Glaring up at him, I knock his fingers out of my face and struggle to my feet. Tiny prickles annoy my legs from where they’d lain trapped beneath me for so long. When I finally steady myself, I whirl on him. “I’m not going to help you do anything.”
“Why the hell not?”
Because I am inches away from the fence I’m positive will lead me to my freedom and I don’t need his help getting through it. Because if I don’t get out now, I may die in The Aftermath. I might be able to last another day or even another three years, but it’s almost inevitable that this game will be the end of me.
Because I am tired of being used.
“I want to leave,” I say. My throat is sore from my breakdown a few minutes ago, so I clear it a few times. “I’m one person. You could turn your back. You can pretend—”
“Nobody’s ever escaped the game. Nobody’s ever tried.”
My voice finally collapses, and I sound like a lost child when I whisper, “But it’s possible.”
“Up until today I would’ve said no. Nobody escapes because nobody is sentient. Except you—you are wide-awake, and I want to know why. What went wrong with your chip to make you become self-aware on your own?”
“Why does it matter? Why do you care if I’m dead or alive? Sentient or not? Just let me go. I—”
“Stop mewling, Virtue, and catch your breath, will you?” Declan says, thrusting a metal canister under my lips. Liquid sloshes around inside. When I stare at it for a long time, he snaps, “Don’t be such an elitist—just take it. This game is crawling with cannibals and you turn your nose up at filtered water?”
I turn my nose up at fresh water given to me by the people who are responsible for designing this twisted game, is what I want to say. Not to mention that I have no idea why he hasn’t fessed up to being at the courthouse—meaning I can’t trust him one bit. But Declan wiggles the canteen a few more times and eventually my thirst outweighs my better judgment. I take the container in both hands. The water doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever had. It’s sweet and there’s a hint of some type of flavoring. I finish drinking so fast I’m left coughing even more violently than before.
“Don’t worry about me—I’m not thirsty,” he says dryly as I thrust the empty canteen back at him. He fumbles it, dropping it to the ground. When he bends to retrieve it, I pull the Glock from its holster. Then I kick the electroshock gun out of his hand. It clinks against the metal gate four feet away from us. After a few seconds of silence, during which his only movement is his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, he cocks his head to the right. The corners of his mouth twitch. “What are you doing?” he asks calmly.
“I’m not helping you, Declan. Moderator. I’m getting out of this game today.”
Sighing, he drops to a sitting position and shakes his head to each side. “Virtue, you—”
“Shut up,” I say. I keep the gun positioned on his chest, right over his heart, as I walk backward. I grab his electroshock gun, then the pair of pliers I dropped earlier. Placing his weapon on the ground next to me, I stoop to the section of the fence I was trying to pry loose when he caught me and begin working on it again. One-handed. And with my eyes locked on him.
“If you weren’t pointing that thing at me, I’d tell you I find multitasking attractive,” he says. When I snort, he grins and adds, “So’s your determination, but I’m faster than you, you know.”
I picture him knocking me to the ground again. My ribs hurt just thinking about it. I tighten my grip on both the gun and the pliers. “Go ahead and try it.” This sounds so much like something my gamer would say, a shudder races through my body. “But just so you know, I’ve killed before.”
He doesn’t need to know that I’ve never really been the person doing the killing, or that the act itself leaves me feeling numb for days afterward.
Declan doesn’t respond. I almost think he plans to stand still and let me finish jiggling at the metal fence but then he begins to laugh. And he doesn’t stop until I face him, hunched over and wheezing, with both hands on the gun.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” he says. “And me. It’s...let’s just say I never saw this coming.” When I give him a look that borders between disgusted and confused, he quickly adds in a cocky voice, “Look, I don’t even know why we’re going back and forth. We both know you’re not going to shoot me, so you might as well put the gun up, Virtue. Look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly believe I feel threatened by you.”
Spitefulness seems to be a common trait in the world Declan and Olivia belong to, and yet I’m still willing to do just about anything to find my way there. “Just shut your mouth before I shoot out your kneecaps.”
I work in silence for a few minutes, pulling with all my might at the metal. Both of my arms hurt from the weight of the Glock and the constant jerking on the fence. The throbbing in my skull is back, along with erratic tremors that pulse through my whole body.
Apparently Declan notices, because he murmurs something under his breath and moves his left leg as if he plans to get up.
“Don’t even think about it,” I snap, swiping the back of the hand holding the pliers across my damp forehead.
“I’ve decided to cooperate.”
“Well, then do what I say and just be quiet.”
“No, I mean, I’ve decided to tell you this isn’t the way out of The Aftermath,” he says.
The tool nearly slips from my hand. “Stop it!”
“What? Trying to help you? You want to get out, fine by me, but at least listen to what I’ve got to say. You’re wasting your time digging away at links and chains when your way out is—” he points to the east, the direction I traveled from “—that way.”
