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“It doesn’t sound like you and Shiki got along.”

“We used to. But he was
obsessed
with
REAL
, with keeping it secret. He wouldn’t even talk about going public. And he kept fighting with the agencies about who would play the Dark Queen, wouldn’t accept anyone they sent over but wouldn’t say why. Then Gopher died.”

I frown. “Who was Gopher?”

“In the game he was a friend of Mariko’s. A fat, nerdy guy who helped her out with stuff. He never got a name, so we called him Gopher. We used to send him out on trips, just walking around where there were a lot of players, so people would see him and think he was running errands for their heroine. Well, one day he went out and didn’t come back. The cops found him in an alley, stabbed about fifty times.”

“That I
didn’t
hear about.”

“Of course not. You think Shiki would let that get out? We’d have to say what he’d been doing; it would blow the whole thing. He became convinced someone was on to us, one of the other publishers maybe, and they were trying to sabotage him. Murder people so that
REAL
got shut down. He was going crazy! Nobody would do that, not for a goddamn game.”

“You must have had your own theory.”

“Yeah.” Aka-sensei holds his beer cupped in front of him, in both hands. “Yeah, I did. I guessed Shiki might not be the only crazy one. See, on the message boards for
REAL
, there was a group of people who had decided that Mariko was lying to everyone, and that the demons were really the good guys. I loved it, tried to encourage them whenever I got the chance. That was the idea, right? That people would react in their own way. But after Gopher died, that part of the boards was celebrating, and I thought, maybe one of these guys is taking this seriously.

“I started looking through the tracking data. I had this idea that if someone from the boards really had killed Gopher, I could track their phone and figure out who. We had a ton of data on everyone who used the app, and the hard-core
REAL
players kept it running all the time so they could get alerts on anything nearby. So I pulled a bunch of information on the top players.”

“One of them was the killer?” I lean forward, expectant.

“I wish. God, that would have been easy. I could have been the hero.” He shook his head, slowly. “No, I forgot all about that. What I found was that the top players were
disappearing
. One by one, everyone who had made the most progress toward, you know, uncovering the demon conspiracy, they were quitting the game. Or not even quitting, just going dark. I found one guy who had the app on, just sitting still, for seventeen hours. After that his phone must have died.”

“Maybe he left it on the train.”

“That’s exactly what I said. But it was
still happening
. I could watch the list in real time, watch them disappear one by one. Even people on the message boards were starting to clue in. When I told Shiki about it, he thought it confirmed his conspiracy theory. He put us all in lockdown. Everyone associated with the project was hustled off to a block of company apartments while he sorted it out.

“I spent a lot of time with Mariko. You would have thought she’d have lost her shit, but she was braver than any one of us. She wanted to move on, incorporate it into the story and run with it. God, that girl.” He sighs. “I was fucking her by then. Honestly, it was just a favor to her. She couldn’t go out, not ever, since Shiki couldn’t take the chance she’d be recognized, so I was one of the only people she ever got to see. She needed
some
kind of entertainment, right?

“After a week, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I snuck out of the building, past the rent-a-cops Shiki posted all around it, and went out to a bar to get blasted. I was feeling…well, scared, maybe, and pissed off, so I overdid it a bit. That was a hell of a night.” A shiver runs through him. “I didn’t think I’d be able to sneak back in, so I got a room at a hotel. I was so drunk, I barely made it up the stairs, and…”

He pauses to look me in the eye.

“Aka-sensei?” I prompt.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he says. “Not anyone. Who would believe me?”

“I’m listening.”

“When I got into the hotel room…” He takes a breath. “
She
was waiting for me.”

“Mariko?”

“Not Mariko,” he says. “The fucking Dark Queen.”

“An actress, you mean,” I say. “Someone Shiki hired.”

“No! I mean, yes, sure. I don’t know. I don’t
know
.” He puts his hands to his head, pressing the half-full bottle against his skull. “Why would Shiki send an actress to do that? How would he even know I was there?” He closed his eyes. “She looked exactly like the Dark Queen.
Exactly.
As though she’d stepped out of my head, off my fucking napkin, and into my room. She has these eyes—they’re like mirrors, like she’s wearing reflective lenses under her skin. You look at her and you see tiny versions of yourself staring back at you. I thought I was hallucinating. Or else that I’d passed out on the floor, and now I was dreaming.”

