Chapter 120: Reality

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the tinted windows of the black Expedition. Air kissed my face, cold, crisp, and thin. Not quite mountain air, foothill air, cut with hints of restaurant spices and car emissions.

It wasn’t – quite – the specific blend that smelled of home to me. Different restaurants, a few less cars. And where was the inversion effect from the bowl-shaped terrain to hold all the nastiest pollutants in?

But it was the closest I’d smelled since we’d gone on the road, and I drank it all in with a smile.

“Yum,” Lena said.

I blinked my eyes open. “What?”

“That smile is a good look on you,” she said.

It widened at the sight of her, standing on the sidewalk, one hand on her hip and the other tapping her phone.

“How’s this one?” I asked.

“Even better.” She returned the smile with interest.

I reached out. My original thought, my instinct, was to run my hand along her jaw, but I remembered at the last second that we were here in Calgary for more than just a taste of urban familiarity. I shifted to tap her phone case. “Since you’re not bringing the mood down, I’m guessing you’ve got good news?”

She swallowed. “I think so.”

She turned around and snuggled against my chest. Among other things, that gave me a view of her phone screen.

It was a Discord conversation with Allen. I reached around her and scrolled up.

NightmareKnight: doc says jan’s got infection from internal confusions?

Ashbird: I’m guessing that’s contusions.

NightmareKnight: tf does that mean?

Ashbird: I dunno, it’s something doctors in movies say.

Ashbird: Just looked it up. It means bruises.

NightmareKnight: y don’t they say that?

Ashbird: Right??

Ashbird: More importantly, is she going to be okay?

NightmareKnight: think so.

NightmareKnight: doc says no major tissue damage it’s just weird because it’s all through her body.

NightmareKnight: keeps asking what happened to her.

Ashbird: Are you gonna go with the alien abduction story, like I said?

NightmareKnight: gonna go with ‘not telling them shit.’

Ashbird: It’s not even totally untrue, though! Just think of the tabloids you’d get in!

NightmareKnight: am. pass.

Ashbird: Know that I’m sighing so hard at you right now.

Ashbird: Seriously, though, that prognosis sounds way better than you were worried about. I told you she’d be okay.

NightmareKnight: because you made me bring her.

Ashbird: I just gave you a nudge in the right direction.

Ashbird: What are you going to do now? Do you need me and Cam to pick you up from the hospital?

NightmareKnight: jan’s getting rest + antibiotics. they want to keep her for observation.

NightmareKnight: observation sounds like bullshit but she wants to do it.

Ashbird: She’s right. Doctors are always going to want to keep somebody overnight if they’ve got unexplained injuries. What if the person got worse? They would get so sued!

Ashbird: Plus they want to heal people or w/e.

NightmareKnight: heh.

NightmareKnight: i’m staying with her. if they try to pull shit they’ll regret it.

Ashbird: Obvs.

Ashbird: They won’t, though, Allen. I promise.

NightmareKnight: aka you HOPE.

Ashbird: No, I mean, if they did, they’d have to answer to me.

The timestamps showed a two minute gap between her message and Allen’s last one.

NightmareKnight: thanks.

NightmareKnight: for everything.

Ashbird: It’s the least I can do for my fans!

I kissed the top of Lena’s head.

She squirmed around to look up at me. “What’s that for?”

“You deserved it,” I said.

She beamed.

I smiled down at her. “I guess I got the answer to my question from the other night.”

She cocked her head. “Which one?”

“What you’d do if a kid did something bad or dangerous.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Lena’s smile dimmed. “Electrocute the kid and set him on fire, huh?”

“Lena...”

“You got the same answer I gave you then,” she said. “I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

I hated that Lena still blamed herself for injuring Allen, even a little, at the end of their match. However young he was – he’d turned fifteen since the start of the beta, from what he and Jan had told us – he was old enough to do a lot of harm to himself, his sister, and other people.

The way Lena had reached out to him had pulled him back before he went so far there was no coming back. As far as I was concerned, she should’ve been proud of how she handled it. I sure as hell admired her for it.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Even three days later, though, I couldn’t seem to convince her of that.

