“Must be,” I said.
“So I’m cashing out around ten thirty last night when I hear a sound coming from the Magician’s office. I rush up there because I think he’s finally back. I’m about to knock and give him shit for making us worry when I hear a voice coming from behind the door.”
“Fatman?”
“Let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“At first, I thought the Magician must have come in through the back, so I knock again, and then I open the door. And suddenly I’m on a video call with some guy.”
“Fatman.”
“That was the handle listed on the screen. He didn’t give me his real name.”
“He’s a friend of the Magician?”
“He says they had a regular weekly call. It wasn’t Skype or FaceTime, though. It looked like homemade software, or maybe something military.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There was a standard video window, but the rest of the interface was text-based, kind of like DOS. It was either really low-tech or bleeding-edge. It was hard to tell.”
“So who was this guy?”
“I have no idea. He asked me if something had happened to the Magician, if he’d been acting strange lately.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I had no idea who this guy was; he was just a face on a screen talking to me through some weird-ass software.”
“So what happened next?”
“I asked him how he knew the Magician, but he was kind of cagey. And when I came right out and asked him if he’d ever heard of Rabbits, he disconnected the call.”
“Shit.”
“I tried calling back, but the user account called Fatman had been deactivated. I tried again and the computer froze. When I booted it back up, the entire program was gone.”
“That’s…weird,” I said.
“No shit,” Chloe said as she pulled one of the Magician’s old Windows laptops out of her backpack.
“Wait, you stole the Magician’s laptop?”
“No, I borrowed a computer from my absentee boss, just in case he needed saving from the consequences of playing an ancient and potentially deadly game.”
“You know it’s called a personal computer for a reason.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, K.”
“Holy shit. You think I’m the one being dramatic here?”
“I do,” she said as she hit enter on the old laptop and the password screen gave way to the familiar launch logo of Windows 95.
“What happened to not playing the game for a while?” I asked.
“I wasn’t playing the game. This guy was just…on the screen.”
Suddenly I thought about Crow’s warning. What if he made Chloe forget I existed? Or what if he did something worse than that? I pictured the look on Baron’s face when we’d climbed through his window and found him sitting in front of his computer. I didn’t think I could handle seeing Chloe like that.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” I asked.
“What else are we gonna do, play Tetris?”
26
IS THAT A FUCKING CROSSBOW?
Along with the outer space elevator scenario, there’s another dream I’ve been having for as long as I can remember.
It begins with me staring at a sheet of ice, what appears to be the surface of a frozen lake. It takes me a moment to realize that my body is freezing, but then I’m shivering as I examine the cracks, colors, and shapes in the ice. The cold is intense, but the mosaic of the ice is so beautiful that I’m able to momentarily forget about the pain and just trace the artistic perfection in the surface of the lake with my eyes.
It’s at this point that I suddenly realize I’m not above the ice but beneath it.
And I can no longer breathe.
This is when I understand that I’m about to die. Panic sets in, and I begin to thrash wildly beneath the freezing blue water, clawing, kicking, and screaming at the surface. But every action does nothing but push me farther down into the icy darkness.
While I’m stuck there beneath the ice, thrashing and dying, I can see everyone up on the surface skating and walking hand in hand, laughing and having fun, and beyond that the blur of families on the grass, laughing at their barbecues and playing Frisbee.
And behind all of that, I can see the sun shining beautifully, way high up in the sky.
Then, just as I’m about to succumb to some weird Leonardo DiCaprio–esque Titanic trip to the unforgiving bottom of that cold wet world, the ice becomes something else.