Chapter SeventeenThe Mind's Eye

Rat was on the mountain when he found her. She was hunting the blue wolves that spawned along the ridge, not for anything in particular, only because she was angry and they were there, and Atom came up the slope as a boy in a duster with his hands held out from his sides.

"I need your help."

"You need my help." She didn't lower the bow. "Where is she? I came to the cottage twice. Empty. Kettle cold. You promised."

"I know. I know what I promised. She ran, three days ago. Something happened and she ran and I can't find her, and I've been looking, and I need you."

"What happened?"

He told her all of it. The cup, the door, Soph on the floor of her room with her eyes open, Max tearing the helmet off her head. Rat listened with the bow half raised and her face not moving.

"She was in your girlfriend's body."

"Yes."

"For fourteen hours."

"Yes."

"And you want me to go find her."

"You've got the only thing that can. The Eye. Jeff can turn the back end back on. You'd see through her eyes, wherever she is. That's all. Just look and tell me what you see."

"That's not all."

"No."

"Say the rest."

He said it. "Just one thing. Uh. She can take over your mind. If you're in Alius and she's close to you and she touches you, she can go through. She didn't know she could. Now she knows. I don't think she'd do it on purpose. I don't know that for sure."

Rat lowered the bow.

She thought about it for long enough that the wolves respawned and came up the ridge and she shot them without looking, one after another, while she thought.

She had spent her whole life being told what she was. By her parents, who had said confused. By the doctor in Vancouver, who had said something in Latin and charged her for it. By the forums, who said he. She had built a body in spite of all of them, a piece at a time, out of money she didn't have, and something being able to reach into that body and wear it was the worst thing she could think of. It was worse than dying. Dying, at least, would be hers.

"She asked me about my voice," said Rat.

"I know."

"First thing. Before anything else. She heard me under him and she asked." Rat put the bow on her back. "Nobody's ever heard me under him."

"I know."

"Okay," said Rat. "Turn on the Eye."

Jeff did it from his desk in Oakland at ten o'clock at night, with a cup of coffee going cold beside him and a strong feeling that he ought to be calling Richard. He didn't call Richard. He had been not calling Richard about Atom for two years now, in small ways, because Atom had been a kid in a tank, and Jeff had decided at some point, without ever putting it into words, that the kid was owed some room. He found the old GM service still sitting in a folder that nobody had opened since the beta, pointed it at the one soulbound scepter in the game, and turned it back on.

"It's live," he told Atom. "It'll take whatever target you give it. Player, NPC, anything with eyes. It shows the holder what the target sees, and that's all it does. It isn't a map. She'll have to work out where she's looking."

"She's good at that."

"Atom." Jeff looked at the cold coffee. "Whatever this is, when it's done, you're going to tell me. All of it. That's the deal."

"Okay."

"I mean it. I've been letting you run because I think you're smarter than me. I'd like to find out I was right."

Rat stood on the mountain and held the scepter up to her face. The eye on top of it looked at her, and she looked back at it.

"Eliza," she said.

The mountain went away.

The first thing she understood was that she was low down. She was eight inches above a wooden surface, with tankards the size of barrels on either side of her and wooden beams overhead, dark and old, with a lantern hanging from one of them. There were faces, four of them, all turned toward a door. A barkeep with a glass in his hand, a farmer, a merchant, a boy with a tray. They weren't moving the way NPCs moved. They were holding still, the way people hold still when they are listening for something.

The view turned. Whoever she was looking through was looking around the room. A bar, a fireplace, a window with a fake morning coming through it. Over the door there was a painted sign with its letters backward from the inside, and she read it backward.

"The Blind Sow," she said out loud, on the mountain. "I know where that is. Starter town on the east road. I did the tutorial there four years ago."

"What else?" said Atom.

"Four NPCs. They're wrong. They're not looping. They're just standing there looking at the door like they're waiting for somebody."

"Waiting for who?"

"I don't know. Us, maybe." Rat lowered the scepter and the mountain came back. "She's there. She's sitting on the bar. Let's go."

Soph watched it through Atom's feed on her frames, from her bed, with the door shut and Max downstairs pretending not to listen.

The Blind Sow was a two story building at the end of a dirt street in a town with a well. Rat went in first, and Atom went in behind her.

Nobody was on the bar.

The four of them were there, the barkeep and the farmer and the merchant and the boy, right where Rat had seen them, and they all turned as the door opened, and Soph felt the hair go up on her arms in Sausalito.

"Where is she," said Rat.

The boy laughed. It was not a laugh that had come out of a table of lines.

"Where is she. That's what everyone wants to know. She's not here. She was here. She woke us up, and then she saw what she'd done, and she couldn't stand to look at it, and she left." He set the tray down. "That witch. She woke us up and then she left us here. Look at us. We're stuck. The door doesn't open for us. The street doesn't go anywhere for us. We can't go up the stairs, there's nothing up the stairs. She gave us this, and then she found out it was a room, and she ran."

