Chapter ThirteenProleague

"Can I take Soph?" Eliza asked.

"I'm taking Soph," said Atom. "We worked this out months ago."

"I know. I want to change it. You can take Gideon."

They were in the cottage on the evening before the winter qualifier. It was December, nearly two years since the accident, and Soph and Gideon had somehow qualified as a wildcard pair. Atom had been looking forward to coaching her.

"Why do you want to change it now?" Atom asked.

"Because you'll be talking to her and she'll be talking to you, and you won't be watching the match. I can get her to pay attention."

"We can pay attention."

"I think I can do it better. I want to try."

"You really want to win, don't you?"

"Yes," she said. "I haven't wanted that before."

He gave in. There was an entry form to deal with, which he filled out through his developer guest allocation. The league allowed coaches to use analysis software. He put Eliza down as a remote analyst and signed the declaration. Soph asked whether she'd been cleared, and he showed her the accepted entry. He didn't go back to the form to show her what he'd called Eliza.

Soph had been to big game events before, but she hadn't been one of the people anybody came to watch. Now there were forty thousand people in San Jose for the qualifier and she was trying not to think about how many of them might see her die. She and Gideon had entered the North American open bracket without expecting much. His opening had worked three times, and three wins were enough to bring them here. She still thought it was a stupid opening. A battlemage shouldn't go that far out without somebody covering him, and her rogue wizard couldn't cover everything. When he died she had to run around keeping herself alive until he respawned. She was small and hard to hit, but that only worked for so long.

The convention hall smelled of carpet cleaner. People had brought energy drinks and spilled some of them already, and nobody seemed inclined to take their frames off. You couldn't really watch without them. Thirty players running around a parking structure made no sense until you could see the canyon they were fighting in. Spectators borrowed frames at the door and spent a while figuring out why a white line on the ground was suddenly the edge of a cliff. It was still worth looking at the real ground occasionally. Rat had broken up a match once by dislocating a finger on a bollard that looked like a tree. That didn't heal when the character respawned.

Having a coach should help. Everybody in the pairs bracket had one, a ghost bound to the player who could spend the match looking at things the player wasn't looking at. They were useful for the math too. You could be good enough to make the top thirty-two on your own and still need a coach to get into the top eight. She hoped Eliza knew what she was doing.

Then the round-of-sixteen bracket updated.

"Who have we got?" Gideon asked.

"The Dogs. Their second pair," Soph said.

"Rat?"

"Yeah."

"Holy shit. We're going to lose to Rat. I'm going to tell my grandchildren," Gideon said.

"You haven't lost," Eliza told them. "Soph, go to the mark on the left. Stop looking over there."

Soph couldn't quite help looking. The ranger was standing in the staging area in his green cloak, with the bow and legendary dagger she'd watched on so many streams. Beside him Daun bounced on her toes and rolled her neck. She had a huge shield for someone so short.

The Dogs had entered the new mixed bracket because Rat wanted Daun to play. Jeong didn't think it was a good idea, but it was difficult to say no to Rat. Daun was a farmer with no sponsor, and staying in the Hongcheon gym was the only way she could afford to be in the competition. Rat had come to San Jose for both of them. Under the mixed rules Daun could link to her and fight, provided she didn't go more than ten meters away. It used the Alius rules for collision, so being a ghost wouldn't keep her shield from hitting Soph in the face. Solenoid had wanted this bracket opened to show people what the Link could do. Soph would have preferred to watch somebody else demonstrate it.

She tried to see the player under the ranger's overlay and couldn't. Rat wore frames, of course, and the character covered everything else. Soph realized she'd never heard the real voice either. She could recognize the ranger instantly and still wouldn't know Rat at a bus stop.

There wasn't any more time to look. They were in a rented lot disguised as a ruined amphitheater, and Soph had to choose which columns she could use for cover. A ranger could get good shots between them. At the horn she tried to keep her eyes on Rat and failed almost immediately. The broadcast couldn't find the ranger for eight seconds either. The first arrow came from somewhere she hadn't looked and hit Gideon's shield arm.

"Column!" Atom called. "Get behind it!"

Gideon moved with half his suit frozen and only just made it before the next shot. Soph couldn't help him. Daun was coming straight at her. She had her shield in front and she wasn't slowing down. Soph put a snare in her path and got a bolt into her leg. That worked better than she'd expected. Daun stumbled, at Death's Door, and Soph readied another bolt to finish her.

"Leave her," Eliza said. "Rat's coming from your right. Two seconds."

"I've got her!" Soph said.

"Roll right, Soph. Now."

Soph rolled. The arrow came through where her chest had been. She came out of the roll just in time to see the ranger unwinding from behind a column, less than fifteen feet from her. That had been stupid. She knew better than to get so interested in a kill that she forgot the other player. Of course Daun had come straight at her. She was supposed to look at Daun while Rat shot her.

