Chapter 1

Grothnir raised his blood-encrusted battleaxe above his mighty mane of golden hair and, with a roar, was about to bring it down on the grizzled head of the hapless guard before him when, suddenly, his beeper went off.

Grothnir paused just long enough for the guard to whip out his sword. Grothnir sighed. He didn't have time for this.

"You're lucky," he said to the quivering guard, and disappeared.

Thomas Aznable frowned into the dark grey void of inactive VR; he was close to levelling up Grothnir to level 10, which was the practical minimum before anyone would really talk to you in the Lotharian Nights. Client B was anxious for progress in the Case of Two Missing Swords, and he was the nervous type, always wanting a status report. Still. The beeper meant new business.

Thomas made a few hand gestures to pull up his main interface, then touched the pulsing red box as it appeared. A large, green-bordered window appeared before him, and within it, a male avatar. It was a stock Japanese model; a dark grey high school uniform hung perfectly on a late-teen body which was topped with an attractive, bland face and short black hair. Thomas frowned again; he had little respect for people who couldn't even bother to customize their avatar.

"Hello," the avatar said in a high, whining man's voice. Sounded like a forty-year-old obese science fiction fan. Probably wanted the bra size on the latest Japanese pop idol. Though considering how young they were getting these days....

Thomas pushed that thought away; this was business. "Yes?" he replied, trying to be courteous.

"I...uhhh...I understand you...find things," the avatar said, fidgeting slightly. This was why Thomas loved virphones; they provided such a rich library of body language. And you could have the body of a ten-foot demon, if you wanted to.

"Yes," he replied, keeping his voice cool and neutral, "on any non-restricted vir system. What do you want to find?"

The avatar fidgeted. "I need you to switch to a secure connection."

To one side of the avatar's window appeared a dark green rectangle containing public-key encryption data. Thomas arched an eyebrow. This guy was either paranoid or part of something really big. Thomas enlarged the encryption window and touched the glowing "OK" button. It disappeared, as did the avatar's window. A fraction of a second later, it re-appeared with a red border.

The avatar nodded in satisfaction. "I need you to access this system and find a particular file." As he spoke, another window appeared next to his, containing connection data for another VR system. Thomas squinted at the text.

"It doesn't even have a domain name?" he asked. "Whoa. Is this a workplace? I don't root around in places that can put me in jail."

"But I really need you to find this file," the avatar whined. "You don't understand. This is important."

"I'm sure it is," Thomas replied. "Not interested. Bye."

He motioned with his right hand to close the connection as the avatar blurted, "Ten thousand!"

Thomas paused. "What?"

The avatar fidgeted. "I'll pay you ten thousand dollars."

Thomas was many things. He was addicted to the seductive immersion of VR. He tended to overeat. He was very smart. And he was very, very curious.

These qualities combined to make him one of the best VR detectives in business. It was a rather silly title, "VR detective," but it was accurate. If you wanted to find something — or someone — in one of the hundreds of thousands of VR worlds, you had three choices: that world's system administrators, a freelance hacker, or a detective. The system administrators were usually a poor bet; not only were they unlikely to deign a response to your request, people's problems would often get them kicked off the world if they were known to the admins. A freelance hacker would get the job done, for a price that most people couldn't afford. The middle ground was the detective's beat.

And right now, this potential client held Thomas' curiosity. For ten thousand dollars, this guy could almost afford a hacker.

"What's the file?" Thomas asked.

The avatar visibly relaxed — prematurely, to Thomas' mind — and replied, "It's a program I wrote; a simulation. It's very important to me. I worked on it for years. But when I went in to work on it a few days ago, it was gone from my cube."

"And you know who took it?"

"Not exactly. But I know it must've been one of my co-workers."

Thomas shook his head. "You need a hacker, not a detective. It may not even be in the system by now."

"No!" The avatar began agitated gesticulating. "I know it's there. I heard somebody bragging about working on a new simulation, but I'm not sure who it was."

Thomas didn't like it. This didn't sound right. And breaking into a corporate system meant risking jail time, which was very bad for business. Still. Ten thousand dollars.

"I'll take it," he said.

 

 

He appeared in a rat's maze of grey cubicles and beige walls. Fortunately, this was an off-the-shelf low-res world; everybody and everything was an abstract shape, designed by a committee sipping bad coffee at some monolithic IT company.

This was fortunate because it meant that nobody was particularly distinctive. In a VR world with full-body avatars, everybody gravitated towards certain social norms, and it was different from world to world. Even corporate worlds were like that; a suit-and-tie outfit would attract attention. And the last thing Thomas Aznable ever wanted was attention.

As soon as the world resolved around him, he put out eight invisible cameras, all ringing him at a distance of one meter and facing outwards. He couldn't really juggle that many; four was his practical maximum. But he needed as much advance warning of...anything as possible.

He began to drift forward, simultaneously pushing his forward camera away from him by another meter. Meanwhile, he was furiously arranging the camera windows into a four-by-two grid at the bottom of his display. Once they were in place — more or less — he began glancing all around him, giving himself no more than one second on any view.

He recognized the world; it was by Halversson Inc., and common in large companies with lots of money to burn on overpriced software. He began to make fumbling motions with his hands, trying to remember half-forgotten commands. He managed to pull up a map of the place just as he reached the end of the hallway and turned right. He continued moving forward, at a leisurely but not overly slacking pace, as his eyes raced around the map, zooming it and re-centering it furiously.

He stopped. Ah. There was Client D's office, barely a minutes' journey away at his current speed. Thomas decided to increase his pace somewhat; his nerves were already humming, and he wanted to finish this job sooner rather than later.

He made it to his client's office without bumping into anyone or anything. This was expected, as Client D had said that everyone would be out of the office at a party at this time. However, the silent, drab emptiness only served to increase Thomas' nervousness. He'd spent some time in khakis and a tie; this place was not altogether alien to him. It was one of the reasons why Thomas was now a VR detective, to escape places like this.

The office was bare, also as expected. The VR world has no need of workspaces in the physical sense. Your VR office is simply a convenient representation of a conduit between you and data. While in your office, you could summon any sort of data and it would appear there, hanging anywhere within the confines of the office. Of course, the higher up you were in the organization, the larger your office, because of the larger amounts of data you have to access. An executive's office might be littered with hundreds of windows and deeps , providing a dizzying cacophony of status and progress in a dozen different ways.

And so, in the digital world as well as the real one, your status was determined by the size of your office.

Thomas pulled up a menu and pointed at the item on the bottom. It was a shortcut he'd made earlier, to a special program he'd bought from a spiky-haired seventeen-year-old, then extensively modified. He cycled through its potential avatars and found a plain cube, which he immediately chose, then he placed the object into the middle of the room.

He pulled three cameras away from their positions and pointed them out the door, looking down the hallway. He couldn't be too careful about this. He took a breath, then touched the cube.

Flickering beams of light shot out from the cube in all directions, some existing for only a fraction of a second. A few turned bright green and stayed, locked on their targets. Thomas waited. More beams flickered out, some locking on. Thomas began to get antsy, even though it had only been a few seconds. He now counted seven green beams. Eight. A few seconds later, a ninth and a tenth locked on, then they all disappeared and the cube itself glowed green. Thomas waited for another moment.

Then he cursed himself. He hadn't checked a single security access point since he got here. He pulled up a blue window, touched it to activate it, and began typing on the virtual keyboard that immediately appeared below it. A few moments later, he retrieved basic status from the security system. No alarms were active, at least. He activated what looked like a small, multi-tentacled blue Cthulu head, and pulled one of the tentacles onto the window. This was Cthulu, a common VR tool. As soon as it touched the status commands on the window, it copied that behavior, scanning continuously.

An alarm sounded, pulsing the Star Trek "red alert" sound into Thomas' ears. He swore. Somebody was querying him. The sysadmin was clearly on duty, and must have noticed Thomas' entry into the security access point. Thomas immediately grabbed Cthulu and waved at it, canceling its behavior. It disappeared.

A window appeared nearby, asking him how to respond to the query and counting down eight seconds before sending an automatic response. He thought furiously for a moment, then paused the countdown and composed a quick, plain-vanilla response, then sent it. The alarm stopped.

Thomas began to dance.

A person interacts with VR primarily with hand and arm motions, pointing at objects and gesturing in a particular way. Different gestures cause different responses. In fact, a major feature of teen chatrooms were hand-crafted objects that only responded to rude and obscene gestures.

Interacting with multiple objects is difficult, as each one may require a completely different gesture. As a result, manipulating several objects at once requires a complicated and delicate set of motions, as well as intense concentration. If someone is very good at this, these motions resemble a dance.

Thomas was very, very good at it.

Cartoon characters appeared and disappeared before him. Windows sprang into existence, grew, shrank, and were gone. He began to sweat with the exertion. He was thinking several motions ahead so he could transition from one gesture to the next with minimum effort and motion, and waste no time with actions he could combine or prioritize more efficiently later.

The world disappeared, leaving a few windows open in the inky black void. Thomas froze. Nothing moved for several seconds, then he lowered his arms. He'd been shut out.

 

Thomas closed his eyes and popped off his visor, then kept his eyes closed as he stripped off the rest of his VR gear. He opened his eyes slowly, to adjust to the light of his room.

He sighed and tossed his two hundred-pound frame onto the frayed sheets of the small metal bed that was shoved up against one wall of this fifteen-by-fifteen foot room. Three of the four walls were papered with posters for various singing idols — some of them real, some CG — in various stages of dress. He liked the CG idols for their sheer kitsch. The fourth wall was plain white. Stacks of magazines and papers created a miniature cityscape on the floor, with one wide boulevard leading from the front door to the bathroom, and a large space cleared in the corner where his VR gear was now laying. He sighed again, deeper and with more force this time, and stared up at the square of fluorescent light beaming down from slightly off the center of the ceiling.

This was very bad. It was so bad, it had never happened to him before. Then again, he had always been careful before. Nothing illegal. Well, nothing against which there was a specific law. He may've taken a few liberties with his access to peek around a few times, but never anything like this. Never anything that might put him in jail.

He swore to himself that this was definitely not worth ten thousand dollars.

A blue light began to pulse insistently on the two-foot cylindrical computer that was standing at attention near the middle of the room. He frowned at it for a moment, as if blaming it for his recent troubles, then heaved himself out of bed and brushed a hand over the top of the cylinder. Infinitesimal beams of light glittered onto the white wall, creating a small window near the bottom, which read:

Pending Instant Message from (Unknown)

His brows furrowed. His toolset was professional enough to keep out spam. He pointed at the window and circled his arms in several broad movements. His system was good enough to interpret large body movements, but nothing so fine-grained as hand gestures.

The system resolved the address of the unknown sender. It was Client D. He immediately punched at it twice with his right fist, and it popped open. Text only.

hi! how's it going?

Thomas narrowed his eyes. How annoying. Of all the people he felt like talking to right now, this was the last one.

As he stared at the IM, his lips curled in a frown, a small flicker of anger flared somewhere deep within him. The more he stared at those four words, the more the anger grew, spreading wider and wider and hotter and hotter, until he shook his head and flipped a gesture at the computer. A circular keyboard glowed to life on the top of the cylinder.

As he reached down to touch the keys, he heard people scuffling rapidly down the hall. As he turned, the door to his apartment slammed open and two very large Asian men wedged their way into the apartment. Each held a pistol aimed at Thomas.

He turned to face them.

"Ahhhh," he said.

It was all he could think of to say. He knew he was supposed to make a witty remark at this point — "I knew I should have invested in a heavy-duty lock," or "Make yourself at home." But the words refused to come. His brain had become exceedingly distracted by the pistols and refused to comment beyond that point.

"You Thomas Aznable?" asked the men on the left in a low, slurred voice.

Thomas gulped. He was pushing his brain to think of a response, and it kept replying, "Pistols! Pistols!"

The man on the right grunted. Thomas' lack of an immediate denial was all the answer they needed. "Nothing personal," said the man on the right.

A black-clad figure flashed like a ferret into the room and punched both men as they were turning towards the intruder. They both stiffened, grimaced, then fell like oak trees to the ground.

The intruder held a tazer in each hand, which she quickly slipped into what looked like holsters underneath her black vest. She was dressed like Trinity's punk younger sister — sleek black pants and a black pullover shirt hugged her body, plus a black leather vest that hung loosely from her rather thin frame. From black roots sprung short black hair. She looked at Thomas and grinned a crazy grin.

His brain was just now managing to get off the subject of pistols, but unfortunately was mostly distracted by this girl's body. She was probably sixteen or so, and Thomas couldn't help noticing that she had an amazing figure, which her outfit simply accentuated. He wasn't undressing her with his eyes, exactly, but it was a bit like glancing at a t-shirt that has something undeniably rude on the front; you can't help staring at it for a moment to verify what you saw.

