The Leveller

  He tries to smile at me, though he looks anything but happy. “Please tell my grandmother that I miss her and I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  I feel a twinge of guilt thinking of Mama Beti. How disappointed she’ll be when I return empty-handed. But it can’t be helped. Wyn’s right. There’s no easy escape and I’ve done my best.

  I found Wyn. Now someone else needs to get him the hell out of here.

  I nod a quick good-bye, then recite the eleven-number code into the MEEPosphere, waiting for the familiar beeping sound to take me back to reality.

  I wait a little longer. No beeps. I’m still in the hallway of Wyn’s imagined Cuban town house, and Wyn is starting to look worried.

  I blink and look up the code again. Maybe I mixed up the numbers. I recite them again, this time more loudly. “5-1-1-9-6-1-0-0-7-0-0.”

  Nothing. Across from me I see Wyn’s shoulders fall, his head drop. He raises his hands and massages his forehead with his fingertips.

  I run down the stairs and out onto the cobbled street, yelling the numbers into the night sky. “5-1-1-9-6-1-0-0-7-0-0!”

  Beside me a car honks.

  A small group of Meeple hail a cab.

  The code. It doesn’t work.

  I am trapped here . . . with Wyn.

  ELEVEN

  MY HEAD IS POUNDING, LIKE THERE’S A CYMBAL-PLAYING MONKEY going to town inside my brain. I consider shooting it with my laser gun—that ought to shut it up—but something about that plan seems wrong. I’m too tired to figure out what though.

  Why can’t I think? I lean against the town house’s exterior wall, then close my eyes and slide down it into a heap.

  The monkey doesn’t stop. BANG BANG BANG BANG. I tuck my head down and put my hands over my ears, which is useless, but I can’t seem to do anything else.

  After a few moments I register a hand on my knee and a soft voice saying, “Hey there.”

  The monkey does its best to drown out the voice. BANG BANG BANG.

  “Nixy, can you hear me?” the voice says, more loudly this time.

  I blink and try to pull myself together. I nod and then wince. Moving my head makes me dizzy.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Wyn says. He gently helps me to my feet. “You need to rest.”

  He takes my hand like I’m a five-year-old and leads me around the back of the house, where a motorcycle’s been parked in the alley. He climbs on, then tells me to get on the back and hold tight. As we ride through the city, weaving around cars, we don’t talk—I can’t talk—and I’m glad Wyn doesn’t ask me any questions. I have no answers right now. I can barely remember my own name. I just rest my head on his back and let him drive. The monkey cymbals are not as loud now.

  We finally reach a huge, stately hotel, its majestic entrance framed with towering palm trees standing sentry. The sign on the door reads HOTEL NACIONAL. Wyn leaves the motorcycle with a uniformed valet, and we walk through a lush lobby, where more beautiful Meeple stand about talking and laughing and clinking little ice cubes in their drink glasses. Some of the people look familiar and I wonder if they are more famous movie stars—or the same famous movie stars. I open my mouth to ask Wyn, but nothing comes out.

  Wyn squeezes my hand. “Don’t worry, we’re almost there.” He leads me to an elevator, where another hotel attendant says, “Good evening, Mr. Salvador,” and presses a button. The elevator goes up to the top of the hotel and lets us out into a luxurious hallway. A small voice in my head is trying to tell me something—warning me—something about strange boys and hotel rooms being a bad idea, but my hand, the one that is holding Wyn’s, ignores that voice, and it soon goes away.

  We go through a service door, up a flight of stairs, and Wyn opens a door into the night sky. We are on the roof of the hotel. He leads me to a small garden and pushes me gently into a wicker recliner. “Wait here,” he says.

  In the distance, I can make out the ocean, its waves slow and steady as they approach then retreat from the seawall surrounding the city. The sound is restful, hypnotic, and soon the cymbals in my head go away entirely. A handful of stars twinkle above me, like fairies. I feel as if I could almost fall asleep, which is ridiculous. I’m in the MEEP. Avatars don’t sleep.

