The alarm went off at 6:15 and Owen's first thought was that someone had replaced his arms with wet cardboard.
He lay there and took inventory. Chest: sore. Triceps: sore in a way that felt personal. Thighs: still mad about the ten squats. Back: the usual dull ache, but less of it, which was interesting. Head: clear. Actually clear, not the gummy fog he'd woken up in for most of his twenties.
Seven hours and forty-five minutes of sleep. He'd checked. He'd lain awake at first, listening to the house, half convinced he'd open his eyes in Tacoma, and then he'd just... gone. Like a switch.
Huh, he thought. So that's what sleep is. I've been doing it wrong for fourteen years. Wild that nobody mentioned it.
Everyone had mentioned it. Constantly.
He got up, pulled on sweatpants and the band hoodie, and went downstairs, where his father was standing in the front hall in a pair of sneakers so old the soles had gone yellow, and a canvas work jacket that said CALLERY on the chest in red thread.
Rick looked at him. Owen looked at Rick.
"You're actually up," his dad said.
"You're actually dressed."
"I'm a man of my word." Rick zipped the jacket. "Also your mother said if I chickened out she'd tell the guys at the shop."
It was cold and wet and grey, the kind of March morning where the sky couldn't decide whether to rain and settled for being damp at you. Their street was empty except for a cat on a porch who watched them with open contempt.
They walked. That part was fine. Owen had a plan, though, and at the second block he explained it.
"Intervals," he said. "We jog between two mailboxes, then walk to the next two. It's how you build up."
"Says who?"
Says a sports-science forum post from 2038, a physical therapist who sighed at me for six years, and roughly nine hundred fitness videos I watched while eating chips. "I read it."
"You've been reading a lot of stuff, lately."
"Since yesterday."
"That's what I mean."
They jogged.
It went badly for both of them, in different ways. Owen's legs were fine, sort of, but his lungs had apparently never been told that this was something they'd have to do, and after forty meters he was breathing like a kettle. His dad was worse. Rick ran like a man carrying a refrigerator up a flight of stairs: heavy, flat-footed, elbows out. At the second mailbox he stopped, put his hands on his knees, and made a noise Owen didn't like.
It wasn't the wheeze. The wheeze was expected. It was the thing underneath the wheeze, a little catch, and the way his dad pressed his fist against his breastbone for a second and then took it away fast, like he'd touched a hot pan.
"You okay?"
"Heartburn." Rick straightened up and fished in his jacket pocket, came out with a roll of antacids, and chewed two. "Burrito last night."
Owen didn't say anything.
He knew this part. Not this morning exactly; he hadn't been here for this morning in his first life. But he'd sat in a hospital family room in June 2036 while a cardiologist with very kind eyes explained that the damage had been building for years, and asked whether his father had ever complained about heartburn when he exerted himself. Chest pressure on stairs. Shortness of breath. Owen's mother had put her face in her hands and said, He ate those antacids like candy.
He'd been the one who didn't know anything.
"Dad," he said. "When did you last see a doctor?"
"Last year. Told you. He said walk." Rick waved his arm at the street, the mailboxes, the contemptuous cat. "I'm walking."
"Was there, like, a blood test? Cholesterol? All that?"
His dad gave him a sideways look. "Okay, nurse junior. Did your mother put you up to this?"
"No."
"Mm-hm." Rick started walking again, a bit faster than before, which Owen recognized as the Callery family technique for ending a conversation. "Come on. Two more mailboxes and then I'm buying you a bad coffee from the gas station."
Owen let it go. Not because it was fine, but because he'd gone for one walk with his father in fourteen years and he wasn't going to turn the second one into a fight. There was time. Ten years, if nothing changed. Less, if he was wrong about the dates, and he'd been wrong about dates before.
Okay. Not today. But soon. You're not letting this one go.
An old woman in a purple tracksuit power-walked past them on the next block, arms pumping, earbuds in. She nodded at them with the warmth of a general reviewing troops who had disappointed her.
"I think she lapped us," his dad said.
