13. On the Air

Century Stadium’s legislature district blooms into being around us. The nearer of the two first-round cashboxes spawns fifty meters ahead on a rooftop patio overlooking the main avenue to the colosseum. I drop a jump pad to propel us there faster. We’re first to the box. Sonnet starts the unlock, then runs the patio’s perimeter. Our heads swivel, waiting for another team to make their presence known. I cast a suspicious eye on a construction crane bent over the walled-off roots of a structure destined to be forever incomplete.

The crane stands between us and the cathedral, which houses one of the round’s cashout stations. The right opponents could really hurt us with that vantage. I think of the Vogues specifically, and the deadly potential of their long-range weapons. I ping the top of the crane, and Sonnet takes my cue, grappling up to the catwalk.

The cashbox unlatches into Barley’s arms. She drops to the street and takes a jagged path of back alleys to get to the cathedral. Sonnet and I provide overwatch from the crane and the rooftops. The report of gunfire comes to us from a distance. Must be a clash over the other box. Can’t see anything at first, but a closer look reveals figures oscillating through the sky, dipping behind the peak of a roof seventy or so meters distant, then rebounding again into the air. Once every second or so, the deep, splashing drumbeat of a CL-40 swamps over the din. The picture fits together in my head now. The Vogues are using a jump pad to bomb their opponents from the sky.

“Group up,” says Barley, pulling my attention back to our side of the map. She’s made a deposit. Sonnet’s with her. I slide clean off my rooftop and take the inertia into a stumbling sprint toward one of the cathedral’s back doors.

From somewhere behind me, I make out three heavy sets of footsteps.

“Company on my back.” I slam the door behind me and set a gas mine beside the knob. “Adjusters, I’m pretty sure.” A rickety wooden staircase brings me to a plain storage space, where our cashout sits on thin plywood sheets. Alarms go off in my head. This whole place is waiting to go up in flames.

The others are ahead of me. They’ve ducked into an adjacent closet that backs up into the brickwork of the cathedral’s main walls. I join them. I angle the barrel of my AKM through the threshold so I can exchange fire without leaving my body exposed. Even here, removed from the station, we’re in a rough spot. Here’s the problem: the Adjusters run a slow, unyielding team build optimized for tanking. The moment I pull my trigger, they’ll have between one and three mesh shields up. In a closed environment like this, one active shield will be enough to cover our angles for attack. When the first shield goes down, another contestant will activate theirs, with the two players not on shield duty free to deal damage the whole time. Given the time to remove the distance, they’ll crush us in a close quarters engagement, and I can hear them coming up the stairs now. The gas mine didn’t hold them long. LadyLuck must have burned the fumes with that pyro grenade she keeps equipped. A small victory. One less gadget for them to use against us in the coming battle.

“Going up,” says Sonnet. I slide my gun back and cast my eyes upward to see a pair of tiny lights flickering from the ceiling of our closet. Two breach charges. A click, and the roof caves around us. I know what to do. I skim the gadgets in my inventory—gas mines, defibrillator, bounce pad—and select that last one. The Adjusters are here. It’s worse than I was thinking. They don’t even need to round the corner to hurt us. Rydr, their captain, totes an MGL-32, same launcher as Barley. The grenades start coming. Some miss the closet. Others hit the threshold and bounce the other way, turning plywood to sawdust where they detonate. Still, about one in three makes it to our feet, and that’s enough.

“Now, Google!” Sonnet shouts over the clamoring explosions, but I wait. I wait until I hear the click of a release. Rydr’s reloading. I drop the jump pad. Sonnet goes first, Barley just behind. I move to follow, but the whistle of a rocket-propelled grenade outpaces me. The pad blows up in my face.

