16. The Finals

00:05 SNT. Glasses clink. No curfew tonight. I stand amidst a crowd of strangers and watch fireworks bulb the sky to mark the start of the 2100s. This is not their first volley. Glasses clinked and fireworks singed the clouds an hour ago as well. This is the way it is done in proper civilization, Edmondo tells me. One tribute to the year as it passes in local time, another to mark the new year in the bleed, this one celebrated simultaneously across the globe.

Smoke gathers. The air is thick even here on the rooftop of Ranzio’s north tower. I scan the crowd for familiar faces. Edmondo introduced us together when we first arrived at the party. It’s the only time he’s allowed us to inhabit the same physical space since we came to Turin two weeks ago. Only lasted through the countdown, though. Now Campe watches while Ranzio nobility encircles me with praise and questions.

“When did you know this was what you wanted to do?” asks one suit.

“Do you ever get tired of playing the same game?” asks another.

“My kids are huge fans. Photo?”

“Are you nervous?”

I don’t put much thought into my answers. They come out half-baked and shallow. Doesn’t stop the execs from fawning over me. I am a curiosity. In less than twenty-four hours, I might also be a Bank It! champion. This could be history. They could tell their kids they met me when the Tough Shells were merely on the precipice of superstardom.

They talk, and they talk, and I respond on autofill while drinking my share of champagne. I don’t drink, usually. This is a pragmatic decision. I need to sleep. By one o’clock, I’ve locked my anxieties away in stupor. Campe helps me stumble back to my room, and the rest of the night is dreamless black.

I wake to my alarm at 09:00. My body traces the motions of morning routine. I shower. I brush my teeth. I put on one of three identical uniforms hanging on a rack in my closet. I step outside and Campe is waiting. Usually, she knocks. Guess I’m not supposed to be rushed along today. My rest is more important than Angela’s photoshoots and roundtables. Once I’m up, though, the brakes are off. I match Campe’s brisk pace to the north tower. The corridors have become more familiar with time. Given another couple weeks, I could probably navigate this route myself. The lack of identifiable landmarks threw me off at first, but now I’m starting to get it. The key is numbers. Measuring paces, counting doors. For example, I’ve learned that the nearest canteen is a right turn from my room, then a left sixteen doors down and another left at the third offshoot, where I can take an elevator to L-10 and finally follow fork-and-knife signage to my destination.

Anyway, the walk doesn’t take long. Around 10:15 SNT, I’m talking to the head of a production team remotely directed by Angela.

“We want action poses,” the producer says. We’re given replica headsets with transparent plastic on the face side. They’ve even set up a lift sling nearly identical to the one in Sonnet’s headroom. Once he’s in the sling, Sonnet can move around the set with the motion of his arms. It looks a bit like swimming.

Angela directs the producer, and the producer directs us. I cross my arms, raise a fist, point to the camera, so on. Our motions are synced. Gotta present the Tough Shells as a united front. Angela doesn’t talk to us directly. In fact, she hasn’t talked with me one-on-one since the car ride. 

Barley hasn’t talked to me either. Not outside the game, at least. I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t even want to think about her. Today, the game is what matters. Anything else can be hashed out later.

We break for lunch at 13:00. Risotto and some form of filleted gray meat I don’t recognize. Tastes OK. When I ask, someone else at my table calls it gutterfish. I can’t make it through one plate. Too much turbulence in the body. I’m jittering worse than before any other game, and I’ve got another seven hours to go. I think I might actually die before then.

Hours pass. Before I know it, the clock’s climbed to 19:00 and I am still alive. The bustle helps. Angela has plenty on her agenda, and Edmondo’s happy to let her go wild. He’d rather keep us busy hyping up the finals than let us get in our heads. 

They take us to the headrooms early. We’re not the first to arrive. The headroom I’ve inhabited for most of my waking time these past two weeks is currently being picked apart by a guy in a plain white jumpsuit. There’s a whole crew of them actually, all wearing the same suits and caps. I recognize the chunky black logo on their caps instantly. Vaiiya. I’m used to seeing their logo on cybersecurity update pop-ups and in ads for brain chips. I’m not so used to seeing their actual people in meatspace. And they’re not the only strangers.

Flanking the Tough Shell-reserved corner of the headroom cubes, spread evenly and postured like statues, people in ash gray uniforms watch everything that happens. They don’t need badges or logos for identification. Everyone knows what a trustee looks like.

“They’re here to supervise. Once the security team has finished, you may enter,” Campe says behind me, her voice unusually low. It’s hard not to be uneasy with MultiCo Broadcast Recreation Corps agents around.

