Alex couldn’t go home. When school was over, he left in a daze, not quite sure where he was going but knowing he could not face his dad. He imagined the sound of the belt.
Snick.
The Game taunted him.
No one asked how you did.
True. Not one of his friends had asked. One for all and all for one, right?
Then, later:
You are a failure in every way.
He left his bike on the side of the road, two streets over from his house.
There was a place only he knew about, a place he used to go to play when he was a kid. Alone. Even in elementary school he just didn’t know how to play like the other kids did.
In first grade, he made up his own languages, and the kids thought it was funny. By third grade they thought it was weird. And he was so hurt. What changed? he’d wondered.
The place he liked to go served as a cave in many of his adventures back then, or a lair, or an underworld, or a subterranean mine track. It was the nook under a driveway on a house that hung over the side of an eroding hill, propped up by piers. You could run up the slope into the soft armpit where the earth ran up to the concrete ceiling. It was dark and moist and cool.
He crawled into there now, and it was so much smaller than he remembered. He tried a little of the old imagination, but it was gone, like a magical realm he could no longer access. The wardrobe had a back wall again. The mirror was just a mirror.
He put on his Aziteks, but the glasses showed him nothing. The Game was disgusted with him, obviously. No illusions to hide in now.
Why couldn’t it light up the cave, with red torches and swarming bats?
As if reading his mind, it told him:
You are the hero of no story.
He lay back in the dirt and stared up at the shadowy underside of the driveway above. He didn’t know how long he stared, just trying to block out the sound of the belt in his head, but the sun eventually went down. He wasn’t going home. He realized that now. He would stay here all night. He even tried sucking his thumb. That had given him so much comfort when he was little. But now it did nothing. It started raining but he kept dry under the overhang. Then clouds and rain came in from outside the cave. He thought he was dreaming, but then he realized it was his Aziteks. Finally the Game was talking to him! How late was it? He was crashing now from all the speed and caffeine leaving his system. He felt like he couldn’t move. So he just watched the images before him, the man standing under the overhang, dressed in ancient clothes, a guard, standing over a slave who crouched on the ground, whimpering. The guard brought the whip down, drawing blood. The slave cried out and fell facedown in the sand—it was sand now, not dirt, all around them—and the whip lashed again and again until someone stopped it. Alex remembered the story from Sunday school, as it played out now before him: Moses grabbing the whip from the slave master and beating him to death, hiding his body in the sand. Alex, bleary, started laughing because he got the Game. And the Game got him.
You are the hero of no story!
Except you could be, it was telling him.
The oldest story on earth.
Masters and slaves.
Chains and freedom.
Those who whip and those who get whipped.
Charlie opened the last hidden folder on his laptop.
He used to have dozens. Games. Hacking stuff. Porn. He’d outgrown hiding all that.
But one folder was still locked away so his dad would never find it. You had to hold down three random keys simultaneously, then type in a password.
Charlie had come home from school. His father had tried to tell him about good news, but Charlie zoned out, and this time his dad didn’t even bother to press. He just left the room, and Charlie was locked upstairs when he came back. It was the end of a terrible week. Charlie still wondered if the Game was letting him go or not. He’d left school, his back bruised from being thrown into the locker. He suffered through a two-hour shift at the copy shop, with no incidents. No men with bats or attackers under his car.
Now he was home and exhausted but couldn’t sleep.
The tombstone picture was seared in his head. It reminded him he hadn’t visited his mom in months. The thought terrified him; it hurt so bad to go there.
He was a horrible son, obviously, he thought.
He opened the hidden folder on his computer. Locked away because his dad had gone to great lengths to purge the house of this stuff. It would be bad enough if his dad knew that his password was Alicia. He’d done it right after she died. Now he couldn’t bring himself to change it, as sappy and humiliating as it was. It would be like erasing the last remnant of her soul.
But the folder might kill his dad, seeing it all in one place. Every home video, every picture, every scanned note and card. The folder appeared, name: Mom.
Charlie picked the first movie, a clip of her holding him when he was a baby.
His vision was instantly blurry, pain exploding all over again, like a tree trunk being torn out of his chest, the roots so long and deep that hardly any stuff was left in him. He was a collection of holes that would never heal.
Someone knocked at his door. He ignored it. He was crying so hard his dad surely heard. The knock was soft and tentative. He saw his father’s shadow in the crack under the door. He knocked quietly once more, knowing he wasn’t wanted, then walked away.
