The registration desk took all of four minutes, which felt insulting after everything it had cost to reach it.
Karl signed where the volunteer pointed.
Elsa filled the team-name box with TBD and a small drawn skull, and then they were back on the steps holding a printed slip that said a team of three now officially existed.
Three. Two short of a legal roster.
Karl folded the slip and didn’t bring it up, because Elsa already knew, and because his ribs hurt too much to have the conversation standing.
Then a car slid up to the curb, and the mood of the entire street changed.
It was long and black and quiet in the way that only expensive things are quiet, and it fit this block about as well as the coach’s suit had fit Karl. A driver stepped out, opened the rear door, and a man got out like the pavement owed him rent.
"Elsa." The man’s eyes moved over her once, the tight grip on her own sleeve, then across to Karl’s split lip and the careful way he was standing, and read all of it in under two seconds. "You call me from the middle of a brawl, then stop picking up. Explain to me what that does to a person."
"Dad, I’m fine—"
Dad.
Karl looked at the car again. Then at Elsa. Then at the car.
’Of course.’
...
Mr. Marinet did not ask whether they wanted a ride. He held the door and waited, and it turned out that was the same thing.
Karl ended up in the back beside Sana, with Elsa up front getting quietly interrogated in a voice too low to catch. Sana sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed out the window, saying nothing, which was normal, except her knee was bouncing, which was not.
"You okay?" Karl asked, low.
"I don’t like cars I didn’t get into on purpose." She said it flatly, then seemed to hear herself. "It’s fine. Drop me at the corner of Halden. Not the house. The corner’s fine."
Karl filed that away and didn’t push. Everyone on this team, it was turning out, kept one door closed.
They let her out at the corner of Halden, and she was gone into the dark before the car had fully stopped.
Karl pulled out his phone.
{You- Won’t be home tonight. Staying at a teammate’s to rest. I’m okay, I promise.}
The reply came fast, the way it always did when she was pretending she’d been asleep.
{Mom- A teammate. Does the teammate have a name?}
{You- Mom.}
{Mom- Is the teammate a girl}
{You- Goodnight.}
{Mom- HA. Eat something. Don’t be rude in someone’s house. Love you.}
He put the phone away with the corner of his mouth doing something he stopped before it finished.
...
The house was not a house.
Karl had built a picture in his head somewhere around the word Dad and the word car, and the picture had not been ambitious enough. Gates. A drive longer than his street. A front hall with a staircase that split in two like it couldn’t decide, and a woman in a pressed uniform who took his ruined jacket off his shoulders before he understood she was going to.
’Holy shit.’
[Query: The Administrator’s heart rate has elevated.]
’I’m aware.’
They fed him first.
A long table, a plate that a cook actually plated, and Karl ate carefully, the way you eat when you’re certain you’re one wrong fork from confirming everyone’s suspicions. Then a bath in a room bigger than his and his mother’s kitchen combined, hot water that didn’t run cold after four minutes, clean clothes laid out that fit him better than anything he owned.
He stood in front of a mirror in a stranger’s shirt and did the math he couldn’t stop doing lately. What one night in this house cost.
What his mother was on her knees in the street over. The numbers sat in the same head and refused to be friends.
’Different worlds. And I’m just visiting.’
Elsa found him in the upstairs hall and grabbed his sleeve before he could get properly lost.
"Okay, you’ve eaten, you’ve stopped looking like a crime scene, come on. I want to show you something."
Her room was warm and cluttered in a way the rest of the house wasn’t, and she was clearly nervous about him seeing it, which she covered by talking faster. Then Karl stopped listening, because on a stand by the window, plugged into a soft glowing dock, sat two helmets.
Sleek. Black. The exact ones from the trailer.
The exact one he had closed a browser tab on because the price at the bottom of the page had a comma in it.
"You have them," he said. It came out flatter than he meant.
"Dad got them launch day. He doesn’t even play, he just likes buying the newest anything." She picked one up and held it out to him, grinning now, oblivious. "I’ve been dying to run a custom with you outside a stage. Just me and you. Come on. Play me. Please."
Karl looked at the helmet in her hands. The thing he’d wanted for a year, being offered to him like a spare controller.
’Everyone starts from zero, huh.’
"One game," he said.
...
The knock came before he’d put it on.
