The Aftermath (21 page)

“What do you—”

Before I can stop myself, I shove my hands against his chest, sending him stumbling backward a few steps. “Answer me! No more lies. No deflecting the question. Just give it to me straight, Declan. You owe me that,” I shout.

Grabbing his chest, he lets out a hoarse noise that almost sounds like a laugh. Almost. “The entitlement. I swear you’re just like—” But then he stops himself. Squeezes his eyes shut as he pulls in a harsh breath. “No, it wasn’t bullshit. I’ve known from the day I met you that your link wasn’t the same. That the connection between you and your gamer is something different.”

I think of the way he rubbed the blue scanner across the crown of my head. The way he kept drawing his eyebrows together. My chest aches. “Then you must know why it’s different.”

“I didn’t come up with the games, Claudia,” he growls. “So, no, I have no explanation for why you’re special, Virtue.”

Something special that will get me captured—that will get everyone else killed. The moderators can easily track me because I’m still linked to Olivia. The longer I stay with Declan and Wesley and Mia, the more moderators and guards will come after us. My head will be the death of us all if I don’t go.

“I’m going off on my own, Declan. And you’re not going to follow me.”

He cups my face in his hands, his gray eyes burning into mine. “Don’t be stupid, Virtue. You need me with you if only to find your—”

But the longer we stay here arguing, the more likely it is that we’ll be found. And I won’t risk letting him or the others get captured. “I don’t think you understand, Declan. I
don’t
need you. I never have.” Lowering my gaze so I no longer have to look him in the eyes, I clear my throat and then whisper, “In fact, I want nothing more to do with you now that I know the way out of here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Declan doesn’t try to talk me out of leaving. It wouldn’t work even if he tried, but it physically hurts when he turns his back on me and stalks away, leaving me with nothing. No goodbye. No more words of anger. Absolutely nothing.

It’s better this way, I tell myself.

But if I’m so much better off, why does the knife in my chest twist deeper?

I say goodbye to Mia first. She cries. I pinch my fingers into the flesh on my thighs so I won’t do the same. “I don’t want you to go,” she says.

“I don’t want you to die.”

She lunges at me, throwing her arms around my upper body and squeezing. God, I don’t want to let her go. She smells dusty, like gravel, but it’s the best scent I’ve ever inhaled. I want more time with her.

I draw back from her and take her face between my hands. “Listen to me, I wasn’t honest with you. You’ve been in this game at least three years, and I’m so very sorry I kept that from you.” She tries to speak, but I shake my head. “If I can get out, I’ll find you. We’ll find Daniel together.”
If there’s anything left to find,
I add silently, and I know she’s thinking the same thing. The expression on her face leaves no doubt. She nods, and I hug her again.

Wesley walks with me for a quarter mile in the opposite direction, trying his best to get me to reconsider. “What the hell do you plan on doing?” he demands. “If they find you...”

“There’s no if. The question is when they’ll pick me up.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

I don’t want to go, either. But I smile up at him. His light gray eyes are narrowed. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “I’ll just bring you guys down. You have a better chance of reaching the border while the mods are playing hide-and-seek with me.”

“Claudia...”

“Which means you should go. Now. Before they show up. Why risk yourself?”

Tentatively, Wesley touches my ear and frowns. “Because I feel like I owe it to you.”

He doesn’t. His player owes me, but not him. I launch myself at him and squeeze my arms around him. “Go. Please?”

He hugs me back, pressing his cheek hard against the top of my head. Right on top of my Cerebrum Chip. I open my mouth to give him a message for Declan, but then I bite my lip and shake my head. “You never told me what you plan on doing when you get out.”

His eyes are suddenly hard. “I’m going after Thomas Lancaster.”

I leave Wesley, the boy who attacked me three years ago and now is my friend, standing in the middle of the road, dragging his hands through his short hair. I don’t look back until I’ve walked a good ten minutes and the only thing behind me is a blurry empty road. Only then do I stop. I drink a bottle of water and shift through the contents of my bag. Three more bottles. Two CDS packets. And Declan’s Triple C.

If I am going off on my own, I’m going to do things my way. I’m going to go back to that bar and save the people who I thought I cared about—since everyone else I care for is gone.

* * *

I am so thirsty I can no longer swallow.

Five hours ago, I stopped keeping track of how many miles I’ve walked. All I know is there’s a lump in my throat, my muscles ache and every noise makes me twitch and look over my shoulder. I walk a little longer, humming a song that’s both familiar and strange. I’m going crazy. By the time I’m deleted, I won’t even feel a thing because I’ll be so out of it.

The warehouse we stopped in right after deactivating Mia and Wesley comes into view. I hobble to it, hoping nobody has taken up shelter here since then.

