City of Cinders Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  City of Cinders (The Cinderella Matrix, #1)

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  THE END MATTERS

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  San Francisco

  2148

  1

  “I’ll get this round of drinks. You get the second from whatever we win tonight. Whoever is still standing buys the third.”

  “Impossible. I can’t have any winnings. I’m not entering.”

  Scotia slid one of the brown bottles across the barroom table. “Oh, you’re entered.”

  Eagerness and anxiety surged through Cindira, a duality of direction with which she was all too familiar. “Scotia!”

  “What? You know you’re going to win.” The redhead lifted her drink, pausing to add, “you always do.”

  Arguing would only make Cindira look like she was fishing for compliments. But, she couldn’t hide her smile. She’d never lost in the arena.

  It was that fact that made her nervous.

  Even though the meek coder adopted an alias for her battles, the attention it brought was building to unsafe levels. Her father’s company, Tybor, hoarded its code writers, forcing them into restrictive contracts with dizzying levels of compensation, at the cost of controlling so much of what went on in their technological lives both inside and outside company walls. One of the few benefits of being the CEO’s daughter was that certain exceptions had been made where Cindira was concerned. Her personal communication device, aka her comque, wasn’t monitored by Tybor security, so she avoided being geotagged. If she occasionally entered an underground hackdome, it was overlooked – as long as she was discreet.

  Cindira looked about, sizing up the potential competition, noting a few repeat adversaries. The Stadium, a vaunted San Francisco hangout that didn’t suffer from its misnomer of a name, strove to be anything more than a dive, serving pirate coders and closeted hackers alike. “Get Jack, jacked in, and jackpot” painted in gold letters over the bar advertised its biggest cash cows: alcohol, semi-legal jackpods, and VR tournaments. Black market cryptocurrencies provided for her entry fees and allowed Cindira to collect her earnings without a trace.

  Easing into something she knew Scotia wouldn’t let her back down from, Cindira sat back and nursed her drink. “Which round am I in?”

  “The sixth.”

  “The master’s round?” Forehead pressed by her splayed out hand, Cindira groaned. “I wash my hands of your fiscal irresponsibility.”

  Scotia cackled. “Does that mean I get to keep it all if I win?”

  “No, you pressured me into being here, so usual terms apply. All losses yours, all winnings are 40% mine.”

  They caught up on the office gossip, waiting. Finally, the speakers hummed as the gamemaster, after seating Cindira’s opponent, called out her handle. “Welcome to jackpod number four, Mistress of Cinders.”

  “To the victor!” Cindira tipped up her glass, hoping to empty it out and fill herself with courage, before placing it, rim down, on the table.

  Across the table, Scotia mimicked the move, adding, “Whomever she should be.”

  Unlike the Ferries, the Stadium had to keep up the appearance of being a legitimate business. If you wandered in at the right time of day, their burgers and fries weren’t too bad, as long as you didn’t put too much thought into what meat you were actually eating. Raids, if unusual, did happen, generally with the election of a new mayor or death of a formerly prominent chiphead that led to an outcry by social reform groups. Consequently, the Stadium kept its jackpods under the bar. Literally. Storage closets on the north and south side of the joint concealed hidden staircases that descended to a dank cellar just large enough to host two devices each. The players, for obvious reasons, had come to refer to the jackpods as “the coffins.”

  Cindira shivered as she descended, a misty, mildewy kiss of air blowing across her forehead. “You know if we ever get trapped down here when there’s a tsunami, we’re both dead, right?”

  “Tsunami?” Scotia scoffed. “A basement in San Francisco, and ocean levels still on the rise? I’m surprised this isn’t an aquarium already. I promise, if the water starts creeping in, I’ll hit the emergency shut down button on the pod and get you out of here.”

  Two ancient jackpods sat before them, each sprouting wires from its underside like weeds. “Coffin” wasn’t too off a description, really. Except for the fact that the devices had transparent walls and a neural saddle that looked like an upside-down pasta drainer, the similarity couldn’t be overstated. On the opposite end of the bar, her opponent would be shimmying into his saddle, and she needed to do the same.

  Scotia tried to calm Cindira’s nerves with levity. “All ready for you, Sleeping Beauty.”

  The coder grimaced as she used a small step stool to climb up into the device. “Any sign of water, right?”

  “The smallest drop, and I’ll eject you.”

  She tried to ignore the smell of sweat and trace amounts of urine that clung to the inside of the jackpod. Even though death in the vreal world didn’t render physical effects in reality, the suggestion to the brain of injury was enough for the host body to react poorly sometimes. So far, Cindira had never felt that kind of fear. She always won, what would she be afraid of?

  As she sat back and nodded to Scotia to close the lid, her hand felt for the power button on her right side.

  BLACK WISPS SPIRALED in a distant gray sky. Cindira gave herself a moment to adjust to both the weight and feel of this alien body. Her massive hands shouldn’t surprise her, but platforms that forced her to embody someone so different from her true self always disorientated. She hated the cheap, catalog avatars used in underground arenas like this one, avatars coded as standardized characters without reference to the player’s own concept of self.

