by Jillian Dodd
“Did you just get a yoga outfit from that guy?” the female agent asks.
“Um, I think so,” I reply, knowing what’s coming next. As soon as I walk out of the warehouse, I find myself in a new location.
“Where are you?” Daniel asks. “This is the strangest game ever. I’m not sure I’m liking this update.”
“Me either,” I agree. “I’ll just quit.”
“No!” everyone watching shouts. “You have to keep going!”
I take another swig from the bottle in front of me, trying to calm the unease I feel.
Did Black X do this because I quit? Are they trying to get at me through this game, and what message are they trying to send me?
My avatar stops to take a look around, the view confirming where I am.
“Is that the South of France? It looks like the Côte d’Azur,” an agent behind me says.
“It’s Cannes,” I say.
“How do you know that? It could be Nice.”
“She just passed Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren sitting in the sand,” Daniel adds. “Gotta be Cannes.”
Merde.
I walk through the town, passing a street named Dumond. It isn’t the name of the street where The Priest lived but rather his fake last name.
Clever.
I change my skin, donning the yoga outfit, and then run up to the door of the house on the corner, taking a gun from my cache of loot.
I ring the bell, and when a man answers, I point the gun at him. I take a deep breath, wondering what will happen next. If Black X knows about Chauncey …
Please don’t let them know about Chauncey.
“It looks like a nice house,” Daniel says. “Kill him, so you can get his loot!”
As soon as he gets the words out of his mouth, we hear the sound of helicopters.
“Abort!” one of the agents says. “Stuff’s about to get real.”
Since no child has come out, that means my secret is still safe. It also means they don’t know that I didn’t kill The Priest. That means, anything I do to him will work in the game because Black X probably wants to know how I killed him.
Although I hate to do it, even in a game, I shoot the person in the game representing The Priest. I don’t want Black X to question his death. I move over his body, taking his loot, and then rush into the kitchen.
Not surprisingly, I find what I need in the cabinets, throw it all in the microwave, and set the timer. I quickly run back into the living room, open the bookcase to reveal a secret passageway, and jump down the stairs as the house explodes.
“Wow! How did you know that would work?” Daniel says in awe. “I never would have thought to do that! Seriously, this is why you are the amazing X.”
I’m still going through the motions of playing the game, going up the stairs into the other home and out the back, but I know there won’t be any more danger until I switch locations again.
And I know what’s next.
Something I don’t want to relive.
But then a car pulls up to the curb next to me. Inside are a man and a young girl. She rolls down her window and yells at me to give it back.
“What do you have that she wants?” Daniel asks. “Little kids are creepy. I bet it’s a trap. She’s probably going to whip out an Uzi!”
I pull up my cache on the screen, wondering what she could be talking about.
“Is that a puppy?” the agent from behind me asks. “Did you get a dog added to your loot when you killed the dude in the explosion?”
I click the dog, putting it in my hand and closely studying it.
My throat goes dry.
And I feel like I can’t breathe.
The little girl in the car is … me.
How would Black X know about the dog?
A conversation I had with Terrance and Ari flits through my brain.
“Did you spend much time with your uncle Sam?” Ari asks me. “Do you know his full name?”
“I didn’t meet him until I was about ten. He and my mother seemed fond of each other. She always hugged him tightly. He was nice to me. Bought me a stuffed dog that year for Christmas. I lost it, um … when the car blew up. My dad was acting strange after my mom died. Not just in mourning. Like scared, which I guess he had good reason to be.”
How could they know about this?
I give the stuffed dog to the young girl and then grab her hand to pull her out of the vehicle as the car explodes. We’re knocked to the ground, stunned, just like I was that day. Tears fill my vision, and I want so badly to stop the game, but my desire to know more keeps me going.
I make my avatar stand up, and the background behind it goes black.
“Whoa! What’s going on?” Daniel says as pixels flash across the screen to stitch together a new location. One where you can see the Washington Monument in the distance. “That’s DC.”
The girl sits up and hugs the stuffed dog. When she lifts her head to look up at me, I notice the glint of a dainty golden locket dangling from her neck. I move my avatar in front of her, hoping no one else notices it, although I’m not sure why. Actually, I am. If Daniel saw it, he’d want me to steal her loot.
And I just can’t.
But I do know where she needs to go next. She holds out her hand, so I take it, helping her to her feet. As I’m leading her to Uncle Sam’s loft, I wonder why I haven’t gone there since.
My focus is quickly brought back to the screen. The outside of the loft looks exactly like I remember it from that day. But before we can go inside, the child disappears, and a man comes out of nowhere, takes all my loot, and shoves me into a cage.
When the door is shut, the screen goes dark again. I know what will happen next. I rub my hand across my forehead, feeling sick.
“It’s okay,” Daniel says, patting my leg. “If you lose, we’ll just start over.”
Of course, he has no idea.
Fortunately, I don’t have to relive Anna’s death. I’m simply taken out of the cage and escorted upstairs to an obviously opulent home that looks nothing like the actual one other than there is a table set for dinner.