It’s empty.

I return to the little room we holed up in for half an hour. I huddle in the corner and rest my head against the wall. Crumbled CDS wrappers litter the cracked concrete floor, and I close my eyes tightly so I don’t have to think of my friends. It doesn’t help. I remember how the four of us sat around eating, talking. Sharp pangs grip my chest. The first normal conversation I can remember, and most of it was probably a lie. Still, I miss Wesley and Mia.

I take tiny sips of water through a split lip, struggling to stay awake, and hate myself for missing Declan, too. I leave the warehouse after fifteen minutes. I can’t afford to stay any longer than that. Olivia hasn’t tried to get into my head for hours. Another person might consider themselves lucky, but not me. I’m waiting for everything to come falling down around me. And I’m too afraid to risk going into her head to try to find out when that will happen. LanCorp might be trying to put me in Rehabilitation again. If I open myself up to Olivia and they succeed, Declan’s not nearby to shake me out of my gamer’s tight grip.

“This will all be over soon,” I whisper as I break through the forest. I stare out at the asphalt in front of me, stretching miles to the west.

I walk. Farther away from the border. Away from Wesley and Mia. Away from Declan. Back into the poisonous cage.

* * *

The lights are on inside the bar. I didn’t even realize the place had working electricity; it makes me pause. I crouch down in the alley across the street. There’s a pile of clothes to my left that smells like urine, and I pull the neck of my shirt over the lower portion of my face.

What if my clan is no longer here? Olivia and The Aftermath’s staff has known about my ability for a couple of days now, so that means my old friends—the characters—might know, too. Maybe they moved to avoid a confrontation. But then I shake that thought from my head. Olivia is proud. She’d never tell anyone that I escaped, especially her gamer friends. She cares too much about her reputation.

I sit unmoving, like a character whose gamer has signed off, as the sun sets. Then I see something move on the second floor. My heart catapults into my throat as Jeremy peeks out a section of unpainted window. They are still here.

I wait, counting the seconds to make sure nobody is around.

I’ll go into the bar and deactivate their chips one by one. If I’m lucky, the majority of the other gamers will log off and I won’t have to put up with a struggle.

And while I’m waiting for the characters to wake up, for their minds to leave Rehabilitation behind, I’ll get into Olivia’s head. Bait her. Maybe I’ll take control of her again. That’ll give my clan a fighting chance of escape while she sends the moderators or whoever after me. She may plan to delete me, but I already know it won’t be right away. If that was the case, my life would have ended more than a day ago, when the moderators came after us at the rock yard—they were told to capture, not kill. She must want something else from me first.

I take out my gun and cock it. This has to be the dumbest plan I’ve ever come up with, more irresponsible than any raid I’ve ever been on. But I know that if I die after all this, I won’t feel as guilty. Freeing the others won’t make up for the people I killed while under Olivia’s control, but it’s better than escaping the game and leaving them behind to rot.

I dash across the street and into the alley. One of the windows is unlocked. I shimmy through it, groaning when I drop to the floor and pain shoots through my legs and hips.

It’s dark inside, and I creep across the hardwood floor, feeling around with my free hand for anything I might bump into. I reach the stairs. I climb them slowly. When I reach the top, I turn in the direction of The Save. My body is shaking as I pull the door open and step inside.

I slip on something wet and sticky. The air whooshes out of me as I hit the floor, and it takes me a minute to gather my bearings enough to climb up on my hands and knees to see what I stepped on.

Blood.

My heart jumps into my throat—falls out of my chest—and I strangle a scream. It’s still warm. When I cover my mouth quickly to hold back vomit, I can smell it and something else.

Charred flesh.

I scramble backward—away from the puddle. Away from death. My back bangs into the bed. A soft arm dangles into my face, smacking me in the forehead. A dead body.

No. No.
No.

I stumble to my feet and look down at the person lying on the bed. Short dark hair, a singed forehead and terrified brown eyes. Jeremy. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment to stop the tears burning the corners. Then I open them, scanning the room to see if April and Ethan are here—if their bodies are here.

“We thought we’d find you here, Virtue,” a voice says behind me. I turn around slowly to face a man. He’s dressed differently from the other moderators—in a light-colored uniform with the LanCorp insignia on the front. And he’s smiling. “If you’ll kindly come with us so that nobody gets hurt, we have a few—”

I lift the Glock and pull the trigger, cutting him off midsentence. There’s a look of surprise on his face as he falls next to the blood on the floor.

I don’t really care that three other people come barging in and send electricity thrumming through my veins.