She leaned forward and grabbed Thomas by the arm. "C'mon," she said. "We can't stay here."

"What?" said Thomas, blinking, as they stumbled forward into the hallway. He cursed himself. He was not being the suave, sophisticated James Bond type here.

"We can't stay here," she repeated matter-of-factly, stopping at the door to glance up and down the hallway. "There will probably be more of them."

"More of who?" Thomas asked, endeavoring to be polite.

She gave a frustrated sigh, pulling him behind her as she made her way down the hall and glanced every which way except at him. "More of them," she said, jerking her head back towards Thomas' apartment. "They wanna kill you. And we can't have that, now can we?"

As smart as Thomas was, it took him a moment to process this, but quickly enough he wholeheartedly concurred. The poor man was a bit out of his depth. He could handle online adventures of practically any type; real men with real guns were rather more than he was used to.

"Excuse me," he said, still endeavoring to be polite as he was yanked down the main hallway of the apartment complex, "but who are you?"

"Y.T.," she said.

He blinked. "No," he said.

She grinned, still not looking at him. "Nah, just kidding. Online, I'm Doodlehopper."

"Doodlehopper?"

"Yeah!" She seemed to pull harder. "So, it's a little...juvie. Whatever. I've had it forever. Four years now."

Thomas' thirty-four-year-old inner wisdom groaned at this, but he thought it wise to let it pass.

She hissed and yanked him into a side hallway, then shoved him into a doorway and slammed herself into the meager cover it allowed. She slipped her right hand into her jacket and held it there, and for a moment only breathed. He decided it wisest to press himself against the door and stay just as silent as her.

Footsteps thundered down the hall they'd just vacated. They sounded like linebackers charging a quarterback. They ran past the side hallway within which Thomas and the girl were barely breathing, and Thomas could only see jeans and sweatshirts hanging off massive bodies. These guys could withstand some serious punishment. He wondered why they needed to.

The thundering pack had barely passed their hallway when Doodlehopper leapt forward, pulling Thomas with her, bolted towards the intersection, and ran down the hallway away from the Linebackers From Hell. He glanced back over his shoulder, horrified that they might notice the escapees, but he could see those huge shapes retreating down the hallway without so much as slowing down.

They approached the elevators at high speed, but Doodlehopper veered away and slammed her body into the door leading to the staircase, banging it open. Thomas winced in sympathy, but far from seeming hurt, she gathered up the force of his piling into her body and redirected it, pushing him towards the top of the stairs.

He took the first few steps one at a time; then she pushed him again and he found himself falling more than stepping down the stairs, barely keeping himself on his feet as he leapt down three or four steps at a time. And she was right behind him.

He hit ground floor with both feet, then stepped forward to give her room. She landed like a cat, light and graceful, then zagged past him and yanked open a heavy steel door that led outside.

They walked out into the brisk air of early autumn and the chorus of man-made noises that permeates the modern city. Thomas shivered for a moment, then found himself sliding to his left and stumbled to the cold pavement. He threw a hand out and managed to catch himself, half fallen on the ground. His eyes were focused far away, and his breath came only in deep, ragged gasps.

Doodlehopper was by his side in an instant, her face clouded with concern. "You okay?" she asked. "Went too fast on the stairs, huh?"

He shook his head, but couldn't catch enough breath to answer just yet. She stayed motionless, waiting patiently. A small part of his mind wondered why she wasn't impatient to keep moving.

After a few moments he had enough wind to say, "Can't...take it all...in." He looked up at her, his expression like that of a child who's just realized he can't find his parents. Openly scared and confused. He asked, "What's going on?"

The girl's face broke into a compassionate smile. "C'mon," she said. "Let's find somewhere to hole up, and I'll talk."

Chapter 2

They slipped through dark alleys and along empty streets to a cheap little motel tucked away from the main thoroughfares. Doodlehopper took charge and checked in as Mrs. Alice Konaka and her husband. The mummy of a man behind the counter didn't even bat an eyelash at them, despite their age difference; he just wanted the room fee up-front. Thomas reflected that this looked like the sort of hotel that got a lot of older "husbands" and suspiciously young "wives" for the night.

Doodlehopper plopped herself down on the worn comforter of the first bed in the room, threw her arms up, and arched her back. Her vest hung loose from her shoulders and her curves seemed ready to burst through her black pullover. Thomas pointedly looked away and walked past her towards the only chair in the room.

He didn't bother to sit; he let himself fall into the chair, and massaged his temples for a moment. He opened his eyes to question the girl, only to find her sitting cross-legged with her hands in her lap, staring at him.

"You aren't gonna try to jump me, are you?" she asked suddenly.

"Err...what?"

"You know. You're not gonna try anything, are you?" she persisted.

He arched an eyebrow. "Wouldn't you break my arm if I tried?"

Her mouth curved into an impish grin, and she relaxed slightly. "I would, actually. But I didn't know if you knew that."

His pride made him smile now. "I'm a detective," he explained. "Only in VR, but I'm still a detective. And I can tell that you not only have the muscles of a screeching kung fu star, you move like one."

His smile faded. "But seriously," he said, "You said you'd talk. What's going on?"

She gave him a perfect nonchalant Gallic shrug. "Can't say much, really. Somebody big wants you to die. I've been hired to make sure you don't."

He arched an eyebrow. "'Hired?'"

She nodded. "You're a VR detective, right?" she asked. He nodded, and she grinned. "I'm the real-life thing, baby." She put a finger to her lips in a Marilyn Monroe parody of thoughtfulness. "Well, that's not quite right. I do lots of other stuff, too. Like this, which is really more like babysitting when you think about it." She paused. "No offence."

He waved it off and massaged his temples for a moment before asking, "Who hired you?"

She shook her head. "Whoever it was didn't want me to say anything about that. I just know I'm being paid a lot of money to keep you alive." A sly grin stole over her face, and he reflected that it made her look quite pretty. "You better not die," she finished.

He grunted, and remained silent for awhile. She continued to study him, like a small child studying a stranger.

He let out a deep breath, then stood up and studied the room. She followed his gaze. "What?" she asked, curious.

He saw what he was looking for, and headed towards the lopsided nightstand that squatted between the two worn beds. "I need to jack in," he stated flatly.

"Oh, no you don't," she said as she sprang to her feet. "Why don't you just set up a flashing neon sign above the motel saying, 'BAD GUYS COME HERE'?"

He rolled his eyes and looked back at her. "Give me some credit," he said. "I'm a VR detective. I spend more time awake in VR than I do in my apartment. I'm not going to wander around like a complete moron."

She chewed her lip, her eyebrows scrunched up in concentration. It made her look pretty. After a few uncomfortable moments she nodded, but her expression didn't change.

"I'm going in with you," she announced.

"Okay," he replied. Just as long as he could get in and get some answers....

He strode to the nightstand and managed to manhandle the poorly-made drawer open. Inside was what looked like a folded large pair of sunglasses. He withdrew them and turned, holding them up to Doodlehopper to show her that there was only one. She was already holding a pair of her own.

His lips pursed slightly, then he resigned himself. He pulled a thin cable out of one end of the folded pair of VR goggles and pushed it into one of two small, off-kilter black jacks that sat in the wall above the nightstand.

She unfolded her legs from the bed and, cat-like, strode to the nightstand, swishing her hips. She gave him a playful grin and jacked in next to him.

He was looking into her eyes, trying to see if she was really up to this. Her green eyes were happy and oh so big, like an excited girl on her first day of school. This worried him, actually, as thought of the trouble that could be caused by an excitable girl hanging over his shoulder. On the other hand, he reflected, she had saved his life.

Still looking her straight in the eyes, he flipped open the goggles and slipped them over his eyes, then slid his thumb along one edge until he found a slight bump, and pushed it.

Within the goggles, he saw he stood in the center of a bare rectangular grey room, about twenty feet square. Of course, the goggles were cheap, and didn't completely enclose his eyes, so he could still see their motel room at the extreme top and bottom of his vision. But the eye is easily fooled, and Thomas knew that after a few minutes of staring at the image that dominated his vision, his brain would automatically block out the "superfluous" bits at the edges.

He realized then that he needed the gloves that were still in the drawer. The girl was still watching him. He tried to keep his dignity by reaching in for the gloves, but his hands couldn't find them, and he ended up fumbling around in the drawer until bumping up next to them, then he peered around the edges of the glasses and awkwardly manhandled them on.

Doodlehopper smirked as she put on her gloves first, then slipped on goggles.

Finally, his gloves were on. He wiggled his fingers for a moment, an unconscious gesture he always made when first jacking in, then touched his fingertips together in a rapid succession of twitches.

He stood on a square stone platform. Four large granite pillars stood guard at each corner of the square, and gentle rolling hills stretched towards jagged purple mountains all around them. Overhead, the sky was clear and blue.

Next to him stood a stunning young woman, wearing what amounted to a purple-and-bronze bikini on her bronze skin. Her skin was covered in white markings and her hair was light purple.

She looked at him and burst out laughing. He arched an eyebrow at her. "What?" he asked, shrugging his seven-foot form, completely enshrouded in a black cloak.

"You look ridiculous!" she hooted, then looked down at herself. "Ugh!" she exclaimed. "This isn't one of those hack-and-slash games, is it?"

He blew out a big sigh. "Not quite. Hack-and-slashes are games. This is more of a shared environment. But it's not just any environment; it's the oldest and most respected one out there."

"So what?" she asked, looking back at him with real curiosity.

He turned back to her. She could not see him grin as he explained, "Only the best play here."

She rolled her eyes.

"Not just in terms of experience," he said quickly. "To play here, you have to be smart, and you have to have been around awhile." He paused. "Just my kind of people."

 

"Do you have to walk everywhere in this world?" Doodlehopper asked, scuffing her feet as they strode over the hills towards one particularly high mountain.

Thomas grinned. "Actually, yes."

She scowled and glanced behind them for what seemed like the hundredth time. "I don't like it."

Thomas looked up at the cloudless azure sky, then down at the small clusters of daisies that grew in patches in the grass. "I kind of like it," he said.

She threw him a questioning glance, and he explained, "They want you to experience this world. Everything here is so carefully crafted. Hey, look up."

He pointed at the blue sky above them, where they could just make out a bird leisurely wheeling. "Most games," he said, "will put birds in the sky. Some games will create birds that circle realistically. But here...if you stayed here and just watched that bird, you'd be able to follow it back to its nest. It would have a nest. It might have a mate, and it might be raising young. That's the kind of detail they put into this place. This isn't just the background for a random monster fight; this entire world is a home."

She had nothing to say to that, and they continued in contented silence for a minute or so, until out of nowhere a sonorous, bell-like voice called out, "One of you is recognized. The other is not. Explain yourselves."

They stopped and Thomas replied to absolutely nothing, "This is a friend. I want to show her around, nothing more. I think she would be useful."

Doodlehopper shot him a worried look, but he grinned and waved it away. The air was still, but Thomas didn't move forward and Doodlehopper was following his lead.

"No," the voice intoned. "You are still new to this world. You may stay, but she must go."

Thomas worked his jaw for a moment. He hadn't thought about this. They were a clannish bunch. His mind sought desperately for alternatives, but he could think of nothing.

"Please?" he said, finally settling on simple honesty. "I really, really need her along with me."

They heard a sonorous, rather impressive, but melodramatic sigh. "Oh come on," the voice said, losing some of its depth and gaining a slightly nasal tone. "Those are the rules. This isn't a democracy, you know. We make the rules, you abide by them. Do you want to get in, or not?"

"Look!" Thomas exclaimed, desperation creeping into his voice. "I'm in a lot of trouble, and I need you—"

He felt something tug at his temples, and suddenly he was looking at Doodlehopper, who was giving him the most outraged look he'd ever seen as she held the VR goggles she'd torn from his head. They were back in the hotel, disconnected from the VR world.

They then had a fight which was too ugly to record here. She could hardly believe that he would blab to a group of strangers that he was in trouble, and he couldn't see why she was so dead-set against getting help from a group of strangers.

Their fight was mercifully interrupted by an impatient blue light that flashed on the wall, next to the VR jack. They glanced at each other, then Thomas slipped his goggles back on to see that they had a message.

Sorry about that. We'll help.

He put one thumb underneath the goggles and pushed them up onto his forehead, and arched an eyebrow at Doodlehopper.

"They want to help," he said, and he couldn't help smirking. Doodlehopper just gave him a sour look.

