Chapter 31: Delivered, Not Read

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a message is answered promptly, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry through your morning. What travels across the world in an instant, arrives in perfect condition, and can still take longer than anything else to come back? Do not answer aloud. Somebody in this Chapter is already waiting on it, and he would rather not be reminded.

Arthur woke up in his own bed, and for several seconds he was happy.

That is the cruel thing about mornings. They arrive without the night before attached, and they give you a few clean seconds of ordinary ceiling before the rest of it walks in. Downstairs, a kettle was boiling. His mother was humming along to the radio, off-key, the way she did when nothing in the world was wrong. It was the sound of a house where nothing had happened.

Igred had brought him home yesterday, with the calm of a man who has made stranger deliveries and asked about none of them. Arthur didn’t remember getting into bed. He remembered three things: a ringing phone, an empty space where Hadjer should have been, and a very large hand opening a car door.

Then the rest came back, and he reached for his phone.

It was the new one, still shiny, with no password on it. He opened his messages and read them from the top.

Are you okay? — 11:42 p.m. Delivered.

I’m fine, by the way. — 11:51. Delivered.

Please answer. — 12:03 a.m. Delivered.

Sorry. — 12:20. A minute later: Not sorry? I don’t know what for. Sorry anyway. Delivered.

That was only the first app. He had written to her on the other two messaging apps. He had written on the social network where his profile picture was a cat and his friend count was zero. He had even sent an email, with a subject line, and had stopped after Hello because he couldn’t think what came next. At the very end, he had messaged the old game account he never used, under the name he used for everything, Ken_love. He didn’t really expect an answer. She had barely looked up when he created her account in the game.

Delivered. Delivered. Delivered. Delivered.

Not one of them said Read.

He stared at that small word for a long time. A person can live with Read and no reply, because Read at least has a face. Delivered is a letter pushed under the door of an empty house. There is nothing to do about it but get dressed.

The magic bus was already humming at the end of his street. From the outside it looked like a normal yellow school bus, which was the cleverest thing about it.

Inside, it was a normal morning, and that was the worst part.

Bliss was laughing. She had a bag of her grandmother’s cookies in her lap, and she was telling the whole row about the phone call, how her grandmother had said a friend? in exactly the voice Bliss had been hoping for. Matt lay across the back seat in a clean uniform, which, for a boy who had been barefoot the night before, counted as a minor miracle. He was complaining to nobody about a cancellation fee. Carter sat by the window, holding his new phone in both hands, and took his first ever photograph, of a lamppost, with the care of someone defusing a bomb.

Everything was loud, and warm, and normal. Arthur stood at the top of the steps and looked for one seat.

It was the third seat from the front, on the left, by the window. It was empty, and it looked like it was trying hard not to look empty.

He sat down across the aisle from Carter. Carter glanced at him and then at the empty seat.

"Did she answer?"

"No."

Carter nodded, as if he had known, and went back to his lamppost. Arthur was grateful for that. Some people know when not to say anything, and they are rare.

The bus rumbled forward, found a road that hadn’t existed a second earlier, and settled into a hum. Behind him, Bliss burst out laughing again. A phone buzzed somewhere, and Arthur’s head snapped around before he could stop it. It was only Bliss’s grandmother. He looked back at the window and tried to pretend he hadn’t moved.

"Dude."

A scarf landed in the seat beside him, and Jaquan landed after it, clipboard under one arm, looking like a man whose day had finally begun.

"Dude. Arthur. Ken_love. Good morning. I’m not dead, thank you for asking."

"Good morning," said Arthur, to the window.

"Good. Now, listen." Jaquan folded his hands on the clipboard. "Since we’ve got a common enemy now..."

"Who?"

"The gentleman who owns the playground. I’m not saying his name. We might end up summoning him." He coughed, and the mark on his wrist didn’t flare, which seemed to relieve him. "My point is, we’re a team now whether we like it or not, and a team with no structure is just a crowd. So, I was thinking. We should start a clan."

