The fireball exploded at Dr Agony’s hip, incinerating his robe, scorching away half his armor and searing the flesh beneath, and sending everything else in his pouch spraying across the cobbles. The wizard shrieked in pain and stumbled to one side, then fell to his knees.
I stepped forward.
“Tell them to stop fighting. Tell them you changed your mind. Tell them whatever you want, but if you want to live, call this off.”
He was trembling as he looked up at me. He had one hand clamped to his side, and the other he raised, shaking, like a beggar. His cracked lips opened, and his voice was less than a whisper.
“What?”
“I said,” the wizard gasped, “I told you I bring all my own gear.”
The hand beneath his robe flashed up and in it was a pistol, a heavy, black, blocky thing that froze me in sheer terror at the absolute realness of it. He pulled the trigger.
The world froze as the gun went off, a hundred times louder than any clash of swords. I shut my eyes, waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. When I dared to open them, I saw Scytri with his hands wrapped around Agony’s wrist in a white-knuckled grip. Blue smoke wafted lazily from the muzzle of the pistol and blue blood spilled from Scytri’s stomach.
“What—” said Scytri.
“No!” I dove past Scytri and came up with Dr Agony’s sword, which I brought down in a glittering arc, severing the red wizard’s hand from his arm at the wrist. He screamed and fell back, grabbing the spurting wound helplessly with his remaining hand. The pistol clattered to the ground, where Scytri picked it up.
“What is this?” His face was paper white and he was shaking.
“Scytri, please, you’re hurt—”
“What is this?” he repeated.
“It’s a human weapon,” I said. “Please, just put it down. You need help.”
Scytri put a hand to his own leaking wound, then raised his head to gaze out across the battlefield. The sound of the gun had drawn hundreds of amazed stares from elf and human alike, stopping half the skirmishes around the square with its roar.
At the far side of the battle, a knot of elves was still fighting. Eneri in his gold armor stood bloodied but unbowed with a sword in each hand. The Eldest huddled behind him, pale hands up in a gesture of self-defense. Some of Scytri’s men—I recognized their red armor—were still battling their way towards the Eldest, but they’d stalled out against an elven shield wall that looked unbreakable.
Scytri raised the pistol in a shaking hand, blew out a long breath, and squeezed the trigger.
The second bang of the gun stopped all fighting in the square. Every eye turned to us. As the elves and adventurers registered what had just been done, they looked as one in the direction the pistol pointed. I looked, too, and so we all watched together as the Eldest put a hand over the new hole in his chest, coughed up a gout of brackish blue, and toppled over, dead.
Ambassador
Dr James Agostino glowered at me across the polished conference table. He’d cleaned up for the meeting, washed off the blood and filth of the battle and gotten clean, white bandages for his wrist, but in his reflection on the table I could see a spot under his chin that he’d missed while shaving.
The three of us—Agostino, Apollonia Blomhaugen, and I—sat in leather office chairs in a small room tucked away off the foyer of the Expedition Hall. A TV hung on one wall below an AC unit and a minifridge filled with bottled water hummed in the corner. It was easy to forget that we were in the Summerlands and not some corporate boardroom on Earth.
The existence of this room was a secret, Blomhaugen had told me as we waited for Agostino. A place for Expedition execs to hold their most sensitive discussions, the room was off-limits to all but Blomhaugen and her coterie, regularly swept for bugs, and had even been built as a Faraday cage to keep electromagnetic signals from entering or exiting.
We’d left our drones outside. They sat powered down in their own Faraday bags, under guard by two dozen black-clad rangers who filled the front room of the Hall to keep out curious adventurers. There were no cameras in this room, no phones, not even a pad of paper and a pencil. Cass had nearly rioted when she’d been told, but in the end, Blomhaugen had invited me and not her.
“Can we make this quick?” said Agostino. “I’d like to do a segment with the elves before I shut off for bed.”
“Certainly we can.” Blomhaugen’s face was steady. “James, what are you hoping to get from this meeting?”
Agostino’s mouth angled in a smirk. “I’m prepared to be merciful,” he said. “All I want is a lifetime ban. Emma and her little friends leave the Summerlands and never come back, and I don’t press criminal charges.”
“I see.” Blomhaugen folded her hands on the table. “And where would you take the game from here, if you were still in charge?”
Agostino crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. His eyes were on me. “War. Let’s not kid ourselves here: we’ve all checked the numbers from the battle, and we all know they aren’t coming back unless we keep this thing going.”
“The elves want peace,” I said. I had to clench my jaw to keep from shouting.
“Oh, that’s why they brought their army?”
“I already told you.” My teeth hurt and I could hear the tightness in my voice. “The Eldest that Scytri shot was from an imru that supported the war. But now his progenitor is Eldest, and their original progenitor was a healer, so—”
“If you say so.” Agostino rolled his eyes. “Well, it takes two to sign a truce. Let them limp back past the Wall while we get our strategy in place and then we’ll show them how humans feel about being attacked.”
“Emma,” Blomhaugen interjected. “Do you agree about the ratings?”
