Reef bit back his anger. “My entire hard drive is wiped.”
“I wish Aedric weren’t so good at doing things like that. I only wanted to get rid of the visa. I knew you would have it.”
Reef pressed his fingers against his temples. Anger boiled in his stomach, no matter how hard he fought against it.
“Do you remember that night at the lounge?” Cadence asked quietly.
Reef turned to glance at the dark building. He remembered his hands warm against her back.
“You said there’s probably some bar in Beijing just like the one in Seattle?” Cadence went on.
Reef closed his eyes against the blank display of his goggles. “Why did you do it?”
There was a moment of silence before she answered. “I bet there’s a place up here in Canada that’s just like Seattle, except it’s men and not women that there aren’t enough of.” Shasta’s tiny voice sounded in the background. She was saying something about snow.
“Why did you do it?” Reef asked again, barely getting the words out through his parched throat. “You didn’t want me to have that visa? Why?”
“I’m tired of being saved, Reef. I just wanted to get free.”
“Free of me?” Reef’s heart felt made of paper.
“Free of all of you.”
She cut off the channel.
Reef sank down onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He searched for his Alt program and then remembered it wasn’t there anymore. He downloaded it. There was nothing else to do. The bricks bulged in his pockets and his jaw trembled while he thought about them.
Alt finished downloading. Reef halfheartedly logged on while he wondered where Olly had gone after they’d split up. He couldn’t remember saying good-bye. He tried him on the chat channel: “Olly?” No answer.
Alt’s cityscape flickered to life around him, copper and crystal dulled by the smoggy mist. A holographic man in a leather vest stood near the corner of the hotel. “You going to tell me about the Fated Blade?” Reef grunted.
The man bobbed his head as he had the last time Reef had seen him. But an unfamiliar, digitized voice came out: “One hour, seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds.”
Reef got to his feet. “What did you say?”
“One hour, seven minutes, twenty-two seconds.”
The back of Reef’s neck went hot with panic. Breck’s words went through his head: It’s not a real quest. Just the Chinese mocking us.
Reef raked his hands through his hair, looked down the street as though he’d find someone there who could help him. You know the game is riddled with leeches? All waiting for their creator to say the word . . .
Down goes all of our infrastructure.
He opened the chat channel and hailed Olly again.
“Reef—”
“Listen, something bad’s coming, something really bad. Get out of the sprawl. Head for Canada. Our infrastructure’s going down—maybe in the confusion you’ll be able to get across.”
There was a crackle that might have been Olly hitting the mic while tightening his goggles. “You sure this isn’t one of your big conspiracy theories?”
“Just trust me. Get out.”
“All right, I’m at the metro anyway. Wouldn’t mind seeing Canada, even if it’s just through the border fence.” There was a pause and then Olly said, “You coming too?”
Reef slid his hands into his pockets, curled his fingers around the edges of the bricks there. “Just get out.”
Reef ended the call. He racked his brains for the username the alien had used to chat with him at the steam plant.
“One hour, six minutes, forty-one seconds.”
The alien answered his hail.
“All that crap you told me about the Fated Blade,” Reef said. “Your people are going to help China attack us, aren’t they? You’re going to shut down the sprawl so we’ll stop coming into your world.”
It took a long moment for the translation program to come back with the alien’s answer: “We’re not helping the Chinese.”
“Bullshit. I just heard the countdown. In an hour all those leeches they planted are going to activate and overwhelm our infrastructure. And then what? Nuclear attack too?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“The Fated Blade. The stupid impossible quest. It’s not a quest at all. It’s a countdown to a digital attack from Great China.”
“I don’t know anything about the quest. Or the countdown. Your wars have nothing to do with me. What I told you is true: Your people have become too dependent on my world.”
Reef was hardly listening. “You’re tired of us coming into your world and funneling out your money. You don’t need us anymore now that you’ve got the solar energy you want. So you’re going to wipe Seattle off the map—”
“You do not understand. This is not about your war. The connection between our two worlds is harming both worlds in ways you do not yet know about. Ways which we have only recently discovered.”
Reef’s breath went cold in his lungs. “What’re you talking about?”