Chapter Twelve
IVAN STOOD AT the edge of Brian Juno’s VIP viewing box with the tips of his fingers touching a window so huge and clean he kept forgetting it was there.
His brain told him that if he leaned forward he’d fall all the way down onto the stage and break his face, but when he tested the hypothesis, the reality of the cool glass met his forehead with a predictable thonk.
Standing up straight, he saw the decoration his attempt left behind: a foggy sweat stain in the shape of the minimal space between his eyebrows. Art.
Behind him, the rapid-fire clicks of Brian typing on his phone came to an abrupt stop.
“Ivan, please. I just cleaned that window,” the cofounder of Wizzard Games said with amusement.
When not onstage or doing an interview, Brian’s accent sounded much weaker.
At first it had surprised Ivan to notice that Brian got noticeably less French Canadian in private conversations, but he’d spent enough time scrolling through fancams of Brian’s impeccable suiting, interview zingers, and dance videos performed in the Wizzard motion capture studio to understand that everything Brian Juno did was part of his effort to procedurally generate a wacky, beloved games industry patriarch also named Brian Juno.
And if Brian Juno had actually cleaned the VIP window with his own busy hands, Ivan was a giraffe.
“No, you did not,” Ivan corrected him.
“You are right, I did not.” Brian’s fingers resumed their clicking on the phone screen. “But someone did. Give me two minutes.”
Unlike the players’ lounge, Brian’s VIP box was devoid of branding.
It was dark and plushy and personal and red, like the inside of an animal, though the color only came from the light tests the arena team were conducting in the house below.
Before Ivan’s eyes the light coming through the glass changed to green, and Ivan knew for a moment what it felt like to stand at the bottom of a pristine lake.
Then the light turned purple, which reminded Ivan of nothing specific, and red once again.
While he waited, Ivan tried to test his knowledge of the academy’s PC arrangement.
Ivan had been poring over the seating chart since Tuesday, when Brian sent him the PDF to ensure Ivan knew where each and every student sat and who their neighbors were.
Would the information come in handy? Probably not.
But Brian expected him to know, so he did.
From the last seat on stage right, Slays Brown’s seat was three places in from Matt Travels; clockwise from them sat ShugZ, Payton and Paxton … Trieu, Kavi, himself, and Zora.
Don’t think about her, Ivan demanded of himself.
He’d done enough of that today, when he felt her react to everything he said with quiet horror, if not disgust. If he wanted to delude himself, he could say that Zora’s upset stemmed from her being mean or naive, because of course he had to pretend to like people he objectively didn’t, of course he had to lie on the spot ten times a minute; that’s what this whole game was about.
But the more uncomfortable she looked, the more visibly tired she became after listening to him talk and talk and talk, Ivan had begun to think that maybe instead of being cruel, Zora was being honest. Zora saw the person Ivan spent his entire life trying to distract other people from noticing, and it was unbearable.
He thought about her black eyes constantly, looking straight through him.
It didn’t help that the girl-sweat-and-shea-butter smell he’d come to associate with her was clinging to him like perfume.
The only way to avoid it would be for Ivan to stop breathing, which she honestly might prefer.
What did he just say? Don’t. Think. About. Zora.
So Ivan returned to his brainteaser of a task, imagining the retrieval of information from his brain like stomping through his mind palace and tearing Post-It notes from the walls with more force than was probably necessary.
The next desk onstage belonged to Sola, a triple-threat streamer whom Ivan once considered a friend.
She’d ditched him when the Emilia thing happened, once he was no longer a cool kid.
Next desk after that was Chaz, and screw Chaz.
After him … ugh. Ivan knew the next answers, but he gave up on mentally reciting them because somehow, the knowledge bored him more than doing nothing.
He sheepishly tacked the Post-Its back on the walls of his brain and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked Brian, only half expecting an answer.
“Editor of WizzFeed,” Brian replied robotically.
Of course. After the scandal of last year’s Guardians League Online championship received some small critique from gaming news sites, Ivan had watched from the sidelines as Brian started scooping up a game journalist from one site, an editor and reviewer from another, and so on until he’d built a team large enough to run an entire site dedicated to news about the league.
These were the people who took Brian’s suggestions and ran with them, crafting the program’s narrative one post, one video, one on-brand tweet at a time.