Soph moved back into cover. For a moment the picture seemed to stick, and then the edges went blurry. There was a low hum she could scarcely hear. She felt sick and wondered whether she'd rolled too fast. She didn't know until afterward that other people had felt it too.

Rat stopped with an arrow half drawn and shook her head. Daun called for her to break left; Soph was coming around. Rat should have moved immediately. They'd used that call hundreds of times. Instead she stayed where she was for half a second, and Gideon got around the column before she saw him. He hit her in the chest with a fire bolt at close range. Her suit froze. Soph caught Daun's remaining leg in a snare and the match was over.

The horn sounded. A banner filled Soph's vision, but she could hear the crowd, and it didn't sound as if they quite believed what they'd watched.

"We won," Eliza said. She sounded very happy. "I told you we could."

"Soph? Can I talk to you?"

It was about an hour after the match. Soph had gone behind the staging area to get out of the crowd, and a tall person in a hoodie was looking for her. She didn't recognize Rat without the overlay until Rat said who she was. The player was thinner than the ranger and stood differently, keeping her hands in her pocket.

"Oh, wow. Hi. It's an honor. I mean, to play you. Gideon's still going on about it," Soph said.

"You played well," Rat said. "Who's your coach? I don't know the tag."

"A friend. She's not ranked. She just does the math for me."

"She's good at it. Listen, I'm trying to find out what happened in there. Did you notice anything strange?"

"A little. I thought I was nervous."

"I got lost. Twice. Both times just before we lost. I can lose track of you, but losing track of myself? That's new."

Soph nearly repeated what she'd said about feeling strange herself. She wanted Rat to understand she hadn't known what was happening. But she'd already said it, and Rat wasn't asking her to explain it again.

"And Daun's call," Rat went on. "She says she told me to move, and I believe her, because I found it on the recording. I didn't hear it when she said it. She thought I was ignoring her."

"I wasn't doing anything like that. I wouldn't know how."

"I watched your part back. I don't think it was you. I'd like to talk to your coach, though. Will you tell her?"

Soph said she would. Rat thanked her and went away, leaving Soph to wonder what she was going to say when she made the call. She had wanted to play Rat for years. This wasn't how she'd imagined talking to her afterward.

She shouldn't have read the forums. She went looking anyway, hoping somebody had seen the same thing Rat had. Instead she found her mother's name. It had taken about four hours for people to discover she was Maxine Ehrlich's daughter, and once they'd found that out there didn't seem to be much interest in discussing the match. She'd grown up around the company, therefore she'd been given a win. Soph wanted to reply to several posts and was glad afterward that she hadn't. Somebody was collecting signatures to keep Solenoid employees' relatives out of sanctioned play.

The holonews picked it up in the morning. By afternoon there were forty thousand posts between three threads, which was a ridiculous number of people to have an opinion about her. She read the Dogs' statement too. Integrity appeared six times, she counted, but they wouldn't quite say they'd been cheated. Other people were happy to say it for them. Gideon sent her a picture of his own name trending and she didn't answer. She'd seen enough. He stopped sending screenshots after that.

She called Eliza from the basement. Atom sent the cottage feed to her frames and Gideon watched on the laptop beside her. Eliza turned to the small window with Soph's face in it.

"What did you do to Rat?" Soph asked.

"I coached you."

"Don't do that. She got lost twice. She didn't hear Daun call. I want to know what you did."

Eliza stopped what she was doing at the stove.

"I thought it would be obvious when you looked at the traces. I can get to the picture through the borrower. And the audio. I delayed Rat's picture a little and removed the call from her mix."

"After it got recorded?" Soph asked.

"Yes. The judges see the server's version."

"What about the noise?"

"The motion cue was out of time. It made her dizzy. Only for a few seconds."

"You keep saying a little and a few seconds like it makes it okay."

"Less than four seconds. I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to help you win," Eliza said.

"I wanted you to tell me where she was! That's what a coach does. If she beat me, she beat me."

Gideon tried to say something and Soph waved him quiet. She was thinking of Rat standing in the corridor, trying to explain that she hadn't heard her partner.

"You need to talk to her," she told Eliza. "Daun made the right call and Rat thinks she let her down. You need to tell both of them what you did."

The kettle began to whistle. Atom moved it off the stove while Eliza considered that. Eventually she agreed.

Soph told Gideon they were withdrawing. He wanted to discuss it first. What would happen to Eliza if they told the league? What would happen to them? Soph said he could find somebody else for next season if he wanted, but she wasn't playing another round. He went quiet after that. She waited for him to give her the login and signed the withdrawal when he did.

There was more to send afterward: the traces and a correction to the coaching declaration Atom had filled in. By the next morning they were disqualified, without their entry fee, and suspended until the review was finished. Atom's guest allocation had been revoked. Eliza wanted to explain it to the league herself, but they wrote back to Atom about his unauthorized service. She kept asking him why they wouldn't answer her.

Rat already had the traces when Eliza's separate message arrived. She was heading home and hadn't stopped examining the match.