Neb took the printer from his inventory and set it down on a flat stone.

‘Can we print some orbs?’ Anna asked at once.

‘Orbs require a lot of energy and there is very little charge left,’ Neb said. ‘But we can still print something useful.’ He manipulated the symbol field with his hands, talking quietly to the machine at the same time. Then to Anna he said: ‘We need to go to the library. If we haven’t fucking torched it with the ultrafusion. We’ve known it right from the beginning.’

‘I don’t think we have,’ she replied, somewhat coolly.

‘Look around, Anna,’ he said, gesturing tiredly. ‘Our team is almost dead. The mesomorph is twice the size it was, and twenty-five levels higher. Half the Circle is destroyed. How do you think we’re doing?’

She didn’t answer, but folded her arms. He turned his attention back to the machine and a golden field flooded from it, projecting on the ground.

‘What are you making?’ she asked.

‘Transport.’ The beginnings of something corporeal were already starting to form in the field.

‘Can you print weapons?’

‘No.’ He resisted the urge to close his eyes in frustration. Every one of these soldiers has a one-track mind. ‘This printer only prints tools and defenses.’

The object in the circle gathered more mass and took on a definite shape. He felt a flicker of his old wonder for the Main.

‘How much energy is left on the device?’ Anna asked.

‘Less than one percent. I think this is pretty much going to be it.’

They were silent, watching the printer do its work. Finally the golden field winked out of existence, and sitting there was a slender machine with a long saddle and a steering control. But the machine was down on the ground, as if its wheels had not been printed.

‘Was that what you expected?’ Anna asked.

Neb was certain she knew by his face it was not. It was supposed to be a motorcycle. He checked the printer settings again, but as far he could tell everything there was correct. He got down and examined the printed object closely. The steering control was a complex shape, with clear grips for the driver’s hands on either side and a range of symbols and controls in the center. It looked somewhat motorcycle-like, but the lack of wheels was clearly an issue.

One symbol seemed to be set slightly away from the others, and he touched it. Then he yelped and fell backwards as the machine jumped into the air. It floated about a meter off the ground, emitting a gentle white light underneath. Neb knew that on Earth the military was exploring hovertech, but it was at scales around the size of a battleship. Not a personal transport.

He walked around the device, touching it gently. It did not rock or waver as he would have expected, but sat rock-solidly on whatever force was holding it up.

‘Do you know how to ride that?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, projecting all his imaginary confidence into the world. ‘Come on.’

He jumped on the hoverbike and Anna got on behind him, swinging her leg over athletically and slipping her arms around him. When Neb put his hands on the control wheel he felt it reconfiguring itself, switches and controls resizing to his hand. He touched the most prominent control gently, guessing it was the throttle, and the hoverbike moved forward smoothly. There was a faint glitter in the air around them as a protective field formed. Neb accelerated and they could feel the rush of the wind, but it was greatly lessened by the field, enabling them to talk.

‘Can it fly?’ Anna asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It was in a section of the printer interface which I think meant ground transportation, or at least something short range.’

‘Okay,’ Anna said. ‘Well -- let’s go for it.’

Neb pushed hard on the throttle and they catapulted forward. Anna gripped him tighter. They raced down the ravine toward a steep narrow trail and the hoverbike tilted steeply backwards when they reached it. Neb hung on to the wheel and followed the trail over and back until they came out over the edge of the ravine.

He caught his breath. The land was coal-black as far as they could see, from horizon to horizon. There was not a hint of grass or a sliver of life or civilization. Smoke and dust hung in the air.

‘Wow,’ Anna said. ‘Ultrafusion packs a punch.’ But Neb could hear the shock in her voice.

He accelerated hard towards the distant library. The Game clock had less than two hours remaining. Hardly more than a blink. The kilometers ticked by but all they saw was blackened desolation -- no roads, no grass, no trees, no animals, no life of any kind. Hills had been smoothed over by the force of the ultrafusion fire. Were any other players out here, Neb wondered, who had survived in caves or a ravine or some other fold in the landscape? They’d be dead soon enough anyway, unless they too could find some sort of mechanized transport.

As they traveled Neb became increasingly certain the library would be gone, obliterated by the ultrafusion fire even though it was almost all the way across the map from where they had fired the weapon. But after ten kilometers or so the blackness thinned and ran out, and the bright colors of the world returned. It was a deep psychological relief to be free of the blackened land, and equally a weight to think of Buzz and Meathead and Mallory still unconscious at its heart. We will get back to them, Neb promised himself. But he was not at all sure it was true.

Neb had always thought of the library as a grand, imposing building, but as they pulled up to the spot marked on the map, all he saw were low, rough buildings squatting in sandy desert. It was bright and hot. The dustcloud from the hoverbike settled slowly. The place seemed abandoned. They walked among the buildings with their rifles in their hands, but all of them were empty.

