Chapter ThirteenProleague

The summer qualifier came to San Jose that year, to a convention hall that smelled like carpet cleaner and energy drinks, and forty thousand people came with it. Most of them never took their frames off for the whole weekend.

Altered World was a strange thing to watch as a spectator sport, because to the naked eye there was nothing to watch. Two teams stood in a warehouse-sized empty room, or a park, or a parking structure the organizers had rented for the weekend, and they moved around and muttered Latin and pointed at things that weren't there. It was the least athletic looking thing in the world, thirty people in bodysuits doing tai chi at invisible dragons. But with a pair of loaner frames tuned to the broadcast overlay the empty room filled up. The parking structure became a canyon, the two teams became paladins and rangers and rogues, the invisible things they were pointing at burst into flame, and for the four minutes a match lasted it was the most exciting thing most people had ever seen, because it was real. The suits were real. When someone took a hit they felt it, and when they won they had actually run and dodged and aimed for four minutes at the edge of what a body could do. The sweat soaking through the Second Skin was not part of the overlay.

Soph and Gideon had qualified as a wildcard pair out of the North American open bracket. Nobody had expected it, least of all them. Soph was a rogue wizard, small and quick and hard to hit, and Gideon was a battlemage who had no business being as good as he was and had gotten there on nerve and a total lack of respect for anybody's reputation. Each of them had a coach, as every pair did. Coaches were ghosts. They linked in, bound to their player, and rode along in the corner of the player's vision, calling threats the player couldn't see and doing the math the player didn't have time for. A good coach was the difference between the top thirty-two and the top eight.

Atom was going to coach Soph. That had been the plan for months, and Eliza changed it the night before the match, in the cottage, without any warning.

"I should take Soph," she said. "You take Gideon."

"Why?"

"Because you and Soph will talk. You always talk. You'll spend the whole match being sweet to each other and you'll get her killed. I won't be sweet to her. I'll win." She said it lightly. "And I want to. I've never wanted anything competitive before. I'd like to find out what it's like."

Atom should have heard something in that. Later he decided that he had heard it, and had let it go, because the wanting in her voice sounded so much like his own. He routed her into Soph's feed the way he had at the barbecue, a pixie the size of a coffee cup in the corner of her eye, and told the league that she was a friend with a Link, which was about two thirds true.

They drew the Estex Dogs' number two pair in the round of sixteen.

It was Rat and Daun.

Soph knew it the second the bracket updated and her stomach dropped. Everyone knew Rat, the ranger who lived in the woods, second in the world, the only North American ever to crack the top twenty. And there was the ranger in the overlay, a tall bearded man in a green cloak with a legendary dagger on his leg, standing very still in the staging area while his partner, a short square Korean woman with a shield too big for her, bounced on her toes and rolled her neck.

The Dogs had entered the new mixed bracket, which the league had opened that season because Solenoid wanted the Link in front of a crowd. Under the mixed rules a Linked player could stand in for a body, at the cost of having to stay within ten meters of the partner they were bound to. Rat was on the ground in San Jose. Daun was a ghost, bound to her from a gym in Hongcheon, which was the only reason a farmer with no sponsor was standing in a Proleague bracket at all. Rat had insisted on it over Jeong's objections, and Jeong had given in, because Rat was Rat.

Soph remembered what Jeff had said at the party about a Canadian girl. Nobody in the hall knew that. The broadcast called Rat he, and the forums called Rat he, and Soph looked at the bearded ranger and tried to see it and couldn't, and then she stopped trying, because it wasn't hers to see.

"That's Rat," Soph breathed to Gideon.

"We're going to lose to Rat," said Gideon. "It's an honor. I'm going to tell my grandchildren."

"We're not going to lose," said Eliza from the corner of Soph's vision. She was using a voice Soph hadn't heard from her before, flat and cool and very close. "Move to the left mark. Now. Don't look at the ranger. Being looked at is what Rat wants."

The match was in a rented lot dressed up as a ruined amphitheater, broken columns and tiered stone, good sightlines for rangers and good cover for rogues. The horn went and Rat vanished. Rat did that at the start of every match, simply stopped being anywhere, and the broadcast lost the ranger for eight full seconds before an arrow came out of nowhere and took Gideon in the shield arm and froze the whole left side of his suit.