Elsa’s father stood in the doorway, not quite inside it, and the temperature of the room adjusted around him.
"Elsa. Your mother wants you a minute."
She went, throwing Karl a look that said behave and don’t let him scare you, which are difficult instructions to follow at once.
Then it was just the two of them.
"Sit," Mr. Marinet said, and Karl sat, and the man looked at him for a while without hurry. "I’ve had people looked into in less time than my daughter’s known you. You—I couldn’t get a clean read on in an afternoon. That’s rare. Usually it means someone’s careful, or someone’s got nothing worth finding."
"I don’t have much worth finding."
"That’s what worries me. A boy with nothing to protect takes risks. Stands in a street and lets five people hit him." His voice didn’t rise. "My daughter watched that. Then called me crying. Whatever you are, you cost her something today just by existing near her."
Karl met his eyes. "I didn’t ask her to make that call."
"No. You didn’t." Something shifted, fractional, behind the man’s face. Not warmth. Recalculation. "She left a team she’d been comfortable on for two years for you. Elsa doesn’t do uncomfortable things. So either you’re worth it, or you’ve talked her into thinking you are, and I intend to find out which before it’s expensive."
"I understand.," Karl said.
The man studied him a beat longer, like a straight answer wasn’t the move he’d prepared for.
"Rest tonight," he said finally, standing. "Tomorrow you’ll be someone else’s problem again."
...
Diving on a real helmet was different.
The exhibition rig had thrown him into the world like a slap.
This one lowered him, patient, the black warming at the edges until the map bled up around him and the grass moved under a wind he could feel in his teeth.
A custom lobby, just the two of them, dropping straight into their heroes so there was no platform, no faces. Karl noticed that with a relief he didn’t examine.
[Instant Quest issued.]
[Quest: Complete this match using a hero other than Charlotte.]
[Reward: Heart x60. Applicable to any bonded hero to advance bond progress.
1000$.]
’You want me off Charlotte.’
[Charlotte does not want the Administrator off Charlotte. This unit issued the quest regardless.]
He locked a frontline bruiser he’d maybe played twice, a slow tank with a hook, everything Charlotte wasn’t. Elsa took Trisla, of course, and lit up the second the match loaded.
"Oh, this is going to be so bad for you, I main mid and you’re a whole tank—"
He was already reading her.
Clear Vision bled arrows up off the ground the way it always did, tagged with her name, drawing her rotations two full seconds before she committed to them. She threw a skillshot at where he’d be. He wasn’t there. He hooked her out of position instead, clean, and her hero folded.
"WHAT. You’re a TANK. Tanks don’t do that—"
"You telegraph left before you burst," Karl said. "You always have."
"I do NOT—" A pause. "Okay, I do. Shut up. Again."
They ran it three times. She lost all three, laughing harder each round, and somewhere in the second game Karl noticed she’d stopped trying to win and started just watching him play, chin on her hand, the game half-forgotten.
{VICTORY.}
[Quest complete.]
[Reward acquired: Heart x60.]
[Bond interaction progress: 50%.]
[A new hero has been unlocked.]
[1000 dollars has been deposited.]
...
The helmet hissed off, and Elsa was already flopped back on her floor cushions declaring rematches for tomorrow.
Karl sat on the edge of the bed and let the panels come up in the quiet only he could see.
[Threshold reached: 50%. Interaction feature initializing.]
That one he hadn’t seen before. He turned it over.
’Initializing meaning what.’
[Restricted. In progress.]
Then, a beat later, in the same flat brackets but somehow not the same at all:
[Charlotte says the tank did not suit you.]
He blinked.
EXP, ticked well past a line he didn’t recognize.
Skills, clear vision, and Steel Nerve, both his now, both carrying across heroes.
Bonded hero, Charlotte. And below her, a slot he’d only ever seen greyed out.
It was no longer grey.
[Second bond slot: available.]
Karl looked at the sixty Hearts sitting in his inventory, then at the empty slot glowing beneath Charlotte’s name, patient, waiting for him to choose.
[Charlotte states the slot is unnecessary.]
[Charlotte states this with unusual force.]
[Charlotte is aware the Administrator is holding sixty Hearts.]
[Charlotte would like to know what he intends to do with them.]
Karl sat in the dark of the richest room he’d ever slept in, and for once, he didn’t have an answer ready.