‘Maybe the library was not the right call after all,’ Anna said. Neb felt a surge of annoyance. Fuck. Maybe she was right. She traced her fingertips over the stone of one of the huts, and they came away dusty.

Then both she and Neb reacted instantly, rifles raised, as a deep voice spoke from within one of the little huts.

‘Whether it was the right call depends on what you seek,’ the voice said. In the dimness of the hut a person was sitting cross-legged, wearing a loose-fitting desert robe. The person had not been there a moment before. They were not of determinable age or gender, and yet they created an impression of presence and solidity that Neb associated with long experience.

‘I’m Raphael,’ the person said. They stood in an easy, fluid, not-quite-organic way, more like a machine unfolding than a person rising, and stepped outside.

Neb stepped back and he did not lower his rifle. In the light Raphael now seemed to look young, their skim firm and tanned and unlined. ‘I am no threat,’ they said. ‘What is it you seek?’

Neb and Anna glanced at each other. Anna spoke first. ‘Can you tell us how to pass the gate guardian?’ she asked. ‘The mesomorph.’

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‘The mesomorph is not a sentient creature,’ Raphael said. ‘It was a curiosity for the Main, who were obsessed with power in all its forms. It was a true threat on its original planet, of course. But to the Main, it was something more like a pet. The specimen at the gate has been trained since birth to ignore people wearing quoncent chains. The metal appears very bright and unpleasant to the mesomorph visual system.’

Neb found himself standing completely open mouthed. Only Anna’s innate reserve was stopping her from looking just as dumbfounded.

‘I see this comes as a shock to you,’ Raphael continued with a smile. ‘People often miss the clues. You have to be looking out for something a little more circumspect than the direct path. Players are almost always attracted to straight lines.’

‘These, uh, quoncent chains,’ Neb said. ‘How could we get some?’

‘They are hard to come by,’ Raphael answered. ‘The answer to that question is not always the same. Sometimes they can be found in the Banker’s house or in the Emorist’s compound. Sometimes they can be traded for in Edgetown. The metal itself can be mined in the tunnels near the southern military base. But we are late in the Circle now, and so other players may have already taken them from the places I mentioned, or perhaps they were never there in this iteration.’

Neb’s thoughts were spinning and he was finding it hard to focus. There was so little time left, and they were so far from the gate, and all of this information from Raphael was just so shocking in its open simplicity. He tried to think of more things to ask, but he felt as if they had already lost. He focused on his breathing, trying not to look at the Game clock. He glanced at Anna, but she seemed to have no more ideas than he did. They should have come to the library at the beginning, and then they would have known what to look for. But now half the Circle was toast, and they were almost out of time.

‘We have a device,’ Neb said, desperately. He took the printer from his inventory. ‘It is almost out of energy, but can it print them?’

‘Oh,’ Raphael said. ‘My turn to be surprised. And I can tell you that my surprise is a very rare thing.’ He examined the printer closely. ‘That device is not always in this Circle. Yes, it will print them.’

Neb felt his heart leap. ‘Does it have enough energy?’ he asked, hardly daring to listen to the answer.

‘We will find out together,’ Raphael answered.

Raphael’s hands moving swift and sure amongst the golden symbols faster than Neb could follow, getting the device ready. ‘The creature is an ultramorph now,’ Neb said to Raphawl as he worked. ‘Will the chains still work?’

Raphael made a gesture that was essentially a shrug, but it seemed to have more meaning layered on top that Neb did not quite understand. ‘Evolution is strange,’ they answered. ‘You can never really predict it. How many chains do you need?’

‘Five,’ Neb answered. He thought of Meathead, Mallory and Buzz alone in the ravine and thought: Hopefully five. But he didn’t say it aloud.

Raphael stepped back and the printer came to life, casting the golden field as before. Five shapes started to fade into existence on the sand, as if they were being revealed rather than created. The trio watched in silence as the chains completed one by one. They were ordinary looking things, like uninspired jewelry, heavy links of a silver-gray metal meant to be worn around the neck. They lay on the sand as though they had been there for hours, rather than newly summoned into being. The printer finished, and as soon as it did so it became silent and still and dark.

‘It had just enough energy,’ Raphael said. ‘Perhaps luck is with you.’

‘We need healing orbs too,’ Neb said. ‘‘Do you… By any chance…’

‘How many?’ Raphael asked.

‘Three. More, if you can spare them.’

Raphael closed their hand and opened it again, and there were three orbs there. Neb took them with a murmured ‘Thanks’. He did not comment on the implication: Three is all you get. He tucked the orbs into his inventory, then stooped and picked up the chains. He expected them to be warm but they were not. He turned them through his hands, link by link. Had the Game really tried to nudge them towards finding these chains? Despite what Raphael had said, Neb couldn’t remember ever seeing anything to that end. He was starting to think the Game had one true aim: Suffering.

