by Vic Connor
“We encourage intense passion for the games. Sometimes, that means people get carried away. Hunts are…dangerous, Niko.” Okonjo spread his hands, still staring Niko in the eye. “Everyone knows that.”
Outside, Tim’s voice thrummed low through the wall. “If everyone knows that, what is Tim screaming about out there?”
“Who knows? He might be angry because he may lose his team,” Okonjo said. A tiny vein along his right temple pulsed, making the fine fur there vibrate rhythmically.
“What?” Niko asked between his teeth.
“Mhm. If Alonso gets expelled, his team will need to find a replacement DPS or they won’t be able to compete in the Ravenscroft Championship. This could affect his future in the Phaeton League.”
“I can’t believe that’s what he’s mad about right now,” Niko said, clenching his fists in the overstuffed chair.
“The Hunt is…well, it’s everything to people here.” Okonjo laughed. There was something familiar in his laugh, in the rolling way he spoke. Where had Niko heard it before? It seemed like an invisible wall was blocking Niko’s memory. He knew who this person was; and yet, he couldn’t place the name. Like someone, or something, was messing with his mind.
“Here… You mean in Ravenscroft?” Niko asked warily.
“No, Niko. In Territoria.”
Niko’s jaw dropped. “You know…about the game?”
“I…had hoped you’d be as invested as the others, my boy, but you seem more interested in the other…players. You, of all people!” Okonjo didn’t quite smile, and the invisible wall finally fell. Niko realized who he’d always reminded him of.
“Clark?”
Okonjo gave Niko a familiar half-smile, the shadow of Clark’s expression on the creature’s steel-grey, furry face. “I’ve been waiting for you to pop out of your…Vat again, a rabbit out of a hat, as it were, so we could have another…chat.”
Fury thrummed through Niko’s veins. He dug his nails into the leather of the chair. “This is the avatar you made?” He laughed without humor. “Wasn’t there, I mean, they made a horror movie about how messed up that is, y’know? Slender Man or something.”
Okonjo—Clark—shrugged. “Not a big movie buff, I’m afraid.”
“Where’s Kiele, really? She went deep enough into the negatives to be logged out, so why didn’t her avatar disappear?”
“Oh, my boy. Not every player gets logged out when they drop far enough into the…negatives. Just you.”
The hairs prickled up across Niko’s body. “Then…what happens to everyone else?”
“We built Territoria to…be real to its players, you see? That’s very important. But it works so well, that…when players get hurt enough, they go into shock, and it can… well. Their minds are convinced they’re dead. Suffice to say it’s a bug, my boy.”
“You mean they die?’ Niko could hear the mingled fear and anger in his own voice.
Clark shrugged. “I expected you to die, too.”
Niko’s face darkened, and his eyes flashed with suppressed fury. “Just when I thought you couldn’t sink any lower. You’re killing kids with your game. Shut it down until the bug is fixed.”
“We can’t fix it without data that shows us why it happens,” Clark said. “We have to reproduce this bug a…number of times. That’s…what you’re all here to test, among other things, you see? I think we can both, ah…agree, Territoria is better than a needle. Besides, it’s not as if anyone’s death here is…undeserved. No one would ever…miss them.”
Blood boiling, Niko opened his mouth to say, I would miss them. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Cal, Hunk, Jeny, Kiele—they were his friends here. Territoria was messed up, and Clark was a bastard, but would he trade his time here for a cell back on Earth? “Then why don’t I die?”
“Ah…to the point. We’ve been working day and night to find what change in the code is causing this difference. There’s this…unique item,” Clark pointed to Niko’s necklace, “but we couldn’t just slap its code onto anyone. It’s interacting with something back in the real world. As far as we can tell, it’s you, Niko. You’re special.”
Niko shook his head, feeling it get hot. “Why? This makes no sense.”
Clark shrugged his shaggy shoulders. “My boy, it’s quite simple. You’re just…better than other people.”