Half my health erased, I expect to fall. I don’t. A narrow, curved ledge remains around the hole the RPG has made. I breathe. I’m still in this. Sonnet motions for me to jump up. The wall behind me chirps. A chill reverberates through me, and I make the leap, too late to clear the blast radius. Rydr activates his C4, and every brick in the wall dislodges, pummeling the back of my body. When the blast reaches my body, it scours my flesh to coin. From Sonnet’s eyes, I watch my totem fall through the floor.

Sonnet presses himself flat against the roof and looks in on the Adjusters below. C4 is a double-edged sword. It takes out cover for everyone. They may have gotten me, but now Sonnet and Barley have a clear line of sight to the cashout station. When one of them goes for a steal—Rydr again, I think—Barley’s grenades and Sonnet’s knives pelt the cashout. Rydr pulls back and Indemne’s mesh shield materializes to cover his retreat. I doubt they expected success. Rydr’s move had all the markings of a baiting maneuver. The Adjusters wanted to mark the location of their opponents, and now they have it.

Barley motions for Sonnet to back away from the opening. “Google, token.” There’s pain in her voice. We haven’t spent a single token yet. We’ve scraped through the toughest matches of our careers, qualifying sometimes by the barest margin, yet we haven’t needed to spend a token. Every contestant gets five for the season, and we’ve hoarded ours like treasure. But she’s right. If there’s a time to burn a token, it’s now, at the end. A prompt asks if I’m sure, and I tap to confirm.

I am back in my body, back in my slick purple uniform, back in my silver-tinged boots. I am not, however, back in the cathedral. Tokens don’t work that way. They bring you back without any aid from your teammates, but you don’t pick where you spawn. Only official parameter is that you’re placed somewhere within fifty meters of your squad. For me, that happens to be the cathedral’s front steps. The sounds of violence come to me through the brick walls. Without further hesitation, I rush in. Rapid-fire shorthand ping-pongs between Sonnet and Barley in our comms. I gather they’re both alive, but so are all the Adjusters, and now they’re stealing.

The siren shrieks once, twice, and keeps going. What’s happening up there? Why aren’t we stopping them? The cashout’s got maybe another forty seconds on it. If we need to take it back, we’re gonna be pinched for time.

My inventory refreshed upon respawn, I deploy another jump pad to get me on their level. That’s when I see how they’re stealing. The Adjusters have dug themselves in with layers of shielding. That would be Indemne’s doing. She plays like this in every game we’ve looked over. With deployable steel barricades and the same drop-down dome shield Barley uses in her kit, plus the mesh shield she can produce at a moment’s notice, she’s the key to the Adjusters’ seeming invulnerability. No mavens means no healing and no defibs. We coin her, we remove their only lifeline.

Easier said than done. If it were just the barricades, Barley could lob her grenades overhead and devastate the little nest they’ve made around the cashout. But the dome shield deflects her grenades off into the no man’s land, and when Sonnet finally brings it down, the alternating mesh shields serve the same purpose. As if the shields weren’t enough, LadyLuck must have popped a smoke grenade before initiating the steal, because I can’t make out anything besides the humming glow of hard light.

In my heads-up display, the icon over Cashout A flips to orange. The Adjusters have stolen. The turret I deploy on the floor begins its work too late, pecking away at the cover they’re no longer using. Staying on the cashout would be a death sentence. They’ll want higher ground, I think. The roof. Sure enough, Indemne clambers up a level, using the remnant of a barricade for a foothold. I bark a warning into my mic.

LadyLuck’s up next, with Rydr taking up the flank. I manage to get a few rounds off into each as they expose themselves between the barricade and the roof. I break into a full sprint. They’ll need me up there. Already the thrashing of combat reaches my ears. Rifle in hand, I follow in the Adjusters’ steps, taking a barricade to the topside. As I pass the cashout, I narrowly skirt around a pair of explosive mines set to dissuade a sneaky steal.