 

They stood at one end of a Greek theater, and Doodlehopper was trying valiantly not to look fed up with the proceedings, and failing miserably. She was not impressed with the large granite stage on which they stood, backed with twenty-foot stone arches that framed the faded indigo mountains and blue sky in the distance. She was less impressed with the granite seats carved into the living rock in front of them, creating enough room for hundreds of people. And she was least impressed with the handful of people that were either standing around them or seated at the first row of stone bleachers in front of them.

She reflected that this may have been caused partly because the person inspecting them most closely was wearing dull green space armor, and she'd never liked scifi games. She'd dated a few scifi freaks, and they'd all been a little too obsessive about their back issues of Starlog for her tastes.

"I don't trust them," announced the man in space armor, straightening up and walking back to the stands.

"Panic doesn't trust them. What a surprise," muttered a waifish teenaged boy who wore a white Greek-style tunic.

"I don't need to hear anything from you, Side," said Panic, rounding on the teenager.

"Okay, okay, enough, you two," said a middle-aged Caucasian woman in green and brown Renaissance peasant garb. She stepped forward from her place a few rows back, stepping up onto the stage to stand before Thomas and Doodlehopper.

"So what do you need?" the middle-aged woman asked.

Thomas threw a searching glance at Doodlehopper, who returned it with a look of stone. She was not happy, and this made him more uneasy than he liked to admit. He reflect that it probably wasn't a good idea to piss off the person who'd just saved your life.

He picked his words with the delicacy of a programmer choosing the most elegant algorithm. "Some people in meatspace seek to do me physical harm. Possibly kill—OW!"

Pain spread like fire through his right shin. The crowd leaned forward; Doodlhopper hadn't moved at all. "Just a second," he announced as he slid off his VR goggles and looked down.

In the dingy light of the motel room, Doodlehopper was just withdrawing her foot and placing it back on the floor. Thomas blinked for a moment, his brain unable to understand this, until he realized: somehow, the girl had turned off her system's physical feedback without disconnecting her from VR. And all while she'd been standing right beside him. Slick.

"What're you trying to do?" she hissed at him, still wearing her goggles. He was momentarily amused by her sightless head thrust out at him.

"What?" he asked. "I have to tell them what's going on."

She blew out an exasperated breath. "If you tell them that they're trying to kill you, that'll tell ‘em exactly how deep in over your head you are. You're in enough trouble without scaring anyone away."

He pursed his lips. "You're right," he admitted, and slipped his glasses back on.

"Sorry," he said to the crowd, which had resumed its conversation but now turned its attention back to him. "Hit my leg. I'm being pursued. I need to find out who they are, and get some protection."

Panic was shaking his helmeted head. "You need the cops, man, not us."

Thomas paused purely for dramatic effect. "The cops might be in on it, for all I know."

Side leaned his thin body back, smirked, and said, "Interesting." He turned to look at the middle-aged woman, whose face was clouded with worry. "Whaddya think, Mother? Let's vote."

Mother blew out a breath, then looked around at the others. Everyone else was quiet, but obviously intrigued. "Right, right," she said. "Who wants to get together to help these two?"

Most of the people there raised their hands; after a moment, even Panic raised an armored fist.

Mother regarded Thomas and Doodlehopper silently for a moment, as if weighing them in her mind, then shook her head. "Okay," she said. "But with this crew, you might live to regret it." She knocked her head to one side and grinned. "On the other hand, with this crew, you will live to regret it."

 

Thomas spent the rest of the night exchanging encryption keys, plans, ideas, addresses, anonymizers, and all the mundane details that were part of this sort of endeavor. The group from Fortis was an eclectic bunch, and while Thomas felt that worked in their favor, it also meant that each member had his or her own perspective on the whole situation and wanted to approach it from a unique angle. That meant having to satisfy a dozen different idiosyncratic cracker geniuses at once.

Doodlehopper spent most of the evening on the bed, listening to music via small wired nodes that stuck temporarily to the skin behind her ears, sitting upright in a vague parody of the lotus position, her eyes closed, and her head swaying slightly. What little time Thomas had to think about her was spent impressed that she was so calm.

Late in the night, as Thomas was collecting the last sets of data from the now eager participants from Fortis, Doodlehopper unfurled herself from the bed, slipped the nodes into a pocket, strode over to the other side of the room, and began a series of stretches. Thomas kept glancing at her form as she pulled her body into what seemed like highly painful contortions, all without noise or a change in her neutral facial expression. She then began to move her body through some form of martial arts forms, though Thomas didn't recognize it. Whatever it was, she had complete control over the forms she practiced that night, never wavering a muscle or seeming off-balance.

They each slept, clothed, in a separate bed. As Thomas lay in the dark, pushing himself to sleep and failing miserably, he couldn't deny the sexual tension between them. And it wasn't a chemical attraction; it was the uncomfortable tension of two people who recognize their sexuality but don't want to act on it. Thomas had to admit to himself that he wanted her, but he knew that getting involved was a bad idea, especially right now when a bunch of very serious, very deadly men were trying to kill him. And the girl definitely didn't want any physical attention from him. Thomas reflected that she probably wanted someone much younger than he, closer to her own age. She was probably fifteen years younger. She could almost be his daughter.

He knew where this line of thought was going, and pushed it away before it turned to his pathetic love life. He threw himself onto his side, pulled the thin, uncomforting sheets around him, and forced himself to think of nothing until he finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter 3

Thomas awoke with a bang.

Literally. The thin door to their room slammed open with such force that dust drifted from the ceiling. Thomas started up in bed, the tangled sheets coiling themselves further around his body. He blinked to clear the haze from his eyes.

Two very large Asian men, wearing business suits, strode into the room. Each had a pistol, one leveled at Thomas and the other at Doodlehopper's bed. She was still curled into a ball under the sheets. Thomas continued to blink, his brain still a few subway stops behind.

"You're Thomas Aznable," one of them stated. The events of the past twenty-four hours poured back into Thomas' mind, and he let out an amazed breath.

"You two again?" he said.

Both intruders shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, well," the first one said, jerking his head towards Doodlehopper's bed, "we didn't expect him last time. You covering him, Karl?"

Karl nodded, his gun aimed straight at the curved outline of Doodlehopper's body beneath the sheets, and his face showing intense concentration. Thomas' brain — which was still a bit dreamy from sleep — vaguely wondered if the thug was trying out some sort of mental powers, or was just that stupid. He figured it was the latter.

His mind had recovered sufficiently to realize that they thought Doodlehopper was a male. He filed that away as potentially useful.

"Boss?" asked the first thug, still looking straight at Thomas.

Thomas blinked back at him. "Me?" he asked.

The thug gave him a disgusted frown. "No, not you, you idiot. I'm trying—no Boss!" His eyes grew wide with panic, but he continued addressing Thomas. "I was talking to someone else Boss! I'm sorry Boss!"

Thomas realized the thug must be wearing a mobile phone with a wire thin enough to be taped to his neck and made essentially invisible. Thomas felt himself frown slightly. He hated it when people did that.

"It's the guy, Boss!" the thug said, his voice as excited as a kid in a toy store on delivery day. "We found him! And he's with the...other guy!"

Thomas was not typically a man of action. He preferred to use his brain, which was his excuse for not exercising. But it was true; he simply didn't have a "bias for action," as he'd read of in a self-help book once.

But he was learning.

He began considering options for escape. He glanced around the dingy room; the only thing near him was the nightstand, on which sat the flimsy VR goggles he'd used the night before. They hadn't brought any extra clothes or luggage. He wondered where Doodlehopper had put her tazers. But they didn't help either; Thomas was propped up on one arm and the sheets were twisted around him. He'd be hopelessly tangled before he got three feet, and that pistol was aimed straight at him.

He realized that the first thug was cringing at him. Heh. Thomas wished he could hear the reaming the guy must've been getting from "Boss."

"Well, I wanted to know, Boss," the thug said in a quiet voice, "should we shoot 'em now, right here?" He paused. "Yeah, it's a motel room." He looked around. "Yeah, pretty crummy."

His attention returned to Thomas, who didn't like the hardness that came to the thug's eyes. "Okay," the thug announced. "Yes. Roger. Thank you, Boss. Over and out."

His eyes focused back on Thomas. "We need to get out of here," the thug said. "Come along quietly."

Thomas gambled. What if they couldn't kill him there? "And what if I don't?"

The thug's mouth twitched down slightly in annoyance. "We don't have ta do it someplace else."

Thomas lost. He sighed, and made slow movements to get up.

The first thug motioned his pistol towards Doodlehopper and said to his companion, "Karl, get him up." Karl sidled over to the bed and gripped the bottom of the sheet.

There was a sudden swirling of sheets, a couple of yelled oaths from the thugs, a blur of black and skin, a low hum, and the sudden acrid smell of ozone. Thomas managed to kick off his sheets and curl his body forward on the bed ready to leap off as the two thugs slumped to the floor like tipped sacks of coffee.

Doodlehopper stood up from between them, a tazer in each of her hands. She was wearing only a black sports bra and black panties. She looked like an Amazon warrior rising from her kill, glorious and proud and beautiful.

She looked at him, ensuring he was okay, and he realized he was staring at her body. He looked away, blushing slightly, knowing that that was not a road he wanted to travel.

Doodlehopper grinned like a wolf at him, then turned and slipped into the bathroom. "Get dressed," she said as she slipped her clothes on.

Thomas nodded to himself. Yes, clothes were a very good idea right now.

 

They slipped through grimy back alleys and slunk across intersections still empty in the pale, ghostly grey of early dawn. They paused occasionally to warm themselves on plumes of warm steam that bellowed from the grates that punctuated the pavement. Once, they stepped into a coffee shop and bought oversweet donuts and coffee that tasted like thin crude oil. And they continued to run.

Thomas let Doodlehopper lead, though after an hour or so of following her zig-zagging path across the city he began to wonder if she had any specific destination or was just wandering.

"Where are we going?" he finally asked.

"Safe house," she replied.

They crept along a back alley that was so narrow it was dim as a cave despite the morning sun. On either side of them stood grim concrete buildings, their lower floor covered with riots of graffiti and their upper floors studded with grim little windows that seemed to begrudge the light.

Doodlehopper stopped halfway down the alley and laid one hand on the concrete wall next to her, almost casually, then turned and leaned her back against it, folding her arms against her chest and glancing up and down the alley.

Thomas stood next to her for a few moments, then said, "Um, what are we waiting for?"

She continued looking around, but grinned. "Can't tell you," she said. "Just wait."

He waited for a few more moments, looking around at the scenery. There wasn't much to see. A thin strip of blue sky peeked out above the buildings around them. The buildings themselves looked like warehouses or converted office space, just like a thousand other buildings in the city. Which might be why Doodlehopper's stopped here, he thought. Perfectly anonymous cover.

"TK421," Doodlehopper murmured, loud enough for Thomas to hear. He looked at her, debating whether to ask her what she meant, and saw that her head was turned towards him but she was staring down the street. He looked in that direction; there was nobody there.

"The color of television, tuned to a dead channel," she said, still looking at nobody. He must have given her a weird look, because she flashed a grin at him and made a motion with her hand to ignore her.

"Home seems about right," she said, then arched her back, levering herself off the concrete and standing upright without using her arms.

"What..." Thomas began. Doodlehopper grinned at him again, then turned 180 degrees and bowed, gesturing at the wall. "Welcome to Safe House," she said.

The concrete wall which she'd been leaning against promptly melted away, revealing an entrance as black as a monolith. No light penetrated. He realized — late enough to make him feel like a fool — that Doodlehopper had been reciting passphrases to the door.

Doodlehopper sauntered into the light-swallowing doorway. Thomas hesitated, then followed. As he stepped through the doorway, his eyes were assaulted by a sparkling array of lights, some distant and some close, most blinking or shifting in the electric life of a psychedelic dream. The lights barely illuminated a few feet of wall, so he felt rather than saw the high ceiling and figured that the entire building was one big warehouse.

But once his dazzled eyes had a second to adjust, his attention was immediately drawn to the large streaks of light hovering in front of him, and a second later he realized they were the ends of shockers. Each one had been modified to glow a bright color, one candy-cane red, another bright yellow and the third neon green.

He gulped and halted, straining his eyes to see beyond the shockers at the people wielding them, but the lights were too low and his eyes couldn't yet adjust from the morning sunlight outside.

"He's a client." It was Doodlehopper's voice, a warning growl from off to his left.

"So?" asked one of those holding a shocker. "Could still be dangerous. Might've tricked you."

Thomas felt sweat pop out on his forehead. If any of those shockers touched him, he'd be in serious pain. Worse, if they decided to be nasty, he could be dead. He'd seen videos of gangs jabbing captured victims with shockers. After thirty or forty shocks, the nervous system gives out.

A husky, older woman's voice came from ten or twenty feet in front of Thomas and said, "Let him go. We can trust Doodle."

