Dorri sat in front of the high priestess in charge of the Gardens, paralyzed by the realization that the scrap of parchment she’d so carelessly stuffed into her pocket would condemn both her and Nildeyr if anyone found it.
Worse, Nildeyr thought she’d gotten rid of it. Why he would think she had when she’d messed up everything else, she couldn’t fathom, but there he sat, merrily trying to lie them both out of trouble.
“We failed to plan properly for our little holiday, I’m afraid and ashamed to admit. We were only going to take a little something, though. Just something small. Only enough to get by until we could make our way south to catch up to the troupe.”
The high priestess sighed and shook her head. “While we prefer to make the Gardens a welcoming place for everyone, I’m afraid we can’t have guests stealing from other guests.”
Nildeyr nodded gravely. Dorri could practically hear his mind whirling with plans for what to do next.
“What all have you taken, then?” The high priestess lifted her hands as if to gesture for them to be searched.
Dorri’s stomach tried to turn itself inside out.
“Justice Ramorile.” The priestess with the long black hair and almost-golden eyes who’d taken Nildeyr and Dorrias into custody suddenly stepped forward and spoke.
The high priestess blinked and turned her head. “Lor’ariel?”
“I think it would not do to turn two of Jaxon’s finest out on these dangerous roads alone. Especially as penniless as they are. I will be traveling to the south. They could accompany me.”
A silence fell as the high priestess tipped her head.
Dorri abruptly realized that at that very moment, no one could see her hands. The black-haired priestess—Lor’ariel—had stepped directly into Justice Ramorile’s line of sight and had her back to Dorri. With an instinct born of desperate fear, Dorri slipped her hand into her pocket and grasped at the damning parchment scrap with two fingers.
Please. Let me get one good roll.
Dice clattered in Dorri’s ears.
[You rolled a 22 for Deftness.]
Elation bubbled into Dorri’s chest. She couldn’t remember her modifier, but she had to have rolled a natural 18 or 19. With one swift motion, she plucked the parchment scrap from her pocket and flung it into the brazier burning just behind her.
The only sound was a sudden, crisp hiss. Dorri turned her head just enough to look over her shoulder and see the paper finish curling into a black husk and vanish into a wisp of smoke.
Relief blurred Dorri’s vision.
“We will provide a few rations for your travels.” The high priestess glanced sharply over the other priestess’s shoulder at Dorri and then even more sharply at Nildeyr. “And Lor’ariel will escort you safely back to the bosom of the Order of Riddles.”
Justice Ramorile wasn’t making a suggestion. Nildeyr and Dorrias were being summarily kicked out of not only the Gardens but also Diairm. Which meant that there would be no time for whatever alternative plans Nildeyr had been hastily constructing. They were just done. The only report they could deliver to Jaxon would be one of failure.
That wouldn’t have bothered Dorri so much. But her admittedly amorphous and tentative plan to leave Diairm and vanish back into the wilds as soon as she could was now also at risk. The quest to successfully swap intel out of Lord Dindale’s pen on behalf of the Order of Riddles might be over.
Failed.
But now she was caught up in this new quest to accompany the priestess Lor’ariel back to wherever it was the spy circus headquarters was located.
The Order of Riddles is known to make its home base in the city of Iskian, in the far south of the Mindet Valley region.
Dorri mentally swatted away the narrator’s helpful voice. That wasn’t the part that mattered.
This didn’t have to be the end of her attempt to steer her own adventure, of course. She could surely slip away from Lor’ariel alone without too much trouble. Maybe Nildeyr would even help her get away.
Screw this quest. I’ll just go wander in the damn woods and make my own quests.
Lor’ariel turned and smiled at Dorri with a glitter in her odd eyes that suggested she knew exactly what Dorri was thinking. Yet again, Dorri couldn’t quite shake that earlier feeling that the priestess was unduly satisfied with exactly how things had just gone. She knew a lot more than she was saying, Dorri was almost positive. It felt like the priestess wasn’t so much rescuing Dorri and Nildeyr as she was collecting them.
#
The next morning, sun’s dawning rays flickered over the smooth stones of Diairm’s main thoroughfare, painting rose and gold glimmers as its light filled the sky. Dorri shivered in the chill. Despite the early hour, the yeasty aroma of baking bread wafted from the market across the way from the Gardens. The bark of merchants hawking their wares turned chaotic what might otherwise have been a perfectly lovely still morning.
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“When she said ‘early,’ I didn’t realize she meant this early.”
Beside Dorri, Nildeyr rubbed his hands up and down his arms. They wore packs, both of them, and Dorri had chosen a heavier fabric for her traveling dress and donned a cloak against the cold she expected from a late autumn morning. Nildeyr wore leathers but had not bothered with a cloak. Dorri could only take that to mean that Nildeyr rarely found himself out of doors this time of day. Or rather, that he’d been programmed to behave that way.
By ‘she,’ Nildeyr had obviously meant Lor’ariel, or as they’d been instructed to call her, Lora. Lora had, like Dorri, dressed appropriately for their coming travels, with a heavy gray-blue cloak over her outfit. Lora, however, wore a flowing robe of shimmering shades of blue and aqua that swirled around her ankles. The morning breeze fluttered the multi-layered hems like colorful kerchiefs. Over top of the robe, Lora had fitted a breastplate of small silvery beads. Here and there in the weave of metal beads, deep blue beads glittered.
