Socket 1 - The Discovery of Socket Greeny (19 page)

“We used to do everything together,” he said.
“Now Chute’s out there and you’re… doing whatever you’re
doing.”

“It’s not a vacation, Streeter. Believe me, I
wish I never left.”

It was the closest I came to telling him
something. The clamp didn’t budge.

The teams squared off at center pitch again.
This time the lookit dropped the tag to our team. Our center took
it behind three blockers and set up a play. Chute flared out to the
left.

Streeter wasn’t watching. He was thinking. I
gently elbowed him, reminded him that he was the most popular
virtualmoder at school. Reminded him he was globally ranked. I
mean, the school trusted him to patch the security codes into the
portal. I reminded him that he would never be alone, if that’s what
he was thinking.

He nodded, but he wasn’t listening.

Our team lost the tag. The visiting crowd
cheered.

“Remember when we were kids and you and Chute
would come over?” Streeter said. “We’d enter Level V tournaments
when we were Level I. Remember what we named our team?”

“Watchdogs,” I said. “And we got
slaughtered.”

“You would spend the night and once my
grandparents were asleep, we’d virtualmode to another
tournament.”

“And get slaughtered again.”

“Remember the time we planted a data bomb in
the principal’s account and froze it for a week?”

“
You
planted it.”

He looked up at the moon hanging just above
the school. “I’m going to miss all that.”

The Bolters looked to score again but lost
control of the tag. The visiting fans groaned.

“You’ll invent something and become filthy
rich,” I said. “Maybe Chute will become a professional tagger. It
doesn’t matter, none of that changes the team, Streeter. We’re the
original Watchdogs.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What’re you
going to be doing?”

“I’m sure I’ll be around.”
I might
disappear, but I’ll be around.

Now I had the distant look. What if the clamp
got removed and I returned to the Garrison for good. What would Mom
tell them then?
He went on vacation. Forever.

“She’s open.” Streeter jerked my
sweatshirt.

Chute slipped past the defensive line. Her
teammate had the tag. He got around a defender, darted to the
sideline and zipped a sharp pass across the center pitch. Chute
caught it fully extended.

We stood on our seats.

Chute lost her balance for a moment and a
defender intercepted her on the way to the dome. Chute leaned
heavily to the left, pulled the jetter almost on its side to stop.
She juked left. Right. The defender lunged after the tag dangling
from the end of her stick. Chute spun, got behind him. Her stick
flexed to the limit and the tag came off like a bullet, just a blur
that straight-lined into the center of the green cube.

GOAL!

The home bleachers were about to come
crashing down under the cheering stomps. Streeter and I were the
only ones cheering on our side of the field. Chute’s face appeared
on the scoreboard, strands of red hair plastered to her cheeks. She
was mauled by her teammates.

For a moment, I forgot about the clamp. I
forgot about the Paladins and the uncertainties and all the
unanswered questions. I wanted to run down there and hug her. I
wanted to drag Streeter with me and we’d squeeze her until her head
popped off. I wanted it to be just another night in our lives, just
like it was when we were Watchdogs.

“Socket?” Streeter said.

He tugged at the back of my sweatshirt. I was
busy screaming Chute’s name through my hand-megaphone, hoping she’d
hear me. I thought about nojakking her but there was no way she had
it turned on.

“Socket!”

I shrugged my shoulder. It felt like he had
his arm around me. “Dude, what are you doing?”

“What the hell is that?”

“What’s what?”

He looked at my opposite shoulder. He didn’t
have his arm around me. A long red tail curled under my chin.
Rudder poked his head around my hood, his golden eyes looking into
mine. I quickly stuffed him inside my hoodie. No one but Streeter
seemed to notice.

I looked around, completely suspicious, then
pulled the collar out and whispered, “What’re you doing here?”

Rudder purred against my chest. Warmth
radiated deep inside.

“Did I just see that?” Streeter said.

I sneaked a few glances around, then opened
my sweatshirt for Streeter to look inside. It might’ve looked
creepy, but no one was watching. I started to introduce them, but
knew the clamp would start thumping. “Ummm… this is… one of the
things I can’t talk about.”

