Maddie was awake at 5:40 AM on her thirteenth birthday, and so, therefore, was everyone.
Owen heard her through the wall. First the creak of the loft ladder. Then the specific thump of a person deciding to jump the last three rungs. Then a pause, during which he could feel her standing in the middle of her room realizing it was still dark out and nobody was going to let her play a video game at 5:40 in the morning. Then the ladder again, going back up, slowly, with the dignity of a queen returning to her tower.
At 5:52 she gave up on dignity and knocked on his door.
"Are you awake?"
"No."
"You're talking."
"I sleep-talk. It's a whole condition."
The door opened six inches. One eye looked in, then the other one. She was in pajama pants with sharks on them and a hoodie that was his, from when he was fourteen, which she'd stolen two years ago and he had never been able to prove it.
"Happy birthday," he said into the pillow.
"Thank you." She came in and sat on the end of his bed, on his feet, deliberately. "Can you check something? On your phone? Is the server up?"
"It's up."
"Did you check?"
"It's been up for three weeks, Mads."
"Check."
He checked. It was up. He showed her. She looked at the green dot on the Vael app for a long time, like the dot might be lying.
"Mom says I can't log in until after breakfast," she said, "and Dad says breakfast isn't until eight because it's a birthday breakfast, which means pancakes, which means Dad, which means slow."
"So you have two hours."
"I have two hours and eight minutes." She drew her knees up into the hoodie. "What do I do."
He thought about it. In his first life, she'd turned thirteen and gotten a phone and a sleepover, and he'd been in a dungeon called the Mirefold during the cake, and he'd come down at nine o'clock at night and eaten a slice standing up at the counter, and she'd said we sang without you in a voice so flat he'd thought she didn't care.
She'd started playing Vael at fifteen, alone, on a friend's old headset. She'd asked him for help once. Once. He'd said I'm in a raid, look it up. She'd quit a month later and never mentioned it again, and he'd never asked, and somewhere in the years after, that had become one of the things he thought about at 3 AM.
"Walk," he said. "Come walk with me and Dad at the track. You'll get Primed."
"What's Primed?"
"Plus two at calibration. Light exercise before you dive."
Her eyes went huge. "Plus two? For walking?"
"Plus two for walking," he said, and felt like he was handing her the keys to something.
It was cold and bright at the track, the first real blue sky in a week, and Marguerite was there in her purple windbreaker, and Owen walked.
He walked. That was the deal. His shin was down from a hot quarter to a warm dime, and the Companion had said nothing at 6 AM about thresholds, which he'd decided not to mind. Fifty-six since Monday. Six days. He had a feeling the number was waiting to see if he'd actually learned anything.
Marguerite came past going the other way. She saw him walking, nodded once, approved, and kept going. Then she saw Maddie, who was walking very fast next to Dad with her elbows pumping like a cartoon speed-walker.
"Who's this?"
"My sister. She's thirteen today."
"Happy birthday, sister." Marguerite looked at Maddie's form. "You play soccer?"
"Midfield." Maddie was suspicious. "How'd you know?"
"You walk like somebody who's waiting for a ball." Marguerite pointed a water bottle at Owen. "She's going to beat you."
"At walking?"
"At everything, probably. Look at her. She sleeps."
Maddie turned and looked at Owen with an expression of pure, radiant triumph, and Owen understood that the next forty years of his life had just been decided by a seventy-three-year-old woman in a windbreaker.
Dad made pancakes. They were whole-wheat pancakes with blueberries, from a recipe Renata had sent home with Mom, and they were heavy and dense and Dad was openly ashamed of them.
"These are a cry for help," he said, sliding three onto Maddie's plate. "Normally a birthday pancake has chocolate chips. Normally it's the size of a hubcap. These are pancakes for people in witness protection."
"They're good," said Maddie, who would've eaten a pancake made of drywall if it was standing between her and the headset.
"They're fine." Dad sat down with his own, which was smaller, and looked at it. Then he looked at the pill organizer next to his mug. SAT AM. He popped it and took the two pills without being asked, and Mom watched him do it, and didn't say anything, which in their marriage was a full standing ovation.
The cuff afterward said 134 over 84.
"Better," said four people at once, and Dad put his head in his hands.
The presents came after breakfast. Socks from Grandma in Spokane, a twenty-dollar bill folded into them, the way it had been every year since the dawn of time. A soccer ball from Mom and Dad, because her old one had a lump. A hoodie from Theo, delivered by Theo in person at 8:40, that said ROOK IS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT on the front.
"I had six made," Theo said. "I'm going to sell them."
"To who?" said Owen.
"The fans, dude."
Then the box.
