Chapter 119: My Turn
I pulled Lena closer and patted her back. Her arms encircled me. Her warmth enveloped me. She rested her head against my chest; I, my chin in her soft curls.
We stayed like that until the cabin door creaked open.
Allen shuffled out onto the porch. He’d ditched the remnants of his cloak and his battered paintball gear. He’d slapped a Band-Aid over most of the burn on his cheek. With his broken mask discarded, there was nothing in him of Mask, the terror of Third Eye. Just a sad, sullen, pasty teenager in black jeans and hoodie.
The change in his posture was almost more startling. He hunched his lanky frame over so badly he didn’t look any taller than me, and Gerry practically towered over him.
“How’s Jan?” Gerry asked.
“Having some soup,” Allen said. “Said she’d be okay.”
Gerry nodded.
“How are you?” Lena asked.
Allen shot her a sullen glare, but it didn’t last. He ended up staring at the two of us long enough for it to get uncomfortable. I felt like I should let go of Lena and fought back against the urge.
Eventually, Allen shook himself in the cold air, sank onto the chair I’d abandoned, slumped back in it, and closed his eyes.
Lena pulled away from me and crouched beside the chair.
“It was supposed to be my turn,” Allen muttered.
She cocked her head. “Hm?”
“Ever since Mom and Dad died, Jan took care of me,” he said. “When I got all this power and everything went wrong, it was supposed to be my turn to protect her.”
“You shouldn’t have had to,” Lena said.
“Yeah, well. She shouldn’t have had to quit school and flip burgers so we could keep our apartment.”
“Agreed,” Lena said, like somebody who hadn’t hated every minute of normal school she’d endured until her parents pulled her out.
“‘All this power.’” Allen banged his head against the back of the chair. “Yeah, right. Everything I did and I’m not even close to your level.”
Was that true? I wasn’t so sure. I’d put every scrap of what I knew about Lena and Allen and Third Eye itself into the morning’s plan. All to set up an attack that Lena could only use twice, the second only if she was willing to burn herself out on Air entirely.
If Allen had focused his Key on defense and trusted Phantom to run Lena out of MP? If he’d realized how her armor worked in their first exchange and swapped to his Key while she was down? Hell, if he’d thought to close in and use his physical strength instead of his Third Eye abilities?
Lena and I had bet he wouldn’t.
We’d been right.
I tried to tell myself we’d been right to make the bet at all.
Lena flashed a sad smile. “You made me use my sealed secret technique, Allen. Nobody else has pulled that off.”
He snorted. “All I’ve done is make things worse.”
Lena’s hand hovered over his. “That’s not true.”
His eyes snapped open. He grabbed her wrist. For just a second, I tensed at the hint of Mask’s cruel arrogance. “How would you know what I did?”
Lena never so much as started, though. Her other hand crossed over, patted the back of Allen’s, and gently tugged his fingers loose.
The fire faded from his eyes. He let go of her and slumped in the chair.
“I know,” she said, “because I can see how hard you’re trying, and how much it hurts.”
He swallowed.
They fell silent for long enough that I heard Ramon shifting on his feet. Everyone else remained still, and he must have felt bad about interrupting the moment, because he just turned back to the ruined practice field.
It was so quiet I could hear Jan stifling her cough inside the house.
Allen tensed and looked to the door. We only heard one cough, though, not another fit.
“I’ll check on her, okay?” Gerry said.
Allen scowled. “Yeah, fine.”
Gerry slipped through the door.
Allen remained to answer our questions.
Trouble was, everybody just stood or sat in awkward silence.
I said, “So.”
Allen hunched his shoulders and looked anywhere but at me.
Just as I was about to give up on waiting, he scooted back in the chair and raised his eyes.
“I didn’t even want to play the damn game. Some oldhead crap my dad blew our money on?” His lip curled. “But Jan bugged me about it all day, ‘cause it was something Dad wanted.”
“She wanted you to feel closer to your dad,” Lena said.
Allen eyed her. Last night, he’d made a crack about how close Third Eye had almost brought both he and Jan to their dead father. His sister wasn’t around to complain about his gallows humor now.
He just hung his head, though. “Yeah.”
“Will you tell us what happened?” I asked.
