We stepped out of the fog and entered a dungeon full of bones.

Spiderwebs stretched between the dark corners of the wet, stinking room, crawling with pale white arachnids that glanced at us with blood red eyes, each of them the size of a fist. Skeletons littered the soaked cobblestones, their empty eye sockets swallowing light, their open jaws swimming with the kind of black empty space that makes you think of bottomless pits and the distances between stars.

'Can we have some light?'

I nodded, blowing into my hand, then rising my palm out to the darkness. A pulsing orb of light, barely the size of a candle flame, drifted up into the middle of the dungeon. At first, the darkness swallowed my spell, but after a few seconds, the orb expanded, the pulses growing stronger and stronger until a mini-sun was floating ahead of us.

What it revealed wasn't pleasant. The bones littering the cold, wet cobblestones shifted, lifting themselves off the floor, ghostly breaths rattling from their empty rib cages. The pale, red eyed spiders, almost translucent in the light, crept back into their corners. If they didn't look like they were about to charge, it might have been uplifting.

Bella moved beside me, pulling out her guns. Bella wasn't her real name of course, but neither was the one I'd told her, or any of the others in the group. We all assumed different identities because we all wanted to be someone different.

It was precisely why we were playing the Game.

Bella wore a long black tailcoat trimmed with gold, and a loose white blouse underneath it, the kind that nineteenth century pirates might have worn. The only clue that she might have been from a thousand years plus that were the glowing pistols in her hand, both powerful enough to disintegrate the rising skeletons into fine clouds of dusts. She captained her own ship that sailed the vast black ocean between the planets in a distant galaxy, and had got filthy rich doing it. She tagged along with us for the pleasure of it, not the loot – which was exactly why I was there.

Tackling the Ruined Undead Dungeon for the rare treasures it contained on my own was out of the question. Too many traps, too many enemies, and if I'm honest, too much darkness. You spend enough time in the Game, you forget that the monsters are just incredibly accurate pixels, that the sword going through your gut is just an illusion, that the ruins crumbling on top of you are just a preprogrammed set piece.

Anyway, I needed the loot, and there was no way I could get it by myself. The rest of our group – officially logged as the Lonely Hearts Club Band – had promised me that they'd help. Vincent Strader had taken time out from hunting down dangerous simulants, owing me a favour after I'd helped him out in his world a few weeks back. Gregory Knapp needed the money for the Steam that powered the tiny cogs and gears of half his body, and I promised him whatever we made from the loot that I didn't need. And Bella, well, she was just happy to be having fun.

The skeletons were standing now, small blue dots hovering in the black pits of their eyes. I'd thought similar creatures in my world plenty of times, but a huge chunk of my mind still couldn't process that what was happening wasn't real. The rational part of me screamed it's a game, it's a game, it's a game, but the rest of me, that could touch the damp walls, smell the stagnant, dripping water, feel the weight of my sword and armour, just couldn't believe that. My mind knew that that everything ahead of me was the product of hugely intelligent computers, but as far as the rest of me was concerned, I was about to fight the undead in a dungeon full of scurrying, fist sized spiders.

And so, obviously, my heart went into fucking overdrive.

Bella notched the first kill. A skeleton with a hole in its skull the size of a yawning mouth staggered out from behind a pillar. She turned, rose her gun, which looked and felt like a eighteenth century flintlock pistol until the barrel glowed blue and a whine fizzed the air before firing, and turned the skeleton into a loose collection of atoms.

At that point, the other skeletons broke for us.

I knew it was coming, but it still caught me off guard. I rose my sword, grunting as the shock-waves of blocking a blow from the closest skeleton travelled up my arms. Then, with a movement I'd never have been able to do in real life, I swiped the skeleton's sword away, lobbed off its arm, span, and cleaved off its head.

Something hard smashed into my back. My armour rang, shaking violently against my ribs, sending shivers up my spine. If I'd been wearing anything lighter, the attack might have killed me, and although it wouldn't have been the end of the world, we'd have all had to start again. I was leading the charge, and they were all guests in my world, so if I died, they died – simple as that. It was why Bella had forced me to wear something tougher, even though I preferred to be light on my feet.

Strader, wearing his long trench-coat and pork-pie hat, put a hole through the skeleton's skull that had attacked me. He liked to use a standard revolver that he'd upgraded to the point that standard was an insult, which was great for tricking other players who thought he was using simple, weak equipment into a false sense of security.