  “Here you go,” whispers Wyn. His arms are full of linens and pillows. He tucks a pillow under my head and covers me with a silky, lightweight blanket. As my eyelids flutter down for the last time, I see him settle into the recliner next to mine. He is staring up at the stars.

  When I next open my eyes, there is a beautiful pink-and-orange haze surrounding me. I blink once, then burrow my head back into the pillow and reach for Hodee, who likes to sleep inside the nest of my curled body each night. Only he’s not there. I register this as strange, but I’m not ready to fully wake up yet to investigate further. This pillow is so soft, the sound of the waves so soothing. . . .

  Waves. Ocean? Something is wrong with that, I know. My brain is trying to pull itself out of slumber, but it’s like it’s fighting itself. Half of it is saying, “Ocean waves . . . mmm.” The other half is saying, “Ocean waves . . . wha?”

  The “wha” side wins.

  I open my eyes. A gorgeous boy sits across from me, watching me. He smiles. “Go ahead and take a minute,” he says.

  I don’t even need the full minute. Within seconds it all comes back to me like a full-scale tsunami: the sharks, the anaconda, the pterodactyls, the banshee, and of course, Wyn. I’m in the MEEP. Not only that, I’m a prisoner here.

  I sit up slowly, combing my fingers through my hair and running my tongue over my teeth. I’ve never slept in the MEEP before; I feel like I should have rumpled clothes and morning breath. But when I glance down, my avatar looks as fresh as ever. That’s a bonus.

  “I don’t get it,” I say to Wyn, who’s still watching me. “Why was I so tired? Avatars don’t need to sleep.”

  “Avatars don’t, but our brains do,” says Wyn. He picks up the blanket on his chair and begins to fold it. “What’s the longest you’ve ever played in the MEEP?”

  I hesitate. I signed a MEEP contract promising I would always abide by the “4 hours per every 24 hours” maximum.

  Wyn grins at me. “Be honest. I swear I won’t tell my dad’s legal department.”

  I grin back and shrug. “I don’t know . . . maybe eight hours?”

  “So compare that to the twenty-four hours you’ve been in the MEEP this time around.”

  “What?” I say, standing now. “I’ve been gone a whole day?”

  “I think so, from what you’ve told me. That’s why you were so exhausted last night. Even though your body is at rest at home, your brain keeps working here. And after all you’d been through yesterday—the maze challenges and, well, finding me—”

  He pauses for a second, and I recall the raging hissy fit I threw yesterday, like I was somehow channeling King Kong. A wave of embarrassment runs all the way through me and I look away.

  “Your brain was on overload,” he continues. “It needed to shut down for a while—in the real world.”

  I guess it made sense. “I hadn’t really thought of that before,” I confess.

  Wyn takes the blanket from my recliner and I grab the other end to help him fold it.

  “I hadn’t either,” he says, “until I totally crashed on the beach one night and woke up the next morning eyeball-to-eyeball with a large crab.”

  I laugh as he takes the folded blanket from me and scoops up the pillows.

  We leave the roof and go back into the hotel, stopping by one of the rooms to return the linens he’d pilfered the night before. The hotel room is decked out in swanky retro furniture and boasts a panoramic view of the ocean. “Did you really go to the trouble of building and furnishing every single room in this hotel?”

  Wyn gives a small laugh. “It wasn’t as hard as it sound
s,” he says, as he begins to make up the bed. I lean over to help him. I don’t know whether to find it charming or crazy that he’s so intent on keeping our MEEP prison nice and tidy. “All the rooms are identical, a simple copy-and-paste job,” he continues. “Eventually I might re-create some of the penthouse suites, but it’s not my top priority.”

  “I assume you mean the Let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here thing takes precedence?”

  Wyn looks out the window and sighs. “Of course.”

  “I’m going to need to know everything,” I say. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  He nods. “Right. Let’s go to the Malecón. We can talk there.”

  The Malecón, it turns out, is the big stone seawall that I saw last night from the rooftop. As we walk along the top of it, we see fishermen, townspeople, fruit vendors, and lovers holding hands. I suddenly remember Wyn holding my hand last night and I bite my lip, but Wyn doesn’t seem to notice. He has turned inward, trying to figure out where to start his story.

