by Vic Connor
PLAYER DEFEATED! 300 EXPERIENCE GAINED
However, this time it put him over to the next level, and the level-up UI scrolled up the side of his vision.
DING! YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 6
HEALTH: 250 HP (+40)
ATTACK: 125 (+25)
CRIT RATE: +0.85% (+0.08%)
ATTACK SPEED: 1.8 HITS/SECOND (+0.1)
DEFENSE: 13 DAMAGE MITIGATION (+3)
ARMOR: 65 (+15)
ULTIMATE ABILITY ACQUIRED: BIODIGITAL_FUSION
With a ding, Niko’s level went up to 6. His final skill flashed to life, a black box with white text that read BIODIGITAL_FUSION. Just as with the others, there was no icon and no ability details. The instant it unlocked, a grey sheen went over it.
“Unavailable?” Niko wailed. “Why is my Ult unavailable?”
“Ults don’t unlock until minute 20,” Jacob said, then winced when he took a heavy blast of musical magic from the Korrigan. Her pale dress billowed as she charged a second volley.
Niko cursed under his breath. “Jeny,” he called, “They’re on Jacob!”
Jeny turned from the Werewolf girl, then ducked her head, charging directly at the Korrigan. But at the instant of impact, the Korrigan winked away, gone from the spot she was a millisecond earlier. Jeny skidded to a halt, looking back over her shoulder at where her target should have been. “Did she dodge?”
“Korrigans don’t have an ability like that,” Jacob said, his eyes wide with bewilderment. “She’s just…gone.”
Niko scanned the rocky heath for any sign of the Korrigan, but she was nowhere to be seen; it was as if she had simply blinked out of existence. It was exactly what Jeny had described when he had pulled Cal out of her Vat.
It’s starting.
There was a pause as the two teams sat staring down one another. The Werewolf was snarling into her comm, curled lips moving without sound. She glared up at Niko, growling between sharp canines. “What’d you do? Where is she?”
“She…logged out,” Niko said.
“What?” It was Jeny, beside him, grasping his arm and shaking it.
Luis’ voice came through the overhead speakers, the confident announcer cadence gone. “Hey, guys? I think we’re going to have to suspend this game. Something’s going on at the amphitheater.”
“What?” Erica yelled at the sky. “What’s going on?”
“I know this sounds crazy, but…a bunch of girls there are just…disappearing into thin air.”
“Guess that’s the wing they started in,” Niko muttered.
Erica squinted at him. “What does that me—” she began, then winked out of existence.
Jeny clutched Niko’s arm closer then. “Niko… Tell me what’s going on.”
Niko looked her in the eye. “I’ll see you on the other side, okay?”
“What other side?”
The skeletal Hone-onna disappeared. Niko’s head started to itch, ache, and heat up. No no no, not now!
“Niko!” Jeny yelled, grasping for his attention. “What other side?”
They could have only seconds left, and Niko couldn’t be certain that he’d ever see her again, especially since his head was already boiling. He leaned down, kissing Jeny on the cheek, just beneath her eye. “It’s all right. If things turned out how I hope they did…Cal and Hunk will be there waiting for you.”
Jeny shook her head at him, flushed and confused, then vanished before his eyes.
The last of the Devil-Dames disappeared from the corner of Niko’s blurring vision. He tried to blink away the hot, muddling pain in his head as Jacob grabbed him. “Niko, what’s happening?”
That’s when someone snapped into the game.
Clark’s furry avatar appeared crisp and suited in the center of the heath, between Niko and the forest. He adjusted his tie, then said in a calm but clarion voice, “You’re making a…mistake, Niko.”
“What is Okonjo doing here—” Before he could finish his sentence, Jacob vanished. It was just Niko and Okonjo now.
“They must have finished up with the girl’s wing already,” Niko said coldly. “I better join them.” He turned on his heels and made a mad dash for the cliff’s edge.
But just as his feet were about to meet air, the stone of the precipice extended out under Niko’s feet. He tried to jump off the side, but the stone path jutted out to meet him there, too. Niko looked back at Clark, who was gesturing blandly with one hand.
“I know you want to log out, Niko,” Clark said. “but I’m afraid you’re…far too valuable an asset to lose.”
