“Well, yes,” she said with a wry smile. “I suppose we are.”
I blew on my coffee to cool it down.
“You’re not angry that I used you to track down this clue, are you?” she said.
I shrugged. “Not really.” And it was true. I really didn’t care. I was having coffee with Murmur, and she’d used me to help her play the game. It was an honor. Chloe was going to lose her mind.
“We all have our own methods of playing,” Easton said. “But the fact you’re here and still alive is impressive.”
“Thanks,” I said, and took another small sip of coffee, careful not to burn myself this time. “It’s true,” I confessed. “Alan Scarpio did ask me for help. He told me that he believed something was wrong with the game.”
Easton leaned across the table. “He was right. The game has always been dangerous, but what’s happening now…it’s different. Players are disappearing and dying at an unprecedented rate.”
I nodded.
“If Scarpio really did ask you for help, then you must be connected to whatever’s going on.”
“I suppose so.” I fidgeted with my coffee cup on the table. As excited as I was about speaking with Murmur, there was no way I was going to tell her about Crow and the Gatewick Institute.
“No connection at all between you and Scarpio before this?” she asked.
“None. The first time I met him was just before he disappeared.”
Easton took a sip of coffee and leaned back in her chair, metal bracelets jangling around her wrists. I counted them—ten on each wrist. Twenty bracelets, a twenty-dollar bill in a man’s hand in line, twenty sugar containers on the servers’-station table. I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do now was fall into some kind of pattern-recognition sinkhole. There was a fine line between those patterns that were connected to the game and the ones that weren’t, and although I felt like I was still operating on the right side of that line, it was getting blurrier every day. I’d grown to depend on Chloe and Baron to keep me focused and on track, but Baron was dead and Chloe wasn’t here. I took a slow deep breath.
“Why are you still playing?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
She stared at me for a moment, then looked around as if she was worried somebody might be listening. She pulled her chair closer to the table.
“Because I know what happens when you win. I’ve seen it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was there. I’ve seen somebody win the game.”
“Who?”
She shook her head. I wasn’t getting that information.
“I’ve seen somebody get their heart’s desire,” she said as she stood up and set a ten-dollar bill on the table. “It was real, and it was amazing, and that’s why I’m still playing.”
She smiled warmly. “I wish you luck, I really do, but I hope you understand, you’re not to attempt to contact me again.”
I nodded, and Easton Paruth walked out of the coffee shop.
As soon as Easton was out of sight, I slipped off my sneakers and found a small flat device that had been hidden beneath the insole of my left shoe. It was flat and gray. It looked like one of those Tile things people use to track their keys.
I slipped the tracking device into what was left of my coffee like a secret agent crushing a sim card, and rushed outside to follow Easton.
But by the time I stepped out of the coffee shop, she was nowhere to be seen.
32
THE MOONRISE
Chloe was waiting outside my building when I got home.
“You called me at six in the morning?” she asked.
“I did.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
I smiled.
* * *
—
“You got to have pie with Scarpio and coffee with Murmur? What’s next, bagels with rescue-van Hazel?”
While Chloe made us breakfast, I told her everything that had happened; how I’d figured out the secret astrological code in that hidden level of Zompocalypso, and how Easton Paruth—who’d admitted she was Murmur—had followed me to that wall behind the dumpster.
After breakfast, I pulled up the photographs I’d taken of that wall, and the two of us spent a couple of hours staring at my phone, trying to make sense of the mess of numbers, letters, and symbols.
“That’s the symbol from the door at Gatewick,” Chloe said, pointing to the small circle atop the triangle sitting in the center of all the other symbols and letters.