A clan. Arthur’s eyes stayed on the glass. A girl outside was walking a dog on a leash. For about two seconds it looked like her.

"We only need five people and a name," said Jaquan. "Joining an existing clan is safer, sure. They come with resources, a reputation, a very rude person at the door. But creating one is better if you can grow it. You set the rules, and nobody can kick you out of your own house. Look at the Lotus family. Look what a name does for them."

Hadjer.

Arthur’s thumb moved on his screen and found her name. Nothing had changed. His last message was still there, small and gray.

"...And I’ve worked out a structure," Jaquan went on. "The leader gets a small bonus, not an insulting one, and the rest of us..."

It was no use. Arthur nodded where nodding seemed to be needed and heard none of it. Jaquan wasn’t going to stop on his own, and there was only one way to look too busy to talk to. It also happened to be something he should have done yesterday.

He opened the system.

He had muted it in the Labyrinth.

He wasn’t proud of that. All the time he had been near Hadjer, a small, cold window had kept opening in the corner of his eye. Warning. Poison level: moderate. Warning. Poison level: high. Then one with three exclamation marks. He hadn’t wanted to hear it. He had wanted, just once, to stand near her without a window telling him he shouldn’t, and so he had told the system to be quiet.

Looking back on it, on a moving bus, it seemed a remarkably stupid thing to do.

At the very least, he could have kept an eye on his HP. Nobody mutes the smoke alarm and then complains about the fire. He felt a slow, thorough embarrassment settle over him.

Fine. He unmuted it.

A hundred and twelve notifications dropped in at once, like pigeons landing on a statue. He started clearing them with his thumb. Poison level rising. Poison level rising. Poison level critical. Host unresponsive. Host unresponsive. Host unresponsive. At the very bottom was one that was different:

Device detected. Would you like to sync to unlock more options?

He frowned.

The system had barely ever asked him a question before. It gave orders, warnings, and now and then a gray wall of question marks, but it had never asked something like this before. He looked at the phone in his hand. It had to be this one. It was the only device he’d ever owned that was really his.

"Sure," he said, and pressed yes.

The phone began to glow.

It was a soft, pale light, like a night-light in a hallway. The edges of the glass shifted, as if the phone had taken a breath, and the whole shape changed in his hand. The corners rounded. The back turned smoky gray. Where the manufacturer’s logo had been, there was a new word, in thin white letters:

BOOPHONE.

Jaquan stopped in the middle of a sentence about voting procedures.

"What," he said, "the hell is that?"

"A phone."

"That was a different phone ten seconds ago. It had a fruit on it, or a lizard, or something. Is that your active? Your passive? An effect?" He leaned in so close that his scarf touched the screen. "Arthur, did you just change a trademark?"

"Something like that," said Arthur. It was his usual answer to any question where the truthful reply started with I’m a ghost.

Jaquan had stopped listening. He had the look of someone who had spent a long, dull morning and just spotted something shiny on the pavement. "Can I?" He didn’t wait for an answer. He took the Boophone carefully, as if it might bite, and began to scroll.

There were apps. A whole grid of them, none of which had been there a minute ago. A small ghost with a halo. A set of blue squares. A shield. And one in the bottom row, a black hand holding a gray flag.

CLAN MANAGER. The Clan of the Unseen.

"Oh," said Jaquan, in the voice of a man in a library.

"Don’t."

"I’m just opening it."

He opened it.

Would you like to create a clan?

"We were literally just talking about this," said Jaquan. "This is fate. This is a sign from an indifferent universe." He pressed yes.

Please enter a clan name.

"I’m good at names," said Jaquan, and thought about it for four whole seconds, which for him was a long time. Then his face changed. He turned the phone toward Arthur. "Do you remember...?"

"Remember what?" said Arthur.

"Our game."