"She's probably at seventy percent sync," Owen muttered, and his dad said, "What?" and Owen said, "Nothing."
His mom was off for the next two nights, which in Dana Callery terms meant she was awake at breakfast and therefore dangerous.
She watched him mix the morning bottle. Water, salt, the potassium stuff, honey, protein powder. She let him get as far as the second spoon of honey before she reached over and took the jar out of his hand.
"You're making a milkshake with seawater in it," she said. "Your blood sugar spikes, then it drops in an hour and you feel like garbage. Half that honey. And the protein's fine but that powder's full of junk. I'm going to talk to Renata on Wednesday. She's the dietitian on my floor. She'll give us something better."
"Us?"
"I said I'd help." She poured the honey back into the jar with surgical precision. "Eat eggs. Oatmeal. Something that takes your body more than five minutes to burn."
He ate eggs. He ate oatmeal. Maddie came down, saw her brother voluntarily eating oatmeal, and silently backed out of the kitchen like she'd walked in on something private.
At 8:20 he was upstairs, door closed, lying on the dinosaur blanket with the headset on.
[LATTICE OS v1.0.3]
[Calibrating... please lie still and breathe normally.]
He lay still. His arms throbbed in a satisfying way. He breathed.
[Calibration complete.]
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 47%]
Owen let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
Forty-seven. Three points above yesterday's login. A night's sleep, a walk, eggs, and slightly less honey. In his first life, he'd once paid sixty dollars for a "neural focus" supplement that tasted like grass clippings and did nothing. Forty-seven percent had cost him oatmeal.
Grass clippings, Kestrel. You paid sixty dollars for lawn.
The river came up around him, and Harrowgate.
Here was the thing about forty-seven.
Rising Cut was clean now, every time. He'd have room to get tired before it started flickering. Back Step was clean. Basic attacks landed a little closer to where he aimed. His dodge window, the slice of time during a Back Step where nothing could touch him, had grown from roughly eighty-eight milliseconds to ninety-four. That sounded like nothing. It was nothing. It was also the difference between a rat's teeth closing on air and closing on your calf.
What forty-seven didn't get him was Breath Guard, which needed fifty, or anything good. He was still a man in oven mitts. They were just slightly thinner mitts.
He also had a schedule.
On the second morning of Vael Online, at some point between nine and ten, a Rare Elite would spawn in the Fenwild: a mire rat the size of a pony, with one milky eye and a squeal that summoned its little cousins. Players called it Old Gnasher. In Owen's first life, a streamer named Nilo Faust had stumbled onto it with a party of four Level 5s, wiped twice, won on the third try by kiting it into the reeds, and screamed so loudly when it died that the clip became the second meme of Vael Online, right after xXDarkReaperXx and the waterwheel.
That clip had made Nilo Faust. He went from twelve thousand viewers to a hundred and forty thousand in a month. In year six he would own a house with a hot tub shaped like a sword.
Owen had watched it maybe twenty times. Nilo had found Gnasher at the north pools. Owen was almost sure of it.
He walked out the south gate and into the reeds with his sling in his hand.
The Fenwild in the morning was a different place. The mist sat lower and thicker, like the marsh was still asleep under a blanket, and the reeds dripped. Fen herons stood in the shallows on one leg with the patience of people waiting for you to make a mistake.
This copy used the author's publication page without permission. Reading the story at its proper page supports the author.
Halfway to the north pools, Owen passed the Pilgrim's Waystone.
He'd passed it ten thousand times. Everybody had. It was a toppled column of pale stone, half sunk in black water, and nobody ever looked at it because it didn't give a quest. This morning, for no particular reason, maybe because forty-seven made the world a little sharper, he stopped and put his hand on it.
[Pilgrim's Waystone]
A road marker from before the Lantern Age, inscribed in Old Calvenic. Most of the words are worn away. You can make out:
"...walk well, for the road is long, and the far shore is real."
He frowned at it.
