Page 44 of Blind Spot
“You’re Slovak.”
“I’m Canadian. I have the passport and the psychological scars as proof. Let’s go.”
The teenager at the counter killed the lobby lights and hit the door release. Somewhere past the entrance, a fog machine exhaled into the darkness. A buzzer went off that vibrated my teeth.
I looked for Rook on instinct. He had already gone through the door on the other team.
The arena was two stories of black-painted plywood arranged in ramps and platforms, lit by ultraviolet bars that turned everyone’s vest lights into floating constellations and everybody’s teeth a violent blue. Fog hung at knee height. Somewhere a sound system played loud music that had been popular when I was in juniors.
I loved it. God help me, I’ve always loved it.
“Rafe,” I said, crouched behind a barrier shaped like a fake boulder. “Strategy talk.”
“Okay.”
“There is none. Chaos is the goal. You go that way, make noise, and draw fire. I’ll flank. You’re the loud guy and I’m the —“
“You’re the what?” Rafe asked.
“I’m the artist. Go.”
He was a terrible decoy. He crossed an open lane like an old man who’d been told the street was safe, upright and polite. Players lit him up from three directions inside four seconds. His vest died with a sad descending chirp.
“Sorry,” I heard him say to the people who’d shot him.
“Don’t apologize to the enemy, Rafe. We talked about this.”
A bolt hit me in the shoulder pod. My vest died. I went down behind the boulder with my hand over the light like a man holding in his guts. When I looked up, I saw the blue-lit, fog-wreathed, serene face of Brock Pratt, who had come around the back of the boulder without a sound.
“Pratt.”
“Varga,” Pratt said.
“How long were you there?”
“Long enough.”
“You’re an unwell person. You know that. Does Sully know that?”
“Sully knows,” Pratt said, and was gone again into the fog. Somewhere to my left, I heard Sully O’Reilly laugh. It was one bark, the laugh of a man who’d made his peace.
I respawned at the base wall and went back in. I had something that I had to get right.
I’d lost track of Rook on purpose because I’d told myself I was here to win. I couldn’t win while distracted by the whereabouts of the most important person in my life on a fake battlefield.
When I glimpsed him, he was playing. He was quiet, but he held a high corner by the ramp where two lanes fed in, and he was taking people down patiently.
He took Trier twice. Then he took Heath.
Public Rook gives the room four words and stands at his stall, letting the world decide he’s a closed door. Nobody at the rink would believe the laser tag Rook. They’d never seen the unhurried, lethal man who was having a good time.
I’d spent five years with him, and I never got to watch him have plain, dumb fun in a room with other people in it. I stood on a ramp and watched.
Naturally, I had to figure out how to shoot him.
I came up on Rook how Pratt had come up on me, and he heard me at the last second. He turned. We both fired and missed in the chaos of it. Both of us crouched behind the same plywood half-wall with fog pouring over the top of it. Rook placed his hand on my chest.
His palm landed on the center of my chest, right on the spot, the off-switch, the place he’d been calling that since our second year, and in the dark and the noise where no one could see, he left it there. His thumb moved once. My loud, narrating brain went quiet. It only went quiet for him.
