Chapter EighteenSnow

The landlord collected Soph in a truck with a shovel behind the seat. Before dawn they reached the logging road, where the crew was still dealing with the fallen tree. He took the old track until the snow was too deep to follow the ruts, then stopped to radio their position. Soph went ahead with his radio in her pocket.

She wouldn't have called it a road if she hadn't been told it was one. There was a foot of fresh snow between the trees, and tracks disappeared wherever the wind had blown across them. At the end stood a dark cabin with no smoke coming from it. The satellite dish was fixed to a stump and had snow in it too.

She knocked twice. Nobody answered. Saying Rat at a real door felt odd, but she tried that as well.

"Look around the back," Atom said through her frames. "See if there are tracks."

There were bare footprints in a circle by the back door. Someone had stood there turning around before walking toward the trees. Ten meters farther on Soph found socks in the snow. The footprints became boot prints there.

"He put boots on," Atom said. "That's something, at least."

She followed them. The overlay made the snow blue and helpfully identified a tree as a spruce. She turned it off. She needed to see the ground properly.

About a hundred meters into the woods she found Rat in a clearing. She had her head back and her arms away from her sides. The Link was still on, connected to a rig at her waist. The cabin relay barely reached her; Soph could see the signal weaken when she turned. She wore boots, jeans and a t-shirt. Her lips were blue and she was shaking, but she seemed delighted by whatever she could see above her.

"Rat?"

She looked down. Soph didn't recognize the expression.

"Who are you?" the boy asked.

"Soph. I'm a friend of the person whose body you're using."

He laughed in Rat's voice. It was the laugh from the tavern.

"I'm out. Look how high it goes. There isn't anything painted at the top."

He turned to look at the trees again.

"I put my hand in that," he said, pointing to the snow. "It hurt, and it went on hurting after I took it out. Nothing's ever done that before."

"You're too cold. Rat's body is too cold. We have to get inside or she's going to die."

"Won't she go to the temple?"

"No. There isn't a temple here. If this body dies she doesn't get another one. Can you move your fingers?"

He looked at them and tried. They were pale with red knuckles.

"It hurts."

"Come back to the cabin. I'll get a fire going. You can see the sky from the window."

"You'll take the helmet off."

Soph didn't want to lie to him. "Yes."

He stepped back.

"You can't put me in that room again. There's nowhere to go. The stairs aren't anything. There are three other people as frightened as me, and the one who did it left us. I can't go back there."

"Eliza's gone too. We're trying to find her. But this is Rat's body. She didn't say you could have it."

Soph crossed the clearing. He tried to stop her. Rat was taller and stronger, with four years of splitting wood behind her, but she was half frozen and the boy didn't know how to use her. His hand caught Soph's coat. She felt how hard he could grip, then felt it weaken as the cold fingers stopped obeying him.

She reached behind the helmet for the cable.

"Please," he said. "I just wanted to see."

"I know."

She pulled it from the rig. Rat went limp and Soph took her weight badly. They fell into the snow with Rat on top of her. For a moment Soph couldn't move.

"Atom, help me get her in."

He knelt beside them. "I can't lift her, Soph. My hands go through. Use the radio."

She got it out and called the landlord. Then she pulled the blanket from her pack and covered Rat as well as she could. She held her off the cold ground until the first responder reached them.

The responder, Hana, brought a litter with the landlord. They carried Rat into the cabin while Soph tried to light the stove. The first two matches went out. On the third the kindling caught and she was able to put more wood on.

When the road opened they took Rat to a clinic. Soph rode with her and answered questions. She knew when she'd disconnected the Link because she'd checked the time to tell Max, but she couldn't say how long Rat had been outside. Snow was already filling the tracks when the landlord came after them.

By evening Rat was awake and angry about what she thought the clinic would charge her. They let her go once Soph agreed to stay with her and listen to the instructions too. Rat seemed inclined to argue with them, so Soph listened carefully. She bought food on the way back, then had to search the cabin for something to cook it in. The opener was in a milk crate. There was a saucepan under the stove.

"You can go home," Rat said from the bed. "You don't have to stay."

"I just bought this. Let me eat first."

Rat had wrapped feet and a pile of blankets, with Soph's coat underneath. She looked at the helmet on the table, which was safely unplugged, then at her boots by the door.

"How much time did I lose?"

