Walking in Two Worlds

by Wab Kinew

“I guess.”

  “Anyway, all I’m saying is I hope maybe now you realize the truth about your friends.”

  Feng looked away.

  “The Floraverse is so cool. But people like Clan:LESS prevent others from enjoying it.”

  Feng finally re-engaged. “Sure, whatever. But you don’t know what it was like for me. When it was tough for me as a kid at school, who was there for me? My parents? Liumei? You? No, none of you were there. Clan:LESS was.” Feng’s jaw tightened visibly. “Alpha was there for me. First, just as someone to look up to on streams. And then he actually reached out and invited me in. You know what it means to have someone you watch stream invite you to play with them?” Feng shook his head. “I could always talk to the guys in Clan:LESS and go on missions with them, no matter what was happening in the rest of my life.” He sniffed hard and wiped his nose. “And now it’s over.”

  Bugz nodded.

  “I don’t even know if it was worth it.”

  Bugz stopped nodding.

  Stormy and Chalice walked back across the paved road playing on their phones. They took their seats on the picnic table again. Stormy eyed Bugz and Feng.

  “What’d we interrupt? You two love birds having a lovers’ quarrel?” Chalice giggled.

  “Shut up,” Bugz said with a smile. She glanced at Feng and, seeing him downcast, set her face into a more serious expression. “What were they doing when you went in?”

  “Still talking,” Stormy replied.

  “His aunt was there too,” Chalice added, nodding to Feng.

  “Sounded like some pretty serious stuff,” Stormy added.

  “Life and death.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Bugz stroked the feathers above the Thunderbird’s eye. The bird sat on a rock face above the shores of another lake.

  “C’mon now, Binesi!” Bugz called out. The Thunderbird straightened up, and after a few false starts she managed to fly up to a nearby tree branch. The massive cedar swayed under her weight as though caught in a strong wind.

  Suddenly, a thick laser beam crashed into the treetop and sent the Thunderbird falling toward the ground.

  “Clan:LESS!” Feng pointed to a nearby rock hill. As he shot off the first few rounds from his machine gun, a small horde of Clan:LESS mercenaries crested the hilltop and returned fire.

  “Mishi-pizhiw, help!” Bugz shouted to the nearby lake. The beast emerged instantly from the water and she jumped onto its back. Bugz wanted to fight, but her Thunderbird couldn’t withstand much more damage. “C’mon, Binesi! Feng! Let’s go!” she shouted. The Thunderbird, suddenly charged with virtual adrenaline, jumped into the air and caught a flight path that mirrored the underwater panther’s trajectory on the water’s surface. Feng jumped from the shore and climbed aboard Mishi-pizhiw’s back. Bugz fired over Feng’s head, with guns in both hands, at the growing horde gathering on the shore they’d just left behind.

  Bugz screamed at Mishi-pizhiw to speed up and they disappeared around an island, leaving the clan out of sight. She cried for the supernatural creature to go faster. After catching her breath, and after darting around a few more islands, Bugz assumed they’d covered enough distance to find some reprieve.

  She noticed motion from the corner of her eye on their starboard side. She turned and saw a fleet of Clan:LESS helicopters closing in on them. How did they find us? she wondered. Bugz jumped into the air and fired off several rounds at two of the choppers, aiming for the pilots. The aircraft spun toward the lake and crashed to the surface.

  Mishi-pizhiw turned and struck at another of the choppers like an attack dog hitting the end of his leash. He captured the helicopter in his jaws and crushed everyone on board, doing away with them instantly.

  “Let’s dive, in three…”

  Bugz looked nervously at the Thunderbird hurtling toward her under enemy fire.

  “Two…”

  The bird took fire again. Bugz jumped to helicopter height and dispatched another ship with sniper-like accuracy. The chopper spun toward the lake as Bugz and the Thunderbird both fell toward Mishi-pizhiw.

  “One…”

  As Bugz finished her countdown, Feng fired several rounds at the remaining helicopters with an angry look on his face. Bugz wondered if he really regretted turning on his clan. She landed with a thud beside Feng and gripped Mishi-pizhiw’s back. The Thunderbird landed on top of Bugz and Feng, covering them both with her wings, and dug her talons into Mishi-pizhiw. The creature roared.

