Like a really patient engine

  “You blow a head gasket?”

  It was Luke. His clothes were a blend of fantasy ranger, cowboy and 80’s a hero. The twins stood o him, Nova dressed like a rainbow hued sci-fi wizard, and Angel in dark armor under a green silk cloak.

  “Uh, ’t figure out how to make it go.” Gradie looked at the bd clear craft like someone else had wrecked it. “Maybe I o imagine like an engine, or…”

  Nova zipped over like a supersonisect, his shoes sprouting wings that buzzed and glowed.

  “Don’t worry about it bro, we’ll help you ter. Mike and them always want the newbies to make a craft first. It's bullshit. Sam spent three days orbiting the big ball in a fug Astro van.”

  Gradie ughed at the image, the it pull on his chest, and looked back at his craft like it had made a wrong noise.

  Angel zipped over to the craft in half a sed and started looking it over, his dark armor with silver trim refleg a starry sky that was nowhere around. Gradie noticed the matteness of his own craft reflected dully in it.

  “This is cool,” Angel said. “Most people make a car the first time, or some shit that looks like an X wing.”

  “Hey we’re gonna hit up Gunmaze,” said Nova. “You wanna go?”

  “Gunmaze?” He remembered the name from somewhere.

  “Yeah, bro. You bee?”

  “No. I think I’ve heard of it.”

  Angel snickered. “Yeah, bro he’s heard of Gunmaze. Probably in big guys fug video or maybe ol’ smokey worked it into an insult.”

  “Aight bro,” Nova said, smiling and nodding like it was a sure thing. “You’re fug going. Fet this shit. Making a craft is its own thing. You o just move around the world for a bit.”

  A maze of guns in a dreamworld with some new friends. The old suspi that this was a halluation came ba, but it had lost most of its power now.

  “Sounds good. As long as you don’t mind carrying me.”

  Nova houghtfuly at the immobile craft.

  “Yeah sure bro. No problem. You ride in our ship and we’ll load yours up.”

  “No, I meant in the game.”

  “Oh! You never know man. Sometimes people are just naturals at it.”

  Auck four baseball sized lights to the side of Gradie’s craft and they fred up and it went flying towards the front of their massive ship. Despite all the frustrati to get the fug thing to move, Grade felt a twang of jealous protectiveness watg someone else fly it away.

  Nova and Angel zipped baside the cube and Luke floated zily after, sipping something glowing on ice. Gradie followed them all ihe dark doorway stu the bottom of one of the square faces like it had just been drawn on.

  The interior was about the st thing he expected to find.

  It looked like any of the suburban houses his friends had growing up, if the living room had eaten every other space. There were couches, chairs, hammocks everywhere. Bottles of liquor floated around in zero g.. Angel was sitting on an oversized beanbag made of tigerskin and making a finger gun at the far wall. A bolt of light shot out and zapped the ter of a target. Nova was standing in front of a bay window with the blinds pulled up looking out at the big ship floating in space, which cshed with the mundane window and wall around it in a way that made Gradie even less sure any of this was real.

  The door shut behind them and the whole Cube hummed. Out the window, the ship suddenly filled the bck void, the only sign that they had accelerated towards it. The cube sailed over the pyramid and the window was all bck void again until the metal horizon of the pyramid rose up from below as they dropped down into it.

  Suddenly, the room fell away into a million pieces, and when those disappeared too, they were all standing on a massive starship deck with t snted gss views all around.

  Nova kicked up into the air and flew to a small floating ptform surrounded by lights.

  Something fshed behind them. Gradie looked out the back window at the glowing o that surrouhe ship, towards a strange horizon that dropped down on the sides. The dark sky glowed and ged colors as if the sun was rising. The other sun, at least the ohat permaly lit the day side of the Allworld, was somewhere down out of sight and Gradie khat the one rising at the other end of the ship had e out of the ship itself. The bck void and the Allworld disappeared as the new sun turhe sky a radiant e-pink. When the sun had settled, Gradie was looking out at a tropical o under a vibrant su with a curved horizon.

  “Hey Gradie.” Angel motioned for him to look to the front massive viewport, and the sky went from pink, to purple above, to solid bck as he turned around, and the sky ahead of the ship was the same bck void sprinkled with lights that it had been before. The ship made a soft humming sound, like a sibling hum to the drone of the Allworld.

