Scary Out There Read Free

unremarkable chinos and, of course, the mask.
    Nim stopped in the shadow of an overturned train car to wait for the dog, and when it caught up, she stepped across the subway rail and onto the Doomsday Glass. She did it slowly, carefully. The dog followed her.
    The second its feet touched the glass, it seemed to tremble and grow bigger. She wondered if it would die. Explode. Attack. But it only shimmered slightly, then stayed where it was.
    The boy was still standing on the tracks. As soon as he caught Nim’s eye, she looked away. She felt dumb, but not dumb enough to stare him down. Sometimes boys could be weird about her and Margaret when it came to the game.
    Case in point: There was a club that met after school to trade tactics and sell each other mods. Nim had gone once, thinking it might be fun—she could share her talent for finding secret items or at least be in a room with people who liked the same things she did. She and Margaret had been the only girls. Alex Ford’s girlfriend was apparently a member, but she was at volleyball practice.
    Almost immediately Nim had caused a stir by voicing her thoughts on how there were thirty costumes for her avatar, and every single one of them was a dress.
    â€œLook, I like the game,” she’d said. It was an understatement that felt more like a cinder block. “I just think it would be neat for everyone to not see my underwear—okay?”
    This spawned a philosophical discussion on whether the digital panties of an avatar were really even her underwear.
    When Nim had tried to offer an olive branch—a really premium piece of intel about a Spirit Lamp that was somewhere in the Iron Wood—no one seemed to care much, andAustin Bauer, who’d been in all her math classes since the eighth grade and was usually not a total dickbag, had actually told her it didn’t exist.
    After that, the meeting had mostly consisted of making fun of Nim for anything that seemed remotely girly. For giving her avatar a pretty hat. For caring about things like basic human decency and pants. For decorating her screen name with little demon-runes when they all passed around a sign-up sheet to share their launch codes in case anyone wanted to meet up on a particular board. Surprise—in the three weeks since they’d attended the meeting, no one had expressed any interest in meeting up with Nim or Margaret.
    The whole thing had turned into one big, stupid obstacle course where the obstacle was always to prove that she knew what she was talking about. And every time she did, her proof was deemed insufficient and she was given another test, and another, just for committing the grievous offense of wishing her character could wear pants.
    The next weekend Nim had been poking around in the Iron Wood and seen the supposedly nonexistent Spirit Lamp glittering beneath the roots of a thorn tree. She’d snagged the lamp, gotten the trophy, and—only partially out of spite—posted her triumph to the achievements board. She hadn’t gone back to the games club.
    The skin thieves were closer now, clattering through the rubble. They were coming for her. She backed away, tradingher knife for a scythe. She was efficient and precise, but not stupid. They might be weak alone, but they could still be dangerous in packs.
    And then, as the thieves came slobbering at her around the Doomsday Glass, the dog did something quite surprising. It lunged from the glass and began to savage them.
    So. Nim had found the place where the simple collided with the ingenious. Everything made sense again, and everything was even better than she’d thought. It was a good day.
    Later though, when she logged out of Subway Run, there was a new message blinking on her dashboard. It was short and strange. It said:
    From: jkx0x0
    Hey Sugar,
    You’re not as good as you think you are.
    It was signed Mr. No One
    Nim looked at it a long time. Then she hit the button and deleted