Og glanced back over his shoulder, locked eyes with me/Kira, and gave her a warm smile that let her know everything was going to be all right, that she was safe, and that he would protect her. In that instant, I also felt her intense physical reaction to Og’s glance and his smile, and it gave me a sense of just how profoundly Kira had loved him. Samantha’s smile still gave me the exact same sensation—a sensation best described as devastation.
* * *
…Then, in a blink, the flashback was over. I found myself back on the dance floor with Art3mis. And when I looked down, I saw the Third Shard in my right hand.
I turned it over to read the clue. But instead of words, I saw an image engraved there. It was an ornate shield adorned with stylized math symbols for addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. I recognized it immediately as the coat of arms of Queen Itsalot, sovereign ruler of the magical kingdom of Itsalot on the planet Halcydonia.
I felt a sudden surge of optimism, immediately followed by an overwhelming sense of dread. On one hand, this was a huge stroke of luck. I’d spent a huge chunk of my childhood on Halcydonia, and my knowledge of it was encyclopedic, even by gunter standards. But I hadn’t set foot on the planet in over ten years. And after my last visit, I’d vowed never to return.
Art3mis and I—along with Aech and Shoto, both looking shaken but eager to rejoin the quest—materialized on Halcydonia. Specifically, within my personal Be-Free Treehouse, located deep within the Friendship Forest of Faraway, which was where any Halcydonian was automatically transported when they returned to the planet. Any kid in the OASIS under the age of thirteen could earn a Be-Free Treehouse by completing the free educational quests spread across the planet. Once you earned your treehouse, it belonged to you for the rest of your life, and no one could come inside it without your permission. It was just a tiny virtual space, but growing up in the stacks, it was also the first space that I was able to call my own—and the only one, until I discovered my hideout.
When Kira and Og founded Halcydonia Interactive and created this planet, they’d cooked up the Be-Free Treehouses as a way to give kids around the world a free, happy, virtual home inside the OASIS that they could always escape to, and find themselves surrounded by an endless assortment of furry friends and anthropomorphic animal teachers who were always overjoyed to see them, and who just wanted to teach them how to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic, all while staying physically fit and being kind to others.
Being able to put on my OASIS visor and be transported to the magical kingdom of Halcydonia was one of the things that kept me sane, and it made my life in the Portland Avenue Stacks bearable. And it did the same thing for millions of other kids around the world.
If you were under age thirteen, you could teleport to Halcydonia for free from Incipio, or from any public transport terminal anywhere else in the OASIS. And once you got there, all the quests and learning games were free too. I never wanted to leave. And for a few years, I almost never did. Those were the last few years of my mother’s life, when she was slipping deeper into depression and the addiction that would end up killing her.
During those last years, as our tiny, grim trailer in the stacks became an increasingly unpleasant place to be, I spent more and more time hanging out inside my treehouse on Halcydonia, and sometimes after she got off work, my mom would log back in to the OASIS and join me there, so I could tell her about my day, or show her the artwork I’d made, or introduce her to one of my new virtual animal friends.
The inside of my Be-Free Treehouse was one large circular room, with a continuous band of windows all the way around the outside wall, giving us a panoramic view of the surrounding forest, which was filled with millions and millions of identical trees, each with an identical treehouse built into it. This dense forest of treehouses appeared to stretch on forever, in every direction.
Like all of the treehouses, mine had a large hollow tree trunk at the center, containing a spiral staircase leading to the ground. I’d decorated the interior so that it resembled the treehouse where Chewbacca’s family lived on Kashyyyk in the Star Wars Holiday Special. Aech noticed this a few seconds after we arrived and chuckled, then she let out a long Wookiee growl of recognition. I didn’t laugh. I was too busy teetering on the verge of an emotional breakdown, as I took a long look around the room.
There was a giant console television on one side of the room, positioned directly in front of an even more enormous blue couch. The TV was still running through a playlist of some of eleven-year-old Wade’s favorite shows. There was currently a green Muppet newscaster on the screen, and after a few seconds I placed him as Gary Gnu, the host of The Gary Gnu Show. He had orange hair and an orange goatee, and he was in the midst of uttering a phrase that I must’ve heard hundreds of times when I was growing up here: “No g’news is good g’news with Gary Gnu!”