  The lights in the sky moved to the right and the Allworld came into view from the left.

  “All right, see this star?” Angel pointed.

  There was a siar dead ter of the wide forward view. It was one of the few stars in the Allworld sky that twinkled, a blueish purple four-poiarburst, like something out of an old fantasy poster.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Gunmaze. We’re going the slow way so you get a sense of where it is iion to the Allworld.”

  Gradie thought about his own ship, that rough k of stohat would barely turn, and wo the mental trol o move a ship like this, much less make it. Suddenly, all the crafts he had seen flying around the Allworld held a deeper gravity, even the floating advertisement he had fled from.

  “All right, we’re going.” Nova’s voice came from all around, as if the ship itself eaking.

  The ship began to shake, which Gradie somehow knew was uo its propulsion, but was simply a ve way to remind its passehat it was moving. The Allworld slid out of view and the stars drifted away from the one in the ter as it ghter. Some of the stars zipped past while others barely moved.

  “So, what is it?”

  “Like all your favorite games had a baby,” Luke said.

  “Fuck that,” Angel said. “It’s a video game like the world is the map.”

  Luke gave Angel a tired, eyebrow raised grin that told Gradie he had heard this kind of thing before.

  “Oh, I was gonna try and tell him what it is in people terms, but if you wanna geek out and fuse him—”

  “It is a Gameworld, Luke’s right there,” Angel said. “But the challenges are not limited to the analog difficulties you find in video games. There are mind puzzles, tests of will, things that use your—”

  “And lotsa shootin,” Luke said, boung his eyebrows at Gradie. Angel sighed.

  “Yes Luke, lots of shooting. And a bit of fighting also.”

  Luke grinned and raised his drink in a toast.

  “Fug A.”

  Gradie tried to use his apparently limited knowledge of how this world worked to build a picture of Gunmaze in his mind, but there was a big hole in it.

  “But how do you decide who wins?”

  Angel frow him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you just will whatever you want into—”

  “You ’t.”

  Gradie tried to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  “Yeah I know I ’t, but what if someone else—”

  “They ’t. Gunmaze is one of the most plex colles of schema iher, and it’s Princes are some of the best.”

  “Princes…” Gradie said, mostly to himself. He remembered Celeste saying something about that, but it felt like ages ago, and he had gohrough a thousand other hims in the Hardworlds sihen.

  Aapped the pommel on his sword and made a face that said he couldn’t believe he had to expin this.

  “Yeah, so when you make something iher, you set the rules for it. Not just physical qualities, but ws, you could say. Who e in, what be made or unmade ihings like that. The rules are called Schema, and the totality of the rules, the system of the thing that you’ve made, is called the Principality, or Prince. You might also hear them called Ghosts ods. They create the order you see everywhere iher. It’s the same thing that makes the money in your wallet—”

  Gradie’s mind flew off with the idea of making his own p the Other, but somewhere along the fantasy got weighed down as he remembered something else Michael had said.

  “They were the first to capture souls, trapping them ihat couldn’t be found.”

  “ you make a pce that people ’t leave?”

  Aopped talking and looked at him like he had mentioned a dead retive.

  “Uh, theoretically yes. That’s why the Saviors exist. You know, the guys in the white ships? Remember, uh, Big guy’s video?”

  Gradie hadn’t thought about that in a long time. He had been too preoccupied with the real dahe violence of the Hardworlds.

  “Does that stuff still happen? People getting kidnapped and locked up in…” He remembered the square bess in Michaels video, and wondered if it had just been a ve visual metaphor or based iy. The thought of being trapped in endless darkness somewhere iher made his skin crawl.

  “Not really,” Angel said, wearily. “Most Spirits spend their time on the big worlds or the routes between, where the Prince’s are to to do something like that. Even if you go off into the bd stumble on some trap, the Savior’s speakers will find you eventually.”

  Eventually.

  The word rolled around in Gradie’s head, and Angel’s assurance of safety sounded like someone who believed that crime never happened in his part of town.

  For the first time since he had found this pce, he was afraid of it. It was like the whimsical glow, that euphoric feeling of possibility that was ed around everything iherworld, had cracked, and something dark and horrifying was looking through.

  “All right! Check it out!” Nova said, suddenly behind them, pointing at the big forward viewport.

  What do you think bat in a pce like the Otherworld would look like? ime, kill you friends guilt free. episode, Gunmaze.