Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  “I did not!” said Jason defensively. He dropped the phone in his lap. “Okay, maybe I was thinking about it, but I can’t. All my messages are gone.”

  “Noah, is your phone wiped, too?” I asked. “Maybe the school did something.”

  “No, mine is fine,” said Noah. Like Jason, he was still in school, though a year ahead and about to graduate. They both had school-issued phones, which meant the school had final control over their contents.

  “You’re sure you didn’t open the file?” said Cass.

  “I said I was sure!” Jason snapped, and Cass put her hands up in a don’t-bite-my-head-off gesture. Jason shook his head. “What if something happened to Terra?”

  “Phones glitch all the time,” Cass said. “Especially school phones. Don’t sweat it.”

  Jason sighed and stood up. “I have to get to work.”

  ***

  To get from the Keatses’ place to mine, I didn’t even have to leave the building. The apartment where I’d grown up was three floors down and two halls over. I knew every stain and patch on the plastic carpet, had probably contributed more than anyone to the worn-in path down the center of the hall. I was less familiar with the walls and ceilings, since I tended to walk with my head down, but I could still identify any of the intervening hallways by the holes in the yellow plaster or persistently dripping leaks.

  I was walking on autopilot. The business with Jason’s phone had been strange, but I just couldn’t focus on it. Instead, I was thinking about names. Despite the stark differences between the Summerlands and every game that had come before, one tradition had survived across realities: gamertags. The most famous were household names. Dr Agony, Rad, Wolfheart and Valkyrie, the members of the legendary party Golden Apple, could be seen on T-shirts, VR headsets, and, on one memorable occasion, a condom ad that ran only once during the Super Bowl.

  Our party had a name, of course: Hearthammer. We’d picked it up in a Dungeons & Dragons game that Keats had run for me, Jason, and Cass when we were kids and it had naturally carried over to our Summerlands party.

  We also had our own gamertags, just as we had agreed-upon roles in the party. Cass went by Jessamine (the name of her first D&D character and more feminine than I would have expected from her) and had gotten dangerously good with a longbow. Noah was called Sepharad, a great name for a wizard, which he would be in the Summerlands. He was learning white magic the same way I was learning red: by mastering the essential Elvish words and practicing the moves hour after hour and hoping we were doing it right.

  Jason was our muscle, literally as well as figuratively after years of training with a heavy steel bar in place of a sword. He insisted on calling himself Yukon, even though Cass hated it; not fantasy enough, she said. I think he’d heard once that the Yukon Territory far to the north was a place of blue water, green grass, and mild sunlight, like the Summerlands itself, and it had stuck with him.

  As for me, I’d gone through a few tags, but that night’s conversation had helped me finally settle on one. I would be called Linnaea, after an eighteenth-century naturalist who’d invented taxonomy, the discipline of categorizing and organizing living things. It seemed like an appropriate handle for the girl who aimed to be the Summerlands’ first proper scientist. I could imagine the cover of my first book, with LINNAEA across the top in big letters and EMMA BURKE underneath it.

  The halls of our apartment block were normally crowded with a bustling mixture of neighbors and squatters. A lot of folks sat out in the halls to eat their dinners, some out of a sense of community, others to use the public plugs to power their hot plates and rice cookers. Having grown up on the block, I knew most of them, especially on this walk, but I was too caught up in being pleased with myself to notice that the halls were silent and empty. It was later than I had thought and the only people still out were squatters curled up under thin blankets in the corners. So I was alone when I heard a familiar whiny voice.

  “Hey Burke, did you get paid today?”

  Jamie Bullard came around the corner of an inset doorway, an oversized hunting knife held loosely at his side. He looked the same as he had at the Expedition store earlier and he certainly had a habit of popping out at you, but there was something new in his eyes that made the back of my neck prickle.

  “I get paid every day,” I replied.

  “Perfect,” said Jamie. His grip tightened on the hunting knife, though he kept his hands down. “Then you won’t mind sharing with me.”

  “Come on, you’re not a criminal. Why don’t you get a job? Then you can share with yourself.” My voice was steadier than my nerves. Jamie had bugged me plenty in my life, but never with a knife in his hand, and never with that look in his eyes.