Head burning, Niko stumbled. The rock beneath him expanded to a wide platform, ensuring he wouldn’t tumble off the edge. Niko snarled and used EditValue to snap over to Clark, throwing a punch.
The furry man dodged with hardly a flinch, moving faster than any player Niko had yet faced. “Please, my boy. I…created this world. Here, I’m nothing short of a god.”
“That doesn’t mean you can act like one in the real world,” Niko growled. “You don’t get to decide which lives are expendable.”
Okonjo—Clark—raised his hands and let them drop. “I didn’t. A jury decided, society…decided, the test subjects even decided for themselves. And so did you, my boy, when you signed on. All this, taking everyone offline, is quite illegal.”
“Well, it’s good we’re all criminals already, then.” Niko came at Clark with a flurry of punches next, spreading the hit range out as far as he could. Clark ducked away from every one with super-human speed.
The fight made Niko’s boiling head even dizzier. He attempted to activate his ultimate ability but was met with a thunk and a message displaying over his UI stating that Ultimates unlocked at minute 20.
He stopped the useless fight, panting with exhaustion and pain. “You knew my parents and what they did the whole time. You framed me for their murder. Did you also erase my memories of them too?”
“A certain…personality had to be cultivated. If you believed your parents died in revolutionary action, it might inspire the same…anti-establishment tendencies. Redirecting your anger toward your own, personal misfortune was much more conducive to our needs.”
“So you stole my memories. You erased years of the life I had with them.”
Clark sighed like an exasperated parent. “Then allow me to make it up to you. If you cooperate, help me stop this…ridiculous breach of contract, I’ll release you from testing.”
Niko paused then. “That’s… I mean, I’m a convicted murderer. Even you can’t undo that.”
“Once we finish using your body to reverse-engineer the serum your parents gave you, my boy, we can…easily fabricate DNA evidence to exonerate you. Verdicts can be overturned if you’re…proven innocent.”
“Serum?” Niko gaped. “You know about that?”
Clark opened his mouth, then closed it in a wide, horrible grin. “Oh, yes. It all came together when you released Ms. Jones from her Vat. After the guards’ reports, and the…blackout data from your past few logouts. You see, we’d made attempts at true reconstitution before, but they yielded…unsatisfactory results, even substantiated with the hippocampus download, DNA readers, and additive manufacturing. Who but Yuri could have thought of priming the body for…atomic reconstruction to reduce the margin of error? Without knowing, they got me closer to my true goal than a whole team of brilliant scientists and engineers. Your parents truly were the…greatest minds of our age. Pity that they had to die.”
Niko lost his temper then, coming at Clark with another wild punch. Clark spun out of the way, then with a lazy motion of his hand, lifted Niko telepathically off the ground. The collar of his shirt tugged, and Niko clawed at the intangible hand holding him up, thrashing and cursing.
“I’m trying to be reasonable, my boy,” Clark said, smiling as he held Niko aloft. “But I certainly don’t have to be. The Territoria facility is attached to a prison. The systems are in the process of locking down as we speak. The reality is, all your friends will
be rounded up while you’re left here, abandoned and helpless to join them. What can you hope to do alone?”
That’s when Niko felt it, a warmth against his breast, soft but pulsing insistently. It was most notable because the heat there made him realize the heat in his head was fading. He stopped thrashing, fingers moving from his collar to the cross hanging at his chest. “You’re wrong. I’m not alone,” Niko said, the moment before he was logged out of the game.
30
The Sacrificial Type
Niko woke up on a table, a light in his eyes, dark shapes hovering over him. His wetsuit was tugged down to his waist, electrodes taped to his chest, and a tube stuck in his arm. He shot up. A woman took a step back from him, one hand raised like it was a stickup, the other clutching a laptop under her arm. Her bob-length twists and pink, cat’s-eye glasses were familiar, and Niko’s face hardened when he realized she was Catherine, one of staff who had experimented on Hunk. He started up toward her, but a clammy hand clamped onto his bare shoulder.
“Easy, newbie. She’s on our side,” came a croaking voice.
He turned.
