by Simon Archer
“Oh yeah,” the driver said. “I see it all over the place. Termina’s always had a big following, you know, it’s entertaining enough, I suppose. But everybody’s paying attention ever since this Joch kid took over this TelCorp thing and started making shit really interesting. It’s almost like a whole second Great Binder War, except it’s far away from any of us. For now, at least.”
“Are people really thinking that it’ll leave the island?” I asked with a scoff and a shrug. “I mean, those people have been stuck there for centuries. Would it really change at the drop of a hat like this?”
“My sentiments exactly,” the driver said, pointing at me again. “In fact, I think Tibor Enterprises is making a huge mistake, not trying to capitalize on all this new attention to the product. By hiding away like this, they’re just making more and more people get all spooked for no reason. It’s not a good look.”
“Well, it makes damn good TV,” I said.
“That it does, that it does,” the driver agreed with a chuckle. “Even my wife’s got me watching every night now. It’s pretty much all we’ve watched for the last few weeks. Things are heating up, though I’m getting kind of restless with all the action happening off screen lately. I hope they get all that sorted out, so we don’t have to watch things go down from a distance anymore. I want to be in the thick of it, watching the most important people on the island get shit down.”
We passed the rest of the ride in silence as I contemplated all this. It was sickening, really, listening to guys like this talk about my home and everyone in it as if they were just characters in some show, far removed from reality, valuable only as entertainment. But these people knew that we were real. That was the strangest thing about it all. They knew that we were real, and they still didn’t give a shit. If anything, they obsessed over and dehumanized us even more than they would if we were just fictional characters.
Finally, the driver pulled up next to a giant skyscraper, no doubt the tallest building in the area. And it looked out of place, in a way, stretching so high into the sky, dark black and covered in neon lights. But then I realized that that was because it could’ve been a building lifted straight out of Termina and set down in this strange place with a very different aesthetic.
“Here we go,” the driver said. “Good luck in there, kids. Don’t get yourselves bound or anything shady like that.” He gave us a wink, deposited us on the sidewalk next to the building, and then sped off in search of his next customer.
“Is it just me, or was that really bizarre?” Lin asked when he was safely gone. “All of that talk about us being entertaining, but being afraid of us. And talking about bindings like they’re these crazy, terrifying things out of horror stories for children.”
“That’s the thing, though, Lin,” I said quietly, staring after the driver. “In this world, we are those horror stories. We’re the boogeymen they tell their kids are going to come after them if they don’t pick up their rooms, or go to bed at the right time. We’re that to them.”
“Just like we are to the rest of the people in Termina,” Cindra remarked softly, and I supposed that was true. The way most of the people on the north side of Termina viewed the foxgirls was a lot like how people here seemed to look at binders.
“It’s just so strange,” Clem said, shaking his head. “Back home, we’re superheroes. Everybody worships us, wants to be us, wants to be with us. We’re the kinds back home. But here, we’re monsters.”
“It’s all relative,” I said shortly, before spinning on my heels and heading straight into the building.
“Wait, what’s the game plan?” Clem hissed, falling in step behind me.
“We just take a look around,” I said with a shrug. “Let’s stick together, though. We don’t want to end up on opposite sides of the building if something happens.”
“Plus, this is a strange place,” Malthe remarked. “It’d be easy to get lost.”
“It’s easy for you to get lost anywhere,” Cindra teased him, rolling her eyes.
“Eh, I guess that’s true,” Malthe admitted with a shrug. “But it’d be even easier to get lost out here.”
And with that, I pushed open the doors. I had to do a double-take when I saw what was inside and then cover my eyes because of all the blinding lights. It was like Termina on steroids in there. There were fluorescent neon lights of all colors all over the place, and the entire place was full of pin-ups of foxgirls and other Termina paraphernalia that wouldn’t have necessarily looked out-of-place in Termina on their own, but taken all together was a bit much. There was Termina night club music blaring from speakers up above. The walls, floor, and other decor were all black as night.
“Shit, is this what they think it’s like in Termina?” Clem screamed over the sounds.”
“Shhh,” I shushed him, bugging my eyes out at him. He was a good fighter, and he’d done a great job rebuilding the south side, but damn could he be dense sometimes.
“Okay,” Malthe said, gathering everyone up in a tight circle. “What do we do now?”
“Let’s just try to get a look at everything, then try and talk to a clerk or something, see what we can find out,” I instructed. “We’ll have to buy something.”
“Ugh,” Cindra said, holding up a plush foxgirl with exaggerated features and staring at it like it was some kind of bizarre doppelganger. “We do not look like this. We do not fucking look like this.”
“Dude, look at these,” Clem said, waving me over to the right-hand wall and pulling a couple of what looked like giant plastic knives out of an open drawer. “I think they’re supposed to be holo knives.”
I squinted at the things and realized that he was right. They sort of looked like holo knives, but they were far bigger and way less sleek.
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “This is so weird.”