After their match, Allen had agreed to lead us to where he’d hidden the SUV he stole from Omar’s garage. That was the Expedition I’d been leaning against. Oversized though it might be, it still wasn’t big enough to accommodate all the former captives. We’d driven it to within range of the cellular towers at Fort Smith and fired off messages to let Erin and the others know we were okay and that Matt and Gerry would join them shortly.

Then, and it was by far the hardest thing I’d ever done behind the wheel of a vehicle, I’d turned around and gone back to the cabin.

We spent one more day and night there so Allen could regain Third Eye access and take his captives home through his Key. Lena had insisted on staying and driving back to civilization with Allen and Jan. I certainly didn’t object; not only did I respect her commitment to helping them, I knew a trip through the Key might leave me in the same condition Jan was in.

Thankfully, it sounded like as awful as the experience had felt, the doctors at Calgary’s Rockyview Hospital believed it was something Jan could recover from.

I still preferred to pass on experiencing it for myself.

Once Allen got through sending people home, we’d driven down from Fort Smith to Calgary. Partly to drop Jan off at a major hospital, in case she needed more advanced care than she could get in the small towns further north.

Partly because I wanted to see the Third Eye Productions office for myself.

I patted Lena’s back. “For now, let’s see what we can learn about this office.”

“Good call.” She stood on tiptoes to give me a peck on my cheek, then slipped out of my arms. The world felt a little colder, literally and figuratively.

Side by side, we advanced on the office.

From the sidewalk, it looked the way Jan had described it: an empty office in a strip mall. We passed two occupied storefronts, an electronics store and a tattoo parlor, and a third, unoccupied lot. A staircase on the side of the building led up to the second and third floors.

Our destination occupied the top floor.

I took out my phone and panned it around. Third Eye revealed nothing my own two hadn’t.

As expected. If there had ever been impossible objects to collect here, Allen would have snagged them. Actually, I doubted they would have lasted long enough for him to see them. He spent the early weeks of the beta fleeing creatures and escaping from Omar’s compound and trying his hand at invasions. By the time he and Jan got to Canada, local players would surely have at least tried the developers’ office to see if there was an ARG clue or a rare find.

Maybe there had been, and they’d gotten it.

“Second thoughts?” Lena asked.

“I doubt there’s anything left,” I said.

“Betcha there is.”

“Can you think of any good reason there would be?”

She tossed her hair. “Nope!”

I laughed. “How could I argue with that?”

“Nobody could.” She hopped up the first step and reached back to grab my hand.

I let her tug me up two flights of stairs to the office door.

It was glass, which meant one glance confirmed what I’d seen from the street. No lights on inside. The only indication it was being used as an office was a small brass plate next to the door. It read “Third Eye Productions,” and seeing it spelled out that way sent a little shiver down my spine.

I raised my phone. I didn’t see any Third Eye objects inside, not that I’d expected to. Looking through the game’s filter did give me a glimpse of dusty floors, desks, and office chairs, though, all illuminated by the light of Lena’s flames.

She dropped my hand and peered through the glass.

I tried the handle.

The door swung open. Either the devs hadn’t locked it to begin with or they hadn’t been back to close up after Allen used his Key to gain entry.

Lena backed up against the concrete wall. Her eyes darted back and forth.

“If anyone is looking,” I said, “it’s a good thing you aren’t acting suspicious.”

“I’m just trying to be careful,” she said.

“Careful is blending in,” I said. “You and I could easily pass for a couple of game developers.”

She rubbed her arm. “I guess...”

I stepped through the door. Lena darted after me.

Despite what Allen and Jan had said, I half expected to feel myself transported to a Realm when I crossed the threshold of the office. Nope. From inside, it looked and felt the same as it had through the door.

Abandoned.

There were desks and chairs, yeah, but no computers or routers. No printers, paper, paperclips, whiteboards, markers, or anything else I associated with an office, much less a game development studio. A layer of dust covered everything, thick except where it had been smudged, presumably by Allen and Jan.

My examination ended when light flooded my eyes.