  “I’ve been working on this world for two years now,” he says, looking out at the ocean as we walk. “I guess you could say it’s my hobby, the one place I spend most of my time when I’m not at school.”

  “Two years.” I nod in understanding. “When your dad invents the greatest video game of all time, you don’t have to wait for the official release like the rest of us.”

  Wyn looks almost apologetic. “I know that seems unfair—” he starts, but I cut him off.

  “I would have done the same thing. My dad’s a developmental artist on the MEEP team. He lets me try new stuff all the time. Just not on a . . . scope of . . . this magnitude,” I say, waving an arm at the miles-long stretch of Havana coastline.

  “So that’s why you’re so good at this,” Wyn says with a grin. “You inherited the video game gene from your father.”

  “Both my parents, really,” I say, and all of a sudden I miss them horribly. “My mom, Jill, is a scriptwriter.”

  “Jill?” Wyn asks, stopping us in our tracks. “Jill Bauer?”

  “You know her?” I ask, though I’m sure that can’t be right. Jill would have told me if she’d ever met Diego Salvador’s son.

  “Well, I know of her. I use her scripts all the time. More than half the Meeple here in Havana speak JillBauer-ese,” he says, laughing. “She’s funny as hell, your mom. Always throws in some wacky surprise. Makes the Meeple more interesting.”

  I admit that I am a little taken aback, and also a little ashamed of myself. I have always thought of my dad’s work on the MEEP as super creative and exciting, and my mom’s work as . . . well, boring.

  “So both your parents are in the biz,” Wyn continues. “Is that why they named you Nixy . . . for the water sprite boss in Sirens of the Seylon Sea?”

  “God, no!” I say, giving him a small swat on the arm. “But the truth is almost as fruity. My full name is Phoenix Ray Bauer. Phoenix for the mythological bird, Ray for Ray Bradbury, my mom’s favorite author.”

  “Sounds like our moms are . . . were . . . the same kind of crazy. My full name is Elwyn Brooks Salvador.”

  “No idea who Elwyn Brooks is,” I say. “Sorry.”

  Wyn laughs. “Don’t worry, no one does. But I’m sure you’ve read Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White?”

  “Yes, and—?” I say, not quite following.

  “Elwyn Brooks . . . E. B.?”

  Now I am really laughing. “Wow, E. B., that is almost as embarrassing as my name.”

  “Well, my mom’s maiden name was Brooks, so I give her a pass on that one. But the ‘Elwyn’ was certainly cruel and unusual punishment.” He grumbles, though he is smiling. I remember the photo of his mother on the piano; he has that same warm smile that reaches the eyes.

  “Maybe Elwyn is a little old-fashioned,” I say, “but I give your mom an A-plus for originality. Charlotte’s Web is one of my favorites. Besides, Wyn’s a cool nickname. Like, for the Wyn!” I yell, raising my hand in the air for a high five.

  Now he is shaking his head and laughing at me. “For the win!” he agrees, slapping my hand.

  We walk in silence together for a few more moments, as if we’re both trying to stretch this brief carefree interlude as long as we can.

  “So when did things turn bad?” I finally ask. As much as I’m enjoying our walk, I know my parents must be truly worried by now. I’ve never taken this long on the job. “Here in the MEEP, I mean.”

  “Thanksgiving Day,” he says. “I could tell right away that something was wrong. My usual frequency code sounded different, a pattern I didn’t recognize. When I arrived at the Landing, I thought about stopping at the main control panel to make sure everything was all right, but the damn Christmas in the MEEP promotion started that day, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.”

  I snort a little at that, and he raises his eyebrows at me.

  “My dad was lead developer on Christmas in the MEEP,” I explain.

  “No offense to your dad,” he hurries to explain. “It’s my dad I was annoyed with. Christmas in the MEEP and this one-year anniversary have consumed him for months. We’ve hardly seen him. And once again, he bailed on my grandmother and me for Thanksgiving.”

  “I get it, believe me,” I say, pushing my hair behind my ears as a breeze sweeps over us. “You should know, though, your dad feels bad about that.”

