The Deadliest Game

still standing out in the roil and turmoil of the town’s main square when a rider went by them at some speed — and then simply vanished with a clap of displaced air.

“Great,” Leif muttered. “Now there’s no way to tell where she’s gone off to.”

“I’m getting a very bad feeling about this,” Megan said. “I think this business with Argath has just heated up somehow. Otherwise, why would he be gone, too?”

Leif shook his head. “Well,” he said, “at least we tried.”

“Trying doesn’t get the job done,” Megan said gloomily. “Doing it does.”

Leif looked at her wryly as they walked through the square. “Ah, the classics again,” he said. “Emerson? Ellison?”

“My mom,” Megan said. “Come on…let’s get out of here. We need to think, and as much as I hate to say it, I always think best off-line.”

They logged out of the game and went off to Leif’s workspace. It was something Megan had only seen in pictures, a stave-house in the old Icelandic style, completely covered with shake shingles, its steep gables sporting elaborately carved dragon-heads. Inside, the place was very clean and plain, done in a high-tech version of New Danish Modern, the big polarized windows looking out on a landscape of green rolling fields overarched by a high, pale blue sky.

Megan wasn’t in much of a mood to enjoy the surroundings or the scenery. She and Leif argued for about an hour over what they’d done and how they could have done it better. At least, it turned into an argument, though that hadn’t been her original intention.

“I’m not sure how we could have done it better, frankly,” Leif said. “It was a fact-finding mission. Fine. We found facts. And pretty good ones, too.”

“Yeah…but Leif, we’re not going to be able to find out anything fast enough to do us any good! I can’t get rid of the feeling that we should have gone about this in a more structured way.”

“Oh? And how long have you had this feeling? I don’t think you had it before we left.”

“Whatever. I have it now. And I’m worried about those other two Elblai mentioned, too. Fettick and Morn.” Megan was pacing up and down, shaking her head. “Supposing that Argath manages to walk away from this fight that’s coming — which he might manage to do; he’s got a pretty good record of escaping from trouble even when his whole army gets massacred — and then he decides to come down on them? From what Elblai said, they’re going to be in a position to beat him as well…and that’s going to make them potential ‘bouncees.’”

“It will,” Leif said, “if we’re not running down a blind alley with this whole line of reasoning to start with.”

“If you’ve got anything better,” Megan said, “I’d really like to hear it.”

Leif sat down on a severely plain couch and ran his fingers through that red hair in a gesture that said he didn’t have anything else at all. “Look,” he said, “let’s take a break from this, huh? We’re just spinning our wheels.”

Megan sighed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Look, when should we meet again?”

“Maybe tomorrow night?” Leif said.

“Can’t,” Megan said. “Tomorrow night’s a family night at our place. I don’t game then. I get to watch my brothers sit and eat us out of house and home. The night after?”

“You’re on.”

Megan prepared to tell her implant to exit. “Look,” she said. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

“No, you’re not,” Leif said, and grinned, though the grin was crooked.

“All right. I’m not. But you were right anyway. We did the best we could, to start with.”

Leif stuck one finger in his ear as if to clean it. “Must be how long I had to hold that invisibility spell,” he said. “I could have sworn you said I was right.”

“I’ll say something else in a moment,” Megan said. “And in English. See you the night after next.”

Leif waved at her as she vanished.

Megan blinked and found herself sitting in the chair in the office. The lights in the room were way down. She glanced over at the clock. It was very late, for a school night anyway. Fortunately she had taken care of her schoolwork before she ducked into Sarxos to meet Leif. All I need is Mom on my case as well….

She got out of the chair stiffly. I’ve really got to have another word with the move-your-muscles program. I feel like I’ve been in the same spot for hours. Quietly she moved around the downstairs office, shutting off the parts of the computer that got turned off at night, and paused by the desk, where someone had, for a change, thoughtfully pushed some piled-up books out of the way of the optical implant pickup. Dining with William Shakespeare. Understanding Chaos Futures. War in 2080. The Knight, Death, and the Devil.

What is he researching? Megan thought, yawned, and went off to bed.

She came down early the next morning to find her father sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the stereo-video window hanging on the kitchen wall with a rather concerned expression. “Isn’t this something you do in your off hours?” he said, pointing at the window.

Megan, who was in the act of struggling to pull a sweater on over her shirt, finally got it pulled down into place and stared at the window. It showed the Sarxos logo, and behind that, stereo footage of a stretcher being hovered out of a flyer ambulance into an emergency room by paramedics in the usual rescue-orange coveralls with the blue LifeStar on the backs. “—assault was said by the woman’s niece, a fellow Sarxos player, to possibly be related to a feud or vendetta attributable to some other gameplayer. Ellen Richardson, who plays in the popular Sarxos virtual-reality role-playing game under the nickname Elblai, was on her way to her job at the post office in Bloomington, Illinois, when a hit-and-run driver forced her vehicle off the road and caused her to crash into a utility pole. She was taken to Mercy Downtown Hospital, where she is reported to be in a coma. Her condition is described as ‘critical but stable.’”

The view changed to that of a woman in a lab coat reading from a prepared statement. “The patient is not responding to stimuli at this time, but she has been scheduled for surgery at the earliest opportunity, and doctors presently give her a seventy-thirty chance of—”

“OhmiGod,” Megan said softly.

“You didn’t know her, did you?” her father said.

She shook her head, unable to look away from the stereo window, now filled with the face of the young blond-haired woman to whom she had been speaking not eight or nine hours ago. It was streaked with tears, and contorted with barely controlled rage. “We received a warning,” she was saying, “that if my aunt continued a certain line of action she was taking in the game, something unspecified but unpleasant might happen to her. My aunt discounted this warning. You hear a lot of this kind of thing during the course of gameplay, people trying to bluff you out of their path. No one had any idea that someone would—”

She choked with tears, turned away from the camera, waving it away with one hand.

Megan stood there, going hot and cold with terror.

We were too late. Too late.

What if—

— oh, no, what if somebody thinks that we—

She ran for the computer to call James Winters.

3

When she caught him in his office, the blinds were drawn, and Winters was gazing down thoughtfully at an audiostereo information pad on his desk. “Yes,” he said, not looking up for the moment, “I thought I’d hear from you shortly. How much do you know about what’s happened?”

“I heard about the lady in Bloomington,” Megan said. “Mr. Winters, I feel so terrible — we were with her just last night—”