“It’s like an exaggerated bastardization of what life is really like for us,” Lin said, holding up a skimpy night club dress covered in blinking neon lights and staring at it with obvious disdain. “They can’t be serious.”
“We’re basically a bunch of cartoon characters to them,” I reminded everyone. “They don’t see us as real people, and they don’t actually know anything about us. Not really. Now come on, let’s grab up some of this shit and try to find a clerk.”
I piled a few of the holo knives into my arms while Clem grabbed the flashing night club dress away from Lin, who looked like she just might rip it into pieces, and Malthe picked up the plush foxgirl just to make Cindra’s blood boil.
Together, we pushed our way to the back of the room with our items in tow, and Lin prepared some of the cash from the motel safe for the transaction.
There was a set of cash registers at the back manned by clerks.
“Hey, man, can I ask you about some of this stuff?” I asked the nearest clerk.
He eyed me with some suspicion but nodded.
“Is this all there is?” I asked. “I mean, there must be a more authentic Termina experience to be had somewhere around here?” I wasn’t sure exactly why I asked this, but it felt like the right thing to say. And honestly, the things on sale were so fucking ridiculous that I just had to ask.
The clerk exchanged a weary but knowing glance with the clerk standing next to him. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Who’s asking?”
Well, shit.
“Uh, I’m a businessman here on an official trip from Direfall,” I said, grabbing onto the first place that I could think of. “What can you do for me?”
“Depends,” the clerk said, chewing on some gum as he spoke. “What can you do for me?”
I exchanged a look with Lin. She quickly pulled some more money out of her pocket and displayed it out for the clerks to see. The one on the right arched another eyebrow at it and then nodded again.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Follow me.”
And so we followed him back behind the cash registers and into an elevator. It was even made up to be like a Termina elevat
or, but there were far too many lights, and it ran far too smoothly to be authentically from the island.
“I said authentic,” I said, shooting the clerk another look.
“You’ll get it,” he said, seemingly unconcerned as he continued to chew away at his wad of gum. “Just hold your horses, pretty boy.”
The elevator came to a smooth halt on the top floor. I was shocked to see that it was made up almost exactly like the top floor of TelCorp back home, with clear binder desks all over the place, and an office at the back.
“Right this way,” the clerk said, leading us toward the office door.
I almost expected to find my own office inside, but I didn’t. I found Elias’s, recreated down to a tee. It was eerie, and I didn’t like it at all. I almost expected the man himself to come bursting out of the closet next to the desk and start berating me for having the audacity to kill him.
“The guy in charge of this stuff is on lunch break,” the clerk said. “You can wait in here for him. He shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“Sure thing,” I said, taking a seat in the very familiar, very low chair that Elias used to make me sit in to make himself feel taller and more powerful. “Thanks for your help.”
“This is… weird,” Malthe said when the guy left.
He pulled something out of his pocket and began fiddling with it. I looked down at it and opened my mouth to ask what it was, but he shook his head and locked eyes with me. So I sat back and let him do whatever he was doing. Finally, he put it back in his pocket and spoke again.
“Okay,” he whispered, leaning in close to me. “I think this place is clear of bugs or other surveillance.”
“That’s… lucky,” I said carefully. “Are you sure?”
“Can’t be certain,” Malthe said. “But we should do some looking around, anyway. I don’t think we want to be here when this guy, whoever he is, gets here.”
“Agreed,” I muttered. I definitely didn’t want to be there then. Whoever this guy was, as soon as we got talking, our lack of knowledge about the outside world could become apparent pretty quickly.
So I jumped up and crossed over to the desk and started rifling through it. But there didn’t seem to be anything of note in any of them. There were a lot of files, to be sure, but nothing that looked interesting or of note to us.
Then, when I reached the bottom drawer, I thought of something. Elias had kept his burner phone, the one Achilles used to contact him, hidden in a secret compartment underneath this drawer. And of course, these people would know all about that.
I reached back and searched for the hidden compartment, and for a minute, I wasn’t sure I’d find it. But then I did. And it contained another set of files.
I pulled them out and began to rifle through them. They looked like personnel files, full of pictures and names, but then I realized that I vaguely recognized some of them. And then, I landed on a picture of a man who I definitely recognized.
There he was, staring up at me. Beaufort, the TelCorp client who had captured Kira. The one who worked for Achilles and spied for him on the surface of Termina. Malthe, who was peering over my shoulder, gasped, but I elbowed him in the ribs to silence him. We couldn’t discuss this here, just in case there were bugs or other surveillance tech that our own equipment hadn’t been able to pick up on.
Malthe quickly pulled another contraption out of his pocket and began to snap pictures of all the pages in the file. Then, gingerly, I placed it back where I found it and looked around at my team. Only Malthe had seen the picture of Beaufort, but everyone else had seen the expressions on our faces. They were all staring back at us with questioning looks of their own.
“Okay,” I muttered. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
Everyone nodded, and we ran back out to the elevator where I punched the key for the main floor.
