Pain. Hazy afterimages made my head spin. All I could do was trace the endless cracks and lines of a cold, slate gray impassable wall currently pressed hard against my cheek.

No, wait, that was a floor.

I was sick to my stomach, my adrenaline was crashing, and I was disoriented. The last thing I remembered was diving through some strange blue doorway.

Oh, hell.

Cold fingers of panic plunged through my chest. I’d slipped through a strange door and lost consciousness in the middle of a chase. If they hadn’t found me already, they were going to soon.

I tried to stand, pushing myself up and immediately smashing back down into the floor as a wave of dizziness and fresh pain washed over me, spreading to where I landed on my left cheek.

“Don’t move, you probably have a concussion. And stop drooling on my floor.”

With a groan, I turned over and found myself looking up the barrel of a shotgun. And decided I must have lost it completely because the person holding the shotgun was the little girl who sold me cookies at the end of the world. The shotgun was more than half as tall as her. She’d traded the traditional uniform for a simple armless top and a pair of shorts. And two serious black eyes. The girl was covered in bruises, beaten so badly I wasn’t certain how she was standing. Somehow I doubted it was all from the meteor impact.

It all added up to an image that was absurd, in a surreal, american gothic sort of way, that became much less surreal as she moved the barrel from center mass to my head. “I said, don’t move, fucker.”

One of the many lessons my father left me with was that an inexperienced shooter was just as, if not more dangerous, than an experienced one. Not because they were good at shooting, but because they were so unpredictable. She was standing too close—three yards away instead of the recommended seven—but I wasn’t an action hero and she wasn’t much for trigger discipline. Too dizzy to raise my arms, I just sat there, trying to clear the fog in my head.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Saw you. Opened a door. Then you swan dove into the floor and started drooling.”

“I meant to your face.”

“Not important.”

I glanced behind her. The room looked like the inside of a small warehouse, bare except for a single mattress on the floor and the strange anachronism of a beastly computer tower hooked up to an old CRT monitor, housed on a tortured IKEA desk too small for both.

I pointed to a simple steel door with a push bar, the only visible entrance and exit. “If they saw me go in here, one thick door probably isn’t going to stop them.”

“They won’t follow us.” The girl’s eyes squinted with effort. “You have to be a User. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to enter the instance, but you look like a civilian. Why were they chasing you?”

Leaving out the more questionable details like my class, I brought her mostly up to speed. How I’d woken up in the hospital today and subsequently witnessed a shooting. And most importantly, how tired I was of having a gun stuck in my face.

Eventually, Kinsley muttered something unintelligible and lowered the shotgun, letting the barrel drag on the floor behind her.

“Look, as a favor, I’ll buy the User Core off you. Unless you have access to a necromancer, it won’t help you much. That guy was blowing a lot of smoke up your ass, but he was right about that. It’s mostly useless to you.”

My ears perked up. “How much are we talking?” Then something else she said sunk in. “Wait, necromancer?”

“Seven-thousand Selve. Hard offer.”

Before I could ask what Selve was, a notification screen popped up, unbidden.

Merchant has offered a trade

S7,000

For

User Core

No. In a slight daze, I used a mental command to close the trade screen and scrolled through my notifications until I found what I was looking for.

Primary Objective Resolved — Neutralize or terminate bounty.

Personal Objective Complete—Remain unidentified by other Users.

EXP GAIN (S)

Reward: User Core (Unmalleable)

The amount was consistent with what I did. Dealt an underhanded but decisive blow, netting the Lion’s share of the reward. But the currency changed. A slow wave of prickling anger washed over me. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last few years of my life living hand to mouth, I could have misread it. But I had an eye for detail. Especially when it came to negotiations and written deals. There was no way I’d gotten it wrong. The reward had absolutely been written as dollars. Not fucking Selve.

“Why don’t you show up for me?” Kinsley’s brow furrowed. There was nothing visible, but she was obviously looking at her own trade screen. “Nothing next to name, class, or level. It’s just blank and my trade request looks like it didn’t go through.”

“Kinsley, pretend I got started on this two days after everyone else. What sorts of things do you sell?”

Kinsley perked up. “The variety increases depending on my level. Right now, it’s mainly weapons and healing items, but there are quite a few tabs I don’t have unlocked.”

