Double-Blind: A Modern LITRPG-Chapter 316

The rain began. It’d been overcast since early morning, but now the fog and early stillness was replaced with a near constant drizzle. Jackson navigated in a way few people could without GPS assistance, switching from thoroughfares to side roads to alleys and back again, all while maintaining a near constant state of momentum.

“Ever drive professionally?” I asked, making idle conversation as I composed another message.

“Not really. A little in the sandbox.” Jackson squinted, following the brake lights of a not-Range Rover that’d just blown the light in front of us. “Mostly just Ubered in the early twenty twenties, while I was figuring shit out.”

“Rough time to pick up Uber.”

This 𝓬ontent is taken from freeweɓnovel.cѳm.

“Eh, kept me locked in. Sense of danger and all. The downtime meant plenty of time to think, which made it conducive to said figuring-of-shit. Spun my wheels while I was spinning my wheels, if that makes sense.”

It did. But between the logical jumps at Miles’ flat, and the timing of him clearing the evaluation, the small, paranoid part of my mind wouldn’t shut the hell up. Miles’ had a lot of military and federal contacts. He had experience running undercover ops. So if he’d been more suspicious of me than I’d realized, it wasn’t much of a jump to imagine him pushing some of his civilian friends in the direction of Kinsley’s ever growing workforce.

“You drove here? In Dallas?”

“I did.” Jackson confirmed. “Primary source of income for a while, pathetic as it was. Kept me buoyant until some of the squaddie chuckle fucks that went private got in touch and roped me in.”

I tilted my head, deciding whether or not the question was even worth asking. It was relatively common knowledge. Especially if you’d actually worked the gig. But with the internet shuttered, common wasn’t as common as it used to be.

“God, the shit we used to argue about.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose and chuckled self-deprecatingly. “Had some friends on the apps. Not full-time, most were students. They never shut up about who paid better, Lyft or Uber.”

“Well, they were definitely part-timers.” Jackson shook his head. “Never understood the concept of brand loyalty. Sure, if you’re just stopping in for weekend money, maybe that conversation’s worth having. But if you’re out there grinding—and I mean ten plus hours a day, seven days a week, killing-your-car-in-half-a-decade grinding—you’d know the real enemy isn’t whoever you ain’t working for.”

“No?”

“It’s the downtime.” Jackson’s mouth turned downward as he relieved the memory. “Supply isn’t consistent. When it comes to anything, really, but you see it as a driver more than most. In the times you’re sitting in the back of some grocery store parking lot, idling, low-key pissed off that you’re shortening the lifespan of your vehicle for someone else’s quick queue time. So most people—the ones who really want to grind? They keep both running in the background. Take whoever pings them first for whatever ain’t a thirty-second drive down the street. Minimize the downtime. It’s the only realistic way to stay solvent. And hell, sane for that matter.

“How fittingly mercenary.” I smiled a little.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

It was the right answer. I set up a false equivalency, kept it vague and non-interrogative, didn’t lead him to it, and he still got it. That didn’t mean he couldn’t still be a plant, but the story at least, passed the sniff test.

Still, it was better to only expose him to the parts of this I was willing to let Miles’ know about. Everything else would need to be underhanded.

“Top floor?” Jackson confirmed.

“Yep.” I agreed, reclining a little in the passenger seat. We’d already made several similar drops, but this was possibly the most important. And if we failed to stop the second transposition, it would be. “You want to go over it again?”

“No need.” Jackson pointed to his shaved head as he maneuvered the car up another ramp. “Got it all up here.”

“Alright then.”

We pulled into a spot near the ramp. Across the large lot, Sara—Vice Chief of the Adventurer’s Guild—sat on the open trunk of an old, pre-system SUV, one leg pulled up to her chest, features pulled into a preternatural scowl. Not wanting to be spotted, I hit the side handle of the civic and leaned back, under the windows and out of sight.

Intuitively, Jackson pulled off, close enough to see Sara through the rearview and hear their conversation through a cracked window.

Jackson turned to me, a little more tense than I expected. “We already talked about this. But I just want to reiterate. Whatever you’ve got in there—” He pointed to the large black binder stuffed with paper on my lap. “—Isn’t gonna piss off the entire AG? Because I’m not looking for smoke. Not with them. Not with the way things are right now.”

I shook my head. “It’ll only help. Assuming they bother to read it.”

“They will. If it is what you say it is. Some anonymous motherfucker sends you a bunch of intel through a proxy, curiosity alone pretty much guarantees it. Whether they take it seriously?”

“Harder to say.” I agreed.

“Yep.”

His door opened and slammed shut, and then he was gone, moving at an unhurried pace towards Sara.

She spotted him quickly, sitting up, planting her idle leg flat on the pavement. “You the asshole that’s been blowing up my DMs since this morning?”

Their voices were faint but echoed off the pavement.