He knew the community theory. The Pilgrim's Road ran from the Riverlands to the coast, all the way to Saltreach and its harbor, so "the far shore" was obviously the sea, and in the second year, when Lattice announced the Shardsea Isles expansion, everybody decided the waystone had been foreshadowing all along. There had been a forum thread. A lot of people had said called it. Owen had been one of them.
It was a nice line, though. He didn't remember it being this nice.
Walk well. He thought about his dad pressing a fist against his breastbone. Then he took his hand off the stone and kept going.
Old Gnasher was not at the north pools.
Owen stood at the north pools for six minutes, sling ready, feeling increasingly like a man who had shown up to a party on the wrong night. A heron watched him.
Then, from the east, faint and very far off, came a squeal like a bicycle brake being murdered.
East pools, he thought. It was the east pools. Nilo came in from the north. That's why I remember north. Because I watched it from his camera.
Fourteen years of memory, and it was all from other people's angles. That was going to bite him one day, and probably not as gently as a rat.
He ran.
Old Gnasher was worse in person.
It sat on a hump of mud at the edge of the east pools, eating something Owen chose not to identify, and it was enormous. A pony with a rat's face. Its fur was patched with grey and it had a scar across its snout, and its one good eye turned toward him as he came out of the reeds, and he saw its nameplate light up red.
[Old Gnasher - Rare Elite - Level 9]
Three levels above him. Elite meant triple health and smarter behavior. Rare meant it wasn't going to respawn for something like a day. No pressure.
A Level 6 should not fight this. A party of four Level 5s nearly hadn't. But Nilo's party had been fighting it on open mud, and Nilo's party hadn't had Reedwalker.
Let's go, you pony-sized disease.
He put a stone in its ear.
Gnasher came off the mud hump like a dropped piano. It was fast on open ground, much faster than the little rats, and Owen had about two seconds of pure animal terror before he was backing into the reeds. Then the reeds closed around them both, and the giant rat hit the thick stems and black water and slowed, wading, thrashing, and Owen kept walking backward at full speed with a grin on his face he couldn't help.
Thirty percent. It didn't sound like much. It was everything.
He let it get close. Close enough to smell it, which was a mistake on multiple levels.
Right foot back. Sword low on the left. Push off, rotate, cut up and across, exhale.
[Rising Cut]
The blade bit into Gnasher's shoulder and it rocked back, staggered for half a second. Not long. Elites shrugged stagger off fast. Owen was already moving.
[Back Step]
The jaws snapped where his shin had been. He felt the wind of it. Back Step, back, back, sling stone to keep its attention as it waded after him. Rising Cut when the cooldown came up. Four seconds. Count it.
[Old Gnasher: 81%]
This was going to take a while.
It took fourteen minutes.
Around the halfway mark, Gnasher threw its head back and screamed, and three normal mire rats came boiling out of the nearest burrows to help. Owen had known it would happen at seventy-five, fifty and twenty-five percent. He'd planned for it by fighting in a spot where the burrows were on the far side of a deep channel, so the little rats had to swim, and swimming rats were slow rats, and slow rats were basically free experience if you had a sling.
At thirty percent, he got careless. He stepped back into a hidden hole, lost his footing, and Gnasher got its teeth into his forearm.
[You are Bleeding.]
HP: 131/220
The pain was dulled, capped by the game at a fraction of the real thing, but it was still a hard, cold chomp that went all the way up his shoulder, and he swore out loud, loudly and creatively, in a way his mother would have had opinions about.
He got the arm free with a Back Step that he did not perform so much as fall into, and the dodge window caught him anyway. Ninety-four milliseconds. Yesterday he'd have been eighty-eight and he'd have been a little slower, and he'd have been eaten.
Three percent, he thought, breathing hard on a mossy stone, eating a bread roll with his left hand while Gnasher waded toward him. Three percent of sync and I'm alive. Eat your oatmeal, kids.
At 9:51 AM, server time, Old Gnasher took a Rising Cut across its milky eye and went over sideways into the black water with a long, wet, indignant sigh.
[Old Gnasher has been defeated.]
