Scary Out There (2 page)

Nim stood with her arms at her sides, waiting for it to complete its charge. As it reached her, she cut the barbed tongue out of its mouth and spun in a wobbly half circle, teetering on the launchpad.

She'd never been the most coordinated when it came to sports, but in Vertigo, it didn't matter if she wobbled on her actual feet—the game had gyroscopic stabilizers. Her headset was calibrated to the exact center of the launchpad though, and when she listed, the goggles glitched a little, creating a weird doubling effect—a blurry overlay that emphasized the line between the fake, virtual world and her own messy bedroom.

She caught her balance and the world righted itself. The severed tongue completed its arc and landed on the ground at her feet with a sloppy, squelching noise.

“Nim,” said her best friend, Margaret, who was farther along the tunnel, slicing through a pack of limbo demons in easy strokes. “I know you know this, but that knife is ridiculous.”

In the world of Vertigo, Margaret was nearly seven feet tall and mostly muscle and carried a machete made of fire and colloidal sulfur. It was surreal to watch this scarred giant brutalize her way through the game while Margaret-Margaret,
real
Margaret, was down in her basement wearing a USC T-shirt and a pair of boys' boxer shorts, listening to the Pixies with her headset on and her contacts out. She'd picked the biggest, baddest woman the character shop offered, but Nim suspected Margaret would have been just as happy as a man or a monster. Anyone but a short, grouchy Chinese girl with double-jointed fingers and a messy bob that was starting to grow out. People didn't bother you much when you were seven feet tall.

During the day they were . . . nobody, resigned to beigeness and boredom and tenth grade at Slope Hill, but when they logged on to Vertigo, they were magical.
Exceptional
.

There was something so gratifying about spending every day in ordinary-world, where people teased you or ignored you or called you fire-crotch (Nim) or flat (Margaret)—where
they talked over you every time you answered in class, going out of their way to make sure you knew exactly how little you mattered. There was something about sitting through all that and then leaving it, happily, voluntarily, for the scariest place on the network.

In Vertigo, it didn't matter who you were. While Margaret smashed her way through the darkest corners, challenging herself to gruesome, manic speed runs, Nim survived by being clever. She was patient and tidy—deviser of traps and torture devices and massive explosions that could take out fourteen enemies at once. Her favorite weapon was the game itself.

There were a lot of rules and limitations, of course—a physics engine that tended to overcorrect every little gesture, and a pretty nonsensical magic system—but there were ways of exploiting them.

“You want the rest of these limbos over here, or should I?” said Margaret, her voice buzzing brightly in Nim's ear. “You can have them. I just maxed out my bank.”

Nim stomped hard on the skin thief, then flicked the blood off her tiny knife and shook her head. Today, she was on a mission to figure out what to do with the dogs.

Vertigo had a roster of eighty-seven basic monsters. Most were sort of humanoid, with hypnotic lantern eyes or poison claws and only one or two basic attacks. The dogs were interesting. They were a problem, because no matter what, they could always hear you.

There were repellent sprays you could buy in the shop and a special bait you could make if you'd collected enough ugly, goopy mushrooms from a certain maintenance room down in the sewers that was really hard to find, but mostly you just snuck past them and tried not to make any noise.

Now Nim was on the hunt, cruising the derelict subway with a tiny knife and nothing else. The shadows felt warm and thick around her, almost like a solid thing. This was the magic of the headset—as soon as you put it on, every surface and texture was like life, only better. The world exploded into vivid clarity, and when a skin thief ran into the point of your knife and bled all over, it looked slick. Every sound and movement was amplified, translated through the headset with nightmare clarity.

Nim whistled softly, a long, low trill, and called under her breath, “Heeeere, puppy-puppy-puppy . . .”

The boy was standing in the open now, gazing at her across the tracks. Nim realized he was wearing a mask, but it was stupidly plain. The mask of a blank face. Of no one.

