Single Player

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Cat

EVARALIN

Don’t you understand?

(Evaralin touches the longbow on his back. Across the clearing, Catha closes her eyes, as if imagining her cheek under the stroke of his palm. Around them, a breeze combs through the forest. Leaves shimmer and sigh.)

EVARALIN (CONT’D)

For you, Catha, I would shoot the moon from the sky.

[GAMEPLAY] Catha runs across the clearing toward Evaralin. They embrace.

(Music swells. Something orchestral and grand but in a minor key so the observant player knows this love is not meant to last.)

I bite my lower lip. The scene is good, I think. But is it good enough to net me a full-time temp job at Heartrender Studios, one of the most prestigious video game developers in North America? By request, I wrote it on the fly during my grueling five-hour interview, which I’ve just entered hour six of. (The HR person did warn me to clear my schedule—not that I had anything on the calendar to clear.) Now, Philomena Okoro—titan producer and the first Black woman to helm a Heartrender game—is reviewing it with an inscrutable expression on her face.

With a skitter, Philo dashes her iPad across the coffee table. I jerk upright on the yoga ball where I’m perched, fear improving my usually terrible posture.

“Is it that bad?” I ask, one eye squinted shut.

“Bad?” Philo gapes at me. “Is it …” Throwing her hands in the air, she pulls herself up from her beanbag chair and paces between the table and the far windows. Beyond the glass, the late-summer Boulder sun shines like a beacon of either hope or blistering rejection. As much as I’m praying for the former, I’m bracing myself against the latter.

“It’s too schmoopy, isn’t it?” I rush out. “You’re right. Catha’s the mage Keeper of her entire high-elf clan at this point. She’s too level headed to rush in toward Ev like that. I can dial it back, just give me another chance.”

I wince at my own desperation but let my words stand. I need this job. Not only do I have fewer Gs (that means money in gamer-speak) than a level-one character, but rent’s due in two weeks and I still owe Lou, my roommate, a hundred bucks for groceries. Why did I think it was a good idea to leave my comparatively cushy life as an accountant to try my hand at games writing again?

Ah, right. Passion. That and the fact that every time I opened Microsoft Excel at my old job, I felt my soul leak out a little.

If my parents and sister could see me now, practically groveling for a twelve-month-long temp position at Heartrender Studios, they’d disown me out of embarrassment.

“Whatever it is, I can fix it,” I blather. I hunch my shoulders in preparation for critical feedback.

“What are you even saying right now?” Philo says, parking herself in front of me. “It’s good , Cat. I’d say perfect, even.”

“Really?” Bit by bit, my body unwinds and assumes a more dignified position. “Does that mean …?”

With a smile, Philo nods. “You’re in, Cat. Welcome to Heartrender. We’ll put you on the team working on Compass Hollow , if that’s okay.”

“If that’s okay? Of course that’s okay!” I whoop, springing to my feet and sending the yoga ball flying. If the hype I’ve read on the internet is to be believed, Compass Hollow is not only a narrative-driven triple-A title with a massive budget but also the next big thing in the choices-matter genre. In most games, the story is set. Sure, players get to choose whether they shoot the bad guy with a shotgun or a pistol, but for the most part, the game concludes in the same way regardless of who’s holding the controller. In a choices-matter game, however, how a player gets to the end means something—and determines what ending they get. Were their gameplay decisions just and true? Or corrupt and conniving? Their choices throughout impact whether they’ll win the day with the planet united behind them or as a lone wolf.

To work on a game as sprawling as Hollow , and with the one and only Philo Okoro no less, is a dream come true. When I crossed paths with her in grad school (she visited to teach a seminar), I never thought I’d ever get the chance to actually create with her. Finally, all those years spent getting a master’s degree in game design and writing for indie projects is paying off. I can see my updated website already: “Catherine Li, writer for Heartrender Studios and Compass Hollow .”

“What do you think I’ll work on first?” I ask, crossing my fingers and hoping for something meatier than menus and tutorials. Character dialogue, maybe? Or better yet, story.

“Given your contributions to Charon’s Scythe ,” Philo says, “I’m thinking writing our love interests could be up your alley.”

“Shut up,” I say, my eyes bugging out. “You’re joking.” It was my idea to add romance to Charon’s Scythe , the only notable game I’ve worked on to date. See, the ferryman Charon doesn’t get a lover in Greek mythology. He just takes dead people across the River Styx. For eternity. Apparently, giving him a person—someone to look forward to at the end of each day when Gaia’s banks pull into view—really resonated with players: the game crossed the “one million copies sold” threshold last month.

Still, I hadn’t known Hollow would include romance.

