Chapter 104: In Another World

Darkness –

Disorientation –

Inversion –

Light –

I landed with a grunt atop something lumpy, something moving. I gasped and tried to stand, then a weight crashed onto my back and drove me down again. Bile burned its way up my throat. I gagged. I managed to choke back vomit.

An urp behind me presaged a burst of wet chunks down my neck and back, and that pushed me over the edge, too.

“Sorry,” Lena groaned, and rolled off me.

If I opened my mouth again there was no telling what else would spill out. Probably not words. I just collapsed in the opposite direction.

With our weight off him, Mask hauled himself to his feet and swatted at his soiled cloak. He snarled, no words, just hisses and crackles through his voice changer.

He was still up, still active.

My brain insisted that nausea gripped my stomach, but that was just an echo. My actual stomach felt fine. How many HP had that cost me? It didn’t matter. I still had at least one. My fingers groped my phone – God, imagine if I’d dropped it! – and conjured a shield.

Long before I swung it into place, I felt the edge of an Iron plate against the back of my neck.

“Keep your eyes on the floor,” Mask said.

“I’m not super inclined to agree,” I said, “considering if you try to push that in, I’m just going to lose HP and I can still hit you back.”

“Dickhead! It’s such a pain when I have to bring people through with me instead of dumping them. Don’t look at the sky!”

Lena pushed herself up on her hands and knees. “If you sent somebody through on their own, how would you tell them not to look up?”

“If they’re on their own,” Mask said, “they don’t puke on me.”

Lena almost bit back a laugh. She ended up gagging from the attempt. “Asshole.”

From the way Mask’s cloak shifted on the floor beside me, I was pretty sure his only response was a shrug.

I didn’t understand why looking at the sky would make us throw up again. None of the other Realms had felt disorienting the way travel through his Key had. Was it because his Realm was somehow associated with Keys as a resource?

Or was it because we’d never clearly seen the sky from within a Realm?

We’d never looked out the tiny window of the Third Eye version of Lena’s apartment. Cinder Alley had lain underground even when it was a real thing, and the version in Miguel’s Realm was sealed off at the escalator. The great tree in the Black Forest came closest. Even there, though, all we’d really gotten was light filtering through a double-thickness canopy. Not only did the great tree occlude most of the light, the regular ones grew right up to it, whereas if it had existed fully in the real world, they would have crowded outside its shade.

I decided to believe Mask until I had reason to do otherwise.

Both to avoid having an Iron plate dig into the back of my neck and to keep whatever was left in my stomach where it belonged, I pressed my forehead to the floor. My eyes scanned back and forth within those limits, though.

From what I could see of Mask’s Realm, it took the form of some sort of building. A parking garage, maybe? I sprawled on bare concrete, and the three walls I could see were made of the same material. Old concrete, cracked, pitted, and coated with fine gray dust everywhere we hadn’t disturbed it.

“You better pull that Iron away from Cam,” Lena said, “or we’re starting up the next round right here, right now.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Mask said. “You can’t fight me here.”

Lena rose to a crouch. I couldn’t see her shift her hand to her phone, but I knew she would have. “Wanna bet?”

“I don’t think he means we can’t win,” I said. “He means we don’t dare.”

“Huh?”

“Mask is the one with the Key.” Experimentally, I tried a push up. Once upon a time, by which I mean a couple months ago, I would’ve huffed and puffed from just the one. It came easily now, and the Iron brushed harmlessly against the hairs of my neck. Careful to keep my eyes low, I turned to face Lena. “If we knock out all his HP, we’ve got no way out.”

I could see Mask out of the corner of my eye. Despite what I’d said, I kept his hand in view. If he moved to touch his phone and add Fire or more Air to his Iron, or even just started swinging it around, I’d strike him anyway and we’d figure out where to go from there.

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He didn’t make any aggressive moves, though.

“You know,” Lena said, “we could kick his ass and wait for midnight.”

“No!” Mask jerked the Iron away from me.

Even through his voice changer, the shift in his tone came through. Dude sounded shook. He backed toward the doorway with his Iron between him and us.

Lena blinked after him. “I was kidding.”

“Good!” His fist unclenched, but he kept the Iron between us. He backed further into the doorway, and when he spoke again, he’d tamped down his panic. “Hurry up. I’ll take you to your buds but I won’t wait forever.”

“Okay,” I said. “We just need to get our bearings.”

Mask’s only answer was to spin on his heel and stalk into the hallway. His tattered, soiled cloak, Phantom’s equivalent to Bernie’s plushy form, swirled behind him. Then it, too, disappeared behind the pitted concrete.

I risked standing up and surveying what I could of the room we’d found ourselves in. I revised my estimation of it. It didn’t look like a parking garage, because you’d be lucky to squeeze a scooter in through the only doorway, much less a car.