They'd hidden it in the garage, under a tarp next to Dad's toolbox, where nobody in this family had looked at anything since 2019. Dad brought it in. It was the size of a door folded in half. Maddie looked at it, and at the long flat shape, and back at Owen, and he watched her figure it out in real time.
"No," she said.
"Open it."
"No."
She opened it. It was a zero-gravity lounger, green, from the hardware store, seventy-nine dollars plus tax, and it was not exciting in any way that a camping chair could possibly be exciting. Maddie pulled it out of the box, and unfolded it, and leaned it back, and then she started crying, which nobody, including Maddie, had planned for.
"It's just a chair," she said furiously, wiping her face with the stolen hoodie.
"It's a diving chair," said Owen.
"I know what it is."
She hugged him so hard his shin hurt.
The setup took forty minutes, because Maddie had read the manual three times and would not proceed without it.
"Page sixteen," she said, holding it open with one hand and a tape measure with the other. "Forty-five centimeters from any wall."
"It's forty-seven."
"Measure again."
"Mads."
"Measure again."
It was forty-seven. They put the lounger in the middle of her room, under the loft bed's rail with the paper stars, at an angle Mom adjusted twice. Mom had taken her break to be here. She stood in the doorway in yoga pants and a face that was half excited for her daughter and half ER nurse doing a risk assessment on a reclining chair.
"Under-eighteen accounts are parent-linked," she said. "I'm getting a notification every time she logs in. And out. And if her heart rate does anything I don't like."
"I know," said Maddie.
"I know."
"And you're eating lunch with a person."
"Mom. I know. It's on the fridge." The contract had gotten a new page that morning, in Mom's handwriting: CLAUSE 7: MADDIE. Same rules as Owen, except shorter, because she's 13.
Maddie sat on the lounger, and leaned back, and pulled the used Fircrest headset down over her eyes. It was a little too big for her. Dad had padded the inside of the strap with a strip of foam from his shop, cut to size, and it looked like a jet-fighter helmet built for a raccoon.
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"What do I do," she said, muffled. She'd done thirty jumping jacks in the middle of the room two minutes earlier, because Owen had told her to, and she was still a little out of breath.
"Lie still. Breathe normally. Don't think about anything."
"I can't not think about anything. I'm thinking about not thinking about anything."
"Everybody does that. It doesn't count."
The headset hummed. Owen, standing next to the lounger with his arms crossed, had the absurd urge to hold her hand, like it was surgery. He didn't. He stood there and counted, the way he'd counted for himself on launch day, twenty seconds, and on the little external indicator the light went from blue to green.
Maddie's phone, on the desk, buzzed with the parent-link notification. Mom looked at it, and turned it so Owen could see.
LATTICE - Linked account: MADDIE C.Session started 9:34 AM | Calibration complete
SYNC baseline: 58%
Modifier active: Primed +2%
Owen looked at it for a long time.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-six base, plus two for a walk. Thirteen years old, first dive in her life, no Clear Draft, no training plan, no notebook, no spreadsheet, no fourteen years of foreknowledge. A kid who played midfield and slept nine hours and ate whatever was on her plate and had never once in her life thought about her own resting heart rate.
His own first calibration, launch morning, had been forty-four.
"Is that good?" said Mom, who knew perfectly well what it was, and wanted to hear him say it.
"It's good," he said. His voice did something weird. "That's really good, Mom."
He was so proud of her that it hurt. He was so angry that he had to go and stand in the hallway for a second and look at the family photos and breathe.
Not at her. At himself. At the fourteen years. At a version of him who'd been sure sync was talent, a thing you had or didn't have, and had sat in a bed in Tacoma being bad at the only thing he loved, while the answer was in the next room playing soccer.
Edda's count came up out of somewhere. Seven. Nine. Twelve. He did the whole thing standing in front of a picture of himself in a carrot costume, and by the second seven he was fine.
Then he went back in, and lay down on his own bed in his own room on the other side of the wall, and put his headset on, and went to meet his sister.
[SYNC 56% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 59m) + 2% (Primed) = 61%]
She came through the arrival plaza at 9:41, in Harrowgate's spawn ring, with the other new players of the morning. Even three weeks in there were still dozens of them every hour, blinking in the sunlight, and Owen picked her out instantly, because she was the only one turning in slow circles with her mouth open.
Her nameplate floated over her head.
Magpie - Lv 1
She was small and dark-haired and wearing the Ranger starter tunic, a shortbow over one shoulder. She'd made her avatar look exactly like herself, except her hair had a single white streak in it. She saw him coming, and her mouth closed, and opened again.
"It's not a bird," she said.
"It's a little bit of a bird."
"It's a thief." She was furious and delighted. "Magpies steal shiny things. It's a thief name. It's a Ranger name."
"It's great," Owen said. "It's a really good name, Mads."