Scooping my jaw up off the ground, I apologize, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you to shut up, obviously, but that … that’d be amazing. I’m obsessed with love in video games.”

Holding up both hands, Philo signals for me to slow down. “Nothing’s final yet. And I don’t think I need to tell you how important it is in this industry to keep leaks out of the news, especially when people have already started speculating about what our game will include. I’m going to put in my recommendation for you to focus on the romantic storylines, but ultimately, what the team and you work on is up to our narrative director.”

With a start, I remember the lead writer and narrative director of Compass Hollow is Andi Zhang, or Andz : the wunderkind who, at the young age of twenty-eight, cowrote Aftermath , one of the industry’s best-selling titles … ever. Besides Philo, Andz is the closest thing I have to a hero—although when asked by normal people, I usually say I look up to someone more relatable, like Michelle Obama.

“Capisce?” Philo asks.

Bobbing my head, I pretend to zip my lips and throw away the key. “Got it. Will I get to meet Andz today? And does Andz go by she/her or they/them these days?”

“Last I checked, either works,” Philo says. “They use both interchangeably, so that’s what I do too when referring to them. As for meeting them today, we’ll see. They’re pretty busy, so no promises. In the meantime, let me give you a tour and introduce you to whoever’s around.”

We walk out of Philo’s office and down the corridor, past glassed-in conference rooms named fun, quirky things like “Hyrule” and “Tamriel,” before descending a short flight of stairs. On the main floor, I meet a few dozen designers and engineers hunkered down in low-wall cubicles before Philo weaves us through a more open area, where there’s a pool table along with several old-school arcade machines. My toes curl inside my shoes with anticipation when I see two professional Dance Dance Revolution pads, but I tear my gaze away from the unoccupied game and instead hurry after Philo, who’s leading me down a long hallway off to the right.

“This is our office kitchen, which we call the Ogre Mound,” she says, pointing to her left. “We get tacos catered every Tuesday, but be on your guard: the testers work literally across the hall. They’re vicious, and they will eat everything within fifteen minutes of it being delivered.”

Following Philo’s finger, I read the label on the door of a windowless room. “The Cave?”

“It’s where our playtesters sit and hunt for bugs in near darkness,” she explains ominously.

My eyes land on a pair of heavy metal doors at the end of the hallway. “What’s down there?”

“Our mocap studio. We can’t do everything on-site, obviously— Compass Hollow is too big a project for that—but we do as much as we can here in the office. Actually, our lead designer should be in there right now. If you’d like, I can check to see if he’s free to come out and say hi.”

“Sure,” I chirp. I’m so bowled over by everything I’ve seen so far that I forget to ask if I can sneak a peek inside the studio too.

“Great. Wait here.” Philo disappears, leaving me by myself in the empty eggshell-colored hallway.

Newly alone, I let the thrill that’s been buzzing in the background ever since Philo told me I landed the job wash over me. After a lifetime of being the odd one out—first in the placid suburbs of Pennsylvania where I grew up and later in Kansas City where I went to college and got my first job as a thoroughly miserable accountant—it’s hard to believe I’m on the inside of a major studio. And I’ve only been in Colorado since June! I moved here from Salt Lake City after wrapping work on Charon’s Scythe with the thought that the Denver/Boulder area has both a strong tech scene and a number of innovative game dev companies.

I. Am. Killing it!

Eagerly, I run my tongue over all the proper nouns filling up my head. The Ogre Mound. The Cave. Heartrender and Compass Hollow and the studio where motion capture happens.

Andz. What will they be like? While I admired their work on Aftermath , I don’t know much about them as an actual person beyond the controversy that engulfed them online a few years ago.

Thing is, when Aftermath first came out, everyone assumed the person behind the “Andz” writing credit was a man—that is, until Andz made an unprecedented appearance at TornadoCon in Sydney three years ago. In an auditorium packed with several thousand sweaty nerds, you could hear a cosplayer’s bobby pin drop when Andz walked out onto the stage and started their talk by announcing their pronouns. In the fifteen or so minutes that followed—I know because the whole debacle was uploaded to YouTube and shared ad nauseum—Andz droned on about balancing narrative with gameplay while trying to ignore the susurrations in the crowd before exiting stage right to no applause and zero questions. But what’s puzzled me to this day is why they even agreed to show up when they were so clearly uncomfortable in the limelight—unlike their cowriter, Jan Eschler.

I wasn’t the only one confused. For several weeks afterward, conspiracy theories permeated every corner of the world wide web, from Reddit and Discord to the back alleyways of 4chan. Rumors swirled that it was a joke, that Andz had been thrust forward by an industry overly concerned with pleasing “SJWs” (social justice warriors) and that Andz had, in fact, written less than a scene, less than a paragraph, less than a sentence for the entire game. There was no way a woman—or a she/they—had written Aftermath . It was too gritty. Too dark. Too … manly.

