Last Light of the Gaming Legend Son-In-Law

Chapter 3: Twenty Degrees

I never found out if Sienna saw the mask. By the time I had pushed it back into the box, her door was shut again, and when she left for the Lions Den at seven the next morning, she only said she’d be late.

At eight o’clock on Saturday, I was sitting in a dark room at the Coral Eye Institute with my chin on a cold plastic rest, staring at a tiny white light.

“Press the button every time you see a flash,” Dr. Leah Morgan said. “Anywhere, even at the very edge.”

“I know how the test works.”

“I know you know.” She was tall, with short natural hair and a pen tucked behind her ear, and she had the calmest voice I’d ever heard. “Humor me.”

I pressed the button. Then I pressed it again. Then I waited a long time for flashes that I was sure were there, somewhere, in the dark around the edges, but I never saw them.

When the lights came on, she was looking at her screen with a face I had learned to read over three years. It was her bad-news face, and she didn’t try to hide it.

“Just tell me,” I said.

“Your field of vision is about twenty degrees now.” She turned the screen toward me and pointed at a small bright circle in a sea of gray. “Imagine looking at the world through a paper towel tube. That’s what you have left. And your night vision is almost gone.”

“How long?”

“For useful central sight? If you take care of yourself, six to nine months.” She tapped her pen against the desk. “If you stress your eyes, if you stare at bright screens for hours, if you don’t sleep… much less.”

Six to nine months.

I sat very still and let the numbers sink in. They didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected; maybe because some part of me had been counting all along.

Three years ago, in this same room, she’d given me the first piece of bad news.

Back then, I was the most famous gamer on the planet, and nobody knew my face. In the world of Throne Wars, the five-on-five battle game that millions of people played every day, I was called Monarch. I was the masked kid from Team Titan who won the World Championship at twenty-four, then again at twenty-five, then again at twenty-six. I never lost a world final, not once. People called me the God of War of the Arena; they made posters, songs and tattoos of a black visor, because that was all they ever saw of me.

I never showed my face. I never said my real name. Oliver Grant, the man who created Throne Wars, found me at eighteen in a dirty internet cafe in Eastport, a poor kickboxer’s son who could read a game the way other people read a book. He gave me a chance, and the mask was my idea. I didn’t want fame; I wanted to win.

Then, one week before my third world final, I sat in this chair, and Dr. Morgan told me I had retinitis pigmentosa. A disease with no cure, she said, that slowly eats your sight from the edges in, like a candle burning down from both sides.

I played that final anyway. I won it. I remember standing under the gold confetti with fifty thousand people chanting MONARCH, MONARCH, MONARCH, and all I could think about was the doctor’s voice, and how the confetti looked a little darker at the edges than it should have.

The next morning, I disappeared. I couldn’t stand the idea of fifty thousand fans watching their king go blind one match at a time; I couldn’t stand the pity. So the legend vanished, and Cole Rivers, nobody, took his place.

“You’re quiet,” Dr. Morgan said.

“I’m thinking.”

“Are you doing the exercises? The tracking game I gave you?”

I pulled out my phone and showed her the candy game, bright colors, big shapes, little pieces that slid across the screen. “Every day. My family thinks it’s all I’m good for.”

“Good. It’s the best thing you can do to keep your focus strong.” She paused. “Cole, why do I get the feeling you’re about to do something I won’t like?”

“Because you’re smart.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m playing in a tournament this weekend.”

She put her pen down. “No.”

“It’s online. I can play from a chair, in a quiet room…”

“You can’t see the corners of a screen, Cole. And this game is all corners. You told me that yourself.”

“I know.”

“Then why?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.” She leaned back. “Does your wife know? About any of this?”

“No.”

“Cole, you’ve been married for two years.”

“On paper,” I said. “She married a quiet clerk who makes good coffee. That’s all she signed up for.”

“That’s not fair to her, and it’s not fair to you.” Her voice was gentle, but it didn’t bend. “You can’t hide this forever. One day you’ll walk into a door in front of her, and she’ll know.”

I almost laughed. “I walked into a table in front of her whole family last night. They thought it was funny.”

Dr. Morgan didn’t laugh. She just waited.

I thought about Sienna’s red eyes and the closed door. I thought about Vivian’s wine, and Spencer’s white sneakers, and a one-dollar offer for everything my wife had built.

“Someone’s using my old moves to destroy someone I care about,” I said. “And I’m the only one who knows those moves well enough to beat them.”

Dr. Morgan looked at me for a long time. She was the only person in the world, besides one other, who knew both of my secrets: the name and the eyes.

“If you play for two days straight under bright light,” she said, “you could lose weeks of sight in a single weekend. Maybe months. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re doing it anyway.”

“It’s only one weekend.”

She shook her head slowly, but she wrote something on a small card and slid it across the desk. “Drops every two hours. Lights low. Take a ten-minute break every hour, eyes closed. And if anything goes dark in the center, anything at all, you stop.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try. Do it.” She tapped the card twice with her pen. “I’ve watched you lose sight for three years, Cole. I’m not going to watch you throw it away in one weekend because you’re proud.”

When I reached for the card, she kept two fingers pressed on it. “Cole. I’m not finished.”

Something in her voice made me look up.

“Your right eye is getting worse faster than your left,” she said quietly. “Much faster. I saw it this morning, and I was going to tell you after the test, when you’d had time to breathe.” She finally lifted her fingers off the card. “When the center of an eye like that starts to go, it doesn’t always go slowly. Sometimes it goes all at once.”

The room felt very cold.

“How fast is all at once?” I asked.

“Days. Sometimes hours.” She held my gaze. “There’s no way to know which day it will be. It could be months from now, or it could be tomorrow, in the middle of your tournament, in front of everyone watching.”