by Jenn Stark
Before Nigel could react further, I left my body the same way I had been practicing at Sensei Chichiro’s house, without the benefit of the accompanying Council ritual. It wasn’t smooth and it wasn’t easy, but I didn’t have far to go. I crashed through the first wall with only a slight bit of discomfort. Inside was a cramped one-bedroom apartment, tidy, with a window onto the street. A man stood at the window, staring through the sheer curtains. He was dressed impeccably, in crisp business attire, his hair carefully brushed. There was a computer on the dining room table, the room apparently doubling as an office. But the computer wasn’t on, and the man wasn’t moving. He merely…stared.
Feeling like a voyeur, I moved swiftly down the apartments on one side, then the other. They were all exactly alike. Simple, clean. Those that were occupied were occupied only by a single person. Mostly men, mostly older. The few women were young—far younger than the men. All of them were Asian, like the guy whose key card I’d stolen.
The empty apartments were by far the harder ones. There was nothing to identify the occupants, though it was clear that someone lived there. The rooms were almost painfully tidy, nondescript with no apparent personality. I was forced to rule them out by things like denture cream, women’s products, and the few odd photographs of other people who were clearly grandchildren. What grandpa would live in a place like this?
The fifteenth apartment was it, I realized almost immediately. There was a computer on the table, and a corkboard littered with maps and drawings similar to those we saw in the warehouse. There was also a flyer for Mongol Horde on the fridge. Yup, definitely the place.
I returned to my own self and tried not to throw up as Nigel half carried me down the hallway.
“I thought you’d gotten better at this,” he grunted.
“I have,” I gritted back, regaining my feet in another few strides. “Sometimes it doesn’t bother me, sometimes it does. But if I’m going to be on a trip longer than a few seconds, it always helps if I have someone talk me through the process. Without that…everything’s harder.”
“Noted.” He propped me up, made sure I wouldn’t fall, then swiped the key card at the door I indicated. The key card worked, and the door opened quietly. But as we were about to go in, a young Asian woman rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway. She opened her eyes wide and gave a startled yip, then dropped her bag of laundry and bolted.
“Get the computer,” I barked, and took off after the girl.
She’d entered a stairwell, and while there was technically still the option of going up, down made far more sense. I clattered down behind her, right on her heels for all fifteen floors, then out onto the open walkway…
And straight into a six-foot-four anime cosplay femme fatale with hugely made-up eyes, shimmering petal-white lips, cascades of cotton-candy-pink hair caught up into voluminous pigtails—wearing a black, pink, and white flared minidress above thigh-high black socks with bright pink bands at the tops, and shiny black platform boots.
“And how do you do, sweet thing?” Nikki Dawes crowed, collaring the girl with one heavily muscled arm.
Chapter Nineteen
I nearly cried out with relief myself as the laundry girl wilted in Nikki’s arms, more grateful than I could express to simply see her again—in all her anime glory.
Nikki Dawes was the closest thing I had to a best friend, along with being the second Ace in the House of Swords. A former cop, she’d had my back from the moment we’d met in a psychic reading room off the Vegas Strip. Back then, I’d been nothing more than a Tarot-reading artifact hunter in search of something—anything—to protect me from the Magician’s magnetic pull, while she’d been a flashy Vegas Connected who’d picked up a side gig as chauffeur for the Council. We’d both come a long way since those days, literally and figuratively.
The district was beginning to fill with people, so though I was dying to find out how Nikki had made it to Tokyo and had managed to outfit herself in full cosplay in barely more than twenty-four hours, I was forced to focus on the issue at hand. Nikki and I turned the young woman right around and marched her back into the building, exiting onto the first floor so we could take the elevator back up to the fifteenth.
Nobody looked out of their rooms, and weirdly, the girl didn’t cry out. She didn’t speak, she didn’t protest, she barely even blinked. I knew she could make noise based on her yelp of dismay when she saw us, but I wasn’t sure how much we’d get out of her.
We reached the young gamer’s room a few minutes later, and though the girl was now noticeably paler, she entered obediently, her gaze going to the bag of laundry Nigel had recovered and laid on the table. The clothes had already been neatly folded in stacks. Tidiness was a virtue for the man. He also seemed not at all surprised to see Nikki, so there was definitely some colluding going on here.
The girl’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed at the laundry, and she folded her arms tightly against her chest. “Is he—dead?” she asked in perfect English. “Is he coming back?”
I glanced at Nigel, then Nikki, who still held the girl with a light touch on her shoulder. That touch was all Nikki needed to get through the kind of interviews she used to hold as a Chicago beat cop with particular ease. Now, given her role as one of my Aces for the House of Swords, it was a skill I found highly useful as well. Nikki couldn’t read someone’s thoughts, exactly, but she could read fears, memories—all the images that flashed through a person’s mind as she plied them with questions. Or, as in this case, someone else did the plying while she stood back and patted the interviewee on the shoulder reassuringly.
“He, who?” Nigel asked, reasonably enough. “This is the apartment of Lin Wei. Is that who you mean?”
At the man’s name, the girl blinked, truly confused. “Lin Wei,” she said, as if trying the name out for the first time. “Lin Wei.”
