Already, she heard the scrabble of the skin thieves. They respawned at a ridiculous rate—it was part of why Margaret liked to come down here.
The boy was closer too, watching as she wound through the rubble with the dog. And, yes, what she was up to probably looked weird, but the only thing that felt dangerous was the way he stared at her. He was using a newer character model—with dark, shaggy hair and a shambling walk—called James. His only defining features were the unremarkable chinos and, of course, the mask.
Nim stopped in the shadow of an overturned train car to wait for the dog, and when it caught up, she stepped across the subway rail and onto the Doomsday Glass. She did it slowly, carefully. The dog followed her.
The second its feet touched the glass, it seemed to tremble and grow bigger. She wondered if it would die. Explode. Attack. But it only shimmered slightly, then stayed where it was.
The boy was still standing on the tracks. As soon as he caught Nim’s eye, she looked away. She felt dumb, but not dumb enough to stare him down. Sometimes boys could be weird about her and Margaret when it came to the game.
Case in point: There was a club that met after school to trade tactics and sell each other mods. Nim had gone once, thinking it might be fun—she could share her talent for finding secret items or at least be in a room with people who liked the same things she did. She and Margaret had been the only girls. Alex Ford’s girlfriend was apparently a member, but she was at volleyball practice.
Almost immediately Nim had caused a stir by voicing her thoughts on how there were thirty costumes for her avatar, and every single one of them was a dress.
“Look, I like the game,” she’d said. It was an understatement that felt more like a cinder block. “I just think it would be neat for everyone to not see my underwear—okay?”
This spawned a philosophical discussion on whether the digital panties of an avatar were really even her underwear.
When Nim had tried to offer an olive branch—a really premium piece of intel about a Spirit Lamp that was somewhere in the Iron Wood—no one seemed to care much, and Austin Bauer, who’d been in all her math classes since the eighth grade and was usually not a total dickbag, had actually told her it didn’t exist.
After that, the meeting had mostly consisted of making fun of Nim for anything that seemed remotely girly. For giving her avatar a pretty hat. For caring about things like basic human decency and pants. For decorating her screen name with little demon-runes when they all passed around a sign-up sheet to share their launch codes in case anyone wanted to meet up on a particular board. Surprise—in the three weeks since they’d attended the meeting, no one had expressed any interest in meeting up with Nim or Margaret.
The whole thing had turned into one big, stupid obstacle course where the obstacle was always to prove that she knew what she was talking about. And every time she did, her proof was deemed insufficient and she was given another test, and another, just for committing the grievous offense of wishing her character could wear pants.
The next weekend Nim had been poking around in the Iron Wood and seen the supposedly nonexistent Spirit Lamp glittering beneath the roots of a thorn tree. She’d snagged the lamp, gotten the trophy, and—only partially out of spite—posted her triumph to the achievements board. She hadn’t gone back to the games club.
The skin thieves were closer now, clattering through the rubble. They were coming for her. She backed away, trading her knife for a scythe. She was efficient and precise, but not stupid. They might be weak alone, but they could still be dangerous in packs.
And then, as the thieves came slobbering at her around the Doomsday Glass, the dog did something quite surprising. It lunged from the glass and began to savage them.
So. Nim had found the place where the simple collided with the ingenious. Everything made sense again, and everything was even better than she’d thought. It was a good day.
Later though, when she logged out of Subway Run, there was a new message blinking on her dashboard. It was short and strange. It said:
From: jkx0x0
Hey Sugar,
You’re not as good as you think you are.
It was signed Mr. No One
Nim looked at it a long time. Then she hit the button and deleted it.
• • •
“Report him,” Margaret said at lunch, peeling back the top of her sandwich and picking through its guts with a plastic fork.
Nim flopped forward in her chair and put her head on her arms. “They’d just say how it isn’t a terms violation and if it happens again maybe I should change my screen name to something more neutral and use a different avatar so I don’t look so obviously . . .”
“Like you have girl parts?” Margaret said, rolling a lump of white bread into a ball and shoving it in her mouth.
The observation was built on a foundation of experience. Nim’s first avatar had been a hyperfeminine model called Sugar, with a tiny waist and a cloud of red hair so voluminous and bright it nearly matched Nim’s real-life color. She had liked the Sugar. It was curvy and pretty. It had looked like her, but better.
She’d regretted it almost immediately.
In Vertigo, the biological condition of being a girl meant a lot of attention, and not the good kind—in Nim’s case, an impressive and never ending flood of messages about the carpet and drapes.
She stuck it out for a month, then traded in the orange haired Sugar for a model called Lola. It meant losing all her progress on Dreadnought Island, but she sucked it up and played the board again. She caught up to herself in a weekend.
The Lola was a hipless pixie with slender arms and basically no chest. She was about as asexual as you could get, with tiny hands and feet and hair so blond it was almost white. It was nothing like Nim’s real-life hair, and that was kind of the point. Now, when she signed into Vertigo, she looked fragile, like she’d been through something mysterious and traumatic and had survived it. Her only act of rebellion had been to download a mod to put her Lola in pants.
