Chapter 50
CHAPTER FIFTY
Cat
“What do you mean, gone?” I ask.
Across from me, Val cocks her head like I’m a puzzle she’s trying to suss out. “They’re not here, sweetheart. Andz popped in for all of five minutes this morning before running out without finishing their coffee.”
“Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know. They checked Reddit and their face went whiter than a glass of whole milk.”
I stop wolfing down the cookie Val gave me for free on account of Revivify being ten minutes away from closing. “Andi checked Reddit?”
Val nods grimly. “It’s my fault. I thought that’s why she dropped by looking like she hadn’t slept all weekend, but …”
Guilt—and something more complicated—pricks my conscience. I smother it with a bite of cookie. “Do you know where she might’ve gone?”
“No idea,” Val says. “She does this sometimes, you know? Something happens and she disappears for a few days.”
Clicking my tongue, I mentally comb through the places Andi could be. I peeked through the side window of her apartment already, but the lights were off with the empty pizza boxes in the kitchen still stacked four high, like she hadn’t been home since Friday night. The office was devoid of life too, hence me showing up at Revivify.
“What about B8?” I ask desperately.
“It’s Sunday afternoon, Cat. What makes you think Andi’s out clubbing?”
“I don’t know!” Vising my palms around my head, I push until the caf é goes blurry. “Shouldn’t I know where Andz disappears off to? Shouldn’t you? How does no one in her life really know her at all?”
At this, Val’s eyes soften. “You can’t blame yourself for the walls she’s built up, Cat.”
“I don’t,” I say, my impatience poking its ugly head out. “But we don’t have a lot of time left before her meeting with Brett ‘I have a ball sack for a face’ McCloy, and I need to warn her.”
“Warn her about what?” Val asks before holding up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t need to know.”
Tapping my lower lip, I scroll through my memories of the past eight weeks. Where would Andi retreat to if things got bad? I know what book she’d read, thanks to all the time I’ve spent camping out in her bathroom. I have a pretty good guess what drink she’d order, given our heart-to-heart at the Top Note bar in Vegas. But where would she go ?
I think about all the things she’s told me about herself: her respect for the composer Yasunori Mitsuda; her love of gas station food; her suspicion that Jan was the one who leaked her personal details three years ago.
Overnight, because of Jan, the entire world became this hostile place. I couldn’t stay home alone, couldn’t go into the office, couldn’t even visit a coffee shop without looking over my shoulder.
Before she said that, she’d squeezed her left forearm … but why is that detail sticking out in my head now? “Her tattoo,” I mumble.
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know where Andi is. I shoot up out of my seat, the rest of Val’s cookie falling to the ground. Val winces at the mess I’ve made of her pristine floors, but I’m too excited to apologize. “Her tattoo,” I declare a second time.
Val arches a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at me. “Which one?”
She has more than one? I try not to hate the woman across from me for having ever shared Andi’s bed. “Th-the visible one.” Seizing a napkin off a table and a pen out of the cup by the register, I sketch a jagged upside-down V. “You know, the one on her left forearm.”
“Do you know where it is?” Val asks, leaning over my shoulder.
“No, but I know it’s in the Rockies. She said she spent a lot of time out in the wilderness as a kid, with her mom. She grew up not far from here, right? Maybe she went out there. That’d explain why my texts keep dropping.” I clip my hands on my hips. “How many mountains could there be in the Rockies? Ten?”
Val grimaces. “Oh honey—”
Refilling my lungs, I barrel on. “No, listen. This is a main-story quest. I have all the pieces to the puzzle. I only need to figure out how they fit together.”
“I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, Cat, but there are over fifty major peaks in the Rockies in Colorado. How’re you going to find the one Andi went to?”
“Google Earth?” I throw out willy-nilly. “Plus she said something about an old strip mall nearby. Wikipedia has to have a list of all the ghost towns along the Rockies, right?”
“Cat—”
“Mission six!” I shout.