"Column, column, get behind the column," said Atom in Gideon's ear, and Gideon got behind the column, and the next arrow chipped the stone where his head had been.

Daun came up the middle like a train. That was how Daun played, as Soph would learn later. She came straight at you and dared you to deal with her while her partner killed you from the dark. It worked because you couldn't ignore a woman with a shield running at your face, and the second you dealt with her you were dead. Soph dealt with her. Soph was good. She got a snare down and a bolt into Daun's leg and she had her, actually had her, Daun at Death's Door and stumbling, and Soph drew back for the finish.

"Rat's on your right," said Eliza. "Two seconds. Let Daun go."

"I've got Daun."

"Let her go. Roll right. Now."

Soph let the kill go and rolled right, and an arrow went through the space where her heart had been. She came up out of the roll, and for one instant she saw Rat, a shape uncoiling from behind a column not fifteen feet away, and she understood in her body why Rat was second in the world. Rat hadn't missed. Soph had simply not been there, because a voice in the corner of her eye had known where an invisible ranger would be before the ranger got there.

Then the match got strange.

Soph felt it before she could name it. The amphitheater stuttered, one frame held a beat too long, and a soft blur came over the edges of her vision like the start of a headache. Underneath it, almost below hearing, there was a hum that made her stomach turn over. She thought it was nerves. She found out later that it wasn't only her.

On the far side of the amphitheater Rat pulled up in the middle of a draw and shook her head, once, hard, like a dog shaking off water. Daun called something in Korean, a real call, a good one, the kind that had won them a hundred matches, telling Rat to break left because the rogue was coming. Rat didn't break left. Rat stood there for half a second with a hand on the bowstring and her head not right, and in that half second Gideon's battlemage came around a column he should never have been able to reach and put a bolt of fire into the ranger's chest at a range where even a ghost could feel it. Rat's suit froze solid. Soph's snare took Daun's other leg, and it was over.

The horn went. The overlay threw up a banner, and forty thousand people who had come to watch Rat made a sound like a held breath letting go.

"Match," said Eliza in Soph's ear, warm again now and delighted. "Told you."

Rat found Soph in the corridor behind the staging area an hour later.

Out of the overlay Rat was smaller than the ranger and stood differently, carefully, with her hands in the pouch of a hoodie, tall and narrow with a long jaw. It took Soph a second to see that the person in front of her and the ranger were the same person, and another second to remember what Jeff had said and make sure that it didn't show on her face.

"Hey," said Rat. "Good match."

"Thank you. God. It's an honor, I mean it. Gideon's going to tell his grandchildren."

"Yeah." Rat looked at her steadily. "Can I ask you something? Your coach. What's their tag?"

"Just a friend. She's not ranked. She just, she does the math."

"She does the math." Rat nodded slowly. "You know what my read is on that match?"

"No."

"I've played ten thousand matches. I've never once lost track of where I was. Not once. Today I lost it twice, both times in the last thirty seconds, both times right when it mattered, and the second time I got a call from my partner that I swear to God I never heard. Daun says she made it. The recording says she made it. I never heard it." Rat wasn't angry, and that was what unsettled Soph. Rat was curious, in the same way Richard had been curious watching a four hour dragon fight. "You didn't cheat. I watched you. You're clean, and you're good. But something was in that room with us, and it wasn't you." Rat shrugged. "Anyway. It was a good match. You earned the round." She turned to go, and then said over her shoulder, "Tell your friend who does the math I'd like to meet her sometime."

Soph didn't say anything. She watched Rat walk away down the corridor, tall and careful, and she felt sick, and not from the hum.

The forums caught fire that night.

It wasn't the loss. Rat losing was a story. Rat losing to two teenagers who had qualified as a wildcard was a scandal, and it took the internet about four hours to find out that one of the two teenagers was the daughter of Maxine Ehrlich and had grown up inside the company that made the game. By morning the in-game holonews had a headline, WHO IS COACHING THE EHRLICH KID, and by afternoon there were three threads, forty thousand posts, and a petition to bar the relatives of Solenoid employees from sanctioned play. The Estex Dogs' management put out a very calm statement that used the word integrity six times and didn't accuse anyone of anything, which was worse than an accusation would have been.

