Chapter 61: Home Stretch

I’d never been happier to see row after row of empty metal shelf frames.

The only reason I didn’t run up to the nearest and throw my arms around it and plant a kiss on its brushed aluminum side was that, technically, we were still on the construction site. I had to save some relief until we made it back to Donica’s Yukon. And maybe a bit more until she drove me back to the apartment.

Oh. Also, I didn’t do that because I would look like a goddamn lunatic. I couldn’t afford to until she dropped me off. Otherwise, she might strand me here.

So instead of making out with the shelf, I hugged the right wall and broke into a light jog. I heard Donica at my heels, matching my pace.

Row after row of shelves, all identical, stretching into the darkness. Echoes from our boots, rolling back to us.

Did the warehouse occupy almost an entire half of the bottom floor of the arcology? It hadn’t seemed so from the hallways, but from inside, I’d swear it was almost a block across. Forget supplying shops. If you filled this place up, you could supply the whole building, probably for the better part of a winter. A nuclear one.

Which made me wonder if there was another warehouse like this on the other side. Absurd though that would seem, there almost had to be, right? Otherwise, that restaurant or pub or whatever we’d seen would’ve had to wheel its supplies through the lobby. Or would the completed arcology have used some wacky freight elevator system to cart cases of beer underground?

I recognized that my thoughts were wandering; I chose to set them free. Sure, I could’ve concentrated on my situation. That wouldn’t have gotten me out any faster, though, and it would’ve sucked a lot more.

At least there didn’t seem to be a bunch of fake door frames in the warehouse. The first door I jogged up to swung open when I shoved it.

I barrelled through and swept my light around. More shelves, a counter, and no Third Eye objects except the decorations we couldn’t collect. The mom-and-pop shop we’d entered the warehouse from. And beyond, within reach, the lobby.

Beyond that?

Outside.

My heart raced and so did I.

I skidded to a halt in the lobby and glanced over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t somehow lost Donica. For one horrible moment, I didn’t see her.

Then she rounded the doorway and staggered to a stop, panting, hands on her knees.

I gave her a moment.

When she’d caught her breath, I said, “How do you keep up with athletes?”

She glared up at me, opened her mouth, shook her head, and gave me the finger instead.

It almost put a smile on my face. “Another thing you’ve got in common with Lena. Once you two actually hang out, you’re gonna be fast friends.”

“Never,” Donica gasped. She straightened up. After sucking down another breath, she continued, “I’m never hanging out with either of you again.”

“Fair,” I said.

I’d been joking when I asked how she kept up, but I genuinely did wonder. Why wasn’t I exhausted? Had I really shaped up so much from a week of playing Third Eye? I supposed if Donica hadn’t spent much time playing the game, and had mostly done her scouting from a car, she wouldn’t have gotten the same fitness program out of it.

Speaking of out, that was where I wanted to be.

I turned back to the lobby to make it happen.

I froze.

The outside doors waited on my right. Just one more sprint and I’d be home free.

A little to the left, where we’d collected those first chairs, was the bank of elevators. Three sets of brushed metal doors.

But I could only see two sets of those doors, because one was open.

I nudged Donica’s shoulder. “Do you have Third Eye open right now?”

“No.” She was still breathing hard, so her voice came out even more clipped than usual. “Those hallways were confusing enough without it.”

“Amen to that,” I said. “So. The elevator doors.”

“One set is open,” Donica said flatly.

“Were they... like that when we got here?”

I felt her shudder. She jerked away from my hand. “They must’ve been. The place doesn’t have power.”

“Right.” I rubbed my hands. “Must’ve been. Only thing that makes sense.”

“I’m very much in favor of things making sense,” Donica said.

It didn’t matter.

If I hadn’t glanced at the elevator, I never would’ve known it was open. Except that it must have been open to begin with, so I’d seen inside and just didn’t remember because I’d been paying attention to other things. Third Eye things. Collectible things, like the chairs. Aesthetic details, like the Art Deco lamps and the carpet in the lobby. We were never going to ride an elevator in a construction site to begin with, so why pay it any mind?

Besides, it wasn’t like it was between us and the front doors.

We had no reason to interact with it.

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I took a step toward it.

Donica grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”

I stared at her hand on my arm. Back at the elevator doors.

They hadn’t closed. Of course. They didn’t have power. They couldn’t.

I could just make out one corner of the inside of the elevator. Waist-high wood panels, a rich reddish-brown like a fancy desk. Carpet, the same low-pile burgundy as in the lobby, but a little brighter. Less dusty. The same Art Deco lamps. Above the wood panels, metal polished to a mirror sheen.

The reflections inside looked odd. If it were mirrored all the way around, it should have had that infinite corridor effect I’ve always found disconcerting. For some reason, the lack of it here made me queasy.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Just. Got distracted. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Donica didn’t even bother responding. She just charged through the lobby to the front doors.

If we were well and truly screwed, if whatever Third Eye shit was going on here went way beyond a game, beyond messing with my mind, then those doors wouldn’t budge –

They slammed wide open when her palms hit them. A blast of colder air shocked me out of my catastrophizing.

I ran to the doors and stumbled onto the sidewalk beside her.

It was freezing out here, and fully dark over the mountains. Most of the skyscrapers had gone dark as well, and a lot of the shops across Broadway. Bars and restaurants remained bright, though, and the headlights of the cars blazed, almost shocking after we’d relied only on our phone lights and the fake ones Third Eye showed us.

