Chương 62: 61: First Things First

Of course, it wasn't that easy. Deciding to take Pen to California was simple. Acting on that decision required a little more thought. Pen was Level 4, and Gus Level 3. Good on him that he'd leveled up twice while waiting in the Dollar General with Pen—he hadn't lied about being a hunter apparently—but 3 still seemed pretty low to me. Would I be able to keep the two of them safe if we ran into trouble? The rift shouldn't be a problem.

System Chelsea had said that it would be weeks before the rifts began to overflow and tier up. But what if Jules and her son Toby were living in a town of Murder Hobos? I didn't know much about the town where they lived. I'd never visited them there, but Jules seemed to like it well enough. That said, while she'd never mentioned her neighbors, she had joked about the town's history as the murder capital of the world. That had been back in the 1970s, though, so… it was just a joke, right?

"How would we get there?" Pen asked.

"Can I bring Gus?"

"Gus goes where you go," I replied, looking at the dogs. Riley and Bear were sleeping soundly; Z was sitting but still alert next to my feet. The dogs would help. Me, Pen, three dogs, Gus… I looked back at Pen. The girl really was beautiful, and there was absolutely no way I could disguise her as a boy. That just wasn't gonna happen without serious cosmetic surgery. Which would be a crime against nature, actually.

"We can use a rift. But I think I should go myself first and make sure it's safe. Just in case…" I didn't say, "Just in case the town is filled with people like your murderous brothers," but I thought it. Pen nodded, a little uncertainly.

"How long will it take you? This is maybe not the best hiding place?" Her eyes darted to the French doors.

"Maybe a couple of hours? It depends on how close the nearest rift is to my friend's house and on what things are like when I get there. Maybe four. But let me check the rifts first and see. Either way, though, maybe it would be better for you to wait at the Dollar General. You could bring some books this time, and maybe a sleeping bag?"

"Okay." Pen still sounded uncertain.

"Problem?"

"Those bugs… that last bug… I'm not sure I could sleep there." She gave a little chuckle but looked away, sheepish. Fair point. I thought for a minute, then said, "I'll let you keep Bear and Riley this time. They can clear out the whole place, which will let you unlock the office in the gas station. There's a couch in there. It doesn't look real comfortable, but at least it's off the ground. You can close the door and sleep in there. There's just one thing I have to check first."

I needed to ask System Chelsea how long an instance would last after it was cleared. If it had some sort of automatic kick-you-out timeline after a clear, Pen might not be able to stay in the office. It might not matter, though. If I could get to Jules and back in a couple of hours, Pen might have a cozy couch in California before bedtime.

"Hopefully, I'll be back before you need to sleep, anyway, and none of this will matter." I stood, dropping my blue throw with some reluctance.

"But I'll go grab you a sleeping bag, just in case, and you can grab a book or two." I hesitated in the doorway, glancing back at my bookshelves.

"If you can't find anything you want to read here, you can check the shelves in the living room, too." I read a fair amount, but I'd gradually switched to ebooks. Most of the books on my shelves were at least ten years old, many of them even older. They'd become scenery in the way that bookshelves do. I didn't know what Pen would find or whether any of it would feel, well, appropriate to her. Needless to say, there were no Bibles on my shelves.

There might be an old one that belonged to my grandparents on the living room shelves, though. I hurried upstairs and rummaged around in the guest room until I found my dad's old sleeping bag amongst the camping gear. Yes, I considered letting her use mine, and no, it wasn't because I'm completely selfish that I didn't. (Mostly selfish, sure.) But anything brought into the rift might wind up covered in bug guts, and I like my sleeping bag. Although… would I ever use it again? Would it ever be safe to camp again?

For a moment, the enormity of what was happening to the world crashed over me. You'd think that should have happened by now—it had been a really long five days, after all. But then again, it had only been five days. I hadn't had time to process everything that was lost. Of course, I didn't have time now, either. I added one more thing to my mental list of things I wasn't thinking about and kept moving. Pen was still in the sunroom, looking at books.

She slid one back onto the shelf when I came into the room and turned back to me, holding up a well-worn copy of The Hunger Games. Her cheeks were pink.