Niko recognized her smell first; a musty, sulfur scent that put Niko in mind of duckweed, cattails, and lilypads. She had oversized glasses, a pug nose, umber skin, and a shock of hair so black it almost appeared green, puffed up from her round head. Her clothes were casual, if not shabby—a hand-knit, overlarge, moth-eaten sweater and leggings with the knees cut open. There weren’t rows of sharp, crocodile teeth, but it was, without a doubt, Kiele. She smacked her tall, heart-shaped lips at him. “You’re noodlier than I remember. Just as pissy, though. Come on, we gotta beat feet.”
The muffled sound of alarm blaring echoed through every wall. Catherine turned to open the door for them, then tugged at it when it refused to open, cursing quietly. “Automatic lockdown. Stage three security. They’re planning to come through room-by-room.”
Kiele hissed. “Can your agent do anything about it?”
“She should have access to any networked system in the facility,” Catherine said, prying open a laptop and typing into it with one hand, the other balancing it against her soft stomach. “I’ll ping her.”
Kiele huffed, tugging a walkie-talkie from her belt. “We have Niko, and Catherine’s agent is working on the locked doors, over.” The walkie chirped as she hooked it back on her belt, smiling her overbite at Niko. “Man, I love this commando stuff.” She laughed and continued in a fast staccato, “That agent… She’s been blocking the live data transfer about our logouts from the Vats. And she placed all CCTVs on a loop, so we could move around unseen. Imagine?”
“You’re not…” Not dead. “I mean, you’re okay,” Niko said. “I thought Alonso… I mean, how did you escape?”
Kiele nodded at Catherine, whose face was buried in her laptop. “She sprung me. See, after Alonso beat the snot outta me, my brain thought I was dying, and I went into shock. So they pulled me out of my Vat and shoved me in the medbay. Good for practicing how to treat this kind of thing in case they get clients who matter more than us criminal scum. Anyway, Cathy here wheeled me out of there in a stretcher, or so she says. I don’t remember it so good, doped up on tech company drugs.”
“I thought she worked for Territoria. Although…” Didn’t his father mention Catherine in his ramblings back in the Moon mod?
“She does; that’s what makes her such a useful pal. She says she’s one of the original programmers, worked with your parents on serum or some such. Whatever that means.”
“I know what it means,” Niko said, earning a smile from Catherine with a trace of pride in it. “You helped them develop it?” he asked her.
Catherine nodded, continuing to type on her laptop.
“And yet, you experimented on us,” Niko said.
“Kept you guys alive,” she said. “As much as I could…”
Kiele slapped Niko on his shoulder. “This is shaping up to be her last day in the cubicle, though.”
Just then, the lock clicked, and Catherine snapped her laptop shut like a compact. “Okay. Okay. She got the doors open. We have—” she looked at her smartwatch, “—fifteen minutes to get out to the vans. Okay, positive affirmation, Catherine. You…can…do this.”
Kiele pushed past Niko, prying the door open with one hand, letting the howl of the alarm in. She put her other hand on Catherine’s shoulder. “Lady, between the three of us, you’re supposed to be the adult, remember? Come on.”
Niko followed. Out in the hall, the lights were dimmed to a dangerous shade of red. People shouted in a distant corridor under the shriek of the alarm. Kiele and Catherine ran toward the sound, and Niko chased after them, struggling to tug his wetsuit back up over his shoulders. That’s when he noticed it.
There, bouncing against his bare chest as he ran, was a Russian orthodox cross—his cross. When had they given it back to him? Why had they given it back to him?
“Hey, Kiele? Did you or Catherine give me this?” He lifted the cross up for her to see.
Kiele spared a glance over her shoulder. “Nope,” she said with a shrug. “I didn’t even notice it ‘til now.” She ducked back behind the wall when a security officer crossed the hall in front of them.
Niko remembered his mother talking about the Vats being able to clone things. “She was right,” he whispered.
They all held their breath as the officer passed, an assault rifle hanging from his shoulder by a strap. A woman’s transceiver voice crackled from the radio on his chest pocket. “They’re in the men’s wing, fourth floor, U-Z. Stop them before they wake up the whole damn facility!” The guard rushed off, the crackling voice drifting down the hall.