Even his outfit was nondescript—chinos and a polo shirt. He had no weapons that Nim could see. She wondered if maybe he had some kind of bonus that made him unattractive to basic enemies. It certainly wasn't impossible.

Vertigo was a strange and generous place. As long as you paid attention, there was treasure everywhere. A few months ago Nim had found a message on the wall of an abandoned
house that you could see only when the moon was up. She'd followed the clues to a cove on Dreadnought Island and was rewarded with a spell that made you disappear completely as long as you stood in a shadow.

She had a hat that stopped time, but only in a certain room in the basement of Noble Hospital, and a talisman that worked a little differently on every kind of demon.

She'd puzzled over riddles, investigated every mysterious door—performed every tedious, cumulative task the game presented her with.

Her newest acquisition was something called a Doomsday Glass. It didn't look like much—a silver disc that fit in the palm of your hand—but when you stuck it to the wall, it spread to the size of a doormat and hypnotized anything that came bopping along.

It struck Nim as severely limited. She didn't
want
to make monsters stare at themselves. It seemed too simple, and Nim's gaze narrowed to razor sharpness whenever Vertigo seemed simple. Now she was on a personal mission to find the place where the simple got complicated.

She'd positioned the glass on the ground between the subway tracks, and now it glittered faintly in the cool light while she prowled the tunnel for the dogs.

As she moved through the rubble—which actually meant doing a kind of little dance, scuffing the launchpad with her feet—she was pretty sure that one had spotted her. She could hear the
tap-tap
of
its claws, see the tendrils of smoke that drifted from between its teeth.

The problem of the dogs had a lot of variables. They were demonically fast when they wanted to be and could burn through most kinds of armor. She'd nearly died twice and wasted a lot of health packs before realizing something important. A dog could make a mess of you in about three seconds, but they never attacked until you looked at them straight-on.

This one was keeping pace. From the corner of her eye, she could see the glow of the coals burning way down in its throat. Picturing it made her think of fairy tales. She was a princess, small and innocent and attended by monsters.

Already, she heard the scrabble of the skin thieves. They respawned at a ridiculous rate—it was part of why Margaret liked to come down here.

The boy was closer too, watching as she wound through the rubble with the dog. And, yes, what she was up to probably looked weird, but the only thing that felt dangerous was the way he stared at her. He was using a newer character model—with dark, shaggy hair and a shambling walk—called James. His only defining features were the unremarkable chinos and, of course, the mask.

Nim stopped in the shadow of an overturned train car to wait for the dog, and when it caught up, she stepped across the subway rail and onto the Doomsday Glass. She did it slowly, carefully. The dog followed her.

The second its feet touched the glass, it seemed to tremble and grow bigger. She wondered if it would die. Explode. Attack. But it only shimmered slightly, then stayed where it was.

The boy was still standing on the tracks. As soon as he caught Nim's eye, she looked away. She felt dumb, but not dumb enough to stare him down. Sometimes boys could be weird about her and Margaret when it came to the game.

Case in point: There was a club that met after school to trade tactics and sell each other mods. Nim had gone once, thinking it might be fun—she could share her talent for finding secret items or at least be in a room with people who liked the same things she did. She and Margaret had been the only girls. Alex Ford's girlfriend was apparently a member, but she was at volleyball practice.

Almost immediately Nim had caused a stir by voicing her thoughts on how there were thirty costumes for her avatar, and every single one of them was a dress.

“Look, I
like
the game,” she'd said. It was an understatement that felt more like a cinder block. “I just think it would be neat for everyone to not see my underwear—okay?”

This spawned a philosophical discussion on whether the digital panties of an avatar were really even
her
underwear.

When Nim had tried to offer an olive branch—a really premium piece of intel about a Spirit Lamp that was somewhere in the Iron Wood—no one seemed to care much, and
Austin Bauer, who'd been in all her math classes since the eighth grade and was usually not a total dickbag, had actually told her it didn't exist.

