Chapter One #2
Everything from the girl’s neck down was obscured by a long black puffer coat that gave the appearance of a lumpy, half-escaped cocoon with a pair of combat boots sticking out the bottom and one of those expensive furry microphones jammed on top.
When she turned to look at Ivan, the tan fuzz of her hood framed her face like a cartoon lion and made her narrowed black eyes stand out against her dark brown skin.
It also prevented Ivan from seeing if she had any hair, but she had the wide cheekbones and smooth skin of a girl whose face card had more than enough credit to pull off a buzz cut, had she wanted one.
Her thick lips, one slightly pinker than the other, had the sticky, matte quality of medicated lip balm; as far as Ivan could tell she wore no makeup, not even the mascara his fellow streamers insisted was a requirement for their eyes to really “pop” on camera.
“I don’t see the problem.” The girl returned her attention to the guard. “You have my name on the list. It’s Zora Lyon. L-Y-O-N.”
Weird name, Ivan thought. It almost sounded familiar? Cute girl.
“Can I—” Ivan was about to say get by, please, since this Zora Lyon showed no signs of letting him step in front of her while she argued with the guard.
“Give me a second.” Whatever the girl saw in Ivan while he was checking her out, she didn’t seem impressed. She held her finger up to keep him beyond arm’s length.
“Miss, you’re holding up the line,” the security guard intoned. The same line that just let me skip to the front for no reason? Ivan scoffed internally.
Zora jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “The line that just let that guy skip for no reason?” She echoed his exact thought, which was kind of wonderful.
Her mention of a guy made the guard look up from his clipboard and notice Ivan for the first time. Ivan pinpointed the second the guard clocked him; his posture became less rigid, and his face relaxed away from the scowl he’d kept up to intimidate Zora.
“Hey, look who’s back!” the guard called out. Ivan didn’t recognize him. Should he? “What’s up, Ivan?”
“Hiya …” Ivan dipped his gaze to the man’s chest and saw his name tag: Hello, My Name Is Frank. “Frank.”
“Yeah, it’s me, Frank!” Frank looked incredibly pleased that Ivan remembered his name.
“Of course! Good to see you again.” Ivan chanced a glance at Zora and saw her gaze drift down to Frank’s name tag. When she looked back up at Ivan, she rolled her eyes. What? This is how you bullshit correctly, Ivan thought. Take notes.
“Sorry about her.” Frank gestured to the girl. “We’ve been dealing with player imposters all day.”
“Imposters?” The word hit the girl like a physical blow. Her shoulders slumped, and her voice lost its punchiness in an instant. “All I did was drop my lanyard. I just wanted to get some air. I—You really don’t recognize me?”
The incredulous, defeated tone reminded Ivan of someone he’d met before. Someone who was also told they didn’t belong in the elite tiers of Wizzard’s esports empire.
And just like that, Ivan knew how he was going to play this.
He checked behind him. VIPs and fans alike held their phones directly in front of their faces, giving Ivan the dystopian feeling that everyone’s bodies ended at the neck and their heads were nothing but shiny rectangular boxes that occasionally flashed white from one corner.
They could be posting this everywhere, he thought, and for the record, they were. Now, to be the good guy.
It began with shifting closer to the girl and sharing a sneaky smile with the guard. “Hey, Frank?” he asked. “I feel bad; this is kind of my fault. I was supposed to get here before, uh, Zena here.”
“Zora.”
“Zora here,” Ivan corrected. “She’s with me, if you get what I mean.”
“What?” Zora exclaimed and took a step away from Ivan, but he reached out and gently pulled her back so they were standing side by side. Just go with it, he willed her to read his mind. I got this.
“Aha.” Frank nodded conspiratorially. “I see. Brought your own cheerleader for your big return, huh?”
“You know how it goes.” Ivan finished the charade off with a wink. This time, Zora succeeded in pulling away from him, and the look on her face made it clear he shouldn’t try again. Luckily, Frank didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, that explains why your name is on the list but no lanyard,” Frank said to Zora, while looking at Ivan. “Those are only for players, you know.”