[Level up! You are now Level 7.]
And then the loot.
[Gnasher's Molar] (Uncommon trinket)
+3% damage against Beasts.
Gnaw: Basic attacks have a 5% chance to cause Bleed.
"Fenfolk say the old rat has been dying for forty years and simply refuses to commit." Durability 100/100.
Owen sat down on the mud hump, which smelled worse than Gnasher, and laughed until his ribs hurt. His real ribs. He could feel them, slightly, through the headset, and that seemed fine too.
He was still sitting there when the reeds parted behind him and a party of four came through.
The one in front wore bright orange leather armor that had definitely come from the real-money store, and he had a tiny glowing orb hovering beside his shoulder. Owen's stomach dropped. That was a stream overlay. Lattice let you broadcast through the headset, and the orb was the camera, and the orb meant chat. A lot of chat.
The guy stopped. He looked at the huge dead rat in the water. He looked at Owen. He looked at the rat again.
"No," said Nilo Faust. "No, no, no. Chat, chat, are you seeing this? Was that Gnasher? Bro. Was that the Gnasher? I've been hunting that thing for an hour!"
No, you haven't, Owen thought. You found it by accident at 9:40 while looking for a bathroom in the reeds. You told that story on a podcast in year four.
"Sorry," he said.
"Sorry? You solo'd it?" Nilo pointed at Owen's nameplate. "You're Level SEVEN."
"I was six when I started."
Behind Nilo, his party made the noise of three people deciding whether this was funny. One of them was already laughing.
Nilo glanced to his left, at something only he could see. Reading chat. His eyebrows went up. "Chat says you kited it in the reeds. Chat says that's not possible because the reeds slow you down. Chat says you're hacking."
"Chat's wrong about the reeds," Owen said, and then immediately wished he hadn't, because Nilo's face did something very fast and very professional, the face of a man who smelled content.
"What's your name, man?"
Owen considered lying. There wasn't really a way to. It was right above his head.
"Rook."
"Rook." Nilo turned to the orb. "Rook. Remember that name, chat, because Rook just stole my entire morning." He grinned, which was annoying, because it was a genuinely likeable grin. "That was sick, though. Respect. Hate you a little. Respect."
Owen raised a hand and walked into the reeds, and very deliberately did not look back.
He should have felt triumphant. He'd taken a world-first Rare from the guy who'd built a career on it. Instead, he felt the specific discomfort of having just kicked over a domino and not knowing how many were standing behind it. Nilo Faust had forty thousand people watching him this morning. Some of those people were in guilds. Some of those guilds had pods.
Ripples, he thought. You change one thing, the water moves.
He also felt a little bad about the hot tub.
He logged out at 11:40 for the hourly stand-up he'd skipped during the fight, plus food. His mom handed him a turkey sandwich without comment. Maddie asked why he'd yelled a word she wasn't allowed to say at 9:30 in the morning. He said a giant rat bit him. She said that was fair.
At 11:58 he was standing behind the bakery in Harrowgate, next to the rain barrel. Pell was gone, quest done. The alley smelled like bread and rainwater.
At 12:06, a character in a pale yellow robe came running around the corner at full speed, chased by nothing, and skidded to a stop.
[Lemonwedge - Level 3 - Arcanist]
"Okay," said Theo's voice, out of a face that was a slightly prettier version of Theo's face. "Don't say anything about the name."
"Lemonwedge."
"I was drinking lemonade. I panicked. It was creation screen pressure." Theo squinted at Owen's nameplate. "Dude. Seven? I've been playing since noon yesterday and I'm three. I died eleven times. To rats."
"You died eleven times to rats?"
"Some of them were big rats."
Owen looked at his best friend, who in his first life he'd answered with busy, and who had quit the game a month later and stopped calling by summer. Theo, who had once biked across town in a snowstorm because Owen's phone was dead and he thought Owen might be sad. Theo, who at thirty had been a face on social media with a wife and a kid and a life Owen had no part in.
He was standing in an alley in a yellow robe called Lemonwedge.
