Chapter 8

Pain. Hazy afterimages made my head spin. All I could do was trace the endless cracks and lines of a cold, slate gray impassable wall currently pressed hard against my cheek.

No, wait, that was a floor.

I was sick to my stomach, my adrenaline was crashing, and I was disoriented. The last thing I remembered was diving through some strange blue doorway.

Oh, hell.

Cold fingers of panic plunged through my chest. I’d slipped through a strange door and lost consciousness in the middle of a chase. If they hadn’t found me already, they were going to soon.

I tried to stand, pushing myself up and immediately smashing back down into the floor as a wave of dizziness and fresh pain washed over me, spreading to where I landed on my left cheek.

“Don’t move, you probably have a concussion. And stop drooling on my floor.”

With a groan, I turned over and found myself looking up the barrel of a shotgun. And decided I must have lost it completely because the person holding the shotgun was the little girl who sold me cookies at the end of the world. The shotgun was more than half as tall as her. She’d traded the traditional uniform for a simple armless top and a pair of shorts. And two serious black eyes. The girl was covered in bruises, beaten so badly I wasn’t certain how she was standing. Somehow I doubted it was all from the meteor impact.

It all added up to an image that was absurd, in a surreal, american gothic sort of way, that became much less surreal as she moved the barrel from center mass to my head. “I said, don’t move, fucker.”

One of the many lessons my father left me with was that an inexperienced shooter was just as, if not more dangerous, than an experienced one. Not because they were good at shooting, but because they were so unpredictable. She was standing too close—three yards away instead of the recommended seven—but I wasn’t an action hero and she wasn’t much for trigger discipline. Too dizzy to raise my arms, I just sat there, trying to clear the fog in my head.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Saw you. Opened a door. Then you swan dove into the floor and started drooling.”

“I meant to your face.”

“Not important.”

I glanced behind her. The room looked like the inside of a small warehouse, bare except for a single mattress on the floor and the strange anachronism of a beastly computer tower hooked up to an old CRT monitor, housed on a tortured IKEA desk too small for both.

I pointed to a simple steel door with a push bar, the only visible entrance and exit. “If they saw me go in here, one thick door probably isn’t going to stop them.”

“They won’t follow us.” The girl’s eyes squinted with effort. “You have to be a User. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to enter the instance, but you look like a civilian. Why were they chasing you?”

Leaving out the more questionable details like my class, I brought her mostly up to speed. How I’d woken up in the hospital today and subsequently witnessed a shooting. And most importantly, how tired I was of having a gun stuck in my face.

Eventually, Kinsley muttered something unintelligible and lowered the shotgun, letting the barrel drag on the floor behind her.

“Look, as a favor, I’ll buy the User Core off you. Unless you have access to a necromancer, it won’t help you much. That guy was blowing a lot of smoke up your ass, but he was right about that. It’s mostly useless to you.”

My ears perked up. “How much are we talking?” Then something else she said sunk in. “Wait, necromancer?”

“Seven-thousand Selve. Hard offer.”

Before I could ask what Selve was, a notification screen popped up, unbidden.

<System Notification: Trade>

Merchant has offered a trade

S7,000

For

User Core

No. In a slight daze, I used a mental command to close the trade screen and scrolled through my notifications until I found what I was looking for.

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<Quest Complete:>

Primary Objective Resolved — Neutralize or terminate bounty.

Personal Objective Complete—Remain unidentified by other Users.

EXP GAIN (S)

Reward: User Core (Unmalleable)

<Reward: S6,500>

The amount was consistent with what I did. Dealt an underhanded but decisive blow, netting the Lion’s share of the reward. But the currency changed. A slow wave of prickling anger washed over me. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last few years of my life living hand to mouth, I could have misread it. But I had an eye for detail. Especially when it came to negotiations and written deals. There was no way I’d gotten it wrong. The reward had absolutely been written as dollars. Not fucking Selve.

“Why don’t you show up for me?” Kinsley’s brow furrowed. There was nothing visible, but she was obviously looking at her own trade screen. “Nothing next to name, class, or level. It’s just blank and my trade request looks like it didn’t go through.”