I arrive in time to see Sonnet shatter. He’d managed to avoid the reach of Indemne’s sledgehammer only to be battered with bullets from LadyLuck’s tube-barreled Lewis machine gun. As they close in on Barley, she drops her launcher and roars. Her charge presses the Adjusters into a tight circle. Shields can’t help them now. She’s in too close. Her elbow tears through Indemne’s ribcage, and the woman bursts into coins. I aim for Rydr and pull the trigger. He wheels around on me, but his health is already down a third. As he returns fire, I shift into run-and-gun mode, evading each grenade he launches my way. Two land near enough to carve chunks off my health bar. Still, I have the advantage. We run dry at about the same time. When he goes to reload, I move in. I’ll bludgeon him to death if I have to. Over his shoulder, I see the result of LadyLuck and Barley’s fight. Not good. I nearly turn back, but where would I go? All that waits below is a cashout I don’t have time for and the mines around it. I follow through with my approach, striking Rydr across the face. He goes down. It’s just me and LadyLuck. Can’t reload yet.

She barrels toward me. The defib paddles sizzle in my hands. I slide across the floor to bring Barley back into the fight. LadyLuck’s eyes trace my trajectory. She pivots to intercept, her hazard-orange bomber jacket flapping with the jerky motion. She’s closer. I’m faster. My paddles make contact and. . . nothing happens. Instead of jolting Barley to life, the electric charge fizzles against LadyLuck’s sulfur black jeans. My eyes trail down her leg, where a booted foot has sent Barley’s totem skidding across the rooftop. It rolls to the edge, teeters, vanishes.

LadyLuck recovers, straightening to her full height. She looks me dead in the eye. I’m already reloading, knowing it won’t help me now. Her Lewis gun’s still got plenty of rounds in the pan.

Either time slows down, or my brain speeds up. My first thought, when I see my opponent sizing me up, is that I don’t want to wipe. Every bit of cash counts, even this early. The thirty-three percent penalty for a wipe would erase somewhere near two thousand multibucks from our ledger. Cashboard says we’re in third right now, narrowly beating out the Vogues, who must have wiped at least once fighting the Overdogs. A wipe would put us behind them too. At the same time, the Adjusters have more to lose than us. If I could wipe them. . . but I can’t. Always pushing your limits is crucial to being in this league of Bank It! players, but so is knowing them. LadyLuck can output more damage per second than me, straight up. I really have one option, if I want to avoid a wipe. I keep my gun up and run away.

I’m counting on LadyLuck to hold her fire, at least for a couple seconds. She doesn’t want to risk a wipe either. My bet pays off. By the time she opts to pull the trigger, I’m far enough downrange to strafe most of her shots. I drop gas mines on her teammates’ totems on my way out. Even beaten, I find a way to be a thorn. Then, instead of descending back down into the church, I leap. The ground rushes to meet me. Despite the unfortunate results of our first engagement, I feel a twinge of joy at the gas mine play. LadyLuck’ll have to blast the mines and snatch the totems from amidst the spreading fumes.

I find Barley’s totem in a bush. She talks next steps while I hand-rezz.

“We will not waste any more time here,” she says, “Sonnet, token. We cannot easily retrieve you.” He does as he’s told. When Barley’s back, we beat a path toward the concourse around the central colosseum. A cashbox rests on the desk of an information booth feathered in brochures. Sonnet catches up quickly. Spawnlog tells us the Adjusters are three stalwarts deep once again. I don’t think they’ll give chase, though. They’re slow, and there’s a more convenient cashbox near where we first spawned. We sprint onto the concourse, and the blood stills in my veins. Three figures approach, decorated head to toe in Ospuze yellow. Of course I recognize them. I have watched them for years, witnessed countless landslide victories. Always as a distant spectator, always at a safe remove. I wanted to be them. Still do, truthfully. I never feared them until now.

