Chapter 68: The Beast

I staggered toward the hallway. Lena scooted back on the bed.

The monster continued to emerge.

Its body alone stretched three feet long, mottled red, glistening, slimy, with wide splayed legs and huge protruding eyes. A thick tail at least as long as its body stretched back under the bed. It opened its maw and probed the blazing air with its long tongue.

Around it, the apartment flash-fried. The carpet smoldered beneath the monster’s ball-like toes, but that was nothing compared to the inferno that marked its arrival. Posters flashed white hot and turned to ash and blew away in the sirocco current rippling through the apartment. The smell of burning polyester marked the pyres of the plushies. Action figures and bobbleheads melted to puddles of sagging plastic. The computer popped and hissed, strained beyond the efforts of any heatsink.

And my Water? Almost instantly, its surface boiled back and exposed me to the full force of the blaze.

I had no idea what the monster was. Every indication I had of what it could do told me I couldn’t handle it.

Run!

I took another halting step back and tensed to.

Lena wasn’t moving, though. She scrunched on the bed, frozen, trapped, the monster between her and the door.

Its wide, flat head swung toward her. Again, it tasted the air.

“Hey!” My voice sounded like it felt, like I was choking on sandpaper. “Over here!”

The monster looked at me again.

Flames rippled from its maw. They spilled onto the carpet and flowed up its back.

I stretched my hand out. Again, I gathered Water with Air and held it before me. Instantly, the surface of the ball began to boil away. Just what the hell did I think this was going to accomplish?

It didn’t matter. I had to do something.

The monster coiled.

So did I.

“Don’t!” Lena shouted.

We both stopped.

“Whatever happens,” she said.

She pulled herself forward to sit at the edge of the bed. It blazed like a funeral pyre and creaked under even her small weight. I saw the sweat glistening beneath her crown’s flames and running down her face.

Nonetheless, she said, “You promised.”

“That was before we got attacked by an actual goddamn monster,” I snapped.

But Lena’s gaze was steel again.

When the monster coiled over on itself to face her, I didn’t seize the chance to strike it from behind.

Lena’s jaw clamped tight. Her hands shook. Her wings stretched to the edges of the apartment, tensed, taut, ready to fly away but with nowhere to go.

She knelt in front of the monster.

My eyes widened. “What are you –”

“It’s okay,” Lena said quietly. Her voice was the only part of her that didn’t tremble.

For a moment, nothing happened. Only the flames moved, burning through the last vestiges of the old apartment.

Then the monster charged Lena.

Fuck promises! I sprang forward, coiling my hands back to spin the Water around for a strike.

For all the good it would do. By the time I’d moved, it was already on her, bowling her back onto the bed. Too close! What could I even do? Any clumsy strike I tried to launch against the monster would hit Lena, too.

She wrapped her arms around its slimy back and squeezed. With no Reactant, did she think grappling represented her best option?

It wasn’t. The monster coiled around her, tail around her waist, torso over her belly, long neck sneaking up around hers. Its tongue stretched out and left a slimy trail through the ash on her cheek.

Then –

She laughed.

I stared.

The monster continued to slither through her grasp, but I realized it wasn’t, had never been, a death grip. She ran her hands up and down its back, patting gently. When its curling motion brought it nose to nose with her she sat up and booped its snout.

“It really is you, Bernie.” Her voice sounded halfway between a laugh and a sob.

The monster licked her face and burbled.

It sank into my head that Lena had called a fire lizard “burn-y.” Jesus.

Also, what?

“Did you miss me, little guy?” she cooed. “I sure missed you.”

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Wait. What!?

The monster – Bernie? – licked her face again and settled in her lap.

His flames and hers curled and twisted and melded and seemed to feed on one another.

I heard a roar at my back and stumbled against the wall. A tornado of flame rippled from the hallway and joined the inferno that was Lena and Bernie.

For an instant, I thought it was even burning her. Her armor blazed so bright it hurt to look upon, but I couldn’t wrench my eyes away. I think I flung my hands forward, but that feeble drop of Water I’d conjured had long since boiled away.

I cried out but I couldn’t hear my voice.

A wave of heat blasted into me and I threw my arm up to shield my eyes.

It passed.

I dared to look again.

Lena had stood. She held Bernie in her arms, his tail curled at her feet. Her armor was gone, or reforged, into something almost like a typical Third Eye avatar’s costume: loose pants that pooled around her sandaled feet, a puffy-sleeved tunic. The only trace of the old armor was the material, scales of red-lacquered steel.

She raised her hand and all the fire in the room bent toward her. Her Fire, now. She closed her fist and it was gone, leaving the room cold and dark, illuminated only by her hair and wings and the dim light from the overhead.

Then she fell to her knees.

I ran to her side, skidded to the floor, and wrapped my arms around her shoulders.

She rested her head against my chest. “Thanks,” she murmured. “You kept your promise.”

I blinked and shook my head. “You’re welcome.”

I blinked again.

We knelt between antiseptic white walls, on generic cream carpet, beside an empty white desk, sagging against a plain white bed. Lena wore holy jeans and striped leggings and a baggy black sweater.