  “Don’t say that. Everybody knows you’re a bleeding heart.” Jamie brought his hands up, spread wide in a mock why the hell not gesture that I guess he thought was an impressive display of casual insolence. In reality it just exposed a bit of his overhanging belly. “You give stuff to your Hearthammer friends all the time. Christ, you even give stuff to the street kids. I’ve seen you. So give some to me.”

  “Jamie, let’s talk about this.” I took a step back and dared a glance over my shoulder. I wasn’t too far from the door to the nearest stairwell, but if I ran, I would expose my back to Jamie and his knife. Plus he knew the block as well as I did and no matter where I hid, would find me.

  “Talk about it?” His gleaming eyes narrowed. “Nah. Wanna fight about it?”

  There it was, the unspoken threat that he held over my head. However big he was, I had spent the last five years learning to fight. The way he was standing, I was pretty confident I could get inside his guard, grab the knife, and walk away. The problem was that I would have to hurt him to do it, maybe even break his wrist. I didn’t want to in the first place, and, if I was successful, I’d feel the full weight of the police on my back within an hour. They wouldn’t care that it was self-defense, not with the chief’s kid crying and clutching his arm.

  I couldn’t even just hand over my money and trust the law would get it back for me. Despite the police insurance I’d dutifully paid since my first job as a kid, there was no point in filing a complaint that Chief Bullard would just toss in the trash.

  “No thanks,” I said, just like he knew I would.

  “Come on,” he whined. His eyes were hungry and his hand on the knife was white and shaking. “I’ve seen you out there running around with your little adventuring party. Don’t you think it’s time to fight a real man instead of imaginary gold dogs?”

  “I said I’m good,” I said tightly.

  “Then give me your paycard,” he said.

  So I gave him my paycard.

  Police Statement

  “It’s not a big deal, Cass,” I said for the hundredth time. Sitting in the dust field behind our block, I was rolling a quarter over my fingers and she was putting a new string on her bow. Behind us, Noah murmured the same word of Elvish over and over as he made little arcs with a stick. Cass stood and aimed at me, arrowless but with the string drawn back to her ear.

  “It is a big deal,” she insisted, glaring at me down the length of her arm. “You should have kicked his ass. We’ll be out of here before long anyway.”

  “Not if I’m in jail.” I passed the coin to my other hand in a satisfyingly smooth motion.

  “Why aren’t you bothered by this? I’m sick of having to be upset on your behalf all the time. It’s exhausting.” Cass loosed the string, piercing my heart with an imaginary arrow and a real thrumming snap.

  I sighed. “You shouldn’t do that. Without an arrow to absorb the force of the string—”

  “It all goes into the bow,” Cass finished for me. “I know, professor. Loosen up.”

  I unleashed a string of Elvish gibberish and flicked the quarter at her, nailing her square in the chest. “Bang. You’re dead.” If we’d been in the Summerlands, it would have exploded… maybe.

  “You had the last word wrong,”
Noah said.

  “No I didn’t.” I twisted around to look at him. “Gíru. That’s what the book says, gíru.”

  Noah shook his head. “It’s not gíru, it’s girú.”

  “Sure, if you go by Ringler, but on Agony’s feed—why do you even know this? It’s red magic!”

  “Emma Burke, you’re coming with me.” It was Keats’s voice, snapping like a whip. I looked up to see Jason standing at his father’s side, his shoulders hunched and his eyes locked firmly on his shoes. Keats’s neck was red and his mouth was working like he was trying to chew a particularly heinous piece of protein gristle.

  “Bathroom break my ass,” I said to Jason as I stood. “You sold me out, you rat!”

  Jason just shrugged, but at least he had the decency to look a little embarrassed.

  “Come on, Emma.” Keats’s voice was still tight. “We’re going down to the station. Now.” I knew he wasn’t mad at me personally, but it was still unnerving to see him like this.

  “Keats, it’s really not a big deal,” I tried.

  “Like hell it’s not.” He was already walking away, expecting me to follow. I’d always guessed Cass got her stubborn streak from her dad; this was just confirmation.

