I dreamed of smoke. Except I wasn’t dreaming, I could smell it--that stench of burning wood. I snapped up at the waist. Fire, there was a fire, and I needed to get up and go--

  I was staring at a fireplace. The fire danced, merry and unconcerned. Smoke went up the red brick chimney, the scent of it drifted out into the room. I was on a bed, though I lay on top of the patchwork quilt. It was a small, narrow room, with a tiny, paned glass window and low ceilings. It was dark, moonlight still carving its way across the floorboards.

  Along with the crackling of burning wood, there was the sound of soft breathing to my right. White-hair sat in a chair, his head back, chin up, a staff across his lap. He was no longer a tattered, slimy mess. His narrow, sharp features were even more drawn and pale in the light of the fire.

  I should’ve woken up in the hospital by now. The leg that I’d been impaled through was wrapped, but it didn’t feel sore. My ribs were sore, but I’d been blasted off my feet twice. My armor was in a haphazard corner, along with my shovel--no longer glowing.

  I looked back at White-hair. He didn’t look…well. Why was he sleeping in the chair? Why wasn’t he in his own bed?

  Purple light was fighting with the light of the fire and the moon. There was a rotating, purple circle on the door. It was one large circle, with two inner circles. Various smaller symbols--ones and zeros, maybe?--flickered on the inside of the rings. Occasionally, the entire thing flashed blue, or orange, and shone with dots of white and black, scattered, before becoming wholly purple again.

  Okay, then. Didn’t know what that shit was, but it probably meant we weren’t safe. I gritted my teeth and swung my feet over the side of the bed. My socks touched the floor. I took a deep breath--

  “If you undo all my hard work by moving for exactly no purpose,” White-hair said without opening his eyes or moving, “I shall snap my staff across your throat and destroy your windpipe. Suffocation is an unpleasant way to go.” His head moved slightly to the side. “Though, I suppose you should know this. Most that die due to flame suffocate from the smoke first. Tell me, woman, do you remember?”

  I gripped the blankets and stared at him. His breathing was careful and even--almost militant in its precision, now that I was paying attention to it.

  “I’m not in a hospital,” I finally said. My heart was hammering in my ears.

  White-hair clicked his tongue and relaxed his neck, turning his head downward to glower at me through his glasses. “No,” he said in that precise way of speaking. “You died a long time ago, Theodora Smith, though I cannot reckon your birth year or origin.”

  I blinked. My hands trembled, and I clasped them together in my lap. I opened my mouth, and White-hair cut me off.

  “Do not bother to tell me. I care not, for the year of it matters little. What I have deduced is that your soul has resided within the System for long enough that your memories are corrupted and fading. Well over five hundred years. Perhaps during the Sun Slaughter War of the 3500s.”

  I stared at him. He was still talking, but my ears couldn’t hear anything anymore. There was a high pitched whine in them. “What year?” I croaked at him.

  White-hair stopped in whatever he was rambling about and flicked me an irritated look, gold eyes sweeping over me with obvious distaste. “4328 is the current numerical value assigned, though there remains some discontent about the continued practice of standardizing Terran Years. However, I would put all foolish interest in the universe out of your head. It is of no concern here, and such knowledge will help neither of us.”

  I was going to be sick. 4328. The year was 4328. This was some sort of nightmare. This couldn’t be real. The year was 2016. I was not…fuck, two thousand years in the future, and somehow dead. This didn’t make any sense.

  Hold it together. White-hair was willing to explain, now, so I had to ask questions. I struggled to swallow the lump in my throat and form words. “What--but, swords? And magic? And I’m in armor--”

  “Correct. We are in a Resurrection Raid,” he said, his lip curled. “The Resurrection Raid is a game–though quite real to everyone experiencing it. A virtual world, where the greatest weapons are magic and blades. Fantastical. I presume you know what ‘fantasy’ is? Or do I grant you too much credit?”

  My mouth worked soundlessly. I couldn’t speak, so I nodded instead.

  White-hair cocked a single eyebrow, but continued. “The players are the souls of dead humans, and the goal is very simple. Slay the Artificial Intelligence, and you will be reborn--returned to life as you were when you died.”

  “An AI?” I said.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Your capacity to ask comprehensive questions is astounding. Surely you know what an Artificial Intelligence is?”

  In sci-fi movies and stories, sure. In my day-to-day life--but shit, why wouldn’t they have artificial intelligence two thousand years in the future?

  “Why is killing an AI the goal?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper. “AI isn’t very fantasy.”

  “The Resurrection Raid is how Artificial Intelligences are born. I will not bother to explain, for it is not relevant, but true Artificial Intelligence cannot be created any other way. Frightfully rare and more kin to god than man, how the Raid proceeds determines the strength, power, and disposition of the Intelligence in question.”