“I don’t get it. This is supposed to be like an adventure,” Daniel says. “This game is driving me nuts. Nothing makes sense.”
“At the same time, it’s awesome,” one of the agents says. “You never know what to expect. It’s like the game designers were high when they created it. It’s so disjointed. I mean, like this could ever happen in real life.”
His comment makes me chuckle.
A corpulent man with a scowl joins me at the table.
“He looks like a really bad guy,” Daniel says. “I think you should engage him in hand-to-hand combat.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, taking a steak knife off the table. “I think I’ll wait and see what happens.”
What happens is the man makes it halfway through dinner before he starts making suggestive comments and stands way too close to me—I mean, my character in the video game.
Merde.
I know what I have to do, but I don’t want to do it in front of Daniel. Or the agents.
But the man in the video starts caressing my shoulder.
Then, he drops his pants.
I take a deep breath and do what I know I have to do.
“AHHH!” Daniel and the men who are watching yell out when I do it, although the female agent whispers, “That. Was. Awesome.”
The second I do what I did to The Moneyman, my character enters a new setting.
My loot is gone. My skin has changed to a designer dress. All I have is an empty champagne glass in my hand. I walk over and engage in conversation with a man at the bar. My flute is filled, and we toast.
“What the heck? Now, you are celebrating cutting off a man’s …” Daniel starts to say, but his words fade out when a team of mercenaries burst into the room and start shooting.
“Take cover behind the bar!” one of the agents yells.
“No!” Daniel says. “Rush th
em. Take their guns. Shoot them all.”
I don’t do either.
Instead, I drop to my knees. The whole time I’ve been going through this, I’ve been keeping track of what Black X knows. And who I know who could have told them. I’ve whittled the list down to only Terrance or my brother as the moles who are in contact with Black X and reporting everything they know about my missions.
But I didn’t tell Terrance about this.
For a brief moment, I wonder if it’s all a hoax. If Ari is really even my brother, really even my twin. I never saw the DNA results. They forged my background. They could have forged his. Maybe my brother really did die. Maybe Ari really is a Bradford, but with his parents both gone, they decided to make him my twin.
“Are you crazy?” Daniel yells. “They are going to shoot you!”
I’m brought back to the present, glancing at the screen.
The team shoots everyone in the room, minus the one man who escaped, takes me hostage, and then puts me in an SUV.
What follows is a shoot-out with a man on a motorcycle and a police chase through the streets of London. Once the last police car is destroyed in the game, the SUV pulls up to the gates of an expensive home.
And this home, like the front of Uncle Sam’s loft, is rendered in great detail and a sharp contrast to the very little detail found in The Priest’s and the Moneyman’s homes. Like, this is nearly an exact replica of Dupree’s estate—from the gilded doors to the paintings on the wall to the desk he stood behind.
While I’m being held hostage, Dupree kills all but two of his men before coming from behind his desk. He grabs me from behind, pressing the gun against my temple, and threatens to kill me.
“You’ve got to do something!” Daniel yells. “Elbow him. Knock the gun away. Come on! You can do it!”
“You have to do something,” one of the agent yells.
When I don’t do anything, the gun goes off, and the man kills himself.
“What the—” Daniel lets out an expletive. “He should have killed you.”
“I expected to die,” I mutter, my real life and my gaming life merging together, that night all coming back to me.
“I never would have anticipated that!” Daniel says. “Quick, kill those two military-looking dudes before they steal the rich guy’s loot.”
I do as I was told, killing them much like I did in real life. Then I move my character over each one to collect their weapons and other loot.
When I do the same to Dupree—the rich guy—he rises up, takes a ring off his finger, and hands it to me. And it’s an exact replica of the ring I still have with me.
I suck in a breath of air. This is no coincidence.
Does Black X know I have the ring? Or did they simply know Dupree had a ring and are trying to tell me so?
“That looks like it will buy a lot of weapons at the market,” Daniel offers. “You should go there next.”
“Maybe,” I mutter as my character is transported back to the sand, standing in front of a series of domed buildings. It’s been a while since I’ve been there, but I’d recognize it anywhere.
The TerraSphere.
“This is a weird place,” Daniel comments, hitting my controller to give us a bird’s-eye view. “It almost looks like one of those crop circles. And what’s up with the dead ring guy? Do you still have a gun? Just shoot him. Maybe he’s like a zombie or a vampire or some other creature that is immortal.”
“If he were immortal, he couldn’t be killed,” one of the agents teases.
“Yeah, they can be killed,” Daniel says. “We’d need a silver stake.”
One of the agents laughs. “I think you need a wooden stake to kill a vampire and a silver bullet for a werewolf.”
I ignore their banter and move closer to the not-dead-in-the-game Dupree.
“I’d kill first, ask questions later,” one of the agents says. “He looks like he’s up to no good.”
“He’s not armed,” I counter.
“It could be a trap,” one of the other agents says.
“Or it could be—” the female agent starts. “Wait, are those wings?”