“The ratings?” I blinked. “Well… no. I don’t. Violence isn’t all the viewers want; I’ve proved that. There’s so much more we could be doing. Stream the rangers’ exploratory expeditions, or just have players do it. More lectures. Language lessons. Cultural exchanges with the elves.” I straightened up in my chair. “Ms Blomhaugen, I used to fix merch machines for Expedition. You’re missing out on so much. Forget T-shirts, you should be selling textbooks to high schools and colleges. Let people visit short-term. You could export flowers—”
Blomhaugen held up a hand. “Thank you, Emma.”
“You’re not seriously listening to her?” Agostino’s mouth hung half open as he gestured at me with one hand and one bandaged stump. “Attempted PK, going to the Wall, who knows where she learned some of that magic—I’d tick off all the rules she and her friends broke, but I can’t because she cut my goddamn hand off!”
“And what are you hoping to achieve here, Emma?” Blomhaugen was as icy as ever, totally unfazed by Agostino’s outburst, but there was something in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She almost looked… expectant?
“Well, stopping the war, for one,” I said.
“Aside from that.” Blomhaugen shook her head. “I mean personally. What do you want?”
“Oh.” I glanced at Agostino, who had open disgust on his face, then back to Blomhaugen. “I want him in jail.”
“You—you what?” At first I thought Agostino was choking, but then I realized he was laughing, a wheezy, uncontrolled sound.
Blomhaugen nodded. “I can do that.”
“What?” Agostino leapt up from his chair. “You absolutely cannot!”
“I certainly can,” said Blomhaugen, looking up at the red-faced wizard. “You can join Donna Markan after she testifies about all the fraud you two committed together.”
“You never cared about that before,” Agostino snarled.
“I’ll admit it, I looked the other way on plenty of your little indiscretions.” Blomhaugen shook her head. “And now I’m paying for that mistake. You brought a gun into my game, James.”
“Your game? Your game?” His voice, always nasal, was rising to a shriek. “It’s my game! Mine!”
Blomhaugen stood, and I found mys
elf glancing back and forth between them like a kid watching her parents fight, unsure which one to be more afraid of. But instead of confronting Agostino, Blomhaugen turned and opened the door.
“Elting?”
A ranger stepped into the room, his hard eyes locked on Agostino. His head was shaved and plastered with a dirty white bandage and I guessed that the healers hadn’t gotten to him yet.
“Take him through the portal, please. Security has been prepped on the other side.”
The ranger nodded. His men followed him as he moved into the room, and together they manhandled Agostino around the table as the wizard struggled. They passed my seat, and his burning eyes on locked on me.
I raised my left hand, palm towards me and back towards Agostino. It was an elven gesture, one of many I’d started to unpack since the battle. It meant something like “I am above you in every respect and you’d better listen to what I’m saying,” and of all the billions of human beings in this world and the other, Dr James Agostino was the only other one who could possibly understand just how insulting I was being.
“Have fun in jail,” I said.
“You’ll regret this!” he spat suddenly. He was looking at Blomhaugen; he didn’t dare meet my eyes. “I swear to God you will! I built this place, I built your little company—they’re all loyal to me, you’ll see—you stole it from me!”
He kept shouting as the rangers dragged him across the foyer; I could hear his voice receding. I bit my lip. I’d promised myself—and Cass, and Noah—that I would play it cool in front of Blomhaugen no matter what happened. But this…
I leapt from my chair and turned to watch just as Elting opened the front door of the Expedition Hall. The bright sunlight of Portal Square picked out the dust swirling around Agostino, thrashing and yelling in the arms of three rangers, and even from across the foyer I had to squint. Beyond the door, out in the blinding white, I began to make out shapes: people, a whole mob of them, and above their heads, a hundred or a thousand drones swirling and jockeying for the best view of the action as Dr Agony was dragged mid-tantrum into the view of the entire world.
“It’s always sad when a great man falls,” Blomhaugen said softly. I turned in surprise. I’d forgotten all about her, but there she stood, looking as calm as if we’d just been discussing what to order for lunch.
She gestured to my chair, and I sat back down, feeling sheepish. So much for playing it cool… though compared to Agostino, I was doing just fine.
“What else do you want?”
“What?” I said, trying not to start stammering. “Really? Why?”
“As a policy, it’s good business to keep my top players happy,” Blomhaugen said. “Anyone who can unseat Dr Agony deserves to be taken seriously.” She straightened her suit jacket and sat at the head of the table. “Besides, you saved us all from quite a slaughter. It was obvious which way the battle was headed.”
“Don’t start a war,” I said. “Please.”
Blomhaugen laughed, a sound like an ice cube hitting a martini glass. “Good God, what do you take me for?”
“You weren’t…?”
“Not a chance.” Blomhaugen snorted. “We sell fantasy. War is too real.”
“Then why was Agony at this meeting at all?” My head was starting to feel fuzzy.
“If I hand him the rope, I’m not responsible for tying the noose.” Blomhaugen folded her hands on the table, her face as still as the icy face of a frozen lake, and I suddenly remembered that she was most definitely not my friend. “What else do you want?”
“Why did you kill Jason?”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Blomhaugen said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Then let me apologize on behalf of Expedition Games. Further, let me assure you that the employee responsible for that tragedy has been dealt with.”
