Anvi-as-Leela sprints past Linda—Linda spent all her coin on a tiny, acid-spitting dragon that flies around her head, dissolving enemy projectiles; Anvi spent hers on boots with a 3X speed modifier. Reaching their wagon, Anvi hops inside.
Linda approaches the ash pile and collects the few coins spread around it. It’s been months since Anvi and Linda witnessed real death. Linda still has nightmares about it, and she knows from their conversations that Anvi sometimes does too.
“Do you have time to collect the bounty, or do you need to go?” asks Anvi. Her character is a tiny dark elf with a purple ponytail; she’s hunched over her storage chest, immobile to Linda’s eyes as she manages her inventory.
Linda taps her fingers to check the time—11:13 a.m. “I should go,” she says. She enters the wagon, triggering an autosave. In the corner, Pickles rises from the floor, fully grown, and wags his tail.
“Good luck,” says Anvi. “Let me know how it goes?”
“Thanks, I will.”
Linda calls up the main menu and quits, then peels off her headset. A view of the woods immediately greets her: lush greenery swaying in the breeze beyond the bay window. The mix of cedar boughs and maple leaves is accented by a single blooming lilac bush. Arthur looked at her askance when she said she wanted to set up her VR system here, but she loves emerging to the trees: a reminder that reality can be beautiful. The window seat is lined with pillows; sitting there with the window open is even better than sitting in a tree. Softer, and scented with lilac. And mosquitoes can’t breach the screens.
She turns away from the windows and docks her headset.
It’s a small house, smaller than Arthur wanted to get her. Downstairs is just this main room, the kitchen, a bathroom, and a mudroom. Upstairs is two bedrooms and a larger bath. Linda still sleeps in her nest chair, which she’s placed by the window in the smaller room—it has a better view. Anvi’s slept in the larger bedroom a few times, when she came for weekend visits, and Linda secretly thinks of it as her friend’s room. She’s thinking of hanging a poster from Anvi’s favorite show on the wall.
She’s been in this house almost two months. It’s starting to feel like home—more like home than her old apartment ever did. Her gut still pulls toward the Cedar Lake property at the word home, but the pull is getting weaker, and she’s leaning toward selling the property. Or maybe she’ll donate it to a nature-conservation organization. She’s pretty sure she never wants to go back. She’s pretty sure she’d be okay with the house being razed to the ground. It’s been weeks since she visited the version she built in-game, but she’ll always have that.
“I’m so sorry,” Anvi said to her in the hospital. Over and over she said it, apologizing for contacting Percy, offering condolences over Lorelei and what Linda had been through. She let Linda read the emails she exchanged with Percy. They were innocuous, Anvi scratching some curious itch Linda doesn’t entirely understand but which she’s accepted as part of Anvi’s engineering self.
“I forgive you,” Linda told her. She’d never said those words before.
The car is supposed to arrive at eleven-thirty. Linda slips on her sandals, wincing against the lingering pain in her shoulder. She declined surgery for the separation. Her hospital stay had been awful enough; she couldn’t imagine going back, staying longer. Letting them knock her unconscious with drugs and dig into her body. But her shoulder should feel better by now. Soon she’ll have to decide if she’d rather live with the pain or undergo the surgery. She hasn’t told Arthur how much it still hurts. It’s been getting easier to talk to him since Cedar Lake, but she knows what he will advise and it’s still hard to tell him no. She wants to make this decision on her own.
Linda grabs the first-aid book she’s been reading from a table by the door and slips it into a bag with her water bottle. She doubts she’ll want to read, but just in case. She walks outside, tapping her Sheath to engage the security system—a concession to Arthur, though it makes her feel safer too.
He was with her every day at the hospital. He brought her flowers and told her stories—about Madeline and Lorelei, and about his childhood spent running through the woods. In some small ways, Arthur as a boy sounded not too different from Linda as a girl. Though he had a warm home to return to. Dinner on the table, a pair of parents who loved him.
Sometimes he held her hand as he talked. One day, he even showed up without a tie.
I forgive you, Linda thought.
A concussion. A sprained ankle and knee. A bruised rib. A broken pinky finger she never even felt. Countless contusions and lacerations, the worst on her feet. They’d kept her at the hospital for four days. Linda suspected it would have been less if she wasn’t who she was. If there hadn’t been such a media frenzy. She was lucky, really, that she wasn’t hurt worse. That she wasn’t shot in the stomach. Or the head.
She blinks against the thought and sees a flash of blood splatter. Lorelei collapsing. Anxiety thrums through her. She looks at the trees across the yard. Breathes in the heady lilac. She remembers leaving Percy’s house only in flashes. A brown-eyed paramedic leaning over her face, telling her she was there to help, asking Linda her name and if she knew where she was. A mesmerizingly calm presence, and Linda had a surprising thought: You—I want to be you.
