his head, then let it pass. He would take what he could get. He stroked her cheek.
But then it was her turn to interrupt. “What you did today, it can’t happen again.”
“What?” He smiled. He loved that she knew.
“Not if you ever want to see me again.”
“You’re worried I hurt your boyfriend?”
“I’m worried you’re blowing our cover.”
“What’s so wrong with that?”
“Oh, Peter,” she whispered, kissing his neck. Someone passed by outside and they froze. But the door stayed shut. The footsteps moved on. She put her lips on his ear. “Wouldn’t a hacker, of all people, know some things are better in the dark?”
He thought of that now, watching Mary and Caitlyn type in real time, first Mary, then Caitlyn:
he’s really nice
So is mother theresa but i wouldn’t fuck her
I really like him.
So do it
I’m scared. What will he do?
Who T?
Nevermind. What about you?
Peter?
Yes
Whatver
Thought you liked him
He’s fun on the side but K is popular
So?
Bad for me if K goes off the rez now—Ive managed this far
Peter reread the conversation. Then again. And again. It bore deeper into him, each time. Caitlyn told him they were cheating because it was more fun. In truth, she was cheating because Peter was a loser. Just like his dad—all the cash in the world, but the old money would never let him in. A McMansion in the boondocks, the King of Nothing.