Only two things had changed from before we entered the apartment.

The sheets on the bed were mussed and tangled from where she’d lain on it.

And in her arms, pressed against her amulet, she clutched an oversized red dragon plushie.

I groped for my phone and found it lying on the carpet beside me.

I picked it up. The Third Eye app was open, showing that I was down to just two units of Water.

Water wasn’t the only thing I’d lost.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Nope.” She patted the plushie’s head and chuckled. “Yeah.”

“I lost 900 HP to that,” I said.

She looked up. “Oh, dang. And you’re not getting that back.”

“Don’t remind me.”

She grinned. “It’s okay.”

“How do you figure?”

“Whatever we take on next, it’s not going to stand a chance against us.” I thought she meant she and I, but then I realized she was holding the plushie up between us.

My hand only shook a little as I flicked to my camera.

The room looked exactly the same through Third Eye. The only flames came from Lena’s avatar, her blazing crown, her wings, draped gently and apparently harmlessly over the bed and desk.

Even Bernie wasn’t on fire anymore.

He rotated his huge eyes to regard me and blinked once, slowly. His long tongue stretched out and tasted the air between us.

I looked around the phone. The plushie remained immobile in Lena’s arms.

“Are you really going with that name?” I asked.

“Of course,” Lena said. “That’s his name!”

I pursed my lips.

Lena scratched his head. He gave a happy burble.

“I got Bernie when I was a little girl,” Lena said. “For years and years, I couldn’t get to sleep if I didn’t have him to hold onto.”

She lowered her eyes.

“The day I moved out,” she said, “I was frantic. Throwing shit into boxes, dragging it down for the movers. I tore up the whole place. I ended up leaving half my stuff, but so what? I kind of wanted to leave all of it. Clean break. Except the one thing I couldn’t find.”

“Bernie,” I said.

She nodded.

I looked around my phone and took in the plushie. It was a wingless dragon, or maybe just a red lizard, about two feet long, plump and sort of abstract. If it had been licensed from something, I didn’t recognize the property. Patches of different-colored fabric, inexpertly sewn, held in what looked like maybe two thirds of the stuffing it had left its manufacturer with.

Through my phone, Bernie looked back at me.

I held my hand out. His tongue flicked across it. He tilted his head, hissed a little, and clung tighter to Lena. Protective? Jealous? At the very least, unsure. His eyes rotated back to her. Fair enough; I’d rather look at her, too.

No movement from the plushie version.

I said, “To be clear, since you’ve still got your smart glasses on, we’re talking about the stuffed toy. Not the giant salamander.”

Lena started to laugh, then realized what I’d said and stared at me, aghast. “I know I can be pretty awful sometimes, but you don’t think I would’ve abandoned a pet?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Just checking.”

“I admit, I don’t really get it,” she said. “How he’s still here. How he’s... like this, in Third Eye.”

Depending on how I looked at him, he either lay unmoving in her arms or whopped his broad tail against the floor beside her.

“It’s great though, isn’t it, little guy?” She scratched under his chin and he curled around her. She looked up at the ceiling. “If the wizards and/or aliens are watching, I forgive them.”

Her mention of what kind of entities the devs might be reminded me. She’d commented on what Bernie was like “in Third Eye.”

And for her, that was fine. She’d had smart glasses on.

I hadn’t.

I didn’t know when I’d dropped my phone, but I knew I’d made my hapless attempt to direct Water with both hands. The whole time, I’d seen the vestiges of Lena’s old apartment burning away, Bernie coiling around her, her wings beating and her armor ablaze.

“It wasn’t just in Third Eye,” I said.

“I know,” Lena whispered. “I mean, I was seeing everything through my Google Glass. But. I felt it, too. The heat. Bernie moving around. When he jumped on me, I didn’t fall back, he pushed me.”

We looked down at the plushie in her arms.

Lena squeezed it tighter. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea.” I cocked my head. I groaned. “Well, it means at least one truly terrible thing.”

She furrowed her brow. “Oh crap, what?”

“For about the millionth time, that smug bastard was right.”

Lena cackled.

Through Third Eye, I saw Bernie’s mouth open, joining in silently. Laugh it up, little guy, I thought. Just wait till you meet Miguel.

“We’ve got to talk to him,” I said. “And Erin.”

If Erin acquiring Fire had been anywhere near this spectacular, she must’ve known there was more to Third Eye than a game from the first day.

“Nope,” Lena said.

Was she worried that she’d lose Bernie again? That she’d lose access to the game just as she’d finally gained the ability to truly play it?

I didn’t think she had anything to fear. Whatever Third Eye was, I didn’t believe a wiki team’s expose couldn’t shut it down. Maybe nothing could.

Okay, maybe she had something to fear. Just nothing that would be safer to hide from our friends.

“We can’t afford to keep this a secret,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I agree, it’d be good to talk to both of them. The rest of the wiki team, too. Hell. We may end up having to tell people about this on video.” Lena met my gaze. “But what we need is to talk to Albie.”