William put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. It was slick with sweat.
“It’s just the close quarters,” William said. “She loves you. You guys are Daniel and Melissa! It’s just the out-of-the-ordinary-ness that makes everything seem weird. I mean, look where we are. But now you guys’ll always remember the time we destroyed a bunch of random people in an epic laser-tag game in the middle of Ohio. That’s the whole point of this trip, to have shit like that to look back on. But it won’t happen if we keep standing here talking instead of getting out there and racking up some kills.”
He gave Daniel’s shoulder a squeeze and dropped his arm. Daniel nodded furiously. “Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. Thanks, Coach. Good talk. Imagine if we were never lab partners? Butterfly effect, dude. Now let’s go catalyze”—he pretended to chamber a round—“something.”
The Tesla Predator was Christina’s white whale, a beast haunting the fringes of the game, skirting the edges of the LIDAR map. Its green outline was thicker than the others, as if Otto knew to infuse its rendering with the special magic of whatever demon fed off its transmission.
She suspected the Predator was equipped with radar. It played conservatively, like a chess player biding her time, thinking several moves ahead. In short, it acted like Otto. Unless the Predator’s driver and navigator were very lucky, she was pretty sure the car was “seeing” the landscape.
Christina and Melissa had clapped eyes on the Predator only once, catching the gunmetal gray of its spoiler as it slipped down an alley at the north end of town. Even the gravel spat by its tires seemed elegant. They had pursued with the intention of herding it down Main Street to Daniel and William’s sniper’s nest, but when Melissa turned the corner, the Predator was nowhere to be found. Christina lifted her palm to the windshield and eased it back to move the map into the foreground. The bright scramble of polygons asserted itself, and the crosshairs receded.
The Predator was already on the other side of Main Street, cruising through the warren of barracks, delivering a kill shot to a Subaru Finback. It was as if the Predator had used Pac-Man logic to warp itself to the other side of the grid.
They had better luck with non-Predator opponents. In the hour since the signal flare brightened the sky, Otto had removed seven infantry soldiers and two vehicles from the game. Their own sensor had taken two rifle hits and zero cannon hits. The infantry shots were unavoidable. Melissa scream-texted Otto evasive maneuvers, but swarms of soldiers in the darkness were impossible to avoid. One of the shots had been a stroke of luck from a sniper.
The second was courtesy of Rainmaker herself.
They’d tailed Eli’s Audi R8, trapping the car in a cul-de-sac where a ruined house had decayed, littering the streets with bricks. The two cars engaged in a ballet of swerves and near misses as they circled each other, impeding clear firing lines. Melissa was multitasking, texting Otto instructions while trying to capture the perfect video, a quick burst of sight and sound that showcased Christina at the helm, the Audi skidding out, dark buildings suffused by lantern light, the furtive shadows of combatants.
Melissa planned to add filters to Christina’s face to make her look like a big-eyed anime girl. Christina approved. Working together hunting enemies made the anxious clawing of the web recede.
The Audi discovered a way out, a dirt lane stamped between barracks, and disappeared into overgrown foliage that resembled a puppet’s mop of hair. Melissa ordered Otto to pursue. It wasn’t until they’d burst from the gauntlet of branches click-clacking against the windshield that Christina connected the presence of an enemy on the map with ambush.
Otto was coming up an alleyway, and there she was, poised for a split second, the spandex-clad girl silhouetted against the glow of Main Street at her back. Rainmaker squeezed off a shot. Christina wasn’t quick enough to counter before the girl melted into the shadows. Otto absorbed the hit.
Since then, they’d been hunting her, too.
The Predator and the spry girl festered in Christina’s mind. She knew it was dangerous to be so fixated—she honestly didn’t care if they won or lost as long as they took out those two combatants—and she confessed this to Melissa.
“Text Otto,” Melissa said. “Back into this driveway and stop.”
Otto pulled a smooth three-point turn to settle back against the base of the hill. They were looking straight up a narrow path to Main Street, blocked halfway by a pile of cinder blocks.
“Daniel and William just took out that little Volkswagen convertible,” Melissa reported.
“There!” Christina pointed to a vampire bat emoji on the map—their symbol for Rainmaker. The bat was a few blocks away, heading east. If she stayed on course, Rainmaker would likely hit Main Street near the fountain. “If we cross a few blocks south of her and haul ass, we can head her off.”
“Daniel and William are right here.” Melissa indicated the pizza and the hamburger, hiding in the empty shell of a roofless garage. The high ground—windows and battlements of the mansions—had proved too hotly contested, and the boys were sticking to ground-floor concealments. “They can pick her off.”
“Don’t text them,” Christina said. “I want her myself. One shot and it’s over.”
“If we sit right here, this Dodge Viper’ll come up on us in a minute or two.” She pointed to a snake on the map. “We don’t even have to move and we’ll get a clean shot before they see us.”
“Screw the Dodge Viper. I’m not gonna let William and Daniel take what’s rightfully ours.”
“They’re on our team.”
“Come on, Melissa. You don’t want to see the look on Rainmaker’s face when we take her out? We’ll turn on the brights when we blast her so you can get a picture.”
Melissa tapped her phone and
