Chapter 105: Lost

I think Lena tried to drag me away from the window, and I think I tried to back off, but neither of us ended up moving. I stood transfixed, as rooted in place as any plant.

A loose piece of asphalt shifted on the street below. A second later and a few steps ahead, a cluster of ferns compressed, then sprang back up. Unbroken. Mostly.

With a shaking hand, I raised my phone and peered through the Third Eye filter.

At first, I didn’t think it helped, but when I stared through it at the places I saw movement, my stomach lurched the same as when I looked skyward.

The same as it had at the construction site.

Now, as then, I couldn’t make out the shape of the creature below me, but something about the distorted light told me it was present.

The one at the construction site had been completely invisible at first, then gradually resolved into something I could perceive without even using the phone. Its visible form began as simple polygons and gradually became something shaped like a human, but even at its most personlike it had been bizarrely, almost indescribably without color or texture.

Another thing that came down to alignment? But Third Eye only let me see part of the way. Why?

Because according to both Albie and VisibleFromSpace, the creatures weren’t part of Third Eye.

If they were telling the truth, what was this one doing in a Realm?

“Cam!” Lena hissed.

I shook my head and dragged first my gaze, then my phone, then myself away from the window. “Sorry.”

“Starting to see why Mask got so freaked out about being stuck here,” she said.

I nodded. “We better find him before he decides to ditch us.”

We scrambled to the doorway Mask had disappeared through. Beyond, I found crumbling halls, devoid of any sign of human habitation less durable than concrete, metal, or plastic. A bit of the latter – a discarded Pepsi bottle – lay on the floor. Since vines curled over it, I had to assume it had lain here since the city fell, rather than being litter from Mask or one of his previous victims.

Mask himself stood by an elevator shaft, and oh, did that make me shudder. At the construction site, an elevator had somehow been tied to the appearance of the creature. Was this how the one I’d seen in the street, or another like it, would attack us?

“Get it now?” Mask asked.

“Not even close,” I said. “Unless you mean why you don’t want to stick around.”

Static from his voice changer. A laugh? A snort of disgust? For once, the device did its job – I had no idea what its owner was thinking. He said, “Fine. When I use the Key, hurry. I won’t leave it open long.”

Lena wrinkled her nose. “Do you get used to going through it?”

“No,” Mask said.

Lena and I exchanged glances. I spread my hands.

“Are you gonna tell us where we’re going?” I asked.

This time, Mask didn’t even bother with an answer.

Travel through the Key had felt awful. Following Mask to yet another unknown location, this time without him being on the back foot from a fight, sounded like a great way to end up abducted.

Nonetheless, it had to be better than staying here and waiting for a monster to climb up and kill us. Even if these creatures proved more passive than the one we’d encountered before, we’d still be stranded here with no food or water except what we could scavenge and no power to keep our phones charged.

Oh, and no hope of escape except that Mask would both take pity on our stupid asses and to be able to find us when he did.

“Say ‘when,’” Lena said.

“Now,” Mask said.

Which wasn’t “when,” but Lena didn’t even bother with a pedantic complaint. No point. Before she could speak again, the elevator doors became a matte black shadow and Mask vanished through it.

Lena and I dashed after him.

I tried to brace myself for the Key’s effects. I might not be able to resist the nausea and disorientation, but maybe I could start to understand it.

Whether because I was prepared, or because I was stepping through instead of falling, or because I had my phone jammed up to my eye, I perceived more of the experience.

Nothing external. Either there were no stimuli or all of my external senses had been deadened. No sights or smells. No sounds except the overloud rushing of my own blood, punctuated by a single heartbeat. No tastes but the dryness in my mouth, no feeling of anything outside myself.

I floated without equilibrium, weightless or in freefall. Despite that, every part of me felt impossibly heavy, as though I was held together less by flesh and blood than by my organs having acquired so much mass they had their own gravity. The thought shot through me that this was my HP at work, holding me together in the face of a void that would otherwise have torn me apart.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

True? Maybe.

Terrifying? Oh yeah.

Especially because one of the last things I’d seen on my phone before I stepped into the Key was my HP total.

After spending the fruits of Albie’s Potion on a few desperate fights and a lot of training sessions, I’d only had sixty seven left.

Was that total ticking down with every second I spent in this void? Was time passing at all? It had to be inside my body, since I was able to form coherent thoughts. I’d only heard that one heartbeat, though.

Before I heard another, I staggered into light and feeling and pressure again. I sprawled forward, hands on my knees, gasping.

I could see myself again, my shaking legs, my phone, my worn-out gloves, my heaving abdomen from which bile clawed its way up my throat. I had directionality again, my feet on the ground. Feeling in my skin, and that feeling was cold.

Outside of myself, I’d exchanged a black void for a white one. Without dragging my eyes from the ground, all I saw was snow. There wasn’t much light, but every star shining down on the ground reflected right into my eyes. If I was still here at daybreak, I’d find out if Third Eye could protect me from snow blindness.

I swallowed and tried to straighten up. On my second attempt, I made it.

