Rated

by Melissa Grey

  Javi grabbed the orb, its purple light casting shadows on the ridges of his plated armor. He tucked it under one arm and bolted, ducking and rolling to the side before a third sentry could sink its talons into him.

  “Payload en route,” Javi said, mindful not to shout into his mic. He had a bad habit of doing that, to the chagrin of his squad. Sometimes, the excitement was hard to deny, especially when they were all playing their parts, moving together like a well-oiled machine.

  “Clock’s a-ticking, Vulpes,” the medic, Domino, warned. He hung back while Javi and the others did their thing.

  “Yeah, I know, dude.” Javi gnawed on his lower lip as he pressed on. This was the part that had tripped them up the past three times they’d attempted this mission. He had to time his jump just right. A millisecond too early or too late and the entire team would wipe. And he didn’t have time to stand and wait for the platforms to align perfectly. The orb was a ticking bomb. If he held it for too long, it would explode. Then jumping on five consecutive moving platforms would be the least of Javi’s worries.

  “I hate this level,” Domino muttered. “Have I mentioned how much I hate this level?”

  “Yes, multiple times,” Rouge replied. “And we’re all super sick of hearing you say it.”

  Javi’s guild—the Marvelous Cosmic Assassins, or Team MCA for short—was the first in the world to make it to this level of the cooperative play mode in Polaris, the world’s largest space-faring, alien-shooting MMO game. But unless they completed it soon, they wouldn’t be the first to finish.

  And that, Javi knew, was unacceptable. For his team, and more importantly for his sponsors.

  Nobody got endorsement deals for coming in second place. Victory paid the bills. Victory put food on the table, tuition checks in the mail, and fresh school uniforms on his siblings. Victory slapped a coat of polish on his rating, keeping it high enough to rake in the big bucks.

  “Come on,” Javi whispered to no one. His team usually ignored him when he started talking to himself with the mic on. It was one of Vulpes’s eccentricities. Part of his charm. “Come on, come on, come on.”

  It was all in the thumbs.

  Javi’s flew over the buttons, angling the thumbstick and lightly tapping on the X button at just the right times. He played that controller like Franz Liszt played his trusty Bösendorfer piano.

  He was almost there, almost at the nexus of energy in which he had to deposit the orb. One more leap and—

  “OH, COME ON.”

  And, a millisecond too late, he watched as his toon plummeted to an ignominious end, mulched to a bloody pulp by the ship’s engines.

  “Told you it was a suicide run.” The sniper’s voice was laden with equal parts disappointment and smug satisfaction. She liked being proved right almost as much as she liked winning.

  Javi let the controller slip from his hands. His palms had gone clammy on the approach. It made his thumb slip at precisely the wrong moment. He wiped at his brow, mopping away at the sweat that had begun to bead there. His room was sweltering. The attic of their old house wasn’t properly insulated. It boiled in the summer and froze in the winter, but it was quiet. Javi needed solitude when he gamed. He had a tendency to get a little too intense when he was six hours into a campaign. Even his little sister Eva said he looked scary.

  But Eva didn’t know that it was that intensity that put food on their table and new sneakers on her feet.

  “Better luck next time, Vulpes,” came the medic’s decidedly less smug voice. Domino took every loss to heart.

  “Yeah, sorry, guys.” Javi rubbed at his eyes. They’d gone dry staring at the glowing monitor. “I’ll try soloing this part later to practice. We’ve got the keys for the checkpoint so I can try again tonight.”

  Rouge chuckled, the sound tinny in Javi’s ear. “No way you can solo this, Vulpes.”

  “Maybe you can’t.” Javi flexed his hands, cracking his knuckles and stretching his fingers. His carpal tunnel would act up later if he didn’t go through his wrist exercises before bed. Gaming took a physical toll, even if it was an almost entirely stationary activity. His hands were his moneymakers. Without them, he was nothing.

  And without him, his family would lose their house. It may have had shoddy insulation, cramped bedrooms, and a rickety boiler, but it was still home.

