Chapter 4: Where The Heart Is

Lena and I got off the bus in the deep shadows of Swedish Medical Center.

If Donica had been laid up there, we could’ve easily walked over to visit her every day during her convalescence. At least until she got sick of us and asked the orderlies to throw us out.

So, you know. One visit, tops.

It hadn’t mattered. Zhizhi had driven her to Denver General instead, and we’d carpooled up there for a group visit a few days later. Probably best for all involved.

Instead of risking our wallets by nearing a hospital without health insurance, Lena and I cut south down Logan. We passed our grocery store and pizza place and the various strip mall stores we slunk out of our apartment to make occasional purchases at. A walk signal later, and we sprinted across to our apartment building.

It was an old brownstone, graying with dust and age. The furnace worked rarely and at the whims of the landlord. The parking lot stayed iced over for weeks after everything around it melted because of its placement in the shadow of the building.

On the plus side, Lena and I split the same rent I’d had the foresight to lock in seven years ago, so we could afford to keep a roof over our heads.

If our videos continued to do numbers, if our checks for them actually started coming through, if we didn’t lose Third Eye access and with it the only reason anyone wanted to watch us? Maybe we could start to imagine better living conditions. But there’s putting the cart before the horse, and then there’s cart shopping when you’ve never so much as visited a stable.

For now, we clung to the metal railing to keep from slipping on the stairs, which stubbornly refroze every night despite the artificial salt scattered across them each morning. Up three flights, and that reminded me that before Third Eye, I’d gotten winded from just those stairs. Halfway along the concrete balcony, we came to our door.

While I got my keys out, Lena retrieved her first-generation Google Glass from the pouch at her waist.

“How come you didn’t wear those when we were looking for Materials?” I asked. “It’s one thing in town, since people get weirded out by smart glasses, but at Chatfield?”

“Nah,” Lena said. “I tried it out, but it’s actually harder to spot materials when you can’t just glance around your phone and see the contrast. I ended up shoving my hand into a bunch of holly.”

I chuckled. “Makes sense.”

I knew why she carried them with her. If we got invaded, or, especially, if we ran into some kind of monster, smart glasses allowed her to control her Third Eye objects with both hands while still seeing what she was doing.

A pair of my own sat comfortably at the top of my Third Eye shopping list. Also, completely out of reach.

I also knew why Lena put hers on when we got home.

I opened the door for her and she barely got a foot inside before she rocked backwards, laughing in delight.

I got a glimpse of Bernie, her dragon plushie that had been patched so many times his original red coloring was more of a suggestion, sitting in a pet bed beside the counter of our kitchenette.

When I averted my eyes for a moment, then looked at Lena, Bernie was in her arms.

If I’d been watching through my phone camera, I would’ve seen him, in the form of a giant salamander, uncurl from the bed and bound across the apartment to leap into her arms. To my naked eyes, his plushy version never moved while observed. Even if I kept a camera trained on him, it would flicker for a frame, then he would appear in whatever location his Third Eye form moved to.

Bernie’s locomotion came straight out of a horror movie. I guess it should have been terrifying. Even, perhaps especially, after the creature we’d faced at the construction site.

But when I saw the smile on Lena’s face as she nuzzled her cheek against his, I couldn’t help but match her expression.

Besides. As a Salamander, a Fire Daimon, Bernie kept the apartment warm while we went out.

I still shut the door behind me to preserve the heat. Old habits die hard.

Lena twirled him around and danced through the apartment. She cooed, “Did you miss us, little guy?”

Bernie trilled something in response. If Third Eye offered a way to understand what he was “saying,” we hadn’t unlocked it yet.

Didn’t stop Lena from pretending.

“I know, right?” She shook her head in my general direction. “He’s such a meanie.”

“Don’t put that evil on me,” I said. “You’re the one who doesn’t want to wear the harness every time we go out.”

Lena had converted an old backpack into a makeshift sling so we could tote Bernie around without one of us having to carry him. It had held up surprisingly well at the construction site. For any major expedition, she would put it on. It looked too jury-rigged to wear around town, though, even for her.

“You could’ve volunteered to carry him the whole time,” she said.

I grinned as I strolled around them. “You’re not wrong.”

I made my way past shelves of action figures, collectibles, and assorted tchotchkes. Mostly Lena’s at the moment, since she’d been scoring more gigs than me in the last few months before we got sucked into Third Eye. As our fortunes waxed and waned, our collections either expanded or retracted across the apartment. When things got bad for both of us at the same time, we Ebayed almost everything and the battlefield became a wasteland.

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If our videos stopped doing numbers, and if we kept ignoring our normal work to focus on Third Eye, we faced a future of empty shelves.

I sat down at my computer and thumbed the power button.

While I waited for the PC to boot up, I leaned back and looked around the monitor.

Lena had, however reluctantly, set Bernie down while she circled to the fridge. She pulled out a large pizza we’d been working over for the last two days. “Want me to get a slice for you?”

“Just leave it out,” I said. “I’ll get mine in a sec.”

“‘kay.” She shoved her own slice in her mouth and sat with her arms over the counter, chewing the pizza cold.

Her phone beeped and she said, “Mrph!”