  “What’s happening right now?” Noah asked.

  “Jason told Keats about Jamie Bullard,” I said, then pointed at the boy trying to avoid my eyes. “Do the crime, do the time,” I told him. “You’re coming too.”

  ***

  The police station was a classic example of lowest-bidder brutalist architecture. The front was all glass, stuck with translucent posters for the department’s corporate sponsors; a picture of a gleaming, greasy Cluckin’ Turducken Meal from Cluck-a-Duck’s made my anxious stomach flip over. Behind the station, the attached jail was a pile of concrete boxes, cell blocks placed like building blocks.

  The Turducken split in half and we were hit with a puff of canned protein scent as glass doors whooshed open to let us in. The interior was sticky with the body heat of two dozen cops, citizens, and handcuffed criminals. No AC in here, which Keats had once told me was an intentional choice to discourage people from hanging around.

  “Welcome to Hollywood Precinct Five!” chirped a disembodied female voice from somewhere above our heads. “The current wait time is seventy-eight minutes. Please feel free to return any time between eight a.m. and six p.m. if you do not wish to wait.”

  If it were possible for so busy and crowded a room to fall completely silent, it would have. Clearly, rumor of the mugging had arrived ahead of us. Between the cops, the perps, and a well-dressed woman who looked up as the touchpad where she was entering a complaint began to play a video ad, every face in the lobby turned toward us.

  I hesitated, half in and half out of the doorway. Grabbing me by the wrist, Keats led me past the reception screens and through a frosted glass door deeper into the station. Jason trotted along sheepishly behind us.

  The cops in the bullpen stared openly as we passed. Some watched with anger etched into their stony faces, others with fear. One absolutely huge officer stood bent over with his hands planted on the desk of a dark-haired female colleague. His biceps strained against his uniform shirt; his face was red beneath the open visor of his riot helmet, which had the name PORTER stenciled on it in worn white paint. He let his gaze linger on us for an intentional moment, then leaned in and whispered something that made the woman laugh, a staccato bark that still hung in the air after she covered her mouth. As he looked back at us, I got the weird but distinct feeling that he wasn’t watching me or Keats: he was looking right at Jason.

  Keats arrived at his desk and quickly opened a new report file on a tablet chained to the desktop. He entered the basics on a touchscreen menu: the date; my name; Jamie’s name. From a series of dropdowns he selected “Misdemeanor,” then “Theft,” then “Petty.”

  Finally he looked at me for the first time since we’d entered the station. Far from the growl I was expecting, his voice was soft when he said, “You need to make a statement for the camera.”

  “Is that—” I hesitated, feeling my neck and cheeks get hot, keeping my eyes locked carefully on the tablet in Keats’s hand. “Is that safe?”

  “Yes,” said Keats. “For you, at least. The report, the statement, the warrant, everything goes under my badge number. That way you won’t be held responsible. And it can’t be ignored.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  I did my best to look the camera in the eye as I made my statement. I tried to stick to the basics, leaving out the times Jamie Bullard had bugged me and my friends in the past, but spilling out a nervous overflow of detail about the exact time, the floor and hall and nearby room numbers where he’d mugged me, and the sixty-two ninety he’d taken. I caught myself a moment before divulging exactly why that money was so important to me. Instead I coughed and finished, “And anyway, that’s what happened. Uh, thanks. Good luck.”

  Hearing myself say “good luck” was the worst moment of the whole ordeal, or so I thought for about thirty seconds as Keats hit a few buttons to log the report. It submitted with a soft ping and I was just thinking about getting the hell out of there when a door in the back of the bullpen crashed open.

  “Keats—office—now!”

  The look in Keats’s eye as he dragged me and Jason behind him to the chief’s office told me that he had known this storm would come, but even so he seemed a bit surprised at how quickly it had whipped up.

  “Who the hell is this?” asked Chief Bullard as soon as we entered. He was looking at me, not Jason; my attempt at passing unnoticed had obviously failed. Invisibility was a white magic spell in the Summerlands anyway. Bullard wasn’t a big man, but his uniform was too small; the collar cut into his flushed neck and the Kevlar vest strained its straps. He was loud enough to fill the room anyway.