The house has a small front porch. A bench that swings. She sits, rocking gently on her toes and watching a spiderweb that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s seventy degrees already; this spring wants to be summer.
Soon she won’t have to wait when she wants to go somewhere. She starts driving lessons next week. She’s terrified, but living out here—it’s only twenty miles from the city, but it feels much farther—she needs to be able to get around on her own. All she has to do is get her license, and then she can buy a self-driving car. A hoop she doesn’t understand but she’ll jump through.
Soon she hears tires crunching up the gravel driveway, and the car pulls around the bend. Linda recognizes Cora’s brown skin and white hair behind the wheel. Linda’s had her as a driver before: a quiet black woman who retired from Google last year. “I have bad knees and the grandbabies are yet to come, so this keeps me busy,” she explained when Linda gathered the courage to ask.
She’s been practicing being friendly, initiating conversations. It’s easier now that she’s alone for long-enough stretches to build up a natural curiosity about the next person she sees.
“Did you hear about those boys from Bellevue?” asks Cora as Linda settles into the back seat.
Graham Williamson and Sergei Burkov. They came forward while Linda was in the hospital and confessed to starting the fire at her house. Rather, Burkov confessed. Williamson went on the run and was arrested in Oregon a few days later. It still makes Linda’s head swim: Not only were they responsible for the fire, they were G.H.
Glitch Hunter: a VR game in which the world is a simulation and the player is an enforcer from the base reality, charged with eliminating “glitches.” Her home was a mission. They trespassed to map the house, then set it ablaze—accidentally, they claim. In the video Linda saw of Burkov, he looked like a hunted man: greasy-haired, with huge bags under his eyes. Guilt had clearly been eating at him. Williamson just looked angry.
“What did they do now?” asks Linda.
It still sends anger flaring through her: All that drama, all that worry, and the G.H. simulation-hypothesis posts were just a publicity stunt for a game. They had more posts planned, leading to some grand reveal. But their plans were thwarted by fire—and panic. Linda remembers wishing it were true, that nothing she knew was real—that she wasn’t real. The thought had even provided an odd sense of comfort. Now she just feels embarrassed.
Cora twists around to look at Linda. “They declared bankruptcy to get off the hook for the civil suit.”
“Huh.” Linda isn’t sure what to make of this news or how it affects the criminal case. She’s been letting Arthur deal with the lawyers. She doesn’t want anything to do with the two men. If the case ends up in court, she won’t go to the trial.
Somehow it makes everything worse that Glitch Hunter isn’t even a good game, not according to the handful of reviews Linda read in the hospital, flicking the tab closed on her Sheath whenever someone walked into the room. The game was available only briefly—Williamson released it against Burkov’s wishes the same day Burkov confessed to the fire—and the reception was primarily one of scorn.
“Don’t want to talk about it?” asks Cora.
“Not particularly.”
Cora gives her a little smile, then turns back to the wheel and puts the car in reverse. Soon they’re heading down the driveway to the main road.
There was an upside to Burkov and Williamson’s actions: People rallied behind Linda. The public seemed to have reached a consensus that the men stepped over the line in using her life in their game. Linda suspects the reaction would have been different if their choices didn’t also lead to her house being set ablaze. To Percy stumbling across Linda at her old home, to his following and ultimately abducting her. To Lorelei and Percy both dying.
During her recovery, she watched a live feed of a group of people outside the hospital. GET WELL, LINDA read one of their signs.
Not Clone Girl. Linda.
Something she hasn’t told even Anvi: She downloaded the game. She hasn’t played it. She doesn’t know if she ever will, but it’s on her system, waiting for her to make her choice.
She gazes out the window as the car winds down a long, wooded road to the highway. Turning right would take them toward the ever-expanding tech hub that rubs against Seattle’s eastern edge. Cora turns left.
After about ten minutes, they traverse the main street of a rundown town. The gun shop catches Linda’s eye, as it always does. She’s faced no penalty for ending Percy’s life. According to the law, it was self-defense and she did nothing wrong. She’s not sure she agrees. “He lunged toward me and it just…happened,” she remembers saying. But it wouldn’t have happened if her finger wasn’t already on the trigger.
They cross a river. Linda watches families splashing below the bridge, and there is a flotilla of yellow inner tubes. “Still a little cold for that, if you ask me,” says Cora, and Linda murmurs agreement, though she’s not sure she means it. They pass a fruit stall on the side of the road and snake their way up a heavily wooded hill. Next come the tourist stops: an overflowing parking lot for a waterfall overlook having to do with some old TV show; a small, cramped town with a train museum.
Soon they’re inching along with a stream of cars into a packed gravel parking area. The line stops while a car ahead tries to navigate a tight spot.
“Why don’t you get out here,” says Cora. “I’ll come back when you’re ready to go.”
