Theo had made a spreadsheet.
Owen found this out at 7:52 on Wednesday morning, at his locker, when his phone buzzed eleven times in a row and then, after a short pause, a twelfth time, which was just Theo saying open it.
It was a shared Google Sheet called ROOK — MGMT. It had tabs. PRESS had view counts Theo had been updating by hand since five in the morning. THEORIES sorted the internet's opinions about Rook into columns: AI / bot (dev plant), Pod pro on a smurf, Actually just a guy, and Ghost.Ghost had four entries. Actually just a guy had one, and it was Theo's mom, who had seen the clip over Theo's shoulder at breakfast and said, "He just looks like a boy who's good at something."
The third tab was called OFFERS.
"There are offers?" Owen said, out loud, to his locker.
There were offers. Two of them. A gaming-chair company with a name like a sneeze wanted Rook to "sit in their seat and say what's real." A fan chat server wanted a Q&A. Both had found Theo, because Theo had replied to every comment under the clip with Rook is unavailable for comment, which was the most suspicious thing anyone had ever said on the internet.
He found Theo by the vending machines, eating a granola bar in the posture of a man who'd been up since five.
"You're my manager now," Owen said.
"Somebody has to be." Theo didn't look up from his phone. "You killed a tree on the front page and then you didn't post anything. Do you know what that does to the algorithm? You've got the most-viewed clip in the game this week and no account. You're a vacuum, dude. People are filling the vacuum with ghosts."
"I don't want an account."
"I know. That's why the plan is mystery." Theo's eyes were bright and slightly unhinged. "We say nothing. We let them say everything. Then, one day, one perfect post."
"Theo."
"And I've told nobody who you are. You can't manage me, and I've decided I'm also not allowed to manage you, so I'm consulting. Also, Gristle_Pete wants to know if you're single. For his sister."
The morning had started on flat ground.
Not the bridge, not the hill, not the mailbox. Their mother had been very specific. At 6:30 on Wednesday, Owen's father had stood in the driveway in the CALLERY jacket with his hands in his pockets, looking up the street toward the hill he wasn't allowed to walk, the way a dog looks at a door.
"So we drive," Owen said.
"We drive to walk," said his father, with enormous contempt. "Like rich people."
They drove the four minutes to Harbor View, where the track was open to the public before seven, and walked it. Lane four. Four laps to the mile. It was dark and wet, and the lights at the far end buzzed, and there were two other people out there: an old woman in a purple windbreaker who passed them on every lap, and a guy in a Seahawks hoodie running sprints on the straightaway, who made Owen's father say, every time, "That man's going to throw up."
They did three miles. Twelve laps. Owen's father walked like he'd been told to walk: carefully, a little stiff in the shoulders, and once on the back straight he stopped and put a hand flat on his chest and Owen's heart went into the floor.
"Heartburn," said his father, after a second. "Chili."
"Dad."
"Chili, Owen. It was your mother's low-sodium chili, and I had two bowls of it to be supportive, and now I'm paying for it." He took his hand away. "If it was anything else, I'd tell you."
He wouldn't. In the first life he hadn't. But he was standing up straight and breathing normally, and his color was fine, and they finished the lap, and then the next one, and on the eighth lap the old woman in the purple windbreaker passed them again and said, "Good morning, boys," like it was a private joke between her and God.
"She's lapped us seven times," said his father, outraged. "I'm going to walk her down by Friday."
At the car, his father leaned on the roof for a second and looked at the track, the lights, the steam coming off the grass.
"Tomorrow you should run," he said.
"What?"
"You've been walking at my speed for two weeks. You're a kid. Run. I'll walk, you run, I'll watch you go around." He got in. "Try not to throw up."
Owen went to chemistry fourth period, and Mrs. Okonkwo handed back the practice worksheet, and he looked at it and felt a very specific kind of despair that he'd forgotten existed.
Stoichiometry.
He was thirty-two years old. He'd run a raiding guild's loot economy for three years. He could tell you the exact ratio of Brightwater to river-salt to fenwort in a Grade II Clear Draft and how many batches you could brew before the exchange prices moved against you. He had once calculated a raid's bleed damage in his head, mid-fight, while on fire.
He had also, at eighteen, in his first life, gotten a D-minus in this exact class, and then never thought about a mole again for fourteen years.
"If 4.0 grams of hydrogen gas react with excess oxygen, how many grams of water are produced?"