OppenHyper’s out front, his big frame made bigger by the holsters and utility pouches covering nearly every centimeter of his uniform. The scope of his machine gun is framed by bull horns, giving him the appearance of an ox rearing to gore us. To his side, Skillish makes so many abrupt, speedy motions he seems to blur in place. The smaller man grips an M11 submachine gun and wears a black puffer jacket brightened by inlaid yellow lights. A vaguely skullish steel mask hides his face. Only his eyes peer out, two pearls peeking from the murky dark. Behind the zephyr and the stalwart is their support player, tactician, and captain.

Proc. Everything she wears is sunflower yellow, even the glasses that wrap around her head. The only contrast, besides her pale skin, is the shock of pink hair overflowing from beneath her ball cap. She carries an AKM like I do. If anyone knows their way around the gun better than me, it’s her. I feel a flutter. It is envy and attraction and fear.

Well, this was always coming. The least we can do is make it difficult.

Sonnet rushes the info booth, and Skillish grapples to meet him. When the other Overdogs open fire, Barley drops a dome shield around us. I set up a turret. We’ll need every source of firepower, however inadequate. Sonnet manages to tag the box. There’s another thousand multibucks in our account. I smile. First move goes to us.

Grenades tumble out of Barley’s MGL-32, and I concentrate my fire on OppenHyper. I’d rather beam Proc, but she’s doing a good job of using her stalwart as cover. She’s also keeping far enough behind him to avoid the blasts targeting OppenHyper, but close enough to keep him in healing beam range. Sonnet engages Skillish in a showdown on the sheltered side of the booth.

Barley motions for me to circle around left. “OK,” I say. I know I’ll draw more fire this way, but it’s the only way to get a good angle on Proc. I’ll have to trust that Barley and my turret can hold the line. The heat comes the moment I slip through the skin of Barley’s dome shield, which breaks down a moment later anyway. OppenHyper has his M60 trained on me. When I get a bead on Proc, I watch her trade healing beam for AKM. Smart. Can’t use the beam to save herself.

Now I’m taking fire from both of them. My health drains at an alarming rate. I won’t be able to finish Proc like this. Behind the booth, Sonnet dies. Then I die too. As I go, I see Barley fire off a rocket. It whizzes past OppenHyper and hits Proc center mass. Her coins get a solid bit of airtime. It’s down to the stalwarts for now, though Skillish will be back on the scene once he’s had a moment to recover.

I don’t see a way out. Barley tries, though. She’s taking more hits than she typically would against an M60. She’s dodging in all the right ways. Like the rest of us, she’s got the M60’s recoil pattern memorized. Unfortunately, that skill doesn’t apply to players in this league. OppenHyper moves his arms as his gun rattles. He compensates for the recoil perfectly, and his bullets come out in a clear, straight-on stream.

Then he dies. His coins don’t fall right. I mean they don’t jibe with the ballistics of Barley’s grenades. No, something else got him. On Barley’s left, I see the first splash of blue emerge. Ermex dives first, I think. Hard to identify the bluejackets, given their uniforms are all cut from the same cloth. I rely on guns. Ermex runs the Cerberus, the triple-barreled shotgun that spits flaming buckshot, so I’m pretty sure that’s them. Plume comes next, with the CL-40 grenade launcher I heard earlier, smaller than Barley’s MGL-32 despite the higher number. Then their leader at the rear, a crack shot with their burst rifle, Harrident.

The Vogues press closer. A zipline from Harrident takes them to the other side of the booth. Barley can’t see them anymore. Can’t hear anything either, which means Skillish was already gone. So is Proc’s totem, I see, and tell Barley. She takes my totem behind a young dogwood tree and starts to revive. Though they must have seen her on their way in, the Vogues pay her no mind. They take the cashbox and run. Maybe this is part of Edmondo’s deal, a mutual non-aggression pact. Maybe they don’t want to waste their time. Either way, we’re safe. Barley brings me back, then I get Sonnet. I do it by hand. Better save my defib.

