Reaper

by Janet Edwards

  Hawk raised his right hand in the air. “Durendal!” The sword flew out of its sheath and hovered above him. Hawk hesitated for a moment before taking hold of the hilt. “That’s how you managed that jump.”

  “Very bright,” said the Reaper. “Yes, I couldn’t give myself superhuman speed or strength, but this is a standard feature on a two-handed weapon, projecting the item a given distance in a given direction. It was easy for me to add the same feature to a ring so I could use it on myself.”

  Hawk lowered his sword and frowned down at it. I kept perfectly still and silent, but I was thinking desperately hard. The Reaper was holding his death knife to my side. If Hawk surrendered to him, then he’d kill us both. The only possible way out of this was for me to die. I had to make the Reaper kill me, so Hawk would be free to fight for his life and the lives of the other Founder Players.

  Then I remembered when I’d played the sacrifice victim. There’d been a better answer than the obvious one then, and the same was true now. The only possible way out of this was for me to die, but ...

  I watched Hawk walk towards us, saw his head bow as he prepared to lay down his weapon, and screamed the words that he would understand but the Reaper wouldn’t. “Hawk. What Hercules said. Make it a habit!”

  Hawk lifted his head, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then swung Durendal’s blade through the air. The Reaper instinctively dodged, but I held still for the razor sharp edge. There was a flash of pure agony as Hawk cut off my head and I died.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  I seemed to be hanging in midair in total darkness. I could see nothing. I could hear nothing. My neck burned as if it was on fire, the pain spreading through my whole body and reaching an agonizing crescendo before gradually fading away. I still couldn’t see or hear anything, and now I couldn’t feel anything either.

  I was dead. That much was certain, but I didn’t know if Hawk had managed to kill me before the Reaper did. If I’d been slain by the great sword, Durendal, then I had died a Game death, and I would resurrect in my castle on Celestius. If the Reaper had killed me with his knife, then this was a final death, and I would never return either to real life or to the Game.

  My body would sleep forever in a frozen coffin, with no mind to return to it. I would never ride on a winged horse again, or walk under Ganymede’s sky. I’d never see the shining wonders of Starlight, or experience life as one of the merfolk of Coral. I’d never make love to a glittering legend of the Game, or to an insecure kid called Michael.

  Even if I survived this, Hawk might not. I’d left the legendary hero to fight a fallen god of Game, left him to use Durendal against a weapon that could delete players from existence. At least Hawk could fight now, instead of surrendering his life in a vain attempt to save mine.

  Despite his words and his actions, part of me had never really believed Hawk loved me until now. I knew that Nathan believed it, Hercules believed it, Kwame believed it, but how could I think that Hawk the Unvanquished could truly love a girl from the body stacks? Michael could, yes, but not Hawk.

  I didn’t doubt it any longer though. He’d proved it when he prepared to lay down Durendal, because he’d been Hawk then, and I knew exactly how Hawk would describe surrendering like that. He’d say it was a bleeping stupid thing to do.

  Hawk would have made that utterly pointless sacrifice for me, knowing that it only meant two deaths instead of one. The Reaper would never have let me live. He’d lost any chance of power, and had no way to escape justice, so he’d take as much revenge as he could on his enemies before he was captured.

  The blackness slowly brightened, and I saw the grey plain that I’d seen when I entered Game. It could be a good sign, or perhaps it just meant that as my body froze, and my mind left it to enter the Game, I had in some way been close to death.

  The plain had been featureless before, and there had been the sound of people whispering. There were whispers now too, but this time I could see things as well. The Kraken’s saucer-like eyes watched me from a pool of water, and its beak of a mouth seemed to be trying to say something to me. Nathan walked by, holding a tiny world in his hands, frowning with concentration as he carved continents and oceans into its surface. Hawk stood ahead of me, a giant figure, ten times my size or more.

  A figure in Game Tech uniform appeared by my right side. I turned and saw it was Kwame.

