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  Kilgore nods slowly. That was a smart move. The mines would’ve stunned the GDL infantry, leaving them disoriented and vulnerable. And with so many GDL turning up so fast, and so little cover in the street, the guy’s strategy was probably one of the few ways to get beyond this point in the game. But remote percussion mines? That’s some serious shit. Kilgore has only ever owned a few, and they were hard-earned. He only used them when there was no other choice, and he was always sorry to see them go. But this guy must’ve tossed them around like candy at a carnival.

  The guy leans down, extending his hand toward Kilgore. “Let me help you up. My name’s Will by the way.”

  Kilgore hesitates. “No thanks. I can stand by myself.” He pushes himself up to his feet, grimacing as his shoulder reminds him he’s been shot for Christ’s sake. But he stands up OK, steady on his feet. He keeps his rifle in his hands. “You did a good job there, but—” He stops himself. He has a question he needs to ask, and questions among gamers aren’t always welcome.

  Will withdraws his hand, moving it back to his rifle. “But what?”

  “It’s just—how did you know?” Kilgore nods toward the street. “What you just did out there—that wasn’t random, and please don’t tell me you got lucky. You must’ve placed those mines just right. You must’ve banked on using this wall. So how the hell did you have time to figure it out?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  Kilgore narrows his eyes. “You’ve been here before? You played it out?”

  “Yup.”

  “Let me get this straight. You got killed here, you went back to basic training, and then you worked your way back up again?” Kilgore lets out a low whistle. “That must’ve taken forever.”

  Will winkles his forehead. “Something like that.”

  “What do you mean? That’s the only way you could’ve done it.”

  “No,” Will says. “That’s the only way most people could’ve done it. I have certain advantages.”

  Kilgore looks Will up and down. Holy shit! This guy is decked out in serious style. Is that the Titan 3 body armor he’s wearing? Kilgore isn’t sure. He’s only heard about it—he’s never seen it, never met anyone who could afford it. Advantages. That’s one way of putting it. This guy must’ve spent a fortune. But there’s another question nagging him. He’d been deafened by the percussion mines and flattened back against the wall. But Will—he wasn’t just unharmed, he was completely unaffected. As soon as the blast was over, he was ready to spring into action, and he took the GDL out before they had a chance to recover. Sure, Will’s body armor is good, but nothing’s that good.

  He looks long and hard at Will. Something just doesn’t add up. For one thing, the guy introduced himself as Will, but that doesn’t match the game tag he wears on his chest. Kilgore glances at the tag. It’s just a string of random numbers and letters. Is that even allowed? And if it is, who would want gibberish instead of a name? Kilgore doesn’t like it, and his instincts tell him to put some distance between himself and this newcomer. But if there are shortcuts in the game or even some cheat codes he hasn’t heard of before, he needs to have them, and he needs to have them now, before his wound and his depleted resources force him to log off. “How’d you do it?”

  Will is all smiles and innocence. “Do what?”

  “You know what I mean.” Kilgore takes a breath, squashes down the impatience rising in his chest. “How’d you do it? The coordinates just got leaked ten days ago, and it took me that long to get this far. But you say you’ve been here already? It don’t believe it.”

  “Coordinates? What coordinates would that be?”

  “Aw, come on,” Kilgore says, and this time, he can’t prevent his voice from rising. “How? How did you get back to this level so fast, and without even a scratch? It’s unreal. The goddamned percussion mines almost knocked me out, but you came through the blast like nothing happened. “

  Will shakes his head slowly. “I might tell you later. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you know how to play nice and share your toys.”

  Kilgore lets out a derisive laugh. “I don’t have anything you don’t have, that’s for sure.”

  Will tilts his head to one side. “We’ll see.”

  “No we won’t,” Kilgore says. “I don’t play co-op, and I’m not interested in whatever crap you’re peddling. Thanks for taking out the patrol and everything, but I’ll make my own way forward from here.”

  Will hesitates. “With that shoulder? You won’t last five minutes.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll take my chances.”

  Will shrugs. “It’s up to you, but my guess is there’s another GDL patrol on its way. They’ll be here any minute. And it looks like you could use—oh, I don’t know, a level three medikit.”