Suddenly, the dots connected for me. “What name did he give you?” I asked. “We’re not here to hurt him, or you, for that matter. We’re looking for people he was with, trying to understand where they disappeared to.”
At the word “disappeared,” the girl’s agitation spiked, and Nikki glanced toward me. Her shell-white lips thinned into a tight line, and her eyes softened. She squeezed the girl’s shoulder. “He’s not in any trouble, baby doll,” she said quietly.
The girl shrugged ruefully. “He didn’t give me his real name,” she said. “It’s not like I should care too much how much trouble he’s in. But—that is the way of this place. There are no names. There is no mail. There are no phones. It is a place for being without living. Hiding without seeking.”
I nodded, and more of the mystery filled in. I’d heard—vaguely—about the Disappeared. An entire subclass of men and women dropped off the grid in many large cities every year, but it seemed a particular problem in Japan, where the culture was so dedicated to work and honor and caring for the family. For some people, it got to be too much, or something happened that they couldn’t imagine digging themselves out of—they lost a job, or a wife, or experienced a tragedy from which there seemed no return. For these people, there were always places to go. Some, like this one, meant you needed some measure of money. Others weren’t as nice, but still got the job done. A place to go underground, to be without being. To hide where no one could find you.
“Did he work?” I asked the girl abruptly. “Lin Wei. Did he have a job?”
“His computer,” she said, nodding. “He worked for a gaming company, all online. A lot of them do that—work online. Some make good money. He did. He was good at what he did, and he loved the work, the game. He…he wasn’t a bad person.” She glanced up at me almost shyly. “Was he married? Is that why he ran away?”
She looked so miserable, my heart twisted for her, especially since I couldn’t offer any answers. “Did he ever invite others here? Other people he worked with?”
“No.” The word was abrupt and flat, as if I’d asked the impossible. “No one comes here. No one is sup
posed to know about here.”
I frowned. “Then why would he have the address on a business card?”
She looked at me in confusion, and I fished out the card. She took it, flipped it over. “No one came here,” she said again.
“How often did you see him, sweet cakes?” Nikki asked. “Every day? You have your own key, right?”
“Every day,” the girl said. “Once a week to clean, do laundry. Other times—if he was here…” She faded off. “You do not bring people to this place. That’s not what it is for.”
We didn’t get much more out of her. Lin Wei had moved in about a year ago, without any explanation. The girl, who gave us only the distinctly non-Asian-sounding name Katya, was the laundress for the building, and she also cleaned the small apartments for many of the residents. She was an employee of the building’s management, but she didn’t live in the building. She had a family, she said. She was loved.
The inference being, of course, that Lin Wei was not loved, or that he had no family.
Nikki showed her a picture of Hayley Adams, but the girl didn’t show any recognition. Merely resignation.
“She’s young,” she said softly.
I looked at her in surprise. Katya was older than Hayley, certainly, but she couldn’t be past twenty-five. “We don’t think he was seeing her. We think he was working with her,” I said, though I had no reason to comfort this girl.
Still, she gave me a tentative smile. “And she’s disappeared too?”
“That’s what we’re thinking, yeah.”
“Was she a worker on the game?”
“Sure.”
“Then you will find her in there,” she said, her face creasing in a sudden smile that lit up her whole face. “That’s what he always told me. To look for him in the game, if I ever lost him. That I could always find him there.”
“You mean in Mongol Horde? There’s um—a message board?” I suddenly felt every inch of my twenty-seven years. When was the last time I’d played a video game? Never. I’d gone on the run at seventeen, and the games available to me in the RVs tended to be more along the lines of euchre and Tri-Ominos. The retirees weren’t big fans of video games. Since then, the industry had taken off like a shot and left me behind.
Fortunately, I wasn’t completely off the mark.
“For the testers of both games, yes,” Katya said.
I frowned. “What do you mean, both games?”
But Katya was on a roll now, her eyes lighting up. “There’s a special room where they could leave messages for each other. He told me to log in as him, and his message would be there and no one would know what it meant, but I would.”
Nigel turned the computer toward her. “Can you log in now?”
She nodded, but her lips turned down at the corners, and she brought her hands together, twisting them tightly. “Yes, I can. But he is coming back, you said. He’ll know I’ve been in his computer.”
“We’ll cover you on that,” Nikki said, with so much sincerity, I found I believed her too. She had a certain cop voice that brooked no disavowal. “Right now, for his safety as well as that of the woman we are looking for, we need you to get in and see if he has left any messages for anyone in this room you’re telling us about.”
Katya seemed to accept that, and I watched her as she swiftly booted the computer and keyed in the login information. Nigel watched closely, then gave me a quick nod. Apparently, Lin Wei was not known for sophisticated login techniques, and Nigel would be able to get in again without Katya.
Once she opened the game, however, Katya’s fingers flew over the keyboard. She kept up a swiftly running commentary as she typed. “He would always start in this place he called the village of the damned,” she said, a smile teasing her face. “He thought it was funny.”
Nigel was keying notes into his phone. “Village of the damned? That’s a location in Mongol Horde?”