Niko swallowed. Better than Hunk, or Jeny, or Tim, or Cal? A part of him wanted to believe he was everything he should be and more, that he entered the game a sleeping legend. It was true, it had to be true, his Mythic was proof if that; and yet…something about it reminded him of Erica’s cloying purrs of encouragement—a lie to stroke his ego into complacency. He had to assume there was much more than what meets the eye.
Well, y’know, two can play this game. Niko looked up with what he hoped was a prideful nod. “Yeah. Of course I am.” He got up from the chair, the seat’s leather peeling away from his skin. “Is there anything else?” He wanted out of there.
Clark didn’t quite smile, and Niko was glad, remembering the big, frightening grin when he signed the papers. “Not at the moment, my boy. Send Tim in when you go, then get some…rest. We get better data when you’re refreshed.”
With a glare, Niko went to the door, gripping the handle tightly.
“Oh, and Niko?”
Niko looked over his shoulder at Clark, and this time, the man did grin. “I’d abstain from worrying the…other students with this information. Why, to them, it would all sound…quite preposterous, after all. Even so, just remember… Even if you can’t see me…I’m always watching.”
Niko swallowed, nodded, then threw the door open, walking as fast as he could. Out in the hall, Tim had stopped yelling, and now just fumed beside the much taller Ms. Gyatso. “He wants to talk to you,” Niko muttered, then stalked down the hall, beelining for the admin building’s exit.
When Niko returned to his dorm, Hunk was already there, curled up on his bed with a well-worn, dog-eared book. He looked up.
“Hey,” Niko said.
“Hey,” Hunk echoed. “Any word on Kiele?”
Niko spat. “Nothing new.”
“You all right?”
“I’m fine,” Niko snarled, then sighed. “I mean, I’m pissed.”
“At Alonso?”
“No.” At Clark. “I mean, not just at him. He beat Kiele, maybe to death. And…” And Clark thinks she’s expendable. “And the school shouldn’t let that stuff happen.” He thinks you’re expendable, too. “They shouldn’t—” He stopped himself, put his face in his hands. “It’s so much bigger than today. It’s so messed up, Hunk, I can’t…” I can’t tell anyone about it.
“Hey. It’s okay, you can talk about it.” Hunk’s hand rested on Niko’s shoulder, not in a bro kind of way, not a manly squeeze, but earnestly, like people used to do when he was young. It was nice. “You don’t have to carry things alone.”
“It’s…to you, it’s going to sound crazy. You probably won’t…you won’t want to be on a team with me anymore.”
“That won’t happen,” Hunk said. “The only kind of crazy that scares me is what Alonso did today.”
“Promise you won’t tell Jeny or Cal?”
Hunk nodded.
“Okay, uh…hoo, you are gonna… So, y’know…” Any phrase coming to Niko’s mind sounded ridiculous even to him. With a sigh, he said, “We’re in a video game.”
After a pause, Hunk laughed through his teeth. “What’s a…video game?”
“Oh boy, uh…” Niko fell back onto his unmade bed, running his hand through his hair. “It’s like a fake reality that some people built for us on a computer.”
“Niko, I’m sorry, I…don’t know what a computer is. Are you really okay?”
“It’s a…” Niko groaned. “What I mean is, it’s…like a dream, kind of. Someone made a dream world, and then put us here and made us all forget our real lives. I’m the only person who remembers, it seems. And Clark. I mean, Okonjo.”
&
nbsp; “What you’re saying, haha, Ravenscroft is…fake?”
“Ravenscroft, the Hunt, Mythics, Cygnus, Phaeton, everything. We’re all in these…immersion tanks that simulate the world.”
Something flashed in Hunk’s eye. He sat completely still for almost a full minute, while Niko shifted uncomfortably on his bed. Then Hunk leaned in. “Tanks?”
“Yeah.” Niko felt like some sort of mental bubble had burst, and he could make himself understood now. “They’re like these tubes filled with gross liquid—it’s blue—and they put a feeding tube down your throat and a mask. They call them Vats.”
“V-Vats?”
“Yeah. There’s hundreds of them all stored in this room, connected to the game. We’re…we’re testing it for them.”
“Do you mean that Kiele isn’t actually hurt?” Hunk sounded indulgent. Patronizing.
