Charlie marched triumphantly into Neiman Marcus. It felt like another universe from the worn-down strip mall.
He looked for the same woman who had raised her eyebrows skeptically at him yesterday. But she wasn’t there, and a much nicer lady in an indigo scarf was happy to sell him the bracelet for $900. He didn’t get the glory of showing the nasty lady how wrong she was about him, but he knew he had just purchased a near-exact copy of the bracelet Mary Clark now wore around her perfect wrist. Same rose gold. Same delicate clasp. He knew it seemed weird on some level to get her the same bracelet she already had, but he knew why he was doing it. Why the Game had suggested it. He couldn’t wait to see her.
Charlie pulled out his phone to text her.
I need to see you.
She wrote back fairly quickly:
Not now. Tim’s here.
Charlie grimaced. But it didn’t feel as if he were a mistress on the side. Her message felt scared to him: Careful. He’s watching.
It was hard to tell for sure. Without human tone, you could read a text a dozen ways. Was she typing from bed, robe open? Or from the closet, door bolted?
Are you ok?
Yes. 6pm grove ok?
Charlie’s heart lit up. But why was she hiding him in the woods?
He felt hope and shame mix. He went with hope and typed:
Ok.
If the Game was watching, he hoped it was proud. He’d taken the cash and turned it into a golden bracelet, replacing Tim’s chains and setting Mary free. He would present it to the princess. He would slay the beast, the dark princeling. He could follow the Game’s neural-net wordplay, its jokey clues. Bracelet → Circle → Ring. One ring to rule them all.
And become king?
No, he didn’t care about that.
Right?
Charlie stepped from the store into the throng of the mall. It felt good, being anonymous, moving freely among the human sea of shoppers.
His phone buzzed again, but it wasn’t Mary.
When he unlocked it with his thumbprint, it opened onto something he hadn’t requested, a map view of the mall. He saw himself, the little blue dot pulsing in the middle of the screen. The stores were flat tan boxes around him, flanking the main arteries of the mall. Then a red dot appeared, something he hadn’t seen before on good ol’ Google Maps. The red dot was moving toward him.
Charlie didn’t know what it meant. But some ancient primal coding told him, Blue good, red bad. If a red dot comes toward you, all things equal, keep moving.
It was the color of bad lightsabers, after all.
As he walked, the red dot followed.
I did what the Game wanted, Charlie thought. Why is someone following me?
Charlie passed Wetzel’s Pretzels and watched the dot keep a steady distance behind him. When he paused in front of Sbarro, the red dot paused, too, far back. When he started walking again, the red dot followed moments later.
Is this a punishment? Charlie wondered. Did I choose wrong?
He thought of Blaxx, those threatened penalty points. Had he earned them somehow?
He looked back behind him and saw nothing but the normal flow of evening mall traffic. After-work shoppers in dress clothes, families with strollers, power walkers in Juicy sweats, geriatric clock-watchers. The red dot hung back. Whoever it was, Charlie couldn’t tell.
He kept moving.
Was I not supposed to take the money?
Was I not supposed to buy the bracelet?
He took a hard right down the Macy’s wing, past the main food court and the movie theater. There were posters for a horror movie about a serial killer stalking a deaf woman (Dead Quiet), a family cartoon about elf-like creatures called Hoppers, and a movie about revenge starring Mark Wahlberg.
The red dot followed Charlie.
Maybe I did choose right, he realized.
Maybe this is a reward. A heads-up that someone is coming.
But then: Who? A security guard?
He glanced back over his shoulder.
He didn’t see a security guard coming.
A Vindicator, playing against me?
(No—we’re a team.)
He saw nothing unusual.
Is the red dot even real?
It was still far enough back. Charlie paused long enough to hold up his phone and scan the crowd behind him through the screen. He saw nothing new.
When he decided to cut through Macy’s, another red dot appeared from that direction, cutting him off. Together, the two dots were moving toward him from opposite directions. Now they were moving even though he had stopped.
Charlie cut left down a crossway. Let the two reds smack into each other while he broke sideways. He passed the harvest display in front of Pottery Barn. The red dots had converged and both turned down the crossway. Another had appeared, coming from the other side of the screen.
Who are these people?
His evasive maneuvers had taken him to a minor artery of the mall, near some of the lower-end stores—a discount music and movie shop called Entertainz, a Spencer’s Gifts, a cheap “skater” shop for poseurs who needed shorts.
That’s when it dawned on him that he had a $900 bracelet in his pocket. He didn’t want to be at the meeting point of three red dots in this part of the mall. It was mostly empty. The few teenagers around looked like they were more likely to join in a robbery than stop one. A heavy scent of pot was in the air, and deafening beats so loud he could hear them from the earbuds a dozen feet away. The teenagers were all staring down at phones, tapping away, and no one seemed to care about him.
Charlie decided to get back to the core of the mall, where the shoppers were.
Then the red dots on his map, growing closer, disappeared.
He swiped his screen, zooming out.
Nothing.
The map was still there, his blue dot in the center.
The red dots had been closing in when they vanished.
