Chapter 51: Bad News

I hunched over the back of Miguel’s couch, eyes once again locked to his TV.

Once again, I watched a video of Lena’s wings ablaze in the air.

For the first time, though, it didn’t put a smile on my face.

Not because the video quality was shit, although it was. The raws from our first video, before we had any idea what we were doing, had looked better than this. At least we knew how to hold our phones steady. Even if the cinematography in this video had been perfect, you could hardly see anything because it had been shot from so far away. Don’t even get me started on the inane commentary. It just went, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” on repeat.

The video repeated, too. A ninety second clip.

Every time it snapped back to the start of the loop, Lena, seated on the couch in front of me with Bernie on her lap, clenched her fists.

“I think we’ve seen enough,” I said.

Zhizhi tapped something on her laptop and the loop stopped, but that left a frozen image of a miniature Lena, wings outstretched, standing atop the Incline. On Miguel’s TV I could just barely make out myself in the lower right corner, a cloaked figure who probably would’ve been odd enough to get a video of my own if I wasn’t sharing it with a winged, fiery shape.

After we got the call from Zhizhi, we had agreed to meet here. I’d called Erin, since none of us wanted to leave a text record. She’d said she was going to talk to both Donica and Matt, but only the former had accompanied her to Miguel’s. Then I’d left Benji a voicemail, telling him something had come up and we might be out late, but not to worry.

If he followed my suggestion, he’d be the only one of us not worrying.

Zhizhi paced by her laptop. Donica drummed her fingers on the arm of her wheelchair. I gripped the back of the couch hard enough to make the leather creak. Erin fidgeted on her seat.

Worst of all, Lena didn’t fidget. Apart from the way her hands flexed when the video looped, she looked more still than when she slept.

Miguel was the only one who could pass for calm. I knew better, though. He lit up a cigarette, something he often avoided both when he had company and when he was early in a relationship. And sure, I could’ve been wrong about him and Zhizhi, or they could’ve worked out that she didn’t mind him smoking. If so, why wasn’t his squirrel-shaped ashtray lending a spot of character to the austere coffee table?

Nope, every last one of us was fretting in our own way.

The worry curdled in my stomach, a different feeling from the acute panic of a confrontation with the creature or the mix of fear and rage I’d felt when we faced off with Mask. This reminded me more of creeping through the halls of the construction site, before we understood anything about it.

I nodded – to myself, since I stood behind everyone but Zhizhi and she was looking at her laptop.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“Is it?” Lena asked.

I ran my fingers through my hair. A nervous tic, but it pushed my unkempt bangs up into the more flattering style Third Eye gave my avatar. Maybe that gave me a jolt of confidence, or maybe it reminded me of a detail I thought might be important. “Actually, I think so.”

Lena, Miguel, and Erin craned their necks to look at me. Zhizhi turned to us, and Donica gave her chair an eighth of a turn.

“Zhizhi,” I said, “did anybody at 9News change their mind about running this footage?”

She snorted. “The only reason I even knew we got it is because one of the anchors and one of the producers were laughing about it.”

“I checked all the local newscasts,” Erin said. “None of them ran a story about a winged figure.”

“So for now,” I said, “it’s being treated as a hoax.”

“By mainstream outlets, yes,” Erin said. “The original footage is already up on TikTok.”

“How many views?” Lena asked.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Any is too many,” Erin said.

“I’m just going to be pissed if this goes more viral than the videos on my actual channel.” Lena tried to laugh but didn’t quite manage it.

Erin smiled anyway. “Nowhere near as popular as that. So far, it’s only connected with the poster’s friends, and a few friends of friends.”

The poster was a woman with the handle Carol_homebody. Not the jogger we’d talked to, thankfully. He knew who we were, right down to the name of Lena’s channel, and if he’d taken a video of us, he’d have had a much clearer picture. News stations might not have laughed it off.

“It better stay that way,” Lena muttered.

I agreed. For all kinds of reasons.

“I’ve looked through the rest of her posts,” Erin said, “as well as her presence on other socials. She isn’t terribly active, but she’s mentioned cryptids here and there. Not claiming to have seen them, of course, just expressing interest. I suppose this is being taken as more of the same.”

