Chapter 56: Ex Mart

I’m not saying I went with Donica because she’d offered to treat Lena and I to dinner.

I appreciated her willingness to try again to befriend us. I thought it was good for both Lena and I to spend time with other people. I wasn’t ready to stop playing Third Eye for the day.

But a dinner offer from somebody who owned her own car didn’t hurt. An SUV, even! When we got to the parking lot, she approached a Yukon, one of those monsters named for a mountain range and about the same size.

Donica saw me looking the vehicle up and down. Mostly up. “I have to ferry around a lot of tall people.”

I wondered why she felt the need to justify her ride. “No complaints from me. What is it you do, exactly?”

“I’m an agent with Marshall Sports.”

I glanced at her. “Martial sports? Like UFC?”

“Marshall,” she repeated, pronouncing the second syllable a bit like “Shawl.” “Erin’s father founded the agency. We mostly handle basketball.”

“Cool,” I said, because I supposed it was.

“It has its moments.” Donica tapped something on her phone and the Yukon’s locks clicked open. “My job is to find talented players and put them in places where their talents can best be used. And since the really talented ones don’t filter down to me, that means I spend most of my time massaging their egos until they accept their futures in Europe and China.”

“And you wanted to branch out into esports?” I asked.

“The best laid plans, huh?” She sighed. “A pity none of us were even as talented as the kids I get assigned to represent. And that there’s not much of a minor league. No room for agents if everyone who falls short of the pinnacle just becomes a streamer.”

While I tried to think of what to say to that, I climbed into the passenger side of her vehicle. The seat felt like something out of a movie theater, and not one of the cheap ones that played second run flicks. It had been pushed so far back, I couldn’t have reached the glove compartment from it. I pulled it forward, though doing so made me sink further into the plush seat.

“It seems like it’s working out for you, anyway,” I said. “Congrats.”

She seemed more tense than she had in the apartment and I figured I’d said something wrong. Finally, she furrowed her brow and bit out, “Thanks.”

I clamped my mouth shut and buckled up.

She barreled down Hampton and Broadway. Smaller vehicles gave hers a wide berth. Northbound. I wondered where we were headed.

To a Burger King, it turned out. I’m not saying I’d gone with her in the hopes of being treated to a more spectacular meal than a Whopper combo, but her choice did surprise me. Erin seemed to prefer hipstery restaurants, and I’d sort of transferred that expectation to Donica, as well.

Regardless, I was happy to munch on a cheeseburger and some fries on someone else’s dollar.

Donica paid with her phone rather than cash. Once we had our food, she stuck a chicken fry in her mouth like one of Miguel’s cigarettes and continued north.

Downtown Denver loomed ahead of us. At this time of year, the sun was already starting to dip below the mountains on our left, but the offices hadn’t emptied out and almost all the lights remained on in the skyscrapers. I rarely got to see the skyline pop this way.

Then again, I rarely saw the skyline at all anymore. Lena had claimed she didn’t need Third Eye for the purpose she’d originally backed it. She thought I’d dragged her out of the apartment enough. I wasn’t so sure. We’d both gotten way too in the habit of staying in.

Between bites of hamburger, I asked, “Are we headed downtown?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Not quite,” Donica said. “We’re almost there.”

“Did you spot this place when you were scouting with Erin, or what?”

“Or what.”

I spread my hands. “Guess I’ll wait and see, huh?”

We came to a stoplight and she took a sip of her Diet Coke instead of answering.

A few lights later, she flicked her signal on and pulled into a turn lane. I thought she was headed to the Alameda light rail station, but instead, she hung a right into the corpse of a parking lot.

I remembered this shopping center, or what had been a shopping center. When I was a kid, my parents would shop at the Kmart here and leave Benji and I waiting for pizza at the Little Caesar’s inside. Those would’ve been good memories if they didn’t include my brother.

I hadn’t seen the place in years, but it didn’t surprise me that it had gone the way of all Kmarts.

It had been replaced with a construction site for one of those do-it-all arcologies with the little shops on the bottom layer and apartments above. The kind of place Lena and I might move to if we were to come into a small fortune.

We wouldn’t move into this one, though. Donica’s Yukon was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Calling it a lot was generous. Most of it had been ripped away, and even this paved area was so chewed up and tracked with dirt you’d need an offroad-grade vehicle to navigate it safely. The buildings where the Kmart and its surrounding stripmall staples had been were gone, replaced not by a working arcology but the bones of one. Girders stretched up about twelve stories. Pressed board walls, uncovered by fake bricks or stucco, hid the first three. A chain-link fence surrounded the site.

When I’d mentioned unmarked graves to Lena, I hadn’t expected Donica to drive me somewhere she could actually get away with digging one.

I waited for an explanation. Then I got sick of waiting and said, “What are we doing here?”

Donica ate the last of her chicken fries. “I told you. Scouting.”

“This is a construction site,” I said.

“It was.” She took a sip of Diet Coke.

“Not typically the kind of place you go wandering around,” I said.

“You know my usual itinerary?” She arched an eyebrow. “I guess you’re not much of an urban explorer.”

I picked up my own Coke and cradled it against my side. No need to let it go to waste if I decided I needed to fling the door open and run for the light rail station. “I’m not much of a trespasser.”

Donica inclined her head.

“Why would you risk something like this?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be a lawyer?”

“A good enough one to get off.” For just a moment, her confident smile wavered. She squelched her doubts in Diet Coke. “If anyone objected, which they won’t, I’d tell them I was inspecting the site because my boss was considering it as an investment.”

I waved at the traffic zooming past on our right. “We’re visible from Broadway. Somebody’s going to report us for sure.”

“There’s no one who cares to report us,” Donica said.

“Nobody working late?” Was it even late? We’d gotten dinner way earlier than usual. “No night watchman?”

“None,” she said. “Look closer.”

I did. There was no sign of activity, but with the sun dipping behind the mountains it would probably be dangerous to do construction work.

On closer inspection, though, I saw what she meant.

No construction vehicles had been left out. They hadn’t even left a crane set up, even though they must’ve had one on site to have put those girders together. There was a layer of dust as well as dirt covering the pressed board walls and bare concrete path into the building, and the few pieces of glass that had been installed, including the front doors, were so dirty I could only see inside because the doors were open. A metal sign had fallen. The fence had sagged near us, untended, and its gate had swung open.

“It’s an abandoned construction site,” Donica said. “A real estate company bought this lot five years ago, but a year later, they had a conflict in their ownership and construction stalled out. No one wants to cut through all the red tape to either finish it or tear it down and start again.”

“Sic semper all my childhood hangouts,” I muttered.

She frowned. “Wasn’t this a big box store before?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “That still doesn’t explain what we’re up to.”

“We’re having a... passable... meal.” She grabbed a handful of fries and nibbled on them until she had only one left. With it, she pointed at the open doorway. “Take a look through your phone.”

I did. Since I didn’t have the Third Eye app turned on, it looked just like it had when I checked it with the mark one eyeball.

Donica rolled her own mark ones. “Really, Cameron?”

Lena would’ve laughed, I thought. “Fine.”

I turned on Third Eye and returned to my camera.

I stared.

Donica raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

I said, “What the actual fuck.”

The same bare girders above, the same stark walls around, the same dusty glass on the door.

But through the doorway and the handful of windows, Third Eye showed carpeted halls, wallpapered drywall, light fixtures, furniture, and a mix of signs in English and in the game’s runic script.