His internal clock told him they’d be close now, if they’d kept the same pace.
Charlie kept moving. He glanced ahead and behind, trying to spot who in the crowd might be the kind of person to stalk a guy in the mall. He looked through his phone again as the crowd rushed past. A woman with a stroller brushed him going the opposite direction. Her toddler stared out from the stroller, and through the phone the kid had red eyes.
Charlie pressed toward the exit to the parking garage. He didn’t have time to appreciate the demon-baby effect. The exit was thirty feet away. He glanced back through his phone. For a moment in the crowd behind him a head was taller than the rest, different because it was a minotaur with blood-orange eyes and a ringed nose with froth and hair, the horned bull-head moving up and down with the steps of a real person.
Someone crashed into Charlie from the front, or he crashed into the person, who told him to watch where he was going. The person said something about stupid kids, and Charlie mumbled an apology and looked behind him, but with his phone down he couldn’t tell who was or wasn’t the bull-man or if he was even still there.
Charlie reached the exit ahead and felt a rush of hope.
Maybe this wasn’t a punishment or a reward.
Maybe it was just a test, another obstacle for the hero to overcome.
He went for his car. The third floor of the garage was deserted and he looked back and didn’t see anyone following, no bull-man, not even a centaur or winged Icarus. He found his car and fumbled to get the key in the lock—was he the last person on earth to drive a car without keyless entry?—and suddenly a hand came out from under his car, like some old wives’ tale about the dangers of mall parking lots passed frantically between suburban gossips.
The grip on his ankle was strong and caught him off guard, bringing him down. He fell backward, banging against the car behind him. Charlie felt the hand pulling hard on his ankle, trying to draw him under the car. He broke free and pulled himself to his feet, and when the hand gripped him again, he brought his other leg down as hard as he could onto the attacker’s wrist. With a sickening crack and a yowl of pain from under the car, the fingers went limp and withdrew back underneath. Charlie grabbed for his keys as he heard the figure sliding out from under the car on the other side, coming around toward him, and he got the right key shakily into the keyhole, jumped in, and slammed the door shut behind him, hitting the lock. He started the car, felt with the palm of his hand the small box with the bracelet in his pocket, took a breath, and got the hell out of there.
That was not a security guard.
That was not a Vindicator.
Who the fuck else is playing this game?
And why are they coming for me?
“I told you there were other people playing,” Peter said calmly, lying back in the grass on the Embankment. “I chat with them online. That’s how I found it in the first place.”
“I figured they were in Japan. Or Germany. Or Ukraine. Not here.”
“I have no idea, Charlie. Everyone’s anonymous. There are a billion people playing online games. Some of them have to be here.”
“But I thought this thing was underground.”
“It is!” Peter sighed, as if he were lecturing a dumb child. “I don’t think you understand the scale of distributed networks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about raw numbers. Do you know the odds of getting hit by lightning? That’s really low, right? It’s one in three thousand. Say the odds of finding the God Game were, like, a hundred times less. That’s still twenty people within an hour of here. Not even counting people who aren’t playing that the Game might just manipulate into doing something.”
“How would it do that?”
“Blackmail. Fake news. Social engineering.”
“Jesus, what did you get us into?”
Peter grinned. “What did we get us into?”
Charlie threw up his hands. Peter was right. No sense denying it.
“I saw other people, too, on my phone, before the mall. They had white masks. Hoods. They looked satanic.”
“Watchers.”
“Who?”
“Next-level players. Don’t worry about them.”
“Don’t tell me what to worry about.”
“Look,” Peter said, “I get it, you’re rattled.”
“I really hurt that guy.”
“Yeah, but he was trying to hurt you.”
“Maybe. Maybe he was just some kid like us.”
“Or maybe he was a criminal casing the mall, and the Game tipped him off that some bozo was coming with a thousand-dollar bracelet in his pocket.”
“I don’t like this. I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”
“Neither do I, obviously. But this could’ve been a fluke. It got out of hand. Well, poor choice of words. I’m just saying, you can break your wrist playing basketball, too. Don’t assume the Game is evil.”
“A fluke? Like the phone going off early?”
“I already told you, I didn’t do that.”
“I know. But if you didn’t do it, the Game did.” Charlie shook his head. “I don’t understand what it wants from us. What’s the goal? What does winning even mean?”
“I know, it’s fun, right?” Peter winked. “God works in mysterious ways.”
Charlie ran into Mr. B. in the hall, who beckoned him into his classroom.
“I’ve been looking for you.” Mr. B. shut the door. “This is between us, okay? Seriously, I could get fired for this.” He looked pleased with himself. But Charlie was still rattled from the mall, and everything here felt too normal, unreal. “You have to promise, okay?”
“Okay,” Charlie said, waiting to hear the fireable offense.
“Well”—Mr. B. unlocked a drawer in his desk and slid it open—“I thought you might have a tough time getting started. Back on the horse, so to speak. So I took a stab at these.” He spread them out on the desk. “They’re nothing special. And there’s only five of them. These days, you guys probably win by doing microtargeting on Facebook or something. So I realize this is a bit old-fashioned. And, I’m not very good at it. But…” He placed a hand on one of the five posters.