I sip my soda water. The ice has long ago melted. “That also seems possible.”

“The Queen doesn’t speak our language,” he says. “That’s what the Professor wrote, anyway. I just thought it would make her a little stranger if she didn’t talk to you directly. She has this voice, like she’s singing a four-part melody all by herself. It’s beautiful. When I heard it, I thought I would cry. And then—she has this
thing
, a twisted little goblin creature, and it tells you what she means. I knew our CG guys were still working on it, but it was
there
, in the room. It hopped up on the bed and spoke to me.”

My smile is strained. I try to convey disbelief. “What did it say?”

“It said, ‘The Queen wishes to convey her thanks, mortal.’

“I laughed at it. I couldn’t help it. I’ve always been crap at writing that epic, mythic dialogue. At that point I’d about convinced myself I was dreaming anyway, so I bowed and got all formal.

“ ‘My Queen,’ I said, ‘I’m honored, but I’m not sure you should be thanking me.’

“She sang another note, and the little imp said, ‘Why do you say so?’

“ ‘If not for me,’ I told her, ‘you wouldn’t have to wear that outfit.’ ” Aka-sensei smiles, a bit wan. “I mean, okay, I didn’t draw the Dark Queen’s gear for practicality. She looks like she came from a cross between a Victorian dress ball and a bondage shop. It shows off her tits—
great
tits—but I can’t imagine it’s easy to get into.

“ ‘If I were you,’ I told her, ‘I’d ditch the fetish outfit for something a little more comfortable.’ Then I pushed past the little imp and into the bathroom, ’cause I didn’t think I could wait any longer. Dream or not, you don’t want to piss all over a Queen’s shoes. By the time I came out, they were gone.”

“I can see why you never told anyone about this,” I say.

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.” He waves the nearly empty beer bottle in my face. “Honestly, I don’t give a fuck. I didn’t believe it at the time, either. I woke up the next morning feeling like shit, of course. Clicked on the TV while I was washing up, and every station was talking about the fire.”

“Fire?” I say.

“At the apartments.” Aka-sensei drains the rest of his beer in a gulp. “I don’t know where Shiki found that old building, but it went up like a fucking torch. Burned to the ground. Only a few people made it out. I was on the top floor—if I hadn’t snuck out, I would have died for sure.”

I wait, in silence. Aka-sensei’s hand tightens on the bottle.

“Mariko made it,” he says. “I heard the story from the firefighters later. She came out half carrying one of the others. Maybe
she
started to take
REAL
too seriously, thought she was an actual hero instead of an actress. She said there was another guy in there, passed out, one of our social media kids, and before anybody could stop her she turned around and went back in after him. A couple of minutes later the roof went and the whole building came down.” Aka-sensei’s eyes glitter for a moment, and he squeezes them shut. “Stupid bitch.”

I let him have the moment, then clear my throat. “What did you do?”

“I think I went a little crazy,” he says. “Like Shiki. Paranoid. Can you blame me? I went back to the control room and grabbed as much data as I could, then ran for it. Found a shithole apartment to stay in, spent all my time in a Net café, running correlations. Tracking down who all those top players were, and trying to figure out what had happened to them in real life. It wasn’t easy, but what I managed to find scared the hell out of me.

“They were dying. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. I built this whole case, cross-referencing dates and tracking locations. Pulled up all the mysterious deaths and disappearances from the police reports. There were too many.
Way
too many, I couldn’t believe no one had noticed. I felt like a reporter tracking down some government conspiracy, waiting for the Men in Black to kick down my door.

“Finally I called Shiki. He was frantic, said they’d been trying to find me, that nobody knew if I’d died in the fire or what. I told him I had something I wanted to show him, and he told me to come up to the office the next day. I brought all my stuff—data, printouts, newspaper clippings. I felt like a loon walking into the publisher with this big fat file under one arm.