After that, the meeting had mostly consisted of making fun of Nim for anything that seemed remotely girly. For giving her avatar a pretty hat. For caring about things like basic human decency and pants. For decorating her screen name with little demon-runes when they all passed around a sign-up sheet to share their launch codes in case anyone wanted to meet up on a particular board. Surprise—in the three weeks since they'd attended the meeting, no one had expressed any interest in meeting up with Nim or Margaret.

The whole thing had turned into one big, stupid obstacle course where the obstacle was always to prove that she knew what she was talking about. And every time she did, her proof was deemed insufficient and she was given another test, and another, just for committing the grievous offense of wishing her character could wear pants.

The next weekend Nim had been poking around in the Iron Wood and seen the supposedly nonexistent Spirit Lamp glittering beneath the roots of a thorn tree. She'd snagged the lamp, gotten the trophy, and—only partially out of spite—posted her triumph to the achievements board. She hadn't gone back to the games club.

The skin thieves were closer now, clattering through the rubble. They were coming for her. She backed away, trading
her knife for a scythe. She was efficient and precise, but not stupid. They might be weak alone, but they could still be dangerous in packs.

And then, as the thieves came slobbering at her around the Doomsday Glass, the dog did something quite surprising. It lunged from the glass and began to savage them.

So. Nim had found the place where the simple collided with the ingenious. Everything made sense again, and everything was even better than she'd thought. It was a good day.

Later though, when she logged out of Subway Run, there was a new message blinking on her dashboard. It was short and strange. It said:

From: jkx0x0

Hey Sugar,

You're not as good as you think you are.

It was signed
Mr. No One

Nim looked at it a long time. Then she hit the button and deleted it.

•  •  •

“Report him,” Margaret said at lunch, peeling back the top of her sandwich and picking through its guts with a plastic fork.

Nim flopped forward in her chair and put her head on her arms. “They'd just say how it isn't a terms violation and if it happens again maybe I should change my screen name to something more neutral and use a different avatar so I don't look so obviously . . .”

“Like you have
girl
parts?” Margaret said, rolling a lump of white bread into a ball and shoving it in her mouth.

The observation was built on a foundation of experience. Nim's first avatar had been a hyperfeminine model called Sugar, with a tiny waist and a cloud of red hair so voluminous and bright it nearly matched Nim's real-life color. She had
liked
the Sugar. It was curvy and pretty. It had looked like her, but better.

She'd regretted it almost immediately.

In Vertigo, the biological condition of being a girl meant a lot of attention, and not the good kind—in Nim's case, an impressive and never ending flood of messages about the carpet and drapes.

She stuck it out for a month, then traded in the orange haired Sugar for a model called Lola. It meant losing all her progress on Dreadnought Island, but she sucked it up and played the board again. She caught up to herself in a weekend.

The Lola was a hipless pixie with slender arms and basically no chest. She was about as asexual as you could get, with tiny hands and feet and hair so blond it was almost white. It was nothing like Nim's real-life hair, and that was kind of the point. Now, when she signed into Vertigo, she looked fragile, like she'd been through something mysterious and traumatic and had survived it. Her only act of rebellion had been to download a mod to put her Lola in pants.

It annoyed her that she was the only person who seemed
to care about this. When she'd broached it at the ill-fated games club meeting, the rest of them had looked at her like she was out of her mind.

Even Margaret didn't bother with mods—especially cosmetic ones. The homegrown stuff tended to be janky, and there were rumors that black-hat hackers built in all kinds of spyware and sketchy back doors to monitor your activity or highjack your machine. As far as Nim could tell, it was paranoid gossip. Most of the time the worst that happened was the homemade mods didn't work, or they sort of worked, and you wound up with your torso square with your headset and your hips somewhere off to the left, getting stuck against the wall when you tried to go through a door.

Anyway, it was a small price to pay to address the little issue that anytime the Lola climbed a staircase or a ladder, anyone behind her could look up her dress.