The Leveller - Julia Durango Page 0,35
. . . maybe eight hours?”
“So compare that to the twenty-four hours you’ve been in the MEEP this time around.”
“What?” I say, standing now. “I’ve been gone a whole day?”
“I think so, from what you’ve told me. That’s why you were so exhausted last night. Even though your body is at rest at home, your brain keeps working here. And after all you’d been through yesterday—the maze challenges, and well, finding me—”
He pauses for a second, and I recall the raging hissy fit I threw yesterday, like I was somehow channeling King Kong. A wave of embarrassment runs all the way through me and I look away.
“Your brain was on overload,” he continues. “It needed to shut down for a while—in the real world.”
I guess it made sense. “I hadn’t really thought of that before,” I confess.
Wyn takes the blanket from my recliner and I grab the other end to help him fold it.
“I hadn’t either,” he says, “until I totally crashed on the beach one night and woke up the next morning eyeball-to-eyeball with a large crab.”
I laugh as he takes the folded blanket from me and scoops up the pillows.
We leave the roof and go back into the hotel, stopping by one of the rooms to return the linens he’d pilfered the night before. The hotel room is decked out in swanky retro furniture and boasts a panoramic view of the ocean. “Did you really go to the trouble of building and furnishing every single room in this hotel?”
Wyn gives a small laugh. “It wasn’t as hard as it sounds,” he says, as he begins to make up the bed. I lean over to help him. I don’t know whether to find it charming or crazy that he’s so intent on keeping our MEEP prison nice and tidy. “All the rooms are identical, a simple copy and paste job,” he continues. “Eventually I might re-create some of the penthouse suites, but it’s not my top priority.”
“I assume you mean the Let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here thing takes precedence?”
Wyn looks out the window and sighs. “Of course.”
“I’m going to need to know everything,” I say. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
He nods. “Right. Let’s go to the Malecón. We can talk there.”
The Malecón, it turns out, is the big stone seawall that I saw last night from the rooftop. As we walk along the top of it, we see fishermen, townspeople, fruit vendors, and lovers holding hands. I suddenly remember Wyn holding my hand last night and I bite my lip in embarrassment, but Wyn doesn’t seem to notice. He has turned inward, trying to figure out where to start his story.
“I’ve been working on this world for two years now,” he says, looking out at the ocean as we walk. “I guess you could say it’s my hobby, the one place I spend most of my time when I’m not at school.”
“Two years.” I nod in understanding. “When your dad invents the greatest video game of all time, you don’t have to wait for the official release like the rest of us.”
Wyn looks almost apologetic. “I know that seems unfair—” he starts, but I cut him off.
“I would have done the same thing. My dad’s a developmental artist on the MEEP team. He lets me try new stuff all the time. Just not on a . . . scope of . . . this magnitude,” I say, waving an arm at the miles-long stretch of Havana coastline.
“So that’s why you’re so good at this,” Wyn says with a grin. “You inherited the video game gene from your father.”
“Both my parents, really,” I say, and all of a sudden I miss them horribly. “My mom, Jill, is a scriptwriter.”
“Jill?” Wyn asks, stopping us in our tracks. “Jill Bauer?”
“You know her?” I ask, though I’m sure that can’t be right. Jill would have told me if she’d ever met Diego Salvador’s son.
“Well, I know of her. I use her scripts all the time. More than half the Meeple here in Havana speak JillBauer-ese,” he says, laughing. “She’s funny as hell, your mom. Always throws in some little fun surprise. Makes the Meeple more interesting.”
I admit that I am a little taken aback, and also a little ashamed of myself. I have always thought of my dad’s work on the MEEP as super creative and exciting, and my mom’s work as . . . well, boring.
“So both your parents are in the biz,” Wyn continues. “Is that why they named you Nixy . .