He stared at it. It stared back. A small eighteen-year-old voice in his head said I don't know, man, a lot?
"Mr. Callery," said Mrs. Okonkwo, walking past. "That face. Is that the face of a man who is ready for Thursday's quiz?"
"It's the face of a man who's thinking about it."
"Think faster," she said, and tapped his worksheet twice with one long fingernail, on the two questions he'd gotten wrong out of four, which was, he realized, fifty percent, which was worse than his sync.
The Wednesday session was a duo, which was new.
Clear Draft at 7:44. Pushups at 7:46, then a minute of the box breathing Renata had given him, sitting on the edge of the bed with the window open. 7:52, headset on.
[Welcome back, Rook.]
[SYNC 53% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 52m) + 2% (Primed) = 58%]
[Theo Banks is online. Lemonwedge - Level 10 - Elementalist]
Lemonwedge was standing in the square in Harrowgate in brand-new robes the color of a traffic cone, holding a staff with a little caged flame at the top like a lantern. He'd dyed the robes. Of course he had.
"Look at me," said Theo, in party chat. "Look at me, Owen."
"I'm looking."
"I'm a fire wizard."
"You're an Elementalist. If you go all-in on Pyre, you'll be mad in a month, because Rime gets Shatter, and Shatter's broken until patch 1.4."
Theo stared at him across the square. A Harrowgate guard walked between them, very slowly, the way NPC guards did.
"Okay," said Theo. "First of all, the tram rule applies. Second, what's Shatter. Third, I don't care, I'm fire. Fire is life."
"Fire is a DoT build with no burst."
"Fire is life, Owen."
They took the east road out past the crofts toward the Fenwild edge, where the bog-crawlers were Lv10-12 and slow and good practice for kiting. On the way, Owen walked him through the screen he'd look at for the next ten years.
ELEMENTALIST (Arcanist path) - Lv10Ember Bolt (rank 2) | Kindle | Frost Lance (rank 1) | Ward of Embers
Branches: Pyre | Rime | Tempest | Class points: 1 unspent
Cast time: SYNC-scaled. (base x (1.5 - SYNC/100))
"Your number?" Owen asked.
"Forty-nine." Theo said it a little proudly. He'd been forty-one on launch day, on four hours of sleep and a Mountain Dew. "Which is good, right?"
"Eight points in twelve days is really good. Look at the formula. At fifty, Ember Bolt's one-point-eight seconds, flat. At sixty, it's ten percent faster. At seventy, twenty. That's not a lot, unless a wolf is coming at your face."
He watched the moment Theo got it. Every point of the number was a little bit of time, and time was the only thing that mattered in a fight.
"Oh," said Theo. "Oh, that's why you go to bed at ten."
"That's why I go to bed at ten."
The bog-crawlers were the color of old soup and moved like they were being paid by the hour. Theo learned to kite in about twenty minutes, which was faster than Owen had in his first life. He learned it the honest way: by not doing it, and getting bitten, and going "ow, ow, ow" while his health bar dropped, and then doing it. Ember Bolt, step back. Kindle on the second one. Step back. Don't stand in the water. Don't stand in the water.
"Why does the water matter?"
"You're fire. Fen water puts Soaked on anything standing in it, and Soaked eats your burns. The tooltip says 'fire resist up.' It doesn't say the water does it. People figured that out in, like, week five."
"How do you know that?"
"Tram rule."
"The tram rule's going to get so old."
They fought for an hour. Owen mostly pulled and blocked and called tells, and watched Theo stop playing and start paying attention.
Owen's own number crept up as they worked. Not from fighting. From moving: running a crawler around a dead tree, cutting across a root at an angle, stepping in front of Theo for the block when one got close.
[Flow: SYNC 59%]
A factual aside: the author publishes this story on an official page, which was copied without permission. Reading there supports their work.
[Flow: SYNC 60%]
He tried Threefold Step once, on the last crawler of the night, near the end, at 61.
[Threefold Step - Imprecise (motion)]
[SYNC: 61% / 60% ✓ | Pivot: 74° / 90° ✗]
Seventy-four. Three degrees better than Tuesday. His hips just didn't turn that far, not at speed, not without his left foot coming off the ground. A headset only listened to what your body could actually do, and this body had spent seventeen years in a desk chair.
