Reef passed through a doorway made coppery by the illusion of an alien fa?ade. The effect inside the men’s bathroom was not as impressive. Chipped tile showed through where the digital overlay was patchy with bad edits.
A businessman at the sink gave Reef’s goggles a look of mingled surprise and distaste. Reef used the urinal and then found the item he was looking for in the sink: a Banishment Spell, his reward for answering the riddle and a tool for sending trolls scampering. It hovered inside a glass globe, a silvery blue swirl that betrayed no threat. But accepting the item into his inventory would invite a leech into the hard drive that ran his goggles. The leech wouldn’t do much harm. Just curl up and wait for a chance to spread to other computers. Until one day, when whoever created the leech finally called upon it to do whatever malicious work it had been programmed to do.
Reef stretched a hand toward the swirling globe. He wondered when he’d have another chance to find a Banishment Spell. He should take it and sell it, like Olly had said. Not worry about the leech.
He hesitated, thinking. Then he hit the globe with a Revert Spell, reversing the edits the creator of the leech had made. The leech was gone.
Reef tried to close his fingers around the spell, hoping against all odds. But the globe vanished. Whoever had inserted the leech had made sure the Banishment Spell would vanish the moment anyone destroyed the leech. Reef was left with the hollow feeling of groping for something only to come back empty-handed, a feeling he experienced all too often.
A ping from his earpiece told him a decent sum of money had been deposited into his account—the government’s way of thanking him for getting rid of the leech.
He met up with Olly again in the vestibule. “Breakfast is on me.”
“You want to hit up your dealer first? Only two sticks left.”
Reef stiffened. He wasn’t hiding things as well as he thought he was.
“Go do it,” Olly said. “I’ve got a long list of dungeons to raid when you’re finished with all this white-hat business. It’s not going to help me if you’re dead in two days.”
“That might set us both back,” Reef joked, his gaze anywhere but on Olly. “Think we should revert the edits to the sphinx first?”
“I’m guessing the spell was destroyed when you ousted the leech?” Olly’s stiff stance said he was still hoping Reef hadn’t gotten rid of the leech, that he had picked up the Banishment Spell and left a copy behind.
“Yeah, the spell’s gone,” Reef said.
Olly sighed. “Then forget the sphinx. There’s nothing left for it to guard.”
Reef gave most of the money to a dealer.
“I’d offer you some,” Reef said to Olly afterward as he pocketed his tin.
“But then you’d have to keep offering every day? Thanks, you can keep it. I’m not fond of fatal withdrawal.” Olly chewed thoughtfully on a thumbnail as they headed toward Pioneer Square in search of breakfast. “Playing Alt must have been mind-blowing back when that stuff still gave you a high.”
They passed boarded-up windows and gated doorways and tried to dodge puddles on the sidewalk. “Can’t remember that far back,” Reef said. A lie. He recalled the feeling of sinking into color and light as he passed through holographic buildings. Wandering for hours in the Warped Wood just to hear the leaves move. Forgetting the real world altogether, forgetting there was anything to forget. But the drug never made him high anymore. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t care, that it was a waste to be high all the time and that it had only messed up his reflexes and made his gameplay worse.
But the truth was he missed the feeling of being completely immersed in another world.
“It was stupid ever to start taking it,” he said, and that was honest at least.
“You were a kid,” Olly said. “If I’d ever gotten my hands on that stuff when I was kid, I would have taken it too.”
Reef pulled his goggles back on to avoid Olly’s gaze. The wet, gray buildings of Seattle turned to bronze and silver and mottled green glass. He didn’t like to think about how his addiction had started. Using resin had seemed normal to him—he’d seen his mother do it. She couldn’t hide it from him in their tiny container home. And it hadn’t taken long to get dependent on resin to the point where stopping meant damaging his organs.
“What does it feel like now when you take it?” Olly asked.
Reef scanned the street for new quests. He registered the flutter of sylph wings, of elven gowns, of fairies circling the streetlight like moths. “Hurts my stomach.”
“That’s called hunger.”
“Feels like my organs are waging wars over supply routes they’ve mapped out on my nerve system.”
“Now you’re being dramatic.” Olly nudged him into the street to avoid a group of men Reef had been too distracted to notice. “They look like they wouldn’t mind scoring a couple pairs of goggles.”