It annoyed her that she was the only person who seemed to care about this. When she’d broached it at the ill-fated games club meeting, the rest of them had looked at her like she was out of her mind.
Even Margaret didn’t bother with mods—especially cosmetic ones. The homegrown stuff tended to be janky, and there were rumors that black-hat hackers built in all kinds of spyware and sketchy back doors to monitor your activity or highjack your machine. As far as Nim could tell, it was paranoid gossip. Most of the time the worst that happened was the homemade mods didn’t work, or they sort of worked, and you wound up with your torso square with your headset and your hips somewhere off to the left, getting stuck against the wall when you tried to go through a door.
Anyway, it was a small price to pay to address the little issue that anytime the Lola climbed a staircase or a ladder, anyone behind her could look up her dress.
“Maybe it’s someone on your launch list,” Margaret said, trying to sound helpful.
But that was worse, somehow. Nim would have to wipe her whole list and add them all back one by one, and even that wouldn’t help, since if Margaret was right, Mr. No One would still be some mysterious jerk who had her launch code.
• • •
In physics, Mr. Howard was drawing vectors on the board, explaining their project for the quarter, which was a complicated telescope involving angles and mirrors and refracted light.
Nim sat at her desk, thinking about Vertigo and the Doomsday Glass, how she’d figured out its point. It was a tiny vacuum from which nothing could escape. A black hole. An event horizon full of monsters. Her favorite thing in the world was just knowing how something worked.
Mr. Howard eyed the class, gesturing with his dry-erase marker. “Can anybody give us a real-life example of a parabolic lens?”
Nim stared at her work sheet. When she closed her eyes, all she saw was the difference between lush, vibrant Vertigo-world and sad, flat ordinary-world.
&n
bsp; Mr. Howard stood with his hands behind his back. The question still hung in the room. Next to her, Jake Sieverson, who had a mouth as pink as a girl’s and very blond, very curly hair, was waving a hand, but Mr. Howard’s eyes swept over him.
“Naomi,” he said in a warm, hearty way that was supposed to make her want to share her ideas and opinions. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
Nim glanced down and shook her head. She did have things on her mind, but she was pretty sure no one wanted to hear about whether or not in-game physics resembled real-world physics, and no, she did not want to tell the class.
Jake Sieverson made an impatient barking noise and shouted, “Satellite dish!”
It was totally against the rules on the class conduct sheet, but Mr. Howard didn’t get after him for not waiting to be called on, just nodded and then put them in their lab groups.
There was chaos as everyone bolted for the back of the room, elbowing one another out of the way. Lenses and mirrors sat in eight identical piles on the back counter. After a minute Nim straggled over to hover around the edges.
In Vertigo, she’d already be sorting through the lenses, figuring out how to turn the curves and angles into some overpowered ultramagnified death ray. The person with the power was the one who knew the secrets, and in Vertigo, she always knew the secrets.
• • •
She went home without her French book or her favorite hoodie, without thinking about the blank faced boy who’d stood across the tracks in Subway Run and watched her set up her experimental dog trap.
The only thing on her mind was the way the Doomsday Glass had revealed its purpose. She’d held the dog in place and made it hers. She’d figured out how to own the very monsters that populated the game. The message from Mr. No One was just some jerk screwing around. It wasn’t that big of a deal. He hadn’t even done anything.
She saw him again two days later.
Margaret was at pre-regionals for science olympiad, talking with her fellow aeronautics nerds about gliders, so Nim was by herself. She was hunting wraiths in the Dollhouse, which was widely understood to be the creepiest, most difficult board in all of Vertigo. Nim and Margaret called it the Escher House because of how the floor plan seemed to twist and fold in on itself, all secret trapdoors and staircases to nowhere and doors that opened on unkillable monsters or portals that plunged you into thorny mazes that were nearly impossible to get out of and sucked your health meter down to nothing.
It was a baffling death trap, and Nim adored it there.
Inside, it was ludicrously big—with echoing ceilings and miles of spiral corridors—and home to a pair of ravenous nightmares with tangled black hair and red dresses, who were always stalking you. She and Margaret called them the sisters. They prowled the halls, invisible until they were right next to you, but Nim had figured out a long time ago that—like everything else in Vertigo—there were ways of exploiting the rules.
Right before the sisters showed up, your vision would flicker blue, a little. It was hard to see if you weren’t looking for it. Nim was always looking. You could see them in reflective surfaces sometimes, and if you hid or ran, they never chased you very far. If you made the mistake of letting them touch you though, they immediately spawned more. It had taken Nim three encounters to figure out that no matter how aggressively they multiplied, there were really only two of them.
The house itself held just an incredible amount of junk, like a lunatic museum full of tiny, precious artifacts. There was a vast, labyrinthine basement and, under that, a subbasement full of moldering catacombs and torture devices. There were libraries and ballrooms and a wood paneled study with the taxidermied head of a goblin in a bell jar on the mantelpiece.
It was one big archive of secrets, and Nim reveled in it.