“My bosses didn’t even get as far as a background check,” Zhizhi said, “but if they had, that would’ve killed any chance of the story running.”

Erin frowned. “You could find posts on my socials expressing interest in cryptids.”

“Sure,” Zhizhi said. “Who doesn’t love Bigfoot? People picking which news stories to run after they get sent a grainy ninety second phone video, that’s who. I’m not saying it’s fair, I’m just saying it’s true.”

“Which is good for us,” I said. “Nobody wants to ruin this lady’s reputation, we just want to figure out if we need to go public yet or not.”

“What do you think, Cam?” Lena asked.

I reached over the couch and squeezed her shoulder. “This hasn’t forced our hand. There’s nothing in that video linking you or I to the people in it. Hell. It’s not even a clear enough picture to link to our videos. Think about it. We came down the Incline a few minutes after this was taken, right? The lady who shot the video was probably still poking around. We may have even passed her on the way down, and she didn’t give us a second look.”

“I think I agree,” Erin said. “Zhizhi tells me you want to make the announcement at the tournament?”

“That was the plan,” Lena said. “No, dammit. Still is the plan.”

“Ah.” Erin pressed her fingers together. “I suppose it makes sense.”

“It does.” Donica hadn’t said more than “hi” since she arrived, so the sound of her voice made me start. Erin, too.

I said, “I thought so, too, but I’m glad you brought it up. What exactly do you think we’re waiting for?”

“I think we’ve just had a very good demonstration.” Donica waved at Miguel’s TV. “This is what it looks like when you go to the public and tell them magic is real. You become a laughingstock.”

“It doesn’t seem very fair,” Erin said. “They’re treating this lady like a pariah, and all she did was send a video of what she actually saw.”

“This is too important to care about what’s fair,” Donica said.

Erin eyed the medical boot on Donica’s ankle, and the wheelchair. She murmured, “Yeah.”

“Which also means,” Miguel said, “it is important enough to not blow accidentally.”

Nods all around.

“We’ve gotta be more careful,” Lena said.

“You’re not to blame,” he said. “All you did was walk up a trail. How were you to know you would find a Reactant?”

“Still,” I said, “we can’t risk scouting in public places.”

“It would be better at night,” Erin said.

“Then we’ve gotta deal with Mask.” Lena punched her palm. “Which is fine for me and Cam. We owe that bastard some payback, and I’ve got a whole new Air to deliver it with. It’s no good if anybody scouts on their own, though.”

“We’ll just have to make certain we don’t go alone,” Erin said. “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Green about setting up a rotation with the DU players, but he must’ve been busy this afternoon. Something to set up over the weekend, then.”

Zhizhi raised an eyebrow. “Are we assuming this Mask character is just hanging around town, waiting to ambush the wiki team?”

“I’m not sure he cares about the wiki one way or another,” Lena said. “It seemed like he knew me from my channel.”

“You’re all in on the lurking part, though?” Zhizhi asked.

“We saw them around a couple of times before the actual challenge,” I said.

Erin rubbed her arm. “Creepy.”

“Lil’ bit.” Lena shrugged, and it only looked somewhat forced. “It only matters if we travel in small enough groups we can’t beat him, though.”

Donica sighed. “Does it actually matter at all?”

Everyone frowned at her.

She rolled herself to face us and crossed her arms.

“First,” she said, “you mentioned a challenge. Do you even know if there would have been a fight if you’d refused it?”

“No.” Lena reached over and stroked Bernie’s head. I realized I had yet another reason to be glad he’d come through okay. If he hadn’t, Lena would never have stopped blaming herself.

“Second,” Donica said, “perhaps one of you loses. Perhaps a whole team does, if ‘Mask’ is so much better than you at the game.”

Lena glared at her. “He’s got a really weird Reactant, or Material, that’s all. Now that I know what to expect –”

“You’ll probably win.” Donica waved her off. “Let’s say you don’t, though. How awful. You’ve lost a PVP match in a PVP game. I get that it’s not what any of us are into. Better than any of you, I get that you don’t want to lose your XP. Even so, don’t you think you’re treating this a bit too seriously?”

I almost caught myself before my eyes flicked to Lena.

“Almost” didn’t cut it.

Donica caught my expression. Her lips pressed together. “Or is there something you haven’t told us?”