CHAPTER 38

VANTA: you logged in at 3am

VANTA: that’s either dedication or insomnia. which one

C-REAL: insomnia.

VANTA: same. what’s your excuse

C-REAL: work’s been complicated.

VANTA: what work

C-REAL: the kind that keeps me up.

VANTA: vague. you’re always vague. it’s the most annoying thing about you

C-REAL: I have other annoying things.

VANTA: I’m aware. I’ve been cataloguing them for years

I sat in the flat at half past three in the morning, the laptop open on the kitchen table. Lisa had gone to bed two hours ago.

Nox’s room was empty. The space he wasn’t in felt louder than the presence of anyone who was.

The Tower of Genesis client sat open on the screen. Floor ninety-two. I had cleared it in forty-one minutes, which was terrible by my old standards and acceptable by my current ones. The System had cleared medium draws three days ago, but I was still rationing.

Before she had messaged, I did something I wasn’t proud of. I would do it again.

The climb logs were public, if you knew where the client buried them. Every session VANTA had run in the past three months sat timestamped to the minute.

I set them against the burglary dates in Quill’s file. Three thefts had exact times attached, and all three sat inside gaps in her climbing. The third gap opened eleven minutes before the theft and closed forty minutes after it.

It was a test that could have cleared her. It didn’t.

VANTA: complicated how

C-REAL: complicated like i’m following someone who doesn’t want to be followed. and someone else is following the same person. and i don’t know which of us finds her first.

VANTA: her

C-REAL: yeah.

VANTA: what did she do

C-REAL: stole some things. nothing big. but the people she stole from are the kind of people who don’t like being stolen from.

VANTA: rich people

C-REAL: rich people.

VANTA: good. fuck rich people

VANTA: is she dangerous

C-REAL: i don’t think so. she’s sixteen. she’s been living on her own. she steals chocolate bars and first editions. she marks her routes with broken mirror glass.

VANTA: ...

VANTA: what kind of marks

C-REAL: arrows. scratched into the back of mirror shards. She leaves them at every site she hits.

The typing indicator stayed on for a long time. Longer than any pause in our conversation so far. When the message came through, the register had shifted.

VANTA: you found those

C-REAL: yeah.

VANTA: and you’re following them

C-REAL: trying to, someone got to one before me.

VANTA: who

C-REAL: don’t know. black car. professional. they’re ahead of us.

Another long pause.

VANTA: she’s not dangerous. you’re right about that. she’s scared. she’s been scared for months. she steals because she doesn’t know how to stop. she started with chocolate because she was hungry. she kept going because it was the only thing she was good at.

I read the message four times.

C-REAL: you know her.

VANTA: i know the type.

C-REAL: you are her.

VANTA: i didn’t say that.

The typing indicator flickered. Stopped. Flickered again.

VANTA: how long have you known

C-REAL: suspected since the footage. You used mirror glass in your theft as a reference to me. Your climb logs just closed it.

VANTA: you’re C-REAL. you’ve been C-REAL since before i started climbing. you’re the only person who ever beat me at anything that mattered. and you’ve been hunting me for two days.

C-REAL: i’ve been hunting a thief. i didn’t know the thief was you.

VANTA: and now you do.

C-REAL: and now i do.

I waited. The cursor blinked on the empty reply field.

VANTA: are you going to turn me in

C-REAL: no.

VANTA: why not

C-REAL: because you’re sixteen and you were hungry and the people who hired me are lying about what they actually want. because you’ve been leaving yourself a trail someone could follow. because you wanted to be found.

VANTA: I didn’t want to be found. I wanted to be found by someone who’d look at the marks before they looked at what I stole.

C-REAL: I looked at the marks.

VANTA: I know. That’s why I’m still talking to you.

VANTA: for the record i looked you up once. years ago

VANTA: there’s nothing. no name, no photo, no guild. just a leaderboard and a clear time nobody’s matched

C-REAL: that was deliberate.

VANTA: i know. i copied it

I sat with that for a while, in a dark kitchen, at four in the morning.

Somewhere in this city a sixteen-year-old had built her entire method of staying alive out of watching how a stranger disappeared, and had never once been told she’d got it from anybody.

The laptop hummed. Outside, a dog barked somewhere in the estate. The sound carried through the thin window glass and faded into the pre-dawn quiet.

Lisa’s door opened at some point after four.

I heard it and didn’t turn round, and she didn’t come in. She stood in the doorway long enough for me to work out that she’d seen the screen and decided against saying anything about it.

Then the fridge. Then a glass of water. Then the doorway again.

“You should sleep,” she said.

“I will.”

