Chapter 1

I'm not a bad person. I'm really not. At least, I want to believe that after this game ends—if it ever does—somebody in the real world is going to recognize me walking down the street, and they'll recognize everything I've done, and they'll smile and say, "Rosalia, I want to thank you."

But that's all wishful thinking. What people are going to remember is the poor guy who's kneeling in front of me begging for his life. They'll remember me kicking him down. Putting my foot on his neck to keep him from screaming. I'm a wanted player, now. My face is posted in every safe zone in the tower. Everybody knows me on sight. No point in staying a green player anymore.

It's almost midnight, and we're tucked away in the depths of some forest on Floor 51. The guy whose throat I'm stepping on, he's starting to cry. He's only a few levels short of being a front-liner, but he doesn't stand a chance against me and my "friends" on his own. Really, I feel for him. He got a hold of some rare dyes, and they're worth enough col to equip a small guild, but he was blabbing his mouth about selling them at half-price. Really, he sounds like a nice guy. Someone I'd take out for a drink or three. Maybe more. I tell him, "Give me the dyes, or I'm going to fucking kill you."

I want to throw up. Maybe my real body is. Maybe it's so disgusted by what I'm doing right now that it's puking, and maybe it's choking, and maybe a part of me would be alright with that. But my virtual body doesn't get sick, and it doesn't feel, so I hold my spear out until its blade is about an inch from the man's eye, and I say, "This isn't a hard decision."

When people remember me, they're going to remember my threats. My spear tip gently resting on their shoulders. They'll remember the time I was arrested and sent to the Black Iron Palace Prison, and all about how I "broke out" and became even worse than before. What nobody will remember are the Record Crystals I keep running all day. Nobody knows about those. Probably never will.

The man I've got pinned is trying to sort through his inventory. It's tough with my boot holding him down and my spear in his face. He manages. One of my party members grabs the dyes and checks to make sure they're what we came for. The man on the ground says, "Don't kill me."

"We're good," my guy says. He initiates a trade so he can give me the heist's spoils, but when I open my menu, my inbox pings.

I can't let my people see that inbox. If they saw some of the messages I had, they'd kill me on the spot. I can see the basic message information for what I just got, though. The PM doesn't have a title. Everything is blank except for the sender information. It reads:

Sender: PoH

It's the PM I've been waiting to get for the past five months. It's also the one I hoped to never get. I want to delete it before ever looking at it. I want to open it now and read every word. I don't even know what I want to do with it, but I can't do any of it in front of my party, so I accept my partner's trade and take the dyes.

When I lift my foot off the man's throat he starts sobbing really loud. Everyone laughs. I laugh, too, but only because I have to. Between his crying and the PM in my inbox, I want to die. "Meet up where we planned," I tell my party, and one by one they teleport out. The good thing about everybody knowing my face is that I can't really teleport with my guild. Teleports take me back to cities. Cities mean people. People will get me arrested. It gives me an excuse to get away from my party—so I can get real work done.

The bad part about everybody knowing my face is that I have to do most of my travel on foot.

But not all of it. Next to the Record Crystals in my pocket, I've got a Corridor Crystal. It's rare. Worth a lot of col—far more than the dyes we just lifted. I pull it out, and as I start to activate it, the man we just robbed says, "You took my weapons and crystals."

I say, "Yeah."

"You're just going to leave me?"

We're a long walk from the closest safe zone. He's a few levels above the monsters on this floor, but without a weapon, and without his teleport crystal, he's fodder. "Yeah."

My Corridor Crystal lights up. It's a dark blue light, and I hate it. I wish I'd never accepted it. The man says, "You're killing me."

And as the light surrounds the virtual me that doesn't feel, and doesn't get sick, but wants to vomit, all I can say is, "Probably."

My Corridor Crystal is linked to Floor 1. It's the closest thing to a safe zone I've got. Floor 1 is still the most populated floor in the tower—Starting City is home to the Army, as well as many of the players who decided that risking their lives trying to clear the tower was a pretty stupid idea—but outside of the City and the few small towns littering the zone, the leveling areas are near empty.

I pop onto a hilltop near the zone's outer edge. In the moonlight, the place is beautiful. I can see fields, and meadows, and lakes, and the lights of the City off in the distance. I also see that Skell is already there waiting for me.

Skell is the only person in the game who knows who I am. If I've got anything I'd call a friend in this game, it's him. He's got my back. He's the only person I can trust.

I hate his guts.

He sees me zone in and asks, "How'd it go?"

"Fuck Kayaba," I tell him.

"We'll get him. The Clearers will take him out. A year and a half of Hell, they'll make him pay. They're getting closer. We just have to make sure everyone's still alive when they get there."

I shake my head, because that's not what I'd meant. "He traps us all in this tower for who knows how long, and he doesn't even have the courtesy to program in a pack of cigarettes." I'm so stressed I can't stand, so I take a seat on the hill and watch the City lights sparkle on the horizon. "Asshole."

"He probably did you a solid with that one."

"Maybe."

Skell sits next to me. If he looks like police, it's because he is. In the real world, at least. Here, he works with the Army to enforce their rules. He just does what he knows. Same as me.

When we were all trapped, there was a short period where everyone thought their world had changed forever. That feeling passed. The sad truth is, once the monsters and weapons and fantasy lands are stripped away, nothing has changed from what it was on the outside.