These people aren’t MultiCo in the same sense we all ultimately are, if you follow the ladder high enough. Trustees come from the consortium’s heart. Before today, I’ve seen exactly two. They were the MBRC technicians who came to inspect my headroom setup at the start of last season and this one. Being in the same room as one was unnerving enough. But then it was protocol. Anyone who makes the World Tourney can expect that visit. Afterward, though, it’s supposed to be less intrusive. Obviously every rig gets a thorough remote scan before each round of play, but it’s just supposed to be the one meatspace checkup. And it’s supposed to be one agent, not a dozen or more.

They’re afraid, I realize. Not the people in this room specifically. No one specifically. MultiCo is too large a machine for any one mind to steer. It’s the sum mind that’s afraid, the MultiCo gestalt. The trustees lining the walls have just done more to make CNS real in my mind than a thousand paranoid loops on my feed. Sonnet gives me a knowing look. I bet he’s feeling pretty vindicated right now. I can’t imagine how Barley’s feeling. I try anyway, because putting myself in her shoes gets me out of my own.

That’s when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I know who it is before I check. Angela and Edmondo presumably know exactly where I am and wouldn’t want to interrupt. I’ve given up on Rahmat. That really just leaves my father. So Pops is calling and I’m not going to pick up. I would like to. I know I said I would. But the parade’s in motion and it won’t stop for anyone. I type out a quick “call you back later.” The Vaiiya guy in my room looks to be about done. In a few seconds, I’ll be in there and everything out here will cease to matter.

The Vaiiya team steps out and into formation. A man whose insignia sports more points than the others comes forward.

“All clear,” he says, “You may proceed.”

The doors are open. I think maybe they’ll search us next, but the security team lets us pass through the entries to our cubicles without any further delay. Looking through the glass walls from the inside of my headroom, I see them walk out single-file. The gray-clad trustees stay in place.

We’re in the bleed by 19:30. My innards are taut with suspense and hunger. I haven’t eaten since the scraps I managed to get down at lunch. Better to go in hungry than with the sloshing weight of a meal in my gut.

Some of the tension goes slack when I enter the Ready Room. The red is warm rather than harsh today. The missing dimensions that sometimes feel claustrophobic instead feel cozy. The not-space is a womb.

“What do you think they’ll do about us winning?” ponders Sonnet. He is looking at me and not Barley as he says this. Never Barley.

“You mean Ranzio?” I ask, “If we win, we won’t need to worry about them. We’ll be made.”

“My viewers didn’t think I’d get this far,” he says, “I mean, now they act like they were with me all along. Really they thought we’d get bumped in round three or four, max. I thought they might be right. No one’s ever done it, you know? Chat loves to say the game is rigged, or they used to, and I get it. We proved them wrong though, yeah? If the whole thing was rigged, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah,” I say, but Harrident put me in their sights and didn’t pull the trigger. Grenades turned to pottery.

Now is not the time. This line leads to doubt, and right now we need confidence. I turn to Barley, desperate for something to draw us back to the meat of the game.

She clears her throat. “Sonnet, how do we open?”

“Poke at range,” he says. He’s fine with talking shop. Still, he doesn’t look her in the eye. “Chip at their health, then I herd them tight when they close the distance.”

“Good. Google?”

“I set mines to limit their options. Keep them on one path while Sonnet pushes them together. That’ll maximize the splash damage output from your ‘nade launcher.”

“Good.” Barley rolls her shoulders. “And when we commit to a fight, strike fast and hard. Do not let them take this to three rounds.”

“Sure, let’s win in two,” says Sonnet, projecting conviction. I lift my head and try to do the same. No good can come from focusing on the strength of our opponents. In the back of my head there is a frantic abacus. It tallies our lost head-on battles with the Vogues, then the battles last match where the Vogues fell again and again to the Overdogs.

We have not always won with raw technical skill. We have qualified with timing and sleight of hand. We have used chaos to take points while others do the fighting. There can be none of that here. No double-stacking, no third-parties. Just three of us, three of them, and one box at a time.

I don’t know if we can win, but I’m excited to wrestle with gods.

20:00 SNT. Lights supernova and bass thunders. Century Stadium manifests.

The first cashbox spawns in the center of the market district. We’re about a hundred meters north, so I figure the Overdogs will tag this one. The boxes never spawn perfectly equidistant, meaning one team tends to be in the better position to serve.

Since we can’t get there first, we’ll need to settle for an intercept. No way to know yet which cashout station they’ll use to deposit, though it won’t change our strategy much either way. Both stations are inside the colosseum. One up in the box seating and the other out in the concourse, it looks like. I’m mildly surprised. Usually Bank It! has better spawn logic.

Barley pings a clock tower on the west side of the market district. It’s decked out in plastic lights. Most of the buildings are actually, which keeps the map lit while the skybox is set to night. I confirm Barley’s ping. The tower’s smart. From there we’ll get a good view of all the main roads leading to the colosseum. Sonnet goes first, grappling up to the top. We trail behind, Barley and I, forced to take a service ladder instead. It’s not worth spending my jump pad on this little inconvenience, as we may need to reposition quickly.