  Bugz yelled, “Dive!”

  The beast plowed his head into the water below. They disappeared within a fraction of a second. The helicopters circled their last visible location on the lake’s surface, puncturing the waves with random gunfire and searchlights.

  CHAPTER 46

  Beneath the waves, Mishi-pizhiw dove deeper and deeper into the depths of this lake. His undulating form was like that seen in photos of the Loch Ness monster. He whipped his tail up and down to propel them deeper still. The lake seemed bottomless.

  “There’s a series of underwater caves we can escape to,” Bugz said through her voice-com. Feng nodded before Bugz continued. “Those tunnels lead to another lake far from here, so we should be able to buy some time to regroup.” She glanced at the chat screen in her heads-up display.

  “KnightSuper: You’re doing great girl”

  “Monkey97: Here’s some coin to help…”

  “Persephoney: Where are you going?”

  “TheRealClanWithout: You’re a fraud!!!”

  Bugz silenced the chat and killed her livestream. It only served to distract now. The gifts she received had slowed considerably since Alpha took over Mishi-pizhiw’s nest. Clan:LESS had overtaken her as the game’s leading players shortly thereafter, and their resources continued to expand rapidly. A school of thought went viral online, arguing Bugz never deserved the stature she’d once enjoyed. Trolls reminded Bugz of this every time she opened a chat window. They’d harass her, taunt her, and otherwise remind her how terrible the online world could be for a young woman. Bugz tried to ignore this online chatter, but the number of followers she’d lost bothered her.

  Mishi-pizhiw entered the jaws of a massive cave opening. The entrance looked like a giant underwater demon’s mouth agape, set to swallow them whole. Suddenly, they found themselves in total darkness. Bugz squirmed out from under the Thunderbird, climbed up Mishi-pizhiw’s back to his head, and gripped his horns. She steered him through the winding cave structures using the night-vision in her heads-up display. They banked sharply to their port side to avoid a massive stalactite, and continued toward a straightaway, passing a school of cavefish heading in the opposite direction.

  That’s weird. They should be swimming away from us rather than toward us, Bugz thought. There shouldn’t be anything else down here. They should be afraid of us.

  Bugz throttled Mishi-pizhiw’s horns forward and they dove into a tunnel that took them several hundred feet deeper before banking sharply to a horizontal plane. Instantly, Bugz’s night-vision blazed white-hot and blinded her. Purely by touch, she flipped off the night-vision and saw a bright light ahead of them. The narrow tunnel shaft offered no room in which to turn around.

  “Feng, get up here!” she yelled. “How did they find us?!”

  Mishi-pizhiw gritted his teeth and picked up speed rapidly, hoping to plow through whatever waited for them at tunnel’s end—one hundred feet, fifty feet, twenty-five.

  Mishi-pizhiw shot out of the tunnel and found himself surrounded by a fleet of Clan:LESS submarines.

  “There’s no way they could’ve known we were down here!” Bugz yelled. “There’s no way. Did you message them?!” She shoved Feng’s shoulder.

  “No!” he yelled back. “I swear. They cut me off voice-com and the group chat.”

  “Then how did they know?!”
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br />   “Don’t even start. After everything I’m going through for helping you. Everything I gave up.” Feng shook his head in anger.

  Bugz gritted her teeth as she unholstered two guns and blasted her weapons at the nearest submarine. A depth charge exploded off her starboard side and sent her careening off Mishi-pizhiw’s back. The massive serpent charged a nearby submarine and crushed it in his jaws like a shark tearing through a rowboat. Gamertags floated up from the wreckage. His enemies changed tack.

  One sub plowed ahead of Mishi-pizhiw, acting as a lure, while three broke off and covered his flank. The three subs began firing at the Thunderbird on his back, now completely defenseless underwater. Bugz noticed and shouted. Mishi-pizhiw grabbed hold of the decoy sub and turned to attack the others, but it was too late. Their laser fire loosened the grip of the Thunderbird’s talons and she sank down to the cave floor.