Lora was also armed with a smooth, featureless silver shield and a small mace too functional-looking to be ornamental. Altogether, the effect was that Lora appeared a vision of pure beauty, like a goddess come to life, while also pragmatically capable of beating sense into anyone who needed it.
NPC. She has to be. Everything about Lora screamed that she was herding Dorri along according to some secret plan. Certainly no player character would know enough about Redemption Wars at this point to be so certain about what to do next as Lora seemed.
So far as Dorri knew, anyhow. It still bugged her, that weird limbo period where she’d felt like a lot of time had passed. Exactly how many of the people milling around in this too-populated city were PCs? Had the game held all the uploads in some kind of suspended animation so that no one really started playing until every other PC had been processed? That didn’t seem impossible. The gamemakers had claimed that the System would create custom storylines for each PC and that their stories could be interwoven.
Forced social interaction, just like in the good old real world. Woo.
The first people to upload had been lucky. Things in the real world had only gone screaming faster toward hell after the Neuroconnect Initiative announcement. Everyone had wanted their own preorder of Redemption Wars, and Ugly Star had started making money hand over fist. That had generated backlash, of course.
Dorri’s mother had always claimed, in her smiling, clueless way, that hard times caused people to pull together. Dorri had already known that was a rose-colored lie, but society had proved her right in a big way. People of course pointed and screamed greedy at Ugly Star. Ugly Star claimed continuing to sell the game instead of giving it away was a simplified way to triage who got on the wait list and that they hadn’t set out to make money off the situation—who was going to be alive to use money of any kind in the very near future, anyhow, including them? Their cavalier attitude predictably threw gasoline on the existing dumpster fire, and the topic shifted to privilege and who got to choose who lived and died, followed by defensive rejoinders of providing technology and scientific advances and how people should be grateful not angry.
The whole global screaming match had seemed like a monumental waste of energy to Dorri—although she remained vaguely, uncomfortably self-aware that as someone who already had the preorder, she was judging from a place of privilege, herself. But as with so many media train wrecks, it was also impossible to escape if you wandered anywhere the media could reach you, and Dorri’s mother was a regular purveyor of sensationalist media.
She was. She’s not anymore.
Hot, fresh tears welled in Dorri’s eyes, accompanied by a wave of hollow pain in her chest. She focused on the physical sensations in her body—cold air stinging her cheeks and the end of her nose, rattle of passing carts—until the overwhelm receded to a manageable level.
The real world had ended so stupidly, with governments and media sticking to their business as usual while the world around them died. At some level, Dorri understood it was about being desperate to cling to the illusion of control. She’d only wanted to turn it all off and never hear their voices again.
Got your wish, didn’t you?
Except that wasn’t quite right, because it implied someone had granted Dorri’s wish. She’d done it for herself. She hadn’t been sick when she opted to upload. She just hadn’t had any reasons left not to. In light of everything that happened, it had seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
And now she was here. Figuratively speaking, anyhow. Dorri forced herself to focus on sensory input and ground herself in the present moment.
Lora stood several steps away from Dorri and Nildeyr, closer to the edge of the thoroughfare that ran between Diairm’s north and south gates. Wagons rolled through, chasing an assortment of lumbering, snorting beasts of burden, from oxen to thick-bodied draft horses to donkeys. Among and between them wound loose lines of travelers on foot.
What Lora had said was that she preferred to wait a bit and see if there might be a traveling group with an armed escort they might join up with before striking out to the south. The expectant way Lora watched the north gate and scanned the crowd coming in through it, Dorri wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what happened.
And what about my plans?
Redemption Wars was, despite Dorri’s misgivings about some aspects of it, a promising use of Neuroconnect, which was in turn as amazing as Ugly Star had been claiming. The tech had created a world that was overwhelmingly real. Not to mention, of course, that it had saved her from simply dying when she logged out from real life.
Dorri saw no reason she couldn’t be impressed and grateful without also calculating ways to make the game allow her to live her virtual life the way she preferred. That, however, was turning out to be a trickier proposition than she’d thought it would.
The Garden’s keepers required guests to check any weapons before being allowed to roam the grounds, which had included Dorri’s longbow and quiver and even the little hand axe and utility knife she carried in her gear at all times. Those things had been returned when they left this morning. Nildeyr carried a shortbow and wore a rapier at a rakish angle on his hip. Dorri would have thought the rapier was merely costuming, except that she’d had the chance to see him use it in the exhibitions the Order of Riddles used as a front for their true work. And of course, if all the stereotypes held, he no doubt had a dagger or three on him, as well.
The return of all her gear increased Dorri’s chances of surviving in the wilds. All she had to do was get out of the city and out from under Lora’s watchful eye. Which seemed simple enough in theory. What Dorri didn’t know was how well Redemption Wars handled solo players or what level of mobs she might run into in various areas outside the city. Keeping at least one companion on hand might be smart, at least until she got a better idea about what was possible within game constraints.
Which meant convincing Nildeyr to follow her instead of her following him. Taking charge of her own quest instead of being railroaded by the NPCs.
The only real question was how easy Nildeyr would be to convince.