  The rest of the team recapped the day’s work with varying degrees of grumbling. Cooperative play was low on their list of preferred activities. They excelled at PvP combat, but co-op was the game’s hot ticket item at the moment. The developers had offered a special sponsorship package to the first team to complete all Polaris’s punishing stages, seven unique levels culminating in the hardest boss battle any of them had yet to encounter.

  He extended his arms out in front of him to stretch his wrists. He half listened to the guild chatter as he gently pulled back on the fingers of one hand, then the other. Javi’s mind wandered to that morning. He used to love the first day of school, but now class represented little more than hours spent not gaming. But today had provided enough amusement to forget his resentment. Like the cute boy with the camera and his dark wavy hair and his equally dark eyes and the freckles that dusted the bridge of his nose.

  And like the graffiti.

  “Hey, guys?” Javi formed fists with both hands and angled them down, lengthening the stretch across the top side of his wrists. It felt nice. “Have any of you heard about weird graffiti recently? Something about the ratings?”

  “Nope.”

  “Non.”

  “Nyet.”

  “No, why?” Rouge asked.

  Javi shrugged before remembering they couldn’t see him do it. “Just something strange at school. I noticed it wasn’t popping up online and wanted to ask.”

  It was curious that there had been no mention of the graffiti on the doors of Maplethorpe Academy on social media. A few posts had popped up that morning in its immediate wake, but by lunchtime they’d been thoroughly scrubbed, leaving not so much as a digital footprint.

  Javi felt a part of his brain perk up. The part that liked to devote itself to wildly unfounded theories about aliens building the pyramids in Giza or constructing the Nazca Lines in Peru. He loved a good conspiracy theory, and the graffiti felt like it had the makings of one.

  Rouge hummed in his ear. “Can’t say I’ve noticed anything, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

  “Thanks, Rouge. You always do.” Javi flexed his fingers and shook out his hands. That would have to do for now. “All right, I’m out. See you guys later.”

  He didn’t wait for their muffled goodbyes. He slid his headset off. His ears ached in relief. They weren’t a perfect fit, but they’d come as part of his latest sponsorship package, along with a customized lumbar support and gaming mouse. Each item was emblazoned with the Panthera logo, a leaping jungle cat, claws bared and mouth open in a silent roar. Panthera was the leading manufacturer of gaming peripherals and Javi’s primary sponsor.

  Or at least they would be, so long as he and his team stayed on top of their game.

  And so long as Javi’s rating hovered in the eighties, a rare feat for a seventeen-year-old orphan.

  His grandmother would slap him across the back of his skull if she heard him refer to himself as such. He might have lost his parents seven and a half years ago, but his grandmother had been the one to raise them even before their parents had died in a car crash, their tires skidding off an icy road in the dead of a night Javi desperately wished he could forget.

  “Javi!”

  His grandmother’s voice rang with the resonance of a church bell from three floors down.

  “Come down for dinner before your brothers and sisters eat it all!”

  It was not an empty threat.

  “Abuela, I’m coming!” Javi shouted, loud enough for even her failing hearing to catch.

  Javi pushed away from his desk, delighting in the satisfying pops and cracks sounding from his joints as he stood and stre
tched. His back ached and his left leg had lost feeling below the knee, but the discomfort was the sign of a job well done.

  Even if he had borked the gauntlet.

  But tomorrow was, as they said, a new day.

  The Lucero children were already crowded around the table by the time Javi made it down to the dining room. He squeezed into his seat between Eva (tall for a twelve-year-old) and the twins, Daniela and Dario (short for ten-year-olds).

  “How was school?” Abuela asked as she piled heaping servings of arroz con gandules onto their plates.

  “Oh, you know, fine.”

  “That’s all you ever say: fine,” grumbled his grandmother. She waved one hand in disdain as the other removed the bowl of rice from Eva’s clutches. “Everything is always just fine. Considering the tuition at that fancy school, they should be expanding your vocabulary, not shrinking it.”