"Could I borrow this? I've never read it, but I saw signs for the movie." She sounded slightly flustered. I joined her at the bookshelf, sleeping bag under my arm, and skimmed the shelves, trying to see what I owned that was embarrassing her. Oh. Oh, yeah, that would do it. For about half a second, I weighed "corrupting a minor" against "providing an adolescent girl with information about her own body," and then I grabbed Come As You Are off the shelf and handed it to her, too.

"Take both. Just in case I take longer than I think I will." You know how they say someone turned beet red? Or red as a tomato? I've never seen that happen, and I didn't now, either. Pen turned a slightly deeper pink, moving from maybe a seashell pink to a peony, and looking ridiculously pretty while she did.

"Thank you," she said, with only a hint of squeaky embarrassment in her tone. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Goddamn it, the embarrassment was contagious. I wanted to say something inspirational to her—or at the very least tilting more toward Favorite Aunt than Sleazy Stranger—but the best I could do was a nod and a move toward the doors. With a whistle, all the dogs were up and at my heels.

I opened the doors, and they piled out, with Gus stalking after them, tail held high. As we walked toward the rift, I had a brief moment of indecision. Should I bring Pen and the animals into my RMI? If the Rift Management Oversight Board was mad at me for bringing people into my interface space… well, fuck them, actually. I'd wait until they told me that was the rule before obeying it, because I needed answers from Chelsea.

I paused at the shimmer and said to Pen, "We're going into a slightly different place this time. It's just for a couple of minutes, and then you guys will head to the Dollar General. Okay?" She nodded, I caught every animal's eyes and made sure they were following, and we all entered the coffee shop. System Chelsea was standing behind the counter, just as she had been the last time I saw her. Intellectually, I knew she was only here when I was here.

But it still felt like I was stepping into a favorite coffee shop with a familiar barista at the espresso machine. I thought I ought to feel anxious about how comforting that was, but honestly I was gonna take my comfort where I could get it this week. I left Pen at the door, looking around wide-eyed, and crossed to the counter.

"Coffee, tea? Maybe a caramel macchiato?" I hesitated for a second at the unexpected reminder of Emma, then shook my head. I didn't have time to get distracted.

"Just answers, please." I rested one hand on the counter and tried to organize my thoughts. First things first, I needed to know—"Allow me," Chelsea interrupted. She smiled the real Chelsea's smile, the one with a hint of mischief, and put up her hand, five fingers outstretched. She tucked in the thumb, then said, "After you've accessed the rift core, the instance will close, but the timing is variable, anywhere from an hour or two to a day or two.

But if you don't access the rift core, the instance can stay open almost indefinitely. I say almost, because should the rift hit 100% mana density and overflow, all open instances will collapse. Best not to be inside if that happens. Thorn's Edge is only at 3% density right now, though, since you just cleared it yesterday, so that's not a risk you need to worry about." I blinked at her. She folded down her pinkie.

"It's a terrible idea to try to absorb an entire rift's mana and I would have warned you if I'd even remotely suspected you might do so. The idea never even crossed my mind. I'm not sure the idea has ever crossed anyone's mind. Except yours, of course. Don't do it again." Ring finger next.

"Yes, of course you may choose another rift to explore, and you're correct that the location doesn't matter. Any wild rift on the planet is available to you." Her middle finger joined the others, and a hint of a wince crossed her face.

"No, I don't know what that administrative review is about. The Rift Management Oversight Board is noted in my data as a hands-off organization, but they do seem to like their paperwork. I wouldn't worry about it too much, though; the System made you a Rift Keeper as a challenge phase reward and taking it away would be… complicated. Many forms, probably in triplicate. I'm sure you'll just get a slap on the wrist for a first offense, whatever it is."

With only the index finger left, she looked at it, then shook her head.

"Murder Hobos. I have no idea what the title does. The terminology is Earth-centric, of course, but that's typical at this stage of integration. The first person who received the title, probably provided the name themselves, within their mental model of whatever they thought they were doing." She exhaled—her speech had come out in one long burst—and smiled again.

"Was there anything else?" I blinked again and thought for a moment, finally replying, "I think that covers it." I glanced back at Pen. She'd wandered over to the wall of bookshelves and was reading titles, head tipped to the side. Chelsea followed my gaze.