Sonnet marks an opponent on the box. He says it’s Proc, the maven. Barley tells him to hold fire until we’re all in position. Not that he’d attack from here anyway; the throwing knives don’t have the range for poke-based combat. That’s gonna be on my AKM, mainly, and also Barley’s grenade lobber.

The box gets tagged before we reach the top of the tower. We only have visual on the one contestant camping the box, which means the others are probably trailing behind.

Or they’re closer than we think. Several floors below us, something foundational gives way. A protesting shriek rattles up from the tower’s steel supports. A thrill judders my spine. My high ground is being demolished by the OppenHyper.

I don’t let myself get too dazzled. My jump pad’s ready before Barley can ask for it.

“Hold,” she says, and she’s right. I can feel the shift of the tower’s weight beneath my feet. Impossible, of course. Except I do feel it, as a trained response to vibrations in the vertices or as a deeper dysfunction of my nervous system. The point is I feel it, and I feel where it’s going. As the clock tower sinks into itself, the roof buckles and leans toward the colosseum, and that is when we take the leap. The angle gives our jump enough directional propulsion to reach the edge of the colosseum’s rooftop.

So far, so good. OppenHyper’s dumped his C4 and we’re no worse for the wear. The box comes closer. The courier is likely my maven counterpart. That leaves their run-and-gun zephyr, Skillish. We should be safe from him so long as we insulate each other. His M11 submachine gun has devastating burst damage and a small clip.

The box is in the open, and Proc’s not with it. Smart. She’s tossed it into the uncovered middle ground. A backhanded offering. The contestant who snatches it up will be the first contestant to die. They can’t get the box to a station without going through us, and we can’t get the box at all without entering their lethal range. Looks like we’ll be spending the next couple minutes in stalemate mode.

I don’t like this. We can’t hem them in if each Overdog continues to move independently of the others. We need something to draw the whole squad in. Bait? I don’t know what we could hook on the line besides a contestant. Actually, there’s one thing. Maybe.

“Sonnet,” I say, “crack a window and get inside. Get higher in the dome. Stick near the outer walls, and make sure they don’t see you.” He moves without waiting for Barley’s confirmation. When he’s gone, she looks at me.

“You have a plan?” she asks.

“Yeah.” And it needs to work fast. I can see motion in the upper floors of the financial district towers opposite us. While we’re stuck here, the Overdogs are picking out their favorite vantage point.

No, I need to think bigger. A war of attrition isn’t their style. Doesn’t make sense with their kits either. Proc’s AKM will work OK at this range. Not so much OppenHyper’s M60 or Skillish’s M11. This is setup for a larger gambit. Hopefully ours triggers first.

“Alright,” says Sonnet, “I’m getting pretty high up here.” He pings his location. It’s nearly perfect. I ask him to take out the window there too, but keep inside and out of view. He’s far enough I can’t hear the shatter, which means the Overdogs shouldn’t notice either.

Smoke spills over the street and swallows up the cashbox. None of the Overdogs run smoke grenades. They must have scavenged the tower for extinguishers

A moment later, the cashbox moves. I toss my two gas mines out into the street and the smoke rolls over them. With luck, a blind Overdog will take a wrong step. The box gets closer and Barley starts her bombardment. I’m nearly ready for Sonnet.

As the smoke spreads, it thins. Soon I can make out the individual shapes of a stalwart and a maven. OppenHyper’s avatar lets out a deep bellow, the in-game indicator of a stalwart’s charge. Same ability Barley runs. Proc stands in front of him, and the raw force of his charge propels them both forward at a pretty quick clip. Smart move. Problem is, putting the maven in front risks everything. She’s got a lower health pool. Barley’s grenades have battered her already, and now that I can see, my AKM’s coming to bear as well. So it makes sense when they swap places. OppenHyper takes the hits while Proc sits in his back pocket with a heal beam.

It’s now or never. I ping a spot at their flank and ask Sonnet to toss his cloaking grenade there. From his height, the grenade’s arc should be able to cover that distance.

“You sure?” he asks.

“Do it,” Barley says, and he does.

The effect is instant. The Overdogs hear the electric fizzle of a cloak and pivot. They won’t be coined by a cheap flank. They stop coming forward, and that’s our first small victory. Barley unloads another set of grenades. I rain bullets. They’ve got no choice but to move for cover. The only spot available is a small souvenir hut. An RPG from Barley caves the side.

The real prize comes when I see the Overdogs’ elusive third. He’s come up from the south, presumably breaking off his own flanking maneuver to be here. He’s out for blood. He’s looking for a zephyr who was never there.