He’s wrong. He has to be. This is where I saw the change in the game map. This is where I found the fence with so much barbed wire. It’s got to be here for something. “Don’t lie to me.”
Declan holds up both of his hands and shakes his head. “Let me ask you this. What would I gain by lying to you? You’ve got a gun—even if it’s an antique that you may or may not be able to use properly—aimed at my heart. And you have my weapon. I’m at a disadvantage, Virtue.”
But he doesn’t feel threatened by me—he said so himself. “This has to be the way,” I whisper.
He grunts. “The best way to die before sunset, yes. The way out of The Aftermath? Definitely not.” When I draw in a deep breath and my shoulders sag a little, he adds, “The worst flesh-eaters in the game are outside that fence. Trust me—I was just out there searching for another character. You leave and I can almost guarantee you’ll be over an open fire before the sun comes out.”
I grind my teeth together. “They don’t work like that. They don’t kill their victims right away.”
Declan lifts one of his shaggy eyebrows. Slowly, he stands up, his palms still lifted in front of him in submission. He turns to the fence, staring out at the flat landscape beyond it. “No, they don’t. But their players are the ones making the rules, and out there, you’ve got a quick death sentence.”
I want to scream at him. Call him a liar again. But there’s something in his voice that makes me hesitate. Anger? Pity? And then I realize what it is: self-loathing. The same thing I heard in my own voice when I barely helped those two boys who begged for water and food.
What if he’s telling the truth? What if I’m wrong and I’ve come all this way for nothing? What if—
“How do you get out of the game?” I croak. “Is it...even possible to get out?”
“I got in, didn’t I? The way out is southeast of here.”
Southeast?
Southeast.
He’s saying I traveled sixty miles in the wrong direction.
“Prove it,” I say.
With his hands still in the air, he moves towa
rd his bag. I take a few steps closer, too. Kneeling beside the fence for such an extended period of time has made my legs useless, and when I move, it feels as if I’m waist-deep in sludge. I keep my face blank so he doesn’t see how much pain I’m in, how easy it would be to overpower me.
“I need my tablet,” he mutters, twitching his head down to his belongings. “Not much I can prove if you shoot me between the eyes the moment I—”
“Just get it,” I growl.
Declan keeps his word. He grabs a tablet just like Olivia’s and presses one of the icons, bringing up a holographic keypad. He spends a couple of minutes entering a succession of codes into it. Then he places the tablet on the ground between us and walks five, six, seven steps in reverse.
“Tap it once. I’ve disabled the touch recognition for the next ten minutes so you might want to hurry,” he says when I pick up his device.
It takes me a few tries to get the tablet to work—I have trouble holding it and the gun and keeping an eye on Declan all at once. When it finally glows in my hand, a 3-D map of the area pops up in front of my face, rotating in a slow circle. I’m disappointed to see that it doesn’t show any street names or character locations like Olivia’s map. I search up and to the left of the image, yet there’s nothing significant about the northwest, where I am right at this moment. But just over sixty miles southwest of Demonbreun—the street I left forty-eight hours ago—is a thin line slicing across the map. On the other side of the border is a yellow landform with two words written across it in bold black print: UNITED PROVINCES (U.P.)
I feel as though I’m choking.
“I’ll just have to go southeast then,” I say, keeping my voice as hard as possible.
“You’re welcome to try, but you won’t make it two miles in that direction.”
“And why is that?”
“Because—” But then he pauses and drops his gaze to the grass for a moment. He clenches his hands by his sides before his dark eyes lock on to mine again. “Because I’ll have the mods all over you before you lose sight of this fence,” he says as he approaches me. He doesn’t seem concerned that I still have my gun raised. All he seems to care about is coming close enough so that I’m within his reach. “I can promise you one more thing. You’ll wish they just shocked you to death.”
“And if I kill you before you can tell the other mods?”
“Then maybe you’ll get out before they review the game records for the quarter. You have about—” he glances at his watch “—twenty-nine days before they check the footage, review your character stats and schedule you for maintenance. But even then, you’re screwed if you manage to escape. You can’t fake your identification in the U.P. Everything is done by fingerprint or retinal scan or biometric verification. Even the AcuTabs have touch recognition, and, trust me, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t have one—they’re linked to everything. And just because you go outside the border doesn’t change the fact your brain is linked to someone else’s head through your chips. Your gamer can just log in and march your ass back into the game. She’d probably just kill you, though.”
I open my mouth to say something, but he interrupts me. “But I can make sure your chip is destroyed the moment you leave The Aftermath. No tracking. No gamer. Just you. I’ve got friends who can make you whoever you want to be in every national database in less than ten minutes, who’ll make sure you have anything you need to survive in the Provinces. All you have to do is say yes.”
Twenty-nine days is a long time to plan and execute an escape. And if I managed to make it this far so rapidly, I can do it again when the time is right. All I need is for Olivia to disappear one more time and then I can give it another go.
