The first time you enter the High Integrity Virtual Environment is dazzling. That buzzing in the back of your head gets louder and louder until suddenly it spills and flows down your whole body, a sound you can feel all over, like your entire body has fallen asleep but you’re still awake and vibrating on some impossible frequency. Then all of a sudden you are—that is to say, you exist—somewhere other than where you existed before. You stand on a horizontal hexagon in a vast chamber full of vertical hexagons. In fact, you realize, it’s made of them, a swelling and bulbous structure as large as a moon that you are somehow flying inside of, all wallpapered with glowing and colorful six-sided doors connected to one another by catwalks and stairways, launchpads, and landing ports, one of which you’re headed to now, on your floating self-propelled hexagonal loading-level platform. If you know where you want to go and speak it aloud, the hexagon will smoothly change direction and take you there. If you want to take the long way around and see the sights, you can just step off onto the nearest landing pad and start walking your way there, passing other players and Sidekicks and floating gray Drones, carrying messages and bits of code and who knows what else, hurrying from game to game, or game to business, or business to place of worship (congregations that were no longer able to afford real-life real estate had taken happily to the opportunities of not-real estate). Below you, the doors and ports and pads drop to a bottom so far down you can’t even see it’s there; above you, the same soars up in reverse. It’s the Grand Central Station of video games, and it’s all up to you and your stash of points, or just your checking account, to decide where to go next.

The first time you enter HIVE, you are born anew.

The four thousand and eighth time you enter HIVE, you’re totally over it, and you just want to know where the heck your boyfriend has gotten off to now.

I was pretty sure I had a good idea where the heck my boyfriend had gotten off to now.

“Family Feudalism, please,” I said, and my loading platform obeyed, floating me through the void until we reached a yellow hexagon emblazoned with a medieval font, decorated around the edges with ravens and pitchforks. It was, at least, a free game, so all I had to do was take a step forward and the game opened up right away, the hexagon splitting apart into two halves that slid to each side like automatic doors. Behind them was an eternal yellow glow.

I entered the game.

I was bathed in light.

I was standing in mud.

Correction: I was sinking in mud. I’d been dropped into the middle of a sprawling expanse of heavily trampled farmland, the kind of scene you always saw in paintings of peasants in fields, except normally the peasants weren’t disappearing ever more swiftly into a patch of muck that was up to their shins and climbing. It was like quicksand—very squelchy quicksand—and if I didn’t move fast, I would be stuck there, or worse.

It wasn’t painful to die in HIVE. You could be drowned in mud, pushed off a cliff, squished by a dinosaur, zapped by a laser, or, in the case of one aggressively realistic dating simulator I’d played, contract mad cow disease from a haphazardly run steak house. All this and more could happen to you, and the result would always be the same. First, you’d feel a warm and comforting sensation, like being zipped all the way into a sleeping bag stuffed with goose down and anesthetic. Then, much less comfortingly, you’d find yourself dumped back out into the world between games, sprawled across your loading platform like you’d been pushed down by some faceless bully. It was all in good fun, and you were allowed to reenter whichever game you’d been in pretty much immediately, but it was undeniably frustrating. More to the point, I did not intend to exit this game fifteen seconds after I’d first entered it, especially since I was a player with a mission.

“Hello?” I called out. “Can anyone help me?”

“Mayhap anyone can,” said a voice. “Or mayhap just me.”

Oh, great. In a fantasy game, hearing a cryptic reply from a mischievous voice just outside your field of vision could only mean one thing: elves. Or gnomes. Or whatever pointy-eared breed of NPC populated this world. If you asked me, they were all insufferable, they were all untrustworthy—and they were all I had to count on right now.

“Okay, let’s cut to the chase,” I said as the mud swallowed my knees. “What do you want in exchange for helping me?”

“Oh, I could never put a price on a fair maiden’s life,” said the elf/gnome/whatever. “But I do know one thing about Hungry Mud …”

Ugh, you could just hear the capital letters.

“The first step to escaping it is removing any heavy, extraneous, or expensive items from your person,” finished the NPC.

“Okay, first off, not a fair maiden,” I said, pointing at my braid. “ ‘Fair’ means blonde. This is ‘Dark Umber.’ I know because they make you choose off a customizable menu. Second: I don’t have any equipment on me, so don’t think you’re making off with anything valuable.”

All this was correct. It was a fair gambit on the NPC’s part; for other players, loading up on weapons and equipment was a way to show how many points they’d earned and spent in HIVE, or just how much dough they had to blow in the real world. I’d stacked up my fair share of points over the years—it was almost impossible to spend time in HIVE and not do so—but I’d never felt much of an urge to splurge on anything. The most expensive purchase I’d ever made was the boots I was wearing now, purchased because they’d looked pretty much exactly like my actual boots. And if I’m being honest, because I’d just met this cute junior named Gus Iwatani at the time, and I’d had a sneaking suspicion I was about to be playing a different type of game than I was used to—one that called for more durable equipment than the default athletic shoes every HIVE avatar was given.

I’d clocked some good hours with Gus in these boots. I was glad they were hidden in the mud right now, or I might have been asked to give—

“Mayhap you could give me your boots,” said the NPC.

Frick. That was the problem with artificially intelligent opponents. You could never tell how intelligent they were going to artificially be. Especially the magic ones.

The mud was up to my hips now, but with some effort, I was able to turn the top half of my body to face my harasser head-on. He was grinning like the cat who ate the canary, if said cat had lots of tiny, terrible, tapered teeth, a sickly greenish hue, and giant pointy ears the size of palm fronds. In short, he was a textbook gremlin, down to his being four feet tall, tops. And yet, perched comfortably as he was on a berth of mud that had been baked into a solid crust, and sinking as I was into an inescapable pit, he was still taller than me.

