43

Chobb met her eyes.

“Marti, get out here. We’re having dinner.”

Zoey heard grumbling and then out shuffled Marti from the bar, with his VR glasses on.

Zoey threw up her hands. “Oh, for the love of—”

Marti lifted the glasses just enough to see what was on the table, said, “I’m not eating meat,” and left the room, seemingly not having noticed Zoey at all.

Titus said, “See? Always in that stupid game.”

The bar guard, Antonio, stuck his head out once more and said, “It appears that Will Blackwater and the rest were not in fact on board the aircraft in question. It was unmanned. Maybe trying to draw our attention away.”

“Thank you, Antonio.”

Zoey said, “He’s coming.”

“You think he and his people are going to board this aircraft in midair?”

“Yes.”

Antonio cleared his throat. Apparently he hadn’t finished speaking. “A separate team on the ground reported that they spotted Will Blackwater among a group entering the Lucky Cat hotel a short time ago, disguised as the cast and crew of an erotic magic show scheduled to perform tonight. It is believed they have since moved into one of the upper floors, but have blocked both the stairs and elevator to prevent being followed. Our team is attempting to find another way up.”

That was the casino/hotel built to look like a giant golden maneki-neko. Zoey said, “Well, how about that.”

Her mother asked, “They’re in that big waving cat building? Why?”

“We’re going to float right past it,” said Zoey. “If we go the normal route. And I mean right past it. And pretty soon, if I remember.”

Titus said, “That’s correct.”

Zoey said, “Unless we change course to avoid it.”

Titus finished his food, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, “Why would I want to do that? Entire lives are wasted delaying the inevitable. I prefer to usher it along. If they’re going to make some kind of ridiculous attempt to board this aircraft from a gigantic waving cat, well, I admit I’m actually eager to see it.”

“Then I suppose I need to hurry.”

Zoey put the little button on the table. It had a cobalt-blue pinprick of light in the center. Chobb jumped up and backed away, knocking his chair over.

This was in no way an overreaction. The magic of Raiden technology was that an astounding amount of energy could be packed into an object that size. Easily enough to blow a blimp out of the sky.

Zoey said, “Sit. My mother is right here, my goal is not to just kill all of us.”

Chobb picked up his chair and sat, never taking his eyes off the device. When Zoey had said her good-byes to the team an hour earlier, she’d asked if anyone had a weapon. Instead, what Echo Ling had handed her was this button.

“How much time do I have, assuming that my people are going to launch a spectacular and lethal raid when we pass by?”

Chobb turned and looked out of one of the side windows. “Considering our golden cat friend is right there, I’d say about five or six minutes. See it?”

Zoey took a deep breath, her chest constricted by a band of bruises.

In the most confident voice she could muster, she said, “I want to buy the Vanguard of Peace from you.”

Chobb sat for a few moments to make sure he’d actually heard her. Then he burst out laughing.

“You think this is about money? You’ve got a lot to learn about men, sweetheart.”

Her mother put a hand on his arm and said, “At least listen to her.”

“Titus,” said Zoey, trying quickly to put the words together. “I am going to give you everything you want. Everything you really want. The only problem is that it’s going to be hard for you to admit that it’s what you want, when you hear it. I know it’s confusing, but just bear with me, okay? What I’m going to do now is make a series of statements and if I say something you disagree with, pick up your fork there and stab me with it. Just pin my hand right to the table. Ready?”

He glanced back over his shoulder, the gleaming gold skin of the cat building just ahead. “Time really is running short here…”

“First statement, this city sucks ass. You hate it here so much that you literally stay in the sky so you don’t have to touch it. Second, you’re miserable right now. Just in general, none of this is panning out the way you wanted. Third, you hate to lose. You’d rather die than lose. Fourth, you really do hate crime. It’s not just talk, I get that now—you honestly hate it when innocent people are victimized and will do whatever it takes to stop it, regardless of what anybody else thinks. Fifth and final point, the future is murky because you have no one to take over your business, like you said. But it’s not just the business that’s in doubt, it’s that mission, to keep people safe. And that bothers you a lot, because you don’t want to let the victims down. Does all that sound right?”

In a thoroughly unimpressed tone, Chobb said, “Sure.” Perhaps just as significantly, he did not stab Zoey with his fork.

“All right. So first, instead of all this”—Zoey swept her hand across the city outside the window with disdain—“I’m going to offer you control over an entire economy the size of Germany.”

This clearly caught Chobb off guard. “Am I about to hear that Will has seized a nation in Africa?”

