“Look who’s up!” said a bald, bearded man in a white lab coat. I assumed he was a doctor. He could have been a nurse, or even just some guy getting paid minimum wage to ruin people’s lives. “You’re lucky you didn’t kill that guard. They would have taken you straight to the burn pile instead of bringing you to me.” He had a nametag, but my eyes kept losing focus when I tried to read it. I was in a clean, clinical space, a guard standing to the side thumbing through his phone. I felt cold, wearing only a medical gown, but it didn’t bother me. I was laid out on a hospital bed with a crash cart stationed beside me, wires running into a patch pump on my wrist. A bank of humming computers hogged the real estate of a nearby table. A heart rate monitor pinged regularly, and the hum of vented air filled the room from above.

  “Name?” said the bearded doctor.

  “Will.”

  “No last name?”

  I didn’t reply. Mom registered me at school as Will Wayman, but I think she made that up. And don’t get the wrong idea. I might have gone to school for a few hours of the week, where I’d run around on a playground, watch movies, read books, play video games, and talk to kids that did all of those things outside of school too, but I was always a street rat.

  I asked Mom once if my dad’s name had been Wayman. She told me he didn’t have a name. From then on, I didn’t want a name either.

  The bald doctor typed briefly on a keypad. “Then Will Doe it is. Age?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Nice. No obstacles to dropping you in the system. How do you feel?”

  “Awful, doc. Stomachs twisted. Head’s a wreck. You got any Z? I need it bad.”

  The doctor chuckled. “Soon you won’t.”

  “Won’t need Z?” I asked, incredulous. “It’s either take or shake, man.”

  “I’m going to introduce you to a third alternative.” The man picked up a plastic bag filled with liquid and hooked it into the instrument on my wrist. “Count back from ten.”

  I made it to seven.

  When I woke up, I was standing on the street, under the shadow of a supertall towering far above. I looked down to my wrist expecting to see wires, but those were gone. I spun around looking for guards, for Kane, for anyone, but I was all alone, and I didn’t have the shakes anymore. On top of that, I had no nausea, no suicidal thoughts. That doctor really had done something to kick me of my habit and then let me go. Was this some extreme rehabilitation project? I felt like a straight, something I hadn’t felt since mom was alive, not since I’d first spiked. That was after mom was gone.

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  I noticed I wasn’t hungry. This was a rare feeling for me since dropping out of school. I at least got to eat breakfast and lunch there. I didn’t know how they’d fed me while I’d been asleep, but that was a pretty good trick.

  I looked around again, not trusting that I could really be alone. But I was. All alone and on the street. I laughed to myself. What good is it to break a streetie of Z if you just drop him back on the streets? I wasn’t hungry now but that wouldn’t last. I knew how the game was played. You lurched around hungry long enough and you’d put anything in your system—even Z—or especially Z. Which reminded me, I had stashed a couple hits of the black stuff in our tent. Now that I knew that bald doctors were giving away free cures for Z addiction, there was no reason not to keep using.

  One rule of the shadows is to stick to your block. When you’ve got nothing, you can’t just march around everywhere and expect everyone to look out for you. If they’re hard up enough, the guys you sleep next to night after night might take advantage of you, much less someone you’ve never seen. On the streets, everyone is someone else’s mark. Kane and I took up shelter under an overpass with a motley of cranks, addicts, crazies, and the chronically unemployed. “Hell hath no fury,” was scrawled on the concrete wall above the frayed tents in red paint written by an unskilled hand, words that had seemed less true as the days living underneath them stretched from weeks to months.

  I walked fast and ignored the weirdos on the street. I saw someone getting mugged by a couple of punks in an alley, but that wasn’t my problem. If you didn’t know how to keep yourself out of trouble around here, you didn’t deserve help. I kept my head down and kept walking. I looked the other way when I saw some guy tackle a dude and then sit on top of him, punching him in the face again and again. I didn’t recognize either of the guys, but street justice is rarely random. Whoever it was getting smacked down likely deserved worse. But when a ragged looking dude in a poncho hacked some lady’s arm off with a machete, even I couldn’t ignore it. Psychos with knives are everybody’s problem.

  “Yo!” I called out. “Back off dude!”

  For some reason, a name and number was floating over the guy with the machete: Max — level 3.

  I blinked, but the display didn’t go away.

  Max ignored me and stabbed again while saying psycho stuff. “First hack, then harvest. Death to the dead.” The lady went slack and the number over Max went up to 4. I felt sick at what I’d just seen and feared for my own life. I beat it.

  I found my underpass and hoped Kane had found his way back too. The old message, “hath no fury” had been scrubbed from the concrete, leaving the word hell hanging solo above our tents in blood-red. And there was my tent. With any luck, no one had rifled through my gear yet and I’d be back in the Land of Z feeling like a dirtbag superman in about five minutes.

  I unzipped the tent flap and jumped back, surprised to see an old man sitting cross-legged in there. Like Max, a name and level number hovered above the old man: Steel — Level 90. I looked at him close. He was really old, with deep age lines in his face, though his gray hair and beard were long and full. Weirdest of all. He looked like a Japanese cartoon character or like someone in a video game. Now that I thought about it, Max had looked like someone out of a video game too.

  “Hey! Get your own tent, old man.”

  Steel’s eyes were closed, suggesting that he was flying high on Z—my Z!

  He opened his eyes and studied me. “Will. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I don’t know you, old man. How do you know my name?”

  He pointed above my head. “I know a lot more than that. Even level ones see player names.”

  “Level ones? You’re crazy. Why are you still sitting in my tent?”

  “Relax.” The old man smiled. “I am your game guide.”