While we fought over this box, the Adjusters had plenty of time to grab the other and plug it in. The clock ticks down on their cashout station, which looks to be underground, given that I see its icon through the cobbled street around the colosseum. I run through the possible spawn locations in my head. Must be the tavern basement five or six streets down. We go that way, but it doesn’t feel right. Something’s not adding up.

It’s the Vogues, I realize. What are they doing going after the Overdogs? They only need the second slot. Why not focus their efforts on the Adjusters? Both outstanding teams, sure, but the Overdogs clearly offer the stiffest competition.

Can’t think about that now. I’m in no position to care what the Vogues are playing at. We need to take this cashout.

Barley kicks in the tavern door. No one appears to be home. Odd. No way they’re camping the basement. It would be like burrowing into their own tomb. All we’d need to do is put Barley at the top of the stairs and have her shell the basement until we’re sure nothing could survive. Still, it’s worth checking. Barley agrees, and says I’m up. I crouch, fan my gun left to right, and take it one step at a time.

The basement stairs creak under me. Light down here’s hazy. It comes from a single bulb dangling from the ceiling by a chain, and from several mines planted around the cashout station. Go figure. No bodies, though.

“Must be upstairs,” I say. I start to ascend again.

“Clear the station,” says Barley. I hesitate. Popping their mines will make a ruckus. We’ll lose any element of surprise we have going for us. Barley waits at the top of the stairs. I do it. I start with an explosive mine, which in turn triggers the pyro mines. The basement burns, and the flame licks the floor above. In another minute, it’ll engulf the whole building.

Barley climbs behind the tavern bar, finds a fire extinguisher, tosses it to Sonnet. I get it now. He moves to where I just was, in the threshold to the basement, and throws the extinguisher overhand so hard it cracks. In a wave, it smothers the fire in the basement, though the flames climbing upward remain. OK. We need to do this fast. I set my turret at the top of the stairs as an early warning system, and I follow Sonnet down. I hear the front door shut, and I don’t see Barley anymore. She’s removing herself from the building, from the game board. We’ll need her later.

Sonnet steals, and I stand guard. Wish I could set some gas mines, but the fire will swallow the fumes too fast for them to matter. I’ll have to make do with what I’ve got. Inspiration strikes, and I leverage my jump pad against a bit of charred ceiling wood that’s fallen. The pad’s angled to launch anyone who comes down the staircase back up it.

Scuffling thuds rain down above our heads, coming closer and closer. No mistaking the heavy footfalls of the three stalwart Adjusters. I duck into a corner and train my gun on the stairwell. I breathe. My body feels distant, beneath the densely layered experience of Naturata, but it’s still there. I know it through the lungs that pang and the gut that pinches.

I hope Barley’s using this time well. Ideally, she’ll have found another way to the building’s second floor by now. Somewhere she can hole up until the Adjusters descend, at which point Sonnet and I can slip out and join Barley in turning the tables.

I make it through six breaths before chaos descends. My turret alerts us to their presence with a siren squeal followed by the patter of automated gunfire. There comes a metal crunch, and the turret goes quiet. I’m guessing that was the heavy end of Indemne’s sledgehammer. Makes sense she’d lead the charge. A knee-high boot takes its first step into the basement.

The jump pad works better than I could have hoped. Indemne tosses a frag grenade down the stairs, and it leaps back up to meet her. There’s a clamor before it goes off, as the Adjusters presumably scatter for cover. Boom. Sounds like at least one of them took a hit. Nothing on the killfeed though. I wonder if Barley’s in position yet.

That kind of ploy only works once. Now they’re wise to it, a new boot steps into the threshold, this one attached to a Lewis gun that riddles my jump pad with holes. The pad crumples from the force of each impact until it’s nothing but scrap. Sonnet rears a hand back, throwing knife pinched between index finger and thumb. But the foot doesn’t budge. I don’t get it. The cashout’s right here. Come and get it.

OK, maybe they expect an ambush. Then why don’t they bomb out the basement like we did? Rydr’s got a ‘nade launcher, doesn’t he? Unless. . . 