“No, it’s weirder than that. Here, I’m going to reach into my pocket—tell your men not to shoot me. I’m just getting my phone.”

Zoey set her phone on the table in plain view, then brought up a live video feed that, upon initial viewing, appeared to be an anthill swarming with hundreds of thousands of ants who were in turn being overrun by an even larger swarm. Zooming in revealed a raging battle between men and creatures of all sizes, wielding elaborate weapons. An army trying to take a sprawling, walled city on a mountaintop.

“This is what Marti’s doing on his headset back there. Echo showed me this. You see how this army here is all tagged with little red icons? Those are Dirk Vikerness loyalists, who just cast Marti out of their federation after he came forward with his confession. The ones tagged in green, those are your son’s, he’s leading an alliance of forces against them, including an army of Zoey loyalists, which until tonight I didn’t know was a thing.”

“Yes, this is the game he can’t tear himself away from.”

“It’s not a game. It’s real. No, listen. In every meaningful way, this”—she poked the phone with a finger—“is reality. The reason these guys care so much about these wars is that the stuff you see getting destroyed or captured here, they can’t just click a button and start over. See that wall they’re tearing down? There’s a factory inside the Hub that makes bricks and there’s a mine that produces the raw materials to supply that factory. There’s a currency to purchase all of it that exists in the game and only in the game. The land they’re building on is just like land in the real world; to build, you either have to kick somebody off their land, or buy it from them, or go out to the edge of the map and spend months clearing wilderness. It’s finite, that’s the word I’m looking for.”

“Are you about to offer me a plot of imaginary land for my real-life business?”

“No. I’m going to offer you control of society’s future. All of the stuff you see here requires work, in the Hub. It can’t be bought with real money, there are no shortcuts or cheats. The reason is that when you make or grow something here, the final stage is to have it authenticated through a company called V-Terra—you pay a few pennies to certify it’s real. A hundred million users in the Hub rely on it every single minute of every day.”

“And you own V-Terra?”

“Well, it was owned by a Chinese billionaire. I had half-seriously asked Echo Ling if I could just buy the Hub out from under these guys. It turns out that’s not a thing, but Echo dug into this and it then took Budd all of one hour to find out said billionaire is guilty of crimes that could quickly get him executed by his government. Budd has spoken to him and we are going to help him out of his jam, in exchange for ownership.”

“And in the next two hundred seconds or so you’re going to try to convince me that selling imaginary goods is a sound investment strategy for the future.”

“You’re not getting it. V-Terra doesn’t sell imaginary goods. It prevents other people from having them. That, it turns out, is the stupid industry of the future. Look, the only reason there is value in having a big fake castle and golden armor is in the fact that other people don’t have those things. That means these people in here finally have the one thing they can’t get in the real world, and the thing they want above all else—status. The whole social order is reversed in here, if you or I logged in, we’d start at the bottom and we’d have no way to just buy our way to the top with real money—V-Terra bans anyone who tries. Work only counts if it’s done in the Hub, which means to them, we’re the societal dropouts, the maladjusted losers to be mocked and pitied. It’s a whole new world for all of the poor souls who couldn’t make it in this one.

“You, then, would pretty much be the king of that territory, taking a tiny cut of every single thing that’s produced. It’s potentially an absurd amount of money and it’s a job you can do from anywhere. You can do it from the beach, in some country where the girls don’t wear tops. The point is, you wouldn’t have to live in Tabula Rasa anymore. You would be free of everything that’s making you hate your life. You will have escaped the Badlands once and for all.”

Zoey’s mother clapped her hands together and said, “Ooh, we could go to Varadero! Like we talked about. The white sand…”

“And all I have to do,” gruffed Chobb, “is abandon my home and my life’s work. I’m sure Will Blackwater would like this ‘deal’ very much.”

“That brings me to the next part. You don’t like to lose and you absolutely do not want to lose to Will Blackwater, of all people. Trust me, I completely understand. That’s why as part of the VOP buyout, you get that…”

Zoey pointed out of the window in the opposite direction of the golden cat, to a wobbly glowing shape in the distance. Her under-construction tower, shrouded in its childish hologram.

“… the single most valuable piece of real estate in the city, which means it’s one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. Right in the heart of downtown, the spot claimed by Arthur Livingston himself all those years ago to lord over all he surveyed. You can do whatever you want with it, write your name across it in gold. No one in this city could ever look at the skyline and say Titus Chobb retreated or admitted defeat. And I promise you, Will Blackwater will absolutely hate that. It will torment him to the end of his days.”