“Thirteen minutes until the doorlock system reboots,” Catherine reported, face in her open laptop again.
Kiele grabbed the walkie from her waistband. “Where are we on evacs?”
A smooth, college-radio voice crackled over Kiele’s walkie. “Groups A and B have been dropped off and the vehicles are circling back now. Do we have a firmer time-frame on the security cameras?”
Catherine typed something into her laptop, then pursed her lips so her skin pushed worried parentheses around the edges. “No. She’s actively fighting their security technicians. Best guess, ten more minutes.”
Catherine led them down a hall, then took two sharp turns until they hit a T-intersection ahead. “The kitchen’s up there to the right. If we cut through, we’re less likely to run into—”
Catherine froze mid-sentence. The sound of booted feet came toward them from the intersection ahead, about to turn the corner. When Catherine failed to act, Kiele looked left, then right, eying an open doorway. She shoved Niko hard into it, and he collapsed heavy into a mop and bucket. The broom closet went dark as Kiele kicked the door shut.
“Hey!” came a voice, gruff and authoritative, through the wall. “Who are you? Staff is supposed to have evacuated this floor!” Niko froze. If he shifted an inch, he’d bring an avalanche of cleaning supplies down on his head, giving away his hiding place.
“Whoa, sorry, it was just so crowded downstairs,” Kiele said. “I get a little nervous. I got a condition.”
“Let me see your credentials.”
“Here, sir,” came Catherine’s voice, shaky and unsure. “We’re so sorry for the trouble. We’ll head to the exits now.”
A pause. “What about her? She looks pretty young to work here. Where’s her staff badge?”
“Er,” Kiele said, “I musta panicked and left them at my desk, haha.”
“I need the two of you to come with me,” the guard said, deep voice thrumming from the other side of the door.
This was bad. If they took Kiele and Catherine, Niko wasn’t sure he’d be able to find his way out of the facility, and besides—he wasn’t about to let them put Kiele back in a Vat. Taking a breath, he grabbed a broomstick, sprang to his feet and burst from the closet, slamming the door into the guard. The man tumbled onto the linoleum, Niko nearly falling down on top o
f him. The guard immediately sprang up to his feet.
Niko knew from experience that his only advantage over this powerful man was speed and a sudden burst of brutality.
Before anyone could blink, Niko slammed the butt end of the broomstick into the guard’s forehead, stunning him for a split second. He ducked under the man’s swinging fist and drove the heel of his right foot into the guard’s left knee. The sound of bone popping filled the hall as the man’s knee snapped back and his weight forced him to fall forward. As he went down, Niko drove his heel into the side of his right knee, snapping it inward.
Barely blinking to let his eyes readjust to the light, he grabbed Kiele by her clammy shoulders, then dragged her back into the hallway they’d come from. Catherine’s ballet flats clicked after them.
“Freeze!” the guard called after them, his voice full of agony. Considering he was still in a pile on the ground, it didn’t have much effect. The gunfire that slugged into the wall as they took a corner was more effective.
“That way,” Catherine whispered, pointing at a dark, open doorway up ahead. Kiele shoved Niko inside, then followed. Catherine took up the rear, closing the door behind them.
It was the upper floor of a massive indoor theater. Niko barely had time to ogle its baseball stadium-like seating, huge screen, and colorful decorations before Kiele dragged him to into an unobtrusive black booth in the upper corner of the theater. The booth was tiny and full to the brim with electrical equipment, screens, and a console covered in buttons and sliders. Kiele dragged him down beneath it, hiding in the hollow beside a rolling office chair. Catherine curled up against the door, broad back pressing it closed. Moments later, heavy footsteps echoed under the cry of announcers on the screen.
Catherine’s sharp-nailed hands clamped over her mouth as the footsteps came closer. Kiele bit down on her knuckles, and Niko held his breath. Unable to even move to get a look outside of the booth, he closed his eyes, clutching his cross. The steps paused just outside of the booth, and for an achingly long time, there was just the crashing panic of the Phaeton League game playing in the background. Then, a voice crackled on the guard’s walkie. “We’ve found them! Maybe thirty here, scattering, all hands needed at floor four, now!”