  Tybor’s coders build custom-made avatars that fit their users’ self-projection—true or otherwise—like a glove as they strode about The Kingdom – Tybor’s true cash cow, a VR playground for the rich and famous. Cindira rarely entered The Kingdom, as busy as she was with proving herself at her job, showing that she was more than the CEO’s daughter, that she was the company’s best coder.

  Deep breaths through her mouth acclimated Cindira’s native neural processes to the faux experiences, as well as let her feel her own mass. And, God, she was massive. Two-fifty stretched out on a tall, muscular frame, weighted down with armor. Not that it would do her any good. What counted in the arena was brains, not brawn.

  Around her feet lay a ramshackle collection of tools and weapons: lumber, axe blades, rope, spears, stones, swords of varying shapes and sizes... a mirror image to those that her foe would have. Straw bales formed a wall around them, both as a way to force the fight into tight quarters, and to simplify the virtual platform and speed its performance. The system read the code the player thought, stringing together the tools provided into weapons of choice. Outside of this manipulation, real world rules still held. Gravity couldn’t be overwritten. Day would not become
night. The dead didn’t come back to life.

  The one left standing at the end won, in whatever way that came to pass.

  Overhead, horns blared, and within two blinks, her opponent’s avatar took shape across the arena. Only by seeing her enemy could she truly see herself, for what united also divided. Each had the same goal; to conquer. The only difference, the color of their tunics. Cindira’s was blue, her adversary’s, orange.

  “Mistress of Cinders.” He didn’t look at her when he spoke, instead leaning over to take up one of the staffs from his armory. “Finally, a worthy competitor.”

  “I didn’t catch your handle.”

  Cindira kept her eyes fixed on him as he leaned the staff against his shoulder while testing the weight of a grapefruit-sized wedge of rock in his hand. A show, of course. Neither would forget that, even now back in the Stadium, the crowd watching on the aeroprojectors hurried to get their bets registered before one of the competitors made the first strike.

  “I’m called Barrel. I’m not sure why, but that’s all part of the mystique, isn’t it?”

  “Barrel?” She searched her memory and found it wanting. “I don’t remember seeing you on any of the master boards at the Stadium.”

  “Never competed there before, but they let me into the sixth round by recommendation.” He strained as he familiarized himself with the balance of his newly-coded weapon, an impressive meld of axe blade to long staff that reminded Cindira of the Grim Reaper’s sickle. “Best of battle to you, Mistress.”

  “And to you.” She returned the customary salutation moments before he ran for her at full force, the staff pulled back to his right side.

  He might as well have been narrating his attack.

  Barrel swung only seconds after Cindira stepped to her left, giving his axe nothing but air to rend. Speed turned against him as his center of gravity shifted. Her adversary fell to the ground in a harrumph, barely avoiding the bite of his own weapon.

  Barrel bellowed. “Coward! Diving away from an attack.”

  “I stepped away from an attempted attack,” she returned. “You think the rules are different here? They’re not. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Was true when Sun Tzu said it thousands of years ago. It’s still true now, even in a virtual arena.”

  In a flash, Barrel regained his feet. “Thanks for the philosophy lesson, let me give you one in anatomy.”

  The swing came quicker this time, so much that Cindira found it difficult to maneuver her avatar’s bulk away. Barrel kept a striking distance, supplemented by a step. He was a quick learner, she’d give him that. Unlikely he’d try running at her full force again.

  She needed a weapon, but the opponent lay between her armaments and herself, and only the wall of haystacks lay behind her. Those weren’t weapons, but it didn’t mean they were useless. He’d need to be closer, though.

  Cindira put up her empty hands as she sidled back, drawing him by instinct in her direction. “The fight seems unfair, given that I’m unarmed.” Her back hit the boundary.

  “You had as much time to choose a weapon as I did.” He pulled back his staff again. “Or maybe you don’t know the simple code it takes to weave together wood, metal, and rope. I can teach you – for a price. Hyuah!”

  Dry shafts of grass scratched her fingers as she pulled the straw bale behind to her front. Barrel’s weapon anchored deep within, the curvature of the blade a disadvantage, catching the bound stack that now gained strength in its formation. With one vigorous yank, Cindira took Barrel’s weapon from his hands, throwing the impaled bale to the far end of the arena.

  “There.” She rubbed her palms down the front of her shirt. “Now we’re even again.”

  Red faced, Barrel guffawed. “You... cheated! The bales aren’t weapons!”

  “Everything here is a weapon, if you figure out a way to use it. The wall’s held together by a weak repeating code, but it’s easily undone. I could teach you – for a price.”

  “Why, you—”

  His response came too suddenly for her to dodge. The force of his blow knocked Cindira from her feet. Strong, angry hands encircled her throat. Left, right, up... no direction offered solace. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe brawn would win over brain.