They were simple and plain: VOTE FOR CHARLIE LAKE. CHARLIE LAKE FOR STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT. And the worst: CHARLIE—THE ONE FOR TURNER!
They were, in Mr. B.’s parlance, lame.
“Again, it’s just a symbolic gesture. It doesn’t have to be these. But I want to see you hang something up. By tomorrow. Otherwise, our deal is off.”
Charlie wanted to say, Bullshit. He appreciated the gesture, but he could burn these posters in front of Burklander and the deal might not be off. Burklander might be the one person on earth to stick with Charlie unconditionally. Even his own father had given up on him, choosing to plow their dwindling funds into a cockamamy restaurant idea rather than Charlie. It was the better investment. Only Burklander couldn’t see that. Charlie didn’t know whether to hug Burklander or call him a fool.
Charlie rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted from the all-nighter, the fight at the mall.
“You doing okay, Charlie?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired. Late night.”
“Trouble sleeping?”
“Sort of. Yeah.”
Mr. B. nodded, like he knew something about that. Charlie wondered whose couch Mr. B. had slept on, those nights after he’d been thrown out of his house. Still, each day he’d come in showered and ready to place unwarranted trust in his students.
Charlie took the posters and promised he’d hang them. He was too tired to fight.
Burklander called to him on the way out the door. “Did you hear about Kurt Ellers?”
Charlie froze. He tried to act calm.
“Yeah…”
“See, there is some justice in the world.” Mr. B. smiled. “Don’t tell anyone I said that. I could probably get fired for that one, too.”
Alex stared at himself in the mirror.
He wanted to do what the Game asked. And fifty thousand Goldz was a gold mine, no pun intended. That was a lot of crypto, and what it would buy was awesome. The Vindicators would think he was badass. But they couldn’t know how he got it. Especially Charlie. So how would he explain it, then?
He would lie. Because they already thought he was a nut. He lied about lots of things. The websites he visited. The drugs he’d been taking. The things his dad did. He could lie about this, too.
Someone knocked on his door.
Alex undid the cheap locks he’d screwed in, the hotel-style chain lock, the slide bar from Lowe’s. His dad was standing there, home from work, looking upset. He was holding something in his hand. A manila envelope, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dinh, perfectly neat monospaced font on the label.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” his dad said, sounding weary.
Inside the envelope was a copy of Alex’s last physics test.
The red F sent a shiver through him.
Alex grabbed the test from his dad’s hands. He knew where it was supposed to be. In his locker. How did it get here?
“Who sent this?”
“When is your next test?” his dad asked back, ignoring him.
When was his next test? Thursday? And what was today—Wednesday? Oh, shit, he should have been studying already. But the Game had happened. And that was so infinitely better.
Unlike physics, he was good at the Game. It told him so.
“Not for a couple weeks,” he told his dad, lying.
But then he realized—what if the same person sent his next test home? He’d be busted twice over. The bad grade. Plus the lie. He knew what that would mean. He could feel it in advance. Phantom pain. No, that was the ghost of pain past. This was the ghost of pain future.
“I told you what would happen if you failed another class.”
“I know.”
“I want to see your next grade. It has to be a pass.”
“Okay, sure.”
“I mean it. The next grade is a pass, or there will be consequences.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll do it.”
His dad hesitated. “Please.” He sounded younger and sadder. “Please pass.”
Alex couldn’t answer. He bit his bottom lip and nodded.
His dad left, and once the door was locked again, three times over, he looked at the physics homework on his desk, then back at the Game on his computer, and picked the Game.
The Vindicators had been the only good thing in his life. Freshman year, it was a haven, from the people who still remembered him from middle school as the Boy from Mars. But then Peter had come, and everyone fell in love with him and worshipped him—Alex did, too, because Peter was the charming trickster Alex longed to be. Yet the things Peter did came out warped when Alex copied them, making him seem all the more alone and odd. Alex had always been the tagalong, but when Peter came, Alex fell one notch lower in the Vindicator hierarchy, which made him feel expendable. Again.
And where was Charlie in all this? Freshman year, Charlie had rescued Alex from oblivion, and it was like, sure, yeah, you’re quiet and everyone thinks you’re a freak, but be one of us. He wished that Charlie still existed, but that guy fell into a black hole of pain, and someone else came out. Deep down he hated Charlie—old and new—for how much Alex needed him.
He would do it. He would do what the Game asked. It would be fun. His prize would impress them. But right now he was more interested in impressing the Game.
He locked himself in the bathroom, and his phone buzzed, a text from an anonymous number.
He read it twice and felt a pit in his stomach.
Who would say this?
Why?
It couldn’t be the Game. The Game’s been saying good things.
Could it be the Game?
Had he screwed up somehow?
Lost favor?
He felt panic. If he was losing ground in the Game, all the more reason to do this task, to win it back. He wasn’t scared.
He read the text again and looked up at the mirror.
Deep circles. Lost eyes.
He stared at himself as the message repeated over and over in his head:
Nobody likes you.