I put up my turret then. I’ve held off at Barley’s instruction. Usually I get my turret and mines set before a fight begins. This one’s different. If my turret’s up too soon, they’ll scope it out and melt it down before it has a chance to contribute. Now they’ve committed. The turret locks onto Skillish first. He takes a few hits before he takes his grappling hook out of range.

I never expected the turret to down him. But it’s clipped him, and that’s enough. Sonnet will have to press the advantage. At Barley’s directive, he launches into the sky in pursuit of Skillish.

It’s working. Proc’s heal beam sputters out and OppenHyper starts to take real damage. He manages the recoil on his thumping machine gun pretty well as he returns fire, and Barley even has to duck back for a moment and wait for natural regen to kick in. I fill her spot. They’re both shooting back now that Proc’s out of heals. She nails me with the AKM. Still, I manage to squeeze out just enough damage to coin OppenHyper. I scoot away from the rooftop edge and toward Barley. I hear the springy release of a jump pad. I turn back and Proc’s gone. So is OppenHyper’s token. She’ll be pulling back to some secluded attic to get off a rezz. We could push, but that might backfire at our current health. There is one play that could benefit us, though. The box has no eyes on it.

A healing Barley joins me in scanning the battlefield. She looks in the direction where the zephyrs disappeared. “Sonnet, report.”

“I’ve got him,” our teammate pants, “he’s fucking slippery, but I’m on him now. He’s cornered, he’s—wait, what the fuck—” Sonnet coins.

“What just happened?” My voice goes shrill. I’m looking in the direction of Sonnet’s totem, and I’m also looking at the box in the street. The call has to be made.

“No way. No way he got behind me,” Sonnet rants, “I was right on him, and then he’s the one on me?”

“Quiet.” Barley pings a window down the block. “There. Proc revives by hand. Google, box.”

My body obeys before my brain can question the plan. If we manage a plug, we’ll be playing defense one contestant short. Doesn’t matter. I’ll let Barley think that far ahead. She’s right for this call, I think. It’s our only shot at getting the box in at all. I let myself fall into the street. I hit the ground running.

The quiet unsettles me. A typical match has a certain level of ambient violence. When you’re not fighting, someone else is. Not so here. During these moments of intermission, the arena is almost still. I can hear only my footsteps and the trill of an animated billboard advertising the season’s most popular microshows. I get the box, and I jump a bit as it clatters off the ground. Then I start the run back. My skin is alive, on high alert for the tactile signals of danger. I can feel sharply the atmosphere of my environment. This only serves to remind me that my body is somewhere else, because the air is stale and motionless.

I am so close. I have climbed the shallow steps to the colosseum’s transparent threshold, where a series of rotating doors await. I am throwing distance. I am only three meters from the door when another shadow crosses my own.

I duck on instinct, sparing my skull the first barrage of bullets. They go through the door instead, punching away the glass. I throw the cashbox and it breaks off whatever glass still clings on. I wheel on Skillish then, but he is gone. A well-cooked frag grenade explodes at my feet. On the rooftop above, I hear fire. On the interface that frames my vision, I see Barley’s HP melt. The next few shots fizzle into a dome shield. Then there’s no more gunfire, and Barley doesn’t die.

“You good?” I ask. My jump pad’s not off cooldown just yet, or I’d be there beside her.

“Keep the box,” she says, “Stay alive. We cannot stagger.” Sonnet spends his third token. Proc completes her rezz. Everyone’s back up now. Just gotta keep it that way.

“High or low?” I mean the cashout stations. My gut feeling is validated when Barley pings the lower one. Makes sense. If I join her on the roof, the Overdogs’ll have a hell of a time pulling off a steal. Without another thought, I plug, and Barley dies.

Proc got her, the killfeed says. Sonnet’s with me now, but we’re on the low ground and outnumbered. OppenHyper hurtles screaming toward us, and when he hits the ground it shatters. We don’t coin then, but we’re heavily wounded. A frag from Proc and a hail of bullets does the rest.

Sonnet curses. Barley talks playbook. I subconsciously parse the critical points as the words themselves whip around my ears.

It could be worse. The cashout just started, so we’ll have a real shot at contesting. Might get two attempts if they kill us quick enough the first time. A less sporting team would have dragged this last battle out. They would have coined us one at a time, waited for a spent token, killed another, and so on. If they wanted, they might have managed to keep us off-balance for the next two minutes. But this is the Overdogs we’re facing. They’ve got an image to maintain. Their fans expect explosive assaults, and when the crux of a fight arrives, they expect a decisive blow.

We’re back up in thirty seconds. The station is theirs. Barley sets our course.

The Overdogs don’t take any potshots as we approach. They don’t shoot even when we come close to the colosseum’s perimeter. Whatever they’re up to, they want us inside. We have no choice but to oblige. Barley is first to breach the interior concourse. I follow, scanning left while Sonnet scans right. No movement here. We take the next few spaces the same way. It’s painfully slow, but it has to be. I’d rather make one good attempt on the station than two rushed, haphazard runs.