Today, she was thinking she’d like to try the Doomsday Glass on the sisters. Most special items didn’t work on them, or else they didn’t work the way they were supposed to, but Nim was always up for a good experiment. Now she was waiting around in one of the ballrooms with her demon talisman equipped. Like a lot of items, the talisman had a backward effect on the sisters. If you carried it, they were impressively more likely to be interested in you.
She took out the glass and stuck it to the front of a low wooden cabinet. There was always the chance that it would make them turn on her, but she didn’t think so. She just hadn’t been able to get them to walk over it. If she could find the right spot though, maybe they’d move into range without seeing it.
The boy was in the corner of the ballroom, lounging in a huge, high-backed chair. He was sitting so still that Nim didn’t notice him at first.
“Hey, Sugar,” he said, and the sound of his voice made her skin crawl.
He’d painted the mask since last time. Now the bland, even features were orange and red and black, covered in spirals and jagged slashing lines.
He sat under a giant oil painting, by the trapdoor to the torture chamber, watching. Nim knew the house was full of other players, but apart from the two of them, the room was strangely vacant.
The James didn’t seem to mind the silence. He didn’t seem to have any agenda besides her.
“Cheating,” he said, nodding toward the glass. His voice was hoarse, like he was deliberately trying to make it deeper.
Nim didn’t answer.
“Aw, come on.” He sounded hearty. Fake friendly. “I’m just saying.”
“Leave me alone,” she said, snatching the glass off the cabinet and shoving it back in her pocket. “And stop talking like Batman.”
He pushed himself up from the chair and padded across the carpet. “Don’t be like that. Isn’t this what you want—everyone paying attention to you?”
“What is your problem?”
Suddenly, the James’s whole posture changed. He loomed over her. The way he stared out at her from perfectly symmetrical eyeholes was horrific. “My problem? Like you don’t go around begging everyone to tell you how great you are? You think this is some special thing, built for you, but you don’t even belong here!”
His voice was like a slap. She knew there were guys who thought that—that she was a fake and a poser, intruding on some private club. She wasn’t stupid. She’d seen the Internet. And still his viciousness stunned her. No one had ever just come out and said it.
Nim stared back at him. The talisman in her pocket was beginning to hiss, glowing faintly through her modded pants, but the James didn’t notice. To him she was nothing. Just the tiny, wafty Lola. “Maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”
He stood over her, taking up so much space he seemed to fill the room, and she heard his breath catch before he answered. She was pretty sure he wanted to call her a bitch, but he didn’t say it. Vertigo had very strict profanity policies.
“Like you’d last twenty minutes without all your little cheats and tricks.” His voice had risen an octave. He no longer sounded like a superhero with a head cold. He sounded petulant. Not the Dark Knight, but the Joker. “You’d end up in pieces, then cry about how it’s not fair.”
In the shadows wraiths were gathering, creeping around the edges of Nim’s vision. “You don’t know what I’d do.”
The James was much too close now, pressing up against the field of the launchpad, making an optical illusion. He was in her room, and not in her room. It was disorienting, how his voice could be so hard and hateful when his face had no expression at all. “You just think you’re so good at this.”
“I am.”
For a second the two of them stood toe-to-toe, nearly touching.
Then the light in Nim’s headset went cold—a cloud passing over a winter sun. “The sisters are coming.”
“What are you talking about? Those freaks are invisible.”
Nim shrugged—the creepy little girl in the horror movie. Her hair drifted around her in a white corona. “Stay and wait if you don’t believe me.”
For one impossible moment the James seemed to
consider it. Then he turned and dove for the door in the floor.
• • •
She saw him the next night, in the funhouse at Dark Amusements. And again in Subway Run. And every time, she tried to restart someplace else, and every time, he appeared out of the shadows five minutes later like a boogeyman in accountant’s clothing. Every time she blocked him, he made a new screen name composed of new gibberish.
In Vertigo the other players couldn’t kill you, but they could definitely make everything harder. When he stood in her way long enough to keep her from opening the door to the operating theater in Noble Hospital, she lost her temper.
She held down the button on her headset until the helpline display came up, overlaying the hospital corridor with a tidy digital menu.
“I want to report a user,” she said, staring past the translucent screen—right at the James, with his weird, painted face.
The voice in the headset was businesslike. “Name and complaint?”
The James stood in front of her, so close that if this were real, she’d be able to feel his breath. She made herself bigger, throwing her shoulders back. “jkx0x0, nth8383, others. A sustained pattern of harassment.”
There was a pause, then the helpline rep said, “And have you tried moving boards?”
“I can’t.” She hated that her voice shook. “He shows up wherever I am. He finds me.”
The headset showed a little animation of zombies marching to indicate the rep was typing, bringing up her account. “Are you using any unauthorized mods? If you’ve altered your account code, Vertigo takes no responsibility for malfunction.”
So they knew about the wardrobe mod, obviously. Nim wanted to scream, but in the back of her mind there was a tiny voice that whispered this was what she deserved; it probably was her fault. She’d compromised her account for something so minor—not like the grinders, who modified their weapons to autoload or fire faster so they could cheat their way up the leaderboards and were total douchebags. All she wanted was just to wear some goddamned pants.