She took a deep breath and made fists. “Who is it though? At least tell me their launch code so I can block them permanently!”
The rep made a fake-sympathy noise. “I’m sorry, we can’t give out personal information.”
Nim had expected that, but still, it felt like getting punched. The terms of service relieved Vertigo of any responsibility for anything. For instance, their policy that you should never give out your launch code—soundly and universally ignored. Right. In a game that basically forced you to cooperate in order to get anywhere.
The James was circling now, closer, closer. Their bodies weren’t real, but she felt him in her nerve endings anyway. He bumped against the virtual bubble of the launchpad, but could not actually step inside.
His voice when he spoke was a soft, ugly monotone. “See? Even the help desk isn’t falling for your little victim bit.”
Nim stumbled away, nearly pitching off the launchpad and into her basket of unfolded laundry, and called him something really obscene.
Immediately, her headset blinked red and her bank dwindled by a hefty chunk. “Shit,” she whispered, then winced as more credits vanished.
The James was directly behind her now. She knew that, under the mask, he was smirking.
“Fiery,” he said. His mouth was virtual, but it felt very close to her ear. When she stared across the corridor at the darkened window of the operating theater, she saw a tiny white haired pixie, standing in a derelict hospital with a monster behind her. She could see the cold, digital gleam of his eyes in the glass.
He held her gaze. The word was a coincidence, a fluke. He wasn’t talking about her real hair color. That wasn’t possible.
Nim’s resolve broke. She twisted away and ripped her headset off.
Vertigo was supposed to be hers. The safest place on earth. And when the monsters touched you, they were never really touching you.
• • •
“Plausible deniability,” Margaret said, slipping a balsa glider wing into a precut slot and making a note on the width and the angle. “He can mess with you a billion ways and still not actually violate any terms.”
It surprised Nim, how relieved she was that Margaret knew the words for what had happened—it had a name. She hated that it had a name.
Margaret scowled at her glider. “What did you even do? Like, to attract his attention?”
“I don’t know,” Nim said, rolling backward in Margaret’s desk chair, twirling in a circle. “Why does it have to be something I did? I didn’t do anything. He’s the one who’s a creep!”
For the first time, Vertigo felt unfamiliar. It felt scary.
“It’s not like it’s real, though,” Margaret said. “Right? I mean, it’s a game—it’s not like it matters.”
It did, though. Nim closed her eyes, struggling against how unbelievably much it mattered. There was no way to say this thing, a thing so huge and offensive it hurt—that someone could do absolutely nothing to you, and it could still feel like everything.
“He’s ruining it,” she blurted out. “It’s mine, and he’s trying to take it!”
“Well then, we should probably show him what’s up already,” Margaret said.
Her matter-of-factness made something glow in Nim’s chest. “How?”
But in Nim’s head a plan was already taking shape. The thing games taught you, more than strategy, more than problem solving or spatial reasoning, was how to play until you won. She already knew exactly what she’d do.
Margaret shrugged and reached for the glue. “I don’t know. Like, trap him in the Bone Swamp until he loses all his bank?”
Nim sat up straighter. “I’m going to kill him.”
For a second neither of them spoke.
“I’m going to do it in the Escher House. And I’m going to use the monsters.”
“Nim,” said Margaret.
“It’s the most obvious place. He’ll follow me—the sisters will do the rest. Maybe I can’t kill him personally, but I’m pretty sure they can.”
“Nim,” said Margaret.
“Listen. The only reason they aren’t fully bosses is because they lose interest in like two seconds if you outrun them or hide. What if they didn’t? Even fully leveled, you wouldn’t survive both of them at once.”
For a long time Margaret seemed wholly intent on her glider, but Nim knew she was thinking hard. “And how are you planning on holding their interest?”
Nim was ready for this. She was becoming something of an authority on the sisters. “I haven’t been able to trick them onto the Doomsday Glass yet—they’re too smart—but I have an idea. You know where they don’t ever look? Up. I’m going to put the glass on the ceiling.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Margaret. “Anyway, they are way too strong. The glass will blow out in like two seconds—it’s not meant for real monsters.”
Nim shrugged, trying to look more casual than she felt. “So, timing will be a factor.”
“You actually think you can reach the ceiling?”
Vertigo was ridiculously open, with tunnels and doors to everywhere, but there were still a few places you couldn’t get to. For the first time, Nim smiled. “Most of the time you can’t. But you know that one place in the library with all the ladders? If you go all the way up, you can get on top of those big shelves. I did it once.”
For a second she thought Margaret was going to argue, to explain the mechanics of why Nim was stupid for even thinking this, why it couldn’t work. Why they had to just let it go and accept that this was how Vertigo was now, forever and ever.
But all Margaret said was, “If we’re going to be building an entire suicide mission around handling the sisters, I think I’m going to need to upgrade my machete.”
• • •
Margaret volunteered to camp at the entrance to the east wing of the Escher House and keep any randoms from wandering in and accidentally distracting the sisters. It involved a certain amount of risk—wraiths tended to congregate in the halls—but, as Margaret pointed out, that really just made her job easier, since no one wanted to hang out there.
