Thursday's tutoring session lasted fifty-five minutes, and for fifty of them Mrs. Okonkwo didn't believe a single word he said.
It was just the two of them and a girl named Hollis, who was there for extra credit and wore noise-cancelling headphones the entire time like a woman in witness protection. Mrs. Okonkwo sat across from Owen with a stack of his old quizzes and went through them one by one, circling things.
"Here," she said, tapping a question about molar mass, "you wrote 'idk.'"
"That was a different me."
"That was February."
"February was a long time ago."
She looked at him over the beaded chain. "Mr. Callery, I have been doing this for twenty-six years. Boys who discover chemistry in March usually discover a girl in April."
"There's no girl."
"There's always a girl."
"There's a game," Owen said, before he could stop himself, and then, because she was still looking at him: "And my dad. My dad's heart. My mom's a nurse. I want to understand what she's saying when she talks about it." That was true. It came out sounding truer than he'd meant it to.
Mrs. Okonkwo didn't say anything for a moment. Then she uncapped a green pen, which he would learn was the pen she used for things she actually liked, and pulled a blank worksheet toward her.
"Ions," she said. "From the beginning. Again. And you're going to explain it back to me like I'm your father."
For the last five minutes, he did. She didn't tell him he'd done well. She just said, "Next Thursday," and put the green pen away, and Hollis took off one side of her headphones on the way out to say, "She likes you. That's the scariest thing I've ever seen."
At the bakery afterward, he told Theo some of it.
Not the future. Not Tacoma, or the parking lot, or the six years Theo hadn't heard from him. He told him the part that was true enough: that the headset was reading their bodies, not just their brains. That sleep and water and food and moving around changed the number. That he'd figured it out from a few old research things and a lot of watching, and that he'd been testing it on himself like a lab rat since Saturday.
"Prove it," said Theo, which was the correct response.
Owen showed him the notebook. Five days of numbers. Sleep, water, food, reps, login baseline. 44. 47. 48. 48. 51.
Theo read it for a long time. He turned the pages back and forth. When he got to WHO KNOWS BREATHING? he snorted.
"So the knowing-where-stuff-is thing," he said at last. "The rat. The ledge."
"I watched a lot of beta footage," Owen said, which was a lie, and also the kind of lie Theo would accept, because there had been a closed beta, and there had been leaked footage, and Theo had once watched four hours of leaked footage of a car game that never came out. "And I'm good at guessing what designers do. That's all."
"That's not all, dude. That's a superpower." Theo turned to the sleep column again. "Seven hours fifty," he read. "Every day. You've been sleeping like a grandpa for a week. For a video game."
"For a video game."
"That's the most unhinged thing I've ever heard," said Theo, with enormous respect. Then: "Okay. What do I do?"
What Theo did, it turned out, was go to bed at eleven on Thursday, eat a breakfast that wasn't a Pop-Tart, and drink half a bottle of Owen's lemon-salt drink at lunch on Friday with the expression of a man drinking a dare.
"This tastes like a lemon got arrested."
"Sip it."
"I'm sipping it." He sipped. He made a face. "Is it working? I feel like it's working. I feel like a vitamin."
It wasn't Friday-afternoon-working, because it wore off in four hours, and they weren't logging in until after dinner. But Owen made him another bottle for eight o'clock anyway, and Theo took it home in his backpack like contraband.
The plan for Friday night was the wolf ridge.
[LATTICE OS v1.0.4]
[Calibrating... please lie still and breathe normally.]
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 52%]
[Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 52m remaining]
Forty-nine without the drink. He'd gained one point of baseline in two days, and he knew why: a week of real sleep was starting to stack. Mom had a word for it, from the ER. Repaying the debt. You couldn't do it in one night. You did it a little at a time, like a credit card.
The river came up, and it was night in Vael.
That was the point. One game day was four real hours: three of daylight and one of night. If you wanted to hunt something at night, you had to be standing in the right place when the sun went down, and on Friday, March 20th, the sun in the Riverlands set at 8:14 PM real time. Owen had looked it up the old way, by remembering it.
Lemonwedge was waiting by the East Gate, holding his staff the way people hold an umbrella they've never opened.
"Forty-six," he announced. "With the arrested lemon. Forty-six, bro."
"That's five more than Sunday."
"I know. I'm a different person. I'm a vitamin." He looked out past the gate, at the dark road climbing into the hills, at the shepherd crofts with their little lit windows and their bells on every gate. "Why are we doing this at night again?"
"Because the wolves come out on the ridge at night, and they're worth almost twice the XP."
"And why are they worth twice the XP?"
"Because they're twice as dangerous."
Theo considered this. "I'm a vitamin," he said, a little less confidently.