The neon spears drew back and away as their holders slipped back into the shadows of the warehouse. For that's what it was, now that Thomas' eyes had adjusted to the light. He could see the outlines of large moving trucks huddled all around the floor, and nearby, literally tons of computer equipment stacked in seemingly haphazard piles.

And now he could see the people, dozens of them. About half were sprawled in small knots of two or three, occasionally swigging from a beer or biting into a microwaved snack before setting it back down on top of a server or router. The rest of the occupants were dancing, swirling, gesturing, and enrobed in VR gear. First-rate VR gear, from what he could see.

Doodlehopper grinned at him from where she was standing, arms crossed across her black vest, watching him. "Welcome to Safe House," she said.

 

"You can stay here for the next twenty-four hours," said the older woman, a chestnut-haired scowler named Dana who hadn't lost her beauty as she aged into her forties. Thomas frowned as the ancient microwave chugging away on the floor near him went silent. His eyes clouded, and he absently pulled open the door to carefully remove a steaming Asiabowl.

"Whatever you say," he said, trying to keep his voice calm, ripping the top off and taking a whiff of the food inside. You had to check for freshness when dining with Young Hacker Types. It smelled very good, though he knew that was partly because he hadn't eaten much. He nodded his head at the folks around them. "Can I ask you about this place?"

Dana smirked, but without humor. "You can ask."

He willed himself to stay calm and grabbed a pair of chopsticks from a bunch sticking out of a Styrofoam cup. He stirred the cooked tofu and rice as he composed his thoughts. He recalled the Art of War. The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

"What is your purpose?" he asked, almost casually.

Dana's eyebrows furrowed for a second, then she gave him a broad smile. This had as much humor as her smirk. "Why do you think we have a purpose?" she asked, spreading her arms.

Doodlehopper shot Thomas a worried look over her plate of noodles.

Thomas gave Dana his best Sherlock Holmes indulgent smile. "You have enough processing power here to map the human genome." More than that, he thought. "I look around and the people I see are all hackers. Young. Stereotypically, loners. Not the types who normally stay together in groups this large, not for long."

She shook her head, still smiling. "This is sort of a convention," she said. "We all know each other online, and we've gathered here for a couple of days' worth of harmless fun."

He snorted, but kept his own smile pasted on his face. "In a giant warehouse?"

Her smile was turning into a newswoman's plastic smile. "It was available."

He struggled to keep the contempt out of his voice, but failed. "And you all just happen to drive large, unmarked moving trucks?"

She tried to spit out a comeback, then turned and furrowed her brows further. Thomas was impressed with himself. He had her completely on the defensive. This was working.

She turned back to him, her eyes dark and furious. "Listen," she growled. "We took you in, and we're giving you free access to our net. Why? Because we trust Doodle." She jabbed a finger at his chest. "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."

Thomas gulped and nodded as Dana whirled and stalked off. Thomas wondered if he'd made a mistake. And he suddenly remembered another bit of the Art of War: He wins his battles by making no mistakes.

Doodlehopper sidled over to him, a playful smirk on her face now. He tried to let it lighten his mood, but Dana's reaction had jangled his nerves too much.

"So," she said. "You really showed her, huh?"

He gave her a sidelong look. But he found himself chuckling, and then the tension eased out of him and he was able to laugh. She laughed too. And it made her look pretty.

 

Thomas flexed his fingers, feeling the luxurious slip of the black leather gloves caress his hands. The gloves were heavily wired, but the wires were so well-integrated that a casual observer would think they were work gloves from ten paces.

He sighed in contentment, smiling at the gloves. This felt good. He was back in his chosen environment.

A fringe of blonde hair leapt up from behind a nearby cluster of servers and routers, followed by the head and shoulders of a teenaged boy. He had the desperate energy and rapid, bird-like moves of a young man who loved where he was and lived in constant fear he'd make a wrong move and be sent away.

"So, ya like it?" he asked, his words coming in machine gun bursts as he ran his fingers over various switches and scanned blinking lights for a dozen different power-up sequences. "It's all the latest. Yaguchi, ARM, you name it. This is some top-of-the-line stuff." He giggled. "Nothin' like the best."

Thomas grunted. Youngsters like this one just annoyed him. This kid was probably the persona behind a hundred different forum hacker aliases and script kiddies.

Doodlehopper walked up, cradling a mug of something hot between her hands, her face doing a poor job of masking worry. Now she was Trinity crossed with Florence Henderson.

He didn't want to ask why she hadn't volunteered to go in with him. It was odd. But he knew that if he asked, and she'd simply forgotten, then she'd insist on going in. Best to let it lie.

He looked over at the teen, who was now squinting into the screen of an ancient cream-colored laptop and beating an uneven staccato beat on the keys. "Hook me up," Thomas said.

"Done," the boy murmured, his eyes still fixed on the screen. "Put on your eyes, man, and go."

Thomas flipped over the goggles in his hand and saw that there was indeed a picture on the inside. Doodlehopper hid a smirk by sipping from her mug. Thomas chuckled at himself, then slid on the goggles. He twiddled his fingers, and....

He stood in the battered, dingy pilot's mess on the I.S.S. space carrier Tiger's Fang. It was a large chamber, evenly punctuated with metal tables and benches, and occupied by about twenty young, clean-cut men and women. The only ways to tell them apart in their grey flight uniforms were their skin color, hair color, and height, as well as the most important: the trim of their uniforms, in auburn, royal blue, and hunter green. There were only three uniforms with hunter green in the room, and their owners were all being treated like great samurai. Which, in this world's way, they were.

One whole wall was taken up by a vidscreen, on which was a list of about fifty names, with statistics for each. As he glanced, one name blinked out from a dirty green to a dim grey; a pilot had just died. He was the only one who'd noticed.

A couple of people turned when he arrived, and one attractive young woman surrounded by other pilots lifted an arm and yelled to him, "Oy, Deathie! C'mon over here! Haven't seen you in awhile."

Thomas grinned and walked over to where she was sitting with two others, a man and a woman who both looked him up and down. They had very young faces, and lacked the casual grace of most of the others here.

"Coaching more newbies, eh, Surge?" Thomas said, straddling a bench.

She beamed at him; the others looked slightly embarrassed. "They're coming along," she said. "Sharky here's really good." She cocked her head at Thomas, arching an eyebrow. "I haven't seen you in a long while. Good to find you back in the game. Take out a few more Itharlik for us." Thomas took a breath to correct her, but her face darkened and he let her continue. "We've been losing a lot of pilots lately, Deathshead."

He waved it away; this was the nature of space combat flight sims. The game must've just gotten harder, he figured. Surge's eyebrows drew together, and she leaned forward like a conspirator from a paperback thriller. "No. It's not like that," she said, her voice low and insistent. "It's...."

She glanced at the newbies; the girl was looking alarmed, while the guy seemed politely bored. A frown flashed onto her face and was replaced with a bland, professional smile. "I think you two need more flight time," she said. "Go sign up for a mission. Something routine. You can't handle a pack of FB's just yet." The guy looked disappointed, but they both agreed and left through a side door.

Surge watched them go, then grabbed him by the hand and began leading him towards another door.

"Hey, wait a minute," Thomas said, and pulled his hand away. He had been yanked around by far too many women lately. "I need to talk to you."

To his surprise, she turned and nodded, desperation in her eyes. "C'mon," she said. "Privately. In my quarters."

He blinked. This was...unusual. Was she asking him back for sex? It was fairly common for pilots to simulate "close quarter combat" in these games, though the games never had full-contact hookups to allow for actual physical stimulation. But her eyes weren't shining with lust. It was more like fear.

He briefly debated with himself about leaving now. He had a lot of other contacts to meet. But something about her expression melted him. Maybe, he reflected, he was becoming soft.

Confusion blossoming in his mind, he nodded and allowed her to lead him out of the mess hall.

 

"We're dead, aren't we Kino?" said Karl.

The two thugs stood before a pair of massive red doors, each door fifteen feet high and five feet wide. On either side stood guards, dressed in business suits like they were. The guards held Uzis. Casually.

Karl nodded miserably and gulped. They heard a thunk that made them both jump, then the doors began to swing open, squeaking like a tortured rat.

They began to walk through the doors and down to the other end of the chamber, whose high ceiling seemed hundreds of feet above them. At the far end of the chamber was a raised dais, on which sat three ancient men in Chinese garb. The two thugs came to a reluctant stop a respectful distance from the dais. Kino flicked his imploring eyes from one stony face to another. Karl simply stared at the floor, like a child called before the school Principal.

"You were ordered to kill Thomas Aznable," rasped one of the old men, his voice slow and precise. "You had two opportunities. Why did you fail?"

Kino spoke with the care of a soldier walking through a minefield. "He was being guarded, Boss."

"By whom?" said another figure with a voice indistinguishable from the first.

"He surprised us both times, Boss. Stunned us before we could see who it was."

They were silent for a moment, unmoving. One of them said, "Why should we give you a third opportunity?"

Kino was silent. He wracked his brains for an answer, but everything he could think of sounded pitiful. He didn't have a reason.

"Because we won't get a fourth one," said Karl, raising his gaze to look at the three old men. His eyes no longer reflected fear; they reflected the determination of a creature that can see its own death and chooses to face it and go down fighting.

Kino blinked at Karl, then looked back at the three old men. The silence was so heavy Kino had difficulty breathing, and his pulse pounded loud in his ears.

"You have a third opportunity," said one of the old men. Kino felt his body sag in relief, but pulled it ramrod straight. "We will send an assistant. Go."

Kino and Karl turned, and froze. At the other end of the room, next to the doors, a man hung in chains, his head bowed to the floor. They pushed themselves forwards, out of the room, but kept their eyes on him. He had long white hair, but the body of a forty-year-old, clad in a long black trench coat. A strange, elongated bird perched on his shoulder and stared at them as they passed. The man in chains did not move, and they could see that his eyes were closed. Kino wondered if he was still alive as the door closed behind them.

As soon as they were safely out of earshot, Karl stopped suddenly, his eyes on the floor. Kino stopped and looked at him, then Karl looked up, straight at Kino, his eyes still reflecting determination.

"Kino," Karl said, "we're going to need guns." He paused to think, then continued, "Big guns."

Kino felt himself smile.

 

Surge pulled Thomas into a cramped room covered with bright posters that he didn't have time to look at; she immediately closed the door and began talking.

"It started a couple of weeks ago. Or, I noticed it then. Pilots were dying, and they weren't coming back." She folded her arms under her breasts and frowned deeper. "You know what this game's like, Deathshead. People may wander off after awhile, but we don't lose week-old players."

He felt himself gaping, and quickly wiped his expression clean. Surge never talked out-of-character; she always acted as if the game were real. Not that she really believed that, of course, but it helped preserve the game's believability if players avoided talking about it as a game and treated it as real combat.

"I did some checking," she continued. Her eyes met his, and fear shone out of them again. "They haven't been online since they died here. Not at all. I had some friends check, too, and they're thorough, Deathie. Real hackers."

He frowned. "What would happen in a player's death on this game that would keep them totally offline?" he asked. "Have you died recently? Have the deaths changed?"

She looked away, seeming a tad embarrassed. "Nothing's changed. I...well, I have to be honest with you Deathie, I haven't died since then. I mean, I haven't gone on any real dangerous missions. I just...haven't really wanted to for the past couple of weeks."

He felt himself gape again, and allowed himself to, partly to show her he realized the importance of her admission. Surge's full name was "Surgeon," and she'd earned it after so many players had described her nearly miraculous aim as "surgical." She was one of the best pilots in the game, she'd been on hundreds of missions, and she was always one of the first to volunteer for another one. And now she was so frightened she was avoiding combat?

She looked back at him. "I just had to tell someone. Sorry to dump on you." She forced a pathetic laugh. "Didn't mean to freak you out. It's probably just all my imagination anyway. I've been dealing with a lot of stuff outside of here. You know."

He nodded, slowly, his head spinning. He pulled himself together and looked her square in the face. "Listen. I'm in trouble. Somebody's after me...outside. I don't know why. Has anyone here been sniffing around?"

She shook her head. "No, nobody. Though it might've slipped by me, frankly. Are you in trouble, Deathie?"

His avatar gave her a sardonic grin. "Apparently. I don't know why they have a problem with me, though. But listen, Surgeon, you have to keep quiet about this. I know I can trust you. Don't tell anyone that anything out of the ordinary is going on. If anyone asks about why I logged in, tell 'em I just wanted to check in with you. And tell me. Okay?"

She nodded and said, "I promise." He breathed a relieved sigh. He knew several hundred people seriously in VR. He trusted perhaps five of them. Surgeon was one of those five.

