Kingmakers, Graduation

12. Adrik

12

ADRIK

T he arcade is a playful cacophony of light and color—the old-school 8-bit graphics of Pac-Man and Centipede bleeping and blaring next to the thunderous surround sound of a brand-new Transformers game.

Rafe loads up a couple of cards with credits, passing one to Sabrina and one to Nix so they can swipe at will.

Nix runs directly over to Tomb Raider , swiping for all four of us.

Sabrina lifts her plastic gun, connected to the console with a long, thin cord. She racks the slide like she’s ejecting a cartridge from a Glock, peering down the sight with a practiced eye.

“Take it easy, Lara Croft,” I tease her. “The game hasn’t even s tarted.”

“You better take it serious,” she says. “I will be judging you.”

I already know Sabrina well enough to recognize that most things that come out of her mouth sounding like jokes are nothing less than the absolute truth. She watches every move I make. There’s a tally in her head where she scores what she thinks of me.

I’m not afraid to perform under pressure.

I rack my own slide, gun pointed at the screen, counting down the seconds until the game starts.

It’s a melee from the moment we begin. Rafe, Nix, and Sabrina are fresh out of Marksmanship class, and I hit the range three times a week. We’re obliterating bad guys before they’ve halfway popped their heads up on screen, the scores tallying so rapidly that the numbers flow by like a ticker tape.

Rafe is steady and relentless, Nix aggressive and utterly locked in. Most of my attention is on Sabrina—she flicks her gun across the screen so fast I can hardly follow her, anticipating the movement patterns of the characters, focusing on headshots for the highest point value.

She doesn’t know this game as well as I do. The little gold relics are key to scoring bonus points. Sabrina hits three, but I nail six in total, beating her score by two hundred.

This angers her. As playful as Sabrina can be, in competition she’s deadly serious.

“Let’s play again,” she barks.

“There’s a billion other games,” Nix says, pulling Sabrina along so she’s forced to drop her plastic gun. “Come on, I wanna race in Mario. ”

Sabrina takes the first round of Mario Kart , ruthlessly nailing Nix with an exploding blue turtle shell an inch from the finish line and zipping past her with a cackle that shows her complete lack of remorse. Rafe wins the next round, via some bullshit with a POW Block.

Then Nix takes us to school on a carnival-style game where you throw plastic balls at ugly grinning clowns that pop up from all corners of the marquee.

When we switch to Walking Dead it’s my time to shine. It’s a two-player game, so Rafe and Nix split off to shoot dinosaurs on Jurassic World , while Sabrina and I slaughter zombies head-to-head.

Sabrina is good at shooter games, but she’s not as familiar with the crossbow console. She hisses in fury as I sweep the first round, obliterating 128 zombies to her paltry 96.

“Next chapter,” she orders, swiping our cards again.

This time she’s locked in, finger curled on the trigger, nailing zombies dead between the eyes the instant they appear on-screen. She’s so aggressive that each zombie is a race to see which of us can strike first, the shambling figures lighting up in blue or green, depending on whose arrow hit home first.

I start out ahead. As the level progresses, she creeps up on me—28 to 21. Then 44 to 39. Then 60 to 58 …

“I’m gonna get you, motherfucker,” Sabrina mutters, sparing no glance away from the screen.

She’s about to pass me when the NPC jumps directly in the way, taking an arrow to the head that Sabrina intended for a SWAT zombie in riot gear .

“You dumb bitch!” Sabrina shrieks at the hapless avatar.

The game deducts points for executing a human, and I get the credit for the SWAT zombie instead.

“Aww, so close,” I say, as our round ends 132 to 131.

Sabrina is pissed. She wants to win every minute, all the time. And she particularly wants to beat me.

I fucking love it. There’s no on and off switch in my head either—I’m full-throttle. I’d never take it easy on her. I’d never let her win. I couldn’t be with someone who would expect that of me.

“ Halo ?” I say.

Sabrina doesn’t answer—she snatches up our card and marches directly over to the Halo consoles.

There are two types of game on offer: classic arcade or team battle, where you can access the online database and play with anyone from all over the world.

I’m pleased to see that Sabrina selects the latter. Team battle is more complex and challenging. You’re not just shooting aliens—there’s real strategy involved.

“Should we play together?” I ask Sabrina.

“You fucking wish,” she says, swiping our card.

As the game loads, I cast a quick glance at Sabrina, separated from me by a partial barrier that prevents me looking at her screen. I can still see the curve of her back and the long fall of her hair, densely black like coal, thick and textured.

She’s nothing like a Russian girl. In spirit, she’s all American—boisterous, overconfident, ambitious. In looks, she’s a citizen of nowher e. I’ve never seen anything quite like her, not even at Kingmakers where students hail from all over the globe.

Sabrina was judging my reflexes—now I’m running an evaluation of my own.

Video games are more useful than an IQ test. Assuming everyone knows how to play, the smartest person wins. That’s how I first met Chief — I watched him run train against Andrei and Hakim in Halo. Despite his awkwardness and the wardrobe literally picked out by his mother, I could see how brilliant he is. I called him Master Chief after the main character in the game. He loves the nickname — guys like him don’t always get the respect they deserve.

“First to fifty kills wins,” I call to Sabrina, to annoy her.

“ I’m aware,” she hisses.

