By the time I got to the conservatory, I had missed rehearsals completely. The rest of the dancers had already left the studio, and I dropped my eyes as I walked into Athan’s office. I was expecting more than just a sarcastic scolding this time. I was so close to graduation, and now was definitely not the time to start slipping up.
Athan had warned me when he first lifted me from the city streets and brought me into the school, that if I ever failed at keeping up, he would throw me right back out on my ass. As much as he had grown fond of me over the years, I didn’t doubt that he would fulfill that promise. He didn’t even turn around to look at me when I walked in, but he definitely knew I was there.
“Mara,” he said as if he were inviting me to take a seat without being bothered to acknowledge me.
I got ready to launch into an elaborate excuse, but then realized I owed Athan better than to lie to him. “I’m really sorry, Athan,” I said, and I meant it. “I was at Inside Out last night, and I got really into this new game, and,” I paused, realizing that my next words would make me sound insane. “And I lost track of time.”
“You lost track of nearly an entire day inside a virtual reality game?” He turned around slowly and stared at me, intently.
All I could do was nod.
“Well,” he said in a tone that was less than angry. “It must’ve been a damn good game.”
I looked up at him in shock. Where were the shouting and the threat that I had used up all of my chances and was going to be expelled from the dance school? Why did he look more amused than furious? Part of me felt a bit sickly that perhaps David was right; maybe Athan had more of an obsession with me than just being his prodigy. I shook that thought from my head immediately.
Athan had never tried anything with me. He’d never made a pass at me or laid a hand on me. In the slightly more than three years that I had known him, all he had ever done was help me to become a real dancer and carve out a future for myself. I had no reason to question that his motives were anything other than pure. I did have to admit, though, that it was strange how he didn’t get mad this time. I mean, I didn’t just show up late to a single class; I had missed an entire day of rehearsals. Anyone else would have felt his wrath full-force by now.
“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I wasn’t trying to push my luck, but I felt like I needed to know why he was always making exceptions for me, especially this time.
“We all need to escape our world sometimes,” he said with a look that seemed wiser than his years should allow him to be.
“Wow, thanks,” I said in a relative shock.
Athan smiled, and then I found myself being excused from his office without even having to stay and work off penance for missing rehearsals. He shouldn’t have been so easy on me, because instead of feeling bad enough not to do it again, I headed straight back to the gaming den.
I felt shady sneaking back into Inside Out as if I were an addict sneaking into a crack house. And strangely, I thought I saw Athan around the corner as I took one last look at the street before going inside. It was a bustling city, though, so even if it were him, it wouldn’t be unusual to cross paths with the guy on his way out for an evening cocktail at one of the local bars. Still, I had a general feeling of unease and paranoia, likely due to my recent lack of sleep.
After this session, I’ll get back on schedule with things. I just need to go in one more time to see.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” Greg asked with a stupid smile on his face.
“You know I come here all the time,” I answered bluntly.
“Yeah, but I’ve never known you to spend the equivalent of a day locked up in one of the game rooms.”
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
He wasn’t even here when I had come out and looked for him. I ended up having to leave the key and headset sitting behind the counter.
Greg pointed up to one of the cameras in the corner of the ceiling. “Watched you leave on the security feed,” he said.
“So you just closed up the shop and left me in there? Knowing I was still playing? What kind of business owner does that?”
“The kind who respects the sanctity of the gaming world and trusts most of his customers not to rip him off. Besides, I know you dance at that fancy school, so I would have come and tracked you down if you had stolen any of my tech.”
“How do you know I go to Boston Conservatory?” I asked. My paranoia meter rose even higher.
“Your teacher comes in here sometimes, too; I think he’s secretly a gamer at heart,” Greg said.
“Athan comes here to game?” I had trouble hiding my shock.
“Yeah, at least a few times a month. I think he even tried out Mystreuce on the night I launched it.” Greg handed me a game room key and a headset. “Surprised he didn’t tell you that he liked the VR world, too, maybe he doesn’t want his students playing with him.”
I swiped the key and headset from the counter and walked away without responding to his last comment. I couldn’t see Athan as a gamer, but then again, there were a lot of things I couldn’t see about Athan. I planned to mention Inside Out to him at rehearsal the next day. Maybe he knew more about all the weird glitches in Mystreuce than David and Gillian did.
I double-checked my timer to make sure there were no more mistakes. I absolutely couldn’t afford to be late to rehearsal again. When I put on the headset and the world of Mystreuce enveloped around me again, I found myself in the same spot that I remembered leaving. Good, at least there’s no glitch with that again. I had been just about to leave the castle at the end of my last session and was anxious to go out to explore the nooks and crannies of the terrain. Usually, in fantasy games like this, there were secrets and surprises to be found. I reached for the door and pulled it open, and what my eyes met with was not at all what I had expected.
Instead of the lush landscape I had seen before, there was a harshly contrasting dark and cavernous tunnel. I stepped behind me to go back inside the castle and try a different exit, but when I turned around, the entire castle was gone. The only thing that stretched around me on all sides was a dark and tangled web of dreary tunnels. I could always just leave the game, but I still had almost four hours left on my timer, and I wanted to explore some more. So I chose a tunnel and started to move.
The farther I walked, the closer I seemed to get toward the voice that I’d heard. At first, the voice sounded familiar but unrecognizable. But once I had made it a good way into the tunnel, the owner of the voice became clear—Athan . The tunnels seemed to go on forever, but as I reached the sound of Athan’s voice, the dark caverns seemed to converge in upon themselves. And in the center—upon a large rock as if it were a throne—was Athan.
