Chapter 65: Weekend Outing

“You should’ve texted, Ben,” I said. “Actually, I’ve got Discord on my phone, you should try that first. I’m more likely to see it.”

“I didn’t feel like getting a response at one word a minute,” Benji said. “Besides, I can’t believe you’re comfortable leaving a digital record of this Third Eye shit. I’m not.”

Judging from where he was looking, he’d directed that statement more to Miguel than me.

Its recipient shrugged. “We plan to go public with it when the time is right. At that point, better to have a record.”

“Go public.” Benji swallowed. “Right.”

Miguel clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry yourself, Ben. Cooler heads then Lena and Cameron are helping with the plan.”

“Hey!” Lena put her hands on her hips, but she continued to smile.

Benji didn’t. “It does make me feel better to hear you say that, frankly.”

Miguel lowered his voice. “Don’t underestimate those two. I’m being serious now. The situation is very strange, potentially dangerous. They’ve handled it well.”

“Thanks, man,” I said. Hearing him vouch for us made my voice catch. I hated it.

Miguel, on the other hand, seemed to love it. He turned and transferred his hand to my shoulder. Before I could either clasp it or brush it away, he swept past me. “We shouldn’t keep you up.”

“You guys don’t want to stay for coffee?” Lena asked.

“I’m good,” Zhizhi said. “I try not to drink caffeine after five.”

Lena checked the clock over the counter. “Technically, it’s first thing in the morning.”

Zhizhi laughed. “Yeah, well, I might get away with that since tomorrow’s Saturday. I’d just end up miserable on Monday if I kept it up, though. Miguel, you want to take me home?”

“I’d love to.”

“Night, you two.” I got the door for them. “Thanks for your help tonight.”

“Thanks for the footage,” Zhizhi said.

“It was certainly an experience.” Miguel waved past me. “Nice seeing you, Ben.”

“Likewise.” Benji gave them a thumbs up. “Keep on keeping an eye on my little bro, yeah?”

Miguel inclined his head. “When do I not?”

Zhizhi watched my reaction. Her mouth crinkled. I don’t know where she found the reserves of willpower not to laugh.

“Enough already.” I opened the door and shooed them out. They went, and I almost got it closed behind them before I heard their laughter.

I leaned back against it and sighed. After a moment, I chuckled as well.

Lena plopped down next to Bernie’s pet bed and settled him into it. She stroked his head with one hand and tapped at her phone screen with the other.

Benji looked up at the clock. He rubbed his eyes. “Shit. It’s actually after midnight?”

“I guess we ended up staying out later than I expected.” I joined them at the counter. I wanted to reach down and stroke Lena’s hair, but I was trying not to get too lovey-dovey in front of Benji when he and Sandy were going through a rough patch. “You still want to talk?”

“Want?” He shook his head. “We need to, but your friend Zhizhi was right. Some of us have schedules to keep.”

“You’re not going home first thing tomorrow morning, are you?” Lena asked.

He hesitated. He reached up to run his fingers through his hair, then pressed them flat on the counter. “No. I need to understand the crap you’ve gotten yourselves into or it’s just going to drive me nuts.”

“We can talk tomorrow, then,” I said. “Go to bed, Ben. Sleep on it.”

“You too, Cam.”

“That’s the plan.”

I can’t speak for either Benji or Lena, but I know I followed it. I might’ve been absurdly resistant to physical exhaustion, but mentally? I was wiped. Multiple discoveries, multiple crises. My head hit the pillow and I conked out.

A crowing rooster woke me at the crack of dawn.

I sat up, blinking wildly. The blanket snarled around my shoulders and pulled Lena and Bernie onto my lap. He hissed angrily. Her hands scrabbled up my pajamas. She dragged herself to a sitting position and groaned.

I traced the source of the barnyard noises. Lena’s phone, emitting light as well as sound from beneath its casing. She’d left it face down on her nightstand, but it was on max volume.

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“What the actual fuck?” I snarled.

The rooster cut out instantly, replaced by familiar mechanical laughter.

Lena snatched up her phone. “Ryu, no! You can’t do that to us. You gotta let us sleep.”

By the time I groped for the lamp and turned it on, though, I saw her smiling at the screen.

“Seriously,” I said. “No more of that.”

Lena nodded absently, more at the sound of my voice than at what I’d said.

I swallowed a sigh. I knew she’d side with the Daimon. She’d only had him one night and he was already spoiled.

It shouldn’t have made me smile, but for some reason, the corners of my lips wouldn’t stay down. I pressed them to the top of Lena’s head so she wouldn’t see and think I approved.

She slid her arms around me and murmured, “Mm.” Maybe I hadn’t sent the right message.

Maybe I revised what message I wanted to send.

A knock at our bedroom door derailed my train of thought. Benji called, “What was that?”

“My alarm,” Lena shouted.

He must have stepped back from the door, because his response was too muffled to make out.

Lena and I exchanged glances.

I said, “We better get dressed.”

She sighed, but nodded.

A few minutes and our best scouting clothes later, we emerged into the living room.

Benji was already dressed – jeans, polo, tennis shoes – and blowing coffee steam off the top of one of our foam cups.