I watched long enough to make sure she hadn’t choked. She hadn’t, either because she’d learned her lesson when she came close right after we first signed up for Third Eye, or because her HP protected her. How would that even work? If you got food lodged in your throat, would it count as doing continuous damage until you managed to cough it up or ran out of HP?

I decided I’d pass on testing.

“Did Matt get back to you?” I called.

Lena shook her head. She mumbled something that was probably supposed to be, “That wuss,” but mostly sounded like someone chewing too much pizza.

By then, my screen had booted up, so I ran through my usual checklist.

Nowadays, that started with the wiki team’s Discord, but nothing new had come through while we were on the bus. Then the wiki itself, to see if anyone had made interesting discoveries, then the subreddit, for the same reason.

I noticed that the tournament announcement remained the top post. The mods, who were mostly wiki team members and mostly shared Erin’s discomfort with PVP, hadn’t pinned the thread. It had just gotten that many responses.

That annoyed me, but I couldn’t quite say why. The tournament did seem like a cool thing, and probably even a good idea.

Nothing more to my taste leapt out at me.

Lena had just filled me in on how the YouTube channel fared, so I crossed it off the list without checking.

At last, I switched over to my mundane sites.

I browsed job offers on Fiverr and Upwork. I tried to convince myself any of them interested me. When I failed, I steeled myself to apply for a few anyway.

They seemed so pointless. Was I really going to spruce up some insurance company’s web portal today, when a portal might suck Lena and I in tomorrow? Was I going to write ad copy for a new blender, when a creature might rip open the apartment walls and puree us with invisible blades?

Yes, because until or unless those things happened, I wanted to eat.

But I’d never felt more like I was going through the motions as I copied and pasted my CV.

Email next. The expected mix of spam, old order confirmations I’d never deleted, and a couple of push notifications from sites I’d once frequented enough to accept their come-ons. One of these days, I really ought to go through and unsubscribe from everything I didn’t follow anymore. Which was probably all of it.

I noticed an unusual email from a couple of days ago. I swallowed a groan. “Hey Little Bro,” read the title. I checked the sender line, hoping it was just weird spam, but no. I recognized my brother Benji’s email address.

Was there anyone I wanted less to hear from? Unless the creature from the warehouse signed up for a gmail account, Benji topped the list.

What had inspired him to darken my virtual doorstep? Nothing I wanted to face on an empty stomach. Or at all.

I pushed back from the desk and made for the open pizza box on the counter.

Lena was still tapping at her phone with greasy fingers.

While I loaded the last slice of pizza onto a plate and into the microwave, I craned my neck to see her screen. “Anything important?”

She jerked away. “No!”

I spread my hands. “Sorry, didn’t mean to pry.”

Of course, now I really wanted to know. I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, but before Lena and I had met, she’d all but sealed herself up in her old apartment.

In fact, breaking out of that isolation was what had inspired her to back Third Eye for way more than she could afford. It had worked, sort of. When she lost her job and ran out of money, she’d moved in with me, and I’d introduced her to my wider friend group. Lately, both of us had started meeting new people through Third Eye, be they friend or, in Matt’s case, foe.

That did not, however, leave Lena with a lot of people to text who weren’t also at least my acquaintances.

Still, if she didn’t think it was my business, it wasn’t.

I got my pizza out of the microwave, bent down to scratch Bernie’s head, and started back to my computer. I figured I’d eat, then face whatever crap Benji wanted to dump on me.

Lena said, “Just got a text from Mom.”

Apparently, today was family day. Or would be, if that email of Benji’s wasn’t three days old.

Difference was, Lena usually seemed happy to hear from her parents. Hell. I would’ve been happy to hear from her parents. They were a hoot. “Tell her I said hi,” I said.

“Already on it.”

My eyebrow raised. Was it my imagination, or did Lena’s voice sound tense? I glanced over my shoulder at her. “She and your dad doing well?”

“Never better.” When Lena caught me looking her way, she pulled her phone closer to her face.

Not my imagination.

I set my pizza down and touched her shoulder. “If there’s something wrong –”

She glared at me for a moment, then her expression softened. “I just said things were good.”

“Yeah,” I said, “ but you didn’t sound like you meant it.”

“I did. Promise.” She reached up and cupped my hand. She grinned. Too widely.

“What I’d actually like you to promise,” I said, “is that if something’s bothering you, you’ll tell me.”

“I will.” She clasped a hand to her chest. “Cross my heart and... Well. You know how the saying goes.”

“Let’s leave it at that.” After how close we’d come to dying, I didn’t much care for either of us saying we hoped to. Even as the consequence for breaking a promise.

I kissed the top of Lena’s head. She leaned back and I kissed her again. Her breath smelled like garbage pizza. It reminded me I had a slice waiting. I found I didn’t care.

“Better not let your pizza get cold,” she murmured, “since your taste is so bad you don’t like it that way.”

I smiled against her lips. “What does it say about my taste that I like you?”

“I know what I said.”

My smile wavered. Those jokes didn’t land as lightly now that I understood how deep her insecurities had run.

I think she must have felt the change in my expression, because she snorted and pushed me away. “Eat! We’re not getting anywhere on an empty stomach.”

“And you’ve got texts to wrap up,” I said.

She bobbed her head.

And my emails?

I’d get to those eventually.