The occupants of the shop, including the clerks, barely registered our reappearance. There were so many people there and the shop itself was so full of loud distractions that I would’ve been surprised if they had.
I quickly flagged down another wheeled vehicle without saying a word to any of my teammates. My mind was racing, trying to figure out just what I had seen, but we couldn’t talk about this yet. Not here. Not now.
“The docks,” I instructed the driver when we got inside the vehicle. “We have a ship to catch.”
20
This driver was far less talkative, which was probably good considering how much my heart was racing, and my mind was whirring. I didn’t think I could keep up much of an act right now. Did I really see what I thought I saw? Did this really mean what I thought it meant? I thought I’d seen something in the file… something that meant... But no, that wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. But then again, none of this was really possible, was it? But somehow, it was still happening.
The driver dropped us off at the docks. It wasn’t as far as I’d thought it was. I noticed a couple of policemen over talking to the shippers, but other than that, it seemed like we were in the clear. I’d been worried that maybe the place would be swarmed with cops looking for the motel robbers, but just as Lin had suggested, it seemed like this was a high crime area, and what we’d done was small-time enough that it didn’t warrant much attention.
These docks were vastly different from the ones I was used to seeing on the south side. There were shippers there working on their ships, to be sure, but only some of them were wooden or looked anything like the ones from Termina. And I imagined those were just the ones used to meet our shippers out not far from the shore to get the cargo.
Other than that, the shoreline was mostly full of yachts and other large white ships, most of them bigger than any I’d ever seen, even along the north side shore in Termina.
And the beach itself was swarmed with people. I could see about a half-mile down the shoreline in either direction. There were people hanging out, lounging around on beach towels and swimming in the water. But here, people were lined up all across the sand, cordoned off by ribbons connected to poles, with each line stretching toward one of the giant boats.
There was a kind of feverish energy all around the place, and I could hear the people closest to us gushing about the trip they were about to take to some tropical climate on a faraway continent. I realized that other than a few businessmen in suits here and there, these were mostly tourists getting ready for their vacations.
“I think our line is down here,” Lin said, pointing to the line on the far right-hand side of the area, leading to an absolutely enormous ship, the biggest one there.
“Damn,” Clem said, gaping up at it. “That thing is huge.”
“I bet they don’t just have canned food, either,” Kinley remarked.
“No way,” Lin said, shaking her head. “This is a luxury ocean liner. We’ll have whatever we want here. Come on.”
We all followed her as she led the way to the back of the line, which felt like it stretched on forever. When we got there, she pulled a stack of bills out of her pocket, already carefully counted into the amount we needed for our tickets.
The line moved slowly, and it grew larger and larger as time wore on, but we had gotten there early and secured a spot on the ocean liner with ease.
As we waited, I shifted back and forth on my feet with great discomfort. I was anxious to get into our cabin and get working on deciphering those papers. And I was itching to run my theory by my teammates. I thought I must be crazy, but the papers seemed to confirm it...
Finally, we reached the front of the line, and Lin handed our money over to the man standing at the front.
“Destination?” he asked, barely looking at us.
“Direfall,” she said quickly. “And we’d like the most private cabin that you can give us.”
“Sure thing. You’ll be with us for the long haul, then,” he remarked, stamping the tickets with something and then handing them over to us.
“Seems like it,” she said cheerfully, and then he gesture
d for us to get up onto the ship.
There was a tall set of white stairs leading up to the middle deck where we congregated with the other passengers who had already gotten their tickets.
“Should we find our cabin?” Malthe hissed, casting his eyes over to where two policemen still stood on the beach.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Good idea.”
“I think it’s down this way,” Lin said, squinting down at the tickets. “Come on.”
She waved us after her, and we weaved our way through the crowd and up to the very top deck. There were more than a dozen decks, actually. I’d never seen anything like it. And we had the whole top deck to ourselves, it seemed. Our cabin took up the entire thing.
“How much did we fork out for this?” Clem asked Lin as we stood on the balcony around our cabin facing the ocean, a pleasant breeze pressing against my face, droplets of saltwater slashing against my skin. She shrugged.
“About half of what we have,” she said. “And we get food and everything with it. I figured we had a lot of money based on the prices I’ve seen for things. It looks like that was the only safe at the motel, and they hadn’t emptied it in a while.”
“Lucky us,” Malthe said, though he cast another skittish glance in the direction of the police officers, who were mere specks now.
“Hey, why don’t you pull out that thing of yours and make sure no one’s listening in on us,” I suggested to him.
“Oh, right,” he said, pulling the thing out of his pocket and getting to work on spinning it around as he walked all across the balcony which ensconced the perimeter of our cabin. “Looks like there’s nothing out here.”
“Go check in the cabin, okay?” I asked him, and he nodded, disappearing inside with a scan of his ticket against the door.
“What was that in there?” Clem asked, coming up next to me and placing his hands on the railing.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Let’s wait for Malthe and then talk about it, okay?” Clem looked disappointed but acquiesced.