I Found You

The rocky footing dragged Yeung-Sung down. He kept looking back, though he was determined to move forward. Outside of the colony he definitely felt strange. The sudden lack of energy flowing caused his body to reach backwards. It craved it, his pores like open mouths unplugged from their daily bottle. But he strode forward, regardless.

Is it really him?

By the shore of the lake a figure lay with his head up in his arms, lounging, thinking out into the pouring grey. He pushed on, faster. But the gravel beneath his feet crushed inwards and spun each step aside. Yeung-Sung swayed in his furious dance against the ground, grimacing as the fragments all cracked like a million tiny bones. There was also that disparate smell of wetness in the air, along with the bracing chill that wound itself along the continental valley. The gamut of emotions churned overhead, making Yeung-Sung’s path feel like a dream. But as he got closer, the rocks swelled into stable stones, the wetness pocketed into the earth as the lake, and the breeze moved on, carrying its message further west. He stretched out and said,

“Wil, its me.”

It couldn’t have been relaxing to be laid out on the rocky beach, yet somehow Wil made it appear so.

“I found you.”

The head of Yeung-Sung’s shadow popped into Wil’s view. Wil clearly saw it, clearly hearing and recognising his voice, but his reactions were slow, his movements insignificant. Keeping his hands behind his head, he craned over as if Yeung-Sung was simply a splatter of rain on the other side of a window that could not be rubbed away; yes, it was a glassy, faraway face that stared at Yeung-Sung.

Standing over Wil, Yeung-Sung stuck his head over like a motherly oak. “Let’s go. We need to head back.”

Wil stared. The rain dived down in streaks in the outstretched greying water of the lake behind him.

“-There’s so many things we need to catch up on,”

The downpour met the beach and started sloppy applause through the stones. Wil stared, letting his off-white shirt be continuously spat upon and battered by it.

“-Everyone at the Wick has missed you so much – “

As a blob of wet smashed his eyelash, Yeung-Sung shut up and let the damp cold run down from his neck to his shoulders, down through the sweat and red-speckled arm, dropping down to Wil. Shivering, he wished that he had taken Carmen’s gun. That would have done a better job at liberating Wil from this despondent state.

He knows. After looking up to the Champion faction for his entire colony career, they turned out to have never been the nerd-infested gaming family he had been hoping for all his life. And instead the captured him. Now he looking up at me. What do I do, what can I say to give back something of what has been taken form Wil?

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Through the curtains of a thousand beads of rain, Yeung-Sung said, “I’m sorry.

“But we need to go back.”

Wil shifted his hand over to his navel and stared straight up, past Yeung-Sung, into the woolly grey.

“I don’t know why they sent you,” he said. His hand moved like a boat in the waves of his breathing.

“How am I going to help anyone when I’ve been stuck here all this time and drip-fed information?”

Wil shook his head, which looked ragged and overgrown, and he clearly was not use to being able to see it in front of him.

That’s the stubborn Wil I know.

Yeung-Sung wagged his dripping arm closer. “Take my hand, you idiot.”

“-If it takes weeks just to gather the resources to beat a single gauntlet, how do they expect us to catch up in…however long we have. Doesn’t matter. It’s not enough, is it?”

He turned to Yeung-Sung for the first time. “You know, right? How long we have?”

“What are you talking about? I beat the last stage of section five only four days ago,” Yeung-Sung told him.

Wil scrambled like a drunk spider against the gravel. “What?”

Gravel skittered and clacked like hot corn. “You did -you mean, you figured it out?”

Righting himself, Wil went in for a high-five, but on seeing the jagged imprints and remaining bits of stone in the flesh of his palm, Yeung-Sung refrained from joining it, waving his hands and entering a bow.

Wil flicked them into the lake, but his momentum had been stopped.

“If you’re beating them, why are you even here?”

They really didn’t tell him anything.

“Man!” Wil mumbled, watching the ripples of the raindrops bounce of the deeper waves of the drop stones, “I haven’t won a single run!”

He paused then, still mumbling. “Well…”

Shrugging, Yeung-Sung took a crunching step to join Wil, shoulder to shoulder, gazing out over the bloating lake.

“It’s because,” Yeung-Sung said with a sigh, “She’s grown savvy to me.”

“Anita?”

“No it’s –”

“Woo-Yi? Tough luck, man,” interjected Wil again, giving him commiserative pat.

“What? No,” Yeung-Sung said, pushing Wil back, “I’m talking about the Airgead AI!”

Wil frowned. “…is a she?”

“Sort of,” replied Yeung-Sung, “but the point is nobody trusts me enough to help, they think I’m working with Jordan now. But you…”

“No! I can’t help you!”

Wil spoke up, dismissing the words. He shouted over the torrents of rain that invaded the lake’s seamless surface, over the indifferent wind that beat his shirt into rippling out his back like a flag. He shouted over the ears of Yeung-Sung, who shut himself off from hearing his petty ‘reasons’, and instead swung his hand through the reeds at the lakebed, catching a sticky vine that gripped his finger in a fuzzy sticky embrace and didn’t let go even when it was pulled from the earth and killed.

It wasn’t that Wil was wrong, but that his attitude didn’t help anyone. Least of all himself. Yeung-Sung thought back to the side of the road, to the unstable government agent that fondled her gun like a car key, waiting for the repair shop to bring her baby back to her.

Even if he doesn’t believe in himself, I have to believe in Wil.

“Of course you’re gonna do it, Wil, “Yeung-Sung said, using the phrasing picked up from his American friend, “You’re the God of games.”

Flinging his shoulders back with a currrackk, Wil leered at Yeung-Sung. The rain bounced violently off his body, giving him a shine -no, an aura of renewed energy. He laughed and laughed, until he sneezed, falling over into Wil’s arm like a fucking fish.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Wil then said, a wet grin on his face, “Let’s get dry first.”

Snorting up a spool of mucus in his childish chortle, he added, “Maybe, um, get a drink?”

The two walked back through the slurry of stones, keeping each other steady by joining arms over shoulders. As the crested they valley, the saw Carmen. She stood at the boundary of the colony, Yeung-Sung’s phone held in one fist, her Glock in the other, down at her side, half-concealed by the thin stripe of metal that was the bumper rail.

I may not get out of this safe -I’ve made enough enemies now. But the least I can do is to make sure he does.