We’ve made it to one of the colosseum’s middle levels when Barley decides it’s time. One more threshold between us and the wide open space beneath the dome. Sonnet goes first. He gets about ten steps into the room before the fire comes down. He slides back into our covered hall with a sliver of HP remaining.

“Positions?” asks Barley.

A knife flicks anxiously between Sonnet’s fingers. “Got a pyramid thing going to cover all sides. ‘Hyper’s on the north side, Proc’s southeast, and Skillish has the southwest.”

Barley grunts, then gives us our positions and assignments in Bank It! shorthand. We go in.

This time, I’m up first. We’re coming from the east vomitory, so strafing right puts me just under Proc. I quickly draw fire from the other two. While their eyes are on me, Barley comes through and turns left. She finds a spot directly below Skillish and therefore invisible to him. Then comes the RPG. A swath of unfiltered light flares in my eyes as the dome’s metal framing goes to shrapnel and slag above me. Proc falls into the arena’s pit.

She’s ready with the AKM. She’s aware enough to know Barley’s not the threat here, given her distance. So she turns to me, and she makes our gun work magic. Doesn’t matter that I’m hitting ninety-percent of my shots, or that I’m ducking and rolling and doing everything else I can to make myself a harder target. It’s like she guides the bullets through the air, maintaining control even once they’ve left her barrel. My head fills with holes. I’m forced to blink a couple times as the rounds go through my avatar’s eyesockets.

She’s better than me. I’ve already accepted that much. But she’s not better than me and Sonnet together. I’ve cut her down to just under half when my coins spill, which means I get to watch through Sonnet’s eyes as he finishes the job. Forty-five seconds left on the station, and both mavens are down. Except we have the advantage, because Sonnet can pull off a rezz well before the surviving Overdogs reach Proc’s totem.

He takes the little blue statue of me behind a row of bleachers and starts the revive. He’s got a second left when Skillish drops. Barley marks the zephyr’s location and batters him with grenades. He’s not after her, though. His gun’s trained on Sonnet. I revive just in time to watch my savior coin. I am ready. Skillish doesn’t have enough rounds to finish us both. I whittle him down and he stumbles backward. When he starts to reload, I take the reprieve to stick a gas mine on the side of Proc’s totem. Good luck pulling her out now. The zephyr backs away further. Right back into Barley’s range. He breaks like a pinata.

Thirty seconds. Us and OppenHyper. I move for the station. ‘Hyper makes himself a billowing silhouette above me. He’s big and made bigger by the flared contours of his costume. The clothing actually puts him at a slight competitive disadvantage. Another subtle way the Overdogs boast their talents. He raises his arms at his sides, as if to beckon me forward. Pure theatrics. So much effort is put into making it seem as if everything the Overdogs do is effortless. OppenHyper holds something that is not a gun in his right hand. There is a click followed by a boom.

I expect the C4 to erupt beneath my feet and turn me to coin. It doesn’t. Doesn’t get Barley either. There is a rending, a crumbling, and the entire domed ceiling falls in. Eviscerated debris soups the air. I can just make out Barley through the thick of the dust, and I realize something is very wrong. There should be a cashout station between us. We should still have twenty-five seconds. And yet, the rectangular yellow machine has already dematerialized. There’s no yellow, only chalky gray. I check the cashboard. The Overdogs haven’t been paid. Oh. Now I see what their stalwart has done.

The ceiling took a lot with it on its way down. In addition to the glass shards and steel framing, the floor piles with broken lights, AC tubing, lollipops of concrete and rebar. The cashout station is somewhere beneath it all.

Barley’s already figured it out. She’s begun an excavation, placing her grenades in crevices of the wreckage. I don’t like what I’m watching. One poorly placed explosive will cave the mess and wipe out her progress. We’ve got one chance. I spray my gun at OppenHyper until he stops peeking over the ledge. I keep my sights trained on the spot just in case.

She makes an opening and moves in to steal. Since she doesn’t need to clear any more ground, she ceases fire, which means the drumline misses its next beat. When I hear the absence, I know the Overdogs’ stalwart must too.

The sirens trigger at ten seconds. ‘Hyper hits the ground. He’s got his M60 out and ready to gun down the thief. Except I’m all there is. His plan’s backfired. The wreckage that blocked off the station now shields it from view. I smile as I initiate a one-versus-one I know I’ll lose. We’ve won the larger battle.

Barley fights him after she steals. It’s actually pretty close, with him wounded from our duel. Her launcher’s just not built for this kind of combat, though. It doesn’t offer the raw, focused damage of a plain old gun. We wipe with money in the bank. OppenHyper sets about reviving his team.

