Chapter 54: The Path

For once, I didn’t panic.

Which made one of us.

I tuned out the sound of Miguel’s lighter flicking and him puffing fiercely at a cigarette, and his and Lena’s coat sleeves rustling as Zhizhi grabbed them and hissed questions. I even put Lena’s worried mumbling out of my mind.

Calmly as you please, and in this case I pleased quite a lot, I approached the gate and shook it.

Locked. Shut.

I grinned.

“This,” I said, “is so goddamn cool.”

“What are you talking about, Cam?” Lena demanded.

“Watch.” I walked about half the distance toward the gate. I paused, then started forward again but with all my concentration fixed on my phone filter.

“Look out for the wall,” she called.

I didn’t.

Silence behind me. My grin widened.

According to Third Eye, I was walking in a straight line. I hadn’t drifted left or right, The wall remained far enough away I’d have to stretch to brush my fingers against it. I continued to stride forward, up to where I’d touched the gate. Fifteen paces after that, I turned around and shone my light on the gate again.

From the other side.

I waved to the others. They rushed towards me. Lena skidded to a stop too late. She crashed into the gate with a rattle that echoed up and down the tunnel. Bernie grumbled from his sling on her back.

Lena grumbled, too, but after a moment, she stuck her hands through the bars and beckoned to me. “What was that? How’d you do it? How’d you know to do it?”

When I reached the gate, I tapped my foot against the metal bar that ran all the way across the tunnel walkway beneath it. “As soon as I saw this, I knew nobody had locked it behind us. At least one of us would’ve tripped for sure. Probably me. From there, it was just a matter of putting together phenomena we’ve already witnessed.”

“It looked super freaky from where we stood,” Lena said. “It was like you kept getting closer and closer to the wall, but instead of you running into it, our angle on you got more and more tilted.”

“Sorry I didn’t explain in advance.” I clasped her hands. “You’ve got to admit, this was a way more dramatic demonstration.”

“Well because you decided to be dramatic about it,” Zhizhi said, “you’re going to have to do it again while I’m ready to film you.”

My grin turned sheepish. “My bad. Should you have Lena do it, if you’re going to get it on camera?”

“You’re part of the show too, lovely assistant,” Lena said. “Get your butt back over here so we can get some footage.”

“It would be best if you explained for the audience what exactly you’re doing, and why you seemed so confident it would work,” Miguel said.

Sure. For the audience.

Still, I nodded. “Good call. Give me a second. I want to check one more thing first.”

I retraced my steps and checked my position with the Third Eye filter. Looking first through the phone and then around it, two paths diverged. One led to the gate. The other had no gate. The part that made me queasy when I juxtaposed them so abruptly was that even though they clearly split off from one another, they both looked like straight lines.

I started walking with my phone pressed to my face, then I lowered it. I had to fight down a moment of nausea, and just as Lena had said, it looked like I was on a collision course with the wall.

If I approached without watching through Third Eye, would I slam my shoulder into the concrete?

I didn’t think that made sense, and sure enough, as I kept walking, it seemed to take more and more steps to reach the wall. I did my damnedest to keep my stride even, but what should have been ten feet became more like twelve, fifteen, and then the wall was no longer getting closer, but moving away.

I started to let myself look around, but there was no need. Lena’s arms wrapped around my waist.

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I turned and patted her back. “All good?”

“Nope,” she said. “You don’t have permission to spook me like that.”

“If you can take permission away,” Zhizhi said, “do. That was some freaky shit. Which is to say, again, please.”

I kissed the top of Lena’s head and wormed out of her grasp. To Zhizhi, I said, “Do you want me to narrate as I go?”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said.

I took a step back toward the gate. Then I took a deep breath. Narrate. Explain. Right.

Everything I’d done made perfect sense to me as I did it. Explaining it in a way an audience could understand – an audience that would still be reeling from a magic-is-real revelation a video or two ago, I assumed – intimidated me more than I expected.

Or was it just that Zhizhi had thrust me into the starring role? I found it much easier to play off of Lena’s lines than to sell my own.

If I fretted over how to start and stop the segment, I’d never get it done. I trusted Zhizhi’s editing skills enough to know she could dub those bits in later, after we had time to sit down and write a proper script.

All she’d asked for was the explanation.

I checked to make sure my phone was recording audio. Yep.

I explained.