  The Clan:LESS soldiers continued firing on the bird as Mishi-pizhiw dispatched the subs attacking him one by one. The remains of the submarines crashed into the cave floor not far from the nearly lifeless Thunderbird. The reverberations reached Bugz, who fired at still more submarines from a perch behind a stalagmite. She destroyed all but one with her deadeye shots. Feng exchanged fire with the remaining sub—a nuclear vessel and the largest in the fleet.

  Bugz turned to see her beautiful bird crumpled on the floor of the cave. She swam as quickly as she could to the bird’s side. Bugz took heavy fire from the remaining sub as it broke away from its gunfight with Feng. Reinforcement subs poured into the cave and quickly engaged Feng and Mishi-pizhiw, bombing them with torpedoes.

  Bugz cradled the bird’s massive head in her arms. She stroked her beak. The nuclear submarine prepared to fire, but Bugz turned and with three shots took out its weapons systems. Damaged but not destroyed, the hull of the sub began to turn a translucent orange. Inside the vessel, the crew engineered a meltdown, intending to crash into Bugz while the nuclear core on board exploded with cataclysmic radiation. It was closing in on Bugz fast, but she refused to let go of her Thunderbird.

  As the submarine prepared to ram Bugz, the Thunderbird summoned the last of her strength and snatched the sub in her talons. The vessel shook in her claws as the radioactive decay hit a critical point. Bugz kissed the Thunderbird and pushed off the lake bottom. Kicking furiously, she put as much space as she could between herself and the imminent explosion.

  Mishi-pizhiw pulled Bugz and Feng into the tunnel with only a fraction of a second to spare. He plugged the mouth of the tunnel with his diamond back and prepared to absorb the energy of the blast.

  Daylight engulfed the cave as the nuclear sub exploded, incinerating the submarine instantly, and the Thunderbird along with it. The blast destroyed all of the other Clan:LESS ships as well.

  Once the shockwave cleared and the boiling water cooled sufficiently, Mishi-pizhiw returned to the scene of the battle and looked sadly toward the floor of the lake. Bugz swam to the edge of the cave and looked down. She saw the lifeless Thunderbird, the last of her kind, petrified in ash. The bird lay with wings spread like an eagle on a coat of arms, still clutching the wreckage of the nuclear sub in its talons. Bugz bit her bottom lip.

  Feng swam past her to assess the scene for himself. “I’m so sorry, Bugz,” he said over voice-com.

  As Feng swam ahead of Bugz, she saw the back of his neck…a glowing orb flashed red. It took a second for Bugz to register what the light meant. She didn’t want to believe she’d seen it, or to accept the betrayal the red light represented, but it flashed again just the same. A tracking device. Feng had led them to her. It was all his fault. Her eyes filled with tears. Adrenaline shot to the ends of her nerves. She drew her obsidian sword.

  “COWARD!” Bugz screamed. “You did this—you did all of this! And you never even had the courage to face me. You never had the courage to fight!”

  “No, Bugz, I didn’t—”

  Bugz cut Feng off mid-sentence. She decapitated him with a quick swing of her sword.

  For a moment, she studied the shocked expression on Feng’s face as his head rotated slowly in the water. Bugz noted the Ø symbol still branded onto Feng’s arm. She shook her head.

  Once a loser, always a loser.

  Bugz turned and grabbed hold of Mishi-pizhiw. His powerful tail propelled them forward as they shot into the cave at great speed. Together, the pair hurtled headlong into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 47

  A young man staggered through the forest on a shadowy overcast night, holding his glowing phone in front of him to illuminate the darkness that surrounded him. He wore a trucker hat pulled low over his eyes, more for reassurance than subterfuge. No one is going to recognize me this far from civilization, he thought to himself. He wore the lumberjack plaid shirt and ripped jeans that were the signature of Clan:LESS members in the real world. On each of his biceps lay matching Ø tattoos. This was the Behemoth, who appeared much more unassuming in the real world than his name suggested.