Chobb tried to suppress his reaction but did not do it in time. He clearly liked that part of the offer very much.

“And yet,” said Chobb, exaggerating his gruffness a little, “the Vanguard of Peace will still fall into his hands, to add to the modified monsters he can turn out at any moment.”

“No,” said Zoey. “It falls into my hands. That’s the deal. He never gets control.”

“I don’t mean to offend you, but whether or not he is given control on paper is meaningless. He will obtain it regardless.”

“No,” said Zoey. “He will not. Part of what you are betting on is me.”

“You can’t even see that Will set this up, that he sent you here to do this?”

“You can’t even see that I know he thinks he did that?”

Chobb watched the digital battle play out on Zoey’s phone. Zoey could see him teetering on the decision. Her mother touched his hand. He was almost making up his mind, on the cusp of a “yes” …

And then he withdrew. Chobb pulled his hand away, crossed his arms.

Zoey’s heart sank into her shoes. The enormous golden cat was now right in front of them, its face filling the side window, the waving left paw giving it the appearance that it was beckoning them to pass on that side, like it was directing traffic. Its enormous eyes were windows and Zoey could see tables and people behind the glass—a fancy restaurant. If the Suits were over there somewhere, she couldn’t see them.

Then, the paw stopped waving, grinding to a halt, held vertically as if it was telling them to stop moving.

Zoey pushed the little silver button closer to Chobb. She placed it so that it would be right under his face.

“Link that to your phone. It will come up with a prompt to activate it. If nothing else convinces you, that will.”

Those had been Echo’s only instructions. Zoey tried to make eye contact with her mother, to send a silent message. Chobb sighed and pulled his phone off of his belt. He fiddled with menus. From where Zoey was sitting, she saw his phone detect the device, a red “Initiate” button appearing.

He tapped it.

Zoey yelled to her mother, “GET DOWN!”

Zoey flung herself to the floor, landing hard on her injured shoulder. She almost blacked out from the pain.

After a moment, she realized no one had joined her down there. Whatever Echo’s device was doing, it was doing it silently.

From above her, she heard her mother say, “Honey, are you okay?”

Zoey wasn’t sure how long to wait on the floor. She slowly pulled herself back up to her chair to find her mother was now staring at her with great concern. Titus seemed mildly confused, then returned to scrolling through what seemed like a very long document on his phone.

“Sorry, I, uh, fell out of my chair.”

“This data seems hard to believe,” said Chobb. “They’re saying crime dropped forty percent in Mumbai among regular users.”

“Uh, sure. That’s what was on that device. The … data. From the Chinese guy. I wasn’t sure, my instructions were vague. And yeah, that’s the point. People who get shut out of the real economy always go off and just make their own, that’s human nature. Theft, contraband, all that. The Hub fills the same need, only nobody gets hurt.”

Chobb kept scrolling.

“They’ve barely been profitable but they’re expecting three hundred million users within the next few years. Network effects make it all but impossible for a competitor to come into the market…” He shook his head. “Even so, I’ve spent my entire adult life in private security. Why would I want to spend my golden years trying to make money in a field I know nothing about?”

“That,” said Zoey, pointing a finger-gun at him, “is the best part. You’re a novice in the Hub, you’re right. But you know who isn’t? Your son, Marti. Do you not see that he helped build a whole empire in there? And not with your money or connections, either. He did it with his own time, his own decisions, his own strategy. You say your son can’t inherit your security empire and your conclusion is that it’s time to throw away your son? How about you get a different empire instead? You could run it together, the two of you, ruling over this magical kingdom in which anything is possible.”

Chobb didn’t answer. Zoey shot a nervous look out of the side windows.

There was a pop and a puff of smoke from the golden cat’s shoulder, right at the joint where the waving arm met the rest of the structure. She saw people in the restaurant behind its eyes go wild, looking around, trying to figure out what had just exploded.

Then the cat’s golden arm fell, rotating down like it was lowering a paw to stop the blimp. It had exactly that effect—the cat’s arm jolted to a stop right in front of them and, a moment later, the blimp gently bumped into it. Everyone inside was jolted and the entire room tipped slightly to one side.

Zoey stopped her plate from sliding off the table and said, “It would appear they have initiated phase one of what looks like a very stupid plan to board this aircraft.”

Chobb said, “Hmm.” But that was it.

