“Yes,” I said.
“Playing the game?”
“I think so, maybe.”
“What makes you think it was Rabbits?”
“I don’t know. I’m probably just seeing connections that aren’t there,” I lied. I didn’t want to get into what had happened in that truck with the Connors sisters. I noticed my mouth was a bit dry, and I was starting to feel a familiar buzzing in my head.
I looked down at my hands and realized I’d been tapping out an Australian Open match between Andre Agassi and Michael Chang.
I casually slipped my hands beneath my thighs. I didn’t think Chloe noticed.
“You know Rabbits is all about connections,” Chloe said.
She could tell I was hiding something, and I got the feeling she was thinking about asking me a direct question I most likely wasn’t prepared to answer.
She put her hand on my thigh and looked into my eyes.
She was worried.
Maybe she had noticed my weird thigh-tapping ritual, after all.
13
PROPERTY OF SHIRLEY BOOTH
A couple of weeks after I’d spoken with Russell Milligan, Chloe and I met up at my place to go over everything we had so far. We invited Baron, but he didn’t show. We tried calling, but it went straight to voicemail.
“When’s the last time you heard from him?” I asked.
Chloe scrolled through the messages on her phone. “Nothing since right after he started working at WorGames.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You?”
I shook my head. “Same.”
“I’d probably go AWOL for a while if I got to spend time living in Sidney Farrow’s latest digital dreamscape.”
“Me too,” I said, “but it’s been over two weeks.” Sidney Farrow aside, I couldn’t remember going more than a couple of days without some kind of text message or phone call from Baron Corduroy.
“Should we maybe send him a towel?” Chloe suggested.
Baron knew Chloe and I used the towel meme in emergencies, so he would understand it was important.
“Let’s give him until the end of the day.”
“Sounds good,” Chloe said.
“What’s going on with the Magician?” He’d also told us he was going to look into what was happening with the game. That was close to three weeks ago.
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “Ever since we discovered the WorGames connection on Scarpio’s phone, he’s been a bit…off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve only seen him at the arcade once since then, and he wasn’t all that open to conversation. He just kind of wandered in muttering about a band called Toto, and then went upstairs and locked himself in his office.”
“Do you think he’s still trying to figure out what’s going on with the game?”
Chloe shrugged.
“Do you know if he ended up getting in touch with anyone at WorGames?”
“No idea. You sure got a lotta questions.”
“We need to sit down with the Magician as soon as possible.”
Chloe nodded. “Can you stop pacing? You’re making me nervous.”
“Sorry,” I said, and sat down on the couch.
Alan Scarpio had gone out of his way to tell me that something was wrong with the game—that if the next iteration started up before that something was fixed, we were well and truly fucked. Then he’d gotten a call from WorGames and vanished.
I kept picturing the look on his face while he was telling me that. He’d been smiling, speaking somewhat flippantly, but there was something behind his eyes.
Something I recognized.
Fear.
“I’ll try to pin him down,” Chloe said. “In the meantime, I think we should talk to your friend who freaked out when you mentioned Rabbits. It sounds like he might know something useful.”
“Maybe, but he made it pretty clear he wasn’t interested in talking about it.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have me.”
I was pretty sure having Chloe tag along wouldn’t make the least bit of difference, but Russell Milligan clearly knew a lot about Rabbits, including something that had freaked him way the hell out.
“We could try,” I said, “but he’ll most likely tell us to fuck off.”
“Let’s go collect our ‘fuck off’ then.”
* * *
—
I got back in touch with Russell and he agreed to meet two hours later at a coffee shop a few blocks away from the University of Washington campus.