“Hey,” I said as I ran toward him. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my game room? Not that I’m not happy you’re here, I just wish you would have told me that you like gaming, too.” I tended to ramble when I was nervous.
“Rehearsals have already started,” Athan said.
That was impossible. I looked at the time and expected at most an hour to have passed. But he was right; I had been inside this game for enough hours to encroach upon the next day again. I didn’t know how or why it had happened again, but he was right, and I had to get out and get to rehearsals.
“I’m exiting right now,” I said frantically. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Why would you leave here?” Athan asked.
I was completely perplexed by why he would ask me that. “To make it to rehearsal before I’ve missed everything again.”
“You’re not missing anything. Besides, I’m in here with you.” That same chill crawled up my spine again. “Well, David and Gillian won’t let me live it down if I miss another class. I have to go.”
“They won’t miss you; I promise.” Athan’s voice sounded cold and calculated.
“What do you mean?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s okay, Mara. I’ve covered for you. No one even knows you’re missing.”
That couldn’t have been true. Of course, David and Gillian would know if I had missed rehearsals two days in a row. And why would Athan want to cover for me anyway? He was the instructor; he, out of all of them, should be the one most upset if I wasn’t in class. Suddenly, I was uncomfortable with the feeling I had gotten of his keeping such a close eye on me and shrugging off my transgressions. I ignored Athan, something that I wouldn’t normally do, and instead, reached for my headset to log out of the game. But when I pulled the exit lever, only Athan disappeared, not the game. I looked around, and I was still inside the caverns—stuck.
“Oh my God, this stupid game!” I shouted aloud.
That was it; I was never going to play this game again after I got out of here. It was a bad time to be stuck in a glitch. I wondered how Athan had managed to leave the game, yet I was still trapped inside. I needed to talk to Greg about investing in headsets that weren’t faulty. Speaking of Greg…he walked up toward me through one of the tunnels just as I was thinking about giving him a solid verbal lashing. But when he walked toward me, I realized it wasn’t him. Well, not exactly him anyway.
“Greg?” I whispered as I looked at the man coming closer to me.
The man had Greg’s eyes, that was for sure. But that was about the only resemblance. This man was muscular, with dark-brown hair and dark eyes. He wasn’t wearing the usual vintage T-shirt Greg always wore; instead, he had on some sort of leather vest. And there was a scar that started at his chin and ran down the entire length of his left side all the way to his waist. But the eyes that stared back at me in the dim light were definitely Greg’s. He looked at me and grinned, which made me immediately uneasy.
“Is there something wrong with the game again? Did you come to get me out?” I looked at him, saying nothing as he stood there. “Why do you look so different in here? Athan didn’t look any different.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the game,” he said. “And my name is Dregon. It’s not Greg anymore.”
Geesh, he was the real hard-core gamer. “Okay, sure, whatever you want to be called in here is fine. But I’m late for rehearsal again. Can you please fix the game so I can log out?”
“You are out.”
I was starting to get mad. “Look, Greg, or Dregon, or whoever you want to be today. I need to get out of the game and get to the conservatory, or I’m going to get expelled right before graduation. And if you don’t fix this crappy game and get me out of here, I’m going to tell everyone what a lunatic you are and how your shitty tech keeps glitching.”
I didn’t even care anymore if I screwed up my game; I pulled off my headset and threw it onto the floor, which normally would have resulted in a blurred and watery vision of the game but instead changed nothing.
“Welcome to your new world,” he said before walking back down the tunnel he had come out of.
I stood there for a minute in shock. Without the headset on, I shouldn’t be seeing this anymore, at least not as clearly. I should only be seeing the exterior graphics in the room, and I should be able to see the door to the game room. But instead, it looked like I was still wholly in-game.
I reached down to pick the headset back up and try to exit the game again, but my headset was gone. There was just me and the now-empty cavern. I didn’t know what else to do besides follow Greg, or whatever his actual name was, through the tunnel in front of me. David and Gillian were going to be absolutely furious with me when I got out of here. They would probably also be worried sick. Being late to dance classes wasn’t a new thing for me, but completely missing days of classes was. And what did Athan mean that they wouldn’t miss me ? That sounded exactly like something a serial killer would say. Before I was able to let my mind travel too far down the dark rabbit hole, I reached the end of the tunnel.
The rolling, green hills had been breathtaking, the castle had been mysterious, and the tunnels had been downright creepy, but this …this was the most seductively intimidating scene of all. The opening of the tunnel spilled out into a dark, expansive chamber that was easily the size of several of the conservatory’s dance studios put together. Inside were several groups of people sitting and standing together on the stone floor, some of which I thought I recognized, and most of which looked significantly terrified beneath the flickering glow of candles. Sitting on either side of the large, open room was two devastatingly handsome men.
The man farthest from where I stood was Athan, looking far more powerful and striking than I had ever seen him before. The other man, who was standing the closest to me, was potently captivating, and I found myself unable to take my eyes off him. The two men looked as though they were overseeing the masses of trembling people in the center of the room, and the man closest to me seemed to be highly unmotivated for any of it to capture his attention. When I recognized one of the girls sitting on the floor as a girl who went missing from the dance studio several weeks ago, I let out a small gasp. The man looked over at me, and for a moment, it seemed there was something that attracted his attention. But Athan quickly interrupted the man’s interest and called to me from across the room.
“Hello, Mara,” Athan’s voice echoed above the sea of people like a breaking wave. “Welcome to Mystreuce.”