Chapter 84: Going Down
“Do you want regular chips or Ruffles?” Lena asked.
I admit I wasn’t paying much attention, but one of her words cut through the fog in my mind. “Ruffles?! Come on, Lena. We’re not made of money.”
She laughed like someone who wasn’t paying by credit card for this shopping spree at a white stucco gas station called Alta Convenience, while dodging the only guaranteed paying work either of us had.
I heard her talking to Zhizhi near the counter, but my mind was a million miles away.
Okay, maybe forty miles away.
I’d just noticed that tucked in the back of the convenience store, they had a Street Fighter cabinet. I don’t mean 2; that was one of the most popular arcade games of all time, so while I had a weird association with it now, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see it crop up all over the place. I mean the convenience store had the garbage original, from the ‘80s. Where would you find a working original Street Fighter? How would you maintain it? It had to be more expensive than an arcade machine someone would actually want to play, right?
It was so incongruous that I had to go up to it and touch its fading wooden frame. I wasn’t looking at it through a phone camera and there were people in the store who I had to assume weren’t Third Eye players. Still, a part of me expected the cabinet to flash and me to get some kind of Materials out of it.
Nope.
Crazy.
I’m sure there was a story behind it. It had to be important to somebody. The manager, or the former manager, or the owner. I tried to imagine the chain of events that could lead somebody to care enough about this particular game to work as hard as they had to be to keep it around.
But when I let myself drift into my imagination, all I could think of was two nights ago, in the arcade in Third Eye’s version of Cinder Alley.
At Lena’s urging, we’d gone back. Back to the shadows, but they hadn’t reached out for us. Back to the flashing lights, but they hadn’t disguised any dangers. Lena had been right. Mask might have won, but he had no interest in coming back for another round.
I’d paid less attention to the Street Fighter cabinet there than I did to the one in the convenience store now. Instead, I’d roamed up and down the lines of arcade machines until I found a game that didn’t look remotely combative. NBA Jam.
Erin and I had ended up taking turns on that one, me because I didn’t want to look at a brawler or fighting game or shmup, her maybe the same, but also because she was a huge basketball nerd. She’d seemed to know every player on every team, even though almost all of them must have retired before she was born.
She’d started to smile halfway through explaining why I didn’t know two of the Bulls players, while Michael Jordan, probably the only basketball player from before my time who I would recognize on sight, wasn’t on the roster. Then she’d glanced at the spot by the counter where the floor looked scrubbed clean. Her smile had faded.
I knew the feeling. I hadn’t had to grapple with it much in the arcade, but today, on the road, I’d smile at Lena’s chatter or the sight of an especially cool Third Eye object, then I’d look around at my teammates and feel guilty.
What was Gerry dealing with right now? What had Matt been dealing with for days before we realized he was gone?
I couldn’t begin to guess.
Frankly, I didn’t want to think about it. I shook my head, banishing memory and imagination alike, and joined Lena and Zhizhi at the counter. The latter had a bag of Ruffles she’d already paid for.
She popped one into her mouth and crunched it. When she saw me eyeing the bag, she said, “Turns out, I actually am made of money.”
Lena and I both laughed.
As soon as I did, I felt my smile draining away.
“Chin up, Cameron,” Zhizhi said. “These roads aren’t busy and they’re in good condition. You’re next in the driving rotation.”
“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “It certainly doesn’t put me at ease. But we’ve all got to do our part.”
“When am I next in the rotation?” Lena asked.
Zhizhi considered this. “Maybe not all of us.”
With that, she took her expensive chips, along with the rest of our supplies, and pushed out the front door of the convenience store. She left us with the ringing of its bell and the heat of a burn that Lena’s Fire could do nothing to ameliorate.
Lena puffed her cheeks out. Her freckles showed. She paid for our regular chips and two cans of Pepsi without a word to either me or the clerk. Then we followed Zhizhi out.
I pushed the glass door open and the bell rang again.
Lena said, “She’s right, you know.”
“That you’re a terrible driver? I forgive you.”
She kicked in the general direction of my shins, but didn’t make contact. “Not about that! I mean, technically, about that, too. But you’re not an asshole for smiling, Cam. We're gonna fix this, and anyway, it’s not your fault.”
Asshole or not, I smiled down at her. “Thanks, Lena. I know you’re both right. It just feels weird.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
She nodded.
“Let’s give this place a quick scan before we get back on the road,” I said.
She raised her phone and swept it over the convenience store’s parking lot. She pumped her fist. “Over there!”
I checked through my own camera.
For all that we’d talked up all the resources outside of town, we’d found disturbingly few so far this morning. Occasional copses of trees for Wood, a fake Wood or Iron sign here and there, but little that had been worth pulling over for. I’d begun to wonder if we should have just taken an expressway after all, instead of the state highway south from Parker. I’d begun to wonder if someone had noticed the finds we’d uploaded last week and decided to beat us to the rest in the area. All the convenient turnoffs and rest stops seemed to have been scouted. Even Castlewood Canyon, a big state park we’d thought might have a new Reactant, had been a bust. Picked clean.
Here, though, was an indication that we’d ventured into unscouted territory. The vacant lot across from Alta Convenience was not vacant when viewed through the Third Eye filter. According to the game, it contained a low, flat sheet metal shed, complete with a pile of tires out front and a sign I didn’t know how to read. Maybe Miguel or Joon Woo could’ve parsed it, depending on how far along their translation project had gotten.
Regardless, it was worth grabbing. How much Iron did that represent? I almost didn’t care. The tires would give us Plastic, and that was looking increasingly precious. I didn’t think we’d seen a single instance of it on the whole drive.