  “Am I alive?” I asked Kwame.

  “That is correct.”

  Another figure appeared on my left. Another Game Tech, a stranger this time, with diamond insignia on his cheeks.

  “Am I dead?” I asked the Reaper.

  “That is correct.”

  Then the plain suddenly vanished, and I was in the great hall of my castle. The real Kwame was standing in front of me, while Hawk sat next to him, slumped on the marble floor, with his head in his hands. Nathan’s face watched anxiously from a mirror on the wall.

  I stared at them for a second before speaking, unsure if this was another vision or real. This was my big chance to say a heroic and memorable sentence, but being me I came out with something ridiculous.

  “What happened to the regulations about a player’s home being private?”

  “Game Techs are allowed to enter a house without permission when a player’s safety is known to be at risk,” said Kwame. “I admit that bringing player Hawk with me was unprecedented, but so was the situation.”

  I laughed.

  Hawk slowly lifted his head and looked at me. He took a deep breath, but he didn’t move or say anything. I was feeling terribly shaky, so I decided to join him in sitting on the floor.

  Nathan was grinning widely now. “We’ve been pretty worried about you, Jex. It wasn’t clear whether the Reaper or Hawk killed you. A Game death automatically sends you into the resurrection process. That’s carried out by the Game world transfer system, and at any time that holds millions of people who are moving between Game worlds.”

  He paused. “We’d no way of knowing which of those millions of constreams was yours, or whether you were in there at all. We just had to wait to see if you reappeared in your castle, and the resurrection process takes far longer than just moving between worlds.”

  I looked at Hawk. He hadn’t said a word yet, and was still white and shocked. “The Reaper?” I asked.

  “The Reaper is dead. I took his own weapon and used it on him.”

  “I was expecting to see passionate hugs at this point,” said Nathan pointedly.

  Hawk shook his head and spoke in defeated tones. “There’s always a price.”

  I stared at him in bewilderment. “What?”

  “When I realized what you were suggesting, Jex, I knew you were right. The only way to save your life and defeat the Reaper was to kill you, but I knew the price. I’d seen this happen with Fleur and Hercules. A player’s first Game death is a traumatic experience. Fleur never forgave him.”

  Now I’d caught up with Hawk’s thinking. “Hercules killed Fleur with a stupid practical joke. This was very different. The Reaper was expecting you to attack him. If you’d tried it, he was ready to kill me permanently, but he wasn’t expecting you to attack me instead. I’m just glad that Hawk the Unvanquished could move fast enough to kill me before the Reaper got over his surprise.”

  Hawk didn’t say anything. I could tell from the lifeless look in his eyes that I wasn’t getting through to him.

  “This is like that idea you had before, isn’t it?” I asked. “The hero against the gods one, where it always ends badly for the hero. You thought that it would end up with you defeating the Reaper, but dying in real life.”

  “There’s always a price,” he repeated.

  “No, there isn’t. You defeated the Reaper, you didn’t die, and I didn’t die either.”

  “You didn’t die because I had to give you up instead.”

  I groaned. “You’re not Hercules, I’m not Fleur, and this isn’t some ... some bleeping Greek tragedy. The Reaper is dead, I’m alive
, and I have a lot of plans for things I want to do in Game.”

  I stretched out a hand towards Hawk, and he touched my fingertips cautiously with his own.

  “You two really need to work on those passionate hugs,” said Nathan.

  I ignored him, keeping my eyes fixed on Hawk. “You’ve got a part to play in those plans. Don’t you want us to walk the beaches of Ganymede, visit Starlight, and go riding together on a winged horse?”

  And suddenly Hawk’s face was alive again, his expression a mixture of laughter and embarrassment. “Of course I ...”

  He broke off and turned to Kwame. “Thank you for your help. I’m sure you have a lot of other things to do now.”

  “That is correct.” Kwame took the hint and vanished.

  I glanced at the mirror, saw Nathan was still watching us, and coughed pointedly. “We’d like privacy now, Nathan.”