Vanhi kept checking the internet for anything in the news about a cardboard box on Tremont Street and tragedy. Any kind of tragedy. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She’d ruled out all the worst things she could imagine from shaking, prodding, and kicking it.
Yet the possibilities gnawed at her, all the things that might have come from her moment of weakness. She delivered that box to win her magic essay back, but ever since, she hadn’t had the heart to go back to the Harvard website and see if it had reappeared. She knew she couldn’t bring herself to hit Submit yet, even if the essay was there. First she had to know everything was okay, that her delivery had done no harm.
But no bad stories popped up, no matter how many times she searched. She watched the morning news and the five o’clock news, too. Just the usual urban and suburban crime. Nothing box related. Nothing God Game–ish. She was starting to relax.
Maybe something good had been in the box. Like the bass pedal. Whatever the person on Tremont Street secretly desired. A reward for some other task. A new Xbox. Adidas Red Apple NMDs. An Aerigon drone with a Phantom Flex4K camera.
And if it had been something good? If no one had been hurt?
Then, finally, she could claim her reward.
All through dinner, her parents chatted excitedly about a promotion her mom was up for at the bank. Her mom kept asking her if she was okay, and her dad kept saying, “Leave the girl alone, she’s had a long week at school, let her daydream!” He’d ruffle Vanhi’s hair each time, as if she were five years old again, in pigtails on his lap.
When she couldn’t take it anymore, Vanhi kissed Vik on the top of the head and asked if she could be excused. Her mom asked why, and she dropped the game-winning card:
“To finish up my Harvard essay.”
“Oh.” Her mom tried not to smile too broadly. “Yes, I think that would be okay.”
Her father winked at her.
In her room, Vanhi opened the application and held her breath, waiting to see which essay was there. Would it be her lousy catastrophe of a personal statement, or the Game’s magnum opus? She clicked on Personal Statement: In Progress and prayed it wouldn’t say:
I am deeply passionate about Harvard.…
That vomitous first line of an insipid essay, the essay of a bright girl paralyzed with fear. She opened her eyes and read:
Vanhi means “fire,” a Hindi word tied to creation and destruction.
Oh, God, she thought. Oh, wow.
She read on. It was all there. The creative destruction. The story of fire, the ballad of her life, her fears and hopes. Her strengths and her failures, too, but framed as insights, recast as possibilities. It was the best essay she never wrote.
And now it was hers.
Mama, this one’s for you, she thought, feeling an odd pang as she did.
She checked her search one more time—still no box-related traumas. Her hands were clean. And with those hands, that delicate fingernail painted hot pink, bedazzled with loopy Vanhi magic, she hit Submit.
At 4:00 A.M., only Peter was happy and unburdened. Alex was hidden under the driveway seeing visions. Vanhi was staring at her ceiling sleeplessly, while Charlie was passed out in his bed, laptop on his chest. Kenny was tossing and turning with nightmares of Eddie Ramirez throwing himself in front of trucks.
But Peter was wide-awake, blissfully serene, unlocking a new level of the Game. He stared down the third-floor hallway of the school, but through his Aziteks, he saw a broad expanse of desert, with a pyramid towering high over him, a luminous eye in the stone just below the apex. This was the heart of the Eye of God, but that was just a tool. He was about to inherit a purpose.
The hallway itself looked like path leading to room 322, which was now not a science lab, but the entryway to the great pyramid, torches on either side casting light over the hieroglyphs. He opened the door in realspace, and inside the pyramid was like nothing he’d seen in other parts of the Game. He’d seen the auction houses, where players bid their Goldz silently on anything they could dream of—drugs, black-hat hacks, back-page services. He’d seen the virtual chat rooms like lush French salons where players the world over met anonymously and exchanged slivers of knowledge about the AI running the system around them. But this was different. He saw a great judgment room, stone walls and red-orange flames, frogs staring dully from the flat surfaces, breathing slowly. A dog-headed man had a staff in one hand and an ankh in the other, standing guard by a golden scale as large as the creature. On one tray was a feather. The other was empty.
The dog-man stared blankly past Peter, blinking, waiting for him to do something.
In front of Peter, on a stone pedestal, was an ancient book containing names. It was the Book of Life and Death. The Vindicators’ names were in there. And now Peter was a Watcher. It was more than just voyeurism now, simple spying as he’d done through the Eye of God. Now he was at the heart of the Game, its core purpose. And he was a part of that mission.
One by one, Peter touched the Vindicators’ names on the thin page, and the scale moved.