to my knees and knocked Ryo clear to the ground. The ground shook beneath us, like we got kicked out of traveling. Even the boots deactivated themselves, and my arrow just spun in place, like a loading screen restarting.
What on earth?
We were on a hill, overlooking the ocean. What had stopped us? Far to the west, near the Island of the Savak, the red sky tore at the horizon. And then another scar through the sky, three times as thick as the last one, ripped up and over, like a rainbow of broken pixels.
“That’s not good,” Ryo said. Way to make an understatement. I met Ryo’s eyes, and somewhere, behind that damaged expression, hid a boy who was dying. He could joke all he wanted, but I couldn’t forget that. He was programmed to be the main character in a game that was breaking down.
Of course it was breaking him too.
I wrapped my arm around his waist. “To the Kneult?”
“You meant K-neult.”
I pulled out the map again and tried to gather my bearings. “Why do you pronounce it ‘the K-neult’? I thought the k was silent.”
“Oh. It probably is for the game. My mom might have forgotten that my dad liked to pronounce the silent k. He’d say, “I k-now,” and then we’d laugh, or when he’d knock on my door, he’d always say, ‘k-nock, k-nock.’”
“That’s k-adorable.”
He smiled at me like what I said was actually funny, or maybe like he was just glad to have someone to talk to about his dad. Ryo smiling in his full armor was a sight, like some drawn perfection glowing in digital sunlight. But all I could see was the boy behind the screen. Lost and broken and the next to die.
I clenched my fists. He wasn’t just tall. I couldn’t let him die for real.
Engage Traveling Boots.
The bar reappeared at the side of my vision, but it didn’t go up or down. Resume step?
I clutched my fingers in his cloak and nodded. My spine tingled with the step, and the ground began to change from brown to deep red sand as we moved south toward the coast.
The staggered lights forced my eyes to blink, the movement sending drag on my back, pushing me closer against Ryo’s chest. Each blink brought a new vision as we rushed from horizon to horizon, following the packed dirt road toward Freedom Square, the capital city of the Kneult.
The step stopped us outside the city.
Disengage boots.
“So, we’re going after the Axes of Creation and Destruction,” I said.
“And hopefully a few more players with the Kneult,” Ryo said. His eyes narrowed as he read something in his vision that I couldn’t see. “Isabel and Marcus are the players in the Kneult sector.”
“What do you know about the Kneult?” I asked as I started walking up the road.
Ryo matched my stride. “My dad invented them, back when he would tell me bedtime stories, or when we’d go camping. They were short angry people with mold growing from their knees. Both the men and the women wore long tangled beards, and they traded their way to power, the person with the most money ruling the kingdom.”
“A plutocracy. Or is it capitalism?”
He chuckled. “That’s not the message of the stories.”
“So what is?”
He smiled a little. “There were a few stories my father told about the Kneult. One was about a boy and a girl, children of rival trading houses, who always competed for the best trade. They would haggle for a pair of shoes, and the girl would win, haggle for a sword of iron, and the girl would win, haggle again for a harp that played an angelic song, and the girl would win. But when she asked the boy why he never traded in his crops or his carvings, even when he had more and could have won the trade, he kissed her and asked her to marry him. And though the families despised the match, though he was a penniless fool, he’d won the one trade that mattered. He’d won her heart.”
I leaned into his shoulder. “I like that story.”
“I like it too. Because that’s how he got all the girl’s stuff.”
I elbowed him in the side, and he laughed again, free and easy. Lighter somehow.
My smile faded as I stepped into empty streets broken with streams and bridges—not one mold-specked person in sight. Freedom Square’s harbor was crisscrossed with empty piers, faded docks, and not a single ship. Empty streets fled through brightly painted buildings and a