I realized the lights on our phones were still on and fumbled to shut mine off.

Donica saw me do it and followed suit.

I don’t know why we bothered. Nobody on Broadway so much as tapped their brakes. A quartet of people emerged from a bar across the street, chatting and waving, and didn’t spare us a glance.

Wordlessly, Donica and I rushed back to her Yukon.

I haven’t always been kind to SUVs in my head, but in that moment, I loved that vehicle more than anything I’d ever owned, and almost as much as anyone I’d ever known.

Then Donica turned the heat on and the Yukon rose a couple notches in my estimation.

We sat there, warming up, catching our breaths, for several minutes.

Donica ripped her hardhat off and threw it into the back seat.

The suddenness of her motion made me jump. After a second to collect myself, I took mine off as well. I set it at my feet.

“That was...” I bit my lip. “That was really goddamn weird back there.”

She nodded.

“Like.” I drew in a breath of deliciously heated air. “I guess, technically, nothing actually happened. We just... got lost.”

“You mean I did.” She looked away.

“I wouldn’t have fared any better.”

“Agreed.” She laughed. It sounded hysterical. I don’t mean the funny kind.

“But I’m not the only one who felt it was weird,” I said. Of course I wasn’t. She’d already acknowledged it.

I needed to hear it again.

I did.

“No.” She shuddered. “I was losing my shit in those hallways. When I realized the prints I was following weren’t mine? I was one hundred percent convinced I was going to die. Either you were a psychopath and were hunting me down, or the place came preloaded with one and we were both screwed.”

“In fairness,” I said, “I’m pretty sure you could take me in a fight.”

That wasn’t true though, was it? I thought about how I’d outpaced her when we ran through the warehouse. Maybe she had asthma or something.

“For sure.” She tried to smile. When it didn’t work, she averted her eyes. “I’m glad it wasn’t just me.”

“There’ve been a few Third Eye things that are just... weird.” If I kept talking, it would all come burbling out. Donica was not the person I should be talking to about this. Or was she? “Nothing on the same level as that, though.”

She frowned. “What part of that do you think was a Third Eye thing?”

“At the least, it was adding extra door frames and making the maze even more confusing,” I said. “Although I guess that’s just an extension of its whole thing of adding extra mundane objects to the environment.”

“They fit weirdly well in there, don’t you think?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but – “Yeah. Some of the impossible objects we see don’t really make sense. In there, everything did. It was consistent, too.”

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

“No clue,” I said. “Unless it has to do with the inspection report? Maybe that’s what a bespoke Third Eye environment looks like, compared to the procedurally generated stuff.”

“Which goes back to your question about why a dev would add stuff instead of taking it away in an environment that it’s, technically, trespassing for us to wander around in. Or them, for that matter.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

I had no idea what to do with our speculation. If we’d actually been in danger, we’d have no choice but to splash warnings all over the wiki. If Erin didn’t like it, we’d convince her. Lena and I would do a video on it and try to warn as many players as possible, even if it killed our channel.

Had we been in danger?

Nothing actually happened to us. We just got lost. I couldn’t even prove we’d gotten lost because of Third Eye, rather than the confusing layout of the physical building.

Hell. I couldn’t admit we’d been poking around the construction site without confessing to at least a misdemeanor.

Another reason for the devs to craft a bespoke environment inside a place players had to trespass to get to?

I sank into the Yukon’s luxurious seat and rubbed my eyes.

Despite how freaked out we’d gotten, despite even that moment on the way out when I’d seen the open elevator doors and felt almost nauseated with dread, neither Donica nor I had been hurt. Neither of us had been threatened. At just about any point, I, at least, could’ve smashed through the window of what I called the vet’s office if I absolutely had to get out of the building.

Hell. The weirdest shit in there didn’t even seem related to Third Eye. The preinstalled shelves and booths, so inconvenient for a construction site, were real. So were the doorframes nailed up around stretches of solid wall. So were the doors without latches or stops.

So were the cavernous warehouse and the maze-like hallways.

So was that elevator.

My hand dropped to the armrest. I sat up.

“What?” Donica asked.

I didn’t look at her. “You saw inside the elevator, too, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“The interior,” I said. “It was finished?”

When she didn’t respond, I risked peeking at her face. The only lights came from the cars whizzing past and the bars across the street, but I thought she looked wide-eyed. She murmured, “I must’ve looked through my phone camera.”

“Even if you did, you’d closed Third Eye by then.”

She looked down at her phone. Uselessly, she confirmed that the app was off.

“Putting in dummy shelves, and booths, and a bar.” She shook her head. “It’s stupid. Wasteful. I get how somebody with more money than sense could think it wasn’t a terrible idea, though. You check out the layout, get a sense for it as a physical environment. Hell. If you couldn’t do that on a computer, I might even say it made a kind of sense.”

I understood what she didn’t say:

There was no excuse for the elevator, and no explanation.

I flexed my fingers over the Yukon’s door. I watched Donica’s hands on her phone, and on her own door handle after she put the phone away.

“I’m not going back.” I couldn’t tell if she was whispering it to me, or to herself.

I forced myself to buckle up and clung to the seatbelt.

She threw the Yukon into reverse, pivoted, shifted back to drive, and zoomed out of the parking lot.