It took a moment. Then it came back, all at once: the game they had both played, long before any of this, on the kind of evening when you are twelve and don’t know yet that you’re lonely. A guild with a handful of other members, and two of them were Ken_love and King_Jaquan. A little floating island in the clouds, with a mossy tower and a broken bridge, and a name that had taken them thirty-seven rejected tries.

"Shadow Isle," said Arthur, before he could stop himself.

Jaquan typed it in, without a trace of sarcasm.

Clan name accepted. Add members from your contacts?

A list scrolled up. It was short, though not as short as it should have been. Arthur’s thumb moved to the top of it without being asked. Hadjer. He tapped her name, and a small blue tick appeared next to it, and for one second it felt like leaving a light on in a window. Then he tapped Carter, because why not. The boy had run through a zoo in the dark, and then hit him twice, which in Carter’s language was a way of saying he cared.

"I’ll add myself," said Jaquan, and typed in his own number. Then Bliss’s, which he had got at the zoo house, and then Matt’s, which Matt had given him with a shrug, as if a phone number were a paper napkin.

Invitations sent.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a few rows back, Bliss said "Huh?" and Matt sat up and said, "What is this?" All through the bus, small lights came on in pockets and bags, and a new app appeared on each phone, unasked: a black hand with a gray flag. Jaquan’s own phone buzzed. He pulled it out and stared at it.

"It’s on mine," he said. "It just showed up. Arthur, it’s on my phone." He looked up with the face of a boy who has been given the best present of his life and is trying not to say so. "This is wicked. This is the most wicked thing I’ve ever seen."

He pressed accept.

Arthur’s Boophone buzzed. Jaquan has joined Shadow Isle.

Then it buzzed again, and again, like the first drops of rain on a roof. Carter has joined. Bliss has joined. Matt has joined.

Four green ticks. And one gray one.

Hadjer — invitation pending.

He looked at it for a while. He hadn’t really expected anything else. It was only that every time he tried to settle into his disappointment, he found it was already full.

The mark arrived without any ceremony.

First a warm, tingling pressure on the back of his right hand, like someone pressing a thumb into it. Then a shape rose slowly beneath the skin, like a photograph in a tray of developer: a flying shadow ghost made of black smoke and sweeping ink strokes, its flowing body curling into a large S shape.

Jaquan was already holding up his own hand to the window light. "It’s identical," he said. "Look. It’s a ghost, but it’s also sort of a shadow. Is that on purpose? Bliss! Matt! Come and look!"

He was out of his seat before Arthur could answer, a scarf-shaped blur going down the aisle to show it to anyone who would look. Carter checked his own mark without a word, the way he checked everything that was free. Bliss held out her wrist, delighted, and showed it to the whole row. Matt gave his a bored look, then turned his hand twice to see how it caught the light.

Arthur let them have it.

He leaned his head on the window and thought about the afternoon. A long black car waiting at the school gates. Igred holding the door. A house with a thick carpet, and a man at the end of it who called people sweetheart. He had promised to tell Igred everything, and everything meant her father, and her father meant that house, and that house meant...

Maybe, he thought, and didn’t finish.

Behind him, Jaquan was explaining to Bliss and Matt why the mark was cool, using a lot of hand gestures and the word aesthetic. The whole bus laughed at something Matt said. Arthur smiled, half a second too late.

A notification slid down in the corner of his eye.

Clan created.

Clan Level: 1.

Effect: +1% to all stats for all members.

He looked at it.

One percent. It wasn’t much. It was like being given one extra minute in a year and not being told when. But it was there: a faint, steady warmth at the back of his mind, like five other lights switching on in a house that had only ever had one.

A cool effect. He turned it over in his head. If this was the first level, what came next?

His thumb drifted back to the grid of apps. The ghost with the halo. The blue squares. The shield. They sat there on the screen, quiet and unexplained, like closed doors along a hallway.

What else can you do? he wondered.

A message sent is a boat sent out to sea;

it may never come back, but it was still meant to be.

TO BE CONTINUED...