“K…？”
“Yes?”
“Promise you won’t get mad?”
“I know it’s…impossible to believe. I just wanted to be completely honest.”
“And I appreciate that,” she said. “But you have to understand how all of this sounds to me.”
I nodded. “I do.”
The two of us sat there in silence for a moment, then I remembered something. I pulled out my phone. “I got the plate number of the car that was following me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Do you think we might be able to find the owner?”
“Um…you’re a part-time day trader and I’m living off royalties from a song I wrote more than a decade ago. Who the hell do we know who can run a plate?”
“Fair point,” I said, staring at a blank screen on my phone. “It’s dead.”
I dug up a charger and plugged my phone into the wall. A few seconds later, the phone booted up and I opened the voice recorder application.
“What is it?” Chloe asked.
“I couldn’t open my camera, so I recorded the plate number using my voice recorder.” I showed her my phone.
Something didn’t make sense. The most recent file was thirty-five minutes long.
“That’s a pretty big file for a license plate.”
“My fingers were wet. I probably didn’t turn it off properly.”
“Wait,” Chloe said, excited. “When did you start recording?”
“Just before I met Crow on that bus.”
Chloe jumped up, her eyes were huge. “Fuck, K, play it!”
I positioned the cursor near the end of the file and pressed play. The sound of Crow’s voice warning me not to play the game spilled from my phone’s tiny speakers.
I pressed stop and looked up at Chloe.
“Play the whole thing,” she said.
* * *
—
Once we’d finished listening to the recording, Chloe sat back down across from me at the table. “That’s insane,” she said.
“I know.”
“Really, though…I mean, do you have any idea how much money and planning something like that stunt on the bus would take?”
I nodded. It was true—although I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. There was something about the man called Crow, however, that made me feel like pulling that kind of stunt wouldn’t actually be difficult for him.
“You asked him about somebody named Emily. Who’s that?”
“A friend of my parents,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie.
“What if this guy is really dangerous, K?”
“I think he definitely falls into the dangerous category,” I said.
“He warned you not to play the game.”
“Or look into anything even remotely connected to Rabbits,” I added.
“So what the fuck are we doing?”
Ever since I’d met Crow, I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents. Was my entire childhood a lie? What were they really doing when they told me they were working on balance sheets and ledgers? Mapping fucking Meechum Radiants with Crow?
“I need to know what this guy knows about my parents, and I’d like to know if any of this stuff is connected to the game, but I’m not sure I want you…mixed up in this stuff anymore.”
“Yeah, well, we’re in this shit together, I’m afraid. I’m not going anywhere.” She jumped up, grabbed the Magician’s laptop, and brought it over to the dining room table. “Let’s start with everything on this computer.” Then she pulled her chair close to mine and gave me a huge kiss.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“Felt like it.”
So, whatever was going on in this reality, Chloe and I were still involved in some kind of romantic relationship. I was relieved, but felt kind of unsteady. Were we at the same point emotionally? What about sex? Had we slept together in this reality?
“What are you thinking about?” Chloe asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re looking at me like a fucking weirdo.”
“You’re a fucking weirdo,” I said, and smiled.
“That’s better,” she said, and then the two of us sat down and went over everything we’d found in the Magician’s bookmarks and browser history.
* * *
—
So, against the dire warnings of pretty much everybody, Chloe and I were back digging into the world of Rabbits.
We found a lot of really cool stuff in the Magician’s bookmarks—including some code-breaking application links, veiled historical references to an ancient game, and interesting examples of alternate reality game puzzles—but we didn’t find anything that pointed toward anybody called Fatman who matched the description of the guy Chloe had spoken with earlier.