“What?”
Grabbing my bag, I sling it onto my back with enough force to knock out a small child. “The mountain in the sixth mission of Aftermath is the same as the one in Andi’s tattoo,” I explain. “Gamers are obsessive. I bet I just need to go on Reddit and ask and within thirty seconds, someone’ll tell me which peak it is.”
“Are you sure about this—” Val stammers.
But I’m already out the door, sprinting up the street toward Heartrender.
I’m right about Reddit. It takes less than a minute for someone to inform me that the mountain in mission six of Aftermath is none other than Mount Elbert, the highest summit of the Rocky Mountains and the second-highest summit in the lower forty-eight. I excuse their passive-aggressive use of an ellipsis even though I can feel their side-eye boring into me from the comments section. For the moment, I have bigger fish to fry than proving my nerd cred.
From there, it takes another thirty minutes of Wikipedia rabbit-holing and Google Earth–ing to identify all the towns in the vicinity with strip mall–esque structures that have been around since the nineties. With a list of destinations in hand, I grab my phone, keys, and wallet and guide my little yellow Bug that has never climbed a mountain in its life onto the highway.
About an hour in, I remember I’m a halfway decent driver and relax. It helps that most of the traffic is traveling opposite me, so for the most part, I get the middle lane all to myself. As the miles go on, my phone drifts from full to spotty reception. It’s disconcerting—I’m a child of the internet—but the intermittent quiet gives me confidence I’m headed in the right direction.
There are three strip malls on my list. The first one is a bust. Not only is it overrun with Osprey backpacks and Salomon boots, the one store that looks big enough to have once housed an arcade is a gun shop. (The muttonchopped owner explains to me in no uncertain terms that “no fake shooting has ever taken place within a hundred feet of this here business.”) I don’t find Andi at the second location either. Out of self-pity, I buy myself a Dairy Queen Blizzard before walking away from the dubious-looking massage parlor and out-of-business GameStop.
Not for the first time in my life, I wish quest markers were a thing. How much easier would navigating be if I had a handy little arrowhead pointing me toward where I need to go? Then again, if it worked like most in-game quest markers, following it would only lead me to an unscalable wall or through a cave filled with a unique monster named something like Galoop the Donglehammer.
I peer down at the last address on my list. When I plugged it into Google Maps earlier, the instructions that came back involved hiking down what looks like a deer path on my phone, which is why I saved it for last. Will she be there? Or will I find nothing but a sprawl of empty buildings? In video games, the hardest-to-reach location is always the one that holds the treasure, but this is real life. There’s no guarantee Andi is out here at all.
With determination running through my veins, I put my car in drive and turn on my headlights. They cut through the dark and help me maneuver my Bug up the turns and switchbacks of the mountain. I keep my eyes strictly on the road until I’m five hundred feet away from where I’m supposed to start walking. Pulling over onto the shoulder, I step out.
The first thing I notice is the view. At my feet, a sweep of valley unfurls, stretching up toward what I can only assume is Mount Elbert. From this distance, its slopes are gentler than I expected, like it’s trying to fit itself against the sky rather than pierce it. Even without a shred of sun to bring color to the world, I can see why Andi loves it here. It’s beautiful.
She’s also not here.
I check my surroundings for a parked motorcycle, but the road is dead, empty except for me and my cooling breaths. Google Maps wants me to walk into the valley, but if Andi is down there, shouldn’t her bike be somewhere nearby? Shouldn’t there be a path, signs of passage, dusty footprints and snapped branches?
Somewhere in the woods, a bird cackles. I flinch. The sound, so much like laughter, reminds me that life isn’t a game and that I’m no hero on a main-story quest. I’m just a bit player, a Koopa, an NPC who may as well not exist when the person holding the controller isn’t looking. And NPCs don’t get to win the day. They’re lucky if they get their side quests completed.
Exhaustion takes over, and I sit in the dirt and grass.
Game over.