Reef ducked his head to hide his goggles. He’d had to part with a really rare Impenetrable Cloak to buy this set. Plus, if someone stole his goggles, they’d probably loot his Alt account.
He and Olly headed into a narrow alley made narrower by huddled forms crouching over food scrap breakfasts. Reef spotted a troll peering over the edge of a Dumpster. He decided he couldn’t bother to stop and attack it, considering how his stomach was rumbling.
“What do you think all these leeches are going to do?” Olly asked. “Come D-day?”
“Crash our communications, energy networks, governmental defense systems—”
“Forget it. I don’t need to hear your Great China conspiracy theories.”
“Why do you think the government pays a bounty for every leech cleaned up? You do understand we’re at war?”
Olly peered around as though searching for evidence of violence. “It’s a very quiet war.”
Reef snorted. “Until China finishes planting enough leeches to create a huge botnet—”
“Not every leech is controlled by the Chinese.”
“—and then once our systems are down, they’ll finish us with a nuclear warhead or two—”
“I said forget it.”
A white blur made Reef stop in his tracks and grab Olly by his grimy jacket sleeve.
“What?” Olly said.
“White rabbit.” He scrutinized a pile of old pallets. “In there.”
Olly pulled on his goggles and kicked the rotting wood aside. “You’re seeing things, bud.”
Reef tried to squash his disappointment. A white rabbit gave a free help to anyone who caught it.
Olly laughed at Reef’s glum expression. “It’s not like it’s handing out money. What were you going to ask it for?”
“The username of whoever keeps editing in that crap about the Fated Blade.”
“I thought you didn’t care.”
“It’s bothering me.”
“You said it was just some top-level gamer playing a joke.”
“It’s annoying, is all.”
“A Queen’s Mark would be better. Then you could get into the palace at the harbor.”
Another white blur. Reef scrambled after it. He saw a flash of fur, long ears pricked forward. Just as he rounded on it, the rabbit squeezed through the closing door of the embassy. Reef yanked the door open, stepped inside—
And the illusion abruptly dropped. Instead of the holographic alien embassy, he found himself inside the tiled lobby of a Seattle bank. A line of text flashed across his goggles: MINIMUM REQUIREMENT: LEVEL 300.
He swore. He was stuck at Level 299 and had been for a year. Without a big fat payment to the Alt franchise, he’d stay stuck.
He’d lost his white rabbit.
Olly was waiting for him out on the sidewalk. “Paywall,” Reef explained.
Olly gave him a sympathetic smirk. “I swear those rabbits pull crap like that on purpose. I followed one into a private house once and almost got arrested. Broke my ankle jumping out the window.”
“What’d it give you?”
Olly reached over his shoulder to pull out an elven ax that shimmered in Reef’s display. “Worth it too. This thing deals twice the damage of a war hammer.”
A muted clatter of dishes greeted them at their usual haunt, where only a few of the scuffed tables were occupied. They elbowed in at the counter next to a scrawny kid cloaked in a black hooded sweatshirt. Reef always ate at the counter. The jostle of elbows and the buzz of conversation swept away the hollowed-out feeling he awoke with every morning alone in his container. The spell of arms and voices, he called it—a phrase his mother had gleaned from one of the antique paperbacks that had doubled as insulation in the cracks of their old two-person container.
Except that when his mother said it, she was thinking of the call to adventure. Namely, heading north out of the sprawl, up into Canada, where green things still grew and the air you breathed hadn’t already been breathed by eight million other people. “The white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces,” his mother would read over the patter of rain on the roof, “and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations.” Reef had promised her, over and over, that he would get them out of the overlap. He’d level up until he was raking in money and then he’d take them away from their reeking container and the men who owned it for hours at a time.
But he hadn’t done it. Especially once his mother, and then he, had become dependent on resin to stay alive. And then, one day . . .
He’d come home to find black-oil blood and twisted sheets. Her chalk-white arms reaching for nothing. Silence and death so thick in the air that he couldn’t breathe.