"What was that?" said Theo. "You did, like, a ballet thing, and then the crawler fell over."
"That was me doing it wrong."
"It looked sick."
"It looked like two-thirds of something sick."
[Bog-crawler slain. +88 XP]
[Lemonwedge - Level 11]
Theo let out a sound like a kettle. Two players riding past on the road turned to look at him.
At 9:20, Owen logged them both out on the road, because clause one was clause one and it was nine-twenty on a school night. He sat up in the dark, and his hips felt like something rusted.
He found a video called Hip Mobility for People Who Sit All Day and did all twelve minutes on his bedroom floor, feeling like an idiot, while a calm woman on his phone folded herself into a pretzel.
Wed 3/25, he wrote in the notebook. Track 3 mi (Dad, flat). Pushups 11. Hip video, 12 min. Pivot 74/90. Sync peak 61. Theo Lv11. CHEM: 2/4 = bad.
And then, under it, because it was true:
I don't remember anything about moles.
Thursday, 6:09 AM.
LATTICE COMPANIONAdaptation threshold reached. Your physical baseline has been updated: 54%. Three this week, Rook! Keep it up.
He looked at the message for a long time in the dark.
Three in four days. In his first life he'd topped out at 53 after fourteen years, and the Companion had never once sent him a message like this. Walking. Pushups. Water. Sleep. The boring stuff, and the boring stuff was working.
He was a little afraid of it, honestly. Not of the number. Of how badly he wanted it to keep going.
At the track, his father stood in lane four with a travel mug of decaf, which he was holding the way some men hold a hostage, and said, "Go."
"I haven't run since—" Owen tried to think. Since 2029. Since never, in this body. "I don't know how to pace it."
"Then go slow. Slower than you think. If you can't talk, you're going too fast. I'll be here." His father nodded at the track. "Eight laps. I'll do four. I'll be walking the second mile while you're still going, and you'll pass me, and I'll say something mean."
Owen went.
He went out too fast, like everybody does, and by the end of the first lap his lungs had opinions. The third lap was where his brain started arguing: you could walk a lap, nobody would know, who even is this for.
It was for a heart. That was who it was for. A heart that wasn't his.
He slowed down, which helped. He breathed in for three steps and out for three, the way the Wayfarer statue on the ridge had talked about breath being a road. Apparently real runners did it too. Most good things in Vael were stolen from somewhere.
On the fourth lap, the old woman in the purple windbreaker came up on his shoulder and didn't pass him.
She just ran next to him for half a lap, perfectly calm, sixty-something, with her silver ponytail bouncing, and said, "Shorter steps. You're reaching."
He shortened his steps. It was easier. It was immediately and unfairly easier.
"There you go," she said, and pulled away from him like he was standing still.
On the sixth lap, he passed his father, who was walking the back straight with the decaf, and who said, as promised, "You look like a wet cat."
On the seventh lap, he didn't think about anything at all. That was new. It was a little like flow. His body was doing a thing, and his head was just along for the ride, and the lights buzzed, and the steam came up off the grass.
On the eighth lap, he finished.
He stood bent over on the line with his hands on his knees, breathing like a broken accordion, and his father walked up and stood next to him and didn't say anything mean.
"Two miles," said his father, after a while.
"Two miles."
"Huh." His father looked at the track. Then at him. Then, for a second, he looked like he wanted to say something else, and didn't know how, and put his hand on the back of Owen's neck instead and squeezed, once, the way he did when Owen was a little kid at the shop, sweeping up. "That's pretty good, bud."
His phone buzzed in the car.
LATTICE COMPANIONMilestone: first continuous 2 miles! 🏃 Physical adaptation logged.
"Your game texts you when you run?" said his father.
"It's got access to my phone's step counter."
"That's creepy."
"Maddie said the same thing."
"Maddie's smart." His father started the car. "Ask it what my number would be."
The chemistry quiz was ten questions, fourth period.
He knew three of them for sure. He knew two more that he worked out by drawing a horrible little diagram in the margin, which was the hydrogen-and-oxygen thing all over again. He guessed the rest.
Mrs. Okonkwo graded them during lab, at her desk, in red pen, at the speed of light, and handed them back at the bell. She put his face-down on his bench and tapped it once.
He turned it over.
54.
He stared at it. Then, despite everything, he laughed. Loudly. Out loud, in a chemistry lab. Jaden Price turned around.