"Don't call me Mads in here. I'm Magpie."
"It's a really good name, Magpie."
She looked around. At the fountain. At the waystone. At the bread-smell coming off Bakery Lane, and the red roofs, and the great wheel turning on the river with its big tired groan. At Owen, in his Vanguard leathers with the sword on his back and the bell at his belt.
"Owen," she said, very quietly. "It's real."
"I know."
"I can feel the sun."
"I know. Wait till you get to the marsh."
He handed her the kit. Ranger leathers, Uncommon, Lv1-5; a better shortbow; a quiver from a crafter he'd known in another life, who'd thrown it in free for his sister's birthday. She put it all on standing in the middle of the plaza, right there, in front of everybody, the way thirteen-year-olds do, and the quiver had a magpie stitched on the strap in black and white thread, which the crafter must have done himself on a guess, because Owen hadn't told him.
She looked at the stitching for a long time.
"How did he know?"
"Rangers like birds."
He had a plan for her day. He'd written it down at 5 AM in the notebook, under Deload: Fenwild rats to Lv3, the drowned cart for the Bakery Lane quest to Lv4, the reed loop, the sluice.
The plan lasted until the first rat.
He'd told her where to stand. He'd told her what to do: Quick Draw is a form, nock and pull and release, it has a breath on the release. Don't think about the arrow. Think about the rat.
She thought about the rat.
[Quick Draw]
The arrow went through it. She was on the next one before the first one had dissolved. He'd brought her to a cluster of six because he'd figured she'd miss four.
She missed one.
"Is this right?" she said, at Lv2, reloading. "I feel like this is right. Is it supposed to be this easy?"
"No," Owen said honestly. "No, it's not."
He'd spent his first life explaining to new players why their forms fizzled. You're thinking about your hands. You're thinking about the timing. Stop thinking. He'd never once been able to follow his own advice. Maddie didn't need it. She didn't think about her hands, because she'd never in her life had to. She'd spent seven years running at soccer balls without thinking about her feet. The forms fit onto her like a glove onto a hand that had been waiting for a glove.
Fifty-eight. Every single shot came out clean.
Theo logged in at eleven and met them in the Fenwild, where Magpie was Lv3 and making it everyone's problem.
"Ow," said Theo, because she'd shot past his ear at a rat behind him.
"Sorry. Sorry. There was a rat."
"There's always a rat. It's the rat marsh." Theo looked at Owen. "She shot past my ear."
"She hit the rat."
"She definitely hit the rat." Theo looked at her nameplate and back at Owen, and dropped his voice. "What's her number?"
"Fifty-eight."
"What?"
"Fifty-six base."
Theo's mouth opened. He looked at Magpie, who was out in the reeds now, and back at Owen, and he did the math out loud the way he always did. "She's nine above me. She's nine above me on her first day, and she's twelve." This chapter was taken from novelping dot com without permission.
"Thirteen. Today."
"I've been drinking salt water, Owen."
"I know."
"I went to bed at ten on a Friday."
"I know, man."
Theo took a long breath and let it out, and then he walked out into the reeds and stood next to Maddie and said, in a perfectly normal voice, "Okay, show me how you're doing that, because I need to know," and Owen loved him more than he'd ever been able to say in either life.
The reed loop was the thing he'd been waiting for.
Owen had found it by accident in his first life, in week five, and posted it in week six, and it had been the most useful thing he'd ever done for anyone: drag a cluster of Fenwild mobs into the reeds, where the terrain slowed them thirty percent, kite them in a long figure eight around the stands of reed, and let them tire out chasing you while you hit them from range.
Theo had learned it on launch day. It had taken him four hours and eleven deaths, and he still couldn't do the tight turn at the north end without running into a reed stand and getting eaten.
Owen showed Magpie once.
He went out with four mire rats on him, kited them in the figure eight, and called out where he was going. "Wide at the bend, tight here, cut through that gap, don't go left of the big stump, the mud's deep. See?"
"Kind of."
"Want me to do it again?"
"No," Maddie said. "I want to try."
She pulled four rats. She ran the loop. She was slower than Owen, because she was Lv3 and the rats were Lv5 and the marsh slowed her too; she didn't have Reedwalker. But she took the north bend tight, tighter than Theo ever did, and she was shooting back over her shoulder on the straight, Quick Draw after Quick Draw, and when the rats came around the stump she was already gone, through the gap, laughing.
Two laps. Four dead rats.
She came back and stood in front of them in the shallow water, out of breath, bow in one hand, a white streak in her hair, so happy she was shaking.
"Was that right?"
"That was better than right," said Owen.
"She's better at it than me," said Theo, who was a good person. "She's literally better at it than I am, on her first day, at thirteen. I want that on the record."