Take those dyes I stole for example. They won't make a player faster. They won't make him stronger. They won't make him better. All they'll do is make him look pretty. For those initial few days, all we thought about was surviving. Then we realized we'd still spend a fortune to look better than the player next to us. That some of us would still kill for that fortune.

Skell looks at me—his short, brown hair looking black in the dark—and says, "What do you have for me?"

I pull out my Record Crystals and hand them over. Combined, it's about three days' worth of conversations—planning crimes, recruiting new members to the orange guilds, committing robbery. Anything a judge would need to convict—not that any of these guys are actually going to get a trial. "We left a victim up there. Out in the forest on Floor 51. Took his weapons and crystals, so he won't last long on his own. I'll shoot you his coordinates. You should send someone out there to pick him up."

He nods, and puts the Record Crystals in his inventory. "This everything?"

This is the point where I should say yes. Be done with it. Ignore what I don't want to see. "I got a PM."

"From?"

"PoH."

Skell's been waiting for this as long as I have. The difference is, he wants it. For a long while he doesn't speak. He doesn't move. Then he says, "What's it say?"

I open the PM. Its text is almost as bare as the message's title. "It says, 'Floor 40.' There's a date, time, and coordinate point attached. That's it."

"That's it?"

"That's it." It's a relief, really. No personal correspondence. Nothing that needs replying to. Just a where and when. "You should get the Clearers from off of the front lines. We know where he'll be now. Go in and make the arrest or kill him or whatever it is you have to do."

Skell looks at me for a moment. He looks up at the moon, and then he looks back at me and says, "No."

"No what?" I ask, because what he's said doesn't make sense. "You're not getting Clearers for this?"

He shakes his head. "We're not making the arrest."

"Bullshit you're not!"

I hate the way Skell looks. The rarest dyes in the game couldn't wipe the look of a police officer off of him—like some sergeant who's had his stripes too long, or a lieutenant who just got his commission. I hate the way he talks. The way he lords over people with words. His demagoguery. Most of all, I hate Skell because he'll sacrifice a few players here and there to get his job done.

I hate myself because I play along.

Skell says, "You getting arrested along with Titan's Hand might be the best thing that could have happened for us."

"Don't change the subject."

"Getting locked up gives you credibility. You think PoH would have sent you a PM if you'd stayed a green?"

"Whatever. He's sent the PM." I don't know when it happened, but I'm standing. Pacing back and forth across my patch of the hilltop. "He wants to meet, and you're not going to do anything about it?"

"Of course I'm doing something about it." He looks at me in a way he doesn't look at anybody else. In the cities he's always smiling. Laughing. Making people feel safe. With me, he's cold and blunt. Maybe it's because he respects me. Maybe it's because, on some level, he recognizes how sick this is. "You're going to do something about it."

"What do you want me to do, stab him in the back?"

"I want you to join Laughing Coffin."

I'd been working orange players for months before I was arrested and sent to the Black Iron Palace prison. Our routine was simple. Orange players were lining up to join Titan's Hand. It was a sham guild, of course—we'd rob people blind, sure, but all the while I was sending information to Skell, who would then get the Army to make the arrests. The problem is, we can't make arrests every time we steal. We have to let some jobs go off without a hitch, or else people start to catch on. Sometimes, I had to let them get away with it.

That's bad enough as it is with an orange guild. Laughing Coffin kills.

I'm not pacing anymore. Not moving. "Fuck you."

"We could get Clearers and take PoH now," Skell says, "but the rest of Laughing Coffin isn't just going to stop killing people because they lost their leader. You can't come back from being red. We need all of them, and we need all of them at once."

"No."

"You meet with PoH. See what he wants. He doesn't just contact people out of the blue—if he's messaged you himself, there's some kind of special interest there. Use that. You're good at that."

And I don't know if he means that I'm good at making people trust me or that I'm good at using people. He might mean both. "Red guild means killing. I'm not killing anybody."

"Well you're going to have to figure something out." He stands himself. Brushes his pants off. Puts his hand on my shoulder, and holds as I recoil. "All we need to take Laughing Coffin down is their home base. Wherever they're staying, or where they meet, or how they get together. If you can find that out, we can have the Clearers on them within the day. We need to know, and you're the only one who can find that out for us."

I've never killed anybody. In the real world, I'd never so much as had a parking ticket. Now I was running a crime ring. I never even wanted to play this game in the first place. "I can't."

"You've done just fine with Titan's Hand. Laughing Coffin isn't any different."

"Yes it is."

"Forget the details. Strip it down and it's the same thing."

"There's no way I can make this work with PoH."

He grabs me tight by the shoulders. Looks me hard in the eyes. "Rosalia," he says, and his voice is low. "You're a police officer, remember? That didn't stop when you put on that helmet and started playing this game."

"I was in the Traffic Bureau." I push him back, and with my stats, he has to let go. He doesn't look away, though. "I made sure people made it across crosswalks. Maybe once a week I'd have a wild day and write a ticket or two. I wasn't trained for undercover."

I hate Skell, but he's the only person in the game who knows who I really am. Not just that I'm not really a criminal. And not just that I never wanted to hurt anybody. He knows more than that. He knows how I feel. "Then I guess they're just going to keep killing people."

And really, that's all he has to say. Over all of my protests, I know he's right. This really is our best shot. As much as it makes me sick, I know I'd sacrifice a player or two to save the rest. I already have. I'll join Laughing Coffin.

Because I'm not a bad person. I'm really not.

I'm the absolute worst.