my mom creates worlds.” His smile seemed false, like something he put on to cover how he really felt. He met my eyes and the mask slipped. “Prince Ryo never lost his dad. And that kind of grief, it changes you. I have a bigger temper than Prince Ryo does, but I’m more likely to take risks. Something in me broke when I lost him, and it’s broken again every time I’ve died in this game. I’m not really sure who I am anymore, having gone through that.”
I reached for his hand.
He squeezed my hand and kissed my fingers. “How about you? Who is the real Dagney Tomlinson?”
He said it with a smile, but I couldn’t respond with one. “Hungry,” I said after a second. “I’m hungry.”
“Let me take care of that.” He opened the bag and gave it a dirty look. “Why would you pack an entire bag full of cheese?”
“It travels well.”
“Always so practical.” He made a face and dug deeper.
“But not quite to your taste?”
He gave a crooked smile. He could smile when he said he didn’t like something; was that what his face would look like when he decided he didn’t like me?
Activate Traveling Boots.
“One second.” My heart raced so fast, I barely timed my step before I ran away. 3 percent. Far enough away I wouldn’t see him, but not so far I’d plunge into an ocean. Again. I took a traveling step with my boots and he disappeared. One second he was there, grinning, and the next I was alone in the woods, dressed in the flickering light. I combed my fingers through my tangled hair and braided it back with nimble fingers.
WHAT WAS I DOING? He was a football-playing, egotistical, and yet secretly broken boy. This was not a good idea. Maybe you don’t even like him. Maybe he’s just tall, have you thought about that?
Side quest, find peddlers, I thought.
The arrow in my mind spun, and I measured the distance between where they were and where I’d stepped. I’d stepped 3 percent away from Ryo, and they were that 3 percent plus some. 5 percent.
I took a step and landed just outside the peddlers’ camp.
Deactivate Traveling Boots.
I walked through the camp. There was a flurry of activity throughout the carts: grieving people burying their dead, tending to wounds, and a woman assembling our supplies into a pile they were clearly about to abandon. The children leaned on their parents’ shoulders. At least they were alive.
She faced me. “Ah, Lady Tomlinson. You’ve survived the onslaught. How fares the prince?”
Her face was blank of emotion, but something in her eyes seemed tired.
Maybe it was all the deaths in this game, but something in me had shifted. “I won’t ask you to do more.”
Her shoulders slumped with relief.
“I’m just looking for food.”
“Take what you’d like,” she said, gesturing her hand toward the pile.
I loaded my bag with dry crackers, drink in sealed bottles, and dried meat. I glanced around. I didn’t know if I could come back for more supplies. The league boots made traveling easier, but we’d have to carry what we needed on our backs.
I licked my lips. “I’d like to trade back for my ring.”
Why did I want it? It wasn’t attached to plus accuracy, or style. But it was my mother’s ring. On my eighth birthnight my fictional mother had knelt with me up in our attic and asked if I was old enough to be trusted with her greatest treasure, a ring she’d gotten from her mother, and her mother before that. And then she died, and it was all I had left to remember her.
And at the same time, the ring was only a token from a story, an implanted memory with a side attachment of grief and guilt, so I’d traded it like it was nothing.
“I’m sorry, my lady.” The peddler I’d traded the ring to pressed his hand to his chest. “I sold that ring.”
I closed my eyes. My real mother was still very much alive outside the game. We used to be so close when I was younger, then the bullying started, and my mom didn’t stop it. I knew she tried, and I knew she loved me, but she wanted me to be more like them. She wanted me to diet and wear darker colors, told me if I wasn’t so angry all the time and if I kept my opinions to myself maybe they’d leave me alone. She treated me like I was a