NAT TRIES to talk to him in the parking lot after school—he sees her running for him, waving, but he gets on the bus quickly and ignores her. She starts calling him almost immediately, but he doesn’t pick up, and then the text messages start:

I’m sorry

Please call me I just want to apologize

I know what ur going thru

I believe you

This one comes as he’s getting off the bus, and Nick stares at it like Severkin would stare at a puzzle-lock on the door to a vault. Is it a lie told out of guilt? Truth? What does she believe, exactly?

He goes inside, but the house is empty, Dad still at work. He goes up to his room and turns on the game, then stares at his phone again. He doesn’t know if she really believes him. Maybe he didn’t explain it well enough. Maybe he should have told her about the things his mom used to do in the game. There was one quest he especially remembers, which started with a slip of paper on his pillow reading, “The Queen in Bluegarden who doesn’t sit on a throne.” Bluegarden was a huge city, overseen by Queen Delilah, but she was always on her throne. Severkin spent an hour exploring the city before he realized that one of the citizens’ pet cats was named Queenie. He’d pickpocketed the cat—something Nick didn’t even know was possible, but apparently his mom had figured it out—and found a note.

He recognized the note from another quest. It was a note between lovers, just a scrap of paper, but Nick saw it in a different context now. It said “We’ll meet where there is a tree that was once a woman.” In the original quest, they were talking about an overgrown statue in an abandoned city. But this wasn’t that quest. This was something Mom gave to him. He’d gone online, remembering Mom saying it was based on Greek mythology, and looked into Greek myths where women had been turned into trees. The big one was when the nymph Daphne was turned into a laurel tree. Nick had known what to do then. There was a gardener who ran the royal greenhouses in the city of Serelle, and her name was Laurel. Severkin searched every tree in Laurel’s greenhouse until he found an enchanted dagger.

In the game, when a player enchants an object, the player can rename the item. The dagger was called the Golden Apple. This one took more puzzling out. He knew the myth of the golden apple, how it caused the Trojan War, but there was no golden apple in the game, no Trojan War. The war in the game was based on World War I. He turned the idea over and over in his head and examined the enchantments on the dagger—improved accuracy. And then he realized that a golden apple was the starting point of the Trojan War, so he should go to the starting point of the war in the game—a pastry shop in the city of Jevo where the assassin had been having coffee, not knowing his conspirators had failed to kill the prince. Like in World War I, a wrong turn had put the prince in the assassin’s sight. The assassin shot the prince, and war began. In the game, the pastry shop was still doing business, so Severkin snuck in one night after it had closed, and in the basement, amid the bags of flour and sugar, he’d found an amulet called Severkin’s Sight, which not only improved his accuracy but let him see people through walls. It had been an awesome quest.

He thinks maybe if Nat knew about that—and about the other quests like it—maybe she wouldn’t have been so skeptical. He looks down at the text messages again.

I believe you

He calls Nat’s number, and she picks up before the first ring is over.

“Thank you,” she says quickly. Her voice sounds sticky.

“What do you believe?” Nick asks. He keeps his voice cool.

“What?”

“You said you believe me. What do you believe?”

“That maybe your mom was misdiagnosed.”

Nick takes a deep breath, and it feels like the first breath he’s taken in a while. “Thank you,” he says. In the background, he can hear murmuring, people talking. “Where are you?”

“My mom’s restaurant,” she says. “Late lunch crowd. I’m in a corner booth. I’m supposed to be working on my homework.”

“Me too,” Nick says.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t believe you. It’s just…I thought Reunne was an NPC, so when you got to that part…” She trails off.

“You don’t believe it’s my mom, do you?” Nick doesn’t mind this as much. He knows it sounds crazy, and he has no proof. But that’s okay. It’s a new theory. He’ll get some proof. And now Nat can help him.

“It just sounds kind of crazy,” Nat says. There’s a beat where Nick stares at his feet and notices one of his shoelaces is untied. He kicks both his shoes off. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said crazy.”

“I know,” Nick says, and stares at his feet. “It does sound weird.”

“Why wouldn’t she tell you?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I feel like there’s the real her but that she only comes out sometimes. The rest of the time, it’s like she’s lost in this fog. I think it could be the drugs they’re giving her at the home.”

“It’s like a conspiracy,” Nat says. “That’s why it sounds so weird.”

“I know that,” Nick says. “But I’m going to prove it’s her. Then they’ll have to let her come home.” Nat is silent, but Nick can hear people talking in the background and a sudden sound like water being poured on a fire, all sizzle and smoke. “Will you help me?” he asks.

“How?” Nat says. “We can’t break character on the server. You can’t just call her ‘Mom’ and see what happens.”

“I know,” Nick says, staring at the menu screen on the game. It shows the mountain of Wellhall, the clouds swirling around it while the eerie sound of violin strings and vocals, more like weeping than singing, play in the background. While he watches, the screen darkens as the clouds around Wellhall swell out like waves, and then the screen shows the Tower, white and gleaming as snow falls gently around it. “Just…If I can prove it to you, will you back me up?”

“Okay,” Nat says. “But if you can’t…”

“Then maybe it’s not her,” Nick concedes. “Maybe I’m just going crazy like my mom.”

“It’s not crazy to want your mom to get better,” Nat says. “I know that.”

“Thanks,” Nick says. The game has started up, but he turns it off now. He wants to play when Nat’s on. “I’m going to do some homework now. But you’ll be on the game tonight? You’ll help me prove it’s my mom?”

“I’ll help you investigate,” Nat says. Which is close enough, Nick thinks. “See you then,” he says.