“It’s a location for both games. Where everything starts.”
“You keep saying both games,” I interrupted. “We heard about players modifying the game. Is that what you’re talking about? Add-ons to make the game more interesting for die-hard players?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It was more special than that. He had mastered the doorway, I never could. Because of that, I was never supposed to play the second game. It was still in beta, very few people allowed in, and those were sworn to secrecy. Not that…Lin Wei, as you call him, was big on secrecy.”
She said this last with an affectionate, if scoffing, laugh, and I narrowed my eyes at her. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that he would have let me play, if I was like him. But not too many people are like him. I wanted to be, though. And he said if what he thought was true, I could maybe be like him one day. That that was what they were all working toward.”
I winced, feeling another headache coming on. “I thought they were working on a game.”
“Well, yes, they were, of course,” Katya said hurriedly. “But he said the game—the game was inspirational. Exciting, even. There were rumors that it wasn’t even a game but more of a real time social documentary, only more important. Like a chase app, but what you could be chasing was…” She broke off, coloring, and I sent a glance toward Nikki. She’d gone pale behind Katya, and she made a wind-this-up gesture with her finger.
Nigel continued smoothly. “If Lin Wei did leave here, where would he go, do you think? Would he return to his family or take off across the country?”
Katya’s lips turned down at this question, and Nikki murmured soothingly, “He hasn’t left, Katya. He’s coming back. But if he did suddenly disappear for a little while and you weren’t worried about him, where would you say he’d go? Besides his avatar being in the game.”
“One of the real-life places that he could see inside the game,” she said, sighing. “That’s where he’d go.”
“A real-life place that had a counterpart in Mongol Horde, you mean?” Nigel pressed.
“Well, not exactly. Mongol Horde was his job, and he was good at his job. They’d made that game so much more popular than it was ever expected to be. All the testers were amazed, he said. Even the designer was blown away.”
This was another one of Katya’s logic jumps, but as impatience flashed across Nigel’s face, I leaned in. “Did you and Lin Wei ever talk about the designer? Had he ever met him in in person?”
“Met him?” she exclaimed. “They’re fast friends. His name is Simon, and he is a genius at game design. He knew just what to create to make it seem like it was real. As if he had witnessed attacks like the ones he put into his game himself. And more than that, he had a way of making you feel like you could do anything. At just a word, he could make you think you could accomplish any dream or take any risk and it would be successful. When Lin Wei would come back from conversations with him, or even talked to him on the phone, he was a different person. Energized, excited, hopeful, happy. Happier than I thought he could actually be.” She shook her head and sighed, her smile once more wistful. “I can’t really explain it better than that.”
“Oh, I think you’ve explained it pretty well,” Nikki said drolly. “So Simon worked with your Lin Wei a long time?”
“A year,” she said, and her cheeks had faintly colored again. “But he wasn’t my Lin Wei. He was his own person, and he pulled together others like him, wherever he could find them.”
“And told them about this, um, second game. This mod inside Mongol Horde.”
She gestured to the screen. Her character was walking through a garish room with a moss-green floor, yellow walls with weird, jumbled art on them, and a blue ceiling. The tones struck a chord with me, but the overall effect was cringeworthy. This was Simon’s great design?
“The Message Room,” she said, and I squinted more closely as her character turned toward the wall. What I’d thought was art was actually papers tacked up on the wall, and through Katya’s avatar eyes, I quickly scanned them. They were exactly as
she’d said—messages, callouts, locations, names. My gaze snagged on one of the notes, and I froze.
“What’re these?” I pointed. “How long ago were they left?”
Katya leaned in. “Callouts for Henry+27,” she said. “That could be his real name—it is a strange thing with this game, many of the players are proud. They want people to know who they are.”
“Plus twenty-seven,” Nigel said thoughtfully.
“It’s the country code for South Africa,” I said, thinking of Rift, of Cyrus…and of Cyrus’s son, Henry, who’d been playing a video game when he’d OD’d. Henry had seemed to recognize me. Just how deep did this game go? “No idea on how long it’s been here?”
Katya shook her head. “I’ve not seen it before, but I don’t usually look at the board. But there are several slips, and…” Her avatar lifted its hand, riffling through the slips with remarkable realism. “There’s a date. Last week—does that help?”
“It helps enough.” I already knew I was right, though. Henry had been in this game, had seen me, recognized me. Even in his mind-blown state back in Cape Town, Henry had been trying to get me to run. “So tell me about the second game. How do you get into it?”
“If a player could open the door, in his mind, they should be allowed to walk through it. So Lin Wei created a mod that had the door in a special room in Mongol Horde, and then he’d play with some of his friends. They’d happen upon that room, enter it, and…if they could open the door, then they could walk through. It’s really just that simple.”
Nigel tapped the computer console again. Katya had moved through out of the Message Room and was crossing to another building, stepping inside what looked like a shop of some kind, with lots of items on shelves. She moved quickly through it and out the back door. “Can you show us this special room?”
That question seemed to lock her up. “No. I couldn’t open the door,” she said, dropping her hands to her lap.
