“Please don’t treat me like an asshole. I’m growing kind of fond of you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m kind of fond of you too.”
“That means no Alan Scarpio, no Tabitha Henry, no Sidney Farrow—at least for a while. I mean it. Promise me.”
I nodded, and then Chloe left my apartment again, this time for real.
I meant what I’d said to Chloe. I was fond of her. In truth, I’d been crazy about her for quite a while, but I wasn’t being quite as honest when I’d agreed to avoid the game.
Rabbits had opened up something within me the night that Annie Connors died, something that needed to be fed—a hunger that would eventually lead me to the Magician’s arcade, and, finally, to playing the game myself.
I couldn’t let it go.
After Chloe left, I went online and looked up the album Crow had been listening to when I’d arrived, Song of Innocence by David Axelrod. That album had been released on Capitol Records, and the image of the record’s label I was looking at on my screen was identical to the label on the record that had been spinning on Crow’s turntable.
I hadn’t imagined it.
I’d never heard of David Axelrod before in my life, which meant that, barring some weird blocked memory from my childhood that included information about that album, what I’d experienced up there in the penthouse of The Tower wasn’t a dream or some kind of mental break.
It had happened. It was real.
Next, I looked up Emily Connors.
There was nothing. No information online about the girl I’d grown up with. No Facebook, no LinkedIn, and no White Pages.
Emily Connors was what hackers referred to as a ghost.
Crow had also mentioned Kellan Meechum, so I searched his name as well. One of the first things that popped up was an article that had been published a few months before Meechum’s death. The article was titled “Invisible Lines.”
Imagine there is an enormous fingerprint beneath the surface of the world—a web of channels or grooves or something similar. Now, imagine that by traversing, crossing, or manipulating those invisible lines in very specific ways, one is able to effect material changes in the fabric of our universe. I believe there is another level of reality—or perhaps multiple levels—and that understanding and mapping these channels or grooves—these lines that I refer to as Radiants—is the key to understanding not only those other worlds, but our own world as well.
The scientific community believed that Kellan Meechum’s later work—most of which had been focused on the existence of these Radiants—was simply the product of a man slowly losing his mental faculties. Like Nikola Tesla’s research near the end of his life where he’d claimed to have created a perpetual motion machine, nobody took Kellan Meechum or his Radiants seriously.
But I wasn’t so sure.
What if Meechum was right? What if his Radiants were the key to understanding Rabbits? What if they were the key to understanding something about my parents?
25
WHAT ELSE ARE WE GONNA DO, PLAY TETRIS?
I woke up to the sound of buzzing in my head.
I must have fallen asleep at some point while looking into Kellan Meechum and his Radiants. It was pitch-black in my bedroom.
I checked the time. It was just after five in the morning.
At first I thought the sound might be the familiar gray feeling creeping around the corners of my skull, but it wasn’t that.
It was somebody buzzing my apartment.
I pressed the talk button of my intercom. “Hello?”
No answer.
Whoever it was didn’t buzz again.
I checked my phone. Three missed calls from Chloe. There was no way I was going to be able to get back to sleep, so I decided to go for a run.
* * *
—
Morning near the water in Seattle feels primal. The breeze moving over the ocean delivers a constant salty brine that wraps around your senses like a blanket. When that scent hits, it almost always brings me back to weekends in Seattle with my parents. I can hear the voices at the market yelling over the distant roar of the waves, and I can see the ubiquitous posters advertising bands playing venues like the Off Ramp and the Showbox—local bands that would soon be filling arenas.
I ran along the seawall, doing my best to forget what had happened at WorGames, focusing my attention instead on the smells of the early morning and the sounds of my feet as they hit the wet concrete and grass. But I eventually found myself thinking about my parents. I’d always imagined the two of them up there in my mother’s office, working on ledgers and calculating expense account deductions. But what if Crow was telling the truth? What if they weren’t accountants after all? What if they were up there working on something completely different?