“You won’t.” She didn’t make an argument of it. “There’s a blanket on the back of that chair. It’s been there since Tuesday. You’ve hung your coat over it twice.”

I looked. There was a blanket on the back of the chair.

“Right.”

“Right,” she said, and went back to bed.

I put the coat on the floor and the blanket over my shoulders, and I didn’t think about it again until much later, when it occurred to me that nobody in the flat owned a blanket that colour.

C-REAL: the people who hired me aren’t the only ones looking for you. there’s a black car. professional. they got to the islington mark before i did. they’re ahead of me and they’re not asking questions first.

VANTA: i know about the car. i’ve seen it outside my flat twice.

C-REAL: you need to leave. tonight. go somewhere you haven’t marked.

VANTA: i don’t have anywhere like that. everywhere i know is marked. that’s the point. that’s how i stay safe.

C-REAL: then meet me. somewhere public. somewhere with exits. i’ll bring my partner. we can figure out what you actually stole that’s got these people hunting you.

VANTA: you want me to trust a hunter who’s been paid to catch me

C-REAL: I want you to trust the only person who ever beat you at anything that mattered.

The pause this time was the longest yet.

VANTA: camden lock. tomorrow. noon. There’s a bench by the water where the tourists don’t sit because the smell’s wrong.

VANTA: If you’re not alone I’m gone. if you bring anyone else I’m gone. If this is a trap I’ll know.

C-REAL: it’s not a trap.

VANTA: You don’t know that. You don’t know who you’re working for either.

I closed the laptop and sat in the dark kitchen. Lisa’s door was still shut.

She is afraid of you. 

“I know.”

Not of you specifically. Of what you represent: a hunter, an adult, someone paid to catch her. She has no reason to trust any of those categories.

“And yet she agreed to meet me. In person, at a location she chose.”

That is either very brave or very desperate.

“Both. Usually they’re.”

I opened the lid again. The leaderboard sat on the screen: VANTA at ninety-six, KITE moved to ninety-five while we talked. The gap between first and second was one floor and a dead man’s hands.

What will you do if she runs?

“She won’t run.”

You sound certain.

“She’s been waiting for someone to find her. She left a trail and agreed to meet. She isn’t going to run from the first person who looked at the marks before the theft.”

And if the black car arrives first?

“Then we get there faster.”

I didn’t sleep. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the grey light creep across the ceiling. The laptop stayed closed. VANTA’s status remained offline.

Somewhere on the other side of the city, a sixteen-year-old girl was packing a bag. She was deciding whether a stranger’s word was worth more than the certainty of staying hidden.

She had been hungry and alone, good at exactly one thing, and had turned that one thing into a way to survive. She had climbed ninety-six floors of a tower that killed most people before fifty.

I knew what that kind of discipline looked like. I spent eleven years watching Jack Foster build a guild out of that exact hunger.

The difference was what the hunger targeted. Jack pointed his at anyone in his way. VANTA pointed hers at a tower game nobody else could climb.

You are going to help her.

“Someone has to.”

The client will not like that.

“The client lied about why he wanted her caught. I don’t care what the client likes.”

Good. I was worried you might.

I stayed at the table until the grey light turned gold and Lisa’s door opened.

She came out in yesterday’s clothes and poured cold coffee into a mug without checking the temperature. She had been awake for most of it.

“Camden Lock,” I said. “Noon. We’re meeting her.”

Lisa drank the cold coffee. “You talked to her.”

“I talked to her.”

“And she trusts you.”

“I don’t know if she trusts me. She agreed to show up.”

Lisa set the mug down. “You knew she was VANTA before she confirmed it. How long have you known?”

“Since the footage. She checks her exits before she reaches for the take, every time. I’ve watched one player do that for years, on ninety floors of replays.”

“That’s a habit, not a person. Half of London checks its exits.” She stopped herself. “No. Go on.”

“I pulled her climb log against Quill’s burglary times. Three thefts with timestamps matched three gaps in her climbing to the minute. The mirror glass was just the confession.”

“You’ve been studying a stranger’s replays for years.”

“Tower of Genesis is a game. She’s the only climber who ever kept pace with me. I stopped playing three years ago, but she kept climbing.” I looked at the laptop. “She says it doesn’t count because the person she beat wasn’t there.”

Lisa was quiet for a moment, then poured the rest of the cold coffee down the sink. “You trust her because of a game.”

“I trust her because she waited three years to beat me fairly. Nobody in the world I came from does that.”

She turned from the sink. “Then we’d better not be late.”

She reached for her coat and I closed the laptop. The leaderboard stayed up for another second before the lid came down: VANTA, KITE, C-REAL, three names stacked like a ladder nobody else could see.