If we spent enough time on the road, would Plastic become valuable enough to us that we’d consider buying it with Tickets?
We had a few extra in our coffers now. Any thought that Mask had been lying about the Tickets ended the first time Erin won a game of NBA Jam. The Tickets had printed out from the automaton Ryu had once possessed, just like the first night at the arcade. Ryu himself had been with Lena at the time, modding a Strider cabinet, so we knew he wasn’t involved.
Collecting the Tickets had meant going up to the counter. Another thing that should’ve been fun, should’ve been cause for celebration, but which instead put us all on edge. Erin had stepped around the clean patch on the floor like she expected it to swallow her up, too.
Michelle wouldn’t even do that. She couldn’t so much as bring herself to look at the counter. She’d spent most of the evening playing Tetris – fair enough, great game, but it was famously unwinnable. I suspected she didn’t want to have to face the prospect of going up to collect her Tickets, and I didn’t blame her.
Eventually, it became apparent that we could each win just one string of Tickets, whether we played a cabinet modified by Ryu or not. I assumed it would refresh at midnight when our HP and MP did, since Lena and I were able to collect more after we’d already gotten some on our first trip. After that, Michelle had squared her shoulders and played a round of Street Fighter 2, while Erin either threw the match or proved herself to be a spectacularly terrible fighting game player.
Michelle had still refused to collect her Tickets. It took longer for her to argue with Erin about it than it had for her to win the match. Finally, shoulders slumped, Erin had tried collecting them, and they’d flashed and disappeared into her inventory.
Lena and I had six more Tickets each from Ryu and the printer we’d bought. He seemed limited to a single set each day, whereas Miguel’s Realm could serve up a set to every player. We could trade off collecting them, but it would slow our growth if we didn’t find enough Reactants in the wild to make up the difference. Maybe we should’ve swallowed our fear and huddled around that arcade, after all.
Far from it, in the bright light of the cloudless Colorado sky, the sparse traffic cleared. Lena sprinted across the road to examine our find.
I followed, scanning everything. Third Eye treated the tableau as two objects, and it apparently thought Lena had focused on both before I did, because I got only 10 XP for each. We still had no idea how these collectible objects were divvied up. Why were the shed and the pile of tires considered two separate things, despite their proximity, but, say, the door, walls, and roof of the shed all counted as part of one object?
Lena reached out. She hesitated. “I better wait.”
I nodded.
I thought about calling, but with the light traffic, it was faster to sprint back to the parking lot of the gas station.
I didn’t like most of the terrain out here, wide open with few trees and fewer hills, but I did find myself appreciating the lack of shadows. Because of our stop at Castlewood Canyon, it was almost noon. Almost exactly as far from the darkness of the other night as it was possible to get.
We were sort of on the run, although nobody outside our team knew it yet. For maybe the first time, though, I let myself feel like I was on vacation, too.
The last shock we got in Cinder Alley had come on the way out.
We’d hung around long enough for the clock to tick over and our resources to refresh. That had indeed allowed us to grab another six Tickets per player. Third Eye seemed to know that Miguel, Zhizhi, and Donica, who had joined us by then, were out of the game and not allowed to collect any, so they couldn’t generate any extras for us.
I’d been ready to put the grind behind us, and I thought everyone else felt the same, but as we left the arcade, Erin had hesitated.
“We are going to need to tell the police, you know.” Her words had echoed up and down the concourse.
None of us had responded until Miguel nodded. “Matt has already been gone long enough to be reported as a missing person. Gerry will soon join him. I don’t necessarily rate the Denver and Englewood PD, but it does not take a brilliant detective to think to ask close friends in the class one took and the other taught.”
“I don’t think I can lie to the cops about this,” Michelle had whispered.
Erin had nodded.
“Then there’s no way we can leave town,” Zhizhi had said. “We’re going to be at the top of the suspect list if we do.”
“I know,” Erin had said. “I’m so sorry.”
I remembered running my fingers through my hair while scenarios ran through my mind. All of them disastrous. Rescuing our friends? Foiling Omar’s schemes? Bringing Mask to justice? We’d be lucky if we didn’t hear the tournament results from our jail cell.
Who was I kidding?
If we couldn’t get stronger, if we were separated and isolated, if we had our phones confiscated as evidence?
The only reason Mask wouldn’t capture us with trivial ease was if he decided some of us weren’t worth bothering with.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Lena had said. Of course. Doing something, making something happen, pulling some scheme. She always wanted to try, until there was nothing left to try.
Erin had swallowed. “There’s not.” She’d pushed her glasses up, and her hand stayed covering her face. Her voice dropped to a mumble. “Unless... he did give me the password so I could cover admin...”
Lena’s eyebrows had shot up.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Donica had said. “You’ll buy some time, but you will get found out, and then we’re going to have a huge problem. What am I supposed to tell your dad? It’s a terrible idea.”
“Have you got a better one?” Erin had asked. From anyone else, it would’ve been sarcastic, a way of lashing out. I know that’s how Lena or I would’ve meant it. Erin, on the other hand, had genuinely wanted to know.
Donica had not had a better idea.
The proof?
Lena waved to Erin as we returned to the parking lot of the Alta Convenience. From the passenger seat of Donica’s Yukon, the only vehicle any of us had that was big enough to accommodate our team, Donica herself swallowed a sigh. Michelle peeked around the back of the SUV where she was helping Zhizhi load our supplies.
We were on the run. We were on a quest. We were on vacation. All of those could be true, but they wouldn’t buy us any time. They weren’t the explanation people outside the team knew about.
According to the email Erin had sent from Matt’s DU account, we were attached to a school trip.