Chapter 93: Record

Donica stared at her outstretched hand and the door she’d pushed open. The rest of us stared at her.

“Your frames are dropping badly,” Erin said. “You really need to get out of there.”

Donica stepped into the room.

I ran after her, just barely catching the door before it swung shut and separated us. I heard Lena’s and Zhizhi’s boots ring on the concrete behind me, felt Lena’s arm bump into mine.

I didn’t look back. My eyes were locked on the interior of the room.

Donica hadn’t gotten far. She’d taken two steps, just barely clearing the swinging door, and skidded to a halt. The splinters of what I was pretty sure had been a half-finished desk blocked her path, snapped down the middle, legs sticking upwards at odd angles.

One chair had just fallen over, but two others, each with an accompanying desk, had been shattered. I had to guess at their numbers considering how their pieces lay strewn around the room. Around the edges of the room, I mean. Everything seemed arranged around a central circle. None of the debris touched it.

In fact, when I looked closer, I realized the dust didn’t, either.

“That’s a new one,” Lena whispered.

I blinked and shook my head. I raised my phone.

Through Third Eye, I saw dirt and broken concrete mounded up all along the edges of the central circle. Inside the berm, the hole it had been dug out of descended out of the light and out of view.

“I don’t know what that is,” Matt said through my headset, his normally deep voice so sped up it was almost squeaky, “but you’d better exercise extreme caution.”

Donica knelt.

“That is not extreme caution,” Matt said.

She ignored him.

She touched a chunk of concrete and I thought it might turn to Stone. Nope. She tossed it aside and I heard it clatter against the wall, even though it landed far outside the cone of vision Third Eye offered me. Beside me, Zhizhi jumped; for her, the sound would be the only indication of the objects she couldn’t see.

From Lena’s arms, Bernie hissed.

“As much as I hate to say this,” I said, “I think maybe we should listen to Matt. Erin, how many frames are we dropping now?”

My headset started to crackle with her answer. Then, abruptly, the sound cut out.

I grunted as weight pushed against my shoulders. Instinctively, I reached out to catch Lena. I felt her arms wrap around mine, and Bernie’s sticky feet cling to my shoulders as his hiss intensified. Nobody reached for Zhizhi. She went down on one knee and offered a hiss of her own.

Donica lifted a clump of dirt.

It crumbled in her glove, spilling down over the soft brown leathers of her cloak and catching on the crystalline clasps of her sleeves. If the heaviness in the room afflicted her, she gave no sign of it. If anything, as she held her hands up and wiggled her fingers, she seemed to move with a lightness I’d never seen in her.

Which didn’t help us any, as the gravity seemed to build and build, like the room, or maybe the world, was collapsing in on itself.

Lena’s wings slumped against my back and the floor and she grunted with the effort of keeping her feet. I knew the feeling. My amulet dragged me down, too heavy for my neck, but then, what wasn’t too heavy? Everything wanted to return to the earth, to bury itself, and us with it. The fragments of desks creaked and snapped and crumpled. Bernie started to slip, and Lena and I both gripped him tightly to hold him up.

“What the actual fuck,” Zhizhi breathed.

I wrenched my gaze to her.

She stared at us and at the room.

She wore an orange safety jacket over a sleek black coat, blue jeans, work boots, and a scrunchy to tie back her hair. Normal modern clothes.

She was the only one.

She fought with trembling hands to drag her camera up.

I forced my aching neck to nod to Lena, and she managed the same. We staggered over and helped brace Zhizhi.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Donica scooped up another handful of dirt and crushed it between her hands. She shoved concrete away and ran her fingers through the disturbed earth.

It seemed to shake loose, like dirt eroding from the exposed roots of a tree, but instead of filtering down the hole, it came to Donica. She stood. She rose, not off the ground but with it. She brought her hands up and the earth, her Earth, fell up from the floor to reach them.

She clapped, and the dirt was gone, and so was the awful heaviness. Lena stumbled, and only Bernie clinging to her with his back feet and me with his front ones kept her upright.

Donica’s Earth was gone, but the hole remained.

The unnatural gravity was gone, yet I still felt pulled toward it.