“Wait, are the players’ lanyards only for players?” Zora asked sarcastically. Frank missed the tone and answered in earnest.
“Only for players. You two can go on in, though.”
Zora shot Frank a look that could have boiled water and stomped through the doors without looking back. Ivan turned around one more time, waved at the crowd and the VIPs alike, and followed Zora in.
Front of house at the Wizzard Theater was a stylish, high-tech lobby with multicolored strips of LED lighting forming zigzag patterns on the dark black walls, and a smooth floor of seamless marble that must be absolutely lethal when it rained.
Despite the sounds of setup coming through the open doors that led to the floor tier of seating and the occasional ding of the elevators in the back, there weren’t a lot of people in the vestibule itself.
The better to get to know this Zora person.
“Whew.” Ivan grinned. “Can’t believe that worked.”
Zora wasn’t grinning. Her hood had fallen down, and the boiling-water glare never wavered as she walked over to a discarded lump of ribbon and plastic on the floor near the doors.
She picked it up, shook it out, and held it up like a show-and-tell presentation.
It was a VIP player’s lanyard, which she lifted above her head to work the fabric loop over the volume of her shoulder-length curly hair.
“It’s bad enough I had to wake up at the crack to get here and that it’s negative screw-you degrees outside,” she said in a tone that suggested she was speaking to herself instead of Ivan, even though he was standing right there.
“But yeah, no, sure. Let’s throw in a washed-up eboy sneaking me in like an imperial concubine when I belonged here on my own. ”
“Washed-up eboy?” Ivan didn’t love the sound of that. Also, who used phrases like “imperial concubine” in any situation, ever? “That’s what I get for doing you a favor?”
“What favor?” Zora asked. Ivan got the feeling she meant it as a real question. Her face was calm. Passive. Uncharmed. Whatever Ivan had wasn’t working on her. That made him nervous all over again.
“I thought you just wanted to get in early like a VIP,” Ivan mumbled. “Figured I’d help you out.”
“Why did you think I wasn’t a VIP by myself?” Her tone was matter-of-fact enough to make Ivan see and more acutely feel where he’d gone wrong this time.
“I just assumed—”
“You assumed,” the girl said, putting a premature period at the end of his thought.
Instead of berating himself and overthinking his words like he had in front of the theater, he dug his heels in. “Look, I’ve clearly touched a nerve here,” he began. “But don’t you think you’re kind of overreacting?”
“Overreacting?” Zora’s thin eyebrows leaped up toward her hairline.
“You humiliated me in front of everyone! I fought my way through the preliminaries and earned my right to be here on my own, just like everyone else.” Zora’s hand went to the front of her neck to unzip her puffer coat, then appeared to think better of removing her protective outer shell, however fluffy.
“And you told him I was your cheerleader?”
“Almost everyone else. And Frank said that, not me,” Ivan responded defensively. This girl was a piece of work. Normally he wouldn’t flex, but Zora seemed intent on seeing the worst in him regardless. “Do you know who Brian Juno is?”
“Of course I know who Brian Juno is,” the girl hissed. “What kind of question is that? He literally cofounded Wizzard.”
“Yeah, he personally invited me to play today,” Ivan continued. “You had to play in preliminaries?” He clicked his tongue. “Yikes.”
Zora took the bait, but not in the way Ivan expected her to. “You know that’s not something to be proud of, right?”
“Why not?” Ivan shrugged. “Doesn’t matter how I got here, as long as I make it into the top two in the battle royale. And I will.”
That made Zora snort. “You sure about that?”
“I am,” Ivan reassured her. I have to be, was the unspoken corollary. A top two placement today was the only thing that would get him back in the game, literally. He had to prove he wasn’t the bad guy he looked like last time he left. That was what gave him his next brilliant idea.
“Hey,” he began in the voice he used to adopt on stream when he needed to come off vulnerable and earnest. “I screwed up here, that’s obvious. Is there a way I can make it up to you?”
“No,” Zora said. Her tone was blunt, but not necessarily angry this time. Ivan hoped that was a good sign.
“How about this,” he said. “I’m going to make it to the top two of the battle royale today.”