“This is the craziest game ever,” Daniel says. “He’s an angel.”
I make my character advance toward the newly winged Dupree. He hands me a note, which pops up on the screen for all of us to read.
You are in possession of the key. Use it wisely.
“But we didn’t get a key,” Daniel says, ripping the controller from my hand and pulling up my cache. “There’s no key in here.”
“Maybe the ring is the key,” the female agent suggests, only to get jeered by the men about women, rings, and commitments.
“Like, as in you got the key?” Daniel says in shock. “Like, you are the one person who got the key out of the millions of players searching for it?”
“I’m not sure,” I say as I wonder if all the hype was just to get me to play. If the key was only meant for me. And if they know that I have it in real life.
I hit the off button and end the game.
“Why did you do that?” Daniel calls out. “We just got the key!”
“I’m tired,” I say even though I am absolutely not.
My head is spinning, my heart racing. For whatever reason, I needed to know that the ring is the key. A ring that was possibly given out by Lorenzo the Magnificent himself to the men he trusted most. His upper echelon. His secret society that grew into so much more. But what if, while The Society grew into a large and reputable worldwide organization, the rings continued to be passed down for generations, a select few trying to rule the world? And what if those men, like Dupree, who amassed nuclear bombs to …
I suddenly stand up, startling everyone around me, and rush into the bathroom.
I need a moment.
I shut the door and turn on the cold water, splashing my face, and then run back out to the living room where Daniel is uploading the video of me playing for the world to see.
“No!” I yell out, worried that this group could somehow see the video and know that I have the ring. Or that someone knows about the ring. Or something like that. I can barely even think straight right now.
Have I lost my tactical edge?
“Why not?”
I can’t tell him the truth, so I say, “Because we need to play again. See what the ring will do in the game. You don’t want someone else to get the ring, do you?”
“I don’t think they can. Supposedly, there is only one.”
“Until I come back online, and they all jump me to take my loot.”
“Oh, good point. Guess it’s a good thing we didn’t stream it live, huh?”
“Yeah, it is,” I tell him, thinking about the ring still hidden in my purse and knowing that Lorenzo is the only person I told about it.
Can I really not trust anyone?
I lie in bed, my eyes closed, Daniel sleeping in the bed next to me, our relationship still completely platonic. I’m trying to remember what all Dupree said about the ring, but I can’t seem to recall it.
The second I go to sleep, I’m reliving the moment.
“Your father had a ring just like it. Do you recognize it?” He doesn’t wait for my reply. He just presses the gun harder against my head. “It’s my own fault really. They said it would work without the devices, but I insisted on a backup plan. When the world goes kaboom, you can quickly get governments’ attention.” He lets out a villainous laugh. “Your passive father would have fully disapproved, and the rest of them will never forgive me for this mess. It’s really too bad you got caught up in it. You were destined to marry Lorenzo and become the Queen of Arcadia while your brother would have taken his rightful place at our table.”
I wake up, drenched with sweat. Quickly getting out of bed, I don a hotel robe and rush out to the living room to play the rest of the game.
I have it up, loaded, and ready to start when Daniel pads out.
“You can’t play without me.” He yawns. “I’m your
partner.”
“Sorry, I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Me either. This is too exciting! But wait. I’m starved.” He rummages around in the suite’s refrigerator and comes back with a barrage of snacks ranging from healthy to not so much. After he sets them on the coffee table in front of us, he reaches to turn on the recorder.
“Um, Daniel, let’s not.”
“Why not? The world needs to see this.”
“I’m just not ready for the world to know the real me,” I answer truthfully. Sorta.
When we start the game, Daniel narrows his eyes at the screen. “What is this? Why am I still dead? And why is the game starting right where you left off? Usually, you have to do the whole thing over.”
“Um, I don’t know,” I say, but I do notice that the ring is now firmly on my character’s finger. I flick the wrist, trying to put it into my loot bag.
Daniel stares in awe. “It’s like you’re royal or something now. When you’re fighting, other gamers will see the ring and probably bow down to you!”
“Or try harder to kill me.” I make my character take off running and come to a brick wall. I quickly discover that I can’t punch, kick, or shoot my way through it. I go through every item in my loot bag, but nothing will work.
“It’s a stupid dead end,” Daniel says. “Run the other way.”
“It won’t work either. No matter where I go, there’s a dead end.”
“Try all your loot again,” he says, making me realize there’s one thing I haven’t tried.
I drop the loot bag and place my palm on the wall, much like I did at the bank vault in Zurich. When nothing happens, I start searching the bricks one by one, stopping when I find what I’m looking for.
I place the ring directly into the groove.
A green light appears from behind, as if a laser were cutting through the mortar surrounding the bricks to create a doorway into the TerraSphere.
“What is this place?” Daniel asks excitedly. “It reminds me of Tatooine from the Star Wars movies. That was the home of both Anakin and Luke Skywalker, who would—”
“Eventually make history in the galaxy. I’ve seen the movies, Daniel.”