That gave me more things to focus on.

Mask stood in front of me, a dark triangle against the white ground. More darkness loomed ahead of him, the starry sky broken up by the outline of conifers in every direction.

I whirled –

“I‘m good,” Lena mumbled. She didn’t sound it, but what mattered was that she was here with me, not stuck in Mask’s Realm or, maybe worse, the void of his Key.

I grabbed her and clung for dear life.

“Gonna puke again, dummy,” she said against my chest.

I didn’t care.

Okay, I didn’t care much. I was still glad when she raised her eyes to mine without throwing up on my chest. Starlight gleamed on her smart glasses. She flashed a shaky smile and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me.

“Hurry up,” Mask snapped.

Lena and I separated.

She wiped her mouth. “Keep your pants on. The longer we’re making out, the longer it is before we start beating some answers out of you.”

“You want answers,” he said, “then hurry.”

I waved toward the treeline. “Lead on.”

He grunted – I was pretty sure that was the meaning behind his burst of static – and stomped forward.

We followed. What else were we supposed to do?

For the first time since Lena started leaving Third Eye active at all times, I shivered from the cold. It bit at the holes in my gloves and crept in through my shoes. I hadn’t worn winter boots, or snow pants, or my parka. I hadn’t needed them in Canyon, where the air had at worst gotten brisk. With Lena by my side, typical winter weather could grow sweltering.

This wasn’t typical.

I put my arm around her shoulders and cuddled close as we walked. If that annoyed Mask, screw him.

Lena pushed into me. “I’m on fire and I still feel like shivering. Where the hell are we?”

Mask didn’t answer. His gait didn’t change at all, so he either hadn’t heard her or decided not to answer.

I raised my phone to see if I could connect to the internet and figure out our location.

“Well?” Lena asked.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” I said.

“You know I always want good news first, bad news never.” She peeked at my screen, so she was going to get both anyway.

“Looks like Third Eye works even though we shouldn’t be able to connect to its servers,” I said.

“Go figure,” she said. “We already knew that, though. You didn’t have signal in Mask’s Realm, did you?”

“Shit, you’re right. That, uh, pretty much exhausts my good news.”

Seemingly normal sky over our heads, mundane snow beneath our feet, the sea of trees and freezing air we trudged through. This place had none of the uncanny hallmarks of a Realm. Nonetheless, I had no more signal here than I had in the ruined city.

If we were back in the real world, how far were we from civilization?

Our road trip had taken us down a lot of isolated highways in some of the most sparsely populated parts of the US. Our phone connections had slowed to a crawl when we ranged far from the cellular towers that spread the network across the country, but if they had ever dropped entirely, none of us had been paying attention to our bars when it happened.

Maybe I could walk for an hour and find myself in some little town with a satellite hookup.

I didn’t like my chances, though. Mask had brought Lena and I out here for a reason, and I could guess what. In a place like this, he could let the people he’d abducted keep their phones – and thus, their Third Eye access – without allowing them to call for help. His powers would represent their only plausible way home and their only link to civilization.

Oddly, despite my lack of signal, I suspected I knew more or less where we were.

The biting cold meant we were either in someplace that stayed freezing year-round, or someplace it was winter, or both. In the few minutes we’d been trudging through the snow, we’d passed more trees than we could find in the entire continent of Antarctica, so I felt pretty comfortable placing us north of the equator.

I doubted that time passed at a wildly different rate in Mask’s Realm or in the void of his Key, because he seemed to possess the ability to pop back and forth to different locations in a timely manner. That meant the night sky overhead was the same one we’d left behind in Texas, and, in turn, that we were still in the Western Hemisphere. That ruled out Siberia.

Not that I would’ve suspected it anyway. We knew from the invasion reports that Mask had gone at least as far as Calgary in Canada.

It seemed he’d swung a lot further north before he came back to stalk us.

How much further? Guessing represented a huge risk. If we tried to walk out of Mask’s trap, we’d have to go south, right? For how long? While pitting the feeble, half remembered survival skills the counselors had tried to drill into my head over summer camp against an environment where there weren’t any counselors and it sure as hell wasn’t summer?

I didn’t like my chances there, either. Trouble was, at least for me, that was the only way out.

Because the lack of signal and the remote location and the freezing cold didn’t even begin to sum up the bad news.

The trip through Mask’s Key had cost me some HP. Not as much as I’d feared! It legit could’ve been worse, and had sure as hell felt it. No, I had thirty two left. Had I lost the other thirty five the instant I stepped into the void, or had it ticked down over time? I couldn’t think of a way to test it, even if I was willing to go back into the Key.

Which I wasn’t, considering that if it was damage over time, I wouldn’t have enough to survive the trip.

Worse, even if the damage did get applied in one lump sum, which the last of my HP would protect me against, that was a ticket for exactly one trip on Mask’s wild ride. I wouldn’t get another until my paltry ten Max HP returned at midnight.

Spending an entire day and night cycle in that overgrown, creature-ridden husk of the city that was his Realm?

I liked my chances there least of all.