Soon, Allie was surrounded by people. She didn’t know most of them—they looked familiar from classes and stuff—but that didn’t seem to matter.
They started telling her stories, without any prompting. Blake and Jackson told her they used to be best friends in kindergarten, but they drifted apart until Click’d brought them back together. Kira and Sean said they hadn’t met until they landed at the top of each other’s leaderboards, but they’ve been inseparable all week. Ben and Brody were both new kids and neither one knew a single person on Monday, but now they had each other and a whole new friend group.
Allie listened to all their stories. She asked if she could take their pictures to use in her presentation, and they immediately started posing for her.
All the attention made her giddy. She felt like a rock star. Or a superhero. Or a superhero rock star.
Then she pictured Nathan back in the lab doing the real superhero work, protecting the innocent by scanning and deleting, and she knew she had to get back to him. But she had to find Eric and Abigail first.
She spotted Abigail standing with her friends, and Eric under the basketball hoop, staring at his phone. Allie waved them over and explained everything. Eric thought it was hilarious. Abigail did, too. And Allie wasn’t certain, but it looked as if they both went straight to their photos and started deleting any they wouldn’t want to share.
As she walked away, she could hear music playing and everyone chatting, and she wished she could join them.
She was at the top of the stairs, heading into the quad, when she saw Kaila Boyd, Holly Cline, and Claudia Jasper standing in a small circle next to the cafeteria.
“This is a picture of the two of you at the beach last weekend!” Kaila yelled as she held her phone up to them. Allie couldn’t make out the photo, but she could tell the phone screen was flashing red.
None of them had noticed Allie yet, so she ducked behind the closest wall and listened.
“We’re sorry,” Claudia said.
“We really are,” Holly added.
“It’s one thing to go somewhere without me, but to make up a whole story?” Allie peeked around the corner as Kaila pointed at Holly and said, “You told me your mom got sick, so the trip was canceled.” Allie could see Holly’s shoulders sink. “So what? You just lied to me?”
“I’m sorry,” Holly said. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
Kaila held her phone up in the air again. “How would this not hurt my feelings?”
“We weren’t trying to be mean, I swear,” Claudia said. “We just wanted to go to the boardwalk,” she added, as if that explained everything.
“Yeah,” Holly said. “And none of the rides fit three people. We would have had to take turns all day.”
Kaila let out a laugh. “That’s okay. I get it. Better to just lie to me about it,” she said sarcastically, and then she turned on her heel and stormed off.
Allie couldn’t see the picture in question, but she was pretty sure if she had watched it go through the queue, it never would have occurred to her to delete it.
Nathan slid over and gave Allie her chair back.
“See anything sketchy?” she asked.
He made a face. “People take some weird pictures,” he said, “but no, everything looked legit.”
Allie wondered how many pictures were slipping out there without her even knowing it.
She had to fix it. But she didn’t know how. And she couldn’t ignore that anymore.
Nathan didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He knew Click’d was broken. He could tell the judges. He could win G4G.
“Are you close?” he finally asked. She knew what he meant.
“I don’t know. I found the problem last night. I spent hours tweaking the code and testing it, but I can’t get it to pass. Every time I think I’ve fixed the photo issue, something breaks somewhere else. It’s all interconnected,” she said, interlacing her fingers together. “I can recode all the photo-related stuff, but not by Saturday.”
The room got quiet while Allie waited for Nathan to give her a lecture about the Games for Good rules. He was going to have far too much fun with this, and she was dreading every second. But then, he looked her right in the eye and said, “The store isn’t charging for paint.”
“What?” she asked.
Nathan tilted his monitor in her direction. She could see his little characters running around the neighborhood, carrying ladders from one house to another, dashing back and forth across the street, and speeding into the hardware store.
“It was working fine. But then I made a bunch of little changes last week—minor things, just cleaning up code and stuff.” He clicked the mouse a few times and zoomed in on the store. She could see the rows of supplies—bins filled with tiny bolts and screws, shelves displaying hammers and screwdrivers, and big push brooms lined up against one of the walls—and once again, she found herself in awe of the details in his imaginary world.
She watched as a woman with blond hair and a red sweatshirt stepped up to the counter holding a bag of nails, and the man behind the counter totaled her purchase. Her player information appeared in the corner of the screen, and as soon as he clicked on the register, fifty points were deducted from her total.
“It’s charging for nails and screws and tools, but as soon as someone comes in and buys paint, it doesn’t charge them. And paint is the most expensive item.”
“Who’s going to notice that?” Allie asked.
“The judges. All they have to do is look at my error logs.”
“You have error logs?” she asked.
“You don’t?” Nathan asked. Allie shook her head.
If she’d had error logs, she would have known about the photo glitch before Zoe had. She would have had a trail to follow. Instead, she had no clues at all.
A little animated character in a blue cap stepped inside the hardware store, grabbed a hammer from the wall of tools, and took it to the register.
“So that’s what you were trying to fix yesterday?”
Nathan nodded. “Yeah. And the day before. And pretty much all last weekend.”
Allie shot him a sympathetic smile. “What does Ms. Slade think?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t told her. I was kind of hoping I could figure it out myself.”
“Yeah,” Allie whispered. “Same here.”
Allie looked back at her screen, staring at the lines and lines of code stretched across her monitor. She knew she needed to get back to work, but the thought of poring through all those commands again made her head hurt. She was certain there was a solution, or even a simple work-around, but she was starting to think she’d never find it.
Then she looked back at Nathan’s screen. It reminded her of a game she’d built last year, where players ran a dog-walking service and had to figure out how much they needed to charge to keep the dogs safe and still be profitable. The graphics weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated as Nathan’s, but the game logic was probably similar.