“Yes, you mentioned that.”
“I can make sure you’re in the top two too. Wow. It’s so weird when you have to say ‘two’ and ‘too’ like that. You ever notice how weird it sounds?” Ivan made one last-ditch effort to build any kind of rapport with this—honestly—super pretty girl with the personality of a scorpion.
“How would you make sure?” she asked, looking almost amused. The almost part made Ivan feel like he’d passed a high Charisma check in Dungeons and Dragons.
“Right. Yeah, so I know we’re all against each other in Guardians League Royale, but there’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t watch your back in there.”
“Excuse me?” Zora stepped back, her eyebrows once again high with disapproval.
“I just meant, like, if you need some help in there.”
“Why would you do that? For me or anyo—”
“Because you remind me of someone,” Ivan answered quickly. “Someone I should have protected. This girl … anyway, I’m different now. You can trust me.” There really had to be a better way of putting that. And if there wasn’t, Ivan was going to have to invent it.
It seemed to mark a change in the way Zora looked at him, though. “Trust you,” she said under her breath. Then again. “Trust you.” Then, as if the muscles in her face finally thawed, her expression softened.
“Normally you can’t trust anyone in a battle royale,” she said, “but, I don’t know, it’s my first competition, and maybe I could use a little help.
” One of her hands crept up toward the fuzzy curls that just brushed at her shoulders, where she twirled one around her finger.
Ivan’s eyes caught on the gesture and lingered there for a moment before he pulled his gaze away. Don’t be weird, he told himself.
“If we have a secret ally in the field, we have a much better shot of making it. Together,” Zora said matter-of-factly. “It would be nice to come out of today with a win and, you know”—Zora visibly fought the shy, borderline flirty smile that threatened to take over her stern face—“a friend.”
Ivan was being weird. “My thoughts exactly. So … partners?”
“Temporary partners,” Zora warned him playfully. “Just until we’re both in the top two.”
“Totally.” Ivan nodded automatically. What would his naysayers say now, seeing him partner up with an unknown girl gamer to dominate a GLR match?
“Listen, I gotta go.” Zora pointed over toward the auditorium doors.
“If you’re serious about doing this, I always start my matches on the ruined tower in the center of the map.
My name in the game is ZORA.” That unforgettable smile reached her eyes for the first time since their conversation started, and Ivan considered his victory secured.
“Of course, sure. Meet you there. I mean—mine’s VANE. And I’m Ivan.”
“Oh, I know who you are. Ivan.” Zora lowered her gaze to the floor, trying to hide just how wide her smile had gotten since Ivan agreed to partner up. She’d be eating out of his hand by lunchtime. “See you in the battle, then. Partner.”
“The battle, yeah.” Ivan nodded, most of his attention focused on the way Zora was looking up at him through her dense, curling eyelashes. He tried to blink away the effect that sloe-eyed stare had on him. He—they—had a match to win. “See you in there.”
Zora slipped through the theater doors and left Ivan to wrangle his thoughts in the vestibule.
He was still wrangling them, barely believing his luck, when he headed up to the players’ lounge, rubbed elbows with a few familiar faces who weren’t as surprised to see him as he’d have thought, and walked out to take his place at one of the fifty PC stations laid out in rows on the Wizzard Theater’s massive stage.
Ivan barely heard the countdown to the match through his noise-canceling headphones, but he felt beyond ready to take his rightful place in the top two when the starting horn blew.
His character parachuted gracefully from the digital sky above the Guardians League Royale island arena and toward the familiar broken tower in the center of the map.
He saw Zora’s character already rummaging through an ammo chest on the parapet and maneuvered his parachute to land a few steps away from her.
It was a good place to start the match. High ground, good sight lines, plenty of cover—but before he could spin his camera around to send Zora an approving thumbs-up emote, he heard a laser shot reverberate through his headphones. Pew—zap!
His screen went red, then black, then scrolled the announcement no player wanted to read less than ten seconds into any game, ever.
GAME OVER. Player VANE has been eliminated by player ZORA.
You really couldn’t trust anyone in a battle royale.