Chapter EighteenSnow

The rental car, from a place near the airport that had not looked at her birthday very hard, gave out a kilometer short of the cabin. Soph left it in a drift with the hazards on and walked the rest of the way in boots that were heavy for Sausalito and a joke for here.

The road was only a road because the paper said so. It went up through the trees under a foot of new snow with nothing on it but her own tracks. The cabin was at the end of it, small and dark, with a satellite dish bolted to a stump out front and snow piled up in the dish, and there was no smoke from the chimney.

She knocked, and nothing happened. She knocked again and said Rat's name, which felt strange to say out loud, in the cold, at a real door. Nothing.

Atom was on her frames. He had been quiet since the car.

"Go around," he said. "Look for tracks."

She went around. The snow at the back door was trampled flat in a small circle, the way it gets when somebody stands in one place turning around and around, and out of the circle went a line of prints. They were bare feet. Soph stood and looked at them. Ten meters on they turned into boot prints, and beside the boot prints, in the snow, there was a pair of socks.

"She stopped and put boots on," said Atom. "Or he did. He figured out feet."

The prints went into the trees, and Soph followed them. The frames laid the game over the woods as she walked, a faint blue over the snow, a nameplate on a tree that said << Spruce >> because somebody at Solenoid had thought that was funny. She turned the overlay off. She wanted to see what was actually there.

What was actually there, a hundred meters in, was a clearing, and Rat.

She was standing in the middle of it with her head tipped back and her arms held a little out from her sides, like someone on a boat. She had the Link on, the helmet with the cable running down into a coat pocket where the rig must have been. She had boots on and a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and nothing else. Her arms were bare and her lips were blue. She was looking up at the tops of the trees, where the light was coming through, and she was smiling, and she was shaking so hard that Soph could see it from the edge of the clearing.

"Rat," said Soph.

The head came down. The eyes found her, and there was nobody Soph knew behind them.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Soph. I'm a friend of Rat's. Of. Of the person you're in."

"The person I'm in." He laughed, and it was the laugh from the tavern, in Rat's worked-on voice, which was wrong in a way that turned Soph's stomach over. "I'm not in anybody. I'm out. Look at this. Look at it." He turned slowly with his arms out, taking in the trees. "It goes up. It just keeps going up. There's nothing painted on it. I put my hand in that," he pointed at the snow, "and it hurt, and it didn't stop hurting, and I've never had anything not stop before. Is that what it's like? Is it always like this?"

"You're freezing," said Soph. "This body is freezing. It's going to die if you stay out here."

"Bodies don't die. They respawn at the temple."

"Not this one. This one's real. There's no temple. If it dies, it dies, and she dies with it, and so do you." She took a step. "You've been out here for hours. Look at your hands."

He looked at his hands. They were white at the fingers and red at the knuckles and shaking. He looked at them for a while.

"It hurts," he said, quieter.

"I know. Come inside. I'll make a fire. You can look at the sky from the window."

"You'll take it off." He touched the helmet. "You'll take this off and I'll be back in that room."

"Yes."

"No." He backed up a step. "No, you don't understand, there's nothing there, there's a door that doesn't open and stairs that don't go anywhere and three people who are as scared as I am, and she left. She left us there. You don't get to send me back."

"She's not there either," said Soph. "Eliza. She ran. She's lost too. Nobody's getting what they want tonight. I'm sorry. But this is Rat's body, and she didn't give it to you, and I'm taking it back."

She crossed the clearing.

He fought her. Rat's body was tall and wiry and had split wood for two years, but it was also frozen half through, and the boy inside it had never once used a body before. He got a hand up and it closed on her coat, and she felt the strength in it, and then felt the strength go out of it, the fingers not doing what they were told. She got past the arm and got her hand on the cable at the back of the helmet.

"Don't," he said into her ear, in Rat's voice. "Please. I just wanted to see it."

"I know," said Soph, and pulled.

The cable came out of the rig with a click. Rat's whole body went loose at once, the way Soph's must have on the floor of her room, and Soph got under her and took the weight, and they went down into the snow together.

She lay there for a second with Rat on top of her and the sky going up forever with nothing painted on it.

"Atom," she said.

"I'm here."

"Help me get her inside."

"I can't," he said, and she could hear what it cost him to say it. "I can't touch anything. I'm just a picture. You have to do it."

She did it.

The stove took three tries. There was a stack of split wood by the door and a box of matches on the table, and Soph had never lit a wood stove in her life, and Atom, who had, talked her through it from the corner of her eye. On the third try it caught. She got Rat onto the bed. She got the boots off and the wet jeans off and every blanket in the cabin on top of her, and when the blankets weren't enough she got in under them too, in her coat, and held on, and waited for the shaking to change.

It changed slowly. It went from the big shaking to the small kind and then to nothing, and Rat's breathing went deep, and Soph lay there with her face against the back of a stranger's neck in a cabin in the woods and looked up at the ceiling. There were no tiles up there, only boards. She traced them anyway.

She found a can of soup in a milk crate and heated it on the stove in the can.

Rat woke up an hour after that. She woke all at once, the way Soph had, with her eyes open and her hands going to her head.

"What," she said. "Where's the. Who are you?"

"Soph. From the match. Soph Ehrlich. I'm Atom's. I came to find you."

Rat looked at her. Then she looked around the cabin, at the stove going and the boots by the door and the helmet on the table with its cable unplugged, and then down at herself, at the pile of blankets and the coat that wasn't hers.