  Kilgore’s eyes go wide. “You... you’ve got one?”

  Will shakes his head. “No, I’ve got five, and one of them is yours—if you want it.”

  Kilgore puffs out his cheeks. A level three medikit would take him back to full health. The kit even has an optional energy boost that you can save for an emergency. But no one would give something that valuable to another player. No one.

  “There’s no strings attached,” Will says. “But I would like you to tag along with me for a while. It gets tough from here on in, and I figure we’d stand a better chance if we cover for each other.”

  “I don’t know,” Kilgore says, and as he weighs up the options, an alert pops up on his HUD:

  THREAT DETECTED: ENEMY PATROL INBOUND

  He checks his health stats, and what he sees makes him chew at the inside of his cheek. Will’s suggestion that he won’t last five minutes is starting to look optimistic. He’ll be lucky to survive the next five seconds. Will is offering him the chance to stay in the game—he has to take it. But maybe there is another way. “I could buy the medikit off you.”

  Will raises his eyebrows. “No, you couldn’t. If you had the credits, you’d have bought one already.”

  The message in Kilgore’s HUD changes:

  ENEMY PATROL HAVE LOCATED YOUR POSITION

  “All right,” Kilgore snaps. “I’ll take the kit. I’ll cover you in the next section. But after that, you’re on your own. OK?”

  “Fair enough,” Will says, and suddenly, his expression changes. The good humor is gone from his eyes, replaced by a steely glint. Every good gamer gets a thousand-yard stare when they concentrate on their HUDs to execute commands, but Will’s gaze is especially intense: as cold and hard as a knife between the ribs.

  Kilgore looks away. He’s got to be careful. He’s not dealing with some rich guy out on a spending spree. Will is the real thing: a hardcore gamer through and through. And gamers have one rule they never break—look after number one.

  A notification appears in Kilgore’s HUD:

  ACCEPT MOD? MEDIKIT L3

  Kilgore stares straight ahead, focusing on the words: Accept mod. The amber progress light in his HUD flashes once, twice, three times, and to Kilgore, each blink takes five minutes. Finally, the message changes:

  MOD TRANSFER COMPLETE: MEDIKIT L3

  Deploy medikit, Kilgore thinks. Maximum Dose. And the instant he completes that thought, the kit goes to work. Kilgore smiles as his health stats rocket. In seconds, his health and energy levels are as good as when he started this level. No. They’re better. And he still has the energy boost to fall back on if things get rough. Fantastic.

  “Come on,” Will says. “We’ve got to get out of here.” He vaults over the low wall and heads across the street.

  Kilgore follows suit. He feels great, invincible. So what if he has to help some guy along the way a little? It’s worth a little effort to feel this good, and anyway, he can always ditch Will later.

  As they jog down the road, Kilgore glances back over his shoulder. “What about the patrol? Will they follow us?”

  “I very much doubt it,” Will says. “They’ll run around like idiots, kickin
g in doors and chasing down every goddamned blind alley, but once we turn the corner and move on, we’ll lose them soon enough.”

  “Sure.” Kilgore smiles to himself. The GDL patrols are good in a firefight, but their AI is weak when it comes to predicting human behavior, and that flaw makes them relatively easy to evade. So long as you can escape beyond the range of their threat detection systems, all you have to do is change direction a few times, stay quiet, stay out of their sight lines, and the chances of them finding you are pretty low.

  But Kilgore’s smile fades when he joins Will at the corner and looks into the side street. What the hell! It’s a bust. The whole street is blocked, walled in by a barricade of assorted vehicles stacked thirty feet high. And the sides of the street are lined with even higher walls of solid brick: no doors or windows or openings of any kind. Kilgore hardly needs to glance at the brick walls to tell that they’re indestructible: part of the game’s structure designed to funnel players in a certain direction. The barricade is the only way forward. But every gaming instinct tells Kilgore to be on high alert. This feels like a trap. He needs to check this out, and carefully. Very carefully indeed.