When I’d blinked the spots away, I turned to stare at Lena, who had her gloved hand on the lightswitch. “What happened to being careful?”

She shrugged. “What happened to blending in?”

“Point.” If we were legit employees, of course we would turn the lights on.

Would Allen and Jan have done the same? Jan could maybe pass for an intern, but Allen looked way too young to have a good reason to show up at an office.

With decent lighting, maybe we could find something they hadn’t.

“Decent lighting,” I muttered. “Huh.”

Lena raised her eyebrow. “Sup?”

“If this place is abandoned, or if it’s been a fake office all along,” I said, “why do they keep the power on?”

“Maybe the landlord for the property pays for it?” she said.

“Could be.” I wasn’t exactly an expert on how power hookups worked for Canadian commercial real estate. “Still, they’re paying rent on the building, they put all this furniture in, and it feels too warm in here for them to have closed off all the vents to save on heating.”

“You think the place isn’t as empty as it looks?” she asked.

“I think,” I said, “it’s worth checking.”

She bobbed her head. “Right wall or left?”

“I’ll take the right.”

We split up. We rifled through the desk drawers and peeked into the adjoining offices.

It didn’t help.

One empty room and piece of furniture after another. No Third Eye objects. Almost no real ones. No personalization on the furniture. Each desk and chair looked identical, even in the separate offices where managers would usually keep the good shit. I ran my hand along the mesh backing of each chair; they all felt the same. So did the wood of each desk. If the furniture had any distinguishing features, they were well hidden.

Lena and I met up at the far end of the office, near the glass doors to its balcony.

“Any luck?” I asked.

She bonked her head against the glass. “Nope. Place is dead AF.”

I sighed. “Well, it was worth a shot.”

I turned and frowned over the office.

Why would someone go through the trouble of renting, furnishing, and maintaining a false front like this? Third Eye Productions might need a mailing address to do business, although they had to be redirecting their mail because there wasn’t any piled up near the mail slot. Either way, they didn’t need a large office space.

Unless it wasn’t an office.

It was the idea of an office.

I raised my phone and took a picture of one of the chairs. I fed it through a reverse image search. No results. I tried the same with the desks and got a couple of hits, but when I examined them closely, I didn’t find any holes for screws or dowels like the ones visible in the reverse image search.

This furniture hadn’t been purchased from any major retailer.

It wasn’t proof, of course. Maybe Third Eye Productions had sourced their office equipment from a local supplier before they abandoned the place.

Sure. Or maybe they’d used the game’s powers of creation to arrange this space for something other than an office.

I snapped one photo after another. I scratched shorthand into my phone. Anything could be relevant, from the address to the number of desks and offices to their arrangement to their physical characteristics to the way they interacted with Third Eye effects.

The game had taken us on one hell of a rough ride over the last month. I had to imagine we hadn’t faced the worst it would throw at us. Sometimes I told myself it was worth it because of Bernie and Ryu, or because of the friends we’d made, or because of Lena’s channel. I told myself it had to be worth it, because she and I had patched up our relationship.

At the worst times, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it.

We’d stumbled on monstrous creatures. Lena’s Daimons got attacked. Our friends got abducted. Benji got scammed, and while Lena might insist Third Eye was worth it just for getting my brother and I to sit down and talk civilly, I knew both he and I would rather his family have kept their financial security.

Allen and Jan saw a vision of their hometown in ruins, so vivid they’d half convinced themselves and their captives it was fate. Even now, we couldn’t truly prove them wrong.

Here, though, in these prosaic-to-the-point-of-uncanny surroundings, was a reminder of why Third Eye had excited me in the first place. After so long, the AR-ARG showing its Altered Reality Game side again.

Not just something to convince me it would be worth it to keep playing, or, worse, that I needed to whether I liked it or not.

Something that made me want to.

Not a silver lining, pure gold.

Lena bent forward and looked up at me. The sight of her crooked smile finally succeeded in dragging my attention away from the details of the office. At least for a second.

“What?” I asked.

“You,” she said, “look like a man who’s figured something out.”

“Nope. Better.” I grinned. “I’ve found something to figure out.”