“No,” Niko said hopelessly. “No, it makes our brains think it’s all real. The testing can kill us; they push us to see how far it can go. We’re just guinea pigs to them. That’s what they’re doing…to you.”
Hunk looked reticent. He was probably too kind to confirm that yes, all this sounded crazy. “What are they doing?”
“You know how you and I get those…those hot headaches sometimes?” Niko wasn’t even sure why he was telling Hunk this now. He knew his friend didn’t believe it. Maybe he just needed to say it out loud. “We get them because…ugh, this sounds nuts but…they’re experimenting on us.”
“Ex—experimenting?”
“Yeah. I saw it. I saw you… They had you on a table, and they were doping you with something, talking about how they didn’t know much more you could take. That’s why I’ve…been trying to sneak out at night. If I drop deep enough into the negatives, I can wake up, y’know.” Niko knew it was too foreign a concept for anyone in the game to understand or believe. It made him feel utterly alone. “You shouldn’t go into the negatives, though. You’d die.”
“Who was there?” Hunk asked.
“Huh?”
“Experimenting on me. Who was there?”
“Uh…it was… Clark was there, and this guy in a baseball cap, and a woman named Catherine or some such.”
“What did Catherine look like?”
“Well… She was black, short. Cutesy-nerdy, kinda? Pink cat’s-eye glasses and short hair.”
“And…Clark? Wh—what did he look like?” Hunk’s breathing was shallow now. “Was he…bald?”
Niko’s eyebrows reached for his hairline. “Yeah.”
“And tall?” Hunk choked.
“Yeah! And his breath smells like—”
“—rot.” Tears sprung to Hunk’s eyes. He sat still for a short while again. “Oh, Niko, I…I remember. I remember the tanks, and the long hallway, with the pictures and the painted lines.”
“In orange and blue, right?”
Hunk put his hands over his mouth. “I thought they were dreams,” he said with a small sob. “I thought they were dreams.”
Niko gasped. “Oh, you woke up too. That must be why they’re running the experiments on you so often.”
“Because…they don’t want us to wake up,” Hunk whispered, “do they?”
Niko swallowed. Clark was watching Niko closely—to try and fix whatever allowed him to log out at will. That’s why they wiped everyone’s memories of the real world; they wanted them to enter the game, then live, fight, die, and be forgotten, their only worth being the data Clark and his team received. It was people in the queue now, but how long until they did it for all prisoners? Homeless people, poor people, anyone Clark deemed to be “stains on society?” Now that Niko thought about it, he could see Clark’s perverse logic. After all, Earth was running out of available water.
Niko froze as he remembered what he had overheard back in the penitentiary lab corridor when he logged out and explored the building. The woman—Catherine, was she?—mentioned something about immortality experiments she thought Clark was running.
He also recalled his mom talking about the game being the ideal soul catcher. His heartbeat picked up as an idea, no more than a guess, came to him: Was Clark experimenting on the kids here to try and discover immortality? To, y’know, digitize their minds or something?
“Aren’t you able to wake anyone else up?” Hunk asked.
It snapped Niko out of his train of thought. “Huh? Oh. Uh… I…never tried.”
“Could you try now? I believe you, I do, it’s just… it’s a whole lot to take in. It would be easier to digest if I could see it.”
“No,” Niko said. “Clark…the bald guy? He figured out I was doing it, and posted guards at my Vat. Can you believe how much their systems are messed up?” He chuckled. “He had to post real guards.”
Hunk frowned. “Why didn’t you escape the first time?”
The question puzzled Niko. Why hadn’t he tried to run? Even if he’d been killed trying to escape, at least there was the possibility of freedom. He’d spent years of his life trying to escape every group home he’d ever lived in. Why hadn’t he tried to escape Territoria?
“I guess…I didn’t want to leave you guys,” he said as quietly as he could.
Hunk sat up straighter, his small mouth opening a tiny amount. Then he gave Niko a big smile that spread across his whole face. “We don’t want you to leave either,” Hunk said. “Listen. I don’t know if I totally fathom all of this right now, but I want to help you however I can. I’ll help you find a way to get past your guards. We’ll do it together.”