  The truth was Javi paid very little attention to school, a fact he kept to himself. It wasn’t very difficult, coasting in the top 15 percent of his class. His grades were good enough to be moderately distinguished without being spectacular enough to draw his attention away from more lucrative pursuits.

  Javi rarely studied. He didn’t have to. His memory, a child psychologist had told his parents when they’d brought him in for evaluations at the age of eight, was nearly photographic. His mind was a vault. Once something was in there, it was in there forever.

  Most lectures he listened to with only one ear. He had a true gift for multitasking, an ability that contributed to what he seriously—and his siblings derisively—called his gaming prowess.

  “My friend Sandra said someone spray-painted bad words on the side of the building,” Eva announced.

  “Qué?” Abuela stretched that single syllable to three times its natural length. “Vandals? At that school?”

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” Javi said, even though it was very much a big deal. A big deal that curiously hadn’t made the news, local or otherwise. People and events critical of the Rating System rarely did. “It was probably just some dumb start-of-the-year prank.”

  “I don’t want you getting involved with any of those people causing trouble, Javi. You’re a good boy and you better stay that way.”

  “I’m not involved!” But all his protest earned him was a pointed glare. So he added, “Yes, Abuela.”

  A squawk from one of the twins was enough to change the subject. Dario had stolen Daniela’s pork chop or she had stolen his. The details didn’t matter. They did this every night. It was comforting in its familiarity.

  Javi let the sound of their squabbling wash over him as his mind wandered. What occupied his thoughts wasn’t the high drama of the vandalism or the simmering tension that had grasped the student body the entire day in its wake, but one student in particular.

  A boy with a camera, standing off to the side, watching a world that didn’t seem particularly interested in watching him.

  Javi had always been told he had a nice smile. A powerful smile. And it wasn’t just his grandmother who said so. His was the smile that launched a thousand Panthera headsets—and that was in preorders alone. He had smiled at Noah, and Noah had stumbled over his words, and the sound of it had sent a frisson of pleasure through Javi’s body. It was one thing to know his smile was appreciated by thousands of people he would likely never meet, but it was a whole other thing entirely to know that it was appreciated by one person in particular.

  That morning on the lawn wasn’t the first time Javi had noticed Noah. He’d been noticing him since freshman year. The boy was quiet and more often than not kept to himself. He was usually the last to be picked for team sports in phys ed. He was so easy to miss. Noah had a tendency to fade into the background. It was almost an art form. He faded with as much virtuosity as Javi shined.

  It was his silence that appealed to Javi. His solitude. Noah was good-looking in a frustratingly effortless way, but that appreciation had come later. Javi surrounded himself with friends, with fans, with his guild. He was never alone, not at home, not at school, not even in the game. He didn’t know what to do with himself during instances of unexpected isolation. He couldn’t help but admire the way Noah took to it as if it were his natural state. Being alone seemed so hard, so alien. But Noah never looked lonely. And that, Javi thought, required a strength of character that he didn’t think he possessed. Javi always appeared confident, even—especially—when he wasn’t. He wrapped his confidence around himself the way Noah did his solitude. It was familiar, well worn. It was, in its way, armor.

  He’d wanted to ask Noah how he did it. How he managed to move through the world without allowing it to touch him. But the words never left his lips. Talking came easy to Javi. Most of the time. It was like performing. From reading his siblings stories at bedtime to entertaining the followers of his Twitch stream while he played, he’d become comfortable with speaking. But speaking to Noah felt as if it would be different, more demanding somehow. Noah didn’t waste words, and Javi rarely ever had to think about his own. He wasn’t sure how to go about navigating a person like that.

  But he very much wanted to find out.

  You’re obsessing, he told himself.

  Acknowledging it didn’t seem to help.

  He finished his dinner and trudged upstairs. Maybe Polaris would distract him. As soon as he booted up the game, a small red badge appeared on the upper right corner of the message icon. In-game mail was notoriously unwieldy. It was poorly maintained. Messages had a habit of disappearing from one’s inbox of their own volition. The anonymity of the game encouraged the sort of failure of humanity common on social media platforms. But every now and then, a fan reached out to Javi to express their delight at encountering him in-game, and those were always nice messages to receive.