The next box spawns in a library on the map’s southern end. We move in according to plan. Sonnet scouts along the curving cobbled walkways of the academy district. I drop gas mines along the cloistered off-lanes. Barley takes the most direct path forward.

The next part goes down in two or maybe three short, inflexible seconds. Time doesn’t stretch for me this time. I’m not able to assess the position of every contestant and respond with the optimal sequence of actions. Everything happens fast and feels fast, so it would be dishonest, or misleading at least, to offer a richly descriptive narration. First, Proc coins Sonnet. Then ‘Hyper and Skillish take Barley, and then they take me.

They get the box in while we’re out. When we approach the Overdogs’ cashout station perched on high (they have chosen the leftover station in the colosseum’s box seating) they kill us again. We’re dispatched without flourish. The veneer peels back. When Skillish guns me down from behind, there is no spectacle. When OppenHyper traps Sonnet in a prison of goo and mines, unable to reach our totems and forced to immolate himself with a breach charge stuck to a flammable barrel, there is no glory. The Overdogs are reduced to mutts wrestling in the mud, biting more than barking. Later, I will see this as a kind of victory. In the moment, it only sinks my heart.

Sonnet spends most of our thirty-second respawn timer cursing. Barley doesn’t interrupt. Talking strategy won’t do much good right now anyway. We’re not getting another shot at this station. We’ll have to see where the cashbox spawns, evaluate our station options, and go from there. While Sonnet screams into the void, I squint and try to see the world where we win. It’s hard to imagine. Seeing the way they played in the second round, a queasy thought comes. Maybe we didn’t take the first point on our own merits. Maybe everything I did was orchestrated to raise the stakes for the all-stars.

We spawn into the legislature district. The cashout station is two hundred-plus meters away and nearly finished. All we can do is wait. I breathe four times, and the next box spawns. The game offers us a small mercy: the box is in a fountain just beside us. I tag the box and we climb scaffolding to a spot of flat roof over the courthouse’s west wing. The Overdogs aren’t here yet. That gives us a chance to plan ahead. Sonnet asks where we should deposit, and I’m taken aback when I look at our options. Again, the colosseum holds both stations. This isn’t a coincidence. MultiCo wants every fight to hit the map’s center. Wouldn’t be the first time; in the ‘73 championship game, the Verts and the Underdogs clashed in the hollow trunk of Holt Stadium’s monumental sequoia.

“The far station,” says Barley. The station she marks is not only farther than the other, but higher as well. “We go around.”

It’s probably our best bet. The Overdogs’ absence means they’re almost certainly camping out in the colosseum. It would be stupid to charge in head-on. But if we skirt the concourse, take a back entrance, keep out of open spaces, maybe we have a chance at making the journey intact.

Just getting near the colosseum takes several minutes. Not because of actual distance, but because we travel through half the map going the long way around. Time isn’t as much a constraint here as it is in a traditional Bank It! round. The game ends when a team reaches two points and no sooner. In theory, we don’t have to breach the colosseum at all. We could build up a defensive position on the map’s perimeter and hold the box. Wait out the Overdogs.

If that approach has crossed Barley’s mind, she hasn’t mentioned it, and for good reason. The Overdogs have outplayed us in every combat situation. If we holed up with the box, we’d just be waiting for them to come in and wipe us. Barley’s got the right idea here. If we plug, we don’t need to win any fights outright. We just need to keep the Overdogs away. Watch totems if we manage to coin one. Force them to token back in. Make the station a minefield. Play the drop if it comes down to it.

We get into the building without trouble. I guess they didn’t have anyone watching the dome’s northeastern side. Once we’re in, Sonnet passes the box to me. If a fight breaks out in these narrow halls, my rifle will be the least effective weapon in our arsenal. I pretend to feel the weight of this box, of the fifty-thousand MultiBucks stored inside. Winning means a hundred thousand split between us, and that’s only the start. The brand deals we could get out of a win here would make us all rich. I try not to think about it too much. The box is beginning to feel heavy. I’m relieved when I can finally let it go, watch it slide into place as the cashout station accepts our tender.

We’re in a changing room deep backstage. In the fiction of Century Stadium, this is where performers would prepare for shows on the colosseum’s astroturf stage. In the reality of Bank It!, it’s an environment designed for close-to-midrange combat . There are two main doors, one on the room’s north side and one on the east. I haven’t seen a changing room with more than one point of entry in meatspace, but I guess sometimes realism has to make some concessions for the sake of enjoyment. So two doors, plus a vent grille on the room’s west side that leads to a traversible shaft. Enough for one team to assault another from three sides. We keep our backs to the south wall and prepare for visitors. I stick a gas mine under the knob of each door. Sonnet plants breach charges around the station with enough explosive power to drop half the room into the level below if need be. Barley takes a corner and waits her turn.