It’s four vs. four, each of us paired up with three random teammates.

From the moment we spawn, I’m hunting for Sabrina.

In Halo , the key to winning is to have a high kill-to-death ratio. You want to murder as many members of the opposing team as possible before taking a bullet yourself.

I’m staying in close proximity to my teammates because smart teams stick together.

As soon as we spot the opposing team, I start hurling grenades. You can chuck them before you get close enough to shoot, and if you’re precise enough, you can bounce grenades off objects and even around corners .

I hear Sabrina curse, and I know I must have hit her shield. She’s not dead though. Before I can close in and shoot her with my pistol, she bolts and disappears.

Sneaky little bastard—she knows it’s a battle she can’t win, two-against-one with my teammate close by.

She’s a fucking shadow, not sticking with her team at all, but running across the map solo, constantly changing positions, picking off stragglers then melting away again.

My team is still winning. We’re up 24-20, because I’m leading the group like a phalanx. I get the gravity hammer and rack up six kills in a row, though none are the person I most want to smash.

“Where are you hiding?” I mutter.

Sabrina can hear me—we’re only two feet apart. But she stays silent, only the clicks of her sticks telling me that she’s in motion, not hunkered down somewhere.

I see a shimmer of red out of the corner of my eye. Sabrina bursts from cover, ambushing me under the protection of an over-shield. Impervious to my hammer blast, she shoots me twice in the face.

I’m out for ten seconds—the longest ten seconds of my life. Sabrina uses my absence to go on a fucking rampage. She kills two of my teammates in the first three seconds, an achievement the game commemorates by declaring “DOUBLE KILL!” at top volume.

“You hear that?” Sabrina calls.

I grit my teeth, watching the seconds count down until I’m back in the game.

“TRIPLE KILL!” the game announces, as Sabrina murders my last remaining teammate .

“I think that was all of you,” Sabrina says, so smugly that I have to restrain myself from karate-kicking the barrier between us.

The moment I’m back in the game, I sprint for Sabrina. I’m determined to blast her shield off and send her to purgatory in revenge. Catching sight of her, I lob the most beautiful grenade right at her feet, bouncing it straight into her shield, cracking it off like a cantaloupe.

Now she’s back to normal, unprotected, me against her. I’d planned to follow up that grenade with a pistol shot to the face, but Sabrina is a fucking jumping bean. She won’t stay still for even an instant, leaping and darting through 3-D space, up and backward and around, using her grappling hook to yank herself around like Spider-Man.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I laugh, trying to blast her.

Sabrina responds by grappling directly over me and shooting me in the back.

I can’t fucking believe it.

I’m out again. Sabrina celebrates by raining terror on my hapless team for ten excruciating seconds.

This time when I respawn, I’m determined to get the over-shield myself. It’s due to regenerate in twenty seconds, and I know exactly where to find it. I jog to the spot, arriving precisely when the game announces, “OVER-SHIELD INCOMING …”

I crouch under cover, knowing better than to run out in the open before it appears, counting down silently in my head.

With two seconds remaining, I break cover .

Only for Sabrina to catapult down from the ramparts and land right on top of me, smashing me in the back of the head with her rifle.

Instant kill.

From behind the barrier, I hear her soft chuckle.

“I knew you’d go for that shield.”

I could kill her right now. Not in Halo —in real life.

When I spawn again, I hunt for Sabrina with a fury I’ve never known. I abandon my teammates to their fate, searching the map for the one and only person I want to see. Finally, I spot her in my peripheral, but I don’t turn my character toward her. I keep running on a straight axis like I have no idea she’s there.

As soon as we reach a junction point, I double back. Sabrina throws her grenades where I should have been.

When I run up behind her, she’s already got her gun up, waiting for me to round the corner, thinking she’s gonna shoot me in the face.

“Looking for someone?” I chortle, hitting her in the back and killing her instantly.

Before she can respawn, the game ends, 50-46. Sabrina’s team wins.

She pokes her head around the barrier, eyes blazing with fury, no hint of celebration on her face.

“Again,” she demands.

“Only if we play together.”

She pauses, considering.

“Alright. ”

The game that follows is the most enjoyable round of Halo I’ve ever played. Now that I don’t have to worry about Sabrina murdering me, it’s Christmas Day. We snatch up every super-weapon, raining terror on the opposing team, killing everyone in sight like we’re invincible and they’re standing still.

Her play is so elegant that I have to stop for a moment just to observe. I’m watching a symphony composed on screen in front of me. Sabrina tracks the other team, triangulating with me, running to where she thinks the other players will respawn before they even appear, killing them before they can look around.

She uses her weapons in a cascade, swapping through one after another for maximum efficiency and speed. She memorizes the map, taking shortcuts, popping up where you’d least expect her.

Most of all, it’s a fucking clinic of headshots. If you miss a headshot you get nothing, so a smart gamer starts at the chest and works up to the head. Sabrina is headshots ONLY. She misses on occasion, but her accuracy is so high that her total points double anyone on the opposing team.

She’s better than me.

I don’t like to admit that, and I sure as fuck don’t say it lightly. But she’s a little more talented at Halo , and maybe even just a little bit smarter than me.

When we lay our controllers down, Sabrina turns, face flushed in triumph.

“So?” she says. “What do you think?”

“I think I always want you on my team.”