Then someone (or maybe multiple someones) doxed Andz. I remember staring at the headline, aghast that anyone could hate a stranger so much that they’d fly halfway across the country and camp out in front of a random apartment building. All in the hopes that they’d catch a glimpse of Andz and get to yell “Dumb, lying bitch” in their face. Who knows how many death threats they received, how many times they looked over their shoulder only to see a face they didn’t recognize and think, Do I need to be afraid of you?

“Uh, hi?”

I snap to. There’s a blonde woman standing in front of me wearing a barely-SFW Betty Boop dress. How long has she been waving at me? Deciding it doesn’t matter, I blurt out a hello. “Sorry! Hi. I’m Cat.”

“Hi, Cat,” she says, overenunciating my name. “I wanted to ask—do you work here?”

I start to say no before drawing myself up to my full five-foot-two height. “Why yes, in fact, I do.” Or I will as soon as Philo and I get the paperwork sorted out.

“That’s amazing,” the blonde woman exclaims. “So, what can you tell me about Compass Hollow ? Plot, characters, mechanics … you name it, I’m interested.”

Frowning, I rack my brain. I know everything in the public domain—how Hollow ’s a single-player narrative role-playing game about a band of heroes coming together to save the world from a fell dragon—but for some reason, I get the sense that this woman is after something other than basic information. I’m about to share what Philo said about love interests when her warning about being discreet floats to the forefront of my consciousness. “Sorry, but … who are you?”

“Oh gosh, I never introduced myself. How rude of me. I’m—”

“Ainsley.”

Someone—tall, lean, with fabulous, black-as-night hair—inserts themself between me and the blonde woman and, in the process, body checks me into the wall.

“Hey,” I say. “Standing right here!”

The person who rammed into me spares me a glance over their left shoulder before turning back to their quarry. “If you don’t mind, Ainsley, we really prefer you not wander off on your own.”

What the … I gnash my teeth together. Nothing boils my blood faster than being made to feel like I don’t exist. (Unfortunately, it happens quite often, which means I spend a lot of my life in a state of low-grade anger.) Standing on my tiptoes, I tap the person in front of me. “An apology would be nice,” I say.

This time, the person turns around and observes me with irises the color of cut obsidian. They look vaguely familiar, but as I try to place them, their dark eyes pull me in, scrambling my thoughts. They have the kind of edgy hairstyle I’ve never been brave enough to try out for myself: a medium fade on the sides with the top swept back. Between that and their impossibly high cheekbones, they’re gorgeous in an effortless I toss my head and people fall over kind of way.

Then they snarl, “Who even are you?” and the real world rushes back into place.

“Who are you ?” I shoot back at the same time as a rail-thin man skids across the linoleum.

Instead of answering me, the person before me darts their attention toward the newcomer. “Carter,” they bark.

“Yes, Ms. Zhang?”

My blood turns to ice. Wait. Ms. Zhang ?

“Shitballs, Carter, how many times do I have to remind you to call me Andi?” With a sigh, Andi gestures to the blonde. “Do us a favor and show Ainsley out, will you?”

“Yes, M … I mean, Andi.”

I watch, rooted to the spot, as Ainsley leans in and touches Andi meaningfully on the arm. I listen as she whispers, “Remember, no story is too small.” I catch the tick in Andi’s jaw as she swans off with Carter a few steps behind. I clock all this without moving a single muscle because suddenly, my ears are filled with white noise and curse words.

How stupid could I be, to mouth off to my boss before they’ve even properly met me? But then, how was I supposed to recognize them as Andi “Andz” Zhang? Gamedevs aren’t exactly A-list celebrities, splashed on the front covers of People and TIME —and besides, the last time I saw a picture of Andi, they had long hair.

Also, they’re way hotter in person.

Panicking, I straighten and stick out a sweaty hand. “Sorry about that. Didn’t recognize you without the”—I pull on my ponytail and let a sheepish grin escape—“TornadoCon hair. We got off on the wrong foot. I’m Cat. I hear you need help in the romance department.”

We both stare down at my outstretched hand like it’s a warm turd I’ve dropped between us. I hear you need help in the romance department ? I could draft a billion meet-cutes and not come up with something so cringeworthy.

Shrinking my arms back into my hoodie’s sleeves, I babble, “What I mean is—”

“Who did you hear that from?” Andi interjects, bearing down on me. “Did you tell her anything?”

“What? Who?”