Streeter stared. Rudder stared back. Blinked.
Waved his little fingers. Streeter waved back. He looked like he
was waving to a… well, waving to a little dragon in my sweatshirt.
The lady in front of us turned around. I smiled back until she was
uncomfortable enough to look away. Rudder crawled around my side,
tickling my ribs up to my neck. I tried to grab him.

“What’s it doing?” Streeter said.

“I don’t know.”

I reached into my hood to pull him off, but
he scampered up to the back of my neck, lay flat against the thin
red line, and purred louder. The vibrations sank into the clamp.
The ever present ache, low and dull, faded. I almost drooled. I
bent over and hid my face. I think Streeter said something. The
vibrations got stronger, warmer and deeper. Rudder suctioned
tightly to my skin.

There was a sharp energy beside me. Clear and
clean.
Streeter. I’m feeling Streeter!
I braced myself for
the clamp to buck, but it lay still beneath Rudder. I opened my
mind to the ebb and flow of the crowd’s collective energy. The joy
and frustration, cheer and anger. The essence of hundreds of people
mingled through me.

A scene unfolded in my mind. Mom went to the
grimmet tree. Rudder came to her, as if he was waiting for her. The
other grimmets sat on the branches and watched her walk off with
him on her shoulder. She took him outside the Garrison. At the base
of the cliff, she held him up.

“Free him,” she said.

Rudder shot from her hands, smudging the air
red like a streaking star.

I opened my eyes. The game was still on. The
air was thick. There was a charge in it, an unnatural tension, like
the moments before lightning strikes.

[Pivot came to her.]
Rudder’s thought
was as clear as if he’d spoken it.
[He told her to release you
from the clamp.]

Pivot’s back? Is he all right? Do the
Paladins know?

[He told her They are coming.]

Who?

[You must get your friend.]

Streeter?

[The girl.]

Who are They?!

He returned to working on the clamp.
[You
must hurry.]

It was nearly halftime. Chute was flying
across the center pitch, her stick up high calling for the tag.

They
were coming. That could mean only
one thing. The duplicates were going to fight back.

No one would forget this night.

I could feel them. The duplicates were here,
at the game. I stood up and looked over the crowd. I sniffed the
air like a bloodhound. There was a scent, a feeling, but I couldn’t
locate it. The clamp wasn’t completely deactivated; Rudder was
still working.
Faster. Go faster, Rudder.

“Sit down, clown,” someone said behind
me.

Streeter stood next to me. “What’s going
on?”

There were hundreds of people here. I sensed
all their individual essences intermingle, how their emotions ebbed
and flowed, what kind of thoughts they were having. Somewhere out
there was a different flavor. Something that tasted plastic-like,
something fake.
Duplicated
.

“Hey, the both of you,” someone shouted. “We
can’t see the game.”

The lady in front of us turned around. It
wasn’t her. I could feel her pulse quicken when I looked at, looked
into
her. I could taste her essence. The same for the people
around us. Even the guy that was standing up and reaching over a
row to snatch my hood to get my attention. He was real.

I pushed Streeter to the side and we forced
our way to the isle without waiting for people to move. One guy
told us to get some fucking manners. I stopped on the steps. The
fake feeling was stronger. Streeter was apologizing behind me when
I saw it. The eighteen-wheel truck was still in the parking lot. It
was rocking side to side. Something was getting ready to
escape.

I took the steps three at a time. “STOP! GET
EVERYONE OUT OF THE BLEACHERS!”

No one could hear me except the people around
me that figured another high school kid lost the battle with drugs.
I leaped off the bottom step and crashed on the track that circled
the field, then I jumped the fence onto the soft grass. I sprinted
onto the field, waving my arms. “CLEAR OUT THE BLEACHERS!” I
screamed at the home crowd.