“And what’s the exchange rate of Selve to USD?” I asked.

Something in my expression must have changed because Kinsley lifted the shotgun back into her lap. “It doesn’t exist.”

“You mean it hasn’t been established yet.”

Her entire body tightened. “It. Doesn’t. Exist. Whatever this thing is, it doesn’t let you do anything with our money. Dollars, euros, pesos, whatever. If it detects any sort of attempt to exchange, the Selve disappears.”

“There has to be a loophole—“

“No, you can’t gift Selve and be paid later. You can’t buy someone an item with Selve and let them pay you for it in dollars. You can’t exchange material non-system items, art, gold, gems—anything that can be assigned a dollar value—with Selve. And no, you can’t do a wire transfer to a Swiss numbered account in no one’s name to receive Selve and disclose the number of that account later.” Kinsley was panting when she stopped, a strand of hair out of place.

Several things clicked into place. No matter how clever and enterprising the girl was, she didn’t come up with all of that on her own. And that, as difficult my time after the meteor had been, hers was likely far worse.

“Rough couple days?” I asked.

“Yeah.” There was a sniffle, then another. “They were nice at first. And the money they were throwing around… yeah. It’s kind of funny. No matter how smart someone seems, once they run out of clever ideas, they always fall back on the piñata solution.”

Hit it until the stuff you want falls out.

Fuck. She reminded me of Iris. A more cynical, angry version of my sister, but the similarities were there. That was where all the misplaced empathy was coming from. But she wasn’t my sister. I didn’t have time for this. The girl stood up and walked to the sink to wash her face. I eyed the shotgun she left behind. Then dismissed it.

“Good luck.” I started towards the chained up door.

“Wait, what? What about the trade?” Kinsley called after me.

“Not interested.”

“Why? As long as you have that core, there’s a target on your back.”

“It was dark. They didn’t see my face.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve already had to switch locations once. It took them a while to find me, but they did. Some Users have methods of tracking you down, probably ability based.”

“I’ll figure it out.” Based on previous experience, I was relatively sure Double-Blind would insulate me from any inquest, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

“I did you a favor.”

“And I’ll do you one back.” I pointed to the weapon on the table. “Kill a User with that and you become a bounty. No outside weapon interference.”

Kinsley’s mouth hung open.

“There. Favor repaid.”

“You’re scared. You’re just scared and you’re running away,” Kinsley snapped.

I hesitated, hand poised to undo the chain, then turned back. “Yeah, I am scared. I just saw two people die, and learned that the system that scammed me values a life in Monopoly money. On top of that, I lost a job, probably two.” Somehow, I doubted anyone was overly concerned with standardized testing amidst this level of chaos. “I’m willing to bet that you can’t buy groceries with Selve. And we all know how this works. It’s too big. It won’t stay quiet long. People panic. The shelves will be bare in a week, if that. So, I’m more worried about when my next actual paycheck is coming from than interested in selling some guy’s remains to buy a larping sword.”

Kinsley’s face grew stoic again, businesslike. “What if I had a way to solve both those problems?”

“Which problems?” It felt like I listed far more than two.

“The job and the groceries.”

I rolled my eyes. “Even assuming you could. Why would you? Why even help me in the first place? Because I bought your cookies?”

“Because it helps me. And you were decent then, and you’re decent now. You knew I couldn’t use the gun, and you didn’t try to use it against me for answers or grab it when I left it there. You didn’t try to hurt me, didn’t expect anything for free because you’re bigger and scarier than me. That’s rare. Someone who can be both decent and desperate.”

Kinsley was wrong about me. But there are few things more stupid than correcting someone who thinks highly of you.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

“Well, first, I have a general store tab. Didn’t lead with that because no one seems very impressed by it. All sorts of food, though. Also, I’m about to level, so I could be on the cusp of unlocking more options. If we do the trade we talked about earlier, it could push me over, hint hint.”

I blinked. That solved my immediate problem, though not the longer reaching ones. “And the job?”

The girl dug around her pocket, eventually finding what she was looking for, and placed it on the table. It was about the size of a fist, cone-shaped, marked with mind-achingly complex gold and emerald inlays. I touched it, and a notification popped up.