  “This is Emma, the girl your son mugged,” said Keats.

  “One of yours?” Bullard was straining to keep his temper.

  “Friend of the family, sir,” said Keats.

  “Friend of the family,” repeated Bullard. His voice was quiet, the rage tucked away for now. “You think you’re a good parent, Keats?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” said Keats. It was the closest I’d ever heard him come to bragging.

  “Think I’m a good parent?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.” Keats stood at parade rest, hands behind his back, looking Bullard square on. Behind me, Jason kept his eyes down.

  “I think I am,” said Bullard. “I’m a decent man, Keats. A good member of the community.” He snorted. “Against the advice of every sergeant on the force I haven’t fired you. You know why? Because on the whole you make my life easier. You bring crime down. That’s good enough for me. But then you go and do this”—he indicated his desk computer, which showed the report we’d just filed—“and it makes my life harder. A lot harder. You know why?”

  “Why, sir?” said Keats.

  “Because your family is all you got, Keats. And since Anna died, my boy Jamie is all the family I have. Now look, I know you love your kids. And these strays you pick up, God knows why. So if you had a chance to give your kid an advantage in life, any advantage, wouldn’t you take it? You would. You’d do the same.”

  Keats was silent as Chief Bullard began to pace.

  “So when my own kid breaks a little law, has a little teenage fun, well, I could bring the hammer down on him or I could let it slide. And if I let it slide, then when we batch up our records and sell ’em up for background checks, my kid won’t get a red flag or a black mark.”

  Bullard was crossing and recrossing his office now, looking at the floor, one hand behind his back and the other jabbing at the air as he went. It was really a monologue rather than a conversation, getting louder and louder as it spun on.

  “But then you had to go and do this”—he waved at the computer again—“and screw it all up! Can’t erase a report entered by an
officer, God knows why. Good luck ever finding a job with this on your record, Jamie. Poor kid.” Bullard turned on us. “Got anything to say in your defense, Keats? Jason, care to stick up for your old man? How about you, girl? Feel good that you ruined a boy’s life over, what was it, sixty bucks?”

  I could barely put together a whole thought, but Keats was more composed. He put his chin up, but all I could see was a man about to get hit on the jaw.

  “My job is to stop crimes if I can, and report them if I can’t,” he said. “I did my job.”

  “That’s how you’re gonna play it, huh?” Bullard was quiet again, but his voice was tight with menace. “Fine. Fair’s fair. My boy won’t be able to find work with this on his record. I’ll be stuck supporting him for the rest of my life. So let’s say no more work for you, Keats. Let’s say your perfect little golden kids can support you until you die. Pack up your things and get the hell out of here, and don’t come back. Fair?”

  ***

  By the time we made it back to the apartment block, I was late enough for work that I couldn’t walk. Luckily there was a bus that could get me to the Expedition store with four minutes to spare, but I had to rush for it, so I couldn’t be there when Keats broke the news to Cass. I wasn’t sure whether to feel guilty or relieved to miss the awkward scene, so I settled on both.

  To distract myself on the bus, or maybe to pretend for five minutes that it was still yesterday, I pulled out my phone and called up one of my favorite Summerlands clips. It was from Dr Agony’s stream, and captured a short fight between his party, Golden Apple, and a group of monsters called trash snakes. It was a pretty exciting video, but I loved it because it captured him performing a particularly amazing piece of magic.

  As the clip began, the four members of Golden Apple—Dr Agony, Rad, Wolfheart, and Valkyrie—were slogging through what appeared to be an arcane garbage dump. They sloshed through waist-high filth, shards of pottery and bones floating in brown muck. Rad was in the lead, a huge maul in his hands, and he looked back and winked at Dr Agony’s cam. Rad was a mountain of a man with dark skin and a shaved head, and his trademark grin flashed bright in the drone’s headlight. He was a Hecker like us and had actually starred in a few Hollywood action movies before the Summerlands went public. He’d signed up immediately.