Nim armed herself with the scythe, but that was mostly academic. For one thing, it was impossible to kill the sisters, but for another, Nim didn’t want to kill them, just lure them down to the farthest end of the library and keep them there long enough to do their job. For the first time since she’d switched avatars, she put the Lola in a dress. For old times’ sake.
She was relatively sure her plan would work, but she was taking no chances. She picked her time and day carefully, based on what she knew. The James was almost always around on weeknights after eight thirty. Once the glass was in place, she equipped her talisman and prowled the Dollhouse.
As she wandered, little doubts began to gnaw. Maybe he wasn’t coming. Maybe this was stupid. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding and she needed to relax. Maybe, after all this, he really was smarter than her.
It was with a sharp thrill that she finally caught sight of his chinos down the end of the hall. She dawdled, trying to appear vague and helpless. She made sure he got a good look before whisking off to the library.
There she waited, touching the shelves, running her fingers over rows of books. She could feel her pulse in her ears. The whole place was heavy with silence and dust. Night was falling now, the shadows growing long. Time passed in Vertigo in huge swaths. The sun plunged below the horizon, and in an instant the library windows darkened. The glass was a black mirror now, reflecting the room. For a second she saw one of the sisters standing right behind her, red clad, black haired. Ghostly, then gone.
The talisman was hissing softly in the pocket of her dress.
When the James spoke out of the shadows, his voice was sly. “I thought you were too good for cute little dresses, but you look hot. You should wear that all the time.”
Nothing about it sounded like a compliment.
Nim was surprised at how sad she felt suddenly. “I’m tired of this now, okay?
”
“If you can’t deal with it, get out. I don’t give a shit if you don’t like it.”
She turned slowly from the window—so eerie, so delicate. She was the girl in the horror movie. “You will.”
Her headset flickered blue, just barely, just for a millisecond. If he ever just paid attention, he would know that. Over in the corner by the door, there was a sound like breaking dishes. The sisters had materialized, side by side. They were standing directly under the Doomsday Glass.
The James whipped around. “What the—”
His voice cracked and Nim guessed he’d never seen both sisters at once before. She had a feeling there were a lot of things she knew about Vertigo that he didn’t.
She stepped toward him. Beyond him, the sisters shuddered but stayed where they were. They stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the mirror. Their hair seemed to drip around them like something liquid, devouring the light. Nim took another step, fingering the talisman in her pocket, challenging the James to a game of chicken he could never win. She was smiling.
The sisters were trembling harder now. She could feel them humming like power lines and wondered if she’d overestimated the strength of the glass. She took another step.
“Are you crazy?” the James said. “What are you doing?” He really still didn’t understand that she owned them.
Their hands were outstretched now, as if to tell her they understood. They saw. She threw the talisman down at his feet and, for one perfect instant, everything froze. The light was so blue it was nearly purple. Nim was small and strange and utterly exalted.
Then the sisters fell on him—a storm of teeth and claws—already multiplying at his touch. They crouched in the vast, soundless library, ripping him apart. Above them the Doomsday Glass glowed white and hot and blinding like a dying star.
The whole room was filling up with black haired girls in red dresses, false, but proliferating. Nim had never seen more than eight at once—they always disappeared as soon as the real ones started to drift away, but now they were multiplying exponentially, crowding in around the James.
Nim’s headset crackled, flashing bluer and bluer. Belatedly, she understood that it was glitching. The game was cutting out. Parts of the mansion stuttered and froze. With a start she recognized one of the carnival rides from Dark Amusements, looming behind all of the books. Then the ceiling began to melt. Her world was coming down around her.
With a tremendous crash the Doomsday Glass exploded and the library with it, collapsing in a storm of dust and static.
Nim stood in the middle of her own messy bedroom. The headset had shut itself off. Her last glimpse of the Escher House had been the James in pieces, strewn across a bloodred floor.
• • •
At school Nim smiled. A lot. She couldn’t help it.
She kept her triumph to herself though. Instead, she dove into the physics project. She didn’t even argue when Matt Avery volunteered her to take the notes for their group. As a reward she was grudgingly allowed to help Austin Bauer with the math.
They spent three days figuring out the inside of their telescope, taking turns measuring the angles and tweaking the lenses. It wasn’t exhilarating or dire, but it was still pretty interesting.
“Hey, Oz, you like that Vertigo game, right?” said Jake Sieverson on Thursday, flopping down next to Austin. “Did you hear someone crashed it? Like, the whole thing.”
Austin made an ambiguous noise and didn’t look up. “Don’t call me that.”
Nim turned away to hide her smile, fidgeting with the corner of her lab book. “I was playing when it happened,” she mumbled.
“Dude, for real?” Jake was leaning on the table, looking right at her for probably the first time ever. “How was it? I heard a server failed or something.”
Nim shrugged, trying to look casual, remembering all the times she’d been excited about something and immediately gotten shut down as soon as she tried to talk about it. “I think it must have been a design flaw. Maybe someone exploited a bug.”