"What?" said Jaden. "What'd you get?"
"Fifty-four."
"Why is that funny?"
"It's a long story," Owen said. "It's a very, very funny number."
Mrs. Okonkwo didn't think so. She asked him to stay a minute after the bell. She was worse than mean about it. She was kind.
"Your mother emailed me on Tuesday," she said, "about you being late. She mentioned the game. And a contract, I think. With clauses."
"There are clauses."
"Well. I run a study session on Thursdays, after school, at three. In here." She looked at him over the beaded chain of her glasses. "My nephew tells me that you understand ratios very well. In the game. He tells me you said, in some video, that the yield of a potion goes down if you get the ingredients wrong."
"I didn't say that in a video."
"Someone did," said Mrs. Okonkwo, "and it's chemistry, Mr. Callery. Limiting reagents. That's this whole unit. You just don't know you know it." She tapped the quiz. "Three o'clock. Next Thursday. Bring the potion."
The parent portal sent his mother an email at 2:58 PM.
She was off that day, and was at the kitchen table with her coffee when Owen got home. She didn't say anything. She just turned her phone around.
CHEMISTRY 11 — Quiz: Stoichiometry I — 5.4 / 10.
"I know," Owen said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You turned your phone around. That's worse."
His mother put the phone face-down on the table. She had her triage face on. What's bleeding. What can wait.
"Clause two," she said. "C or better by the end of the term. Or your hours are cut in half."
"It's March. The term ends in June."
"I can read a calendar. You told me, when we wrote that thing, that you were going to treat this game like a job. You said it like you were thirty."
He didn't say anything.
"So here's the thing about jobs," his mother said. "You still have to do the boring part. I've been a nurse for twenty-two years, and the most important thing I do, every single shift, is paperwork. Nobody makes a TV show about it. But if I don't chart, somebody gets the wrong drug." She turned the mug a quarter-turn on the table. "Chemistry's the paperwork, Owen. You don't have to love it. You have to do it." This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
"Mrs. Okonkwo's got a study session. Thursdays at three. I'm going."
His mother looked surprised, then suspicious, then, slowly, something else. "You're going."
"She said it's the same as potions. Limiting reagents."
"Is it?"
He thought about it. Brightwater, river-salt, fenwort. Two to one to one. If you only had one river-salt, it didn't matter how much Brightwater you had, you only got one batch, and the rest was wasted. Limiting reagent. He'd done it ten thousand times. He'd just never written it down in grams.
"Yeah," he said, a little stunned. "Yeah, it kind of is."
"Then here's the deal." His mother picked up a pen, and pulled the contract off the fridge, where it lived under a magnet shaped like a lobster, and wrote, under clause two, in her very good handwriting:
2a. Owen goes to Mrs. Okonkwo's Thursday sessions. If the next quiz is under 60, school-night hours go to 2 until it isn't. (Mom. Effective now.)
"Two hours," Owen said.
"Two hours if." She capped the pen. "Which you can prevent, by being the man who goes to the boring meeting."
He read it twice. It was fair. It was so fair he couldn't even be mad about it, and he wanted to be mad about it a little, just for the dignity of it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. It's a good clause." He meant it. "It's a really good clause, Mom."
His mother looked at him a beat too long, then got up and put the contract back under the lobster.
"You're very weird lately," she said, not unkindly. "You know that, right?"
"I've been told."
He did his homework first. All of it. At the kitchen table, where she could see. Then he made a flash card that said LIMITING REAGENT = the river-salt on one side and the thing you run out of first decides how much you make on the other, and stuck it on the inside of his door, where he'd see it every night before he put on the headset.
Then he put on the headset.
[Welcome back, Rook.]
[SYNC 54% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 54m) + 2% (Primed) = 59%]
Theo was waiting for him in Harrowgate square, in the orange robes, standing next to the notice board, where something new had gone up that afternoon. Everyone was crowded around it. A Harrowgate crier, an NPC in a blue tabard with a brass horn, was reading it out every two minutes, to nobody's delight:
"Hear ye! Hear ye! By order of the Lattice, the first Vael Circuit is called!"
VAEL CIRCUIT - SPRING QUALIFIER (DUO)Registration open now | closes Fri Apr 10, 11:59 PM PT
Matches: Sat Apr 18 (online, all regions)
Eligibility: both members Level 12+ at close | any hardware (headset or pod)
Format: best-of-three, arena rotation | single elimination after group stage
Top 8 duos per region advance to the Spring Invitational (Seattle)
"Every walker starts on the same road."