  “Oh. Right. I’ll end the call then.” The mirror went black for a second, before changing back to showing a reflection of the room.

  Hawk’s hand took mine. “What now, Jex?”

  “If the Reaper is dead, then there’s no need for me to hide away on Celestius any longer. As I recall, we were having a special moment on Ganymede when Nathan interrupted us with a call.”

  Hawk smiled. “Yes, we were. Game command. Request group Game world transfer to Jex private beach on Ganymede.”

  There was the blurring sensation of transferring between worlds, and we were no longer sitting on a marble floor but on soft sand. There was a faint, mauve mistiness to the air, and it held the scent of flowers mixed with spices and sea salt.

  Hawk and I lay back on the sand, and gazed up at the fiery whirlpools of Jupiter’s storms for a few minutes in silence. My father had lived here on Ganymede for over a century, walking its beaches and helping its people. The Reaper had killed him with his bombs, and Hawk and I had killed the Reaper in turn. Now my father’s name would be listed on the memorial on Avalon, but I would never go there to see it. For me, my father’s memorial would always be Ganymede itself.

  Finally, Hawk spoke. “The last time we were on this beach, I’d just kissed you when Nathan called us. Would it be rushing things if I kissed you again?”

  My father had told me that you should remember the past but live for the future. “I don’t think another kiss would be rushing things at all.”

  Hawk’s face blocked my view of the glorious sky, and I closed my eyes to concentrate on the warmth of his lips meeting mine. Jupiter, in all its splendid majesty, waited patiently for our attention.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Hawk and I stood looking out from the balcony of my castle. Several weeks had passed since the traumatic day when Hawk cut off my head, and the whole population of Game must have watched the replays of the final battle on Celestius a dozen times or more.

  Everyone believed that Marcus had truly been the Reaper, and had helped and encouraged Tomath with the bombings out of pure joy at spreading destruction and death. There were a couple of obvious weak points in that story, such as how Tomath had managed to get the deletion weapon to Marcus when he was confined to his castle on Celestius, and why Marcus would help Tomath bomb his own world.

  The Game Techs had covered the first point by explaining that they’d had to shut down Celestius to make changes to its server configuration. This had been done while the Founder Players were meeting in the Amphitheatre, but the Game Techs had needed to move Marcus and Chiron to another Game world for an hour or two.

  That much was perfectly true, but the Game Techs had added some extra details. They claimed that Marcus had asked to spend that time at his house on Camelot, where he’d lived for a couple of years before being put under house arrest on Celestius. The Game Techs said that they’d agreed to what seemed a reasonable request, not knowing that Marcus and Tomath had been friends on Camelot, and Tomath had used Marcus’s old house as a safe place to store his enhanced items and deletion weapon.

  The other Founder Players explained the second point themselves. They all found it perfectly believable that Marcus would be attracted by the idea of crashing Celestius and killing a lot of the family, and that he’d find it even more amusing if there was a risk of him dying himself.

  It seemed unfair to me that Marcus was made doubly the Reaper’s victim, first being killed by him and then being blamed for his actions, but the truth was impossible to explain without admitting the Reaper had been a Game Tech. Hawk said that it wasn’t as if Marcus had any friends who’d be hurt by the deception, but that made it seem even sadder to me.

  My status on Celestius had changed now. Most of the Founder Players had seen what happened at the party, and they’d all watched the replays countless times. They’d seen the look on my face as I saw death coming and wondered which death it would be. They’d seen Hawk’s expression of despair when he cut off my head.

  They didn’t think of me as an unprecedented newcomer any longer. I’d been a key part of the most dramatic event that had ever happened on Celestius, and that made me part of the family too. I even had my very own family feud with Venus.

  Hawk and I still had one thing to sort out though. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “I’m not forcing you into it. There are times when you’re maddeningly childish, but there are times when you’re unbelievably heroic. I’ve decided I can put up with one for the sake of the other.”