“I signed up,” he said. “But I wasn’t into it, so I picked ‘physical’ on the signup bonus to troll her and didn’t start playing. Until it showed up.”
“Oh, the amulet?” Lena’s eyebrows raised. “Do you still have it?”
He pulled it out from his hoodie. The same design as Lena’s, and a lot like mine if you viewed it through Third Eye, but Allen’s was set with a polished onyx so dark it seemed almost lightless.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Hey, twins!” Lena unzipped her parka enough to show hers off. The ruby glinted in a way I wasn’t sure the morning light explained.
Allen smiled. It didn’t last.
“After that, it didn’t get weird again right away,” he said. “It was just a game, yeah? I started scouting and shit. Seemed cool for a while. I started wearing my old Halloween costume for PVP.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Jan had dug a box of Dad’s crap out of storage in case I needed a code or something,” he said. “I didn’t, so who gave a shit, yeah? When I started getting into the game, though, I figured I’d go through it with the filter on. There was this old key in there. I’m like, ‘what’s this open?’ and Jan didn’t know so I grabbed it.”
“And got your Key,” I said.
“Yeah.” Allen pounded his fist on the arm of the chair. “When I touched it, the floor went dark and Jan fell in. I jumped in after her.”
“That was brave,” Lena said.
“Couldn’t just leave her.” Allen shrugged. “You know where we ended up.”
I nodded. “The dead city.”
He returned the nod. “I could tell the Key had torn Jan up inside, so I didn’t want to use it again. We were gonna walk to the edge of the city and try to find help or something. We got as far as the super’s office downstairs. I saw this whole rack of keys hanging there and...”
“Wait,” Lena said. “A whole rack? How many Keys do you have?”
“One,” Allen spat. “I never got to grab any more. That’s when one of those things found us.”
I winced. The creature at the construction site had pushed our team to its limits even with Albie’s help. I couldn’t imagine trying to escape one without a dev beside me. “How did you survive?”
“Phantom saved us,” Allen said.
Lena’s head dipped. Still sorry she’d had to hurt Phantom to stop Allen, I knew. I rubbed her shoulder.
Allen didn’t seem to notice us. “I found him – his mask, I mean – in the dead version of our apartment. I thought it was just a duplicate of the one from my costume, yeah? When that creature came after us, though, Phantom woke up and we thought he was another monster until he tried to protect us. Didn’t do so good, but he gave me enough time to use the Key.”
“Did it take you home?” I asked.
For some reason, Allen hunched over again and averted his eyes. He didn’t look angry, more... embarrassed? “It went to Florida. Orlando.”
“Huh?” Lena cocked her head. “Why?”
“I dunno,” he muttered.
I fought down a smile because the rest of the story made it inappropriate. “You ever go there as a little kid?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Got it,” I said.
He looked up sharply, but I didn’t say anything more.
Allen must have wanted the Key to take him somewhere he felt safe. It sucked that his and Jan’s apartment hadn’t counted. Even so, I couldn’t help but find it funny to imagine that the sinister Mask’s happy place was the Magic Kingdom. How many years removed was he from those childhood memories?
Not enough to have gone through the shit he had.
I found it easier not to smile. “What happened next?”
Allen shifted on his chair. “The hell you think? We see Philly in ruins, everything we read about the game says that will happen, Jan’s hurt, we’re stranded, there’s monsters. We freaked out.”
“So you went for help,” I said.
“We were pretty close to this OdysseyZZ guy, and he seemed like he knew his shit.” Allen scowled. “Yeah, right. All he did was steal mine.”
“You mean the Keys you saw in your Realm?” I asked.
“I screwed up and told him about them,” Allen said. “He put me and Jan up in this hotel on his compound. He said him and a bunch of his goons were gonna go through the Key with me and figure shit out. Gonna ‘protect’ me. Instead of fighting that creature, though, he just grabbed the Keys and bailed.”
Lena’s back stiffened. “Omar abandoned you with one of those things?”
I tried to massage the tension from her. Didn’t work. Maybe because I had to fight to keep my own hands from curling into fists at the thought of someone leaving a kid to fend for himself against that creature.
