Rabbits(76)

“Hello again,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “I was hoping I might be able to speak with you.”

“And here we are.”

I nodded. What the fuck was happening?

“You were surprised that Sidney Farrow didn’t recognize you.”

“Yes.” I was just about to ask him how he knew that, but I stopped myself; I wasn’t sure I was ready to handle the answer.

“I have some questions about you and my parents, and I’d like to speak with Emily Connors,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“I’m going to ask you to do something, K—but please understand that I’m not asking you to do this for me. This is for you. I’m giving you this…opportunity out of respect for your parents. If you were anyone else, this conversation would be much different.”

“Okay…can you please just tell me what’s happening? The last time we met you said that had you known I was here, you would have made sure we’d met much sooner. What did you mean?”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I had been led to believe.”

I sat there for a moment, staring down at my hand gripping the edge of the sharp plastic seat. Was I dreaming? This couldn’t be real. Why did all of those people get off the bus?

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“If you don’t stop playing the game you’re calling Rabbits immediately, everything you know is going to either change or disappear, and everybody you know is going to forget you exist. This includes that girl Chloe from the arcade, I’m afraid.”

“What…?”

He smiled. “I’m sorry it has to be like this. I really am.”

“Why are you doing this? Saying these things?”

“Like I said, this has nothing to do with you personally, K, but you need to stop playing Rabbits—and that means no looking into anything related to anything else that might be even remotely connected to the game. Do you understand?”

“I’m not even sure I am playing. Not really.”

“Well, then,” he said, “what I’m asking shouldn’t be difficult.” He rang the bell, and the bus pulled over and stopped.

And then the man called Crow stood up and stepped off the bus.

After a moment, I leapt up to follow him, but the doors had already closed. As the driver guided the bus slowly back out into the traffic, I rang the bell repeatedly.

“Pull over!” I yelled, but the driver just kept driving.

He finally pulled the bus over two blocks later, at the next scheduled stop.

I hurled myself off the bus, pushed past a group of people trying to get on, and rushed out onto the sidewalk.

I ran the two blocks back to where Crow had exited the bus, but he was gone.



* * *



—

I walked the rest of the way home.

I’d been inside my apartment for about five minutes when somebody buzzed.

I pressed the talk button of my intercom. “Hello?”

“I’m outside. Let me in.”

I was trying to come up with some way to tell Chloe about the missing Sunday, Crow, and Emily Connors that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic when Chloe burst into my apartment and handed me her phone.

“This guy,” she said.

There was a pale, thin man with a skinny black mustache on Chloe’s screen. He was standing in front of a bank of computer monitors.

“Who is he?”

“He’s Fatman.”

“Fatman?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“He’s not fat.”

“I guess it’s ironic or something.”

“Must be,” I said.

“So I’m cashing out around ten thirty last night when I hear a sound coming from the Magician’s office. I rush up there because I think he’s finally back. I’m about to knock and give him shit for making us worry when I hear a voice coming from behind the door.”

“Fatman?”

“Let me finish.”

“Sorry.”

“At first, I thought the Magician must have come in through the back, so I knock again, and then I open the door. And suddenly I’m on a video call with some guy.”

“Fatman.”

“That was the handle listed on the screen. He didn’t give me his real name.”

“He’s a friend of the Magician?”

“He says they had a regular weekly call. It wasn’t Skype or FaceTime, though. It looked like homemade software, or maybe something military.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. There was a standard video window, but the rest of the interface was text-based, kind of like DOS. It was either really low-tech or bleeding-edge. It was hard to tell.”

“So who was this guy?”

“I have no idea. He asked me if something had happened to the Magician, if he’d been acting strange lately.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. I had no idea who this guy was; he was just a face on a screen talking to me through some weird-ass software.”