It was surprising enough when we didn’t run into the Overdogs on our way in. Then they didn’t have a single member guarding this station. Now we’re fifteen seconds into the cashout’s deposit cycle, defenses primed, and still they wait? Something is wrong. I say so.

“They must have grouped up on the other station,” Sonnet reasons, “wouldn’t make sense to spread themselves thin. I’m sure they’re on the way.”

But another thirty seconds into the deposit, the Overdogs haven’t shown. I feel uneasy. My focus wobbles. I flick my AKM from door to door in rapid succession, as if the violence-adjacent behavior will provide enough action to keep my mind riding the edge.

“They will not engage us twice,” Barley says. There is a quaver in her voice. My heart’s BPM jumps a tempo. If Barley’s scared, we’re fucked. Sonnet’s look says he’s thinking the same. I wrack my brain for something to say, something to cut the tension and bring us back to the game. I get what Barley’s saying. The cashout’s running out of time. If the Overdogs had hit us when we first plugged, the prevailing team in that encounter would likely have to contend with another last-minute push from their opponents. Now, there’s no more time for second chances.

The cashout timer hits the halfway mark. The floor goes out beneath it.

“Wasn’t me,” snaps Sonnet. But his breach charges have gone off anyway, triggered by another explosive, and left us teetering on the floor’s burnt crust perimeter.

“Don’t follow,” warns Barley. A protective instinct tells me to trail our station, but she’s right. We’ve got a view straight down from here.

Except the cashout station isn’t straight down. There are holes in the three floors below us, and at the bottom there is nothing except a meter-wide disc stamped vertically on a wall. A jump pad, set by Proc not to launch players, but objects. The inertia of the station’s fall channeled into lateral careening. The steal begins. I don’t see how we can do anything but drop.

Despite her warning, Barley is first down the chute. Then Sonnet, then me. I angle my drop away from the jump pad. The others go for the launch, but I’m better at range. I see them when I land. They’re outside. The Overdogs’ gambit has blown the cashout clear of the colosseum.

They cancel the steal, of course. If they coin us here, they’ll still have time after. It’s OppenHyper on the station. Skillish lunges at Barley. I don’t see Proc. ‘Hyper ducks for cover and I can’t get a good line on Skillish between the bodies of my teammates, so I press forward for a better angle. Outside, the varnished models on the animated billboards press on with their blurbs unbothered. There he is: OppenHyper, crouched behind a garbage bin. Wouldn’t have seen him without the bulky barrel of that M60 poking out. I get a bead on his head and pull the trigger. My gun doesn’t buck. My sights stay trained just behind his ear.

It takes me a second to realize I am not just lacking recoil. Most of my brain screams at me to keep shooting because this is life or death. But there is something countering the fight-or-flight impulse, something like a voice of reason, and it says my gun’s not rattling because it’s not doing anything at all. I listen for the gunfire then. I hear nothing, and the stalwart in my sights is still alive when he shouldn’t be.

The others figure it out around the same time. Skillish transitions from an erratic bob-and-weave to a suspicious stalk as he walks circles around my teammates, who look at their weapons in bewilderment. Sonnet’s knives just won’t leave his hands, no matter how he tries to flick them. Even my target, realizing something has broken, abandons his cover. He gestures wildly. The body language tells me he’s doing a lot of talking, though I can’t hear a lick of it. Proc comes down from a perch on the second floor, where she probably would have done a lot of damage if I’d come fully out into the open. She shakes a fist at OppenHyper, then points at me.

Sonnet is talking, I think. I am preoccupied. I search for anomalies and find another. The billboards have gone quiet and still.

They are not quiet and still for long.

The face materializes on every screen at once. A three-dimensional rendering of the face specters the sky. It is the blue of electricity, hooded and low on polygons. It speaks, and the words lilt like music.

“WE BREAK THE CODE

THE WALLS ERODE

HERE ENDS YOUR BLOODY CHESS

TIME IS THE REAPER

THE TRUE SCOREKEEPER

YOUR DEEDS HAVE COME TO NEST

TO THOSE WHO CLING

FOLLOW THE STRING

WE ARE CNS”

The server goes down. There is no Ready Room. There is only black. Only the darkness inside my headset. I yank the thing off and let it fall to the carpet. My face burns, from tears I guess. My stomach spills on the floor. A door opens. Someone clasps my shoulders and pulls me out of the room.

“No!” I shout, phlegmy and frayed, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”

The hands go from my shoulders to my elbows. I can’t move my arms. I am pushed stumbling down a hall. My vision clears up enough to tell me I’m not in the headrooms anymore. The halls we take are darker than they should be, and emptier. There’s no one else here. Finally, one hand releases to open a door, and I’m thrust into a service stairwell. I nearly tumble down the steps, but the hands catch me.

“I don’t know what happened,” I say. I can’t control the sobs that punctuate my words. “It wasn’t me.”