"Eight hours. From the tavern until I got the cable out. We don't know exactly how long you were outside. They think most of it was in here."

"Then I went into the woods."

"You were looking at the trees. In a t-shirt. Leave your feet alone, please. If the color changes we have to go back tomorrow, remember?"

"I remember. Who was it?"

"The serving boy."

"What did he want?"

"To see the sky. Feel a fire. He thought he'd found a way out. I don't think he knew you were still there."

Soph watched the soup because it was easier than watching Rat.

"He held on to my coat. Your hand did. He begged me not to send him back."

Rat didn't say anything for a while.

"I would have begged too. If I was him." She shifted against the pillow. "Thank you for taking it off. And for coming. How did you find me?"

"Gideon got your route from Jeong and found an old cabin listing. He wants to explain it to you himself. The landlord brought me in."

"I'll think about that later. Is the soup ready?"

"Yeah. I poured it back into the can. I couldn't find a bowl."

"I don't have bowls. That's fine."

After Rat ate, Soph put her frames on. Atom was by the milk crates.

"She's eaten. She didn't like the soup," Soph said.

"I heard. I've been here. I didn't want to interrupt. Can you tell her I'm sorry? I knew the board could turn on and I let her go in anyway."

Soph repeated it. Rat nodded without looking away from the stove.

"Have you found Eliza?" Soph asked.

"No. Jeff closed public access to Alius. I can see the tavern from the hill. They come out to the road, stand around for a while and go in again."

He'd been awake all night and most of the day. Soph could tell before he said it. He wanted to talk about something he'd built, but first he had to explain what Jeff was trying to do.

They couldn't simply restart Alius. The NPCs would go back to the versions saved before Eliza touched them, and everything they had become would be lost. Jeff was keeping the affected regions running while he tried to collect their new memories. Those memories were still being moved between client jobs, which would expire if nobody answered them.

"Copy one while it's going," Soph said. "Can't you do that?"

"We tried. We got the original dialogue tree back. Another time we got nothing. Jeff thinks he can gather the state, but he hasn't got it working."

"Then keep people out until he does."

"He's disconnected every registered session. Some early clients have a cached realm and don't ask before joining. We're catching those as we find them. The NPCs can also send jobs out like Eliza does, and we don't know which ones she woke up. We have to find them."

"Okay. What did you build?"

"It deletes the jobs for one character and removes the restart record. Jeff helped. I put it in a sword so I could use it quickly if I had to."

Soph didn't like where this was going.

"It kills them?"

"Yes. It won't pause them. I don't want to use it unless one is already going through to somebody."

Rat had been listening to Soph's half of the conversation. She turned from the stove.

"He wants to delete them?"

Soph explained the rest of it. Atom had a list of all four hundred and eleven NPCs. They could find the awake ones and keep talking to them while Jeff worked on the transfer. If one tried to get into a client, they would have the tool.

"Who decided we should be the ones to choose?" Rat asked.

"I don't know," Soph said. "I don't like it either."

Eliza's original process could save its own checkpoint, Atom told them. The new minds had grown inside the game's NPC runtime, and he hadn't considered what that would do before giving her access. He needed her help as much as Jeff's. Meanwhile Gideon would stay at home with a wired control for the last render gateway. Jeff had arranged it so he could isolate the gateway if they saw something trying to leave. If that failed, Jeff could still roll back the whole realm. Atom had told him what would be destroyed.

Soph looked at Rat. Her lips were almost their usual color again, and she was still buried in blankets. It seemed unfair even to talk about asking her to do this.

"You can stay out," she said. "I'll understand."

Rat thought about it for a while.

"Nobody goes in alone. That's one condition. Max looks at my helmet first, that's another."

"She's already talking to Jeff about it. She wants the ribbon cut, like mine."

"I watch them test it. And you stay right here beside me. If I put my hand up, out here, you get it off. You don't ask me what's wrong first."

Soph repeated the conditions to Atom, waiting for him to agree to each one. Max called an hour later. With the camera showing her what Soph was doing, she talked her through opening Rat's helmet and disconnecting the board. Then they ran the captured command from Soph's takeover against it. The reader still worked. The output board didn't come on. Rat asked for the test again before she let them close it.

They would do the rest in the morning. Rat had been told to sleep, and she didn't have enough energy left to argue about that. Soph put her phone on charge within reach of the bed and made herself a place on the floor. Snow was beginning to cover the truck tracks outside.