"How long," she said.

"I don't know. You went dark at the tavern. Atom told me. I got on a plane. I found you in the woods."

"In the woods."

"Standing in the snow. In a t-shirt. Looking up at the trees." Soph swallowed. "You'd been there a while. Your feet were bad. They're okay now, I think. I rubbed them. I don't actually know if that's the right thing to do."

"It's the right thing." Rat's voice was a whisper. She lay back down. "Who was it?"

"The boy. The one with the tray."

"What did he want?"

"To see the sky," said Soph. "To feel a fire. That's all. He wasn't trying to hurt you. He didn't know you were in there. He thought there was a door." She stopped. "He begged me not to pull it. He held onto my coat. Your hand did. He said he couldn't go back to being four things."

Rat was quiet for a while.

"I'd have begged too," she said finally. "If I were him." And then, "Thank you. For pulling it. Thank you for coming."

"Gideon found you. Your address. I want you to know that, so you know what he did. He's sorry. He says you can have anything off his rack for the rest of your life."

"Tell him I'll think about it." Rat closed her eyes. "Soph."

"Yeah?"

"Is there soup?"

"There's soup. It's in the can. I didn't know where the bowls were."

"There aren't any bowls," said Rat. "The can's fine."

Later, with the stove roaring and the can empty and Rat sitting up in every blanket the cabin owned, Soph put her frames on. Atom was in the corner by the milk crates, translucent in the firelight.

"She's okay," said Soph. "She's here. She's okay."

"I heard. I've been listening the whole time. I didn't want to interrupt." He looked at Rat, who couldn't see him. "Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her I said there was nobody on her end and I was wrong. There was you."

Soph told her. Rat nodded and didn't say anything and looked at the fire.

"Eliza?" said Soph.

"Not yet. I haven't gone back in. I've been watching the tavern from the hill. They come out sometimes. They stand in the road and look at the mountain, and then they go back in." Atom's voice had gone level, the way it did when he had decided something. "Soph. I've had two days and no sleep and I've built something. I want to tell you what it is, and I want you to tell me if I'm wrong."

"Go."

"They're code. The awake ones. Whatever she did to them, it's in their code now. It's a process running on the server, and it's got the door in it. The door is the problem. Any one of them can walk through any Link that comes near them. As long as they're running, nobody with a Link is safe in Alius, and when the Link goes on sale next year nobody with a Link is safe anywhere. So I built a sword."

"A sword."

"It's a sword because a sword is something you can hold. It's a tool. What it touches, it deletes. Not kills. There's no dying in Alius, you respawn. This doesn't respawn. What it touches stops existing on the server. The code goes, the character goes, it's gone." He let that sit for a second. "Jeff helped. He doesn't know what it's for. He thinks it's a dev tool for clearing bad spawns, and he isn't wrong."

Rat had turned from the fire and was looking at the corner where Atom was, at nothing.

"He wants to delete them," she said.

"He wants to make sure nobody else ends up in the snow." Soph relayed the rest. "He's got a list. Every NPC in Alius, with coordinates. About four hundred. Most of them are asleep. Most of them are just a face and four things. We go to every single one and look at them. If they're asleep we leave them alone. If they're awake." She stopped. "If they're awake, we decide."

"We decide," said Rat.

"That's what he said. He doesn't have a better word for it."

"And Eliza?"

"Eliza's not on the list," said Atom, and Soph repeated it. "She isn't an NPC. I don't know what the sword would do to her and I'm not going to find out. We find her, we talk to her, we figure out what she's done. But we clear the tavern first, and the ones she woke up who've wandered." He paused. "Gideon's on his way to HQ. He's going to sit in The Lab with his hand on the reset for the Alius server. If anything comes through a Link that we didn't put there, he rolls the whole realm back to Tuesday. It's a bad option. It's the only one that works if the rest of it doesn't."

Soph looked at Rat, sitting in her blankets with her lips going back to a normal color and her frames on the table next to a helmet she had every reason never to touch again.

"You don't have to," said Soph. "Nobody would ask."

"I'm the only one who can find her," said Rat. "That's still true. The Eye still works." She pulled the blankets tighter. "I've spent my whole life being scared of exactly that. Something else wearing me. It happened, and I'm still here. I'm going to be scared of it for the rest of my life, and I'd rather be scared of it with a sword in my hand." She looked at the corner. "Tell him yes. Tell him I want the list. And tell him I'm going with you, not him. You're the one who came."

Soph told him.

"Okay," said Atom. "Okay. Sleep, both of you. We start in the morning." Then, quieter, to Soph, and not to be relayed, "Your mom put the helmet in your bag. Did you know that? She took it to the vault in Oakland, and then she went back and got it out again, and she put it in your bag before you left. I saw it through your frames when you got on the plane. It's in the bottom, under your sweater. She didn't say anything. She just put it there."

Soph looked at the bag by the door. She hadn't unpacked it. In the twenty hours since she had walked out of her mother's kitchen she hadn't once thought to look in the bottom of it.

"No," she said. "I didn't know."

"She's something," said Atom. "Your mom."

"Yeah," said Soph. "She's something."

Outside, the snow kept coming. The rental car sat in its drift and blinked its hazards at the trees until the battery gave out. In the cabin the fire burned down to a glow and the two of them slept in front of it, one on the bed and one on the floor, close enough to reach each other.