The Cairn Hills at night looked like a painting somebody had been forced to finish in a hurry: big black shapes of hill against a sky full of fake stars, the cairns on the hilltops like piled teeth, silver mist in the hollows. Every croft had a lantern over the door and a ring of copper bells on the gate, and when the wind came, the whole countryside chimed faintly, like a kitchen full of wind chimes.
"A ringing house is a living house," Owen said.
"What?"
"It's what the Cairnfolk say. They hang bells on everything. They think the noise keeps the shades out." He pointed at a croft as they passed. "The shepherd there sells a quest at Level 10 where you bring him bells. That's the Shepherd's Charm."
Theo looked at him sideways. "You've got a hundred and seventy-seven bells."
"I have a hundred and seventy-seven bells," Owen agreed.
"Is this a market thing? Are you doing a market thing? Oh my God, you're doing a market thing. You're going to be the guy in the Exchange chat with the stock charts."
"I'm not going to post stock charts."
"You're going to post so many stock charts."
The Copper Bell, on the Harrowgate board that evening, had been six copper. It had been four on Monday. Somebody on the forums had datamined a Level 15 recipe on Wednesday, Bell-Ward, which used ten of them, and a few people had started to notice. In his first life, it had gone to seven by Friday and ten by Monday and then up, and up, and up. He remembered the shape of that chart better than his old phone number.
Don't sell, he told himself. Don't sell at six. Don't sell at ten. Don't get cute.
The trouble with knowing the future was that everybody else's panic was contagious anyway.
The wolf ridge was a long spine of rock running north-south above the eastern crofts, with grass on its flanks and a shallow cave at its southern end where the wolves denned. At the far northern end, just visible, was the blue light of the shrine.
Owen didn't look at the shrine.
"Rules," he said, crouching behind a cairn just below the crest. "Cairn wolves hunt in packs. Three to five. There's always an alpha. The alpha's the big one with the white throat. If you hit a wolf and it's not the alpha, it yelps, and the alpha howls, and the howl calls flankers. Flankers come in from the sides. You never see them until they're biting your ankles."
"We hit the alpha first. But the alpha's smart. The alpha won't come in until it thinks you're tired." Owen pointed downhill, at a lit croft about forty meters back. "And they won't go near a lit lantern. If it goes bad, we run for the light."
The page hosting the story supplied this passage without permission. Returning to the author's official publication supports the creator.
"Like little kids."
"Exactly like little kids."
Theo took a breath. "Okay," he said. "What do I do?"
"You stand next to the lantern, and when I pull them in, you put an Ember Bolt on whatever's biting me. Not on the alpha. On whatever's biting me. And if anything gets on you, you Back Step—"
"I don't have Back Step. I'm a wizard."
"You stand really close to the lantern."
The first pull went fine.
Owen went up over the crest and found a pack of three in the grass: two gray wolves and a big one with a white throat, Level 11, its eyes faintly green. It lifted its head and looked at him, and he could see it thinking, which was the most unsettling thing about Vael. The monsters thought. Not much. Enough.
He threw a rock.
The rock was the trick. In his first life, he'd discovered that the alpha's AI treated a thrown object as an insult, not an attack. It didn't howl for flankers. It just came at you, with its pack, in a straight line, like a guy who'd been bumped in a bar. You saved the flankers for later.
The alpha came. Owen Back Stepped down the slope toward the lantern, turned on the grass, and met it with a Taunt Strike. Its friends piled in from both sides, and Theo, standing in the lantern light with his staff out, flicked two fingers and said "Kaal," and a ball of fire hit the left wolf in the side.
"I got it!" yelled Theo. "Did you see? I got it!"
"Again!"
The fight took forty seconds. Owen held Breath Guard through the alpha's first lunge and felt the clean -30% land, and he didn't try the exhale trick, because with a fast animal it was a coin toss and he wasn't paying for coin tosses with two wolves on him. He took the alpha down with three Rising Cuts and a Bleed. Theo burned one of the grays to death. The last one, at twenty percent, turned tail and fled toward the den, and Owen let it go.
"Why'd you let it go?"
"Because it's going to come back with friends."
"Why would you let it—"
Four wolves came over the crest.
Night in Vael lasted one real hour, and they used every minute of it, and then they stayed after the fake sun came up, when the wolves got weaker and cheaper but didn't stop. It was the best XP Owen had seen since launch and the most dangerous place he'd stood. He knew every nook of it. He knew the rock where you could wedge yourself so only one wolf could get at you. He knew the gully where the alpha's howl echoed and called in wolves from two packs instead of one, which was very bad, unless you wanted that, which at 9:05 PM, he did.
He hit Level 9 at 8:48 PM, in the middle of a fight, on the edge of a cairn, with a wolf hanging off his arm.
[Level up! Rook is now Level 9.]
[+5 attribute points available.]
He didn't spend them until the wolf was dead. Then he sat on the cairn and did it carefully, while Theo kept watch with a look of great importance.