This time when I pass out, there’s no other Claudia. No memories. No voices or out-of-body experiences, either. There’s just me, suspended in blackness and silence and pain. Like a puppet dangling in a dark room with a million needles poking into her flesh. I don’t have time to ask myself if I’m alive. Something shocks the back of my neck, and I convulse. I open my eyes, shrieking and choking on my own vomit, unable to move because I’m cuffed to a chair.

“Welcome back,” a man says, placing one hand on either side of my seat. He leans down so that his face hovers right over mine. He glances at his watch. “You’ve been out for nearly half an hour, Virtue.” My vision is hazy, and I have to squint so I can get a clear view of him. Short and stocky, with close-cropped auburn hair and a smooth face. He’s wearing the same outfit as the man I killed upstairs.

As he smiles down at me with straight teeth, I picture him with longer hair that brushes his collar, gapped teeth and a pockmarked face. Before he’s able to speak again, I hear myself murmur, “Bennett.”

“Glad to see you remember me, Claudia. I’ll be escorting you out of the game, to meet with Mr. Lancaster,” he says.

I remember him almost too vividly. He escorted me just over three years ago, too. To a blue-lighted laboratory where I was surrounded by machines—some transparent, some stainless steel and others the same metallic white of the Regenerator. I’d turned to him, with tears streaming down my face. “What he’s doing to me is wrong.”

“You’re a character now in LanCorp’s newest game.” He’d avoided my eyes, but when I tried to jerk away from him, he’d pressed an electroshock gun to my rib cage. “And if you try something reckless, I will electrocute you, Virtue. I don’t care who you are.”

As the memory dissolves, I look up into his eyes. “You killed Jeremy,” I whisper accusingly. I won’t say anything about the memory. Why bring up something that doesn’t fully make sense to me?

He leans back. “Well, you killed Anthony, did you not?”

I don’t even flinch when he tells me the name of the person I shot. Nor do I point out that Jeremy was dead before I made the move to do it. I swallow hard and choke out, “Where’s April and Ethan?”

“Where’s Hastings?”

I stare at him, unblinking. Unsure of what he’s talking about. After a moment of silence, he grits his teeth and shakes me. The cuffs around my wrists bite into my flesh. “Where’s Hastings?” he repeats.

“I’ve no idea who the hell you’re talking about,” I say.

He hits me. So hard I taste blood and spit. “Don’t be an idiot, girl. Declan Hastings, the boy you’ve been traveling with. Dark hair, gray eyes—a sarcastic little prick?”

Declan. Of course that’s who he’s talking about. I feel stupid for not catching on to Bennett immediately and even more ignorant for never asking Declan what his last name was. Funny to halfway fall for a boy when I don’t even know his full name.

But even if I’d asked, what’s to say he would’ve told me the truth? Just about everything that came out of Declan’s mouth was a lie.

“I don’t know where he is.”

Seething, Bennett draws back to hit me again, but then he catches himself. Balls up his fist. He looks over his shoulder to where the two other men stand at attention with their hands behind their backs and feet spread apart.

“Get me the other two characters,” he orders.

My heart jumps as the men go into the basement. They wouldn’t bring back dead bodies. Ethan and April must be alive. A few minutes later, my thoughts are confirmed when the rest of my former clan is led into the bar. The men force them down on their knees and position electroshock guns on the backs of their heads, execution-style.

I try to keep all emotion off my face. If I pretend as though these people mean nothing to me, they won’t be hurt. I narrow my eyes. “What are they here for?”

Bennett gestures to the man behind April, and he nods. He tangles his hand into her red hair, then jerks her head up. Her face is bloody, bruised. And when our eyes meet, there’s fear in hers.

She’s sentient.

I draw a painful breath into my lungs. Shift my eyes away from her quickly. “You get off on torturing someone who’s helpless?” I ask, my voice cracking midsentence.

“Where’s Hastings?”

“I. Don’t. Know.”

April lets out a scream that echoes throughout the room, and she sags forward, her face down toward the floor. I can see her tears dripping onto the hardwood.

“You would go off with a stranger with no clue where he’s going?” Bennett demands.

“Of course I knew where he was going. The border. Out of the game.”

“And after that?”

I shrug. “Why would he tell me that? I told you—I don’t know.”

Bennett flicks his hand, and there’s a loud thud, followed by Ethan coughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him curled into a ball, holding his stomach. He’s spitting up blood.

I cringe and squeeze my eyes shut. “Stop it.”

“I don’t know how,” Bennett says, mocking me.

The two men begin beating April and Ethan. Kicking and punching until their fragile bones give, the crunching sound even more deafening than the cries for help. I don’t know if either of them realizes that the men have drawn their electroshock guns, but I do. And a moment later, the scent of burned flesh mixes in with the odor of blood and vomit.