And when the ethical quandaries involved in covering one’s own company as news clashed against the unprecedented access the WizzFeed writers had to the players themselves, the access won every time.
“Okay, VANE,” Brian said after another few seconds of clicking.
Ivan turned around to see him slip his phone into the cupholder of his large, boxy leather recliner.
Ivan thought that was Brian’s way of signaling that Ivan had his full attention, but he was simply swapping the phone out for a tablet, which he tapped at intently until a mirror of its screen appeared on all of the viewing suite’s many television screens.
“Before we start, you got anything to report?”
Ivan dutifully launched himself away from the window and plopped down into the chair next to Brian’s.
That was a mistake. The seat was nowhere near as soft as he expected, clearly some dumb new chair technology from someone who enjoyed modern art and had never sat down once in their life.
It felt like he’d tip over the moment he got too comfortable in any direction, which may have been the point.
As much as he admired Brian, “comfortable” wasn’t a word he’d use to describe their working relationship.
“Couple things,” Ivan began. “Someone tried to bring a bunch of booze to the first party after orientation, but I was able to clear it out before anyone could get it on camera.”
“Thanks for that. Last thing I need is some kid getting alcohol poisoning on day one.”
“No problem.” Ivan knew what Brian wanted him to talk about, but it felt better if he led up to the whole Zora thing with some other useful information. It made Ivan feel like these reports were official, like Brian had hired him for a real summer job.
“Hired” was a strong word; “hired” implied that Ivan was getting paid.
He wasn’t, or at least not in actual money.
When Brian approached him after his fiftieth-place loss at Wizzcon and offered him a spot in the summer academy regardless of his in-game performance, obviously Ivan had leapt at the chance.
All Ivan had to do was attend the program and keep an eye on everyone on behalf of Wizzard Games.
And also to “keep things interesting,” no matter what.
And to report back so the company couldn’t be surprised by any twists in the academy’s inevitable inter-player drama.
“Payton and Paxton are fighting,” Ivan continued. He withheld the part where he knew it was Zora who sabotaged them. If Brian found out how good she was at stirring up shit, it would be her in his suite twice a week instead of Ivan. “That’s something to watch. Friends to rivals or whatever.”
“Nice.” Brian nodded, far from satisfied. “And …”
“And”—Ivan swallowed thinly—“I’ve picked the front-runners, like you asked.” It was far more accurate to say that the front-runners chose him, but Brian didn’t need to know that. “Kavi Khurana, Trieu Vu, and Zora Lyon.”
“Not Cassius Sharpe?” Brian raised a blond eyebrow. “You don’t think the first battle winner is worth looking out for?”
“Nope.” Ivan shrugged. “He doesn’t have what it takes.”
“And yes to Zora Lyon? Number fifty?”
“Yep. Trust me.”
“Okay,” Brian said with playful skepticism. “Let’s see if you’re right.”
Brian fiddled with the remote until the TV screen showed what Ivan had come to see: the god’s-eye view of the Wizz-Algorithm working in real time.
Part stock market ticker, part rapidly shifting leaderboard, with every view, comment, like, reaction, and WiTch minute spent on each academy player’s profile contributing to their standing in real time.
Ivan watched the numbers and names flicker all around them, wondering if this was what it was like to live inside a computer.
It was almost too much information for his brain to take in at once, until Brian paused the entire operation with a touch of his finger.
The characters on-screen resolved into something more readable.
Names, in a list, numbered from one to fifty. Ivan only had to look for five:
#1 Cassius Sharpe
#27 Ivan Hunt
#28 Trieu Vu
#31 Kavi Khurana
#50 Zora Lyon
“This is how we looked this morning, before the open lunch,” Brian explained. “Now that your WiTch accounts are open and everyone’s been posting …” He tapped the screen again, and the names swapped around.
#8 Ivan Hunt
#20 Trieu Vu
#23 Kavi Khurana
#30 Cassius Sharpe
#32 Zora Lyon
Ivan felt a wash of pride. He had been right. With the addition of audience scoring into the Wizz-Algorithm, everyone had trended positively except for Cass.
“Wait a minute.” Brian squinted at the screen. “Zora Lyon jumped eighteen spots since this morning?”
So did I, Ivan thought. That’s not a coincidence.