“Barley,” I snap, “Rydr’s not here.”

Then I hear the bombs. Two floors up, sounds like. I curse. Somehow, they smelled what we were cooking. LadyLuck stands still at the top of the stairs, and now I know why. She’s not here to fight us. She’s a prison guard.

“Turn around,” Sonnet says before letting loose a flashbang. I tuck my head into the corner and close my eyes. Even then, the bright sears through my lids. When they flutter open again, I can make out most of my environment. Sonnet lunges into the stairwell, flicks his knives into the stalwart at the top. This isn’t exactly the plan, but it’s what we have.

LadyLuck’s no good at this range, and she knows it. She stumbles away and out of sight. Sonnet follows her right into a cluster of mines. The killfeed prints his name. It comes just before Barley’s. Says Indemne got her, which means they only left LadyLuck on us. Makes sense they’d give her a boundary wall of mines too.

I shrink back into my corner and think. Too much time left on the cashout to even consider delaying. Without backup, I doubt I could hold them back for more than five or six seconds. I consult the cashboard. We’re not doing terribly, all things considered. Better than the Vogues, mainly because we haven’t wiped, and they’re still throwing themselves to the Overdogs. Still, if we don’t get this cashout, our prospects aren’t so good.

Maybe I wipe? No, too late for that. The Adjusters timed everything just right. By the time we get through our thirty seconds on the bench, we would hardly have enough time to get back here, let alone knock off the Adjusters and steal.

I see one option, and I don’t have time to look for another. I ask Barley and Sonnet to token, and I climb the wreckage to the tavern’s main floor.

LadyLuck’s still here, kicking around by a booth. I finish her with three shots to the head, then twist around in time to see Indemne’s sledgehammer crush my face.

I am in Sonnet now. He launches past the cathedral toward a growing pillar of smoke. The whole tavern block is an inferno. He waits outside for Barley, helpless as the Adjusters take our cashout. LadyLuck’s back up by the time he gets there. He can see her pacing the main floor, walking circles around my plastic totem, which has fallen on its side.

I bite my tongue. “Should I—”

“Yes,” says Barley, so I push the button. A contestant can token anytime, once five seconds have elapsed after death. I’m back in the ring, a good ways off the cashout. No way I get there in time to take the money. Which is why tokening would be a bad idea, if getting a last-second steal was our goal.

I’m about thirty meters out when Sonnet and Barley slip back into the crumbling tavern. They soften up LadyLuck first, pushing her into the upper floor. Then Barley lays waste to the basement yet again. Indemne holds out a while down there, protected as she is by her electric shields and barricades. Even so, it’s a matter of time before her defenses fall. No one’s coming for her. Rydr’s not going to risk a wipe to attempt that save. That’s why I’m not surprised when I see him stomping out of the building’s back exit. I ping his location for the others and hold down my trigger so that I lay a sheet of bullet casings on the air.

He tries to run. I’m faster. He manages to reach a row of vacant apartments and slam a door between us. That earns him a couple seconds, during which his cashout finishes, and his squad’s nearly as rich as the Overdogs.

The money doesn’t last. I’m through the door a second later, and he’s too busy scrambling for an exit to put up a fight. He dies with his fist against a window. Indemne dies in the cramped space between a cement wall and a steel barricade. LadyLuck dies from a knife stuck under her chin. It all happens too fast for a token. Too fast to stop the wipe. The Adjusters lose a third of their earnings, which is just barely enough to make a comeback technically feasible. I have trouble seeing how we win, but I can’t imagine losing. I can’t. Let Edmondo do what he will.

In a community garden on Century Stadium’s south side, the Overdogs become untouchable with their second cashout.

Somewhere between the champs and us, the Vogues respawn, their actions still a mystery. Maybe they knew we’d never help them, corporate alliance or no.

We regroup. The last boxes spawn.