  “I’m not doing this for you,” said Hawk. “I’m doing this for myself. I’ve spent four centuries acting the part of Hawk. Four centuries trying to deal with the issues of Michael. Four centuries locked in a destructive cycle of childish feuds with Hercules.”

  He shook his head. “For all that time, I knew the only way for me to solve my problems was to go back to the real world and do some growing up, but I couldn’t face doing that. Now I’ve been back to the real world once to meet you and chase the Reaper, the idea of going back again doesn’t seem so daunting.”

  He paused. “I have to go back to the real world, Jex, but you don’t have to come with me. I’ll only be gone for a year. You could wait here in Game for me to return.”

  “I’m coming with you. The best way for us to build the equal partnership I want is to spend a year together as two ordinary eighteen-year-olds in the real world.”

  I gave Hawk a mischievous look. “I can introduce you to all my old friends. If you’re lucky, then Falcon may let you act a part in his next re-enactment.”

  Hawk groaned.

  “By the time we’re back in Game,” I added, “people should have forgotten that stupid name they’ve given me.”

  “I’m afraid that’s unlikely, Jex the Deathless.”

  I winced. “I feel that being called Jex the Deathless is asking for trouble.”

  “I’ve always felt that being called Hawk the Unvanquished was asking for trouble. I spent several decades objecting to it, but it didn’t do any good. I was stuck with it, and I’m afraid you’re stuck with your name too. The whole of Game has seen the replays of you surviving what could easily have been two real life deaths.”

  I gazed up at two winged horses that were circling overhead, sighed, and made myself say the words. “Game command. Request Game Tech assistance.”

  After a few seconds, a figure in Game Tech uniform appeared.

  “Yesterday, Hawk and I requested that our bodies should be defrosted,” I said. “Is everything ready for us to ...” I broke off in shock. The face of the man wearing the anonymous uniform was a little older and more handsome than in real life, and he had blue Game Tech insignia on his cheeks, but he was still easy to recognize.

  “Nath ...” I broke off the greeting as I remembered the Game Tech regulations. “I’ve never seen blue insignia before. Trainee status?”

  “That is correct,” said Nathan, his face impassive. “Your bodies have been defrosted as requested. Do you wish to leave Game now?”

  “I don’t exactly wish to leave Game,” said Hawk, “but yes, it’s time for u
s to go.” He paused to give that characteristic, one-shouldered shrug. “Perhaps Michael will grow up to be a bit like Hawk.”

  “I think Michael has always been a lot closer to being Hawk than you realized,” I said.

  “Should it be of use to you,” said Nathan, “there is a room with the rent paid until the end of this month, and a job vacancy in the body stacks.”

  Hawk nodded. “That will be a good starting point.”

  “Nathan, is there any chance we’ll see you when we re-enter Game again?” I asked.

  “Whenever you wish assistance in future,” he said, “please request a Game Tech, and one of suitable rank will respond.”

  I understood the message. The Game Techs had bent the rules, let Nathan come this once as a special gesture, but it wouldn’t happen again. He was a Game Tech now, and this was goodbye forever.

  “I’d give you a hug,” I said, “but I understand the reasons for the barrier between the Game Techs and the players. You deserved Celestius too. I hope you’re happy with your choice.”

  For one brief second, Nathan allowed his face to change from the mask-like expression of a Game Tech, to one of pure pride and delight. “That is correct.”

  There was moisture in my eyes, but I blinked away the tears. It would be entirely wrong to cry when Nathan had achieved his dream. Hawk and I were among the legendary ones, the Founder Players, but Nathan was a Game Tech. He would be a god of the Game, and a far better one than the Reaper. Nathan would create not destroy.

  “The mental transition of leaving Game will be easier lying down,” said Nathan.

  Two flower-strewn couches appeared on the balcony next to us. I lay down on one, and Hawk the Unvanquished lay on the other. I took one last look up at the circling winged horses and closed my eyes.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “I’m ready too,” said Hawk.