  He tripped over a stump and hit the ground as his phone flew through the air ahead of him. Damn. He rubbed his throbbing shin until he regained his bearings. He couldn’t see anything around him, the forested surroundings completely foreign to a city kid like him. He scanned left and right before noticing the glowing orb of his phone laying against a tree well outside his reach. He tried to shake the feeling that he’d landed in a writhing mass of maggots. He stood and frantically brushed the pine needles from his clothing.

  Slowly, deliberately, and with more than a little fear, he walked forward with his arms stretched out in front of him, sliding his feet on the forest floor as though skiing cross-country. He felt a tree in front of him. Nervously, he felt up and down its skinny trunk and navigated himself around it. His feet ran up against a bush. He crouched down to ascertain its exact shape by touch before slowly stepping over it, still half expecting a bottomless pit to swallow him on the other side. His foot touched solid ground and he breathed a sigh of relief. He saw the glowing rectangle directly in front of him and scooped down to pick it up.

  The phone’s screen shone brilliantly, bathing everything around it in light, the AR function now almost useless. It’d shone like this for his entire half-hour trek through the forest, but he knew he was near his destination now. He lifted his eyes from his phone and looked ahead. There, in front of him, illuminated only by the light of his handheld screen, lay a clearing.

  The Behemoth panted. He lunged forward and tried to run, believing his will would carry him to the finish line. He tripped over a large root and flew again, this time sliding face first into the wet earth.

  The Behemoth felt a light rain on the back of his head as he inventoried the damage. His throbbing shin hurt pretty badly once again, and his torso and legs were soaked, but he could still breathe. He’d lost his phone a second time. He pulled himself up and blinked a few times before regaining his vision.

  And then he saw it.

  His phone lay in the mud many steps ahead of him, but something else grabbed his attention. Looming over the top of his screen like an alien obelisk, bathed in the orange glow, lay a giant rock pile arranged in the shape of a circle. The Thunderbird’s Nest. The young man ran toward the nest and launched a video chat as soon as he reached his phone. Alpha and the other Clan:LESS leaders answered the call. The rain picked up as the connection locked in.

  “What?” Alpha asked.

  “I found it!” the Behemoth yelled, the wind picking up all around him. “I found it! It’s just like in the ’Verse—a giant stone circle!”

  “You found it?” Alpha asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Okay.” Alpha nodded. “Send us your location. This is excellent. There’s no way Bugz can stop us now. Good job, soldier!”

  Alpha terminated the call and left the Behemoth sitting alone in the darkness. Rain poured down on his head.

&nb
sp; CHAPTER 48

  “Bugz, hold up.”

  She could see Feng approaching in the hallway. Teenagers crowded the space, rushing out of their homerooms. Taking note of the impending confrontation, one passerby tapped a friend and they both stopped to watch.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Bugz said, looking at the floor.

  “C’mon.”

  “No.”

  “Bugz, talk to me!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “You owe me an explanation.”

  At this, Bugz turned and faced Feng with amazement in her eyes. “I owe you an explanation?” She amped up her tone. “I don’t owe you anything. You destroyed everything I cared about!” Bugz squared up to Feng, clearly challenging him. In spite of her shorter stature, she brought her face to within inches of his.

  “What I did to you?” Feng’s face contorted in anger. “You eliminated me from the Spirit World! I have to start over from scratch! Do you know how long it took me last time?”

  A crowd had gathered in a circle around them now. Every student had seen a stream or a replay of what happened in the Floraverse the night before. They’d all watched Bugz destroy the boy they assumed she loved. Dozens of phones now livestreamed this real-life rematch. The devices’ transparent screens revealed the shocked and excited expressions of their users.

  “You deserved it,” Bugz said. “You brought them to me, and they took everything I had. Everything I gave life to is dead. Everything I did for my culture, it’s over. There’s only one of my creations left.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only trying to help you.”

  Bugz fought back the urge to scream. She felt like hurting him. She also felt gross for still caring for someone who clearly didn’t understand her. Again, she thought of the scars she’d seen on her cousin Ally’s arm. A tear escaped down her cheek.