“Ahah. No ma’am. Apologies, on behalf of my benefactor.”

Sara hit a vape, half shrugged, her expression shrewd. “They happen to explain how they managed to leave their name off the messages? Haven’t seen that much.”

“No ma’am, did not.” Jackson stopped around ten feet from her, his voice warm and congenial.

“Got a name, either of you?”

“Never gave me theirs. Unfortunately, mine was recently misplaced.”

“Cute.” Sara hit her vape again, and in the time it took me to wonder when, exactly, she’d started smoking, stood and slammed the trunk of her sedan. “My first instinct was to ignore this. That was probably the right call. I don’t have time for a cloak and dagger. Let your client know when they—he, lets be real, only men do this shit and a woman wouldn’t have sent a male messenger to meet another woman alone in a parking lot—wanna stop jerking off and get serious, contact me. With their name attached.”

She fished her keys out of her inventory.

“Really sure you want to do that?” Jackson challenged, not showing an inch of concern.

“Because whatever you have in that folder is that valuable?” Sara rolled her eyes. “Yeah, really sure I do.” She spun the keys by the ring. “Gonna make this complicated?”

It was an unfortunate miscalculation on my part. I knew Sara was stressed. She’d been stressed ever since the Adventurer’s Guild’s haphazard venture into the transposition left Tyler gravely injured, on a slow road to recovery that he was still traveling, even to this day.

“You know, I’m a fan.” Jackson said.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

What?

“What?” Sara peered at him suspiciously, thrown by the sudden pivot.

“Maybe that’s a weird thing to admit, being a fan of someone who’s out there, doing the same sorta thing you could do if the system distributed the marvel powers in your favor, but it is what it is. I’m a fan.”

Sara’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re a stalker. And a civilian.”

“Civvy yes, stalker no. Just watched the footage like everyone else. You’re scrappy. Put the AG on the map for me. Same for a lot of other ordinary folks. Overseer focused on the scary bastards. But you gave us someone we could root for. Someone out there defending us squares, watchin’ out for people who couldn’t defend themselves. Lost your arm for it. Thank you for that.” There was no deception in his voice. Only gratitude.

Jackson gave Sara a casual, left-handed salute, then walked away.

She stared after him, mouth tight, until she finally spoke. “Okay, wait.”

Still facing away from her, Jackson flashed a grin, reining it in as he turned around. “Yes?”

Sara glanced away. “I’ll listen to what you have to say. But only after you tell me your name. Maybe that’s petty, but that’s what I’m asking.”

“It won’t help you.”

“Forget it—”

“Jackson,” He said.

Sara blinked, again thrown by the pivot. “Why… wouldn’t that help me?”

“Canvass the neighborhood for middle-aged black guys named Jackson, and you’ll find out.” Jackson grinned.

The Adventurer’s Guild leader very obviously held back a laugh. “Fair enough. Uh… shit. Sorry for being a bitch.” She sighed. “Wouldn’t believe the number of messages we get from looneys and would-be soothsayers who think they’re the center of the universe and hold the answer to everything.” Dropping her guard, Sara approached Jackson and shook his hand.

“Can’t speak to that, but anyone with eyes can see mental health ain’t so great right now.”

“That’s the truth. So what are we doing here?” Sara asked, regaining her seriousness.

Jackson wiggled the binder, then held it out to her. “Won’t go as far as to offer the answers to everything, but do have the honor of handing over the keys to the next transposition.”

“Really?” Sara raised an eyebrow.

“Points of leverage on every region and the guilds that hold them. Insights into a couple of places everybody has questions about, and how to approach those places should they become a threat.”

“Is that all?” Sara asked, understandably skeptical.

“No. That’s the first half. Second section is practical abstract. Strategies, worst-case scenarios, possible directions the next Transposition could take, along with methods to ensure joint cooperation in those scenarios.”

She nodded along, uncommitted. “And what’s all this gonna cost me, Jackson?”

“That’s the best part. It’s not.” He held the binder out to her.

It was difficult to make out from the rear-view window, but Sera’s face seemed to cycle through several expressions, before she landed back on skepticism. She took the binder from him and grimaced from the weight. “Jesus. It’s a fucking doorstopper.”

“Uhuh.”

“So it’s free.”

“It is.”

“No strings attached, no favors owed.”

“Not a one.”

As if testing to see if he’d stop her, Sera flipped the binder open, cradling it with her constructed arm and flipping through the pages. She paused several times, whisper reading the contents, growing more concerned with every section. She took her time. “I… have questions.”

“Happy to answer what I can.”

“There’s a lot of sensitive information in here. Some of it will take time to verify, but I can concede, based on Adventurer’s Guild section alone your benefactor isn’t playing around.”

“They didn’t strike me as the playful sort.” Jackson agreed.