Another unfinished building, like the construction site?

My hand tightened on my phone. If this was anything like the last one...

“What was up with him?” Lena muttered.

“Only one way to find out,” I said.

She scowled. “Follow him.”

I nodded.

“First,” Lena said, “I’m looking out that window. He could just be messing with our heads.”

“That’s probably going to suck for you.” I padded over to her and rubbed the small of her back. “I’m not going to stop you, Lena. Just, if you end up puking again, try not to hit me this time.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Aw, you’re so supportive, Cam.”

“I try.”

She hugged my waist, then stalked to the window.

I still wasn’t willing to look up, but I did watch Lena’s progress. The cracks around the window were bad enough that parts of the concrete had chipped away, revealing bare rebar. I caught a glimpse of another building across what looked like a narrow street or wide alley, but deliberately didn’t look any closer.

I could tell that Lena did, because I heard her gulp and saw her grip tighten on the window.

“I guess,” I said, “Mask wasn’t just messing with our heads?”

She staggered back to my side and slipped her arms around me.

“This doesn’t feel like a good way to avoid throwing up on me,” I said. Nonetheless, I wrapped her up in a hug.

We stayed that way for a few minutes while her stomach settled. Finally, carefully, she peeked upwards to meet my eyes. She flinched away from something past my head, probably a crack in the ceiling. “The sky is all fucked up.”

“How?” I asked.

“You know that one window at the big fish tank in Tropical Discovery?” she asked. “The round one that’s sort of like a dome sticking into the tank?”

I nodded. Now that she’d mentioned an exhibit from it, it struck me that I didn’t know if any of the wiki team had scouted the Denver Zoo. A big oversight, if not. Lots of walkable spaces, and who knew what Third Eye would associate them with? Water, for the aquariums? Earth, for the craggy enclosures? Air, for the birdcages?

Keys, for the locked gates?

None of which were available to us right now. I shook away my speculation and answered Lena’s original question. “I know the window you’re talking about. I think the way it looks is called a fisheye effect, which I guess is appropriate. What about it?”

“The way it distorts the view at the edges, the whole sky here is kinda like that. Except, like, a bunch of those bubbles going in and out at different sizes.” She shuddered.

I patted her back. “Shit. I can see how that would be disorienting.”

She clutched my back. “Mask is wrong, though.”

I frowned. “About what?”

“The sky’s not the worst part.”

I gave her another squeeze. Then I extricated myself from her embrace and approached the window.

I kept my eyes low and shielded them with my hand so I didn’t have to see the whole sky, but even a glimpse of it through the gaps in the buildings made my vision swim. I braced myself on the windowsill.

That left me looking down.

My initial impression of “narrow street” seemed accurate. Six stories below, chunks of pitted asphalt suggested what must have been an urban road at some point. Some far removed point, because most of it had crumbled or been covered by dust and dirt. Even that was hard to see beneath a layer of mosses, vines, and ferns. Here and there, I saw rusted boxes of metal that might’ve once been cars but now looked more like jagged planter boxes for how overgrown they’d become.

At the end of the block, a fire hydrant remained distinguishable. Almost intact, in fact, having lost only its paint and one of its nozzles. More vines grew out of the hole, so it was clear no water had pumped through it in a long time.

Beyond it, block after block of the same. An entire urban center reclaimed by nature.

Whatever city this Realm evoked, it had been abandoned and fallen into ruin at least decades ago.

Which didn’t make a ton of sense, considering that every other Realm we knew the provenance of tied in to something that Third Eye, at least, considered to be a pivotal moment in the life of the player it was attached to. I didn’t think there was a city this size in all of North America that had been so thoroughly abandoned.

“The ruins are creepy,” I said. Especially to someone as attached to urban life as me. I’m sure some people would find the idea of plant life overtaking a city calming, even comforting. Or at least they’d say so until they saw it. “I’m not sure how they’re worse than the sky, though.”

“Keep watching,” Lena said. She shook her head. “The hell am I saying? Don’t.”

I tried to drag my eyes away from the disorienting scene. The sky still bubbled at the edge of my vision, and below me, plants shifted in the wind.

Wind? Weird. I hadn’t felt any up on the sixth floor.

I blinked. Lena was beside me, grabbing my arm.

“Why do you want me to stop watching?” I asked. “I think I’ve seen enough of the sky now that I’m not going to get sick just from a glance.”

Movement near the base of the building drew my eye. Young trees that had grown up through the cracks in the pavement swayed in the breeze.

In opposite directions.

While none of the foliage around them moved.

Wind couldn’t do that.

“You should stop watching,” Lena said, “because I really don’t want them to see us.”