“Ooh,” said Saif, “let’s try statue. I’ve always thought there should be a statue of me.”
“Of course,” said Marisa, and had to struggle not to roll her eyes. No matter how charming he tried to be, that rich arrogance was still in there. She hid her disgust and scrolled through the menu to find the statue. She used female avatars almost exclusively, but she loved designing new ones, and she couldn’t help but collect an assortment of male looks over the years. She pulled up the statue design and linked it to his account; he accepted, and suddenly the baby blue dog man was replaced with an eight-foot marble statue, sculpted into an image of ancient Roman perfection. Saif looked at himself again, and the marble face smiled as proudly as if he’d designed it himself.
“This is incredible,” he said. He looked at her. “Do you . . . buy these?”
“I make them.”
“Yourself?”
“Of course.” She said it casually, but inside she was beaming with pride. She looked back at her menu and opened the list of arenas. They were all functionally identical, but with different skins—a blasted city, a nuli factory, a pirate ship, a jungle island, and more. She found the one that looked best with the statue, a kind of Mediterranean ruin called the Colosseum, and opened it up. The lobby announcer declared that the game was loading, and a moment later they were standing on the crest of windswept hill, looking out at fallen pillars and cracked flagstones, nestled amid tufts of grass. Instead of military robots, the drones on this map were lions and manticores and other mythic beasts; Marisa could see them prowling in the distance.
“This game looks way cooler than Muffin Top,” said Saif.
“We haven’t even started playing yet,” said Marisa. “Each team has five agents, and you can customize your powers. . . .” She paused. The VR game was just a pretense, really—they weren’t here to play; they were here to talk about Bluescreen. She wanted to find out what he knew about the people who made it . . . she needed to find out. Anja was in trouble, and how many other people? eLiza was dead, and five innocents were in prison for it. What she learned from Saif might save them.
Or it might implicate Saif. Despite herself, she suddenly didn’t want that to happen.
Marisa looked across the Colosseum, watching a manticore pace across a high stone platform. “You know what?” she said. “Forget the rules, I don’t really want to play.”
Saif’s statue looked at her. “You just want to talk?”
“Eventually.” She felt the sudden urge to stall, to delay as long as possible the confirmation that he was lying to her. She opened the power menu, scrolling through the various abilities. “But if you’ve never played, there’s something you’ve got to try first.” She blinked on a power package, and copied it to him. “Flight.”
The powers engaged, and Marisa felt herself float up, just a centimeter off the ground. She flexed some imaginary muscle and flew off into the sky, the ground falling away beneath her in a rush. The wind on her face wasn’t real, but the exhilaration was; she pulled to a brief stop, high above the Colosseum, and plunged into a power dive, forgetting everything else, just for a moment, whooping with joy as she aimed for a fallen arch and rocketed through the gap, dodging the vine-wrapped pillars and skimming the tops of the grass with her fingertips. She soared back into the sky again, looking around for Saif, and saw him sailing toward her with a grin.
“That was amazing,” he said. “You’re good at this.”
“The flashy stuff is easy,” she said. “It’s the fine control that takes a lot of skill—hovering in one place to line up a sniper shot, or making fast turns through the sewer stairways.”
He smirked. “There’s a sewer in a Roman ruin? Big enough to have stairs?”
“We just call them sewers, no matter what the map looks like—the part underground is the sewer, and the player who fights there is called the Jungler. I don’t know why.”
“So there’s something about this game you’re not an expert in?”
She grinned at him. “Maybe a couple of things. The terminology is old, full of weird holdovers from games so old my abuela used to play them. But”—she flew back a little, spreading her arms—“when it comes to actually playing the game, I’m almost pro.”
The marble statue raised its eyebrow. “Want to prove it?”
She studied his face. “You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I believe you,” he said, and the corner of his lips curled into a mischievous grin. “But how many times am I going to have a one-on-one with a semipro Overworld player?”
She nodded her head; he wasn’t doubting her skills, he was testing them. She eyed the field, looking for a suitable challenge. “We can’t go head-to-head, because you’ve never played—even a novice could beat a total noob. But maybe . . . okay, here we go. You see that manticore on the roof?”
“I’m a big manticore fan,” said Saif. “I’m a fanticore.”