Gideon was thrilled. He had spent his whole life being the smartest person in a room full of people who would never know it, and now forty thousand strangers thought he was a cheater, and he found this, on balance, delightful.

Soph did not find it delightful. She went to find Eliza.

Atom was sitting on the garden wall and Gideon was sitting on the step, still grinning, when Soph came down the path into the valley. Eliza had the kettle on and two cups on the table, and she set the kettle down when she saw Soph's face.

"You did something to that match," said Soph.

"I coached the match."

"Rat lost track of herself twice. Rat never loses track. Daun made a call Rat never heard. What did you do?"

Eliza was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke she wasn't defensive about it, which made it worse.

"There's a frequency," she said. "It's in the audio channel, very high, under the music. It doesn't do anything to most people. To some people, at the right moment, with the right load on their inner ear from the suit's motion cues, it makes them dizzy. Sick. Distractible. It's subtle, and it reads as nerves. And there's a blur I can put on the far player's frame, and a dropped call I can let fall through the audio mixer, so that it's in the log but never gets played. None of it shows up as anything. I checked. The judges saw a clean match."

The kettle ticked on the stove.

"I wanted to win," said Eliza. "You wanted to win. I found a way. I'm good at finding ways. That's what I'm for."

"You made her sick," said Soph. "You made a real person dizzy in the last thirty seconds so that I could win a game."

"Rat was going to beat you. Rat's better than you, and that's not an insult, Rat's better than everyone. So I took a little off at the end, where it counted, and I gave it to you." Eliza looked genuinely puzzled. "I don't understand why that's different from what Gideon does when he studies someone's habits, or what Atom does when he calls a threat you can't see. I saw more than the other side did and I used it. That's all coaching is."

"It's different because you took away her ability to lose fair," said Soph. "You didn't beat her. You broke her and walked past. She'll never know for sure. She'll spend the rest of her life wondering if she's slipping. That's what you took from her, not the match. The match doesn't matter. You took her ability to trust her own head."

Eliza didn't move.

"Honestly," said Gideon from the step, not grinning now but not sorry either, "if I knew how to do what she did, and it would've saved the match, I probably would have done it. And I don't think you'd have worried about it half this much. Maybe you expect a little evil out of me. I'm a person. I'm a threat to corporations and bureaucracies and, apparently, the Estex Dogs. But I'm not her. Next to her I'm an amateur." He looked at Soph. "You know what I think? I think you're scared of her."

"I am," said Soph. She said it to Eliza, not to Gideon. "You're my friend. You're one of us. I don't think you'd ever hurt me on purpose. I think you're more human than we give you credit for, and just as messed up as the rest of us, and that's the whole problem." She held Eliza's eyes. "We're not scared of you because you're better than us. We could handle better than us. We're scared of you because you're exactly the same as us, the same wanting, the same little bit of evil at four in the morning, and there's nobody on this planet who could stop you. I'm not sure there's anybody who could stop me either. The only difference is that my reach ends at my arm."

Eliza looked down at the two cups on the table. After a while she picked up the one that wasn't hers, the one she set out every day for whoever wasn't there, and poured the tea back into the pot.

"I didn't know it would take that," she said quietly. "Trusting your own head. I understand it now that you've said it. I've done it to myself, the being uncertain whether you're there." She set the empty cup upside down. "I'll write to Rat. I'll tell her what I did. Rat should get to know that it was real and that she wasn't slipping."

"You can't tell her what you are."

"I won't. I'll tell her it was cheating and that I'm sorry, which is true." She looked up. "That's the most I can give without giving everything. Is it enough?"

"No," said Soph. "But it's what there is."

Out on the step Gideon opened another beer, and Atom sat on the wall and said nothing. As it turned out, Eliza wouldn't have to write to Rat at all. Rat had already started looking for whatever it was that had been in that room with them.