The two of us sat down and I told her about the photograph I’d discovered, and what Silvana had to say about it.
Chloe took a look at the photos with and without the scar.
“Holy shit, this is so weird.”
“The Magician must have found the same pictures I did, and called Silvana about the scar on her arm.”
“I still haven’t heard from him,” Chloe said.
“It looks like he’s out there somewhere following the same clues we are. I’m sure he’ll be in touch soon.”
Chloe nodded, but she looked unconvinced.
“I wanted to say sorry for earlier,” I said. “I hate to see you stressed out, and it’s so much worse when it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just…everything with Baron and the Magician, and you missing time and stuff…I don’t wanna lose you too.”
I smiled. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t wanna lose me either.”
The two of us ordered some food and watched a French thriller from 2003 called Swimming Pool. Chloe picked it. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen it already. I was happy to watch it again with her. Anything to take my mind off things for a little while.
“Should we open a bottle of wine?” Chloe asked, after the movie ended.
“Maybe in a bit,” I said.
Chloe shifted and stretched, and as she was stretching, she sank into the middle of the couch, into the soft spot between the two cushions. I had to grab her to stop her from falling over. Our faces were suddenly less than an inch apart.
“You seem a little tense,” Chloe said, moving even closer.
“I’m fine,” I said, which wasn’t completely true. I’d started shaking.
And then, we were kissing.
Chloe tasted like summer, her lips full and soft, her skin warm against my face.
The two of us pulled away at exactly the same time.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said.
“Yeah.”
Chloe snatched the remote control from my lap. “Wanna watch another movie?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
22
THE BYZANTINE GAME ENGINE
Chloe and I were startled awake at eight thirty the next morning by my phone vibrating on the coffee table. The two of us had fallen asleep on the couch.
I answered the phone and put it on speaker. It was Sidney Farrow.
“Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound like I’d been up for a while.
“Do you have time to meet later today?”
“Sure, anytime.”
“I’ll be there in an hour. I think I found something.”
“Great.”
“Can you tell Chloe?” Sidney said.
“Um…yeah. No problem.”
I hung up the phone and rolled over to find Chloe staring at me with a concerned look on her face.
“What happened last night can never happen again,” she said, deadly serious.
I opened my mouth to speak when she burst into laughter.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Your face.” Then she jumped up. “I’m going home to take a shower and change. I’ll be back.”
* * *
—
Sidney Farrow showed up at my place about an hour after she’d called. Chloe walked through the door a few minutes later.
“I did a lot of digging,” Sidney said, “but I wasn’t able to find anything on any of the testing module servers, the design database, or any of the machines running bytes for my new game. But then, yesterday morning, a technician I asked to flag anything connected to Baron’s ID code found some files that had been uploaded by somebody using that code.”
“What files?” Chloe asked.
“It looks like Baron uploaded a few things to the company’s internal general folder on the day the woman who’d had the seizure was taken to the hospital. An encryption protocol is automatically activated whenever someone using a Byzantine ID uploads something, so I needed to get them decrypted.”
“What were they?” I asked.
Sidney handed me her phone.
The first file was a screen capture. It looked like it had been taken from some kind of news show. There were two talking heads: standard anchorwoman and her male counterpart. Running along the bottom third of the screen was a crawl displaying headlines covering the news of the day, most of them related to a hurricane building somewhere off the coast of Florida.
“That’s a scene from my game,” Sidney said.
“No way that’s computer generated,” Chloe said, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s too…real.”