‘Neb,’ Anna said quietly. ‘We’re almost out of time.’

Neb looked to Raphael and asked: ‘Are you Main? Are you them?’

‘No,’ Raphael answered. ‘They are gone. I am a Remnant. Part of the System they left behind to run the Game.’

‘What else should we know? What should we have done? What even is the point of the Game? What is the prize?’ Neb found the questions running out one after the other, almost uncontrollably.

‘No-one knows the prize,’ Raphael said. ‘That’s the deepest mystery of the Game, and of the Main. And as for your choices, they are your own. No-one can make them for you. That’s the trouble with consciousness, at all levels -- it’s very hard to make good choices.’

Neb closed his eyes, feeling an overwhelming desire to lie down on the ground and just go to sleep. Was this what a breakdown felt like? He was edging closer than he ever had before to total instability. Too much had happened in too little time.

‘Doc,’ Anna said. ‘We need to move.’

He glanced over at her, and for once didn’t see her beauty. He saw only her: hard, unyielding, uncompromising, cold. But more, too: brave, strong, wise. A woman of action. Kind, too, in a strange and possibly very fucked up sort of way. So, yes. Beautiful. A frightening beauty.

‘Will we meet again?’ he asked Raphael.

The being smiled. ‘You can predict anything except the future.’

Neb smiled. ‘I guess we’ll find out,’ he sad.

He and Anna got back on the hoverbike and accelerated hard back the way they had come, streaking across the dead lands to whatever last horrors the Circle had left for them.

Buzz, Mallory and Meathead were as they had left them, still unconscious in the ruins of the transport. Neb paused before he applied the orbs, looking at each player. Buzz’s face was lined and craggy, older in repose than he looked in motion. Neb knew almost nothing about him as a person. Wife? Husband? Children? Anything? No idea. Neb found his gaze drawn instead to Mallory, as if his mind simply could not contemplate Buzz as a man rather than a commander. Mallory was chiseled and handsome in a way that was often not obvious in his high-energy waking state. Neb could see what Anna saw in him. Last was Meathead. At the beginning, when they had started the mission, it was Meathead that Neb had most hated. His insults were the sharpest, his insights the most cutting. And his antics the funniest. Meathead’s neck was almost as broad as his head, and the left side of his face was lined with tiny scars, almost invisible in normal circumstances. Some old injury or other. He had seen some shit, Neb knew, but he had come through it more true to himself, not less. Again Neb felt sad at how little he knew of him. Did Meathead even have a real name? If he did, Neb had never heard anyone use it. He reached out and touched Meathead’s face, and whispered: ‘Brother’. Then he applied the orbs to all three of the men.

Once they came around Buzz looked from Neb to Anna and guessed at once that a lot had happened.

‘Fill me in,' he ordered, climbing out of the ruined transport and jumping to the ground heavily. Meathead and Mallory landed on either side of him, a formation Neb suspected was so ingrained it was unconscious.

‘We went to the library,’ Anna said. ‘The Doc was right -- we should have gone there to begin with.’ She didn’t look at Neb as she said it. ‘We met a person there who filled us in on how to pass the gate guardian.’

‘You’re fucking kidding me,’ Buzz said. ‘How?’

Neb took the chains from his inventory and threw them on the sandy ground.

But Buzz did not look at them curiously, as Mallory and Meathead did. Nor did he look to Neb and Anna and ask what they were. Instead he made a strange strangled sound in his throat. Neb looked at him in concern, thinking that somehow he was choking. ‘Are you okay, sir?’ he said.

‘Where did you get these?’ Buzz whispered. His face was ashen, as though he was hearing terrible news for the first time. Neb had never heard him speak so quietly before.

Anna looked at Neb, confusion and uncertainty in her eyes. ‘The person’s name was Raphael,’ she said. ‘He called himself a Remnant, left behind by the Main. He helped us print these chains. The mesomorph will not touch anyone who is wearing them.’

Buzz did not react at first. Then after a few moments he said: ‘Oh fuck,’ and his hands went to his head. It was almost just a guttural shout. The commander looked from one of them to the next, eyes wide. Meathead and Mallory stood by confused, uncertain. He was freaking them all out.

‘Sir,’ Meathead said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fuck,’ Buzz said. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry. I just never thought I would actually see these fucking things. It’s not your fault. Fuck.’

As he spoke he took a small device from his pocket and pushed the single button on it. There was a shimmer in the air only a few meters away, and then a tall creature was standing there. It stood upright, and its eyes had very human-like characteristics and glowed with intelligence, but it was clearly an insectoid being. It had four powerful arms made from bulging sections. Around its mouth it had mandibles that were in constant motion, giving it the impression it was constantly chewing. It stared at the humans with undisguised contempt.

Then it said to Buzz: ‘I assume you have some news?’