  Wyn shrugs and his face turns unreadable. “So anyway, I left the Landing in a hurry and walked through the portal. I came through the wardrobe, then immediately left the bedroom. I was heading down the stairs when I heard a noise.”

  He pauses and I look at him in question.

  “An impossible noise,” he says, looking out at the ocean again.

  I continue to stare at him, trying to be patient. “What do you mean an impossible noise?” I finally say, unable to wait any longer.

  He turns to face me again. “I heard someone open and shut the wardrobe door.”

  TWELVE

  “ARE YOU SAYING THINGS TURNED BAD WHEN SOMEONE FOLLOWED you into the MEEP?” I ask Wyn, as we continue along the seawall. “Why? Anyone who has a beta code could have entered. I do it all the time in my line of work.”

  “Yes, but I have my own private frequency, Nixy. I coded it myself, with help from my father. We’re the only two who know it. And I knew that he wasn’t going to follow me . . . he was in California for the anniversary launch.”

  “So what did you do after you heard the noise?”

  “I went back to the bedroom, but it was empty. And when I opened the wardrobe door, there was nothing but Black.”

  A small chill runs down my back, though the virtual Havana sunshine is perfect and the temperature warm. “Okay, what happened then?”

  “Well,” says Wyn, blowing out a slow breath from his cheeks, “I still wasn’t that worried. I figured maybe it was just a technical glitch—maybe my ear trans needed replacing or the MEEP network was acting up. I use a lot of beta programming, so it wouldn’t be too strange to run across a problem now and then.”

  I nod as he speaks, encouraging him to go on. It all sounds reasonable enough.

  “So that’s when I initiated my return frequency. Only it didn’t work.”

  “Did you try yelling really loudly?” I ask with a rueful grin, remembering my ridiculous display last night.

  Wyn smiles at me. “Believe me, I would have broken your eardrums if you’d been here. I think I tried about a half dozen times before I gave up. It’s a panicky feeling,” he says, as if letting me know that my temper tantrum last night wasn’t completely uncalled-for. “I spent the next twenty-four hours running all over the place, trying every door, yelling random codes, killing myself over and over . . . that’s how I ended up falling asleep on the beach, in fact. I’d just taken a running swan dive off the seawall, hoping I’d break my neck and reanimat
e in the Landing.”

  “And instead you took a cozy nap with crab daddy,” I say, peering down at the beach below, though there isn’t much of it left. The tide is rolling in fast now. “Surprised you didn’t drown.”

  Wyn stops and looks over the seawall with me. “I’ve been fooling around with the tides, trying to create a schedule for them that mimics the real tide charts of Havana. It’s almost high tide now. In fact, we’d better turn around and make our way back if we don’t want to get splashed. The bigger waves come right over the wall.”

  “So back to your story,” I say as we reverse our tracks. In the distance I can see the towering white Hotel Nacional gleaming in the morning sun. It looks like a palace. “What happened after you woke up on the beach?”

  Wyn shrugs. “I tried to keep calm. I figured my grandmother would be the first to notice I’d been gone too long. I knew she’d be worried and probably call my father, and that my father would send in one of his programmers to fix the problem.”

  “So you also thought it was a technical issue,” I say. “But yesterday you told me that someone was intentionally keeping you trapped here?”

  Wyn’s face turns dark and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “We’re not the only people here, Nixy.”

  “What? How do you know?” I ask, eyeing the Meeple around us.

  He shrugs. “The subtle differences that come from a lack of script. Small idiosyncrasies. I don’t have to tell you about them. You just know, don’t you?”

  I nod because I do. I’ve always been able to sense my marks, even when they’re surrounded by Meeple. But I also knew exactly what I was looking for. Who I was looking for. “Have you spoken to them?”

  Wyn shakes his head. “No, they’ve been successfully avoiding me. They try to blend in with the crowd, but I programmed this entire world from scratch . . . and they just don’t fit in.”

  “Have you tried chasing them down, capturing them?”

  “Of course. I thought maybe you were one of them yesterday, that’s why I—”

  “Mugged me?”