James came back into the room, but Devin still didn’t move away yet. I jammed the borrowed holoset in my bag. Not that it sounded like James would have recognized it.
“Whatever you do,” Devin whispered, “try not to leave the game in crisis. Go out calm. Otherwise, you can get hurt for real. And that’s the other thing: it will feel real. Be prepared for that.” He raised his voice, “And that’s how your Scoop account works.”
With that, he wheeled away, back to his own desk, more nonchalantly than I could have managed. Like he hadn’t been up to anything but showing me how to work my office computer.
I wondered if his cautionary notes were overblown. Sure, I’d been a little woozy that morning when Lucy took her holoset off me, and there were all those warnings online. But even if the holoset was a revolutionary innovation, Worlds War Three and the rest were only games, and ones that millions of people played voluntarily. How dangerous could they be?
Not nearly as dangerous as the Warheads when they were outside it, from what I’d seen. Games couldn’t make people doubt their own sanity. And it didn’t matter.
The Warheads’ reign of terror, Hydra or no Hydra, was about to come to an end.
CHAPTER 8
I settled down on my bed at the appointed hour of ten o’clock. After locking the door. My parents had gone to bed, earlier than most people as always, a habit Dad claimed he’d picked up way back in boot camp.
I hooked the shell of the holoset over my ear. I was unusually jumpy, but I didn’t want to dwell on whether that was because of my worry about what might happen between Anavi and the Warheads, or my anticipation of “seeing” SmallvilleGuy in a new context. Devin had said the game would seem like it was real.
It’s not a date. Don’t think of it as one.
That didn’t mean it didn’t feel like a date, though, at least a little. Not that I had been on many, but there’d been a few coffees (Tulsa, Birmingham) and even a movie (Louisville). The guys always drifted away afterward, which never came as that much of a surprise.
I knew I could be intense. And since we were always moving around, it wasn’t like I could let anyone get too close. I’d learned that the hard way when I made a best friend in fourth grade, a girl named Rory who read as many magazines as I did and liked watching CNN. We met in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, both of us trying to find an issue of TIME we hadn’t already seen.
But it was too hard to keep up via postcards and email, after the move. I had kept looking for another friend like Rory. I’d missed her. For years.
And today SmallvilleGuy had spent his prized savings just in case he needed to join me in the game. It was hard not to feel like we were coming to mean something more to each other.
But I didn’t know if he felt the same.
He was my friend. That was all I knew for sure.
So don’t think of it as a date.
I took a deep breath and told myself that I’d settled my nerves, though my heart was beating as fast as if I really was heading into a battle.
People from all over the globe played Worlds War Three and could go to any area they chose. But if you let the settings default, it put you in the vicinity of people who were also close to your actual physical locale. I hoped SmallvilleGuy didn’t have any trouble changing his settings to the coordinates I’d passed on from Devin.
I reached up to switch on the covertly borrowed holoset. In an instant, the world around me fell away and the game landscape rose to meet me.
Without others around and ambient noise for distraction it was spooky how quickly the game replaced reality. And how real it felt.
My research on Worlds had confirmed that, just like it had worked in Lucy’s game, I could give voice commands if I wanted, but the game was sophisticated at reading pupil cues and translating them into movement. You could also move your limbs, and it would read the motion and translate that into action, but people rarely played that way. Apparently it was because it was hard to keep track of what you were doing outside the game.
“Look around,” I murmured.
Like that, I turned in a slow circle, taking in my surroundings.
Night, but not full dark yet. Or maybe it was and the two giant moons that hung over the landscape, one tinged red and the other pale white, made enough light that it never truly was dark. There was also a large alien spaceship, round and ringed with glowing lights that made a pattern almost like visual music. The ground beneath my feet was covered in overgrown grass, and it tickled the bare skin of my ankles and feet.
I looked down to check that. Yes, I was definitely barefoot.
In a war game? Thanks, Devin. I wonder if you actually are good at playing this.