Running hurt. Maybe that was why she liked it. The old Lyra had hated running. Now, she could go distances. The problem was that, over time, it started hurting a little less. So every day, she pushed herself further.
And further. And further.
Her parents and friends had been bewildered when she’d given up dancing for this. She’d held out until November of her senior year of high school, a year ago, nearly to the day. She’d faked it as long as she could. But even she wasn’t a good enough actress to fake the kind of dancer she’d been. Before.
It seemed wrong that her whole life had been derailed by a dream. A single memory. Lyra had known that her biological father was dead—but not that he’d committed suicide, not that she’d been there. She’d repressed the trauma so thoroughly, it hadn’t even existed for her. One day she’d been a normal, happy teenager, and the next—literally overnight—she wasn’t.
Wasn’t normal. Wasn’t okay, let alone happy.
Her parents knew—not what had changed but that something had. She’d fled to a faraway college, but look where that had gotten her. Scholarships only covered so much. Her parents had told her that the remainder of her out-of-state tuition wasn’t an issue, but clearly, they’d lied, which probably meant Lyra hadn’t done nearly as good a job at pretending to be normal as she’d thought.
As she ran—no matter how far she ran—Lyra’s brain kept cycling back to the same conclusion: I have to drop out. That would buy some time at least, take one bill off her parents’ plate. The prospect of quitting college shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t like Lyra had made friends this semester or even tried to. She’d coasted through her classes like an academically inclined zombie. She was just treading water.
But that was better than drowning.
Gritting her teeth, Lyra picked up her speed. This far into a run, that shouldn’t have been feasible. But sometimes, all you could do was push.
By the time she stopped, she could barely breathe. The track blurring in front of her, Lyra bent over, her hands on her knees, sucking in oxygen. And some asshole chose that moment to catcall her. Like she’d bent over just for him.
A moment later, a soccer ball rolled to a stop by her side.
Lyra glanced up, spotted a group of guys waiting to see how she would react, and spent a few seconds wondering what the collective noun for asshole was.
A bevy? A clutch?
No, Lyra thought, picking up the ball. A circus. The circus of assholes probably wasn’t expecting her to punt the ball over their heads toward the goal, but her dad was a high school soccer coach, and once her body knew how to do something, it never forgot.
“Missed!” one of the guys yelled, cackling. The ball hit the crossbar at an angle, ricocheted off, and smacked the jerk who’d catcalled her in the back of his head.
“No,” Lyra called out. “I didn’t.”
 |
Dropping out was the right move. The only move. But when Lyra tried to walk up the steps to the Registrar’s Office, she ended up a block away at the campus post office instead.
I’m going to do it. I just need a minute. Lyra walked mechanically to her PO box. She wasn’t expecting mail. This was pure procrastination, but that
didn’t stop her from turning the key and opening the box.
Inside, there was an envelope made of thick linen paper. No return address. She reached for it. The envelope was heavier than it looked. No postage. Lyra froze. This envelope—whatever it was—hadn’t been mailed.
Looking back over her shoulder, feeling suddenly like she was being watched, Lyra ripped the envelope open. There were two items inside.
The first was a thin sheet of paper with a message scrawled across it in dark-blue ink. YOU DESERVE THIS. As she read the words, the paper began crumbling in her hands. Seconds later, there was nothing left but dust.
Acutely aware of the way her heart was beating in her chest—pounding against the inside of her rib cage with brutal, repetitive force—Lyra reached for the second item in the envelope. It was the size of a folded letter, but the instant her fingers brushed its golden edge, she realized that it was made of metal—very thin metal.
Removing it from the envelope, Lyra saw that the metal was engraved: three words, plus a symbol. Not a symbol, she realized. A QR code, just waiting to be scanned. Reading the words told Lyra exactly what she held in her hand.
This was a ticket, an invitation, a summons. The words engraved above the code were instantly recognizable—to her, to anyone on the planet with access to media of any kind.
The Grandest Game.