“Ainsley. Did you say anything about the game? I’m guessing you’re new, since I haven’t seen you around here before, so let me remind you that even prospective hires are under an NDA.”

I glower at my boss-slash-opponent, at their coiffed hair and glittering eyes. What did I do to deserve the third degree? Famed writer or not, Andi “Andz” Zhang is turning out to be a bit of an asshat. “The only thing I told her was my name,” I retort. Then, before I can rethink my life decisions, I add, “Pretty sure that’s not covered under your precious NDA.”

I nearly clap my hands to my mouth, I’m so horrified at myself. What is wrong with me today? I’m usually polite to a fault, at least around the people I want to like me—and shouldn’t I want Andi to like me? But something about them is rubbing me the wrong way. Their This is my kingdom and you’re just a cockroach to be stepped on attitude, for one.

Nevertheless, I should apologize. No use antagonizing the person I’ll be reporting to for the next twelve months. I’m figuring out the best way to say sorry without sounding sarcastic when the double doors at the end of the hallway screech open and Philo pops her head out. “Sorry that took so long, Cat, but Gabe ended up roping me into a conversation about—” She stops when she sees Andz standing there, the scowl still on their face. “Andi?”

“Philo,” Andi growls. “Are we letting interviewees wander the office these days?”

“Oh, come off it, Andi,” Philo says, striding up toward us. “I left Cat unattended for all of five minutes. She’s the new temp you told me to hire, by the way.”

“ I told you to hire?”

The derision in their tone makes me flinch. Andi clearly doesn’t want anything to do with me. I fixate on the eggshell wall behind them and try to talk my face out of blushing.

“Remember?” Philo pushes. “You said, and I quote, ‘Whatever, Phi, get me another head for my team, or don’t expect me to hit my deadlines.’ Well, here you go: Cat Li, at your service. I read a couple of her scenes this afternoon, and trust me, they’re literal fire. She also contributed significantly to Charon’s Scythe , so you might want to consider letting her take a stab at the love interests—”

“No, Phi, not this again.”

“Yes, this again, Andi,” Philo scolds, her mouth growing stern. “Be nice.”

Andi studies me like I’m a fetch quest they can’t be bothered with. A good five seconds go by before they say, “I guess you’re hired.”

I swallow. Part of me is still furious at being bumped, then ignored, then interrogated, but for the sake of appeasing Andi and Philo and appearing like a normal, well-adjusted human being, I resolve to play nice too. “Thanks,” I say. As an olive branch, I tack on, “I’m actually a big fan of yours. You and Jan Eschler did such amazing work on Aftermath . If someone had told me this morning that come this afternoon, I’d be working on the same game as Philo and Andz, I would’ve laughed in their face.”

Andi’s eyes narrow, pulling their cheekbones even higher. “It’s Andi. Not Andz. That’s an … internet thing.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I suck in my cheeks. “By the way, do you have a preference? Between she and they? I asked Philo already, but I want to be sure.”

Andi blinks at me. I resist the urge to check if I have eye poop. “She is fine.”

“Cool cool cool,” I say. “Well, sorry again for the misunderstanding, but I honestly can’t wait to work with you. With regards to the romance options in Compass Hollow , I love writing that stuff, so I’m eager to dive in. If we get the logistics squared away today, I can come in as early as tomorrow. Say, nine thirty?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Andi says, checking her email right in front of me. “We’ll coordinate async. Philo’ll make sure you get set up with a Slack account. Keep an eye on it, and I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”

With that, I’m dismissed. In her rush to get to wherever she needs to go, Andi clips my side with a leather-jacketed shoulder. I grab my arm. It’s hot where she touched me, like she burned me with her indifference. I glare after her, anger crawling up the back of my neck, but before I can figure out how to hurl daggers from my eyes, Andi is gone.

The fight goes out of me as disappointment wallops me in the chest. Far from being the person I expected, Andi is standoffish. Dismissive. Mean.

“I’m sorry,” Philo says with a grimace. “Andi’s not usually that … brusque. She’s been dealing with a lot. A few senior writers who’ve recently moved on, a journalist who won’t leave us alone, and last month, Brett—that’s our new boss from our publisher, Elevation Art—told us he wants us to add romance options to Compass Hollow . All when we’re already behind schedule and understaffed. I had to search the Ogre Mound’s couch cushions for the budget to bring you onboard.” Sighing, Philo drags on a new smile. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry about all that. Andi’ll come around. I think.”

While I catch the hitch in Philo’s voice, I force myself to shrug. “No worries. I get it. I’d be attached too if I were the writer and director for one of the most highly anticipated games since The Last of Us Part II .”

Philo grins. “Girl, you’re gonna be great for this game,” she says. “I can tell.”