The God's Game System

Chapter 13

Leo had the hotel driver drop him at the bottom of the hill and walked the rest of the way up to the Leroy estate. As far as the Leroys knew, he was still a man who couldn't afford a bus ticket, and until the auction tomorrow night, he wanted them to go on believing it.

The guard at the front gate recognized him from fifty feet away and kept his feet up on the desk. "Service road, Leo," he called through the window, pointing with his coffee cup toward the side of the property. "Mrs. Leroy's orders. Your stuff's out back by the garage. The rubbish truck comes at ten, so I'd hurry."

The service road ran along the outside of the garden wall, past the greenhouse and the pool house, and ended at a concrete yard behind the garage where the staff kept the bins. There were three of them lined up against the wall, and Leo knew what he would find before he reached them, because a sleeve of his old work jacket was hanging over the lip of the nearest one.

Four years in this house, and everything he owned had fit into two bins.

The staff hadn't bothered with bags. His shirts, his jeans, the paperback novels he read on his breaks at the warehouse, all of it had been dumped straight in on top of last night's kitchen scraps, and someone had emptied a coffee filter over the lot. Leo stood there and breathed through his mouth. Then he rolled up his sleeves.

He only wanted one thing, and it wasn't the clothes. Somewhere in this mess was a shoebox he'd kept at the back of his closet for three years. It held the only photograph he had of his mother, taken the week Mia was born, and the pocket watch Grandfather Leroy had pressed into his hand the night before he died.

Leo lifted out a shirt with eggshells stuck to the collar, then a pair of boots, then a split bag of potato peelings, and set each one on the concrete beside him as he dug.

"Oh my God," someone said behind him. "He's actually doing it."

Two of the maids had come out onto the kitchen steps. One was holding her phone up sideways to film him, and the other had a hand over her mouth, though it did nothing to hide her giggling.

"Careful, Leo," the one with the phone called out. "The good stuff's at the bottom."

The kitchen door banged open again, and Victor Leroy stepped out in a grey bathrobe with a mug in one hand and his own phone in the other. Elena's brother was thirty-one, soft around the middle, and he had the permanent sunburn of a man who spent more time on golf courses than in the office he was paid to run. He took one look at the yard and broke into a delighted grin.

"No, no, this is perfect." He raised his phone and switched to the voice of a nature documentary. "And here, in his natural habitat, we find the wild ex-husband foraging for breakfast. Notice how he sorts the eggshells from the potato peel. Truly a remarkable creature."

The maids shrieked. Victor tapped his screen a few times, and Leo heard the little whoosh of a message being sent. "Family group chat," Victor explained cheerfully. "Mum's going to love this."

Up on the terrace that overlooked the yard, a set of glass doors slid open, and Margaret Leroy stepped out in a cream dressing gown with a cup of tea balanced on its saucer. She looked down at Leo the way she might look at a stain on a tablecloth.

"Victor," she said, "when he's finished, have the gardener hose that whole area down. I won't have it smelling of him."

Leo kept digging.

Red light flared at the edge of his vision, and the chat began scrolling so fast he could barely follow it.

[Constellation 'Golden Archer' says: Is this a cooking channel now? Breakfast with the Sovereign!]

[Constellation 'Merchant of the Golden Sun' says: My avatar would rather die than touch rubbish. He owns the company that collects it.]

[Constellation 'Crimson Warlord' says: The man who made my champion kneel is eating out of a bin. My week just got better.]

[Constellation 'Shadow Hunter' says: Sovereign, your boy has eggshell on his sleeve.]

"Get your hands out of that filth," the Sovereign said.

His voice landed in Leo's head with enough weight to make his ears ring, and every word was shaking with fury. "Every Constellation in the high realm is watching my avatar root through garbage while a fat man in a bathrobe narrates it. They are laughing at you, boy, which means they are laughing at me. Do you have any idea what you are doing to my name?"

They'll enjoy it even more if I leave without what I came for, Leo told him, and pulled another shirt out of the bin.

"Then let me show you exactly where you stand," the Sovereign said, "since you seem to have forgotten."

A new window unfolded in the air between Leo and the bin, wider than any he'd seen before and edged in gold.

[Universe Server 07: Avatar Rankings]

[Registered Avatars: 51,207]

[#1 | Lucien Ashgrove | Avatar of 'The Eternal Emperor' | Standing: 9,840,112]

[#2 | Kaito Ren | Avatar of 'Dragon Lord of the Ninth Heaven' | Standing: 7,206,551]

[#3 | Amara Duval | Avatar of 'The Weeping Saint' | Standing: 6,918,004]

[...]