“I mean...” Allen’s shoulders shifted. “He told me to run away, too, but basically, yeah.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“I ran. Duh. I knew I wasn’t strong enough.” Allen sighed. “When I got back, he said me and Jan weren’t supposed to leave until he ‘figured things out.’ I wasn’t gonna wait for him to figure out we knew too much, so I broke her out of his compound. That’s when I learned the Key works on locks. Cars, too. We stole one of his SUVs and ran the hell away. Couldn’t go home, it was gonna get wrecked. Plus OdysseyZZ knew where we lived.”
“Is that when you decided to go to Canada and try the devs?” I asked.
“And got jack shit,” Allen said. “Better than getting ripped off again. I guess? After that...”
“You gave up on trusting people,” Lena said, “and tried to become the Nightmare Knight.”
The reminder of the name he’d tried to go by made Allen’s unbandaged cheek flush. He scratched the back of his neck. He muttered, “Mask sounds cooler anyway.”
“You think?” Lena grinned. “The Magnificent Ashbird has no room to talk either way.”
“No way, that’s an awesome name!” He sat up. I thought that up to that point, he must have been too lost in his misery to parse the fact that The Magnificent Ashbird had his hand clasped in hers. He realized it now, all right. He reddened even more and twisted so he could fix his gaze on the wall of the cabin.
Lena’s grin widened. To everyone else, it probably looked like she enjoyed being somebody’s crush. I knew what it really meant: she’d just remembered that she was, and wanted to hide how it freaked her out.
Allen didn’t notice either way. He hung his head. “I keep screwing up. Keep hurting Jan. Keep hurting everybody. Everything I do, I just make things worse.”
“I know a thing or two about that,” Lena said. She tugged at a tangle of her hair. “You know, until a while ago, I’d dug myself a hole so deep I couldn’t see out of it.”
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. If she’d been sitting and him crouching, they’d have been eye to eye. As it was, he towered over her even more than when they were both standing. A crooked smile tugged at his cheeks. “W-wouldn’t take much.”
“Hey!” Lena turned her nose up and puffed out her cheeks.
I couldn’t help but chuckle. Matt joined me.
After a moment, so did Allen.
Once Bob, Nadia, and Ramon got in on it, Lena finally cracked and laughed at herself.
Even Gerry and Jan emerged from the cabin. They stared at us like we’d all gone crazy.
Well, maybe.
Eventually, we fell silent. Lena stood up and rolled her shoulders.
I rubbed them.
She flashed a little smile at me. Her voice turned pensive. “You know how I got out of that hole, Allen?”
He kicked at the porch. “I guess OldCampaigner pulled you out.”
“Up the last rung, maybe,” she said. “But it was Third Eye that made the ladder.”
Allen swallowed.
“That’s why I can’t believe the game is evil,” Lena said. “Unlike you, we have talked to the devs. They’re – Albie’s – good people. She swears the creatures like the one that attacked you aren’t part of Third Eye, and I believe her. Whatever’s happening, whatever’s coming, it’s not Third Eye causing it. Third Eye is giving us a way to stop it.”
“Even if it’s the future?” Allen asked.
Lena bit her lip. “I don’t believe that.”
“You can’t know, though,” Jan said.
Lena didn’t answer. She looked to me.
How the hell could she think I knew what to say?
Absurdly, because the right thing to say was itself absurd, I did.
I smiled to hide my worry. And my embarrassment. Lena had the right idea; you could conceal anything behind a grin. “Here’s what I believe. Even if what you saw was fate, The Magnificent Ashbird would burn it away and forge a new one.”
Lena’s freckles showed. Smooth as in an edited video, though, she struck her victory pose. “Of course!”
Allen stared, open-mouthed. Absolute. Fanboy. Awe.
Jan was just as wide-eyed as her brother. Her voice wavered when she spoke, but she still said, “Even you’re not strong enough to fight those creatures.”
“Well,” Lena said. “Maybe.”
“You want us to go back to civilization with you,” Jan said. “You don’t know we’d be safer, though. Not really. You’re just hoping.”
She said “hope” like a curse.
Lena wagged her finger. “Actually, that’s where you’re wrong.”
Jan’s eyes narrowed. “How do you figure?”
“You saw how powerful I am, right?” Lena waved a hand over the ruined practice yard. Then she patted my back. “Even so, Cam is the one who protects me.”