Aech and Shoto ran over and threw their arms around her avatar. I resisted the urge to join them, but just barely. Instead I just stood there next to Faisal, who couldn’t resist hugging me instead. And I was so happy, I hugged him back.
Samantha was still alive. I still had a chance to make things right with her. To tell her how wrong I’d been, about everything. To apologize for not listening to her. And to tell her how much I’d missed her…
But she didn’t stick around that long.
“I only jumped online for a few seconds, to let you all know I was OK,” she said, gently pulling free of Aech’s bearlike embrace. “Now I need to go let the medics clean me up. There are also a few things I need to do, and I can’t do them while Halliday-9000 is watching.”
Her deadpan 2001 joke caused me to involuntarily snort-laugh. Samantha was the only person who had ever been able to make me do this, and she knew it. I glanced over at her in embarrassment and she smiled at me again. And this time, with great effort, I managed not to look away.
“Z, you, Aech, and Shoto need to start searching for the Second Shard now,” she said. “Hurry! I’ll rejoin you as soon as I can.”
And then she vanished without waiting for me to reply.
I stood there for a minute, staring at the spot where her avatar had been, attempting to rein in my stampeding thoughts.
“Zero in, buddy,” Shoto said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Arty’s right. We need to find the Second Shard. And fast.”
I nodded and removed the First Shard from my inventory. When I held it aloft in my hand, it filled the conference room with its incandescent blue glow as each of its facets caught the light and refracted it onto the walls and the floor in a kaleidoscopic pattern.
I held the shard out to Aech, but when she attempted to take it, her hand passed right through it, as if it were an illusion. Shoto tried the same thing and got the same result.
“Halliday coded this shard so that anyone could find its hiding place and trigger its appearance,” I said. “But it can only be picked up by one of Halliday’s two heirs. Me or Ogden Morrow. Halliday gave Og his old arcade-game collection, remember?”
I told them how I’d used the Boris Vallejo calendar in Og’s basement to change the year of the Middletown simulation, and how I’d obtained the First Shard in Kira’s bedroom. I didn’t mention that I’d paid a girl named L0hengrin a billion dollars to figure all of this out for me. I was ashamed to admit that I’d needed her help. And I was determined not to call on her for more assistance unless I had no choice.
“The First Shard has a clue etched into its surface,” I said, turning it over in my hands so they could see it. “A hint about the next shard’s hiding place.”
Aech cleared her throat and read the clue out loud.
“？‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero,’？” she recited. “？‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero.’？” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “Any ideas?”
I shook my head.
“Not yet,” I said. “But this is the first opportunity I’ve had to try to decipher it.” I pointed to the first line of the clue. “But I think the first line must be a reference to Kira, and her career as a videogame artist. ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero.’？”
Aech nodded. But Shoto didn’t respond—he was already lost in thought.
“I’ll buy that,” Aech replied. “But what about ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero’？”
I recited the line in my head a few times, trying to parse the meaning. But my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It had been a mistake to obsessively rewatch that crash footage for some sign of Samantha. Now all I could think about were all of those charred human corpses I’d seen littering the park where her jet had made impact. The bodies of at least a dozen people—people that Anorak had already killed, without hesitation.
“Come on, Z,” Aech said when I failed to respond. “You must have some ideas…”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, vigorously scratching my scalp in an attempt to jumpstart my brain. “I suppose it could be a reference to Ranma 1/2? A heroine demoted to hero?”
I was grasping at straws and Aech knew it.
“Come on, Z,” she said. “Ranma was a boy who changed into a girl, not the other way around. And besides, the clue reads ‘the very first heroine.’？”
“Right,” I said. “You’re right. Sorry.”