Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

/ yeah.

Rrango went first. He banked into the Exit, and it took him. A sharp seam of light girdled his body as he sank. I’d never hear from him again.

/Our turn next?

I spun around. Aremi, my prize, had dropped behind me, finally. I told her I’d been worried about her, about what Melanak might have done.

/don’t worry. am a big girl.

/there are other alts , I pulsed. /come with me?

I glanced over at the office door. Closed and locked. I didn’t want any interruptions — no Jocelyn to muddy the end.

/not sure , she ping’d.

/how about your email address?

/why?

/i want to know you better.

/ok , she ping’d back. / twat@faggot.com.

That’s when I knew Aremi was gone. Her account, ghosted. Melanak had torched everything.

/what the fuck do you want? I ping’d.

/hahahahahahahahahaha.

So I pushed her, all my damage-per-second arrayed against her. Melanak tried to resist, except inside Aremi, he was a weak soul. I would take her with me into the Exit and annihilate us both.

But as I drove her, the Exit began to retreat away, like draining water. I chased it, Aremi struggling in my arms, but still it fell away, out of reach. Crowds of figures then emerged from the sky — iridescent dragons, armored horses, creatures I didn’t recognize. Below us, a new render appeared, lush and vivid, pagodas dotting the land.

The Chinese platform. This was the integration.

/wtf? Melanak ping’d.

A dark-haired girl with black wings answered. / ?

/konichuwa, fucktard , Melanak ping’d back.

The girl raised her hands, whispered a spell, and a thousand crows came and tore us both to pieces.

I powered the machine down. I could hear Jocelyn on the back patio. I’d forgotten it was summer. I’d forgotten about the sun. Since Jocelyn was home, midday, it had to be a weekend. Outside, she was tending to the plants in a raised bed on our patio. She wore a straw hat, pink gloves, and a pair of cutoff jeans made from an old pair of mine, which meant, at some level, I didn’t disgust her. At her side lay a small pile of weeds. She had tried so hard to make this place a place.

“It’s over,” I said. “More than over.”

She removed her gloves and pulled me to her. “There’s so much world left to see,” she said, and let it hang there, between us, the line from the game, until I finally understood. “How about a tour?”

I got on my knees. I didn’t know the name of a single plant in the row.

“Show me,” I said.

On their first morning in what was the most spectacular place she’d ever been — rampant sun, palms everywhere, bungalows planked on top of the water — Haley and Mac paddled (Mac doing most of it) one of the resort’s outrigger canoes to the raft in the lagoon ( lagoon, outrigger , when would she get to use these honeymoon words again?) where, probably because he’d lost seven pounds since the ring sizing, Mac’s wedding band just slipped off.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” Haley said. She sat upright, her left arm covering her breasts. She’d been on the raft, sunbathing topless for the first time ever, feeling pleasantly retarded from the mai tais they’d had at arrival the night before and then, because fuck it, again at breakfast. They’d flown for twenty-two hours, in a blur of deplaning and re-planing and magazines pulped down to their acrostics, to this crumb in the Pacific. She was not awake enough for an emergency.

Mac treaded water next to the raft, scanning the water, his snorkel mask askew.

“It’s right below us,” he said. “I watched it go.” The ocean was pristine here. She could see forty feet down, to the ridges of sand that looked like the piping on corduroy. Bits of coral and kelp drifted in the current. But she couldn’t see the ring, the white gold band they’d debated over forever that now had become, suddenly, a six-hundred-dollar piece of sea glass.

“Can you dive for it?” she asked.

“It’s too deep. I tried.”

Haley shivered. “Shit, Mac, someone could take it.” Suddenly, the water seemed vast and rioting with threat. She thought of sharks and rays — the flappy mouse pad ones — and the Portuguese men-o’-war, which, she learned from the travel book she’d checked out from the library, were translucent brains with stinging hair.

“Mermaids might take it,” Mac said. “For their merriages.”

He was not nearly worried enough. “You’re always in problem-solving mode until the moment I need you to be in problem-solving mode,” Haley said, and worked her arms through the straps of her top.

Mac climbed onto the raft. “Hang on. Just let me boot up.”

He lay down and whirred and clicked and sliced his hands through the air like a robot. Mac worked in advertising; he could only be serious after he’d riffed a little. Haley noticed the wet hair on his scalp made a land bridge from one side to another; the bald spot was progressing. The bald spot would need to be acknowledged and accommodated. His threadbare, beloved T-shirt (Madison High School Class of ’99) was glazed to his chest; he wore it even in the water. He was shy about his scars on his belly, from a childhood surgery, but Haley felt, and she’d said something and then knew to drop it, that wearing a T-shirt while swimming made them both look like they didn’t belong at the resort, like they’d won the trip on a game show.

“The ring’s not going anywhere,” Mac said. “I promise I won’t take my eyes off it. But let me just say your breasts look fantastic right now.”

“See, you just did take your eyes off it.” Haley eyed the beachfront, the crescent of folding chairs and umbrellas. The other honeymooners at the resort, French girls with punky breasts who made Haley feel prissy for even bothering with a top, were nowhere to be seen. Last night, the place seemed overrun with young French newlyweds. She’d seen them all cramming into a hotel shuttle bus to the bars. But now the walkways that bridged between bungalows were empty. Haley untied the outrigger. She’d get help and she’d leave Mac out here if she had to.

“What the hell is that?” Mac asked.

And then Haley saw it too, the plume of black smoke in the sky, toward town. Something big was on fire. But they had other things to worry about.

In the breezy hotel lobby — it was a wind tunnel, open on both ends — the concierge gave Haley the worried expression she was hoping for. He had hazel skin, jet-black hair, and blazing white teeth, with a British flag pinned to the lapel of his white tuxedo.

“There are divers yes?” Mac asked, dripping on the tile. “We pay dollars. Many dollars.”

When Mac said it, Haley realized she didn’t even know yet what the currency was here. Francs? Sand dollars? Mac’s ring was probably worth a half year’s labor. As soon as word got around that the ring was in the lagoon, everybody would be diving for it.

“No diving this day,” the concierge said. “I am sorry.”

“Not one?” Haley asked. “Not even, like, a guy with an air tank?”

“Tomorrow,” the concierge answered. “Tomorrow, everything.”

One of the French girls slow-walked through the lobby. She pressed a gauze bandage to her head with a crust of blood at the fringe. Too much fun? Haley thought vindictively. The girl’s brown mane was clumpy and uncombed. She carried an ice bucket and barely picked her flip-flops off the floor.

“What happened to her?” Haley asked the concierge.