Lena grabbed the pot and poured us cups of our own. We sat down. We sipped. We waited.

When we were done drinking ourselves awake and Benji still hadn’t spoken, I said, “If we need to talk, let’s talk.”

“Yeah.” He tipped his empty cup back, then tossed it into the trash bin. I’d noticed one in there every morning since he’d started staying with us, but hadn’t had the heart to admit we washed them out and reused them until they cracked. “We should. What’s your plan for the day, though?”

“We’ve got some experiments to run,” I said. We had yet to even try to figure out how our Tickets worked. “Mostly, though, scouting. Looking for more Third Eye resources.”

His brow furrowed. “You need to do that, huh?”

“We do,” I said, “but we’ve got to be careful about where we go during the day. Okay, we have to be careful about it at night, too, but in a different way. That’s not the most important thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

I spread my hands. “I guess that depends on how many of the things we’re afraid of turn out to be true.”

“The most important thing,” Lena said, “is that we’re cool. In general, but of course we are! You and us, I mean.”

Benji rapped his knuckles on the counter. “I’ll take you scouting. We can talk while we drive.”

“Ben, you don’t have to –”

“Awesome!” Lena clapped. “That would be a huge help. We can check places that aren’t on the RTD system. Right, Cam?”

I ran my fingers through my hair. “Right.”

Utter defeat. Good thing I was pretty sure I shouldn’t have tried to resist in the first place.

We got our coats, marched down to the parking lot, and piled into Benji’s Sonata. Lena rode shotgun. I sat in the back with Bernie at my side.

Benji fired up the car. “Where to?”

“The farther out of town you’re willing to go,” I said, “the better.”

For some reason, that made him laugh. “First time for everything.”

“What do you mean?” Lena asked.

“Cameron wanting to leave town? He always hated road trips growing up.”

“Oh, he still does,” Lena said.

“I didn’t realize I’d RSVPed to the roast of Cameron Howard,” I said. “Hopefully the better comedians will come on later.”

Lena bent over the armrest to look back at me. She stuck her tongue out, but it was surrounded by an easy smile.

Benji laughed, full-throated.

What the hell. I laughed along with them.

“Seriously, though,” I said. “You’re right that I’d rather hang out in the city, but we did so much better finding Materials when we roamed out of town.”

“This game is so weird,” Benji muttered.

“You’re not wrong.”

He stayed on Hampden, westbound. We cruised past the greenbelt and the tunnel. If we pulled into the parking lot and delved inside, could we return to Miguel’s Realm without bringing the man it was meant for? I wanted to know, and I was curious what Benji would make of the echo of Cinder Alley, but not enough to go into the tunnel in broad daylight. Besides, it wouldn’t be a very efficient way to scout.

We drove through commercial and industrial parts of town. The speed limit jumped and the Sonata stayed five, ten miles per hour above it. Only a few trucks and SUVs overtook us.

When was the last time I’d been in a car moving this fast? Any time I’d traveled far from Englewood, it had been on a bus or a light rail train. Between that and being situated in the back seat, the ride really did feel like a flashback to my childhood.

Right down to Benji saying shit I didn’t want to hear. “I’ve been looking up Third Eye. Couple of weird stories floating around. Did you know somebody got booked for assault?”

“Playing Third Eye?” I nodded. He could see me in the mirror. “We heard about it, yeah. A PVP incident that got weird. There’s a reason we’re down on invasions.”

Lena fixed her attention on her phone. Still feeling guilty about how she’d planned to invade Matt? Or still wishing she could? Whatever was running through her head, it stopped in its tracks. She started tapping on the phone and trying and failing not to giggle.

“What’s Ryu up to?” I asked.

“Ryu?” Benji asked.

“My new Daimon,” Lena said. “He lives in electronics like Bernie does in his plushie. Wanna see?”

“Not while I’m driving,” Benji said. Which wasn’t exactly the same as, “Later,” but he let Lena take it that way and so did I.

“We know Third Eye can get dangerous,” I said. “It’s more than just other players. One thing we haven’t told you about. We went... somewhere the game didn’t want us to. We ran into a monster there. Not a Daimon. Something a lot weirder, a lot more hostile. You remember Donica, from the park?”

“The woman with the busted ankle?”

“That’s how she got hurt,” I said. “We’re pretty sure we would all have suffered worse if we’d stuck around. One of the devs had to rescue us.”

Benji shook his head. “And yet, you’re still playing.”

I thought about my speculation from the night before. If the devs weren’t infallible when it came to magic, if Albie wasn’t, then how justified had her confidence about confronting the creature been? It was one thing for her to miscalculate about a player’s state of mind. Quite another for her to overestimate herself in life or death situations.

I didn’t want Lena thinking about that, so I pushed the conversation on as fast as the car zipped down Hampden. “I told you, in a lot of ways, we’re safer staying in and getting stronger then we would be quitting. Besides. Are you really telling me that if you got access to a game that could change the world, you’d stop playing?”

There weren’t many stop lights on Hampden, but we’d reached one and it was red. Benji took the opportunity to lean over and look me in the eye.

“Depends,” he said, “on what it changed.”