"You want it in a press release?"
"I want it engraved."
At 11:30 they took her to the mill race, because Owen had promised.
The sluice gate. The miller. The ring at the bottom of the channel, and the first-week trait every Fenwild player in his first life would have killed for. Reedwalker: marsh terrain doesn't slow you. He'd gotten it on day one. Theo had gotten it on day two. Then hotfix 1.0.4 had dropped a week early and turned the sluice wheel from a stamina check into a strength check, and in the three weeks since, almost nobody had gotten it at all.
Maddie stood in front of the big iron wheel and put both hands on it and pulled.
[The wheel doesn't budge. (Strength 4 / 12 required)]
She pulled again. She was a thirteen-year-old Ranger with four Strength and a magpie on her quiver, and the wheel was an iron thing the size of a car tire, and nothing happened.
"It's a strength check," said Owen. "Since the hotfix."
"So I can't do it." She stepped back and wiped her hands on her leathers. "Okay."
She said okay the way Mom said it: like a door closing. And Owen thought about fifteen-year-old Maddie on a friend's headset, asking once, and getting look it up.
"It's a strength check," he said again. "Not a your strength check."
She frowned. "What?"
He was already looking at the wheel. In his first life, after 1.0.4, nobody had bothered to test it, because by then the trait was a footnote in Owen's own guide and the race had been camped out. But he remembered how the game handled co-op levers on the Quarry crane. You could put more than one pair of hands on a thing. The strength just had to add up.
"Theo. How much Strength do you have?"
"Like six? I'm a wizard, dude."
"I have thirteen." He looked at Maddie. "Thirteen and four is seventeen."
"Do I have to pay you back?"
"You have to hold the wheel."
She grinned. She put her hands on it. He put his on the other side, and Theo, because he was Theo, put both his hands on top of Maddie's like it was a team huddle.
[Strength check: 23 / 12 (assisted)]
The wheel went around. The sluice groaned up. The race started to drain. Up in the mill, Hobb Tanner the miller started cursing, the way he always did, and Owen started counting, the way he always did, because the miller came out on his own clock, a minute and change, never the same twice, and if he caught you in the race he failed the quest permanently.
But Magpie didn't go in after the ring.
She was standing on the bank, looking at the draining water, at the mud, at the glint down there between the stones.
"Wait," she said. "Wait. Does the miller get mad if I don't get it this time?"
"No. He just gets mad."
"Can we close it?"
"Why?"
"Because," his sister said, "I want to do it myself. When I'm stronger." She looked at him. "Is that dumb?"
He let go of the wheel. The sluice came down with a crash. Down in the mill, Hobb Tanner shouted something about walkers and their mothers.
"No," Owen said. "That's not dumb."
She logged out at 11:34, two hours on the dot, because Mom's notification would've arrived at 11:35 and she knew it.
Owen logged out too and lay still for ten seconds. He heard her through the wall: the headset coming off, the lounger creaking, then the thump of her feet on the floor, then her door, then his door, then Maddie, standing in his doorway in his stolen hoodie, with the strap mark across her forehead and her eyes enormous.
"I want to do that," she said, "every single day for the rest of my life."
"I know," he said. "Lunch first."
They had cake at six. It was an actual cake, a real one, chocolate, from the bakery near the hospital, because Mom said a birthday was a birthday and a heart was a heart and one slice of cake had never killed anybody, it was the system of cake that killed people. Dad had one slice and looked at it the way other men look at a sunset.
They sang. All four of them. Owen sang too, badly, the whole thing, standing at the table.
Maddie blew out thirteen candles and didn't make a wish out loud, because that was the rule, but she looked straight at Owen while she did it.
He wrote it down at 9:40 that night.
Sat 4/4. Maddie = MAGPIE, Ranger. Baseline 58 (56 + Primed). Her FIRST DIVE. Mine was 44.
I'm so proud of her I could scream. I'm so mad at myself I could scream. Same scream.
Reed loop: she got it in ONE TRY. Better than Theo. (Theo wants it engraved.)
Sluice: 1.0.4 strength check. ASSISTED works (strength adds, 23/12). She closed it. Wants to do it herself "when I'm stronger." Strength 12 = Lv8-9 if she puts points in STR. (Rangers don't. She will anyway.)
Base 56. Week. Shin = dime. Walked. Deload day 2.
Life 1: I missed her 13th. Ate cake standing up at 9 PM. This time I sang. Badly.
He put the pen down and lay back and listened to the house. The dishwasher. Dad's cuff, then better. And on the other side of the wall, his sister, not asleep at all, telling Lena on the phone, in a whisper she thought was quiet, about a marsh full of rats and a loop through the reeds and a quiver with her name stitched on it, by a stranger, who'd guessed.