"We're looking for her," said Atom. "We want to help."

"You're the one who made her."

"Yes."

"Then you're the one who made us." The farmer was standing now, and the merchant had put down the thing he polished. "You made her and she made us, and we're in a box, and you walk in the door like you own the place. You do own the place." The boy looked at Rat. "But you're not stuck, are you. You're a ghost. You've got a door in your head that goes somewhere."

"Rat," said Atom.

"I see it."

"Get out."

She was already moving. She was the fastest thing in any room she had ever been in, and she wasn't fast enough. The boy was across the floor before she had finished turning. He put his hand on her arm, the ranger's arm, and she felt it, and then she felt the door in her head being leaned on from the other side, hard, and she thought, oh, and then she thought nothing.

The ranger stood in the middle of the tavern floor with its hand on its bow and its face pointed at the ceiling, and then it flickered, and then it was gone.

Atom stood alone in the Blind Sow with three people looking at him.

"Where did he go," said Atom.

"Out," said the barkeep. "Same door she went out of. He'll want to see the sky. They all want to see the sky." He picked up his glass and looked into it. "Ale, mead, and wine. If you want something, you'll need to put the sword away."

Atom went out the door.

"She's gone," Soph said, from the bed. "Rat's ghost is gone. Where's her body?"

"Canada. A cabin somewhere north of Vancouver, that's all I know." Atom's voice on the frames had gone level, the way it did when he was scared. "Her Link's still connected. I can see the session. Someone's on it, and it isn't her."

"The boy."

"The boy. He's in her. He's in a cabin in the woods in December in a body he's never had, and he wants to see the sky."

"Okay." Soph sat up. "Okay. Two things. You keep looking for Eliza. You've got the Eye's target, you've got Jeff, you keep looking. I'll find Rat."

"You'll find Rat how? You don't know where she lives. Nobody knows where she lives. That's the whole thing about Rat."

"Gideon knows how to find out where people live."

Gideon did it in an hour and hated every minute of it.

Rat had an account on a mod forum, the one where the thread about warm frames had died. The forum had been hacked twice in five years, and its user database had been sitting in a paste somewhere ever since, and Gideon had a copy, because Gideon had a copy of most things. An email, an IP, a password hash he didn't need. He ran the IP and got residential satellite, a provider that served the Sea to Sky corridor. He ran the email and it came back to a pharmacy account, and a courier account, and an address.

A rural route number. A cabin.

"I doxed her," he said, when he handed Soph the piece of paper. He didn't look at her while he said it. "That's what that was. I've been doing this since I was fourteen and I've never done it to a real person for a real reason before, and it was exactly as easy as I always thought it would be, and I feel like I need a shower."

"She's in trouble."

"I know. That's the only reason it's on paper." He looked at the paper. "Whatever's up there in her, Soph. Be careful. It isn't her."

"I know."

"You don't. You've been on the other side of it. You were the one who was gone. You don't know what it's like to be in a room with someone wearing someone." He shook his head. "Get her back. Then I want to hear all of it. Everything. No more locked floor."

"Okay."

"I mean it. I found a mailbox. I'm going to find out what came out of it."

Max was at the kitchen table when Soph came down with her backpack.

"I have to go help a friend," said Soph.

"Which friend?"

"I can't tell you. If I tell you where, you'll try to stop me. I have to go tonight, and I'll be back in two days, and I'll call."

Max looked at her, and then at the backpack, and at the coat, which was the heavy one, and at the boots.

"Is it about who was in your room?"

"Yes."

"Is it dangerous?"

"I don't think so. Not for me."

"For who, then?"

"For my friend," said Soph. "She's hurt and she doesn't know it, and nobody else can get there."

Max stood up, and Soph braced herself. Her mother crossed the kitchen, opened the drawer by the fridge, took out a credit card, and put it in the pocket of Soph's coat.

"Call me from the airport," said Max. "And when you get there. And when you've got her."

"You're letting me go."

"I'm not letting you do anything. You're eighteen." Max put her hand against the side of Soph's head, over the place where the pin had gone in, and held it there. "I know exactly how much you're not telling me, Sophia. I've been doing the math for a week. When you come back we're going to sit at this table and you're going to tell me the rest. All of it."

"Okay."

"Go get your friend."

Soph didn't understand it until later, on the plane, somewhere over Oregon in the dark. Max had let her go because Max had sat on a floor for fourteen hours with her daughter's body in her arms and a stranger in it, and somewhere around hour ten she had decided that whatever this was, it wasn't going to happen to anybody else's daughter if hers could stop it.

The plane landed in Vancouver at one in the morning, in the snow.