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One Year Later…Mia Becker,
Berlin, Germany, 2:24 AM
I wasten minutes into the game. I was wired in, and my fingers flew over the controls. On-screen, Kassius, the Velerion hunk I’d created to be my training partner, sat in the pilot’s seat looking handsome and stoic and almost real. Handsome wasn’t the right word. Hot was better. When my friend and fellow player, Jamie, had said she had a crush on her imaginary sidekick, I hadn’t laughed because I had one on mine, too.
Not a thirteen-year-old-girl boy-band kind of love, but an all-out, I-wanted-him-naked-in-my-bed kind of craving. My vibrator got a workout as I thought of Kass. Nightly and often twice on nights I played the game and spent hours listening to his voice. I knew it made me slightly crazy and a sign I needed to date more, but no men I met matched Kass’s… everything.
The game, Starfighter Training Academy, was cool and challenging, but it wasn’t all that fun anymore. Not since Jamie had won the game and went radio silent two weeks ago. She’d literally disappeared after celebrating her win. Jamie, Lily, and I had all watched the cut scene finale as General Aryk congratulated her on becoming an Elite Starfighter. Watched when she’d accepted the pair bond to her game-made hottie, Alexius. Sat stunned as her screen had gone black. After that… nothing. No Jamie when I’d tried to connect to play again. Lily hadn’t had any better luck. Our friend had just poofed into thin air. Vanished.
Gone.
With my job in the intelligence community and my hacking skills, I couldn’t let it go. I’d accessed places a normal person wouldn’t dream of looking. She might live on the other side of the Atlantic, but everything in the world was online. In police files. Tax paperwork. Employment records.
I’d even hacked Jamie’s employer’s database—which had been ridiculously easy—and discovered that she’d been terminated for not showing up for work. That had been over a week ago.
Searching for family had come next. It was possible she was visiting her oma. But no. No grandmother. No father or siblings. Only a mother who was in a prison-run rehab program. Their log showed that Jamie had not called or visited once.
“You have no idea where she is?” Lily asked through my headset as I watched her pound the side of a Dark Fleet stronghold into rubble with her giant mechanical fists. As usual we were playing together, and her destructive tendencies appeared to be opposite what I imagined when compared to her soft British accent. She was a librarian in real life but made me think of a prima ballerina swinging a sledgehammer when she played the game. Lily tore through Dark Fleet scum like a tank playing in the Starfighter Titan division.
“None,” I replied. “I tracked her phone number and called. No answer. It’s like she vanished off the face of the Earth.” I spoke clearly into my headset as I looked to the pilot’s seat on the stealth ship Kass and I were flying for this mission in the game, which I hadn’t been able to beat.
Yet. But Kass—yup, I’d given him a nickname—and I got closer to winning every time. As an MCS pair, he flew the Phantom, which was what I had named our ship. Generally, he piloted and I sat buckled into the computer that covered the copilot’s area as well as the entire rear of the cockpit, using my computer skills to hack into the Dark Fleet’s systems from the complex quantum processors as he moved in so close we could have reached out and touched the enemy with our bare hands.
As I played, I spoke to Kass as if he were real, and he gave formulated responses. I even chatted when he never said anything back, as if we were truly side by side fighting the Dark Fleet. Anyone would call me crazy, but I was half in love with him.
An avatar in a video game.
An alien, no less, who was just pixels on my screen.
Sometimes he seemed more real to me than the people I worked with. Then again, my colleagues were serious and dangerous, and we all lived with a lot of secrets. They were good people, loyal. Dedicated. Lonely. People like me.
I never once fantasized about my coworkers. Never dreamed of being pushed up against the wall. Never imagined dropping to my knees and making any one of them lose their mind as my hair was tugged.
“She hasn’t used her credit cards?” Lily asked, breaking me from my dirty thoughts. About an alien in a video game. Maybe Jamie was in an insane asylum and I would be joining her next.
“How would I know that?”
“Don’t bother lying. I know what you do.” Lily’s chuckle followed as her Titan mechanical warrior—something like a Mech Warrior or a Transformer straight out of an action movie—jumped on top of a low-flying enemy shuttle and ripped off the communication panel with its powerful hands. “This the one you want?”
My eyes widened as she’d done that so easily. We’d all improved as we’d played together. Jamie had won the game first because she’d been a badass as a starfighter pilot. “Easy, Lily. There are bombs on that shuttle. They could blow.”
This bomb-run mission was a new addition to the game with enemy weapons that could easily take us both out. Then it would be game over.
Our mission task—mine and Kass’s—was to hover over the shuttle and remain hidden from the Dark Fleet ships’ sensors, take control of that shuttle through hacking, then redirect it at the Dark Fleet’s armada and blow them all to bits, using their own weapons against them.
“Not going to happen.” Lily’s Titan jumped off the shuttle as Kass flew us in close.
“Thanks, Lily.”
“Go get ’em!”
I grinned as I hacked into the shuttle’s navigation system and remotely steered it away from the planet’s surface.
“You’re fifteen seconds ahead of where we were last time.” Lily’s voice was husky with excitement. “You’re going to bloody do it this time, Mia. You’re really going to do it!”
My gaze dropped to the timer in the lower right corner of the screen. Fuck, yes!