“Why does Charlie get to be the king?” That was Alex, sulkily.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Maybe because I clicked on it first.”
“The camera-on-camera thing was my idea,” Kenny said, annoyed.
“No one’s gonna forget that,” Peter told him. “When they write books about this. You’ll see.”
Kenny ignored him. “Whatever, it’s just a game.”
“True,” Charlie said. But deep down, did he feel a bit of excitement, being named king? He did found the Vindicators, after all, back in the day. Not that anyone much cared anymore. Peter was the real golden boy now. So did it thrill a little to be king here, with Peter his right-hand knight? You bet your ass it did.
Turns out, it didn’t matter anyway.
“Try to move,” Kenny said.
Charlie clicked on his pieces. Nothing happened.
“Maybe white has to go first.”
“More bullshit,” Vanhi said.
Maybe. Or maybe Charlie hadn’t unlocked the mysteries and permissions of Intro Social Control—a purchase he kept to himself, since he couldn’t explain it without embarrassing Alex.
When in doubt, change the subject.
“Come on,” Charlie said. “We’ve got a school to map.”
Fueled by adrenaline and awe, they spent the next three hours running through the empty halls of Turner High like conquering barbarians, waiving their phones around, capturing every fire extinguisher and trophy case.
It was a decadent thrill—the school was theirs! Empty, quiet, after midnight: their footsteps and whoops echoing down the corridors and bouncing off the lockers and tiles. All day long the school was fraught with hazards—a sea of bodies pushing and shoving, laughing and bickering and canoodling and fighting—but now it was theirs alone.
Charlie jumped up and smacked the GO TIGERS! sign, sending it swinging on its hinges.
He let out a holler and felt freer than he had in years. It was pitch-black out the windows, silent as a crypt.
They kept running until they couldn’t think of where else to run.
Suddenly Charlie’s phone buzzed in his hand.
All of their phones did.
A text came in:
Area Mapped! Time to Level Up!
And then it started.
On their phones, the gamespace was a perfectly realistic simulation of the school, mapped with all the surfaces and objects of the space around them. But then Charlie saw it, creeping in from the edges of the screen. A rippling, which turned out to be animated vines and cracks moving over the walls and ceilings and floors, buckling the surfaces and giving them a gamelike, hyperreal sheen. Vines like from some medieval castle or haunted Victorian mansion, winding through the doorways and down the halls, into the slats of the locker vents and around the Roman clock. Virtual cracks opened up in the plaster and cinder blocks, giving everything a dark vibe. Torches flickered on the walls. The EXIT sign, always lit, now glowed a deeper red at the end of the hall, pulsing slowly, like a burlesque vampire den.
Wherever they moved their phones, they could see the real world through the screen, layered with the gamespace as an alternate dimension of weeds and fog and iron gates and glowing hieroglyphs, augmenting the reality of Turner High with something new and extra.
Peter reached past his phone to a locker. They could see his hand on the screen, grabbing some stranger’s locker and lifting the latch.
In real life, the locker stayed shut.
On the screen, it swung open. A small pile of Goldz was inside.
“Yep.” Peter nodded in appreciation. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”