Where Futures End Read online

  “There’s no Fated Blade in the Girl Queen stories,” Olly said as he and Reef hurried out of the lobby.

  Reef raised his eyebrows. “You’re telling me you’ve read all the thousands of books people have posted online and seen all the hundreds of movies and three-D movies and four-Ds, and you can say for sure there’s never been some Fated Blade?”

  Olly grunted. “Maybe. But if I had that kind of editing privilege I wouldn’t waste it on an impossible quest.”

  “When’s the last time you made any changes to the game?”

  “I revert edits all the time.”

  “That’s changing things back, not making up something new.”

  “Game doesn’t need to be edited, in my opinion. Fewer people editing means fewer people adding in all these bugs that are screwing up everything.”

  Reef shook his head. “Editing the game is half the fun—you get to make Alt the game that you want it to be. Who do you think makes up half the quests you go on? High-level gamers with top editing privileges.”

  “And who do you think plants all the viruses and leeches you spend all your time trying to get rid of?” Olly said.

  “Gives me something to do,” Reef said with a smirk.

  They headed into a vestibule to find the sphinx guarding the entrance to the men’s room. Its great tawny haunches were pressed up against a door that managed to look ignoble despite the brassy sheen Reef’s goggles lent it.

  “Hey,” Reef said in greeting.

  “Holding up against the smell?” Olly added.

  The sphinx peered down at them with yellow eyes set in a woman’s face and launched into its programmed speech. “Beyond this entrance to a den of wonders lies a valuable treasure of great power.”

  “Ever hear anyone get so sentimental about automatic flushers?” Olly asked Reef.

  “You’d feel the same way if you had to sit outside a bathroom all day,” Reef said.

  “If you wish to enter the den,” the sphinx went on, its voice striking a balance between mystery and condescension, “you must answer my riddle.”

  “If it’s about a troll in the woods, we already heard that one,” Olly said.

  “Wasn’t very funny,” Reef added.

  The sphinx ignored their comments and launched into its riddle: “Men ride upon my back, though I cannot be tamed—”

  Olly chuckled. Reef rolled his eyes.

  “—I surge and rush over ten thousand graves.”

  “Man,” Reef said. “Now that we’re here, I really have to take a piss.”

  “It’s not a real sphinx, dork,” Olly said. “Just take off your goggles.”

  “And come back into the game to find my character being gnawed on.”

  “Well, what surges and rushes and . . . dies?” Olly was already using his goggles to check the web for an answer.

  “I’m only thinking with my bladder right now. I thought you said this was supposed to be easy.”

  “Easier than it used to be. Until yesterday it was three riddles randomly generated from a who-knows-how-long list. And the sphinx was supposed to give us a time limit before eating us.” Olly kept searching the web for an answer, flicking his gloved fingers to scroll through a forum. “Someone definitely edited this quest: They did a sloppy job with the dialogue. The sphinx kept bobbing its head after it was done talking.”

  “Told you. There’s a leech in there.” The sound of a flushing toilet echoed out from the bathroom, somewhat dampening the solemn effect of the setting. But it lent Reef inspiration: “The ocean.”

  The sphinx closed its oval eyes at Reef’s answer. “Your intellect is keen. Retrieve your treasure.”

  It shuffled its haunches to make room for them to pass. Reef glanced at Olly.

  “Only enough leech-infected loot for one of us,” Olly said. “And I have no desire to supervise your bladder functions.”

  Reef passed through a doorway made coppery by the illusion of an alien façade. 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 buildin
gs 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.”

  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.

  He shook away the memory, jostled the boy next to him a little too hard. A spill of long, golden brown hair slipped free from the hood. Not a boy after all. Reef couldn’t see her face, but it didn’t matter because his gaze was locked on that long fall of hair, glinting a dozen different colors in the morning light. He reached to touch it, though he felt the same as when he had reached for the Banishment Spell in its ephemeral bubble—that it was impossible, that she would only disappear . . .

  She turned sharply. “Not for sale,” she said, as if he couldn’t tell the difference between a prostitute and someone with regular access to a shower and no taste for a drug that would forever alter her body chemistry. She took in the sight of his goggles perched on his head, the rings around his eyes, the stain of the drug on his shirt where flakes of resin had dropped and left green-gray spots. “Couldn’t pay me enough to be with a filthy raccoon like you anyway.”

  She snatched her bag of food from the counter with a trembling hand, her face white with fear of whatever violence she imagined Reef would do to her. Reef caught sight of the bracelets on her wrist, engraved with her husbands’ names, and then she darted out the door.

  “I think you mean owl, not raccoon,” Olly said after her. “And if you wait for the afternoon rainstorm, we’ll be cleaner than whatever’s stuck up your ass.”

  Reef tried to laugh but his throat seemed to have swollen nearly shut.

  The owner of the diner, Maksim, came by then and set down two bowls of their usual: potato and Tabasco soup. “What trouble have you two been into today?”

  “No trouble,” Olly said. “Just saving the continent from a looming digital war.” He rolled his eyes.

  Maksim shook his head in disapproval. “It’s always that game. You need to find a girl.”

  “You going to provide the map? The one who was just in here doesn’t seem eager to come back.”

  “Don’t need a map.” Maksim winked. “Just a little money.”

  Olly stared into his bowl, but not because he was embarrassed. Reef knew he’d been with girls before, and what other girls were there besides prostitutes?

  “What level you boys at now?”

  Olly gave him a glum smile
. He was far below Reef. “Two ninety-nine,” Reef admitted.

  Maksim whistled. “No. Really? How does someone your age get so high up there?”

  “Start as a little kid. Got to have something to do while your mom’s with clients.”

  The comment didn’t throw Maksim at all. “They’ll be surgically attaching those goggles to you someday. Owl Eyes is already half there.” He nodded at Olly.

  “Better than having them snatched off my head like my last pair,” Olly muttered.

  “When’ll you hit level three hundred?” Maksim asked Reef.

  A fresh surge of frustration mixed with the soup in Reef’s stomach.

  “He’s stuck at a paywall,” Olly said. “One that requires a pretty serious amount of cash.”

  “Ah.” Maksim grimaced in sympathy as he turned to help another customer.

  Olly gulped the last of his soup and hopped down from his stool. “I got to go meet with a raiding party, Two Ninety-nine.” He pulled his goggles back on and looked at Reef. “Think you can delay the digital war on your own for a while?”

  Reef frowned. “Do I take names first and then kick asses, or is it the other way around?”

  Olly chuckled and strode out the door.

  Maksim returned to the counter and said to Reef, “You seen this posting? Could help you get past your paywall.” He tapped a monitor on the wall.

  Reef squinted at the screen. It was an ad for a worker husband. Posted by someone with two husbands already and looking for another income. The photo showed a young woman with the wide-set eyes and rounded chin of a doll. The ad said she was only nineteen, but Reef suspected it was a lie. Ads like these were always too promising.

  “You get the money you need for level three hundred, she gets a little slice of your income.”

  “Any slice is a slice too big.” But Reef’s gaze wandered to the photo of the girl again. Underneath her sweet expression were hints she had lived in Seattle too long: the tilt of her mouth, the flinty black of her pupils. The way she side-eyed the camera seemed to say he could fix all of that for her.