“Who?” Inplexicably, my nerves had disappeared, replaced with a coolness that matched whatever Blomhaugen was projecting.
“A rogue lawyer,” the CEO said. “Overzealous in his protection of our corporate secrets. Again, my sincerest apologies.”
“Who?”
Blomhaugen cleared her throat. “Did you meet Alan Brodie on your way in?”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “All over what? Some files? It was about the elves, wasn’t it? You wanted people to think they were all gone, but you had proof they were alive.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny the contents of the files your friend received.”
“Well, I hope it was worth it.” I crossed my arms. “I’m still not sure why I shouldn’t tell the world.”
“I’ll only ask one more time: what else do you want?” Blomhaugen’s eyes bored into mine, but I refused to flinch. “I can try to chase down the money James stole from you, though I should warn you, it could take years. Finances in the real world aren’t as simple as here, and even in prison, James will have lawyers.”
“Sure.” I waved my hand as though the offer were nothing. “Go ahead. But that’s not enough.”
“I’m listening.” Blomhaugen leaned back in her chair, her hands still folded.
“There’s a store manager I used to work for, back home. Mr Fessy. Get him his job back and fire his boss Roger Sorolla. Actually, give him Sorolla’s job.”
“Done.”
“Okay, as far as here in the Summerlands. All of Hearthammer is forgiven for whatever rules we broke.”
“Of course.”
“Next…” I could feel a lump forming in my throat. We’d reached the things I really wanted. “I’m in charge of negotiations with the elves. I’ll translate until other people can learn Elvish, and then I get to be, like…”
“Ambassador?”
“Exactly. Ambassador. Still a player, though, too, so I can fight, use magic, find treasure, everything. But I’m at all the peace talks, plus any delegations to the elves after that. Really, we should set up an embassy for them here, and our own in… wherever the elves actually live.”
“You’re rambling again.” Blomhaugen straightened up. “Is that all?”
“Actually…” I licked my lips, which had gone suddenly dry. “There’s one more thing.”
***
A week later, I stood in the slanting red light of sunset, looking at the patch of ground where new players came through. It had been thoroughly trampled during the Battle of Portal Square, churned to mud and watered with the blood of human and elf. The stone gazebo had collapsed completely, reduced to a pile of rubble that sat nearby on the stained cobbles of Portal Square. Most of the buildings on the plaza were splashed with gore or scorched by fire.
A chipped metal pipe showed in the dirt at the edge of the glowing moss ring, which seemed to have survived the battle unscathed, and it occurred to me for the first time that there must be hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable buried beneath the soil of the Summerlands. On either side of the pipe, a few green shoots poked up a fraction of an inch from the earth. Someone had planted them just today: new bulbs to replace the bed of flowers I’d tumbled into when I arrived.
“They’ll grow back,” said Magpie.
I turned in surprise. I’d thought I was alone; almost every adventurer in the Summerlands—the ones who’d survived—was on Meat Street, drinking and eating in a party that had started the night after the battle and showed no signs of stopping a week later.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Only a minute.” He shrugged. “It was nice to see you looking happy.”
“Look…” I caught myself staring at my boots and forced my gaze up to meet his. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much since…” I sighed. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk to you. I just don’t know what I want you to say.”
“There’s nothing I can say.” Magpie’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “But I can show you.”
“Show me?” I blinked, but Magpie was already stripping. He had a clean black shirt on, and he pulled it over his head
, mussing his thick hair as he revealed the lean muscles of his stomach and chest. My eyes caught immediately on the tattoo of Jason’s name—then I began to laugh.
Magpie was doing the most ridiculous dance I’d ever seen.
“What the hell are you doing?” I choked. He was twisting like the love child of a stripper and a drunk snake, his hands over his head as he rotated slowly, giving me a good look at his battered body. A sudden thought made me glance up. “Is your camera on?”
“The world must see my dance of seduction,” he said in a low voice that sounded ridiculous coming from his slight frame. He even had a sort of accent going on, like a lover from a hundred-year-old romance movie. “As must you. Drink it in. All of it. This is what you are giving up if you will not love me. If you will not have me…”
He stopped dancing with no warning, shifting back to himself as suddenly as if someone had flipped his crazy-person off switch. I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.
“And now that we’re well past the time delay on live feeds, allow me to explain exactly what each one of these tattoos means to the Vyronas crime family.”
“You—” My mouth was hanging open, and I let it stay there for fifteen solid minutes as Magpie went through his entire history as a contract boy. Line by line, victim by victim, he sold out his crime family with absolutely no shame, implicating every capo and thug he’d ever worked with, even inserting embarrassing personal information about them as it occurred to him. He reached Terra’s tattoo, then Jason’s, and when he’d finished the story of the Expedition lawyer with the accent who’d paid to have Officer Brayden Porter kill a seventeen-year-old boy, he finally looked at me with eyes so wide and empty that any anger I still felt was lost in them immediately.
“Turn off your camera,” I said.
“It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?” He smiled. “I’m not invisible anymore.”
Expedition- Summerlands Page 29