"'Any hardware,'" said Theo. "That means pods."
"It means pods."
"So it's us against people in forty-thousand-dollar beds."
"It's us against everybody." Owen read the eligibility line again. Level 12+ at close. Theo was eleven. Two weeks. Easy, as long as he stayed out of the Thornmarch, which, in the first life, he hadn't stuck around long enough to wander into. "You want to?"
Theo looked at the board, where a Halcyon-sponsored duo, both Lv14, gold trim and floating logos, were registering like it was a red carpet.
"Are you kidding?" said Theo. "I made a spreadsheet, Owen. There's a tab."
"There's a tab for the Circuit?"
"There's been a tab for the Circuit since Sunday."
They registered.
Team name?
Theo typed ROOK + LEMONWEDGE. The system thought about it, and offered it back to them, slightly edited, the way it always did:
Registered: Rook / Lemonwedge (Duo) | Region: NA-West | Seed: unranked
"Unranked," said Theo, with relish.
They spent the rest of the night getting Theo to 12, because Theo had decided that was the most important thing in the world, and Owen agreed.
Owen took him up the Cairn Road into the hills, where the day-wolves were Lv11 and ran in pairs. He showed him how to stand on the uphill side of a wolf, because wolves in Vael lunged in an arc and lost a step going uphill. A dev had explained it in a 2028 talk: We modeled pack predators on actual biomechanics. Gravity's a stat.
"Gravity's a stat?" said Theo.
"Gravity's always a stat. That's what nobody gets about this game. It's not a game with physics. It's physics with a game on top." He blocked a wolf, felt the shield take it in his arms like a real weight, and stepped left as Theo's Ember Bolt went past his ear.
[Flow: SYNC 60%]
[Flow: SYNC 61%]
[Flow: SYNC 62%]
Sixty-two. He felt it go up like a breath he'd been holding.
Three wolves later, at the cairn with the broken top, he tried Threefold again, on a day-wolf that came in fast, and felt his hips go almost there, the left foot staying down, the turn following through farther than it ever had, and the third beat, the breath, landing like a hand on a table.
[Threefold Step - Imprecise (motion)]
[SYNC: 62% / 60% ✓ | Pivot: 79° / 90° ✗]
Seventy-nine.
"Seventy-nine," he said, to the dead wolf. "Twelve minutes of pretzel lady and I got five degrees."
"Who's the pretzel lady?"
"Tram rule."
"That's not a tram thing, that's just a weird thing."
[Lemonwedge - Level 12]
Theo didn't make a kettle sound this time. He just stood on the hill in the orange robes, holding the little caged flame, looking down at Harrowgate's lights and the river and the black line of the Fenwild beyond, and said, quietly, in party chat, "Holy shit. We're eligible."
"We're eligible."
"We're in an esports tournament."
"With about four thousand other duos."
"With Rook," said Theo. "That's a whole tab."
At 9:24 he logged out.
LATTICE COMPANION - Session SummaryDuration: 1h 32m
Baseline in: 59% | Peak: 62% | Baseline out: 59%
Hydration check-ins: 1 ✓ | Stand-up reminder: 1 ✓
Physical adaptation: logged | Milestone today: 2 miles ✓
Another personal best, Rook! Rest well.
He did the hip video again on the bedroom floor in the dark. It hurt less than last night, which was either progress or the placebo effect, and he was too tired to care which.
Thu 3/26, he wrote. Track 2 mi JOG (first!). Dad walked 1 (flat, fine, no chest stuff). Purple windbreaker lady: "shorter steps." Pushups 11. Hip video. Base 54. Peak 62. Pivot 79/90. Theo Lv12. Registered for Circuit. CHEM QUIZ: 54 (lol). Clause 2a. Okonkwo next Thurs 3 PM.
He looked at the page, and then at the line he'd written for tomorrow.
Fri 3/27: Dad's bloodwork.
In his first life there hadn't been a Friday, March 27. No appointment, no tubes, no results. The first number anyone ever wrote down about his father's heart was on a hospital form in 2036. This time it was tomorrow, and his father had said, in the car, with the window down, Ask it what my number would be, like it was a joke.
Owen put the notebook away and lay in bed and, for once, didn't fall asleep right away.