Whistles were blowing. Assistant coaches were
already after me. The taggers slowed down to watch the madman
sprint over center field. I kept ahead of my pursuit, made it to
the other sidelines, leaping over the other fence. I could hear
them laughing. The security guard was nowhere to be found. Every
lookit was on my tail beaming their eyelight at me but they weren’t
going to do shit.

I made it around the home bleachers and no
one was listening, but people got out of my way. There were half a
dozen men after me, some of them fans just trying to keep the crazy
off the field.

“EVACUATE THE BLEACHERS!”

The parking lot was fifty yards away. The
truck was going side to side so violently that the tires were
lifting off the ground. People were taking notice and I felt a
shift in mood. Some already were moving in the other direction. But
I couldn’t stop. I had to let them all see where I was going. They
all had to see that something was about to happen.

A man appeared in front me. Just appeared.
His clothes snug and dark blue. Another two men blipped into
existence next to him, their hair cut tight. Their expressions
hard.
Paladins
.

I stopped. My pursuit stopped, too. They saw
the Paladins materialize from a timeslice. I understood they had
temporarily stopped time but the others didn’t. They were trying to
process how these hard men just appeared and what they were doing
with the spikes in their hands. Why were they sticking them into
the ground and why was a yellow laser beaming straight into the
dark sky?

“CLEAR THE AREA!” I pushed past the gathering
crowd and their blank stares. I clenched my hand, searching for a
grip on a timeslice but couldn’t get there. “SOMETHING’S IN THE
TRU—”

The explosion was bright.

Then it was dark.

It sounded like a high pitch.

I couldn’t remember what I was going to do.
It was something. Something urgent.

The darkness took form. First it was just
that some blobs were darker than others. Then there were lighter
colors flapping through the darkness. It looked like snow drifting
out of the sky. I had that feeling like I needed to wake up for
school or something. A blurry face popped up like a puppet.

“We got to go!” Streeter’s voice was far
away.

I could taste the tang of blood. The
fluttering white things, they were debris: paper and cups and
popcorn bags. Panic crawled over me. The atmosphere tensed.
Streeter pulled me up. “Are you all right?”

I touched my head. The bleachers were
partially shattered. People were running. They were screaming. I
saw people pulling limp bodies from the wreckage. I saw some bodies
that were just laying there.

“We got to go, get up.” Streeter pulled some
more. “Get up, man. WE GOT TO GO!”

I got up and the world was wobbling. The
Paladins were setting more spikes that looked like yellow bars
circling the flaming truck. Beyond that, the school walls had
crumbled. Half of the dome over the Pit was missing. With each
spike and yellow bar, the heat from the roaring fire cooled. They
were sealing off the site, protecting the civilians. They only had
six up when the thing blew again. I could hardly feel the second
explosion except through the ground. What would the place look like
if they had got here a minute late? Would there be anything
left?

Maybe they weren’t protecting the public.
Maybe they were here to catch something.

Streeter led me onto the field. I stumbled
after him. People ran past. Half a dozen taggers lay in the grass.
Chute was one of them. I pushed Streeter off and ran, sliding into
her on my knees, wrapping her in my arms. A blue knot was on her
forehead, blood trickling between her eyes.

She touched my lip. “You’re hurt,
Socket.”

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Can
you stand?”

She saw Streeter behind me. “What’s
happening?”

The ground shook from a muted explosion, this
one not as intense. The yellow bars had contained most of the sound
as well as the impact. “Socket.” Streeter pawed at my arm. “Socket,
Socket… you got to… you got to see this.”

The dome had completely collapsed, and fire
erupted from it, licking the sky. Something was poking out of the
burning trailer. It looked like a tree branch, but it wasn’t
burning. It was growing out of the flames, red-hot and pointing up,
and then it bent on a hinge as it cooled. It grew longer and bent
at another hinge several feet below the first. More of them
emerged, bending at angles until they were long enough to reach the
ground and lift an oval body from the carnage. The giant daddy long
leg spider stepped out of the flames, its glowing body cooling.

The crawlers had come with the Paladins. They
would save us. But something wasn’t right. Why were they coming
from the truck?