Rabbits(57)

Then suddenly I was sitting with Annie and Emily Connors, back in that truck on that lonely country road, the fuzzy static of the radio the only sound.

I opened my mouth to warn Emily about what was going to happen, but before I could speak, the world ended in an explosion of wild light, heat, and rumble.



* * *



—

I woke up covered in sweat, with no air in my lungs.

I’d forgotten how to breathe.

It was like that feeling you get when your mind tricks you into believing you’ve momentarily forgotten how to swallow.

I jumped up and smashed my knee against the glass corner of my coffee table as I rushed through my living room. The sharp sudden pain in my knee forced an involuntary scream from my lips, and my lungs were suddenly working again.

I yanked open the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony, filling my chest with crisp rainy air in enormous panicked gulps.

The cool bracing wind and wet concrete beneath my feet slowly brought me back to reality.

Of course it had been a dream—a recurring dream I’d been having, off and on, for as long as I could remember.

Aside from the beginning of the dream, which was always slightly different, once the world lost all gravity and I began to float it was the same: outer space, the black monolith, the elevator, everything.

I looked into the kitchen at the clock on my microwave. It read 4:44 a.m.

There’s a theory among those of us interested in (read: obsessed with) the game of Rabbits—something we call fours.

The theory goes like this: Rabbits players, and perhaps also would-be Rabbits players, notice one specific time on the clock, 4:44 (afternoon and/or morning), more often than people not connected to or interested in the game. This has to be complete nonsense, of course—an example of nothing more than confirmation bias—but I do notice that specific time constantly, and can’t help but think of Rabbits whenever it happens.



* * *



—

The first thing I did after I noticed the time was compose a text to Baron. Whenever one of us sees that specific time on a clock, we text each other: 444.

Once the fog left my brain, and I remembered that Baron was gone, I deleted the text message and crawled back under the covers.

I missed my friend.

After a few minutes of tossing and turning, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, so I got up to make coffee, and then started looking into Minister Jesselman’s suicide.



* * *



—

The incident had taken place on the Cardiff University campus in Wales. Nobody interviewed could agree about what Jesselman had meant by “the door is open”—although most people believed it was related either to his open-border immigration policy (his campaign had used the phrase in their election materials a couple of years back) or to a personal scandal he’d been involved in featuring some kind of English sex cult.

Outside of The Phrase, there was nothing that appeared to connect the incident to Rabbits—but it had to be connected. There was no way our discovering that video was a coincidence.

I closed my laptop and started digging around to see what I might make for breakfast. I had my choice of expired watery yogurt, questionable homemade granola with way too many raisins, or bananas, some too green, the others too black. While I was trying to decide, Chloe called and told me to meet her at a restaurant downtown for brunch. I told her I’d be right there.



* * *



—

“I found something this morning,” Chloe said in between bites of overcooked home fries and undercooked pancakes.

The restaurant was an old pub that served greasy spoon–style food during the day. Chloe and I had been there a few times before. The dark wooden walls and sticky floors always made me nostalgic for college. Outside of the eggs Benedict, the food was uniformly terrible. I always had one of their Benedicts, but Chloe clung to the futile hope that she’d eventually find something else on the menu that might pass as edible.

The place was almost completely empty. Most of the morning regulars had already passed through on their way to work.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Remember when the Magician handed me those pages with the names of players who’d died or went missing?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I remembered seeing one of those names in a couple of Rabbits forums recently, so I looked her up.”

“And?”

“She was a player from Cameroon who died under mysterious circumstances, bitten by a spider that wasn’t indigenous to the area. Her best friend was raising hell about how something was fishy, and then one day, she just disappeared.”

“That’s weird,” I said, “but it might just be coincidence.”

“It’s not good, K. Girl dies, friend goes missing. Shit like this is happening all over the world.”

I grabbed my coffee and moved over to Chloe’s side of the booth. “You sure?”

Chloe nodded.

“How?”

“A couple of legit Rabbits obsessives I know run a popular darknet forum called TuringLeft.”

“Isn’t that site in Spanish?”

“Yeah, they’re based in Madrid. My friend helps moderate. I asked her if she’d heard anything about people connected to Rabbits going missing and maybe even dying. She told me that players are worried something’s wrong with the game. This morning, when I logged in, there was a message splashed across the front page of that forum in ten languages.”