  Virtual death didn’t affect the real-world body, but the mind still felt the pain. Stars burst around the edges of her vision, blackness creeping in. She might as well surrender; her dead body would only up Scotia’s losses. But the movement of something on the edge of her vision drew Cindira’s attention. A flash of white fur, the scurry of tiny feet. Some sort of rodent? She’d never seen one in the arena before, but then again, she’d never been pinned to the ground, moments from defeat.

  The creature was gone, but it had drawn her eyes to the only thing that could save her now: the stockade of weapons she’d ignored earlier. What she wouldn’t give now for one of the swords, or even an axe. If wishes were weapons, Barrel would fall down dead. But no code she knew of could make things fly through the air.

  “Why won’t you yield, already?” Barrel’s grip clenched even tighter. “You should be dead!”

  The dead did not wage war. Cindira struggled to make her muscles obey, drawing up her left hand to signal while her brain attempted to piece together the necessary lines of code that would tell the program she’d surrendered. Barrel’s grin widened, but only for a scant moment. The very next, his eyes filled with terror. Suddenly his hands were off her as he backed away.

  “What in the hell?”

  Cindira sat up, sputtering, spinning around to follow her opponent’s gaze, when she too saw it. Every weapon, every blade, every staff, even the fist-sized rocks, floated in the air, poised to strike.

  She blinked, and every one of them rushed forward, streaming through the air. Cindira swallowed her scream and squeezed her eyes shut. To victor was one thing. To disseminate your opponent limb from limb was quite another.

  “JESUS CHRIST, CINDIRA, get out! Get out of that, quick!”

  Cindira opened her eyes, seeing not the bloody gore she’d just caused, but the hood of the jackpod lifting away.

  Smoke stained the air as she sat up, looking around in confusion, trying to find the source of the heat against her face. Had the jackpod overheated? She couldn’t move fast enough. Adrenaline pumping through her veins pushed her to her feet and into Scotia’s hold. The redhead pulled Cindira clear as white fogged the air. A bartender bearing a fire hydrant rushed past, followed by the surly gamemaster who managed the floor.

  “No winner!” He threw his hands wildly through the air. “System error! No winner! All bets void!”

  The crowd groaned, some shouting that Cindira had clearly been defeated, others saying that she had been on the edge of turning the tide.

  Confusion clouded Cindira’s thoughts. “Scotia?”

  “You heard him, system error.” The redhead didn’t pause, too concerned with making the door. “Weapons don’t just fly through the air unless something goes wrong. Hurry up, we have to get out of here before anyone tries to claim you were cheating. I don’t know who the hell this Barrel is, but he was seconds away from making a half mill off your defeat.”

  “So what? He didn’t lose anything. You heard the gamemaster, all bets void.”

  “I don’t care. A man who can throw that kind of black market crypto at the Stadium isn’t someone we want knowing who we really are.”

  Scotia may not have been alone in her thinking. As normality reclaimed her and Cindira became more in tune with her real-world surroundings, she found herself in a stream of people heading to the exit, though that also could be because the smell of smoke filled the air.

  “Glitches happen,” she tried to argue, looking back over her shoulder in hopes of catching a glimpse of someone befitting the name Barrel. “I’m sure it’s really not that big... of a... d—”

  Her words died when she saw him: Cade Fife, staring back at her with equal doses of confusion and disbelief. What the
hell was her step-brother doing at the Stadium? It wasn’t the high-class, in-crowd hangout he and his twin sister Kaylie usually frequented. Stalking Scotia, maybe? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Or...

  Cindira came to a stark realization: her step-brother was spying on her. To what end, she didn’t want to imagine, and if she should find herself in a verbal shouting match with whomever ‘Barrel’ was, news getting back to her step-mother and eventually her father couldn’t be stopped.

  Cindira felt the need to be gone ASAP, outpacing Scotia in three steps and pulling her friend insistently forward by the hand.

  “You’re right. Let’s bolt.”

  2

  Cindira Tieg observed her father’s second wife from the only acceptable position: at a distance. Standing at the back of the crowd came with other benefits, though. Best of which was that no one noticed you, and the last thing she wanted today was to be noticed. Already, it felt like the secret of her narrow escape the night before had taken on mass, a bowling ball imbedded in the pit of her stomach that should make everyone gawk at her.

  So far, though, so good. As Kaylie gloated at the right hand of her own mother, none of the Tybor employees in the lobby had a vantage from which to notice Cindira’s angry frown. Perhaps Johanna, standing at the front, could have noticed, if she ever cared to lend Cindira a sympathetic eye. Sadly, the mild-mannered code writer knew the only time her step-mother gave her any consideration was when barking out commands or passive-aggressive insults.

  “There was a healthy crop of candidates, both from outside and within Tybor, worthy to fill the vacant Director’s position.” Bold, blond, and voluptuous, Johanna also had a tongue forked in the middle, even if metaphorically. “At the end of the day, the candidate who embodied our ideals, was a proven leader, and has shown herself to be not only competent but cerebral in the broadening and emboldening of our platforms, became obvious. Yes, she is also my daughter, but Kaylie’s innovation to create vreal estate within The Kingdom environment itself has led to our biggest quarterly growth of profits since we launched fifteen years ago.”