"Okay," Owen said. "First thing. What's your sync?"
"Like, forty-one? Is that bad? It feels kind of laggy."
"When did you go to bed?"
"Four?"
"What did you eat today?"
"There was a soda involved."
"Drink some water when you log out. Real water. Eat something with protein. And stand up every hour."
Theo stared at him. "You sound like my mom."
"Your mom is right. Your mom has been right about everything this whole time." Owen jerked his head toward the mill. "Come on. I'm going to get you the best item in the starting zone, and you're going to have to do something stupid and slightly illegal for it."
"Oh, hell yes."
It went mostly fine.
Pell gave Theo the quest. Owen showed him the sluice wheel and explained that it used Stamina, not Strength, and Theo leaned on it, red-faced in a way the game rendered faithfully, until the water dropped. Theo climbed down into the channel. Owen counted.
At forty seconds the channel was drained. At fifty, Theo had the ring. At sixty, Theo was still down there.
"Theo."
"There's coins down here, man."
"Leave the coins."
"There's a knife!"
"Leave the knife, the knife is garbage, you have about twenty—"
The miller's door banged open at seventy-one seconds. Not ninety. Seventy-one. Owen's whole first-life guide had said ninety, and he'd tested it himself, and he'd been sure.
"OI!" bellowed Hobb the miller. "What in the drowned hells are you doing in my race?"
Theo came scrambling up the wet stone with the ring in one hand and the rusted knife in the other, robe dripping, and the miller came at them both with a broom.
[Reputation (Harrowgate): -10.]
"Run," Owen said, and they ran, and the miller chased them as far as the bakery before giving up, yelling about youth and respect and how his own father would've drowned them both. They ended up behind the rain barrel, breathing hard, Theo laughing so much he had to hold onto the wall.
Seventy-one seconds. Maybe it was random. Maybe the miller's timer had a range and Owen had just never seen the bottom of it. Or maybe something about the world had shifted by nineteen seconds overnight, and he'd never know why.
He decided to worry about it later.
[Quest complete: The Mill Race Ring]
[Trait unlocked: Reedwalker.]
"What's Reedwalker?" Theo asked.
"It's the reason I'm Level 7," Owen said. "Come on."
They spent the next hour and a half on the reed loop. Theo was a bad Arcanist. Then he was a slightly less bad Arcanist. Arcanist forms were gestures and words: Ember Bolt was a two-finger flick toward the target, followed by a sharp spoken "Kaal," and Theo kept doing it in the wrong order and fizzling, until Owen explained it like a gun: aim first, then pull the trigger. "The flick is where. The word is when. You're yelling when before you've said where."
"That's actually really helpful," Theo said, surprised, and hit a rat in the face with a ball of fire.
He made Level 5 at 1:40. He celebrated by doing a dance that the avatar rendered at forty-one percent sync, which was to say late, and not all at once, so that it looked like a man being slowly electrocuted. Owen laughed so hard he nearly fell off the foundation.
"Hey," Theo said, when they were sitting on the stones afterward, watching the mist burn off the reeds. "Real question."
"Mm."
"Yesterday you ghosted me all day. Today you're, like, my personal trainer. And you yelled at me about water." Theo looked over at him, and for a second, under the prettier avatar face, it was just Theo, eighteen, a little worried. "Are you okay? You're being kind of weird."
It was the third person in two days to tell him so. Owen was starting to think he'd been a much worse person at eighteen than he remembered.
"I had a bad dream," he said. "That I wasted a lot of time. On the wrong stuff. Ditched people." He shrugged, and the avatar shrugged a fraction of a second later. "I didn't like it."
Theo thought about it. Then he nodded, like that made total sense, which was the best thing about Theo and always had been.
"Okay," he said. "So what's next?"
Owen looked up, east, past the Harrowgate walls, to where the Cairn Hills started, and beyond them the long grey scar of the Sunken Quarry.
SYNC: 47%
"Go eat something that isn't soda," he said. "Then I'm going to show you a ledge."