[#48,913 | Leo | Avatar of 'Sovereign of the Absolute' | Standing: 2,140]

Leo read the list from top to bottom. The name at the top had a gold crown beside it, and next to the crown sat a viewer count that ran to nine digits. Nine hundred million watchers were following Lucien Ashgrove at this very minute, while Leo's channel, the one the Sovereign had been bragging about all night, sat at one point four million.

"The Emperor's boy," the Sovereign said, and there was something in his tone now besides anger, something older and more personal. "He has been collecting kneeling men since he was nineteen. He owns two governments and the debts of a third, and his Constellation has sat at the head of the High Council since before your sun was lit. Forty-eight thousand humans stand between you and him. Forty-eight thousand, and you are picking eggshells off a shirt."

Leo looked at his own line at the very bottom of the screen.

Two days ago, he said, I wasn't on that list at all.

The Sovereign had no answer ready for that, and Leo used the pause.

The people laughing at me right now are the same people I need off guard tomorrow night. Every one of them who walks away from this thinking I'm a joke is one less person watching what I do at that auction. Let them laugh.

The window hung in the air a while longer. Then the Sovereign made a disgusted noise, and the rankings folded away. "Find your box," he muttered. "Quickly."

"Hey." Victor had come down the steps while Leo was distracted, and now he stood at the edge of the yard with his phone still raised. "Elena told us something funny at dinner last night. She says you walked into Vane & Co. yesterday and dropped thirty grand on a suit." He tilted his head. "So I've been wondering where a houseboy finds thirty grand. You've been helping yourself to the silverware, haven't you? Or did you find a way into Dad's study before we kicked you out?"

Leo straightened up and looked at him, and the Eye of Truth opened beside Victor's face.

[Subject: Victor Leroy.]

[Last statement: He believes it. He also hopes it is true.]

[Concealed: $2,100,000 transferred out of Leroy Group accounts in the last 90 days.]

[Recipient: Harbourline Holdings.]

Leo filed the name away. A thief who accused someone else of stealing was usually a nervous thief, and a nervous man with two million dollars of his family's money sitting in someone else's account would be very easy to push later.

"Check the company accounts, Victor," Leo said mildly. "I'm sure the numbers all add up."

Victor's grin stayed on his face for a second after the rest of him had stopped believing in it. His phone drifted down to his side. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then glanced up at the terrace, where his mother was watching both of them with her teacup halfway to her lips.

"Victor?" Margaret said. "What is he talking about?"

"Nothing," Victor said, too quickly, and turned back toward the kitchen. "He's talking nonsense. Let him have his rubbish."

He went inside without filming another second, and soon the maids followed him in, still whispering to each other.

Leo turned back to the bin.

He found the shoebox right at the bottom, crushed nearly flat, with its lid torn off and a dark puddle of coffee soaked through the cardboard. The photograph was still inside. He lifted it out carefully by one corner and saw straight away that it was ruined. The coffee had bled across the paper in a brown tide, and where his mother's face had been there was only a smear of colour and the outline of a hand holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.

Leo stood there with the photo in his fingers, and for a while he forgot about the maids and the terrace and the red screens in his head. It was a stupid thing to hurt over, a square of old paper, when Mia was alive and safe and that was what mattered. But it had been the only picture, and they had thrown it in with the potato peelings without even looking at it.

He slid the photo into his shirt pocket anyway, and that was when he saw the glint of silver in the corner of the bin.

The watch had slipped out of the box and down into the gap between a crushed carton and the side of the bin. Leo reached in, worked it free, and turned it over in his palm. It was heavier than he remembered, its case worn smooth by forty years of the old man's thumb.

Three years ago, in a hospital room that smelled of lilies, Grandfather Leroy had waited until the rest of the family stepped out to argue about the will. Then he had pressed this watch into Leo's hand and folded Leo's fingers around it with what was left of his strength.

"Keep it with you," he'd whispered. "Someday it will stop. When it does, you'll understand."

Leo had never wound it once. It had ticked on its own every single day since, through three years of scrubbed floors and night shifts, and he had stopped wondering why a long time ago.

He pressed the catch, and the case sprang open.

The watch had stopped. Both hands sat perfectly still, pointing at a time Leo would know anywhere, because the night before last he had watched a digital clock freeze at that same minute, in a hospital room where water hung in the air and a voice inside his head first called him trash.

The hands read 10:14.

Leo stared at them, and without meaning to, he let the Eye of Truth fall on the watch.

[Item: ???]

[Appraisal failed.]

[Origin: High Realm.]