 

Thomas pulled up a window, typed a few commands, and closed his eyes. He ignored the growing sounds of creaking wood and horse hooves on cobblestones, giving himself room to be calm. He always had difficulty with social games.

He opened his eyes to find himself in an eighteenth century coach, surrounded by dark woods. Rich curtains hung, swaying, from the windows. He was momentarily thankful that VR couldn't fully convey a sense of motion, as the coach bumped along its way.

The muffled clip-clop outside slowed, then stopped, and the coach came to a halt. The door opened, and Thomas unfolded himself into the night air. He stood before a large manor house, every window lit with candles, casting a warm glow on the black shadows of towering oaks around it. He strode inside, barely glancing at the scenery.

Within, a kaleidoscope of skirts swirled and swayed and filled a large ballroom with the titters and murmurs of a hundred young gentlemen and ladies all vying for the next great dramatic moment. A string quartet at the far end of the room played Mozart.

Thomas ground his teeth together. He hated this place. The poseurs of VR all gathered here. This was a magnet for all the bored housewives and snobbish retired old men who didn't have the imagination for a fantasy game and instead vied for rungs on the social ladder of a long-dead but longed-for society. Half of them were politicians, and that should tell you something.

He put on his best Mr. Darcy face and scanned the crowd. The quartet finished its precise rendition of Mozart—it was a music file being aped by computer-rendered musicians—and the crowd paused and broke into polite but disinterested applause. And there she was, in a gold dress that glistened with jewels like dewdrops in the light of a hundred candles, her auburn hair made up in fanciful curls, just turning her pretty little head from the bland, beaming face of her dance partner to glance in Thomas' direction.

Chapter 4

He stepped forward with the grim purpose of a rescue worker wading into a river to retrieve a struggling victim. And it was like wading into a river, the room was so thick with people, but it was easy for him. One thing people learned quickly in this game was how to read people, and a man striding purposefully through a crowd of debutantes is not a man to interrupt lightly.

She had turned back to her dance partner and was tittering about God knows what when he came up behind her and, keeping his voice as flat as possible, said, "Miss Bright?"

She turned, a fake welcoming smile on her lips, until she recognized him. "Mr. Wainwright!" she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. "How marvelous to see you again! I do believe it's been months since I last saw you. Have you been touring on the Continent?"

"We need to talk," he said, his eyes boring into hers.

She was perfectly still. Her banal dance partner looked shocked, and Thomas mentally scowled at him. Thomas had no time for decorum.

"I'm afraid," she said, her tone icy, "that Mr. Harryhausen here has my next dance. If you'll only—"

Thomas stepped forward, gritting his teeth. "I'll be leaving shortly," he said, "and I may be unable to return." She didn't move. "I beg of you, just a moment of your time."

She turned to her partner and murmured, "Please do excuse me, it seems that Mr. Wainwright has a rather urgent matter to discuss." The man nodded dumbly, his eyes wide. A small part of Thomas wondered how this guy had ever managed to get as far as a dance with Miss Bright if such simple events left him speechless.

The musicians began another waltz as Thomas and the woman retreated through a small door into a green waiting room lined with bookcases and furnished with a few chairs and end tables. Floor-to-ceiling French doors opened on a balcony and a slight breeze of fresh night air that caused the heavy curtains to sway slightly like drunkards. He closed the door and she sighed in relief.

"Thank you for that little act," she said. "That Harryhausen's a monster."

He turned to her, lowering his voice to a whisper, and said, "That wasn't an act."

Her eyes widened. "What sort of trouble?"

"I don't know. Big guys keep coming after me. With guns. They're trying to kill me. I've managed to get away from them so far, but my luck will run out eventually."

"Why?" she said, her voice perfectly composed but her expression intent on him.

"I don't know." She cocked an eyebrow and he said, "Honestly. My nose is clean."

"And you want me to look into it?"

He couldn't help smiling. "You certainly are the quickest wit on this sim. Yeah. Do you know why anyone would want a VR detective dead?"

She shook her head. "I don't know of anything. VR detectives are, frankly, not worth the effort. A mistress, maybe. But your kind is too valuable to kill, and your associates are too nosy to let the disappearance of one of your own stay quiet." She frowned in thought, then rattled off a few unlikely scenarios which might explain his situation. He shook his head to each of them, explaining how they didn't apply. Finally she let out a frustrated breath.

"Well, I still can't make heads or tails of this, but I'll look into it," she said, then grinned. "I won't even charge you for it."

He blinked for a moment, nonplussed. "Thanks," he said, suspicion laced through his voice. "No offense, but...uhh...why?"

She swept past him, towards the door. "Like I said," she replied, "Your kind is too valuable."

She opened the door, walked back out into the dance, and closed the door behind her. Thomas caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and glanced over to see a small tabby cat peer at him from behind one of the curtains. He grinned at it, then pointed at it and said, "That's two contacts, and two promises of help. Let's see Doodlehopper complain about that!"

The cat meowed plaintively, and Thomas logged out.

 

Thomas peeled off his VR gear, handed them to the teen, and sighed and stretched, feeling his tendons pop. The teen turned towards a display and within seconds was back into a game of nethack, so Thomas wandered away into the depths of the warehouse to find something to fill his growling stomach.

It was like an odd sort of cathedral, where the thin light that filtered through the grimy windows above them cast deep, crossed pools of shadow in unexpected places among the random assortment of moving trucks, stacks of humming computer equipment, and plain cardboard boxes. And among it all, the blind and deaf worshippers danced to the internal lights and music of VR, oblivious to him and the few others who weren't jacked in.

He discovered that the boxes were filled with supplies—food, soda, t-shirts (most of them illustrated with scowling Korean anime characters), even basic medical supplies. He grabbed a freeze-dried dinner and popped it into a random microwave, one of many scattered around the place.

He heard the scuff of boot on concrete and looked to one side to to see Doodlehopper walking towards him. She gave him a smile and leaned on a large rack of servers, her hands shoved in the pockets of her jacket.

"Do you ever let me out of your sight?" he said, returning her smile.

Her face clouded and she nearly blushed. Her eyes went to the floor. "Gotta keep an eye on you," she said apologetically. "I'd be a pretty lousy bodyguard if I didn't."

"I don't mind," he said, waving it away. "It's your job."

She relaxed visibly, and the server rack groaned as her weight shifted. "That's good. I thought maybe you'd explode when you found out I'd followed you in."

"Followed me...." He was puzzled, but only for an instant. "You were with me in VR?"

She blinked. "You mean...you...I had to! It's my job!"

He flushed with anger. "You didn't even trust me in VR? Detective work in there is my job! What, did you think that if something happened, I'd be defenseless and you'd just jump in and rescue me? You think I'm as useless in VR as I am in real life?"

Her mouth hung open, her eyes wide. His words hung in the dry air. The microwave beeped.

Thomas scowled at it, then whirled and stalked away. Doodlehopper pursed her lips, then pushed herself off the server rack and followed.

 

Doodlehopper trailed Thomas out of Safe House, down several grungy back alleys that were still dim in the wan afternoon sun, increasingly convinced that Thomas had no idea where he was going. He didn't seem to care; just striding forward like Churchill with a stiff wind behind him. He finally emerged on a reasonably active commercial street and entered a convenience store as though seeking vengeance against the owner. Doodlehopper entered quietly, eager to avoid any outright confrontation with Thomas.

She sidled over to the magazine rack and watched Thomas as he picked up a bag of chips and began reading the back. She watched him read that bag for twenty minutes. He only moved to switch the hand holding the bag.

She passed through astonishment and disbelief quickly, settling into resentment and anger for over ten minutes until rage pushed her to edge over to him.

"Oh, come on, Thomas," Doodlehopper hissed. Thomas turned to study several identical — but colorful — sugar-filled drinks in a loudly buzzing refrigerator. "It's my job," she continued. "I have to protect you."

He whirled on her, his face contorted into an frightening mask of anger and frustration. "It's your job to hide things from me? To go behind my back? To spy on me when I'm trying to do what I do best?"

Doodlehopper stepped back, completely nonplussed, her jaw hanging open in shock.

"You couldn't tell me that you wanted to go along, could you? No, you had to protect me from myself, like you've been doing all along. I had to be rescued from my own apartment. I had to be dragged to Safe House. I'm sick of it! I'm sick of being treated like a baby."

Doodlehopper spun to face the door and Thomas grabbed her shoulder and said , "Don't run away—" But she was not running away; her every sense was attuned and pricked and straining. She turned and launched herself at Thomas, taking him down in a heap.

The shelves exploded in fireworks of brightly-colored shards of plastic and metal, glittering in the air amidst the fine dust of pulverized mass-market snack food. To Thomas, it sounded like an Apollo rocket was lifting off next door. His hands covered his ears as his eyes squeezed shut as he felt bits of shelving and less destructible foods bounce off his body.

The glass drink cases began to shatter and the bottles inside exploded in neon fountains of overpriced sugar water, flooding the floor in a sticky rainbow. The lights went next, each one shattering and sparking at random. Then, finally, the thunder of gunfire ceased.

On the street outside, three men stood in a line facing the store. Kino, the one on the left, looked nervously at the man in the middle. Karl, the one on the right, looked with awe at the man in the middle. The man in the middle wore a trenchoat which billowed in the wind, and in each hand he held a machine gun one foot in diameter. His muscles bulged, and his nasty grin twisted the nasty scar that ran from his right eye down to his chin into a serpentine shape.

The man in the middle stepped forward, his weathered military boots crunching on the shattered remnants of the convenience store's windows. He took a deep breath and yelled to the blasted wreckage of the store, "I am Grey Hackle the Heavy-Armed, and I have come for Thomas Aznable!"

Thomas' eyes snapped open. He was curled up in a pool of sticky liquid, in an aisle between two relatively sturdy shelves—both were only half annihilated, and offered about four feet of ragged cover above them. Doodlehopper crouched next to the remains of the opposite shelf, her arms outstretched and her hands flat against the floor, looking just like Julie Newmar. Her eyes were focused inwards, every other sense straining to detect their adversaries.

Thomas twitched, catching Doodlehopper's eye. He mouthed, "Is he crazy?" Doodlehopper made an impatient motion with one hand and looked away.

They could hear the crunch of glass beneath boot, and both stopped breathing. Outside, Grey Hackle advanced further, his grin widening into a skull's permanent rictus.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" he shouted, stepping up onto the curb. "I'll find you soon. Why not be a man and at least show yourself before you die?"

Thomas' jaw set. This was not the first man to threaten him. VR was full of immature script kiddies who taunted improbable destruction at the slightest hint of provocation, but there were other, more dangerous breeds who could erase your existence—or at least make it very difficult to use your credit accounts.

Thomas had never had a hero. Even when he was a kid, he'd been in his share of fights and been threatened by his share of bullies. Nobody had ever stood up for him. He always did that himself. He could be immature, lazy, picky, quick to anger, and just generally a jerk. But he had always stood up to bullies.

Grey Hackle made another step and shouted, "Nobody's going to save you now!"

Thomas looked at Doodlehopper, examining her like a clue. Her body was taut, her eyebrows drawn together in concentration. Her face betrayed more than that; she was uncertain and she was afraid.

Thomas acted.

He rolled to his feet and grabbed a piece of shelving in each hand.

Grey Hackle heard a scuffling near the center of the store and, a cold light appearing in his eyes, he swung his guns inward, his mind working at an unconscious level trained over decades of hunting men.

Thomas spun with every molecule of grace that he could pull out of his hunched, aging body and flung one shattered hunk of metal to his right.

Something clanged to Grey Hackle's left, and without even thinking his left arm swung towards it and his left index finger squeezed its trigger.

Thomas pushed his body further into the spin, releasing the other hunk of metal to spin in the opposite direction towards a mostly intact glass case as he scooped up another piece of shelving—this one flat and triangular—in his right hand.

Grey Hackle heard glass smash to his right, and his right arm obediently swung in that direction and began firing.

Thomas allowed himself to straighten out, planted his left foot, and—barely noticing the sparks and shrapnel flying from the gunfire landing on either side of the store—pitched his triangular missile directly at Grey Hackle with a throw that would have made any pro baseball pitcher proud.

Grey Hackle's brain registered the bit of shelving half a second before it hit him in the stomach, which gave his arms just enough time to swing slightly inwards. Then it hit, and his body doubled over but his fingers clamped reflexively on the triggers of both guns, so that the pavement around him exploded in a Roman Candle of bullets. Kino and Karl dove away and scurried into a nearby alley, then Grey Hackle's body slumped and the guns went silent.

Adrenaline seared through Thomas' veins as he drew in ragged breaths. Beads of sweat popped out all over him. He was staring straight at the huge trench coat-covered lump of Grey Hackle, as though boring a hole into him. He couldn't quite believe that it was already over. He looked down at Doodlehopper.

