The Unseen by Jake Lingwall

forward. She squeezed the bike tightly with her legs and reached out to grab one of the fake arrows in front of her bike. This is insane. By the time she had knocked the arrow to her bow, they had already covered several hundred feet. The wind was blowing in her face, but the goggles that Motorcad had printed for them kept her from having any problems with her vision.
    A target shot up from behind the trees and into the air. Kari took aim at it, but she was too slow; an arrow shot out from Motorcad and shattered the target into a billion pixels. A scoreboard appeared in the corner of her vision and showed that Motorcad had earned fifty points.
    “I’m winning!” Motorcad yelled proudly, like a schoolboy.
    Another target appeared on the other side of them, and this time Kari released her arrow before the target was destroyed. She missed, but a digital arrow from SeptemberMist landed on the target a moment later.
    “Leave some for Lancelot,” Motorcad said over their in-game audio channel.
    “Lancelot?” SeptemberMist said.
    “FreeLANCER. Lancer-lot, Lancelot?” Motorcad said.
    “It’s a stretch,” SeptemberMist said.
    Motorcad destroyed three more targets, and still Kari hadn’t even been close to connecting with one. And I thought I was bad at capture the flag. A target appeared on the side of the path right as it merged onto a paved road. Kari was excited to be on pavement, where her ride would be smoother. She wasn’t able to get an arrow off before SeptemberMist destroyed the newest target. Kari watched as the target blew into pieces. Below where the target had just been, Kari could see the clear red markings of several cheetahs. Those aren’t in the game. Why would they have cheetahs out here?
    For protection—remember what just happened to me? They don’t want anyone swooping in to ruin what they have here. It made sense that Joseth would take measures to defend the
Unseen. The auto-cycles turned onto the paved road and accelerated down the street. Targets popped up more often now, but Kari was too far behind in the score to try too hard at earning points. Instead, she started to wonder about the limits of the game itself. I wonder what would happen if I did this . . .
    Kari shot an arrow out to the side at Motorcad’s bike. It connected, and his bike shuddered and slowed, losing valuable ground and time on SeptemberMist, which allowed her to score several targets.
    Cool! She thought before she felt her bike shudder a second later. She thought she was going to be thrown from the bike to her death, but she clutched to the auto-cycle. Not cool, actually!
    Motorcad’s bike had only slowed for a second when she shot his, but hers didn’t recover. It continued to slow until it came to a stop. She couldn’t be sure if the smoke rising from her bike was virtual or real.
    It only took SeptemberMist and Motorcad a minute to realize what happened and to circle back. Motorcad ended the game, with him being declared the winner by a wide margin. He made it back to Kari’s disabled bike first, a few moments ahead of SeptemberMist.
    “Don’t trust anyone,” he said.
    “What?”
    “And don’t talk about this out loud anywhere in Valhalla and don’t mention it to anyone else, understand?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You OK, Kari?” SeptemberMist said as she pulled up next to them.
    “Yeah, I’m fine.” Kari blinked a few times, unsure of what to make of her friends.
    “Looks like your ride is toast,” Motorcad said. “Not sure what happened there. Must be a bug in my game code or something.”
    “Why don’t you hop on the back of mine,” SeptemberMist said. “We’ll head back home. And we’re not going to play this game again any time soon.”
    “Sore loser,” Motorcad said. He smiled as if there was nothing to worry about in the whole world and waited for Kari to climb on the back of SeptemberMist’s auto-cycle before racing them back to Valhalla.

Chapter Fifteen
    It’s not location,