One moment, the whole world went black around me.

  The next second, I stood in a cave.

  I was still holding the Leap headset out to Dave, who—instead of being perched atop my ratty old couch—was now standing on the point of a slick-looking stalagmite.

  I let my arm drop. I knew exactly where we were.

  “This is the starting area for Seven Keys,” I said, turning in place. The cave was a long tunnel with a half-circle of light at one end, cut up by the pointy silhouettes of stalactites. About ten feet down the path, a bluish wall of light separated us from the rest of the cavern. That hadn’t been in the game.

  “Huh. Guess you were right about what game they’d pick,” Dave said. “And you said you have recordings?”

  “Yeah. Some. Lore sent them to me after he shipped off.”

  “Shipped off?”

  “It’s a lot to explain, but he should be in a habitation ship. They’re almost to Mercury by now. They’re millions of miles away. Hopefully safe from all this.”

  I eyed Dave at that, but he met my gaze levelly. He must have known my unspoken question, because he said, “I wouldn’t know if the Conduit got to any spaceship or not. Hunters like us are just grunts.”

  I wanted to ask what the Conduit was, but there was a more pressing matter right now. I fiddled with the Leap and said, “The Kitty Scouts. Seth. They’re not here.”

  “Nope, they’re not, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it,” Dave said, his voice needlessly aggressive. “In fact, hundred to one, they’re going to die today, and you can’t stop that either.”

  My heart sank. “But—”

  “You can’t. It is not physically possible. This is not me keeping information from you. It’s not be conveniently leaving anything out. You literally cannot help them right now. They will have to help themselves.”

  I chewed off a strip of my lip, tasting blood. I didn’t want to believe him, but I found that I did. Dave was speaking more seriously than I’d ever heard him speak, and we’d been in life-or-death situations ten times already.

  “Will they at least have someone explaining this to them?” I asked.

  “They’ll be assigned a basic Game Guide. That’s like me, only Level One and mechanical. A sort of orb thing.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s something.”

  “They should all be together, too. Strength in numbers, and all that. You can add them to your Entourage for the next Phase, if they survive, by some act of the Core.”

  I wanted to ask what an Entourage was, but I could guess. It was like a team or a party or something. I could get to that later. Right now, I had bigger concerns.

  “You said you wouldn’t know if the Conduit got to my brother. What is the Conduit?”

  “They’re the aliens in charge of all this marmot feces,” Dave replied. Once again, it seemed there was no slang translation for whatever curse word he’d just used in his own language.

  My fist tightened on the headset. “They run this game, huh? So if I survive, will I get a chance to meet them? Preferably with a laser gun in my hand.”

  Dave narrowed his beady little eyes at me. “What’s your name again?” he said. “I forgot.”

  I looked past him, at the glowing blue wall. “Talon,” I said. “Talon Fields.”

  “Well, that’s good then. Now, when you ask me a stupid question like that one, I can look at you and say, ‘Talon, my dude. Are you stupid?’”

  I flexed my hands, but decided against replying. I couldn’t even begin to think about revenging myself on these so-called Conduit. I had to survive their game first.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “What is this?” I asked, striding up to the wall of blue light. “Can I touch it?”

  “That one? Yeah. It’s the red ones you don’t want to tangle with.”

  I poked it. The wall of light felt solid, and the blue color gathered around my fingertip where I touched it. There was a faint, harmless electric buzz. I pressed harder, and the buzz got more painful. The wall remained solid, inflexible.

  “So these Conduit people,” I said. “They’re… what? Some sort of all-powerful alien race?”

  “No one really knows,” Dave replied. “They all wear big robot suits. I mean, everyone figures they’re a specific race, but it’s possible they conscript people from other races and hide them in the suits. But none of that matters. You’re never going to meet one of them, laser gun or not.”

  I thought of the hundreds, probably thousands of dead kids. Never? We’ll see about that.

  “Why do they even run this Trash Planet thing?” I said. “Is it a cover for taking over other planets and wiping out all the people that live on them?”

  “Trash Planet is not a thing. It’s a broadcast.”

