Roadside Crosses

biking this weekend. It’ll be some sanity in an island of madness.” He then told her more about the family get-together he’d mentioned earlier.
    “Napa?”
    “Right.” His brow wrinkled in a cute and charming way. “My family is . . . how do I put this?”
    “A family.”
    “Hit the nail on the head,” he said, laughing. “Two parents healthy. Two siblings I get along with a majority of the time, though I like their children better. Assorted uncles and aunts. It’ll be fine. Lot of wine, lot of food. Sunsets—but not a lot of those, thank goodness. Two, tops. That’s sort of the way weekends work.”
    Again, a silence fell between them. Comfortable. Dance felt no rush to fill it.
    But the peace was broken just then as Boling’s cell phone hiccuped. He looked at the screen. Immediately his body language had shifted to high alert.
    “Travis is online. Let’s go.”

Chapter 24
    UNDER BOLING’S KEYSTROKES , the DimensionQuest homepage loaded almost instantly.
    The screen dissolved and a welcome box appeared. Below it was apparently the rating of the game by an organization referred to as ERSB.
    Teen
    Blood
    Suggestive Themes
    Alcohol
    Violence
    Then, with his self-assured typing, Jon Boling took them to Aetheria.
    It was an odd experience. Avatars—some fantastical creatures, some human—wandered around a clearing in a forest of massive trees. Their names were in balloons above the characters. Most of them were fighting, but some just walked, ran or rode horses or other creatures. Some flew on their own. Dance was surprised to see that everyone moved nimbly and that the facial expressions were true to life. The graphics were astonishing, nearly movie quality.
    Which made the combat and its vicious, excessive bloodletting all the more harrowing.
    Dance found herself sitting forward, knee bobbing—a classic indication of stress. She gasped when one warrior beheaded another right in front of them.
    “There are real people guiding them?”
    “One or two are NPC—those’re ‘nonplayer characters’ that the game itself creates. But nearly all of the others are avatars of people who could be anywhere. Cape Town, Mexico, New York, Russia. The majority of the players are men, but there’re a lot of women too. And the average age isn’t as young as you’d think. Teenage to late twenties mostly but plenty of older players. They could be boys or girls or middle-aged men, black, white, disabled, athletes, lawyers, dishwashers. . . . In the synth world, you can be whoever you want to be.”
    In front of them another warrior easily killed his opponent. Blood spurted in a geyser. Boling grunted. “They’re not all equal, though. Survival depends on who practices the most and who has the most power—power you earn by fighting and killing. It’s a vicious cycle, literally.”
    Dance tapped the screen and pointed to the back of a woman avatar in the foreground. “That’s you?”
    “One of my student’s avatars. I’m logging in through her account.”
    The name above her was “Greenleaf.”
    “There he is!” Boling said, his shoulder brushing hers as he leaned forward. He was pointing at Travis’s avatar, Stryker, who was about a hundred feet away from Greenleaf.
    Stryker was a tough, muscular man. Dancecouldn’t help but notice that while many other characters had beards or ruddy, leathery skin, Travis’s avatar was unblemished and his skin as smooth as a baby’s. She thought of the boy’s concerns about acne.
    You can be whoever you want to be . . .
    Stryker—a “Thunderer,” she recalled—was clearly the dominant warrior here. People would look his way and turn and leave. Several people engaged him—once two at the same time. He easily killed them both. One time he stunned a huge avatar, a troll or similar beast, with a ray. Then, as it lay shaking on the ground, Travis directed his avatar to plunge a knife into its chest.
    Dance gasped.
    Stryker bent down and seemed to reach inside the body.
    “What’s he doing?”
    “Looting the corpse.” Boling noted Dance’s furrowed brow and added, “Everyone does it. You have to. The bodies might have something valuable. And if you’ve defeated them, you’ve earned the right.”
    If these were the values that Travis had learned in the synth world, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped sooner.
    She couldn’t help but wonder: And where was the boy now in the real world? At a Starbucks Wi-Fi location, with the hood over his head