None of us moved. The only sounds were our heartbeats and the crackling of Lena’s flames, then we began to breathe again and it sounded horribly loud.

Donica turned, but she kept staring down at herself. The black gem at the heart of her amulet seemed to shine, though it looked darker than it ever had before.

She wrenched her eyes up to us and they widened further.

She squeezed them shut.

I blinked.

Erin’s voice crackled in my ear. “– don’t care, I’m going in after them!”

“Did we read different messages from the dev?” Miguel asked.

“You don’t even have safety equipment,” Matt said. “If you’re not willing to listen to me, at least –”

I clutched the headset. “We’re okay.” My voice sounded ragged.

Silence on the other end.

Then three voices, all at once, all overloud. I winced and tugged the headset away from my ear until they settled down.

“Thank God you’re all right,” Erin said. “It’s been fourteen minutes! Do you need us to come in and get you?”

“No!” I said it, and so did Lena and Donica.

I considered this turnabout fair play for what my ear had been subjected to.

“Okay,” Erin murmured. “Okay. We’ll go back to the Yukon.”

“Yeah. Just wait there.” I took a deep breath. “What did you see on your end?”

“Very little,” Miguel said. “All we got from your microphones was static, most of your camera feeds remained frozen on a single frame, and those running Third Eye came through as a slideshow.”

“So we don’t have a decent record. That sucks.” The little cameras clipped to our vests had no internal memory, they just broadcast whatever passed in front of their lenses to one of the laptops in the Yukon. I rolled my shoulders. My body still felt sore from the gravity that had pressed down on us. “It wasn’t just me who saw that, right?”

“No way,” Lena said. “It was just like back in my old apartment.”

Donica clutched the front of her safety vest, where her amulet would be on her avatar. “I saw it, too. Felt it.”

I nodded. “Congrats.”

She tried to smile, but her face didn’t quite find the right configuration.

“Still feel like an NPC?” Lena asked.

“Depends on whether this was intended content or not, I guess,” Donica said.

“Heh.” Lena patted Bernie’s head and gave him a squeeze. He was a plushie again, unless I peeked through my phone. “Of course it is. If it was a glitch, it would’ve either killed us or given you something way cooler than plain old Earth.”

Donica looked at her phone.

“It was Earth, right?” Lena asked.

Donica nodded.

Lena shrugged. “There you go. One of us!”

“You’re starting to make me regret it.”

“I’m very glad that you got a Reactant, Donica, obviously,” Erin said. “But please, now will you leave the site?”

“Yeah,” Donica said. “I wasn’t trying to delay us. I just hit the wall, and...”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Miguel said. “It worked out for the best, yes?”

“Assuming I want to keep playing.” Despite herself, Donica looked down at her phone again. That smile she hadn’t quite managed began to tug at the corner of her lips.

She’d want to keep playing, all right.

I looked her up and down with my phone, curious if her avatar’s outfit had changed like Lena’s did. Nope. Maybe because she hadn’t gotten armor in the first place, she hadn’t shed it when she claimed her Reactant? Or was it because this was just a Reactant in the wild, not part of a Realm meant for a specific player?

Like all things Third Eye, it raised more questions than it answered.

Questions better pondered from the safety of literally anywhere else.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get outta here.”

“I’m with that,” Lena said.

Donica just nodded. She and I reached down to help Zhizhi to her feet.

Zhizhi flinched away from our touch. Her wide eyes flickered back and forth between us.

“What?” I asked.

“You... I...” She dragged down a ragged breath. “What the hell was that?”

“That’s what it looks like when one of us gets a Reactant,” I said.

“Okay, but –” She shook her head. “How did I see it? Forget seeing. I felt it! It felt like I weighed a million pounds.”

“We tried to tell you what it was like,” I said. “The gravity was new, but it must depend on what kind of Reactant you’re getting. Whatever it is, I guess, at least for a little while, it really is real.”

Zhizhi shuddered. “And you want that?”

“Don’t you?” Lena asked.

“No! It scared the shit out of me.”

“Fair,” Lena said. “But think about it. Isn’t Cam wrong?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“About us not having a record, I mean.” Lena pointed at the camera Zhizhi clung to. “Unless I’m totally clueless about how those things work, you just caught real magic on tape.”