But if Declan is right—like he is about the border—I won’t last in the world outside the game once I break free. It doesn’t make sense to risk so much just so I can immediately stare death in the face. He’s offering to fix me so she’ll never use my head again.
If I say yes.
If I let him use me.
“What is it you need me to do?” I spit out.
He grins like someone who’s won a major battle. This must be what a flesh-eater looks like right before snacking on his victim. Or, at least, what his gamer looks like behind his wall of screens.
“I’ve been sent into the game to retrieve a character with a glitch that’s affecting the characters around him. His last known location was Nashville.”
Another glitching character? “Where do I fit in?”
“The navigation on my AcuTab doesn’t work in this game—too many firewalls—and all I have to go on is a general direction. You know the area. You can help me find him quickly, so I can get out of this place. This is a very sensitive and special assignment and I have a limited amount of time to get it done.”
No, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But I hear myself ask, “And you’ll get me out, too, if I help?”
“I swear on my life.”
“How long will it take?”
“A few days. Maybe a week at the most.”
“Won’t you get in trouble for helping me? Thirty minutes ago you told me escape is illegal.”
He shrugs and gives me a smile that looks more like a grimace. “You said it yourself—you’re only one person. My boss will never know I busted you out. I need to find this character, and I’m willing to break a few rules to do it.”
This situation is wrong on so many levels. I’ll have to go back to the bar on Demonbreun and allow Olivia to play me whenever she feels the urge to, which is much too frequently. And whatever Olivia free time I have will be spent with a boy who’s just as shady as she is.
But he won’t turn me in if I do this. And there’s a chance—even though it feels much slighter than before—that I’ll still escape.
My answer comes out in a whisper that’s so soft, I barely even hear myself. “Yes, I’ll help you.”
CHAPTER TEN
We start our trip in bitter silence. I’m raging inside, terrified. I’m furious at myself for giving in to Declan, but also I don’t know for sure if he’ll follow through on his end of our bargain. What happens to me if he turns on me? I kick at loose crumbles of asphalt and grip the straps of my bag so tightly my knuckles turn white and my shoulders slump from the pressure.
But I think the worst part of this trip is the obvious: I’m going back the way I came.
My journey was a failure.
No matter how I look at my situation, I’m at a severe disadvantage.
Declan follows several paces behind me. When he’d suggested it, he’d sworn it was to protect me in case we were attacked from behind—this right after he had told me we were taking the highway instead of the woods for safety and the sake of efficiency. Yeah, sure. What he meant was he didn’t want to deal with me attacking him. I haven’t turned around to check, but I’m certain his electroshock gun is drawn, ready to send pain slicing through my body at the slightest provocation.
I can almost feel the electricity thrumming from the probes.
Breathing in deeply, I finally steal a glance over my shoulder. I was wrong. He doesn’t have his weapon pointed at me. With his head down, his hands shoved into the pockets of his black pants and his lips drawn into a thin line, Declan looks deep in thought. I don’t want to care what he’s thinking about, don’t want to waste my time and energy letting his pensive expression bother me, but I can’t help it. Because even though he works for the people responsible for so many others’ personal hells, he’s the first person I’ve met in at least three years with life in his eyes and the ability to speak for himself.
So what is it he’s not saying to me?
Does he congratulate himself for scaring me into submission? Wonder what I’m thinking about at this exact moment? Ask himself if I’ll make a hasty, stupid
decision and try to attack him again?
“Claudia.” His voice is questioning as it interrupts my thoughts. I whip my head around to see he’s no longer staring at the ground. Now his dark gray eyes are focused on me. “How long have you been sentient?”
Don’t tell him, a warning voice screams in my head.
My sudden dry mouth has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve been conservative with the little water I have left. I flick my tongue over my lips, tasting fear. “As in?”
“Self-aware.”
Three years. I’ve been partially self-aware for just over 150 weeks and completely cognizant for the past few. And it’s all thanks to you.
I could tell him the truth, but I don’t think honesty will ensure my safety. Not when the person questioning me is a game moderator. And I don’t think being sentient in this game is a good thing, at least not from the outside looking in.
“Virtue?” Declan releases a deep sigh. When I choose to ignore him, he narrows his eyes at me. “You could at least give me a straight answer. After all, I’m the only person who can help you find your way out of this game.”
Coming to a complete stop in the middle of the road, I spin to face him. He looks slightly stunned when I stalk toward him, so close I can see the tiny scar just above his lip, can count the three freckles that are nearly invisible on the bridge of his sunburned nose.
“A straight answer?” I ask. “You threaten to shock me to death, bullied me into helping you do your job and now you’re demanding answers from me?” I jab the center of his chest with my knuckles, and he winces. He grabs my wrist in a quick motion that’s not forceful, not harsh, but, nevertheless, it steals the breath from me.
“Look, all I care about is—”
“It should be doing your job so we can get out of this game. You shouldn’t care how long I’ve been awake, just that I’m that way right now,” I whisper.
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