On his control room screens, Julius Himura watched Eddie sneak into the game space through the maintenance hatch into the bathroom where the new girl was hunched over the bathroom sink clutching her belly. Her suit telemetry indicated she was in some distress, with elevated heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. Her Soul Points were approaching zero, as the talisman had been siphoning them away into the system for several hours. To make sure she didn’t escape, Himura engaged her suit brake, which would have a similar effect to encasing her in cold molasses. With the woman mostly immobilized, Eddie clamped a hand over her mouth, scooped her up, and ducked back through the maintenance hatch, which would be invisible to anyone still wearing their visors.

But then Himura’s entire control panel, screens and everything, went black and silent.

“What is this now?” he said in growing alarm. Power failure? No, the lights were on. System crash? No, there were backup systems for backup systems. A full system crash would require something like an electromagnetic pulse detonation.

He hit an intercom button. “GM, are you there?”

No response.

Now that was concerning. No GM meant that the artificial intelligence core had been locked up somehow or sent into an infinite feedback loop. But it was not like the early days of computer programming when, under certain conditions, a poorly debugged conditional loop could crash the program. For an AI like the Gamemaster, such an occurrence would be like a momentary daydream, or “zoning out” as the humans were calling it in this era, a moment quickly recovered from.

His control room was centrally located at one of the nodes of the Resonator Core. The Ruby Ticket game space was a few floors down. The nearest maintenance hub abutted that game space. With his entire system down, he had no way to communicate with Eddie, much less anyone else. Until this moment, he would never have thought such a thing could occur, because into all the redundant systems he’d built redundant back doors. He had no idea whether there were hundreds or thousands of confused players locked in a pitch black game spaces in a labyrinthine building.

He picked the red telephone to reach the emergency department, but there was no dial tone.

On the wall was an emergency reset switch, which would perform a hard reboot of every system in the building—including the Resonator. Which meant weeks or months of stored resonance flux would dissipate in an instant. His efforts would be back to square one, which would increase the chances his back doors and subverted systems might be discovered.

“Hold fast, for now,” he told himself.

So he left the control room and descended the narrow stairwell to find Eddie.

He burst into the maintenance hub and found a gamesuited body sprawled on the floor, motionless.

“Eddie!” he said, kneeling beside the big man. His visor was shattered, and blood ran from his nose and ear and from the cracks in his mangled visor. On the floor nearby was a tool tray full of tools, several of which lay scattered across the floor.

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Himura felt for a pulse at Eddie’s neck. It was weak, but steady. Eddie’s body had probably sufficiently integrated with the suit that it would help heal even a skull fracture. But he had to find where that accursed new girl—Savannah was her name—had run off to. When Himura’s control room systems had crashed, her gamesuit brake must have been released. If the systems were up, it would be a matter of seconds to track her. But they weren’t.

Eddie groaned and stirred.

Himura stood over him.

Half of Eddie’s face was swollen, one eye almost shut. The other eye fluttered open and tried to focus.

Himura said, “You let your prey get the better of you.”

Eddie rolled onto one elbow, rubbing and blinking his good eye. “Suit brake didn’t work.” His words were slurred.

“I wouldn’t have thought you needed it.” Himura’s voice dripped with derision.

“She’s strong. Knew some martial arts…” Eddie levered himself to his knees. “My head… Feels broken.”

“There was a monumental glitch in the game system. If I can get it back up and running, you’ll heal quickly.”

Then he remembered the maintenance terminal here in the hub. It wouldn’t have the capabilities of his control room, but it would at least tell him how many of the building’s systems were still running. He crossed the chamber to a locked metal cabinet on the wall, fished out his universal key, and opened the doors. Within stood a large screen, keyboard, and control glove. He quickly powered up the terminal, donned the glove, and brought up several system reports, scanning them.

“Most curious,” he muttered. None of the game spaces had recorded any sort of outage. None of the players in the building had experienced any glitch in game play or environment.

But then he pulled up system checks on the Gamemaster. Its core temperature and memory were nominal, but a few minutes ago its neural network activity had spiked to the upper rail. That might explain its inability to respond.

He pulled up gameplay numbers and footage for every game space with games in progress, and found no anomalies. Until…

The Ruby Ticket game space had experienced some sort of system override. Approximately four and a half minutes of game data was gone as if it didn’t exist. There was no record of what had happened in that space during those minutes—no footage, no combat data, no skill use data, no transcript of what was said or by whom. Another strange occurrence, something he didn’t think was possible. With so many redundant systems, the only thing that would explain it was if all the data busses in and out that game space had been overridden at the same moment, and all that data shunted off somewhere else.

Someone—or something—had taken over that game space for four and a half minutes. Did he dare try calling the boss? As the director of Karnath’s Crimson Castle, Himura had full discretion, which was how he’d engineered the systems and put the necessary people in place to launch his plan. Alistair Marquand was not known to communicate with underlings. Himura had never seen the man in person. He simply sent his reports and requisitions, which were received without comment.

Could it have been the Others? Th’zai itself? Could the great Th’zai have sensed its lowly slave’s efforts and taken matters into its own…appendages?

Were his resonance flux calculations in error? Unlikely, as he had checked and rechecked them so many times.

More investigation was needed.

“What are your orders, Master?” Eddie asked. He had been on his knees, head bowed for several minutes. Himura checked Eddie’s shattered visor. The bleeding had stopped, and the broken pieces had begun to knit. The swelling on one side of his face had turned shrunk to a purplish-black bruise. Eddie’s serrated tongue flicked across his cracked lips.

“Your healing will accelerate now I have system access again. The moment you’re at a hundred percent, your mission remains the same.”

“Maybe I’ll just kill her.”

“You have my permission. If you choose to feast, fail to save my tribute at your peril. My own hunger grows.”

“Of course, Master. We feast in Th’zai’s name.”

“In Th’zai’s name.”