“Have you read this?” Sara snapped the binder shut.

“I have not.”

“Are there other copies?”

“Can’t speak to that.”

She crossed her arms, tucking the binder beneath them. “If every section is that thorough, there’s enough in here to completely upend the status quo. Not to mention a mountain of sensitive information a less scrupulous person might consider prime blackmail material. I guess, the issue is, I can’t understand why anyone would give this up.”

The natural question. Which of course, was why I coached him on it.

Jackson cut in smoothly. “The client’s an information broker. It’s what they do. There’s a version of reality where none of this came to light, stayed tucked away. But as is so often the fate of people who trade intel, the client uncovered something they probably shouldn’t have. Something guaranteed to come back to bite them, eventually.”

“I… see.” Sara said, her brow furrowing.

“And as they suddenly find themselves under existential threat, there were two options. Burn it all, or hand what they have over to the sort of people out there defending squares.”

“Is this the part where I, ecstatic about the windfall, offer to help?” Sara asked, still looking for an ulterior motive.

“Nah. The games’ already over. This is how they want to end it. Nothing more.”

I felt a little bad for Sara. She seemed confused by the generosity, unsure of how to handle it. I knew as the most visible guild in the dome, the AG dealt with a lot. But this really seemed to hit her like a curveball.

Sara flipped the binder open again. “The, uh, little detail that got your client in hot water. It somewhere in here?”

“It is.” Jackson confirmed.

She smiled a little and rolled her eyes. “But you haven’t read it. So you can’t tell me where to look.”

“If only.” Jackson walked backwards, flashing a winning smile. “But I wholly believe you’re sharp enough to figure it out.”

Sara rolled her eyes again and tucked a stray bang behind her ear. “Come on. Isn’t there a rule about not flirting with the messenger?”

“There is. Can’t flirt with the messenger, but the messenger can flirt as much as he damn well pleases. Respectfully, of course.”

“Of course. Then again, I’ve never been particularly good at following rules.” Sara deadpanned. “We know each other’s names and you’re not terrible to look at. Want to hit the bars sometime? Blow off steam?”

Jackson faltered. “Uh.”

“No?” Sara raised an eyebrow. “Fake arm give you the ick?”

“N-not at all.” Jackson almost choked.

A message alert pinged, and I pulled it up.

“Where you thinking?” Jackson recovered quickly.

“Neutral territory. Maybe… Lower Greenville?” Sara offered.

“So we’re hopping.” He clapped his hands together. “I can work with that.”

“Message you when I’m free.”

I closed my eyes, feeling a sense of relief from checking another item off the list. Footsteps crunching gravel grew closer until the driver’s door opened and the weight in the car shifted. Jackson started the car, and I cracked one eye open to look at him.

“Don’t start with me.” Jackson groused. “That was not the way I expected that to go.”

I raised my hands in surrender. “Didn’t say shit. Not my place. That sort of thing happen to you often?”

“Hell no. Been in a dry spell longer than the Sahara.”

“It’s the timer.” I grunted, feeling an upsurge of worry. Because unless we made record time in the tower, I wouldn’t be here in the days leading up to the event, when the panic was at its worst. “Everyone’s coping. Falling back on their baser instincts. At least she asked you to the bars. Saw a couple bare-ass fucking behind a Wendys earlier today.”

“Which Wendys?” Jackson asked, cocking his head.

I struggled to remember the crossroads. “Uh. Motor City and South Lancaster.”

“Behind the dumpster?”

“Uhuh.”

“Not to poke a hole in your theory, but they’re always out there. Three, four days out of the week. It’s their thing.”

“Dallas never changes. You really a fan?”

“Of the consummating crackheads?” Jackson gave me side eye.

“Of Sara.”

“Yeah. I like their vibe. Her vibe. She absolutely kicked ass in the footage.” Jackson pulled out of the parking space, navigating towards the ramp. “There actually some incendiary detail in that folder that got you in trouble?”

“No.” I smiled a little. “But she’ll read it all cover to cover, trying to find it.”

Jackson clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Click baiting people in the post internet age?”

“If it works, it works.”

/////

A short drive later, Jackson let me out at the bus-stop. Some buses were still running, but the schedule was sporadic, and reached less of the city than it had before the dome. There were other, less visible entry-points into The Order’s underground base, but at the current moment I was less worried about being visible outside the order than I was inside.

This was the place I’d first met Sybil, Hastur’s oracle. The only person who could bring me to Hastur directly. She’d never said it, but I’d gotten the impression the first time around that the place held some special significance to her.

And as before, I found her waiting on the bench. She looked older somehow; her pale skin more wrinkled, almost translucent. When she turned her hooded head, the blank eyes gave the impression she’d sensed me, rather than seen me.

“Hello Sybil.”

“Matthias.” Her smile was gentle, almost motherly. “He’s been expecting you.”