In practice, five hours of intense and difficult play got them most of the way there. The Torgai Foothills—which, only two weeks ago, had been some of the most desolate territory in all T’Rain—were tonight overrun by roving bands of characters Good and Evil, Bright and Earthtone. Every bit of open land was littered with skeletons of departed characters and infested by ransom thieves fighting pitched battles against hastily formed coalitions of ransom carriers. Zula and Wallace joined up with one such group that was carrying a total of eight thousand gold pieces. It was reduced to a quarter of that size by successive ambushes and then joined another coalition with ten members, which later split up because, as they belatedly found out, they were going to different places: apparently, different REAMDE files specified different coordinates. Everything was hard fought and required multiple scouting missions, feints, and probing attacks.
Zula was not a gamer. She avoided people who were (another reason she’d liked Peter). She’d fallen into the job at Corporation 9592 not out of any desire to work in that industry but because of the family connection and the accident of knowing how to do what Pluto wanted. The character she’d created in the world of T’Rain was her first personal exposure to this world, and it had taken some getting used to. She had learned to understand and appreciate the game’s addictive qualities without really being addicted herself. Devoting this much time—six hours and counting—to a game session was a new behavior for her. She was only doing it to extricate herself and Peter from this freak situation they had gotten into. She had assumed that it would take about fifteen minutes and that then she would go home and never see Peter again, never see Wallace again.
Now it was light outside. She’d been awake for twenty-four hours. There was something deeply wrong about the situation, and the only thing that had kept her from simply running out the door of the building and flagging down the first car she saw and asking them to call 911 was the addictive quality of the game itself, her own inability to pull herself out of the make-believe narrative that she and Wallace had found themselves in. She’d always scorned people who compulsively played these games when they should have been studying or exercising. Now she was playing the game when she should have been calling the cops. And yet none of this crossed her mind until Wallace’s phone began to emit a Klaxon alarm sound, and she looked up and noticed that it was daytime, that her bladder was about to explode, and that Peter was asleep on the couch.
It wasn’t the first time that Wallace’s phone had rung. He had it programmed to make different ring sounds for different people. Until now his calls had all been generic electronic chirps, which he had silenced and ignored. But this was the sound of battle stations on an aircraft carrier. He snatched it up immediately and answered “Hello.” Not “Hello?” with the rising inflection that meant To whom am I speaking? but “Hello” with the full stop that meant I was wondering when you’d call.
The sound of the Klaxon had awakened Peter, who sat up on the couch and was dismayed to see that last night hadn’t just been a bad dream.
Zula got up and went to the bathroom and peed. She was debating whether she ought to look in the mirror or just shield her eyes from the sight of herself. She heard Peter cursing about something. She decided not to look in the mirror. All her stuff was in the shoulder bag anyway.
She emerged from the bathroom to find Wallace sitting rigidly in his chair, quite pale, mostly just listening, almost as if the phone had been shoved up his arse. Peter was pounding away furiously on his laptop. The T’Rain game had vanished from the screen of the computer that Wallace had been using and from Zula’s as well. In its place was a message letting them know that their Internet connection had been lost.
She smelled cigarette smoke.
No one was smoking.
“Tigmaster’s down too,” Peter said, “and all the other Wi-Fi networks that I can reach from here are password protected.”
“Who’s smoking?” she asked.
“Yes, sir,” Wallace finally said into his phone. “I’m doing it now. I’m doing it now. No. No, sir. Only three of us.”
He had gotten to his feet and was lurching toward Peter and Zula. He came very close, as if he couldn’t see them and was about to walk right through them. Then he stopped himself awkwardly. He took the phone away from his head long enough for them to hear shouting coming from its earpiece. Then he put it briefly to his head again. “I’m doing it now. I’m putting you on speakerphone now, sir.”
He pressed a button on the telephone and then laid it on his outstretched palm.
“Good morning!” said a voice. “Ivanov speaking.” He was somewhere noisy: behind his voice was a whining roar. The pitch changed. He was calling from an airplane. A jet. “Ah, I see you now!”
“You … see us, sir?” Wallace asked.
“Your buildink. The buildink of Peter. Out window. Just like in Google Maps.”
Silence.
“I am flyink over you now!” Ivanov shouted, amused, rather than annoyed, at their slowness.
A plane flew low over the building. Planes flew low over the building all the time. They were on the landing path for Boeing Field.
“Soon I will be there for discussion of problem,” Ivanov continued. “Until then, you stay on line. Do not break connection. I have associates on street around your place.”
Ivanov said this as if the associates were there as a favor, to be at their service. Peter edged toward a window, looked down, focused on something, and got a stricken look.
Meanwhile another voice was speaking in Russian to Ivanov. Someone on the plane.
“Fuck!” Wallace mouthed, and turned his head away as if the phone were burning his eyes with arc light.
“What?” Zula asked.
“I have correction,” said Ivanov. “Associates are inside buildink. Not just in streets around. Very hard workers—enterprising. Wi-Fi is cut. Phone is cut. Stay calm. We are landink now. Be there in a few minutes.”
“Who the fuck is this person on the phone!?” Peter finally shouted.
“Mr. Ivanov and, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Sokolov,” said Wallace.
“Yes, Sokolov is with me!” said Ivanov. “You have good hearink.”
“Flying over the building—from where?” Peter demanded.
“Toronto,” Wallace said.
“How—what—?—!”
“I gather,” Wallace said, “that while we were playing T’Rain, Mr. Ivanov chartered a flight from Toronto to Boeing Field.”
Peter stared out the window, watched a corporate jet—Ivanov’s?—landing.
“Google Maps? He knows my name?”