  “You mean like reality television?” I said. “Because that’s way worse. And you’ve participated in it willingly? Really?”

  Dave’s feathers puffed out. “Hey, don’t lump me in with Remnant, okay? I don’t have a choice. He picked me as his Game Guide, so I had to go. That’s all there is to it. The same goes for—”

  He stopped, then sighed and looked away. “Now ain’t the time for this sort of talk. Game Mode is loading. We should prepare.”

  He was right, and I shifted my focus back to the inside of the helmet. For the first time, I saw the huge letters across the front of my visor, so large that my eyes hadn’t recognized them as letters at first.

  LOADING

  NPC Seeding

  As I watched, the phrase NPC Seeding slid right, replaced by the phrase Reticulating Splines. It was just like a real game loading screen, going through the tasks it was performing as it performed them. Not that “reticulating splines” was a real thing. Lore had told me it was an old coder joke.

  “It’s co-opting obscure human jokes now,” I said. “Do the Conduit trawl our data to decide what game to model their TV show after?”

  “Yeah. They want the show to be as… genuine… as possible. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “You’ll see. But basically, they want to make you look like real people, with your own culture and so on.”

  “We are a real people with our own culture and so on.”

  He fluffed his feathers again. “You’re bitching up the wrong stud, my dude. I don’t control any of this. I’m stuck in it, just like you are.”

  I recalled what he’d said when Remnant had melted. Put the damned helmet on, before we’re both dead.

  “So that’s why you’re helping me,” I said. “You’ll die if I die.”

  “Okay, kid. You’re not really asking the right questions right now, and I get it, but we need to focus. This is the last chance we’ll have to talk without someone listening in, at least until we find a vault.”

  Shit. I hadn’t even been thinking about that. If this… game… was broadcast to the universe, then the fact I wasn’t Remnant would be pretty obvious pretty fast.

  “If the show runners find out I’m human, what will happen?” I asked.

  “They’ll kill you. And when you die, your Game Guide dies, too. So I have a vested interest in keeping you alive.”

  I made no mention of the fact that he’d helped me kill his previous Hunter. That wasn’t something I needed to know to survive.

  “Is the helmet really enough to protect my identity?” I asked. This did seem like something relevant to survival, and I needed to learn between now and when that blue wall came down.

  “Yeah,” Dave said, indicating vaguely with one green wing. “Remnant was a piscin, a shape-shifting entity. Piscin can take any form. Setup Mode is only sporadically televised, and at the time you caked my old boss, no one was watching. If they were, we’d already be dead.”

  I straightened. That was one hell of a risk he too, helping me. Without his advice, I would have never beaten his old partner.

  I thought of the other Hunters, and how they’d reacted to me. I thought of Dave’s advice to treat FATE like crap.

  “Remnant was a real piece of work, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “You’ve got no idea. Now where was I… right, so, Remnant often takes the forms of people he kills. It helps him kill more of those people. Pretend to be a native, and you can lure in more natives, see?

  “But there’s no piscin who can do this perfectly. It’s the law. When they’re born, the Conduit dock their DNA.”

  “Dock?”

  “They cut off a part of their genetic code,” he said casually, as if that wasn’t one of the most horrifying things I’d ever heard. “It keeps piscin from being able to perfectly mimic anyone. As in, they all have a weakness. Remnant’s weakness was that he couldn’t change his eyes. He’s a midnight piscin, so his eyes will always glow bright blue.”

  I swallowed. “You mean….”

  “Yep. Even when he took the forms of Coreless he was hunting, he never showed his face, or else he’d give the game away. Most species don’t have glowing blue snake eyes.”

  I scratched my chin just under the helmet. Seems I’d have to get used to itches like that.

  “Long story short, he always wears a helmet,” Dave concluded. “Ever since he first picked up the NerveGear nine seasons ago, he’s never shown his face even before Game Mode starts. It’s a part of his mystique, and trust me, it works. The viewers love him.

  “So keep the helmet on. Always. It will hide you in plain sight—just as long as you don’t do something stupid.”