"What a patient girl. She wouldn't have heard a word I said, so as far as she's concerned, you've just been standing here staring into space for the past few minutes." I opened my mouth to reply before realizing that Pen would hear my side of the conversation. Perhaps I didn't want to talk about her while she was standing right there. But I kinda thought she might be a little too used to the idea that children should be seen and not heard. Or maybe in the Barrow household, it was only girls who weren't heard.

"Thank you for your help," I said carefully. Pen glanced in my direction, and seeing that I was looking at her, turned to face me.

"What an odd place this is. It reminds me of this book my gran read to me, about a girl who fell in a rabbit hole. I don't know why, but... well, that was a long time ago. Daddy didn't like that she read it to me; he thought it was sinful." She clutched the books she was holding a little tighter to her chest. I looked around the coffee shop. I couldn't see the resemblance myself, but we were looking at very different things. JJ had described the RMI as the classic A-Ha video.

Maybe the black-and-white drawings in the classic Alice in Wonderland were the only frame of reference Pen had.

"It's my Rift Management Interface," I said to Pen.

"It's… well, it's complicated. But I did find out that you can stay in the gas station office indefinitely as long as you don't touch the rift core."

"And there are no bugs in there, right?"

"Exactly." I handed Pen the sleeping bag I'd been carrying, and rounded up the dogs with a look.

"Let's go." I opened the door and took everyone into the rift, but I didn't go past the beginning of the dirt road. By now, they knew the way and Bear and Riley could probably kill the bugs in their sleep.

"I'll be back as soon as I can," I told Pen.

"Be good," I told Bear and Riley. Riley would be, of course. Bear? Well, maybe she would be, too.

"See if you can get another level," I told Gus.

"You and Pen are the only ones who can get XP from the bugs, so make the most of it." And then Zelda and I went back into the RMI. This time, I walked straight to the map.

"Coffee? Tea? Caramel macchiato?" Chelsea called from across the room.

"Is there a reason you keep offering me a caramel macchiato?" I asked without looking back at her as I zoomed in on California on the map. There were so, so many rifts. Chelsea had said there were hundreds of thousands of them.

"I found it in your memories and liked the look of it, so I researched how to make it," Chelsea said, a hint of pride in her voice. I'd zoomed in on Jules' town. Her address was easy to remember. I hadn't been there, but we'd joked about it: 123 Seabreeze for a house two blocks from the ocean, on a stretch of the coast that always, always had fog. That breeze was damp and chilly, not nearly as romantic as the name made it sound. The nearest rifts, though, were not nearly as near as I'd like them to be.

One to the north, probably at least two miles away. One inland, even farther. And one in the ocean. That was the closest, but it didn't do me much good. I didn't have a mini-submarine to take me to the shore. And then I actually processed what Chelsea had just said. I stopped and turned away from the map, looking back at Chelsea.

"You found it in my memories?"

"Yes?" She sounded tentative.

"You can see my memories?" I repeated.

"Any memories of events that occurred after integration, yes. Before integration, no, not unless you think about them and for those—well, they're not accurate. They're just what you remember. The System's records are less fallible than sapient memory." Chelsea seemed a tiny bit apologetic. Maybe she thought I was freaking out about the AI in my brain, recording everything I did, said, and thought. I wasn't, though. Creepy Santa Claus was super creepy, but I'd resigned myself to the oversight…

well, it felt like eons ago. But it was at least a few days.

"Do you remember when I looked at Jack's license?" Chelsea tipped her head to the side and for a moment, her eyes went robotic. Not the glazed look that people got when they were looking at their HUD, but an even more distant look, as if she had temporarily shut off her vision. And then she was back.

"Yes," she said.

"It was approximately 17 minutes into the Challenge Scenario on the first day of the System integration. You were emptying Jack's pockets in an attempt—" I waved her words to a halt.

"I don't need the full details. I was there. But do you remember the address on the license?"

"Of course. Jack Francis, 721 Moorhaven —" I interrupted her again.

"I don't need it now. I just wanted to know if you had it." I'd been regretting not getting Jack's number ever since I got home. Not that it would have done much; cell phones were working erratically. But if he'd gone home—and I was sure he would have—he might still be there. If I went looking, I might be able to find him. There was a chance, anyway. First things first, though. I turned back to the map and zoomed in on the northern rift. It was closest to 123 Seabreeze.

First I'd find Jules, then I'd get Pen to a safe place, and after that I'd think about what came next.