Excerpt

BLACK WISPS SPIRALED in a distant gray sky, but both the weight and balance of the form in which she found herself felt alien. The massive hands shouldn't surprise her, but platforms that forced her to embody someone so different from her true self always disorientated. There was never any telling the form you would take in the hackdome. Most battle programs like this one came preinstalled with a catalog, and the avatar you found yourself in was usually up to chance. Today, she was what Scotia liked to refer to as "the Banshee." If this creature had existed in the real world, it would stand about two meters, with arms about two-thirds the length of its body. Other than that, though, scrawny. Little muscle mass, and a profile which did not lend itself to agility or speed. Neither of those things mattered, though. What dominated the hackdomes wasn't physical strength, though too many players fell into the trap of internalizing what they thought the shape of their avatar demanded. But this was a realm of algorithms and logic, and the only muscle a champion needed to flex was their intelligence.

Deep breaths through her mouth acclimated Cindira's native neural processes to the faux experiences, as well as let her call to arms her... well, arms. Around her feet lay a ramshackle collection of tools and weapons: lumber, axe blades, rope, spears, stones, swords of varying shapes and sizes... a mirror image to those that her foe would have. Straw bales formed a wall around them, both to force the fight into tight quarters, and to simplify the virtual platform's speed and performance. The system read the code the player thought, stringing together the tools provided into weapons of choice. Outside of this manipulation, real world rules still held. Gravity couldn't be overwritten. Day would not become night. The dead didn't come back to life.

The one left standing at the end won, in whatever way that came to pass.

Overhead, horns blared, and within two blinks, her opponent's avatar took shape across the arena. Only by seeing her enemy could she truly see herself, for what united also divided. Each had the same goal; to conquer.

"Mistress of Cinders." He didn't look at her when he spoke, instead leaning over to take up one of the staffs from his armory. "Finally, a worthy competitor."

"I didn't catch your handle."

Cindira kept her eyes fixed on him as he leaned the staff against his shoulder while testing the weight of a grapefruit-sized wedge of rock in his hand. A show, of course. Neither would forget that back in the Stadium, the crowd watching on the aeroprojectors hurried to get their bets registered before one of the competitors made the first strike. No doubt the odds had shifted towards her foe; too many spectators accepted the weaker-looking female form she occupied as inherently disadvantaged. Luckily, Scotia wouldn't be one. She'd take every bet, no matter how small or how large.

"I'm called Barrel. I'm not sure why, but that's all part of the mystique, isn't it?"

"Barrel?" She searched her memory and found it wanting. "I don't remember seeing you on any of the master boards at the Stadium before."

"It's my first time."

That didn't sound right. "You have to earn your way into the Master's League."

"I did, or should I say, you earned my place for me."

Her head cocked to the side, the flow of long, shinny blue hair flowing around her shoulders.

Barrell passed along a smirk as he looked up. "You've beaten everyone else. I was... let's just say 'recruited.'" He strained as he familiarized himself with the balance of his newly-coded weapon, an impressive meld of axe blade to long staff that reminded Cindira of the Grim Reaper's sickle. "Best of battle to you, Mistress."

"And to you." She returned the customary salutation moments before he ran for her at full force, the staff pulled back to his right side.

He might as well have been narrating his attack.

Barrel swung only seconds after Cindira stepped to her left, giving his axe nothing but air to rend. Speed turned against him as his center of gravity shifted. Her adversary fell to the ground in a harrumph, barely avoiding the bite of his own weapon.

Barrel bellowed. "Coward! Diving away from an attack."

"I stepped away from an attempted attack," she returned. "You think the rules are different here? They're not. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Was true when Sun Tzu said it thousands of years ago. It's still true now, even in a virtual arena."

In a flash, Barrel regained his feet. "Thanks for the philosophy lesson, let me give you one in anatomy."

The swing came quicker this time, so much so that Cindira found it difficult to maneuver her avatar's bulk away. Barrel kept a striking distance, supplemented by a step. He was a quick learner, she'd give him that. Unlikely he'd try running at her full force again.

She needed a weapon, but the opponent lay between her armaments and herself, and only the wall of haystacks lay behind her. Those weren't weapons, but it didn't mean they were useless. He'd need to be closer, though.

Cindira put up her empty hands as she sidled back, drawing him by instinct in her direction. "The fight seems unfair, given that I'm unarmed." Her back hit the boundary.

"You had as much time to choose a weapon as I did." He pulled back his staff again. "Or maybe you don't know the simple code it takes to weave together wood, metal, and rope. I can teach you – for a price. Hyuah!"

Dry shafts of grass scratched her fingers as she pulled the straw bale behind to her front. Barrel's weapon anchored deep within, the curvature of the blade a disadvantage, catching the bound stack that now gained strength in its formation. With one vigorous yank, Cindira took Barrel's weapon from his hands, throwing the impaled bale to the far end of the arena.

"There." She rubbed her palms down the front of her shirt. "Now we're even again."

Red-faced, Barrel guffawed. "You... cheated! The bales aren't weapons!"

