Chapter 6 The Message in the Static
The message dissolved the moment Renne turned toward him, Like it was never there.
Caius sat with it behind his eyes and said nothing. He needed to think before he spoke. That was a rule he had developed over years of development meetings where saying the wrong thing too early collapsed a conversation before it produced anything useful.
Renne crouched beside him. "What just happened? Your face did something."
"Aftereffect from the integration." He said it easily. Not a lie exactly, more like a partial truth wearing a lie's clothes.
She looked at him for a second longer than comfortable. Then she let it go.
He turned his attention inward, examining what the Nullwalker fragment had left behind. The class data was mostly corrupted, large sections missing, the skill trees broken off mid-branch. But one skill had survived intact enough to function.
Null Step. He read its description the way you read something written in your own handwriting from years ago, familiar and slightly foreign at the same time. The ability to move through System-designated space without triggering environmental responses. Locked doors, System barriers, walls the game classified as impassable. In theory, he could walk through any of them.
The eleven percent intact data meant the skill misfired nearly half the time.
"I need to test something," he said.
He stood up and walked to the nearest section of collapsed wall, a section the System had classified as solid geometry, impassable terrain. He looked at it and reached for the Null Step skill the way he'd reached for the glitch in the Crusher's shoulder, that same instinct, that pull toward the mechanism underneath the surface.
He pushed, nothing happened. He walked directly into the wall and stopped against it like a normal person hitting solid stone.
Renne made a sound behind him, not quite a laugh.
He stepped back and tried again. His left arm went through the wall up to the elbow and then stopped, the rest of him still on the outside, his arm inside solid stone. The sensation was deeply unpleasant in a way that had no good reference point.
"That looks uncomfortable," Renne said.
"It is." He pulled his arm out, shook it once and tried a third time. This time he went through completely.
One step, two, the wall passing through him or him passing through the wall, the geometry flickering at the edges of his vision, and then he was on the other side in the small dark space behind the collapsed section, standing in terrain the System said shouldn't be occupied.
He stepped back through. Renne was watching him with an expression he hadn't seen on her yet. Not fear or warmth. Something that lived between professional interest and genuine alarm, the face of someone recalculating.
"Two failures and one success," he said. "Sixty percent is apparently optimistic."
"You walked through a wall."
"Third attempt."
"You walked through a wall." She said it again like repetition would make it make more sense. "That's not a skill in this game. That doesn't exist."
"It existed in a deleted build." He sat back down on the rubble. "The class it came from was cut before launch. Nobody has ever had access to it in the live game."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "In three hundred years, nobody has ever pulled anything out of a corrupted zone. Not a weapon or a piece of equipment." She paused. "Not a single fragment of data." She looked at him steadily. "Until you walked in there twenty minutes after arriving in this world."
"I built those zones. I know what's in them."
"That's not what I mean." She stood up and moved to the waystation's doorway, looking out at the terrain beyond. Her back was to him but he could see the tension in her shoulders, something working itself out. She turned around. "I mean that what you just did is not possible. And impossible things in this world have a way of becoming very expensive very quickly."
"Expensive how?"
"People notice. People talk." She crossed her arms. "And some people in this world collect things that shouldn't exist, remember? I said that to you an hour ago."
"I remember."
"A skill from a deleted class. Pulled from a corrupted zone by an entity the System doesn't recognize." She looked at him with the calculation still in her eyes, working something out. "Do you understand what someone would pay for that? What someone would do to have access to it?"
"I'm starting to."
"Good." She moved back inside and sat down across from him. "Then understand this too. What you just demonstrated, if anyone saw it, and in this world someone always sees something, you have about six hours before the wrong people start asking questions."
He looked at her. "You said nobody's ever pulled anything out of a corrupted zone. How do you know that?"
"Because it's the kind of thing that gets talked about. Quietly, in the right circles." She hesitate,. Just slightly. "There are things the player community knows about corrupted zones that never get discussed in the open."
He leaned forward. "Tell me."
She opened her mouth. Her hand shot to her interface instead.
The movement was automatic, the reflex of someone whose System alerts had trained their body to respond before their mind caught up. She stared at whatever was appearing in her vision. Her jaw tightened.
"What?" he said.
"PVP bounty flag." Her voice had gone flat and cold. "On me."
"Someone placed a bounty on you."
"Just now." She was already moving, standing, with blade in her hand. "Someone watched us go into that corrupted zone." Her eyes moved to the waystation's entrance, then the collapsed section of wall, running exits. "And they decided that me knowing about you is a problem that needs to be removed."
Caius stood. "How many?"
"The flag doesn't tell me that." She moved to the doorway and looked out. Nothing visible yet. She stepped back in. "But a bounty this fast means whoever placed it was already watching. Already close." She looked at him. "Can you walk through walls sixty percent of the time or a hundred percent of the time?"
"Sixty."
"Wonderful." She checked her blade. Looked at him. Something moved across her face quickly, a decision being made, the kind that didn't feel good but felt necessary. "You said you built this place. That you know how it works."
"Yes."
"Then tell me something useful." She moved to the wall beside the doorway and pressed her back against it, listening. "Because they're already outside."
From somewhere in the terrain beyond the waystation, a sound. Footsteps. More than one set. Moving with the specific confidence of people who knew exactly where they were going.
Caius looked at the wall on the opposite side of the waystation. At the solid geometry the System said was impassable.
"Third time's a charm," he said, and reached for Null Step.