“Your turn,” she says brightly, depositing us in front of the screen. “Everyone has to play at least once: Vee’s rules. You’re not going to disappoint a kid, are you?”
Even with a cloud hanging over my head, I find it hard to refuse her anything, let alone Vee. Julian doesn’t even bother to protest once he gets a look at Vee’s puppy dog eyes. So, we play the game. At first, we do terribly; we have no idea what we’re doing, and we weren’t watching when the others were learning. No one wins the first game—it’s more that I lose slightly slower than Julian does—but it seems to light a fire under him because he gets completely focused, asking questions about the game in a surprisingly rich voice.
Marlowe, having morphed into a teenager, cheers me on from the side. It convinces me to put more effort into the game, too. Maybe I just have better reflexes, but it’s not that hard once you learn the buttons; I beat Julian four out of five times. It’s a silly game, but it makes me smile nonetheless when Vee gives me double high-fives and Khrys kicks me out of the way to take her turn.
Julian, though, looks dazed. He turns blue eyes on Devyaan, and his expression settles into something half feral, half determined. Everyone else is already intent on watching Khrys battle it out against Maximus, especially because there’s been an odd tension between them. I’m the only one who sees Devyaan’s mouth go slack. Julian stalks towards him, snags his sleeve, and pulls him out of the room.
I turn to see if anyone else saw. “Are they—?” But no one else is paying attention. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood after witnessing that. I decide to take what tomorrow morningthrows at me and deal with it as best I can. The most important thing is to get hold of Neuro-syn 23 before we depart from Novus. I asked Marlowe to trust me, and I intend to follow through.
With so many of us, Mario Kart gets boring quickly, and Maximus has tech that allows him to play, but it doesn’t work so well with older games. Vee digs out a multiplayer shooting game and hands out Dreamframes. There are only four, so he sorts us into two teams. He’s captain of one, and Marlowe is captain of the other. For some reason, she finds this extremely amusing and keeps shooting me smug looks. I have to bite back the urge to tell her she’s more than welcome to captain theMidasif she wants; I think she’d enjoy that too much.
Her team goes first, and the rest of us watch on the screen as they infiltrate an abandoned warehouse with the objective of hostage retrieval.
Vee groans. “Ah man, that’s my favourite setting.”
“It’s fine, we can do the same one and show them how much better we are.” Beau winks.
I watch passively as they complete objectives, fight bad guys, and close in on the suspected location of their hostage. It involves a shocking amount of physicality, and to my surprise, Maximus proves he is more than just a pair of nice hands; there’s at least one fighting style in his repertoire. Marlowe, in comparison, is terrible. She makes the same mistake several times, burns through all her lives and gets her team respawned twice. It does wonders for my mood.
By the time our turn comes up, Vee’s ruthlessly grinning at his mother’s prowess, or lack thereof. She blows him a big kiss and salutes me, refusing to be bowed and, as always, I’m impressed with her ability to stay in good spirits.
“Ready?” Vee calls once we have our headsets on, and we’re standing in place. It takes a moment to get used to the cognitivereality, to sync my awareness of where I am with where it feels like I am. Once I do, pushing away a brief disorientation that threatens to make me anxious, it’s easy enough.
The warehouse is much bigger when it’s towering over us in person. Windows are boarded up, doors ripped from the hinges, and crumbling sections of the roof hang over the edge. We approach from different entry points, a tactic a ten-year-old boy probably only knows if he plays way too many video games. Still, no one challenges his orders because even though his avatar is middle-aged and grizzly, he’s just a kid. For a moment, I even forget how silly this looks from the other side—it might be cognitive reality, but people tend to roleplay their actions anyway.
Our target is the wife of a diplomat, guarded somewhere in the building by an unknown number of assailants. The game, aware this is a repeat of the same setting, changes the string of events that follows.
I slither through a gap in the panelled roof, swing onto a rotted beam just before it snaps and drop down onto the top floor of the warehouse. It’s impossible to be quiet—squatters must have lived here for some time, and debris is littered everywhere. I pause in a crouch, head cocked, listening for trouble. Sure enough, I was heard and someone is coming. The approaching footsteps are soft and barely audible. I fetch up against the wall beside the doorframe and forgo my weapon. Hand-to-hand will be quieter, and if I dispatch them quickly, I can continue without attracting anyone else to this sparse room where there’s no acceptable cover. Plus, there’s the likelihood it’s a teammate, so I don’t want to shoot first and ask questions later.
A shadow falls through the doorway and onto the threshold. I catch the flash of a long barrel in the moonlight, and I strike. My teammates have knives or automatic handhelds; this is anenemy. He has a split second, between when I launch myself around the doorframe and when I reach him, to get his gun up. Slapping the barrel to the side with one hand, I jab two fingers into his eyes with the other, quick and vicious. He jerks back, blindly swinging the gun at me, but I follow, duck the blow and slam my fist into his solar plexus hard enough to hunch him over. The air explodes out of his mouth, but he leaps for me, attempting to bowl me over. Dropping to a crouch, I sweep his legs out from underneath him, yank the gun from his hands as he tries to overcorrect, and clock him upside the head.
He slumps to the ground, out cold.
Sweat coats my body, and I take a moment to catch my breath. I wedge the gun between a weeping pipe and the wall, check the man’s pockets for a radio, and continue on my journey. It’s strange to realise that I’m having fun.
Our team respawns once, but we clear the warehouse and reach our target with fewer blunders than the first team. The hostage, red-faced and panting, thanks us all profusely as we escort her to an ambulance, and then the game is over. I pull the Dreamframes off, adrenaline pumping through my veins, and expect to see my team gloating. Instead, all eyes are on me, and the room is silent. I take in the wide eyes and the slightly ajar mouths. Vee is the only one who grins at me.
“What?”
“That. Was. Awesome!” He turns to the others. “Wasn’t that awesome?”
“Cap, what the fuck was that?” Beau asks over the boy’s head, amazed.
At first, I don’t understand—as a team, we worked really well together. After clearing our respective sides of the warehouse, we converged on the same floor and approached as one body. It was hardly the work of a well-trained, experienced squad, but I thought Vee did an excellent job. I’m snagged by Marlowe’sincredulous gaze, and it hits me: I was so invested in the game that I naturally slipped into soldier mode.
“It’s possible I was a little... zealous,” I say slowly.
Khrys coughs. “I’ll say.”
“What the hell kind of training have you had?” Liz asks.
I hang my headset and step away from the screen, smiling sheepishly. “I was in the IAF for a time. I guess it’s like riding a bike, huh?”
That seems to appease everyone because comparisons of the two teams start flying around the room. Marlowe hooks my arm and pulls me flush against her side.
“Didn’t I say?” she whispers with intensity. “Lethal.”
Yes. And once the adrenaline wears off later, I’ll suffer for it. I don’t experience PTSD like a few of my old comrades do, but coming down from moments of high adrenaline can still affect me. I think it’s more that my body still remembers, and the muscle memory triggers actual memories. Hopefully, if I can convince Marlowe to sleep in my cabin tonight, it won’t be too bad.