Jake was still watching her. He started to say something else, but Austin cut him off. “Why do you care? You don’t even play.”
Later, after Jake had gone loping back to his group, Nim turned to Austin. “He’s not allowed to ask about it?”
“Screw that guy. He’s such a tool—he never shuts up.”
“Yeah, sure,” Nim said, but it seemed kind of uncalled for to get mad at Jake, who was only making conversation. He was one of those people who’d talk to anyone about anything.
She flipped back through her notes, humming quietly, just thinking about her triumph. “Pretty crazy about the server though, right?”
“Can’t you talk about anything else?”
“Fine,” she said, even though she was pretty sure she’d been talking about nothing but Cassegrain reflectors all week. He was being way crankier than normal. Maybe he still hadn’t forgiven her for proving him wrong about the Spirit Lamp.
They worked in silence, adjusting the tension on their springs. As Nim was calculating ratios, Austin came around the table and leaned on the back of her chair. If he wanted to check her work then go right ahead, but he wasn’t going to find anything wrong with it. She hunched over the mirror mount, measuring the angle. She’d forgotten her protractor and was using the hands on her watch as a sort of rough guide.
“Cheating,” Austin said, nodding at the watch. In the glass, she could see the reflection of one hazel eye as he gazed down at her.
She sat very still.
His voice was low and oddly satisfied. He didn’t really sound that much like Batman after all.
“Leave me alone,” she said, even though he wasn’t touching her.
She’d spent so long solving mysteries, but now and for the first time, she actually understood. Everything. To be a girl in a place boys thought they owned meant you never got to own it too. They wanted you modest. Grateful. Helpless, even when the truth was, she was better than him. Would always be better than him. It didn’t matter.
The war between them was over, but that was a lie. She’d defeated him with the equivalent of an atom bomb, and in the real world, he had simply reset. It was never over, and she would be forced to prove herself—always—again and again. Nothing was ever better.
“What?” he said. “I’m just saying.”
Brenna Yovanoff was raised in a barn, a tent, and a tepee, and was homeschooled until high school. She spent her formative years in Arkansas, in a town heavily populated by snakes, where sometimes turkeys would drop out of the sky. When she was five, she moved to Colorado, where it snows on a regular basis but never snows turkeys. She is the author of a number of novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Replacement. Her most recent book is Places No One Knows.
Website: brennayovanoff.com
Twitter: @brennayovanoff
Facebook: facebook.com/brennayovanoff
* * *
What Happens to Girls Who Disappear
CARRIE RYAN
* * *
She’d read the novels and seen the movies. She knew the popular guy just didn’t suddenly decide to fall for the class outcast. And Cynthia knew she filled that role at her small parochial high school: her interest in European board games, her collection of vintage hair accessories, her odd hobby of amateur taxidermy. They marked her as other.
Except that Cynthia was beyond other. She was practically nonexistent. A ghost in her own hallways.
Her problem was that she wanted to believe. Because, in the movies the hot guy may only ask the weirdo out because of a dare, but eventually he always sees who she really is and falls in love.
In the movies he makes her beautiful. Wanted. He makes her matter, and everyone else sees it too.
Well, other than that one movie with the pig’s blood, but there’s always an exception to every rule.
And the rule for Cynthia was that she was nothing, and she’d stay that way until graduation. But in her heart, in th
e place of her most secret dreams, she craved to be the exception.
That was her downfall.
And like any good downfall it started innocuously enough. When the first text came in, Cynthia’s phone vibrated against the hard plastic desk chair, rattling loudly in the silence of the math test. She jumped from the surprise of it, her hand reaching back to slap against her pocket. This caused a sea of snickers to ripple around her. Cheeks already flaming, she tried to slump out of existence, but it was too late.
With a beleaguered sigh Mr. Banks held out his hand, not even bothering to look up from the stack of papers he’d been grading at his desk. “No phones in class,” he droned. It was the same message he gave day after day but the first time Cynthia had ever received it.
Because Cynthia never got texts.
Shoulders slumped, she slipped from her desk and shuffled to the front of the room. Every whisper, every giggle, was a needle scraped across her skin, giving off a sound like fingernails down a chalkboard.
She glanced at the screen before handing it over. The text stood out against the background picture of a blurry selfie taken at camp last summer.
HEY BEAUTIFUL.
One of her feet refused to move, staying rooted a split second longer than expected, and she pitched forward before regaining her balance. The wash of murmurs behind her notched higher. She tried to clear the lock screen, intent on erasing the words but her fingers were too clumsy, and Mr. Banks plucked the phone from her before she could finish.
The words still blazed on the screen. Of course Mr. Banks read them. His eyebrows twitched. The corners of his mouth tightened. Not in a frown, but a smirk. He glanced at her, and she read it all in his expression. In the way he shook his head once before dropping the phone in a drawer.
That he’d known instantly what she’d already figured out: It was a mistake. Those words hadn’t been meant for her.
For a moment she was afraid he’d actually laugh. Or worse, read the text out loud, demanding to know who’d sent it. Instead, he slid the drawer closed and hunched back over his stack of papers. “You can pick it up at the end of school.”