ROOK - Level 9 VanguardHP 280/280 | Stamina 228/228
STR 11 | AGI 21 (+2) | END 23 (+2) | FOC 6 (+1) | SPI 4
SYNC 52% (Drift) - dodge window 104 ms - input lag ~144 ms
Form tolerance: ±52 ms
Modifiers: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3% [3h 18m]
Forms: Rising Cut (45) ✓ | Back Step (40) ✓ | Taunt Strike (40) ✓ | Breath Guard (50) ✓
Traits: Reedwalker
Trinket: Gnasher's Molar
XP: 0% to Level 10
FOC was the stat nobody put points into on a Vanguard. In his first life, he hadn't either, until year three, when the theorycrafters had worked out that Focus widened the timing window on every form you did. Plus or minus forty milliseconds, plus two per point. At low sync it hardly mattered; your forms were failing on the sync check, not the timing. At high sync, it was everything. A precise idiot beats a strong idiot. Someone had put that on a T-shirt.
He was going to be precise. Eventually.
"How's it going over there, Mr. Spreadsheet?" said Theo.
"Good. Really good." Owen stood up. "How are you doing?"
Theo didn't answer right away.
Theo had died three times.
The first time was the gully at 8:30. Owen had pulled a double pack on purpose, and one of the flankers had come up behind the lantern, around the far side of the croft, where the light didn't reach, and taken Lemonwedge from behind. It took him in four bites. Theo had spent his three-minute respawn timer saying "what the f—" in increasingly high tones while Owen killed the rest.
The second time was the rock at 8:55. That one was Owen's fault, and he'd said so.
The third time, at 9:10, was just bad luck. A wolf had rolled a crit. Lemonwedge had gone down with a high little oh and a puff of red, and Owen had seen the little gray skull icon float over his friend's name, and Theo's mic had gone silent.
Now he was standing at the waystone back in Harrowgate with his staff in his hand and the Weakened debuff over his head, not moving.
"Theo?"
"I lost half a level," said Theo.
He had. Ten percent of current-level XP per death. Three deaths. Lemonwedge had been eight-tenths of the way to Level 8, and now he was barely half.
"You'll get it back in twenty minutes."
"I'll get it back, and then I'll die again. Because I'm forty-six. Because you're fifty-two. Because the wolf bit me and I couldn't move fast enough, and you just—" The mic made a noise, a breath, a sound like he was rubbing his face. "Dude. You just dance. You're fighting four wolves and you're dancing, and I'm standing next to a lamp like a toddler, and I still die."
"Theo—"
"I'm not mad at you." He was a bit. "It's just—this is your thing. You're really good at it. You're like a completely different guy in here. And I'm the guy you're carrying." A pause. "I could just play something else. Like, it's fine. I've got the car game. We could do the car game on weekends."
Owen stood very still on the ridge.
He knew this conversation. He hadn't been there for it in his first life, because in his first life it had happened over text, a month after launch, and he'd been in a raid. thinking of quitting vael lol. you're always busy anyway. He'd sent back a thumbs up. A thumbs up. And Theo had quit, and then there'd been the car game, and then there hadn't been anything.
"Okay," he said. "Listen to me."
"Dude—"
"No. Listen. You're at forty-six. You know what I was at a week ago? Forty-four. On Saturday, I was lower than you are right now." He started walking back down the ridge toward the gate, because he wanted to be standing next to his friend for this, even if it was only in a game. "I'm not good at this. I'm prepared. There's a difference. I spent a really, really long time watching people do this, and I took a lot of notes, and that's all it is. I'm not the main character. I'm a guy with a notebook."
"That's not—"
"And you're not the guy I'm carrying. You burned two wolves tonight off the lantern, at forty-six, on a hand-me-down headset in your mom's den. Do you know what pod players are doing right now? They're at the quarry, at ninety-eight, killing mud. They'd die on this ridge. They'd die because they've never had to stand next to a lantern and think."
That last part was, Owen privately admitted, a bit of an exaggeration. But only a bit.
Silence on the mic. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
"I deaggro'd that third wolf," Theo said eventually. "Before it got me. The one that went for the gully. I flicked it and it turned. Did you see that?"
"I saw that."
"That was kind of sick."
"That was very sick."
Another pause. Then, grudgingly: "I want the lantern closer."
"I can't move the lantern."
"Then I want a different lantern."
"There's a croft with two lanterns on the north side," Owen said. "It's next to the shrine."
"What shrine?"
"I'll tell you when we're there," said Owen.
They were halfway back up when they met Iron Hollow.
There were six of them, coming down the ridge road from the north in a loose wedge, torches up, grey tabards with the white tower. Owen saw Tor's two-handed axe first, because you couldn't not see it. Then a broad, handsome man at the front with a shaved head and a smile like a car salesman who had just found out your credit score. He had the Level 11 tag. His name floated above him in guild-officer gold.