"Everything here is a weapon, if you figure out a way to use it. The wall's held together by a weak repeating code, but it's easily undone. I could teach you – for a price."

"Why, you—"

His response came too suddenly for her to dodge. The force of his blow knocked Cindira from her feet. Strong, angry hands encircled her throat. Left, right, up... no direction offered solace. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe brawn would win over brain.

Virtual death didn't affect the real-world body, but the mind still felt the pain. Stars burst around the edges of her vision, blackness creeping in. She might as well surrender; her dead body would only up Scotia's losses. But the movement of something on the edge of her vision drew Cindira's attention. A flash of white fur, the scurry of tiny feet. Some sort of rodent? She'd never seen one in the arena before, but then again, she'd never been pinned to the ground, moments from defeat.

The creature was gone, but it had drawn her eyes to the only thing that could save her now: the stockade of weapons she'd ignored earlier. What she wouldn't give now for one of the swords, or even an axe. If wishes were weapons, Barrel would fall down dead. But no code she knew of could make things fly through the air.

"Why won't you yield, already?" Barrel's grip clenched even tighter. "You should be dead!"

The dead did not wage war. Cindira struggled to make her muscles obey, drawing up her left hand to signal while her brain attempted to piece together the necessary lines of code that would tell the program she'd surrendered. Barrel's grin widened, but only for a scant moment. The very next, his eyes filled with terror. Suddenly his hands were off her as he backed away.

"What in the hell?"

Cindira sat up, sputtering, spinning around to follow her opponent's gaze, when she too saw it. Every weapon, every blade, every staff, even the fist-sized rocks, floated in the air, poised to strike.

She blinked, and every one of them rushed forward, streaming through the air. Cindira swallowed her scream and squeezed her eyes shut. To victor was one thing. To disseminate your opponent limb from limb was quite another.

"JESUS CHRIST, CINDIRA, get out! Get out of that, quick!"

Cindira opened her eyes, seeing not the bloody gore she'd just caused, but the hood of the jackpod lifting away.

Smoke stained the air as she sat up, looking around in confusion, trying to find the source of the heat against her face. Had the jackpod overheated? She couldn't move fast enough. Adrenaline pumping through her veins pushed her to her feet and into Scotia's hold. The redhead pulled Cindira clear as white fogged the air. A bartender bearing a fire hydrant rushed past, followed by the surly gamemaster who managed the floor.

"No winner!" He threw his hands wildly through the air. "System error! No winner! All bets void!"

The crowd groaned, some shouting that Cindira had clearly been defeated, others saying that she had been on the edge of turning the tide.

Confusion clouded Cindira's thoughts. "Scotia?"

"You heard him, system error." The redhead didn't pause, too concerned with making the door. "Weapons don't just fly through the air unless something goes wrong. Hurry up, we have to get out of here before anyone tries to claim you were cheating. I don't know who the hell this Barrel is, but he was seconds away from making a half mill off your defeat."

"So what? He didn't lose anything. You heard the gamemaster, all bets void."

"I don't care. A man who can throw that kind of black market crypto at the Stadium isn't someone we want knowing who we really are."

Scotia may not have been alone in her thinking. As normality reclaimed her and Cindira became more in tune with her real-world surroundings, she found herself in a stream of people heading to the exit, though that also could be because the smell of smoke filled the air.

By the time they'd slowed down, it was only because they had run out of land. Here, on the bay shore, the red-blue shafts of lights from the Authority transports no longer lit the sky. Across the murky waters, over a field of makeshift boats bobbing in the water, the barren Berkeley Hills rose. Further down, an eerie red glow marked where the Ferries stood, housing who-knew-how-many chipheads, vreal addicts who'd given up on any chance at life and instead slowly drifted further into their fantasies.

"I think we're good." Cindira's words pushed past airy breaths. "If anyone thought we were worth tagging, they'd have caught up to us by now. But we still don't have much time."

Cindira lifted her comque into view, tapping away at the light-based interface it projected.

Doubled over, Scotia scrunched up her nose. "What are you doing?"

She waited until the task was complete to answer. "I pinned into the Authority's mainframe, made sure your comque GPS records were altered." She lowered her wrist, and automatically, the light green glow from the wrist-worn device died away. "And gave you about twenty minutes to get home before your GPS node reactivates."

Scotia's eyes went wide. "You can do that?"

Cindira shrugged. "Their AI isn't too different from what we use at Plaxis, and it operates with the Purusha Plus language as its backbone, so yeah." Her eyes rolled to the side. "Not that it wasn't without consequence."

Head dropping, Scotia forced her breath into submission before pushing off her knees and pulling herself erect. "Do I want to know?"

"If we weren't there tonight, no way we could have won the tournament, is there?"

"Jesus, Mary and..." Snapping to attention, Scotia shook her head. "At least tell me you retracted our entry fee?"

"What do you think I am, some backstreet hacker?"

"No, you're main street, biggest storefront. The best of the best." A smile on Scotia's face fell away.