  Javi clicked the message icon, drumming his fingers on his desk as he waited for his overtaxed broadband to connect. He’d need to upgrade again, to ensure his connection remained stable and strong while gaming, but upgrades cost money and tuition was due in a week, for him and his siblings.

  His fingers stilled as the message loaded. It wasn’t text, but an image.

  A jester, exactly like the stickers affixed to the security cameras at the front entrance of Maplethorpe Academy. Beneath the jester’s painted face, four lines of text stood out, written in the same lurid red as the jester’s makeup.

  ON THE DAY OF THE PROPHET FALSE

  ONE MUSTN’T DANCE A FORBIDDEN WALTZ

  A COPPER FOUND AND A FORTUNE TOLD

  ALL BESIDE A BOX OF GOLD

  “What the fish sticks?” Javi said softly. His abuela would whip him upside the head with her chancla if she caught him swearing under her roof.

  He grabbed the nearest scrap of paper he could find amid the disorganized clutter on his desk. It was a poster featuring Javi wearing the very Panthera headset he’d just removed, with a mustache drawn on his face in Sharpie, courtesy of one of his siblings. They thought his endorsement deals were hilarious.

  With the same Sharpie that had probably been used to deface his own image, Javi scribbled down the message before the game’s unreliable inbox had the chance to devour it whole. He snapped a picture with his phone, too, just in case.

  He leaned back in his chair, huffing out a heavy breath.

  It was a troll. It had to be. He was being trolled by someone with too much time on their hands. And since he had too much time on his hands, he’d fallen right into their trap. The urge to reply to the initial message was too powerful to ignore. He always told his guild not to feed the trolls, but it was late and he was tired and his eyes were straining from staring at a glowing screen for too long. And making sound decisions was for chumps.

  He wiggled his fingers over the keyboard, puzzling over how to respond. Then the Polaris client crashed. Javi blinked at the screen.

  That was weird.

  He clicked the icon to boot the game up again. It took longer than usual.

  Also weird.

  Whe
n he got back to his inbox, he found it empty.

  The message was gone. The jester had vanished.

  “Trolls,” he whispered up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. He’d stuck them up there when he was nine and never got around to removing them. “It’s just a troll.”

  But no matter how many times he silently repeated the words as he got ready for bed, he couldn’t shake the sight of that jester’s uncanny, knowing smile.

  The Jester smiles as the message disappears from the boy’s Polaris inbox.

  Their smile widens as they think of the name they’ve adopted. It’s fitting, considering the role they mean to play.

  A jester.

  A figure who speaks truth to power, who holds a mirror up to society. A person who can laugh in the face of kings and live to see another day.

  They are, of course, one of many.

  The Jester is not an individual. The Jester is an idea. A movement.

  Right now, this particular Jester is also a gardener.

  Planting the first two seeds is easy.

  One is analog, the other digital. The latter is far easier for the Jester to track, though there is a certain pleasure in the physicality of the former. It’s the same pleasure that came with the feel of aluminum in their hand as they left their first message, the resistance of the can’s trigger as they pressed down on the nozzle. The hiss of paint as it slashed across the doors.

  They know that sowing the harvest will be much more difficult, but nothing worth doing is ever easy. Young minds are fertile, though the conditions for growth are hardly ideal. But still, like any patient gardener, the Jester will do the work.

  Now all that’s left is to see how those seeds blossom. Whether the fruit will ripen or wither on the vine.

  At Maplethorpe Academy, pupils lacked for nothing. The school boasted state-of-the-art laboratories, fully equipped athletic facilities, and a library large enough to satisfy the needs of the most curious scholars. But it wasn’t simply enriching minds that Maplethorpe offered prospective students. The school’s ethos promised a range of benefits for attendees: a stellar education, yes, but also a promising future, a healthy boost to the ratings of its graduates, and, most importantly, student wellness.