Corran - Iron Hollow (Guild Leader)
In his first life, Owen had met Corran exactly once. It had been in month seven, at a guild summit in Vessmarch, and Corran had shaken his hand and called him "buddy" and then, a month later, sold his own guild's bank to a gold-farming outfit in another time zone, and vanished. Eighty Iron Hollow players had woken up broke. Half of them had joined Owen's guild. That was how Owen's old guild had gotten big.
"Hey hey!" said Corran, and spread his arms. "It's the Rat King!"
"Hi," said Owen.
"Look at this! Running the ridge at night at Level nine! That's a pro move, buddy. That's what I tell my guys: go where the other guys aren't." He clapped Tor on the shoulder. Tor looked at Owen like a man looking at a stain. "Tor tells me you and him had a little disagreement down at the quarry."
"I don't think we disagreed."
"He tried to train eight mudlings on you, and you made them walk home." Corran laughed, big and warm. "I loved that. I watched it on the clip like ten times. That's what I'm saying. That's talent."
There it was. The word. Owen felt it land on him like a hand on his shoulder.
"Thanks," he said.
"So here's my thing." Corran stepped closer. Behind him, the other five had spread out a little, not threatening exactly. Just present. "We've got thirty-one guys. We've got pods. We've got a sponsor talking to us, a real one. We've got the quarry, and we're going to have the first boss, and the first raid. We want the good players. You want to be one of the good players?"
"I'm good," said Owen.
"Of course you're good! That's why I'm asking!"
"No, I mean—" Owen gestured at Theo, who had his staff held very tight. "I'm good. I'm with him. We're doing our own thing."
Corran looked at Lemonwedge. Lemonwedge looked back. Corran smiled at him, very kindly, the way you'd smile at someone's dog.
"Your buddy can come too," he said. "Obviously. We take care of our guys."
You take care of your guys, Owen thought, until month eight. Then you take their money and buy a boat.
He didn't say it. He'd learned a long time ago that you couldn't win an argument with a man who didn't know he'd lost one yet.
"Thanks," he said. "Really. We're going to stay solo for a while."
Corran held the smile for a beat too long. Then he laughed again and slapped Owen on the arm, an actual slap. There was a tiny thud of collision.
"Smart. Smart man. Keep your options open." He started walking again, and his guys moved with him. "Offer stands, Rat King. Good pull out there, by the way. GOOD PULL, BOYS!" That last part was to his own group, for no reason, at full volume, as they went past. Somebody behind him whooped.
Tor was the last to pass. He paused next to Owen and said, very low, so that nobody else could hear: "Brannagh says you know things."
"I know a lot of things."
"She says you know things you shouldn't." Tor looked at him for a long second, and he didn't look stupid at all. "She's going to find out how."
Then he went after his guild down the ridge, and the torches went with him, until there was only Owen and Theo and the wind and the bells.
"What," said Theo, "the f—"
"Yeah."
"Who were those guys?"
"Those guys," said Owen, "are the reason I take notes."
Dawn came up grey over the hills a few minutes later. They pulled the north end in daylight until 11:00, next to the croft with two lanterns, where the day packs were small and stupid. Theo didn't die again. He got his half-level back and a little more, and at 10:41 he dinged Level 8 with a yell that made Owen's ears ring, and spent his points in Spirit and Focus without being told. "For the regen," he said, "and for the—you know. The timing. The thing with the stat. I watched a video."
"What video?"
"Your video," said Theo. "You're the video now."
Owen didn't tell him about the shrine. He'd thought about it. He'd stood with his friend at the edge of the croft light and looked north along the spine, a few hundred meters, to where the blue light had burned before dawn and would burn again tonight, where a statue held a stone lantern and a voice at night taught a form that needed sixty percent. He was at fifty-two with the drink. He was at forty-nine without it.
Not yet, he thought for the third night running. But closer.
They logged out at 11:02 by agreement, because Owen's mother had said "midnight at the absolute latest" in a voice that had been honed in a trauma bay, and because Theo, it turned out, now had a bedtime.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 50%.]
Fifty. Down two from his login, three hours in and with the drink running low. But he'd stood up every hour, and it was still fifty. In his first life, fifty had been a good day.
His phone lit up before he'd taken the headset off.
Theo: ok i'm not quitting
Theo: that was so sick
Theo: also who is brannagh
Theo: and why does the axe guy talk like a serial killer
Owen: Go to bed
Theo: I AM IN BED. LIKE A GRANDPA
Theo: night rook
Owen lay there in the dark for a long time, holding the phone on his chest.
Night, Lemonwedge, he typed. Then he deleted it and typed it again, because he wanted to be sure he'd sent it.