A sudden cold washed over me. “What’s happened? Is something wrong with Ikumi? Is she okay? Do you know where she is?”
Yano’s heads turned, no longer facing Lord Wildhammer in the game, but rather staring out directly at real-life us through the screen. “They’ve got her,” he said slowly. “And they’re not planning on letting her go.”
“They? Who are they?” I demanded, my voice trembling. It was a good thing I was already sitting down—my legs felt like Jell-O. This was what we’d feared all along. But to hear it confirmed. Ikumi—kidnapped. A chill tripped down my spine.
“You’re serious,” Lilli broke in. “I mean, you’re not messing with us or anything?”
“I would never joke about something so terrible,” Yano assured us. “It’s completely serious. Worse than the time they ran out of fresh porg meat on that new Star Wars VR. And that was a crushing state of affairs, let me tell you.”
“So what happened?” I demanded, trying to get him back on the subject. Which was sometimes a problem with Yano. He was smart, but… easily distracted.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Yano admitted. “All I know is she disappeared about a week ago. Which wasn’t a big deal at first. The girl likes to take her little trips around the digital world. And she often prefers to travel solo. I’ve told her time and time again how dangerous this is, of course. But does she listen to her guide? Does anyone ever listen to—”
“Then she’s just gone?” I interrupted impatiently. “And you think someone took her?”
This was not good. This was so not good. Ikumi had been through so much already. If something else had happened to her…
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Yano replied. “I mean, it was as if she disappeared off the cloud entirely. I searched, of course, as any good guide would. But I came up empty-clawed. Until one morning I woke up to a distress signal, pinging away. I’d given her this in case of emergencies. But the sound was so faint, I had difficulty pinning it down. That’s when I first realized she was in trouble.”
He opened his mouth, puffing out a small cloud of smoke. We watched, fascinated, as a blurry hologram seemed to pop up in the middle of it.
A hologram of Ikumi.
She was dressed in a strange silver suit, almost like something you’d see an astronaut wear. Around her was a set of glowing green bars, like a laser prison. Behind her was a window, and out that window was a brilliant array of starlight. Was she in outer space?
Her gaze turned to us. As if she could see right through the monitor to the arcade. Her eyes clouded with tears. Her mouth wobbled, then opened. “Help me,” she begged. “Ian and Lilli, I need your help.”
I rose in my chair, almost knocking it backward. My heart pounded in my chest. “Ikumi!” I cried, even though on some level I knew she couldn’t hear me. That this was just a recording. When had she made it? And where had she made it from?
The smoke drifted into the air and her image disappeared. Lilli pushed me out of the way and sat down in my chair. “Where is she?” she asked Yano. “Do you have any idea? You said someone took her. Who? Was it the same people who took Hiro?”
For a moment Yano’s face seemed to darken. “Hiro?” he repeated. “What about Hiro?”
“He’s missing, too,” I explained. “They don’t know where he is.”
Yano gazed at us solemnly. “Then this is worse than I feared,” he replied. “Your friend—and maybe her father, too—is in grave danger.”
I swallowed hard. “You said they won’t let her go. Who’s they?”
The dragon tossed his three heads. “Have you ever heard of Admiral Appleby?” he asked.
“Obviously,” I said, surprised. “He’s a legend. And he’s from here—Austin. I think his gaming company is headquartered just outside of town.”
In fact, Admiral Appleby was almost as famous as Atsuo Takanama, Ikumi’s grandfather, who created Fields of Fantasy. He got his start designing eight-bit games for Atari back in the day and had always been known for being a little on the eccentric side. Which was the nice way of saying he was super weird. For one thing, he wasn’t really an admiral. He’d never been in the military at all, from what anyone could tell. And for another, he always dressed as if he were an officer of some sort of futuristic space squad, even on a Tuesday.
Most recently he’d been in gaming headlines for developing an updated version of Mech Ops, a futuristic horror massively multiplayer role-playing game that had originally been released in the eighties as an eight-bit side-scrolling game. The new version was meant to be state of the art. A new kind of virtual reality experience no one had seen before. Online, people were chomping at the bit to get their hands on an early copy.
But what did that have to do with Ikumi?
“I don’t understand,” I said to Yano.
“Of course you don’t. Humans hardly ever do!” The dragon blew more smoke from his nose. “When I received the distress signal, I realized I needed to track her down. Through my extensive data mining online, I was finally able to match the background of her distress call with a short scene from the new Mech Ops game trailer that was just released,” he explained. “So… putting two and two together, which is really not hard for a very advanced AI like myself…”
Lilli and I exchanged horrified looks. “Wait. Are you saying she’s trapped in a video game?” Lilli asked. “Like, another video game?”
“But she just got out of Dragon Ops!” I cried, furious. My heart ached as I thought of poor Ikumi. Once again held against her will. It wasn’t fair. “They can’t do this to her!”
“They can, and they evidently have,” Yano replied matter-of-factly.