  Kilgore has one good piece of gear—the only thing of value he’s ever owned—his HUD. He’s spent months modifying it, working on the code himself. He took a basic HUD and stripped its code structure right back to its bare bones, then he set out to make it special. Now, it has scores of new mods, all integrated into the original framework so they’re undetectable. He’s careful to keep his helmet and uniform looking shoddy. No gamer would ever guess at the power in his HUD, and even the game itself could not recognize that some of his mods stretch the rules of what’s allowed.

  Now, his HUD is telling him there’s something wrong with the barricade. Something very wrong indeed. “Do you see that?” he asks.

  But Will doesn’t answer. He’s no longer standing at Kilgore’s side. Kilgore turns his head and does a double take. Will is already running toward the barricade, raising his rifle as he moves.

  For a split second, Kilgore is frozen to the spot. It would be easy to let Will discover the hidden power of the barricade himself. Of course it will kill him, but so what? Will’s already been more than useful, but his gung-ho attitude is fast becoming a liability. Still, a promise is a promise. “Hold your fire!” Kilgore yells. “Stay where you are!”

  Will staggers to a standstill and turns around, but he doesn’t lower his weapon. “What’s wrong, kid?”

  Kilgore runs to his side. “This kid just saved your ass.”

  Will snorts, but before he can answer back, Kilgore punches him on the shoulder. “It’s a trap, you idiot. The whole barricade is wired—high tension. The current will arc out and cut you down before you even get near. And if you shoot at it, it’ll trigger an alarm. I’m certain of it.”

  Will studies Kilgore’s expression. “And how the hell would you know that?”

  “I just do, all right?”

  “I don’t buy it,” Will says. “You’ve never played to this level before, and there’s no way you’ve seen anything like this barricade earlier in the game.”

  Kilgore stretches his lips in a parody of a smile. “If you must know, it’s my HUD. I wrote the mods myself. It can pick up on this sort of thing.”

  Will grimaces in disbelief. “But how could you know to pick up on the HT if you’ve never seen anything like this before?”

  Kilgore hesitates. This guy likes to ask a lot of questions. But it’s time to get moving, and the quickest thing to do is to toss him a bone. “I programed it to pick up on anomalies, OK? When it picks up something new, it feeds me the data. I’ve learned to interpret it.”

  Will opens his mouth to speak, but instead, he turns and examines the barricade, thinking. “And the alarm—you can see that?”

  “No, not for certain,” Kilgore admits, “but there’s some sort of connection. It’s bound to be an alarm. It stands to reason.”

  “So if I fire at it?”

  “It’ll bring every GDL patrol in the area down on our heads in seconds.”

  “OK, I’ll bite.”

  Kilgore breathes out a sigh. But his sense of relief doesn’t last long.

  Will smiles and turns to point his gun at the barricade. He looks Kilgore in the eye. “You mean something like this?” Then, without even aiming, he squeezes the trigger and fires a volley of shots into the wall of vehicles. But there’s no hollow echo from the cars, no dull rattle of hot lead meeting metal. Will’s bullets simply sizzle and burst against the enhanced barricade.

  “You asshole,” Kilgore yells. “What part of what I just said did you not understand?” He opens his mouth to say more, but at this moment his HUD lights up like a Christmas tree. Holy crap! Multiple threats, all homing in on their position with a speed and precision he’s never seen before in all his many hours of game time. He glares at Will, but the man just stands there, a stupidly wide grin plastered across his face as if he’s just played the best practical joke in his life. “To hell with you,” Kilgore mutters then turns away and breaks into a jog, heading back toward the main street. He has maybe twenty seconds to get out of there and find a safe place to hide. He needs to get his head together. There has to be another way out of this situation; there’s always a solution somewhere if you look hard enough.

  Wrong. He does not have twenty seconds, nor anything like it. He hasn’t moved more than a few yards down the road before the first shot smacks into the concrete just a few feet behind him. He bends into a half crouch and runs faster, changing direction, looking wildly from side as he races down the road. More shots. Closer this time and coming from somewhere to his right. They’ve flanked me. If they get in front of him, he’ll be trapped. He’s got to get out of sight. But the street’s empty. Where the hell is the wall? He hid behind the brick wall just a few minutes earlier, but now it isn’t anywhere in sight. It can’t be gone—that makes no sense. But he recognizes the graffiti on the bullet-pocked building on his left. The low wall, the only useful shelter in the whole street, should be right next to him. He checks the other side of the road, but it’s a waste of time. The wall is gone.