  “Doesn’t really answer why we kill them,” I said. I was blinking rapidly. The world was swimming.

  White-hair didn’t respond, for a moment. There was something in his eyes, the gold darkening, that made something crawl up my spine. “You cannot truly slay them. The ‘death’ of the Intelligence merely brings the Raid to a close. The Raiders that slew the Artificial Intelligence now own it, to do with as they will. In reality, it is rare that the Raiders actually keep their new acquisition, and ownership of the Intelligence is instead passed to whoever sponsored those Raiders to begin with.”

  I collapsed back onto the bed. I stared at the ceiling. Old, nicked wood planks. It looked exactly like what I’d expect a medieval inn to look like. Medieval. Something that was, what--five hundred years ago for me? Almost three thousand years ago for everyone else?

  Everyone I knew was dead.

  Shit, I was dead. Had I burned to death? How did burning to death mean that I’d end up here? Shouldn’t I be in either some sort of afterlife or the blank void of nothing? But I was in a game, instead. I was still living, but not living.

  Everyone I knew was dead. My entire life had revolved around my grandmother, my dad, and my siblings, and they were all dead, and--

  I couldn’t remember their names or faces. I remembered who they were. I remembered my sister’s brow furrowing as she edited her newest selfie, hunched over her phone. I remembered the way that my brother had wrinkled his nose when I’d told him to go pick up his underwear out of the bathroom. I remembered my youngest sister, curling into my side, her breath slowing until we exhaled and inhaled in sync.

  Teddy, she’d said, When’s daddy gonna be better?

  They were all dead. They’d been dead for two thousand years. And I didn’t even remember their fucking names.

  A Hemingway quote popped into my brain, a thought I’d always found poignant and now found horrifying. “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name.”

  I had to remember. I couldn’t kill them twice.

  I strained. Nothing swam to mind. Little facts--the oldest of my sisters had been obsessed with managing her eyebrows, lecturing me on modern makeup trends. My brother’s favorite game had to do something with hopping between platforms, and he’d snicker every time he handed me the controller and I jumped right off the edge. My grandmother smoking at the table and staring off at the orange tree in the backyard, waiting. The woman she was waiting for would never come.

  But no names.

  I didn’t realize that I’d curled on my side and begun crying into the ragged quilt until White-hair swam into my vision. He leaned over me, his mouth twisting and his eyes narrowing. He had crossed one arm, and he held the other hand up, fingers curling.

  “Have you no other inquiries? Sitting there and weeping accomplishes nothing,” he said.

  I blinked at him and laughed, a hiccupping, hacking sound. God, this man was a dick.

  His mouth pursed, thinning into a narrow line. “You cannot be this weak willed. The System has designated you a Paladin, which is a class granted only to people of great conviction.”

  I wanted him to go away. I wanted to cry, and sleep, and consider my options with the coming dawn. I closed my eye.

  White-hair kept talking. “You know nothing, and such a deficiency will see you gutted, your organs made gifts to a sky that should never witness them. Furthermore, when that happens, I will pay the price of your grief.”

  I opened my eye. His face was suddenly very close to mine, and molten gold blazed. Had this man never experienced sadness?

  I opened my mouth and hesitated. I looked at White-hair, at the sharp, cutting lines of him, of that fierceness in his gaze.

  Nothing I could say would make this man care. If he’d been capable of sympathy, he would’ve shown it. The fact I’d saved and carried us both didn’t matter to him. He was self-important, scathing, and liked to hear himself talk.

  Why would I waste my breath? I closed my mouth and shut my eye, rolling over so my back was to him.

  For a moment, the only sound was the fire crackling and my shaking inhales and exhales.

  When White-hair spoke again, it came out as a hiss. “I should have left you in the forest to your own devices, and let the consequences fall where they may. How dare you spit on the lengths I have gone to, all seeking the preservation of your person, and you sit there and sulk like a useless, wretched child.”

  Oh, my silence and deliberate snubbing had properly infuriated him. He could rot angry, for all I cared. Seethe in his corner. In fact, he didn’t have to stay any longer, if he didn’t wish it. He’d helped me, sure, but I’d also helped him. We could go our separate ways. I’d never asked for his presence, and by the sounds of it, he hadn’t asked for mine.

  “Have you no response? No temper? No fire in your soul? Spineless, craven creature, that picks the quiet because they lack wit and will for anything else.”

  Clever, grieving woman who knew that her silence was the best way to piss White-hair off. Tears collected at the corners of my eye, and they traced their paths down my face. I let him fume, allowed the words to roll over me as he ranted and seethed. He threatened, raved, paced, and finally collapsed in the chair behind me, and still I did not respond. Exhaustion rose, a dark, pitiless well. I drank deep from it, and slept.

  I didn’t sleep long.