A dart of fear runs through Linda; she’ll be stuck.
No—having to wait isn’t the same as being stuck. And she wanted to come here. She promised herself she would come here.
“How long do you think you’ll be?” asks Cora.
“I’m not sure.” For all Cora knows, Linda is just here to enjoy a day in the sun. “The latest I can stay is about three.” Three hours feels impossibly long, but it’s good to have an outer limit.
“Okay, great,” says Cora. “I’m going to head back to those outlets we passed. Text me if you want to go earlier; otherwise, I’ll meet you here at three.”
“Thank you, Cora.” As Linda opens the door, she synchronizes her breath with the breeze and imagines the air carrying her feet out to the gravel. Standing, she stares down for a moment. There’s a lighter patch of healed skin where she cut herself on the barbed wire. The cuts were among the least of her injuries, but they’ve been slow to fade.
Laughter ahead. Linda shuts the car door. There are vehicles everywhere. Pockets of people are gathered around the cars, collecting items or packing them away.
She didn’t intend to come on a crowded weekend afternoon—but she set a deadline and then procrastinated. In the end, her choice was to come today or break the promise she made to herself, and she fears if she breaks this promise she’ll break another. She fears she’ll skip tonight: the first session of an EMT training course she signed up for. It’s just a two-hour orientation, but a commitment nonetheless. And a declaration of intent: If I start this, I will finish it. Her hand slips to the book in her bag. It’s not the textbook for the class—she gets that tonight—but she’s been reading it every night, dreaming of a day when she might be in a position to alleviate pain.
Eleven weeks. Three days a week. It simultaneously sounds like forever and like no time at all.
She will finish this course.
Anvi’s the only person who knows about the class—she helped Linda navigate the sign-up requirements. How strange and right it felt to type her new name into the online form: Linda R. Niequist. All because Anvi took Arthur by the shoulders, pointed him toward Linda’s hospital bed, and said, “Talk.”
She sets herself a new deadline: three weeks. She’ll tell Arthur about the class by then. Once she finds her feet.
Cora’s sedan inches away, and a dark-haired family hustles past Linda. The father is carrying a cooler, the mother holds a young boy, and two girls balance an inflatable raft over their heads. Linda listens to their excited chatter without understanding a word—she’s pretty sure they’re speaking Spanish—then she follows them. Gravel crunches beneath her feet. The first sign she sees points toward a trail: RATTLESNAKE LEDGE.
She’s not looking for a ledge.
The inflatable raft bobs to the left, taking a different path. Linda follows. The raft is bobbing ahead faster now, and the glisten of water flares through the trees.
There’s not enough water to swim.
She still remembers it so clearly. The cracked drying mud. The tree stumps. Lorelei’s hand on her back.
But this is the first time she’s been here.
She remembers, Lorelei wrote in an unsent email she’d saved for years on a USB drive shaped like a watermelon slice. Anvi recognized the device and helped Linda access the messages. The emails are like diary entries: Lorelei explaining herself to Arthur, Lorelei railing against Arthur for being absent, Lorelei bouncing between joy and despair. Linda has most of the messages memorized, and sometimes she lies awake at night, reciting them to herself—trying to understand. Trying to forgive.
She’s found she can forgive Anvi for snooping and Arthur for struggling, but she can’t forgive Lorelei. Maybe this will change someday, but for now she’s working on forgiving herself instead. For now she’s focusing on letting go. On moving on. On making and keeping promises.
Linda steps off the paved path into the grass. The inflatable raft has disappeared into the distance. Ahead is a set of fenced-off garbage bins and a series of porta-potties. One’s door is open but has the lock engaged. It bangs softly in the wind.
She walks forward, and then there it is: a deep, glistening, and expansive blue framed by a dipping mountain ridge. Children and dogs splash at the water’s edge. A baby that Linda can’t see cries. The scene is as bright and crisp as an oversaturated landscape in Fury and Honor.
Rattlesnake Lake.
She’s read about how this land used to be a town and how that town was overcome by flooding. How the water rises and recedes with the seasons and rainfall, at times exposing the many great tree stumps that used to pepper the town, at times burying them in its depths.
It must have been a dry season when Madeline came. But this is a spring day after a long, wet winter, and the lake is massive. From where she stands, Linda can see only a single stump breaking the mirror-like surface, and it’s topped with a smattering of fresh green growth where other plants have taken root. A child is pointing at it and laughing, joyous. It’s impossible to tell from here, but Linda imagines the child is a little girl. The child scrambles toward the green-laden stump, and Linda takes a deep breath. She smells the woods but also the smoke of a charcoal grill and an undertone of waste coming from the bins and the porta-potties. It’s imperfect, complicated—real.
A gentle smile unfurls across her face. I’m Queen of the Lake, she thinks.
It’s nothing like she remembers.