“Heavy shoes cause extra suction in the Hungry Mud,” the gremlin continued, looking down at me. “You’d be helping yourself as much as me. Lose the boots.”

“Nope,” I said, even as the mud bubbled up to my shirt. “Try something else.”

“What else is there to try?” the gremlin asked, his tone quickly becoming much more exasperated and much less medieval. “How else do you intend to get out of there?”

I didn’t have an answer. Yet. But I believed I could figure this out. Being smart was just a matter of noticing things, and noticing things was just absorbing information, and if I was good at nothing else, I was good at that.

But currently, there wasn’t very much for me to absorb. Just the gross brown farmland. And the gross squelchy mud. And the gross little gremlin. And the gross, slightly less squelchy mud that the gremlin stood on.

Wait.

“How’d you get up on that mud?” I asked. “Can I get up there, too?”

But even as the gremlin opened his mouth to answer, I raised a hand to shut him up. It was the wrong question. I could feel it. The gremlin was magic, so for all I knew, he’d teleported there, and anyway, anything he said was bound to be annoying. So, different question. But as the mud rose and a light rain started to fall, it was getting harder to concentrate on what the right question could—

Oh.

“It’s raining right now,” I said, looking at the baked earth where the gremlin stood, where drops were starting to spatter. “And it looks like it’s been cloudy all day—no sun. So … how did that mud get like that?”

The gremlin looked down at the ground.

He looked up at me again.

“You know,” he said, “I’m actually not sure.”

And then a massive, moving column of flame ripped across the plain, missing me by just a few yards and missing the gremlin by no yards at all. The fire was followed swiftly by an enormous shadow that passed over the earth, and when it was gone, there was no gremlin—just a pile of ash, a dry heat in the air, and a lot more baked mud.

And in the sky, a huge ruby-red dragon was reaching the end of a terrible, lazy loop, and beginning to make its return.

“Oh,” I said weakly, watching as smoke rolled out of the dragon’s nostrils. “That’s how the mud got like that.”

Luckily—by a significant stretch of the meaning of luckily—the new swath of baked mud came right up to where I could just reach it. Now torso deep, I thrust my arms out as far as I could, preparing to push myself up and out. I hesitated for just a second when I saw that each raindrop hitting the freshly scorched earth instantly evaporated with a menacing hiss. For all intents and purposes, I was about to slam my hands down on a sizzling-hot fajita plate.

Then the flap of leathery wings beat at the air above me, and I decided very quickly that I’d rather be sizzling than burned to a crisp.

“Nggh—ahh!”

My palms seared and steam rose in billows between my fingers, but I pushed through the pain and slowly began to rise out of the mud.

Too slowly. The wings were getting louder by the second, approaching from the south, or whatever counted as south inside HIVE. I focused on pushing, refusing to look up and see how close the dragon was getting. But I didn’t really have to look; it became all too clear as a shadow fell over me, sliding up from …

The north?

“Kara! Take my hand! Also, hi!”

A metal-gloved hand thrust itself in front of my face. Too relieved to question it, I grabbed the glove, which instantly set about helping me by trying to yank my elbow out of my socket.

“Aargh!” I yelled, which I think was fair.

“Keep pushing!” my new friend encouraged me while enthusiastically trying to rip me in half. Was I imagining it, or was the air getting warmer? The dragon must have been right on top of us. Despite the burning in one hand and the wrenching pain in the other, I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and pushed.

Squeeeelch!

The mud let me go.

“Whoa!” I toppled forward onto solid ground, taking my helper down with me.

Whoomph! Another blast of fire tore past us, missing the bottoms of my mud-covered boots by mere inches, as well as the metal boots of—

“Sammi?!” Now that we were at eye level, I could see that my new friend wasn’t so new after all. It was the same face I saw every day at the fifth-period lunch table, albeit with a few Modifiers: bright violet eyes, a suit of lightweight armor that managed to beautifully complement Sammi’s turban, and a nose piercing that I knew for a fact Sammi’s mother would never let her get in real life.

“Thanks for the help,” I said, pushing myself up to my knees. “Hey, do you—”

“Laddu!”

Ah, of course. There was Laddu, Sammi’s virtual Sidekick, tumbling adorably over Sammi’s shoulder. Laddu looked more or less like a smallish peregrine falcon, if they were a lot fluffier, a lot more orange, and a lot more willing to be petted gently on the head without tearing your throat out.

“Hey, Laddu,” I said, providing the obligatory head pat. “Listen, would you guys—”

“Laddu!”

“Happen to know where I could find—”

“Gus!” Sammi’s violet eyes went wide as they beheld something shocking over my shoulder. I whipped around and, sure enough, there was Gus, dashing madly over the mud. In fact, he was racing directly toward the dragon in a move that contradicted pretty much all my assumptions regarding the right direction to run around dragons (i.e., away).

“Don’t worry, Sammi!” Gus yelled. “I got this!” As he ran, he kept his eyes focused on the dragon, even as his hands moved down to his belt and detached a large and spiky object—a grappling hook, I realized with a flip of my stomach.

The dragon, frustrated by its two failed attempts to secure some oven-baked human, was bearing back down on us now with smoke in its nostrils and a look in its eyes that said Third time’s the char.

“Just watch this,” Gus said, swinging the grappling hook in rapid circles and turning back to flash a cheeky grin. “Flamebreath’s not gonna know what hit— Kara?”

The cheeky grin became a stunned stare. The grappling hook slipped from suddenly slack fingers. The dragon pounced, and hook met scale, but not around the neck, as Gus had presumably intended. Instead, the poorly thrown grappling hook sank deep into the corner of the dragon’s wing, and with a bellow of pain, the dragon hurled itself back into the air.

Taking Gus along with it.