“We’ve seen Third Eye distort space before. In some cases, it’s been obvious, with areas expanded far beyond their physical limits. It’s not just that everything gets larger, though; the space isn’t just expanded, it’s filled by objects that seem to suit it. Extra rows of shelves in a warehouse. Extra steps atop a walking path.” I hesitated. “An extra apartment in a block of identical ones.”

I had to keep walking forward for the sake of the video, but I would’ve liked to have seen Lena’s expression when I said that last sentence. I had to content myself with hearing a little gasp from her, and a supportive meep from Bernie.

“This is subtler,” I continued, “but it’s the same basic principle. Now put that together with how objects we create have physical existence. We can climb on them, step on them, and it feels... really weird, I’m not gonna lie, but it does work. We climbed safely over broken glass, and I don’t mean the Third Eye material, I mean real stuff, by putting down a layer of conjured Iron.”

Murmurs at my back. A wall in front of me.

I kept walking. I kept talking. “I realized that the same thing was happening here. The world as Third Eye sees it is sort of... overlaid on the world we see through our ordinary eyes. But it goes beyond just vision. Both versions really do exist. It’s hard to interact with the Third Eye version unless you’re exclusively looking through the game’s filter, but it actually is possible as long as you know exactly where to go. That’s how non-players have been able to benefit from Third Eye objects, or to follow Third Eye paths.”

When I lowered my phone, I was standing on the other side of the gate. Lena and Miguel were nodding along with my words. Only Zhizhi wasn’t, because she held her camera steady on her shoulder.

I smiled for it and ran my fingers through my hair. Now my bangs would look the same whether she was filming me through Third Eye or not. Good for another shot of confidence.

“I’m not going to pretend to understand how this works,” I told the hypothetical audience. “Much less why. I’m starting to get that it works, though, and even a little bit of how to take advantage of it.”

“And – cut,” Zhizhi called.

I gave her a thumbs up.

“Now,” she said, “do it one more time, and I’ll film with the filter off and the lights on. We’ll have to decide when we start showing the real magic stuff if cutting between the two views will make viewers queasy or not.”

“This is a lot of walking back and forth,” I said.

Lena smirked. “So explain in advance next time.”

I laughed and gave her the finger.

One more trip around the gate. It should’ve been exhausting, but of course, compared to walking all around Parker and its surrounds, it didn’t even rise to the level where I noticed. I didn’t feel the least bit out of breath, even though I repeated my monologue so Zhizhi would have another take to pick from when she edited the video.

When I finished my circuit and returned to the far side of the gate, I found Lena holding Bernie out to me. I scratched under his chin and petted the back of his head. He hummed.

She smiled at him, then at me. Same expression aimed at both of us, and the rush of warmth I felt had nothing to do with the flames of her avatar. She asked, “You think this is how my Realm worked, huh?”

We’d found Bernie, and Lena’s Fire, at the apartment she’d lived in – had hidden from life in – before she moved in with me. Out of Third Eye, it had looked empty, untenanted, and we’d wondered at the time if that was a lucky break or if the devs had arranged it somehow. Through Third Eye, it had looked like a replica of the apartment as it was the last time she lived there. Her Realm, promised as part of the level at which she’d backed the game.

“I’m almost positive,” I said. “The only part I don’t know for sure is whether it was the whole floor, and the elevator took us to where we were supposed to be, or if it was just the one apartment, and if you’d checked the next door down, it would’ve had the same number as yours.”

“So weird.” She kissed Bernie’s head and restored him to his sling. “So cool.”

“Nice job, Cam,” Zhizhi said. “I followed what you said, and you’ve almost got me where I’m not freaked out about it.”

“I wish that I could say the same,” Miguel said.

We all glanced at him.

“It’s a great explanation,” he said. “I’m just not sure why you’re so at ease with it. The last time you led an expedition into a highly distorted space, it did not end well for any of us.”

“First of all,” I said, “I didn’t lead shit.”

Miguel shrugged. Lena and Zhizhi exchanged glances.

I didn’t understand their reaction, but I pushed it to the back of my mind to answer Miguel’s original question. “Second, that’s the best part about this tunnel.”

He raised an eyebrow and puffed on his cigarette.

Zhizhi frowned at her camera. Reviewing the footage for a clue, maybe.

Lena kept smiling, though. She’d already figured it out.

“At the construction site,” I said, “Third Eye put up a bunch of indications we should keep out. Even the way the space was distorted pushed in that direction, made it harder to go forward.”

“Whereas here,” Lena said, and I nodded along with her, “Third Eye invited us in.”