Niko tried, and then stopped trying not to smile. Even if Hunk didn’t totally understand, even if he didn’t believe him, Niko felt lighter knowing they could at least talk about this now. When they’d first met, Niko would have never guessed how reassuring this shy, nervous kid’s friendship would be.
The alarm started in his dreams, a distant wail inside a foggy, nonsensical plotline that Niko already felt slipping from his mind as he woke, the blaring getting louder. His eyes cracked open, and it was like someone had taken cotton out of his ears. The alarm was deafening, and he rolled over to slap it into silence. He swatted away three more snooze alarms, burrowing under his covers, knowing that any moment, Hunk was going to come over and shake him awake, tell him he needed to get to class.
Yet, eventually, the alarm blared a fourth time, and at last Niko huffed and pushed himself to a sitting position, rubbing his eyes. He’d slept in his clothes. His mouth had the nasty unbrushed taste. Why had they programmed this into the game?
Blinking away the fog of sleep, Niko looked across the room for Hunk, who by now surely had made his bed, gotten dressed, and was combing his hair perfectly into place. Instead, he was met with crumpled, sweat-soaked sheets and an indent on the pillowcase.
Hunk was gone.
23
Home
Niko exploded out from his dorm room and looked frantically around. The hall bustled with students headed to their morning classes.
There was a tall windowsill at the end of the hall. The owl boy he’d seen a couple of times before sat perched up there, reading a book. Niko shoved past clusters of students to get down the hall, earning a few hollered grievances along the way. He skidded into the wall, then pulled himself onto the windowsill, much to the owl boy’s dismay.
“What the ding dang do you think you’re doing?” the boy squawked over his brown, cowl-necked cloak.
“Move,” Niko barked, but he was already edging the boy off the sill.
Niko pried the window open and cool air hit his face. He swallowed, standing up and looking down. The building didn’t just have three floors; this side of the dorm was at the ridge, so it went deep into the wooded valley. Hunk would never leave his bed like that. They took him. I told him the truth, and they took him. Clark had warned him not to tell the other students, but he’d done it anyway, and now…
A cacophony of voices was calling up at Niko, crowding around the windowsill and asking some variation of “What are you doing?”
> Guards be damned, Niko told himself. I’m getting out. I’m going to find him. He shut his eyes, the gasp behind him rising as he tipped himself forward, and fell.
Hot pain exploded across Niko’s skull, the clang echoing around him like the clapper in a ringing bell.
He’d hit his head on the lid of his Vat. He sighed into his mask, eyes squeezed shut from pain. The feeding tube pressed at his throat; the viscous liquid sloshed around him. Stressed, annoyed, he pounded on the lid as hard as he could until the goo started draining. Eyes screwed shut, he prepared for the fight that awaited him. Once the tank had drained, he sucked in the new air, then shoved the lid open.
But when he looked around for the guards, not only were they not there, Niko himself wasn’t in the penitentiary.
This wasn’t the long, alphabetical storage room, nor was it the onboarding or experimentation room. He found himself in a basement, too small to be anything but residential. Strips of blue light hung from the ceiling, a modern water-heater stood in one corner, and a workbench covered in complex medical equipment occupied another. Amidst the many boxy and pointy devices, Niko recognized a blood pressure meter, a dusty syringe, and not much else. He pulled himself from the Vat, hopping over the edge, wet feet landing on thin, cheap carpet.
What he found weren’t quite stairs; it was more like a ladder, y’know, like the kind you pull down from an attic. Eager to find Hunk, slipping and almost falling with each step, Niko climbed up to a trap door in the ceiling with a pair of folding locks, like you’d find on a chest. They were secured, and more alarmingly, they could only have been locked from here—from the inside. Niko looked around. The basement was one open space, with no dark alcoves for someone to hide in, and no body laid out in sepulchral repose. He was alone down here.
After a breath, Niko reached up and undid the latches on the trap door. It popped open, and Niko could see it had some rubber insulation, like a fridge door. He pushed it up and crawled out onto a hardwood floor. His breath caught in his throat.