The engines revved, the pilot presumably trying to steer around the cat’s paw. Then, incredibly, a tiny figure was running along the golden arm, hundreds of feet off the ground. They were holding some kind of a rifle. Zoey thought it was almost certainly Wu. He stopped and aimed his weapon, firing directly at them. It launched a projectile that unspooled a length of thin cable and thunked into the hull. Chobb rolled his eyes and sighed, sure that his floating office was going to wind up sustaining quite a bit of damage before this was done.

Zoey’s mother gestured at the battle playing out on the phone and said to Chobb, “You can say all that isn’t real, but your son, and your life with him, that’s real. You know what isn’t? This dumb wienie-wagging contest you’ve been tricked into having with Will Blackwater and all of the other reptiles just like him. That’s the game, the one the world tricked you into playing, convincing you that winning it is worth losing your family, your life, your peace of mind. It’s all so stupid, Titus. A game little boys make up on the playground and can’t ever stop playing.”

The airship was now attempting to fly in reverse, straining against the cable that was now attached to the cat’s paw. Wu was running back across the arm, toward a gap in the shoulder joint.

Something was approaching from somewhere beyond the cat’s arm, a small pair of bright lights growing in the distance.

Amplifying the tough-guy gruffness in his voice to almost comical levels now, Chobb said, “My own people will do their own analysis. Redo all of these projections. But if they agree with what I’m seeing here … I’ll do it. To hell with it.”

Zoey’s mother said “Yay!” and hugged him.

“Don’t celebrate too hard,” said Zoey, studying the events outside the window. “There’s a good chance we’re still all about to die in a stupid blimp shootout.”

Chobb said, “I still don’t see how I won’t wind up living the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for retribution from Blackwater.”

Zoey watched the oncoming lights outside her window and shook her head.

“You won’t have to look over your shoulder. I said before that what you’re banking on is my ability to get between you and Will. Well, Titus, we’re going to test that ability right … now.”

It turned out those moving lights outside belonged to a drone. It whizzed past the windows and then there was a crash and a noise like a robot getting his hand caught in his food processor. The drone had destroyed one of the engines. A moment later, an identical sound from the other side, a second drone hitting its mark.

The blimp stopped struggling against the cable. They were listing again; some silverware slid off the table and clinked onto the floor.

“They’ll swing that paw back up,” said Chobb, “with the cable attached. It will draw the passenger hold even with the top of the cat’s head up there. At which point we will be boarded, presumably.”

Zoey raised her voice to the nine guards, plus any others who may have remained hidden.

“Everyone stay calm! Will’s plan is not to simply kill all of us, as far as I know.”

Titus said, “Yes, stand down unless I give the order. Everyone got me? If I become incapacitated, well, you know what to do.”

Soon, another cable was fired from the rooftop, from a flat spot in between the cat’s enormous ears. It impacted the paw and a moment later, the cable was being pulled tight by some kind of apparatus up there, drawing the paw up vertically and dragging the blimp along with it, just as Chobb had said. As they drew even with the rooftop, there were the Suits, Zoey’s people looking like fleas as they scurried around the Lucky Cat’s rooftop cafe, frantically messing with their blimp-boarding equipment.

Wu was there with his rifle and he fired another cable. The hook on this one smashed through the side window and everyone jumped. The cable was then pulled tight and the hook grabbed the window frame, pulling them toward the rooftop, yanking them free of the paw, metal squealing and complaining every step of the way. They inched their way over, drawing close enough that Zoey could see everyone’s nervous faces out there, her people jacked up on adrenaline and ready for action.

Zoey said, “If you don’t want them to destroy your door, maybe go over there and open it?”

“I would not do that to a man,” Chobb said. “To get all pumped up to breach a door, only to have someone just pull it open instead? I am not capable of such cruelty.”

The blimp jolted as it forcefully contacted the rooftop. There was shouting from outside, commands for everyone to clear the door.

Chobb said, “Cover your ears.”

An explosion blew the lock and the door was ripped open. A figure clad in sparkly red dove into the room and rolled.

It was Echo. She tossed a weapon to Zoey, who wasn’t ready. It bounced off her right boob.

Zoey yelled, “Wait! I’m okay! I’m okay!”

Wu charged into the room next. He tossed a black sphere toward Zoey, like he was aiming for her face but missed high. When it reached her, it burst into a wadded-up cloth, which then spread and lowered over her, like an invisible hunter had thrown a sack over Zoey with the intention of hauling her away. It was actually a bulletproof fabric, intended to shield her from crossfire. She’d been briefed on it at some point.