She was still crouching on the floor, though now she was staring up at him with wide eyes, in total shock. For some reason, this annoyed him.

Suddenly she lept forward, past him, down the aisle, put one foot against a case and launched herself out of the store, now running with feline grace towards Grey Hackle, her eyes darting about as she zoned in on the dark alley and ran into it.

Kino uncurled from his fetal position and looked up just in time to see a lithe body overshadow him and the distinctive form of a tazer loomed towards him. He had just enough time to groan "Not agai—" before his body convulsed and he blacked out.

 

Doodlehopper paced up and down the shabby motel bedroom like a general from a bad World War II movie. Thomas was sprawled back on the bed, his hands behind his head, watching her. He had a bemused expression on his face, and he really didn't know why. He was curiously detached from Doodlehopper's anxiety. He felt relaxed, yet perfectly awake.

She glared at him. "That was crazy. Crazy in the head," she said, still pacing.

He reflected for a moment. "Yes. I suppose it was."

She glared harder. "You could have been killed."

His mouth twisted into a sardonic grin. "Yes, that was how things were going."

She didn't have an answer for that; she just paced faster, her eyes focused inwards again. Then she looked back at him, her face set and serious. "Don't ever do that again," she said firmly.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Can't promise that. Neither of us knows what might happen next. Who else is lurking in the shadows?"

"Stop that, dammit!" she shouted, turning to face him, planting her feet. "Don't you care?"

"Yes, I care," he said, spitting out the words. "But it's my life, and I've just discovered something that I can do to defend myself. I'm not going to stop just because it gets your panties in a twist."

She snorted in frustration, then looked down, thinking. Then she looked back at him, her eyes searching him. Then her eyes hardened.

"You know, when I got into this racket, somebody gave me some advice. He said, 'Honey, sometimes you'll work with jerks. And when you do, remember this: Just like they can fire you, you can fire them.'"

She let this sink in, and his eyes widened slightly.

"Now that you're so satisfied with yourself that you can pull a trick," she continued, "it looks like you won't be needing me anymore, now will you? 'Cause that's sure how you're acting."

And with that, she stalked over to the door, yanked it open, walked through, and slammed it shut behind her. He heard her receding voice yell, "You're not worth it!"

 

Well, thought Thomas, that certainly changed things.

He cast his eyes to the dull ceiling and began thinking about his options. Things seemed increasingly bleak as he ticked off possibilities. He couldn't go back to his apartment. He couldn't go back to Safe House. The cops were surely combing through the shattered convenience store by now, and he and Doodlehopper had certainly spent enough time standing in the aisles for the clerk to remember them. Thomas felt a flash of guilt at the cold shoulder he'd literally turned towards the girl, but that was quickly subsumed with a stronger flush of anger at her treatment of him, sneaking into VR and following him around VR like a spy.

He suddenly wondered just how she'd done that. It was difficult to track somebody on VR, especially when they're hopping from world to world like he'd been. A small corner of his mind murmured admiration, but his indignance drowned it out.

He deduced that the teen guiding Thomas in had probably helped her, attaching some sort of tracer to his session when setting it up then handing the output to her. Thomas mused that, for all he knew, she had charmed the boy into doing her a favor.

That same corner of his mind that was impressed with Doodlehopper now began to gnaw at him. Was it really right of him to dismiss her like this, so casually? Hadn't she saved his life? She'd been paid to do that, he countered. Even so, she'd been a genuine help to him, and a good friend. Had he ever had a better friend?

He pushed that thought away. He'd never had any close friends in the physical world. He'd never made friends easily growing up, and once he'd begun VR diving for hours every day in junior high, he'd spent too much time in VR to be able to make friends. He'd chosen his life, and he was comfortable with it, he told himself.

But was he? Hadn't he always been a bit disappointed with his lack of deep physical connection? If he was so comfortable, where was this disappointment coming from?

He opened his eyes, and stared up at the bland beige ceiling, and missed Doodlehopper. Sadness swept over him in a wave far larger than he had suspected possible, and he curled over in the bed as if to avoid it. He was alone, but worse, he was isolated, like a thick invisible wall surrounded him and blocked out the rest of the world.

And, suddenly, he was so very sick of being alone.

 

Doodlehopper strode down the street like a battleship at full speed. She had her hands jammed into her jacket pockets and barely noticed the streets as she carved a path through the fog and grime of the city. She was frustrated, she was angry, and though she didn't want to admit it to herself, she was exhausted nearly to the point of physical breakdown.

Trouble was, she was in way over her head. She just knew what her Mum would say if she were here. "Why'd I have to raise a daughter who'd risk her life and limb to earn a dollar? Are you a hooker now? Selling your body for a few measly bucks?" All rational explanations were useless.

But no, she said to herself, she wasn't going to think about Mum right now. Too many other things. Like this damn stupid Thomas. She'd met some pretty thick guys in her time—had dated a few—but Thomas took top prize. Strutting around like he was suddenly Sherlock bleeping Holmes. She was glad to be rid of him. And back to less dangerous jobs.

Which was just when she noticed two very large men in trench coats standing on a street corner, their attempts to blend in to their surroundings making them stick out like an Uzi in a garden. She slowed, and cursed herself for not seeing them more quickly. She was way too distracted.

She had no trouble recognizing the two thugs. Her hands reached into her jacket automatically, but stopped halfway to the smooth handles of the tazers. The thugs were facing her, their hands were empty and outside their pockets, and they looked...hangdog. Like they wanted to apologize.

She approached them with the caution of two junkyard dogs meeting for the first time. They didn't move until she stopped moving, about twenty feet from them. One of them opened his mouth.

"We're sorry we tried to hurt you."

Doodlehopper didn't exactly decide to stay still; she was too shocked to do anything else.

"We were just following orders. Nothing personal."

She remained still, wondering if she was being taped for some TV joke show.

"Will you forgive us?"

This was the enemy. She may have been young, but Doodlehopper had been trained hard and well. This was the enemy, waving a flag of truce, and history showed that many times this was the most dangerous thing for an enemy to do. But...well...she tried to think of a reason not to accept their apology, and couldn't think of a thing.

"Okay," she said, trying to sound cool.

Both massive men visibly relaxed, the speaker especially. "I'm really, really glad you said that," he said. "Because, uh, we kind of have a problem."

 

It was the third most awkward cup of coffee Doodlehopper had ever had. The first was the one where her mother had suddenly asked if she was a virgin. The second was with a boyfriend who was not only eyeing every other girl in the place, but also commenting on how good they'd be in the sack. This one, sitting in front of two men who were acting like little kids in the Principal's office, wasn't nearly as bad. But the hairs on the back of her neck refused to go down. Her mind was screaming that these were enemies, not to be trusted, and what was she doing sitting here carefully sipping a bad cup of coffee listening to them?

She had to admit she was intrigued. The talkative one poured out his story, about his life in the mob, being assigned to "take care of" Thomas, his failures to do so thanks to Doodlehopper, and some ludicrous fairy tale about meeting with a bunch of mafia big-wigs who had some guy chained up in the same room.

Still. They dutifully showed her the tattoos on their palms, which marked them as mafia for life. The very few who managed to escape that life made sure to get skin grafts for their palms, since one glance at those tattoos meant an instant pink slip.

The talkative one was winding down. "So, you see, we can't go back, because they'll kill us. And no matter where we go, they'll find us and kill us. There's no use in running. But...errrrr...." He looked down at his hands, which were throttling a paper napkin. "You're really good at protecting yourself, and you're against them. So we figure, if we could join up with you, we could fight together. We'd protect you, and you'd protect us."

She fought the urge to laugh, knowing that that would be at best impolite and at worst an invitation for one of them to launch into hysterics.

He saw her face spasm and quickly said, "We won't get in your way! We'll make our own meals and everything. And we really are good at what we do, we just...well...you're better than anyone else we've met."

She closed her eyes and scrubbed a hand over her face. "I hate to sound cliché," she said, "but there's no way I can trust you. Maybe you've been given another chance and now you're just trying to get my guard down."

The quiet one spoke up, saying with a soft voice, "Boss is going to send another group after you. We know who they are, and we know how to stop them. One of them is going to attack you tonight. We can tell you what's going on, and I know their system enough to hack in and find out what they'll do next."

She shook her head. "I'm not guarding your guy anymore."

They both looked surprised, then the first thug said, "That doesn't matter. They'll come after you now anyway."

She'd expected that. Groups with the cash and cajones to hire nutjobs like Grey Hackle always wanted every loose end tied up. She knew she'd continue to be a target; she'd just hoped she could get enough distance to keep the heat off...oh well.

She gave them hard looks, searching them. She couldn't shake the impression of frightened kids. And from the looks of them, that's pretty much what they were.

Finally she blew out a breath and said, "Give me the info on tonight's attack. If it checks out, we'll meet again here at, oh, ten tomorrow morning."

Their faces lit up with hope and they nodded. The second one explained, "Tonight, you'll be attacked by Zazun the Blade. He always attacks at night. He uses swords, but we don't know what kind or even how many. He's silent and not flashy at all. Usually kills very clean. But when things get messy, uhhh...so does he. I saw some of the cop photos. Blood and stuff everywhere. He'll go after you first, then Aznable."

She nodded, then stood. "I'll be ready."

 

That night, a shadow swam through the streets and alleys of the city, a figure so fast and so quiet and so stealthy that it was barely noticed by the drunks and the homeless. It slithered up a fire escape and slipped through the shadows of ventilation tubes, barely whispering across the gravel on the roof. It stopped above a skylight.

If anyone had been there to see it, they would have seen the outline of a man, dressed in Japanese clothes in various dark shades of dark and navy blue. His black hair was pulled back in a small knot, and his intense face peered down through the window, like a hawk studying prey.

He turned and glided to a nearby ventilation shaft, then folded himself into it and descended into the bowels of the building, with only the occasional slight sigh of shifting metal to advertise his passage. He found an appropriate grate, silently opened it from the inside, and climbed out into a small storage closet. A few moments later, he was in the hallway, turning the knob on a door and silently pushing it open with his left hand.

Before him was a large, empty room, lit only by the moonlight streaming down from the skylight in the center of the ceiling. Motes of dust hung suspended in the light like stars. And, in the exact center of that light sat Doodlehopper, her legs crossed, wearing her black jacket, shirt, pants, and boots. Her hands lay open on her legs, and as the intruder entered the room, her eyes opened and looked straight at him.

He held his place, inwardly surprised at this turn of events. He had not expected the girl to be so prepared. He knew better than to underestimate a prepared enemy, so he waited, gauging her. She did not move, simply watching him, for several moments.

Then she moved her hands to either side of her body and stood as smooth as a cat, the scabbard strapped to her side dangling heavily. His eyes fastened themselves on that scabbard, noting its every motion as it swayed next to her hips. Slowly, but not leisurely, she put her right hand on the hilt and tugged. Ah! It was not a scabbard; it was a bokken, a practice sword, probably made of some lightweight metal. It detached easily from the clip on her belt and she swung it forward, grasping it with her left hand to hold it upright in front of her, her eyes still staring straight at her opponent.

He put his feet together and stood straight, pulling himself up to his full six feet in height, then announced, "Please put that down."

She snorted. "Like hell."

"That bokken will stop my blade no better than a blade of grass. I do not wish to see a good instrument wasted. Please put it down."

She shook her head, slowly, keeping her eyes on him. "I have the right to defend myself with whatever I have. You're just gonna have to deal."

He sighed, like a parent confronting a petulant child. "Since I have been unable to kill you immediately, I must ask you this: Do you still protect Thomas Aznable?"

One of Doodlehopper's eyelids twitched slightly; whether from irritation or exertion, he could not tell. "Why d'you wanna know that?" she asked. "Gotta write it down in your Killing Diary?" His face clouded. She allowed herself a small, vicious smile, and continued: "'Tuesday: Bought bread, went out with Cindy, killed a guy in his sleep.'"

"Mr. Aznable is currently sleeping in a motel room twenty-two blocks from this building," the man said, his voice betraying a thin edge of annoyance. "If you are still pledged as his protector, you seem to be doing an odd job of protecting him."

Her vicious smile turned positively nasty. "You think I care what you think of me? You, a petty assassin who slaughters the innocent for a quick buc—"

And he was ten feet in front of her, his sword already out of its sheath, the thin blade glowing in the moonlight and arcing towards her right side like the grin of Death's Cheshire Cat. She shifted her weight and shoved her weapon towards his, knocking his sword out of the way with a clang as she turned back inwards and swung the blade with all her might towards his stomach and chest....

But it was no longer there; he glided out of the way and pulled himself back a few feet. How did he do that? she thought. He reversed his momentum in mid-strike!