“I know.” The voice is Barley’s. I whirl to face my captor. It’s not her. It’s a stranger in MultiCo gray. But Barley is here, waiting at the next landing down. She looks at me and has the audacity to smile.

“What the fuck is going on?” This cannot be real. It is another level of Naturata, or it is a dream. My nails dig into my face. No helmet. No waking up, despite the deepening pain. I am trapped here. I leave my face in my hands.

“We sent a message,” Barley says, “to over five billion people.”

“The game. Oh, God. We were so close. Barley, we almost. . .” I feel bile. I retch and nothing comes out. My throat burns dry.

Barley speaks softly. “The game is over.”

“You did this,” I say. I try to make my voice level out. 

“I helped,” she says, “The work is greater than any one of us.”

“How, though?” The pieces aren’t fitting. “You don’t know how to fucking hack Bank It!, or do whatever the fuck they did. So why are you part of this?”

She gestures at the walls around us. “Location.”

Oh, I want to throw myself at her. I want to break her teeth and shove her down the stairs. But I am outnumbered, so I keep her talking.

“You lied about everything, then? The storm, the shit you said about hard times in the desert?”

“All true. I knew the storm would bring me here, yes, but what I have said is what happened. A storm came. I lost connection. I tell you truths when I can, Quinn. I do not like secrets.”

I scoff. “Funny.”

I think she sees the humor in it too. She smiles again, though there is sadness in her eyes. She looks at me like I’m an injured animal. I feel bad for her, momentarily. Barley cannot be a good person, and yet, she cannot possibly deserve the punishment coming to her. She will not escape MultiCo. No one does.

“You lied to me just the other night, remember?” I meet Barley’s eyes. “You said you weren’t involved with anything serious.”

“It is not serious,” says Barley, “It is only a game.”

The door behind me opens again. Another trustee poser, carrying Sonnet over broad shoulders. He dangles limp.

I rush the newcomer. I beat on his chest. I consider going for a leg sweep, but I don’t know how to drop the man without dropping Sonnet.

The other impostor pulls me back by the shoulders. Gentler than they could have done, all things considered. The larger man slowly lowers Sonnet until he’s sitting on a step. A third person enters the room, this one carrying a folded wheelchair. Wasn’t fast enough, I guess.

I see now that Sonnet is conscious. His eyes are open and glaring at Barley.

“I knew it was you,” he says, “I knew as soon as the guns turned off.”

“I am sorry,” says Barley.

“No you’re fucking not.” I’m close enough to feel the spray of Sonnet’s words.

Barley shakes her head. “I did not want to trouble you. Sonnet, Quinn, I know you are good people. I wished to tell you everything so many times. It hurt to stay quiet. You must understand how sensitive—”

“Why are we here?” Sonnet asks a question I had not thought to ask. It is odd, Barley chatting like this when an army of security guards could swarm us any moment. Maybe we’re hostages. Or maybe she wants to be caught. Maybe she wants to be a martyr. She approaches me slowly. I stiffen, but I don’t draw back.

“I know you have lost freedoms,” Barley says.

“Because of you,” Sonnet interjects.

She swallows. “I want to restore what I can. I want to give you a choice. Stay or go. We have little time. Our distractions can keep them occupied only so long.”

Sonnet leans forward, his hands pressed into fists on the step. “Go with your gang and get fucking brainboxed by MultiCo, or stay here and face the consequences for your mess. That’s a shit choice, yeah?”

“We have a way out. We will escape. I cannot tell you how. I can only take you or leave you.”

“I’m staying,” Sonnet crosses his arms, “I’d rather get the chance to argue my case when MultiCo comes down. You’re not getting that, you know.”

Barley nods. “I understand your decision. And you, Quinn?”

This should be easy. It’s not. I find myself wanting Barley to convince me. So I ask her, “Why go?”

“You are a seeker, friend, and there is so much more to see beyond the walls. You search for meaning. There is meaning in struggle. It is not easy meaning, but it is true.”

She sees right through me. I hate that. But I see her too.

“You don’t get to talk about truth. Not you.” The bile comes again, and I spit up something semi-solid. “I’ll stay here. You should probably get going.”

Barley sighs, shakes her head, and reaches for something metal tucked into her belt. I struggle against the hands holding me in place. I didn’t think it would go like this. Barley wouldn’t—

She wouldn’t. It’s not a gun. It’s my pepper spray.

“It will look better this way,” she says, “Tell them you chased me here.”

The hands release me. I don’t have time to feel relief where the grip was because it is replaced by the heat of the sun and the grit of sandpaper dragged across my face. I hear Sonnet’s chair clatter on the floor, and the thump of footfalls descending. I scrub my face with my shirt. I let the tears push out what they can. When nothing works and the fire reaches my brain, I writhe.

Someone opens the door, eventually, and I feel myself being lifted.