Zoey frantically clawed the sack off of her, only to find that in the two seconds it’d taken her to do that, Wu was now behind Chobb, using him as a human shield, a katana at his neck. Chobb, Zoey thought, was doing an admirable job of staying calm. His guards were pointing their weapons, yelling commands. Wu was yelling back.

Zoey ran—well, limped quickly—around to get between the guards and Wu/Chobb.

“Stop! It’s okay! Everybody!”

Andre entered immediately after, wearing a flashy red tuxedo, brandishing a gun with a barrel big enough that Zoey could have put her fist in it. He fired a projectile that bounced off the opposite wall and rolled onto the floor.

Zoey yelled “No!” just as the canister sparked and began spraying white smoke into the room. “Stop! Here…”

Zoey ran over to the smoking canister and kind of nudged it out the door with her shoe. She put her shirt over her mouth and nose, but the smoke just seemed to be for concealment, it wasn’t tear gas or anything.

Through her shirt she said, “I’m fine! I’m fine! Everybody stop the rescue! Somebody kick that gas thing away from the door, some if it’s still blowing in.”

Everyone stopped yelling, at least for the moment.

Will was outside the door, it turned out, and he calmly kicked the gas grenade aside on his way in. He’d somehow had time to change suits and the bastard had a drink in his hand.

To Echo, he said, “I told you she was fine.”

Wu slowly removed his blade from Chobb’s throat and sheathed it.

Echo came over to Zoey. For the first time, it registered with Zoey that Echo was dressed as a magician’s assistant, in tights and red sequins, apparently to coordinate with Andre as the magician. Unless this was some kind of progressive act where the roles were reversed.

Echo got a view of the blood on the back of Zoey’s shirt. “Are you okay?”

“How do I look?”

“Like you died and were resurrected by someone who got distracted halfway through.”

Zoey said, “Hey, when did you guys replace Echo with this talking trash bag full of fish heads?”

They were interrupted by a noisy wind outside. A helicopter was approaching. It didn’t sound like Zoey’s rental.

“Whose helicopter is that? Are a dozen more VOP dudes going to zipline down?”

“We reached out to Megaboss Alonzo for help,” said Will, “but he flatly refused. We then sent Budd after him to try to change his mind, about thirty minutes ago. So without turning my head to look, I’m very confident in saying that is Alonzo’s helicopter and that Alonzo did not send his men, but in fact came himself.”

Will sipped his drink and the helicopter descended behind him. Its programmable skin was made to look like the scales on a snake and across the length of its undulating body were the words MEGA and BOSS alternately flashing in red.

Zoey, having to shout over the sound of the helicopter now, said, “So you launched this venture with no actual ability to get me off this rooftop? Just hoping that Budd and Alonzo would come through at this exact moment?”

“You hire the right people and trust them to get it done.”

Andre ran out of the room and waved his arms at the helicopter. A moment later, the engine went silent, the helicopter having landed atop several pieces of cafe furniture in between the cat’s giant ears. Out from the aircraft came Budd, Alonzo, and Alonzo’s bodyguard, Deedee. Soon everyone was crowded inside the beached blimp.

“All right, everybody,” began Zoey, “I’m not saying this under duress. We’ve come to a resolution. It will take a long time to explain and there are thousands of lawyer hours remaining to work out the details but…” She paused to take in and let out an exhausted breath. “I think we have it worked out.”

Zoey’s mother stood and said, “Everybody sit down! There are plenty of chairs. Titus’s chef has enough back there for all of you.”

Nobody sat. The blimp was tethered to an enormous cat’s head with two destroyed engines and its door had been blown aside. The passenger hold now contained at least twenty people carrying a total of probably fifty weapons.

Zoey’s mother said, “SIT!”

People started finding chairs. Andre propped the door closed as best he could to keep the cold out. Echo came and sat next to Zoey, across from Titus and Zoey’s mother. Echo looked at them, then shot a curious glance at Zoey who waved her off with an “I’ll explain later” gesture.

Zoey said, “Titus’s chef has made a really good dish here, it’s some kind of pork I think. And the side is…”

Chobb said, “Those are honey-roasted Sekai Ichi apples. As for the meat, as I said, I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. Based on what I’ve heard, secondhand.”

Zoey took a bite. “What is it?”

“It’s wild game I caught myself. In fact, some would call it … the most dangerous game.”

“Dude, just tell me what it is.”

“Wild boar.”

Zoey was too tired to get whatever reference was being made there.

“Yeah, it’s good.”