She regained her balance and paused, studying him. His face betrayed him; he was watching her with greater intensity now. She gave herself a mental high-five for that.

"Do you protect Thomas Aznable?" he asked again, his voice as unperturbed as when he'd first asked it.

She grunted. "Persistent little bugger, aren't you? Okay. Yeah, I guess I do."

She saw him as he accelerated forward this time, giving her a larger window of opportunity to respond. But he didn't slow down, and angled past her to her left. She was puzzled for half an instant, then with all her strength she pushed her legs off the floor and slid to her right. He raised his blade almost languidly, and it flew through the air where her kidneys had been. She fancied she could feel its breath whisper along her side. He spun to face her but did not move further; she risked a glance down and saw the fabric of her jacket gaping down where his sword had cut clean through it.

She pushed down the panicked fears of a blade and a man that could cut through leather like a finger slicing through air and returned her attention to her opponent, but as she did he rocketed forward, bringing his steel around in a devastating arc that she knew could cut clean through her neck.

So she raised her blade to block. His mouth twisted slightly in amusement, knowing she didn't have the strength and the position to fully block his blow. At the final instant she twisted her hands slightly.

His steel met hers and an explosion threw his sword away, electricity arcing in sinuous waves between her bokken and his blade until he drew back to a comfortable distance. His eyes were wide and his nostrils flared in indignant surprise. She smirked.

"Wait a sec," she said. "I thought you wanted to fight?" She shifted her weight onto her back foot and yelled, "Let's fight," launching herself at him with every pound of weight and strength she could muster.

She attempted a kote, the end of her bokken reaching for her opponent's wrist. He pulled back yet further — though he was only a few feet from the wall now — and with inhuman speed spun his wrist around her thrust. A quarter-second later he was lunging at her towards his left, pulling his sword with him so as to slice into her left side. She ducked to her right, plowing into his chest and pulling the bokken towards her, hoping to trap him between its pulsing electricity and her body. But this meant grabbing his sword arm, leaving the deadly steel on its end to strike her back. Sure enough, she felt the muscles in his arm constrict, so she planted her feet and spun him away. He came to a rest nearly in the corner, and as he did she realized that he had allowed her to break their dangerous embrace, probably knowing that neither would leave it unscathed.

"You have great skill," he said, watching her carefully as he raised his sword into a ready position.

"Chudan kamae," she murmured, and his eyes widened a fraction of an inch as she leapt forward in a men uchi or blow to the head, her bokken whistling through the air ahead of her in a neon shimmer of electricity. He feinted to the right and brought his sword around in a deadly arc towards her exposed left side. She just caught his movement in enough time to swing her bokken towards his blade, making contact. Light exploded from the steel of his sword where it made contact with the crackling lightning of her bokken, then she was surprised to realize that he was holding his sword in place, pushing against her. She shifted her weight enough to let both weapons slide to the hilt, still locked, and she heaved forward with all her strength.

He held her at nearly arm's length, adjusting his stance every so often to keep her bokken from coming near him. Energy cascaded off the connected metal, sparking and flashing like fireworks. She glared grimly into his eyes, which were as calm as that of a professor studying a specimen.

She couldn't help frowning. She was just barely keeping him at bay, and he showed no sign of running out of tricks. She remembered a pitched battle against her sensei once, and his strikes and slashes were just like this. Well, not quite as deadly, but just as calm and focused as this man's.

Fear rushed into her mind, flooding her with a cold, clammy feeling of dread. She saw her death standing just beyond this man. He waited.

She felt unexpected wetness moisten the corner of her eyes as she asked, "'S there any way I can back out of this?"

He shook his head. "I must kill you."

"I could say I'm not guardin' him anymore."

He shook his head again, as certain as the grave. "You may be attempting deceit." He paused, as if weighing whether to continue. "To me, you are already dead."

The fear grew and shifted into rank hatred of herself, for her weakness. This was not what it was supposed to be like. She never acted like this. She was Doodlehopper, always fearless, always copping an attitude.

Until she saw her death hovering behind a man's naked blade.

Her instincts ripped her back to reality, to the man staring at her behind his sword. She realized suddenly that he had been watching her this whole time. He could have attacked at any time and overwhelmed her, and he was so good he had to have seen her fear and lack of focus.

He saw her surprise and said, "I will not do you the dishonor of killing you when you are, eh...unarmed?" He sounded uncertain about his choice of words; she nodded grimly.

And she dropped her bokken. She slowly put her arms to her collarbone, and with a voice so even she surprised herself, she said, "You'll have to kill me unarmed."

He was silent for a moment, then chuckled. "If that is your destiny. I am not as honor-bound as all that. I will still kill you; you have made it suicide."

He raised his blade and rushed her. She knew what she had to do; she didn't have time to notice the fear welling up inside her. One hand slipped into her jacket and gripped a tazer as she leaned to one side, his blade hissing past her as her arm struck out like a viper.

He convulsed, striking his sword against her outstretched arm and collarbone, hard but not enough to cause much pain. She leaned her weight onto him, keeping the tazer on him until his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the ground, the sword clattering to the floor.

She looked down at her arm and chest and grimaced. His well-trained wrist muscles had beat the blade into her arm. Her shoulders were in worst shape, as they'd born the brunt of his attack. Her shirt now hung in several ribbons, and blood ran in long red streams down her arm.

So she felt no shame when she closed her eyes and let herself shake and cry.

 

Thomas awoke with a start. He spun, twisting the sheets around him so he could see the lean, dark figure standing on one side of the bed, arms folded. It took him a few seconds to recognize it, then he relaxed.

"Doodlehopper," he said. "Why're you...I mean...you...."

She smirked. "No worries," she said, "I'm back. Bodyguarding, I mean." Her grin widened. "And this time, we've got some help."

 

"So, whaddya think?" Doodlehopper asked.

Thomas looked across the bar at the two thugs, who were fingering cups of coffee and trying to look like they weren't trying to look at Thomas and Doodlehopper. They looked like nervous school children waiting outside the Principal's office.

He blew out a breath. "I don't see how we can afford to trust them, but then we can't afford not to trust them."

"Exactly how I see it."

"Okay. They're in. But let's keep an eye on them. I'll try to trust their information, but I won't trust them."

"Heh. I don't trust anybody."

They were quiet for a moment. Thomas looked down.

"I'm sorry," he said. She looked away, as though unwilling to commit to a reply. "I was a jerk. I do need your help, and I was stupid to blow you off like that." He paused. "No, not just stupid. Stuck up.

"Look. I have an ego as big as the 'net. All my life, people have warned me about that. It's...it's why I don't have many real friends. Any real friends, really."

Her eyes were on his now, her face radiating sympathy and wonder at his admission. He was still looking down, his features taut with the strain of confession.

"I don't like that about myself, but I've never been able to change it. I think...I think I never really had a reason to change. I could always blow it off, or return to the 'net where a big ego is an asset. But...now...."

His eyes returned to hers, the penitent gaze of a man seeking redemption. "Now I have a reason to change. Because of what's happening. And...because of you."

She took a step back, and for all her concern, her face wore the mask of a teenaged girl who'd been the object of too many mens' desperation.

"Not like that," he hurried to reassure her. "I'm not confessing my love here. But I am indebted to you. You've shown me how I can be. You're...my inspiration."

She smiled shyly, in that way that he found so blasted pretty. Inconvenient just at the moment he was struggling to negate any romantic interest.

"Anyway," he said, struggling to remember his point, "I can change. I want to change. I think I'm about to change." He grinned. "And I'm going to need somebody to kick my rear into doing it when I change my mind. Deal?"

She grinned right back and extended her hand. "Deal."

Karl turned to Kino and whispered excitedly, "They're shaking hands. I think we're good!"

Chapter 5

The next few weeks were a blur. Doodlehopper dragged Thomas through the muddy streets of Thailand, making him sit in dark, spare rooms in which the air was heavy with incense, as she traded taut sentences with lean, hard men. They spent thirty-six harrowing hours chasing a lead through the hills of Hong Kong before he disappeared completely. They spent almost a week in overcrowded basements in Norway, trading in a few favors for unfettered access to the secret undergrounds of the 'net, where nearly everything was known by somebody, and everything else could be found for a price.

Thomas and Doodlehopper were sharing the detective work, each using their own methods and, after each little success or failure, collaborating on the next best move. Kino and Karl played back-up, setting up hotel rooms or flights, finding safe places to eat, and generally being the oddest concierge service any of them had ever seen.

Thomas was on his feet for most of each day. This would have been difficult enough for his weak muscles, but Doodlehopper had begun sparring with him the first day. For hours every day, she led him through stances and mock battles, charging at him and jabbing him with her fists and feet. She never attacked hard enough to really hurt him, and her mood was always one of gentle patience. But after three days, his muscles were screaming. Two days later, he woke up so sore he honestly thought he was going to die.

But after a week, his muscles' screams ebbed to a low moan. After ten days, he felt no more than a dull ache. Then Doodlehopper stepped up her training and he fell into bed exhausted every night.

Now they were in a suite in a large hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, pausing for a day to keep their movements erratic. They'd snuck into an empty room on the ground floor and taken advantage of its VR socket for an hour that morning, but they left the room with fewer leads than they'd started with. Doodlehopper had insisted that they spend the rest of the day training.

They'd pushed both beds against the wall of the suite. Karl and Kino were sitting on the beds, their backs against the wall as they punched away at their laptops, murmuring to each other. Karl, the slightly larger one—though that was like saying "the slightly larger elephant"—was the more 'net-savvy of the two, and spent most of his time buried in a laptop whether they had 'net access or not. He needed Kino's help for whatever he was doing now.

Doodlehopper crouched and lashed out with her right leg, aiming for Thomas' midsection. He danced backwards and pivoted his body to the left, swatting at her foot with his left hand. She used the momentum to spin to her left, whipping her head around as she turned 360° and settled her weight back down on both legs, studying him.

"Could have used more force there," she said.

"But I knew you'd do that. 'Conserve your energy.' "

Her mouth curved into a grin at that phrase, which she'd been repeating to him for weeks.

"How long do you think we have?" he said.

She paused, not to think about it, but because she wanted to delay thinking about it. She jerked her head at the men on the beds. "Kino, how long until they send the next one after us?"

Kino lifted his head and grimaced. "It's kinda tough for us to tell. Things seem to be settling down, but you never know what they're going to work on first. Old scores...they may not get back to 'em for weeks."

Karl shook his head, his eyes still on the laptop screen but no longer looking at it. "I heard today. They'll be cleaning up old scores first." He paused to calculate. "Three days."

Doodlehopper blew out a breath. "What if we run?"

Karl shook his head. "Another day, maybe."

Doodlehopper's eyes met Thomas'. He simply looked at her, waiting for her reaction. She realized for a moment how much he'd changed from the self-important VR detective she'd pulled out of his apartment building. Now, he deferred to her knowledge and experience.

Suddenly she asked, "What do you want to do, Thomas?"

His eyebrows rose slightly, then he smiled. "I want to fight," he said.

"Are you scared?"

"Yeah."

"Are you ready?"

"I don't know."

"Good answers." She bit her lip and thought hard for a few moments. "All right," she said, looking him straight in the eye. "We stay and fight."

Karl's eyebrows shot up. "Thomas?" he said, his eyes still on the screen. "You have a message."

Thomas scooted onto the bed and Karl tilted the laptop's screen so Thomas could read it. Thomas' eyes grew wide.

"What?" Doodlehopper asked with a worried tone.

"Remember that Jane Austen, Victorian game I went to?"

Doodlehopper remembered the swirling skirts and upturned noses and nodded.

"The woman I talked to...she wants to meet me. In person. She says it's important."

Doodlehopper snorted in amusement.

He looked up at her, his face somber as a mortician's. "This woman knows more heads of state than I could name. If she says it's important, it's im-por-tant.

Doodlehopper became instantly serious. "Okay, where's she wanna meet?"

"Near D.C." He glanced at the thugs. "Do we have the money to get there?" They glanced at each other, then nodded. Thomas looked back at Doodlehopper, a pleading look in his eye.

She tried not to smile with gratification at his look to her for approval. "Well, can we trust her?"

"There are very few I would trust. She's one of them."

"What if they've gotten to her? Maybe they're pushing her to do this."

He shook his head. "One, she has so much influence, that's unlikely. Two, if someone pushes her, she pushes back. Three, she'd simply shut up, stall, and notify me that she's being pressured."

He stood up, his back arched, in an almost superheroic pose. "These are the sorts of things I had to know in VR. Trust me here; she has something to say, and it's no trap."

She thought for a moment, but her mind could offer no reasons to refuse. She nodded. "Let's meet."