  Kilgore’s mind works fast. The vanishing wall could be a glitch, or it could be a deliberate move by the game—a response to Will’s half-ass attack on the barricade. Either way, he’s in the open and dangerously exposed. No choice but to run.

  Kilgore powers forward, chased by a hail of bullets, but he’s tiring fast. The energy boost, he thinks. The mod flashes up in his HUD, but before he can activate it, it happens—the one thing he’s been dreading. Dead ahead of him, a muzzle flash lights up a darkened window. And another. The bullets crack into the road at his side, no more than a hair’s breadth from his pounding feet. They’ve surrounded him, cut off his last chance of escape.

  Kilgore skids to a halt, his boots grating across the grit, sending up a plume of dust. Then without hesitation, he changes course. If he can move fast enough, maybe he can rob the snipers of their angle. He reaches the other side of the street in a few powerful strides and hurls himself against the building, pressing his body as flat as he can to the brickwork.

  For a second, it works. The stream of bullets stops, and Kilgore’s HUD shows the GDL on the move. What the game’s defense soldiers lack in foresight and imagination, they make up for with persistence. In moments, they’ll take up new positions, and Kilgore will be out of options.

  “Over here!”

  The voice comes from back along the road, the very place he’s just expended so much energy to escape from. Kilgore turns his head and stares in disbelief. Will is crouching down, sheltering behind an abandoned SUV. It’s a good spot to hide: the only decent cover on the street. How the hell does the guy do it? Seems like Will has an uncanny ability to find the sweet spot in any scenario. And more to the point, how come Kilgore just ran past the SUV without seeing it as a hiding place himself?

  Kilgore grinds his teeth together. There’s no time for questions. T
he crack of rifle fire starts up again, bullets blasting holes into the brickwork at his side. Staying where he is, is not an option.

  “Come on!” Will calls, and he waves his arm, beckoning Kilgore to join him. “I’ll cover you.”

  This is crazy, Kilgore thinks. But what choice does he have?

  Will makes the decision for him, popping up above the SUV’s hood and shouldering his rifle. He unleashes a barrage of automatic fire, tracing a line across the windows of the buildings opposite, shattering what little glass remains and splintering the rough-sawed planks at the boarded-up openings. He pauses for a split second, adjusting his aim, then concentrates his fire on the rooftops.

  This is Kilgore’s chance. The energy boost is still ready on his HUD. Select energy boost—activate. A sense of strength surges through his body, more powerful than any adrenaline rush, and Kilgore double-times it, darting toward the SUV, his head down, his arms and legs pumping like an Olympic sprinter. He flies over the ground, covering the distance in a second. His body is a powerhouse, a freight train travelling at full tilt. He could run through a brick wall if had to. He grins like a maniac. This is as good as it gets. Even the rattle and crack of gunfire is distant now: little more than a noise in the background.

  Kilgore plants his left foot and launches himself into the air, diving toward the SUV. He lands in a perfect judo roll and bounces up onto his feet. In one movement, Kilgore shoulders his weapon and takes up a position at Will’s side. Together, they rock the buildings opposite then duck down behind the SUV.

  There’s a moment of silence, and the two men look at each other and share a smile. Again, Kilgore thinks. I want to do that again. He licks his lips. Christ. How many of these medikits did Will have left—four? The boosts are out of this world. And maybe they explain the way Will can move with such speed and poise, dealing out death and destruction without letting the smile fall from his face. Maybe he’ll give me another, Kilgore thinks. Just one more. And he takes a breath, savoring the tang of cordite in the air.

  But the respite is short-lived. In seconds, the GDL fight back begins. And from the way the SUV shakes and rattles, the Defense League troopers are as mad as their programing will allow. Will leans back against the SUV’s door and checks his weapon.