Last Light of the Gaming Legend Son-In-Law

Chapter 2: The Mask in the Closet

The guest cottage behind the Lockwood mansion was small and cold, and at midnight it was very quiet; the only sound was the old fridge humming in the kitchen.

I had washed the wine out of my hoodie twice, and it still smelled like Vivian’s anger.

At 11:20 p.m., the front door opened, and Sienna came in with her laptop bag and red eyes. She’d gone straight to the Lions Den after the cake, for an emergency meeting with her staff, and from the look on her face, it hadn’t gone well.

“You’re still up,” she said.

“I made tea.”

She dropped her bag on the couch and didn’t touch the tea. “Halo Headsets is pulling out. They called during the meeting, our biggest sponsor, gone, just like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Two players asked to leave tonight. Two.” She laughed, a small, broken sound. “And I have to find five hundred thousand dollars in two days, or my father sells my team to Spencer Dalton for the price of a candy bar.”

“Let me help,” I said.

She looked at me, really looked, for the first time all night.

“Help?” She almost laughed. “Cole, you couldn’t even keep your job at the corner store. You make coffee and you play candy games. What are you going to do, sell your phone?” She rubbed her face with both hands. “I don’t need help. I need a miracle.”

“Sienna…”

“Please don’t.” She picked up her bag again, as if she might run back to the Lions Den, then put it down. “Do you know what Spencer said to me in the driveway tonight? He said he’d keep the team’s name, out of kindness. Out of kindness, Cole. Like he was doing me a favor by stealing my life.”

“He won’t get it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” I said. “But I know how it feels when someone steals something you built.”

She stared at me for a second, as if I’d said something in another language, then shook her head.

She walked into her room and shut the door.

We’d slept in separate rooms for two years, so the closed door wasn’t new; but tonight it sounded louder than usual.

I sat on the edge of my bed, took off my tinted glasses and put them on the nightstand. Then I put two drops in each eye and waited, counting slowly to sixty, while the blur came and went.

The world got a little clearer, but not much. The edges were dark now, all the time, like I was looking at life through a paper tube; the middle was still sharp, but the middle was getting smaller every month.

I pulled out the small magnifying screen I kept under my bed and plugged in my phone.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Show me.”

I rewatched the whole match, frame by frame.

Game one, nothing strange, just a team that knew the Lions too well. Game two, at minute fourteen, Iron Dynasty split into three groups and baited the Lions toward the north tower. My stomach dropped. That was the Emperor’s Gambit, the second move I’d ever built for Team Titan.

Game three got worse. In twenty-two minutes, they used two more moves from our private playbook, a fake surrender and a trick we called the Silent Bell, and then they finished with Crown Fall.

Four moves. Four moves we never used in a public match, not once. We didn’t need them to win our three world titles, so we kept them locked away for a fourth World Championship, and that fourth final never came, because the morning after our third win, I disappeared.

“Who are you?” I asked the screen.

Five of us knew those moves. One was me.

The first face that came to my mind was Kai Tanaka, our old jungle player, sharp-faced and quiet, with his small black hair knot and his round silver glasses. Three years ago, he was my teammate. Now he was the head coach of Iron Dynasty.

The coach of the team that had just used my moves to crush my wife.

“Kai,” I whispered. “Did you do this?”

I went through the other names in my head, the way you check the locks on your doors at night. Two of our old teammates had moved back home, one to Brazil and one to Seoul, and quit gaming forever; they didn’t even own computers anymore. That left Kai, and it left Dex Carver.

Dex, the caster with the warm voice, who’d gone quiet on the broadcast tonight.

I shook my head. Not Dex. Dex was my best friend, my shot-caller, the guy who drove me home after my first lost match and sat with me in the car for two hours without saying a word. When I disappeared, he told the whole world on live TV that he couldn’t play without his king. He still talked about me on his show, every week, like a brother looking for a brother.

No. Not Dex. Never Dex.

The screen didn’t answer. But in the corner of the replay page, a small ad started blinking, gold letters on a black background.

THE KING’S GAUNTLET. 1-VS-1 DUEL. OPEN TO ANYONE. THIS WEEKEND ONLY. GRAND PRIZE: $500,000.

I stared at the number.

Five hundred thousand dollars. Exactly what Sienna needed, by exactly the right time.

I clicked the ad with a shaking finger. The tournament would run online all day Saturday and Sunday, five hundred and twelve players, single elimination, and the final would be streamed live on Sunday night. Registration closed at midnight.

The clock in the corner of my screen said 11:51 p.m.

“This is crazy,” I told myself. “You can’t see the corners of the screen anymore. You promised Dr. Morgan…”

I thought about Vivian’s wine dripping off my chin. I thought about Spencer’s one dollar. I thought about Sienna’s voice when she said she needed a miracle, and about the three words someone typed into a game chat tonight, as if they were laughing at me through the screen.

Long live the King.

11:56 p.m.

The registration form asked for a player name. For three years, I’d had no name in this world at all; I was just the house husband with the candy game.

11:58 p.m.

I typed slowly, one letter at a time.

LastLight.

I pressed enter, and the screen flashed green. REGISTRATION CONFIRMED. FIRST MATCH: SATURDAY, 10:30 A.M.

I sat there for a long time, listening to the fridge hum.

Then I got up, went to my closet and pushed aside the old shoe boxes at the bottom until I found the one I hadn’t touched in three years. It was black, with a small brass lock, and the key hung on a string around my neck, under my shirt, where nobody ever saw it.

The lock clicked open.

Inside, wrapped in a soft gray cloth, lay a black visor helmet, smooth and shining, with a dark glass front that hid the whole face.

I lifted it out, and my hands remembered the weight before my mind did.

Three years ago, fifty thousand people had screamed for the face behind this mask without ever seeing it. They’d painted it on signs. They’d tattooed it on their arms. They’d cried when it disappeared.

I turned the visor in my hands, and my own tired face looked back at me in the dark glass.

“Hello, old friend,” I whispered.

Behind me, the floor creaked.

I spun around. Sienna’s door was open an inch, and the light inside her room was on.