 

They met at a quaint independent coffee shop in an upscale suburb twenty miles west of D.C. With its wide open room, broad tables, and teapots lining the walls, Thomas felt like he was in an English tea room. He sat with his back to one corner of the room, sipping a double espresso, as she walked in the door.

"Jimmy! How are you doing?" she asked, her face bright with a smile. The pseudonym surprised him, but he got it by the end of her question. "I'll just get something for myself, then we can talk, all right?" she continued, and strode right over to the counter to order.

As she got her drink, he got up and walked awkwardly over to her. "My legs are kinda tired," he said, "mind if we walk as we drink?"

She gave him another dazzling smile and followed him out of the store, onto the mostly deserted sidewalk in front of the long strip mall in which the coffee shop sat. They began walking towards the far end.

"I've had quite an adventure for the past few days," she said, sounding half playful and half scared. She sipped her coffee in an act of non-chalance, but there was a hesitancy to her demeanor he'd never seen before.

Her voice fell. "Also, I was followed on the way here. Dark blue Honda Accord. Two men. Big men."

Thomas put one hand behind his neck and cricked his head back as if stretching and used the action to glance behind them. There was the Accord, following from about fifty feet behind them. He grinned and resumed walking. "It's okay; they're with me."

She glanced at him, wide-eyed.

"I told them you'd notice," he said apologetically, "but they insisted."

She chuckled in amazement. "Well that's a relief. Because this has me on edge. Me, the fabled Ice Queen."

"What's happened?" he asked. He didn't like hearing her ramble; it wasn't like her normal, razor-sharp personality.

"Were you hired to look for a file when you got into trouble?" she replied.

He gave her a shocked look. "I thought so," she continued. "I looked into your problems, and was approached by a man who gave me a copy. I can't go into any more details, but I do know that it's the file you were trying to get out of that corporation."

"What's in it?" Thomas said, still barely able to believe Bright's progress.

"I've no idea, and I don't want to know. I'll make it available on a private server and will se-mail ¹ you with temporary authorization." She gripped her arms. "I want nothing to do with this."

He stopped—mostly out of shock—and turned to face her. "I'm truly, deeply sorry I got you into this," he said, looking straight into her eyes, meaning every word.

She blinked, non-plussed, then gave a small, tension-relieving laugh. "You have changed. Listen, I'm just freaked out, that's all. You must be in deep to have traveled so far. Is there anything I can do to help?"

He shook his head. "Sending me that file will be more than I ever hoped."

She smiled, and his heart ached at her beauty. But no; she was married, and he was not about to drag her further into this.

"Thank you," he said. "I won't involve you any more. I'd better get out of here now."

She hesitated, then looked deep into his eyes and replied, "Let me know when you're safe. I'd like to...get together. When it's safe."

If Kino's and Karl's eyes hadn't been on him, he would have taken her to a hotel. But no. He took a deep breath and said, "I will," and walked back to the waiting car.

 

Doodlehopper's voice whispered in Thomas' ear, "Here he comes." Thomas opened his eyes, taking in the darkness of his bedroom. His heart raced, but he willed it to slow down. His eyes slowly revealed the blank walls, the thick shag carpet, and the outline of the thin wood door. The only light came from the glowing red LED of his bedside alarm clock.

He uncrossed his legs and stood, feeling the soft fabric of his sweats on his body. He stretched his arms and legs with the leisure of a cat, but his eyes never left the door. His right foot went firmly behind him, brushing the bed pushed up against the wall behind him. He raised his arms to chest height, balled his hands into loose fists, and he waited.

His heart began to race again. He took a few deep breaths, but his mind began to imagine what might be coming through that door any moment. No matter that Kino and Karl had told him exactly who would be coming. His mind showed him a parade of villains coming through the door: a tentacled monster, a massive ogre, a gunslinger so quick Thomas would have no time to react.

He pushed those thoughts out of his mind and concentrated on his own predicament. He mentally checked each limb; no pain. A little stress, maybe, but....

"You always lock up," Doodlehopper had said over and over, and he realized now that he had done it again. Every muscle was taut, and his hands were clenched like vises. He let out a breath and, with it, let the tension out of his body. He was loose again. Loose and ready—

The door slammed inwards with a rush of air. Thomas pulled back without thinking. A small form hurled itself at him and he was knocked bac. His legs flew out from under him and he fell on top of the bed. Hands gripped his throat and squeezed.

Shock granted him a split second of clarity, and it was just enough for him to curse himself. He should have used his attacker's momentum to toss him back into the wall. He'd been so surprised he'd given up his one advantage. Before he could berate himself further, pain exploded from the terrible pressure on his neck. He could hardly believe that strangulation hurt so much. Thomas' hands leapt to his neck, but his attacker had fingers like iron.

Thomas was trapped underneath the attacker, and because neither was moving, Thomas couldn't gain advantage through momentum. Stars appeared and everything began to go dim, then finally something in Thomas' training surfaced. He shifted slightly, then brought his right knee up with all his might, right into his attacker's groin.

The attacker's hands loosened just slightly, and Thomas brought both his hands into a fist and launched them at the attacker's own neck. The attacker leapt away, to his credit.

Sweat sprung to Thomas' brow. He thought about Doodlehopper, Kino, and Karl, all crouched in their hiding places throughout the building. He regretted their mutually agreed decision to let Thomas deal with this himself. This was to be Thomas' graduation test. He didn't want the proof, now. He just wanted to stay alive.

His attacker leapt at him again, and Thomas struggled to examine him for important details: brown clothes, a close-fitting helmet of some kind, and gloves looming large, coming at his face. This time, his attacker grabbed Thomas' head, one hand over Thomas' eyes and the other on his chin. This time, Thomas was ready. Thomas let his neck drop back, dropped to the floor, and rolled backwards, using his arms and legs to push against his attacker. The brown-clothed man sailed over the bed, slamming into the wall above it and falling onto the comforter below. Thomas twisted onto his side and came up in a crouch, rocking back on the balls of his feet, then planting one foot behind him as he brought both fists before him in a fighting stance.

He got a good look at his opponent now. The helmet looked like a converted piece of fetish gear, made of latex stretched over a web of metal strips that conformed exactly to the wearer's head. There were generous holes cut for his eyes, ears, mouth, and nostrils, but otherwise it looked like a bad X-Men costume.

"Okay," Thomas said to the man, "Now what?"

The attacker blinked. Thomas took one step forward, planted his foot, then brought the other out in a vicious kick right into his attacker's face. His head snapped back and he collapsed in a heap on the bed.

Thomas edged closer, his heart beating fast in his chest. He never thought he'd actually do that. He'd even said something cool! He bent down to see if this guy was really unconscious.

And the attacker uncoiled like a spring. Thomas flew backwards, through what was left of the door, feeling a sharp pain in his side. He landed a few feet outside of the door in the cramped hallway. His attacker sat on Thomas' stomach this time and closed his fingers around Thomas' neck. Thomas didn't have the leverage to use his knees this time. He coiled his arms around his attacker's, but that was like trying to move steel girders.

His vision began to blur, and his eyes wandered to his attacker's grimace, then down to his attacker's Adam's apple. An idea floated into his brain, which seemed like a pretty good idea: He uncoiled his right arm, brought his fist back towards his chest, then rammed it into his attacker's Adam's apple.

The attacker released Thomas and fell backwards, his weight landing on Thomas' legs, but Thomas grabbed the man's shirt and pulled him back, landing another blow on his attacker's neck. The assassin felt like two hundred pounds of Jell-O in a sack, now. Thomas shoved him back, got on his feet, then drove his fist directly into his opponent's Adam's apple.

The man's hands came up to his own neck now as he began to wheeze and rasp, his body stretched taut. He scrabbled at his own throat as he began to thrash around on the floor, slapping his hands on the walls. Thomas looked at him, simply observing, his mind still a fog as he regained his breath.

As he did so, his attacker died.

It took a few more moments before Thomas realized that his attacker was dead. Thomas fell to his knees and put both hands on his attacker's chest, which was utterly still. He spent several seconds just feeling the inertness of the body on the floor. Blood no longer pumped through these veins. Heart stopped, lungs stopped, like an old factory with all the machinery intact but no power. His stomach heaved, and he leaned over to one side and dropped his dinner on the carpet.

When Doodlehopper walked in quietly a few minutes later, Thomas was still crouching there. He hadn't cried. He hadn't screamed, or even whispered to himself. He'd just sat on the floor, bent over, wide-eyed, his face contorted into a mask of fear and disgust.

His mind was a whirlwind of pure emotion—disgust at his actions, hatred of himself, fear of reprisals, and a hundred others. They fed off each other and grew and washed in and out of his consciousness in waves, great terrible waves that completely engulfed him.

Doodlehopper crouched down and laid a hand on his shoulder. He didn't move. She began to speak, her voice soft but distinct.

"Feels awful. Like your insides are doing flip-flops. Like you've just crossed that line that you always said you'd never cross. Feels like you betrayed yourself. You feel sorry for him, you wish you could take it back, you'd do anything to take it back, to put the life back in him."

She sighed, and her sigh filled the hallway with sadness. "But you can't. You may never forgive yourself for it. But it's done."

She stroked his back, lightly, gently. His muscles began to unwind themselves. He started to speak, but no words came out, just the beginnings of thoughts.

She shushed him, but did nothing more to comfort him. He began to shudder violently. She stood and looked down at him with sympathy, knowing there was nothing she could do for him.

"Okay," he said, his voice shaking despite his best effort to control it, "okay, what do we do now?" He was still curled in a ball, his eyes staring sightlessly at the floor.

"We leave," she replied

"But what about...." His eyes went to the limp body next to him.

"His associates will come and collect him. There's no point in taking our time over him; it'll only slow us down. Are your things packed?" she asked, knowing they were.

He nodded, then looked up at her. His eyes were like an awed and frightened child's. "What am I going to do?" he asked.

She sighed. "Stay alive, and do better on the next one."

 

Thomas flexed his arms and grinned at the void of his unconnected VR world. A few months ago, he'd spend all day here, barely aware of the outside world. Now he'd seen a good chunk of that outside world, and even the wildest virtual reality couldn't compare to physical reality.

It was several more moments before he was able to connect; they had set up so many levels of security and anonymity that it took half a minute just to initialize their connection. But finally he was in, and messages popped up in discreet windows to his left. He pointed at them, and began to read.

And he froze.

 

The sun shone with perverse happiness on the crowd of several hundred black-clad mourners gathered around the yawning grave. The crowd had that subtle air of class that permeated a group of powerful people. Thomas knew that senators, diplomats, high-powered lawyers, and a hundred other well-connected people made up that group. Plus the friends collected over a lifetime.

Thomas himself was not in the crowd; he was observing it from a distance, nearly halfway across the cemetery. Doodlehopper had gone nearly wild when he'd insisted on attending, and when he made it clear she'd have to physically restrain him—which she still could, if she wanted to—she finally let him, provided that she, Kino, and Karl provided constant protection. So she and Kino stood next to him, while Karl patrolled nearby for suspicious people.

He'd grown close to all of them in the past weeks, but right now they felt like weights on his shoulders. Miss Bright was gone. Her real name meant nothing to him; he just knew her as a good friend. His mind replayed their one physical meeting over and over again, wishing there was more, wishing he'd had more meetings, more conversations. He wished he'd been able to see her laugh, once. She had such a musical laugh online.

And, in that moment, a switch flipped inside him.

He turned to Doodlehopper and whispered, "Okay, that's it. I'm not running any more. There's another assassin coming after me tonight, right?"

Doodlehopper's eyebrows gathered as she nodded.

"Okay. I want you to give the file I recovered to your friends at Safe House. After I take care of the assassin tonight, we're going after whoever's behind this." Her eyes went wide and she began to shake her head, but Thomas continued, calmly but firmly. "A good friend of mine is dead. I can't...no, I won't keep running any more. I have to turn this around, turn it back towards them, or it will never be over."

She said nothing. Her expression of shock was slowly replaced with an admiring smile. And in that moment, he leaned down and kissed her.

It seemed to last for five minutes, but Thomas pulled away after what he knew must have been only a few seconds. His world swayed. Doodlehopper's expression was back at shock, but not anger...something tender. Not love, exactly, and certainly not lust. But tenderness.

He gave her a warm smile and said, "Okay, I'm ready to go."

And with that, they left the mourners with their dead.

 

They knew that running was no good, so they found a B&B and holed up there, knowing that with the night would come another attempt on Thomas' life. As they unpacked their suitcases in a Colonial-style bedroom, Thomas asked, "Why are they only sending one at a time?"

"Don't think they can spare any more," Karl answered, gruff as ever, as he continued unpacking. "A lot of s—" He glanced at Doo