“Shiki listened, I’ll give him that. I told him we had to shut it down, that the players were going crazy and killing each other, that something creepy was happening and I was scared out of my mind. I thought he’d understand, since he’d been acting crazy all along, but he was like a different person now. Calm, smart, reasonable. Asking questions that made it clear how half-assed my ‘research’ really was.”

“Did you tell him about the Queen?”

Aka-sensei snorted. “Of course not. I told you, I didn’t believe it myself. And he would have just thrown me in a hospital. I thought the disappearances would be plenty, but he folded his hands and told me how it was going to be.
REAL
would go on, he said. They’d gotten new funding, a new investor who was very interested in the project. They were going to put together a new team, working remotely to help protect the secret. Mariko would ‘mysteriously disappear,’ in the story, and we’d get a new heroine.

“I got angry with him. Shouted a bit. Told him I wasn’t going to be a part of it. That was when he told me there wasn’t a place for me on his new team. He was grateful to me for creating
REAL
, and I’d keep getting paid, but they didn’t want me to be a part of it anymore. Then he got up and left.

“I just sat there for a while. In shock, I guess. This thing had been my
life
for more than a year, and I was half out of mind with fear, and now he was saying, ‘Go home, you’re done.’ After a while I decided I wasn’t going to take it, and I went to find him. I asked one of the office ladies where he’d gone, and she told me he was in the conference room. I was going to storm right into his meeting, I thought. Get in his face.

“The conference room was the kind with glass walls, with blinds all around so you can get some privacy when you need it. Shiki had the blinds shut. I could see a little light, though, where something had gotten tangled up. A little peephole. I took a look.

“Shiki was there, all right. And so was
she
.”

“The Dark Queen,” I say, deadpan.

“The Dark fucking Queen. She’d traded the stupid outfit for a nice black suit, with sunglasses to cover up her eyes. But I could tell it was her. Same face, same body, same long black hair. I
drew
her, of course I could recognize her. And she looked at me, when I put my eye to the window, and
smiled
. Then Shiki started to look around, too, and I ran for it.”

“That’s it,” Aka-sensei says, leaning back in his chair. He looks like a man who has had a weight lifted from his shoulders. “That’s the whole story. They keep paying my salary, and I keep turning it into booze and cigarettes. I stay the hell away from anything to do with that game.”

“But
REAL
is still running.”

“So I hear. I also hear they’re on their fourth new heroine.” He shakes his head. “Maybe they just don’t enjoy the work? But…”

“You don’t think so.”

“I told you the story. It’s done. What else do you want?”

“I want to know what you think, Aka-sensei.” I finish my drink and set the empty tumbler down. “Do you really believe it? The murders? The Dark Queen?”

He laughs. “Do I look crazy to you? Of course I don’t believe it. I was on two hours’ sleep a night, running that goddamn game, drinking whenever I got the chance, and Shiki with his goddamn paranoia…” He shakes his head. “Just accidents, that’s all. Stupid accidents, and people who got bored of a game, and a woman who looked like some drawing I made. That’s all it can be, obviously.”

A long, silent moment passes. He meets my eyes. His hand tightens on the tabletop, knuckles going white.

“You
do
believe it, don’t you?” I say, very quietly.

“She was
there
,” he whispers. “I don’t know how. It doesn’t make any sense. But it was
her
. No one who saw her could think she was…” He swallows. “Human. No matter what she looks like—she isn’t. And Mariko’s dead.”

Another pause, and he shakes his head.

“Get out of here,” he says. “I’m done with this. Go write your goddamn story. Shiki will never let you print it.”

I don’t move. He cocks his head, staring at me.

“You’re not from the paper, are you,” he says, flatly.

“Not exactly.”

“Then…”

Just for a moment, I let him see my true face. He takes it surprisingly well. His hands clench into fists, and his face goes pale, but he doesn’t scream.

“Can I ask you something?” he says when he manages a breath.

I nod.

“Is this really my fault? All of this. If I hadn’t created
REAL
…”

“It’s about belief, Aka-sensei. My kind has always fed on belief. When people play your game, they
believe
, even if it’s only for a while, and that opens the door.”