It had saved our lives a lot of times. Bella liked to call Strader the ace up our sleeves, and it was a pretty fair description.

'Daydream when we're outta this,' Strader said. His long, sullen face matched the growl of his voice. For a second, I wondered what his real face looked like, but an arrow splitting the air in two distracted me. With reflexes that could only be the product of hours and hours of grinding and levelling up, I swiped the arrow away with the side of my gauntlet.

'Arrows,' I told the others. 'We've got archers.'

'Allow me,' Gregory Knapp said, pulling out a vial of Steam and sucking it into his clockwork lungs. A few seconds later, his hand whirled, the skin pulling back by tiny cogs, a long steel barrel replacing it, pushed forward by a belt of gears. He rose it up to the archers lining the top of a wall that my light was only now showing, and fired.

For a few moments, all I could hear was the clang of my sword, the whine of Bella's gun before the plasma burst out of it, Strader's grunting as he wrestled a skeleton's arm behind its back. And then nothing but an explosion, filling my ears, ringing through my helmet, smashing against my skull. Debris hurtled towards us, a chunk of brick striking my breastplate, thudding hard enough to shove the wind out of my lungs. Smoke and dust ran over us like an avalanche, stinging our eyes.

'Christ Knapp, you didn't have to blow the whole god damn wall away!' Vincent Strader grunted and fired his revolver, blowing away skull. 'Can't see a damn thing! We need to get back. Find somewhere defendable. There's too many of them.'

Bella coughed hard, barely able to speak. 'I'm – I'm good with that.'

I could barely see anything, but we hadn't moved much since pushing into the room. With the kind of semi-psychic movement of a group that had been playing together for nearly every day for the last two years, we backed down the hallway we'd come from. The smoke trailed after us, hiding the hazy skeletal figures that were really just very convincing computer sprites.

I staggered back, swinging my sword as best I could, catching the odd lunge as the skeletons chased after us. The smoke started to thin, and I could see Gregory Knapp beside me, taking another shot of Steam. His hand pulled off its familiar trick, the gears inside him tugging what remind of the flesh away, revealing his cannon.

'Knapp, don't even think about–'

He waved a vague hand at me. The Victorian clothing would have been jarring in this environment if I hadn't already seen him chasing rival space pirates across the surface of a distant, made up moon in Bella's world. 'Have no fear, my dear friend! Half a dose, half a–'

He fired his cannon, his arm jerking back violently. For a few seconds my stomach tightened, knowing that in an instant there'd be another flood of smoke, another hail of rubble.

When the small explosive ball did strike its target, the chaos was at least a little better. Smoke covered us, but it was finer, like a thin fog, and the only rubble to hit me glanced off the sides of my armour.

'Aha!' Knapp cried. 'Their retreat and reinforcements are blocked! Have at them, good fellows!'

We did exactly that. Knapp, having used enough Steam already, went to the back of the group as we took on the majority of the remaining skeletons. With the smoke dissipating, their attacks were easier to block, and my counters easier to follow up. Bella's pistols glowed, whined, blasted. Strader's revolver boomed six times, then another six after he reloaded. Pretty soon, as the dust settled into heaps on the ground, we'd cleared our enemies out.

The enemies not blocked off by the collapsed doorway Knapp had caused, at least.

'So,' Bella said, sliding her pistols into the holsters on her hips. 'That way's fucked.'

Strader took off his pork pie hat and ran a hand through his short, dark hair. 'We've got other ways in, right?'

'There should be,' I said. The Ruined Undead Dungeon had been designed with a multitude of different ways to approach it in mind. We'd just picked the easiest route, and considering we'd only just about survived it, the others didn't look too promising.

'Think you could blast us all the way to the treasure, Gregg?' Bella smirked at the corner of her mouth – and if it hadn't been for the helmet I wore, she probably would have caught me staring at it. For a few moments I let myself wonder what her real lips looked like, and what it would feel like to kiss them. It wasn't a fantasy I should have been entertaining though – when it came to the Game, anybody could be anybody. A male could play a female, and vise versa, and any kind of male/female at that. The only real limit on your appearance was the clothes you wore, which you either had to buy or find, same with weapons, upgrades, everything. Bella might have looked and sounded like a woman, but there was every chance that she was some middle aged guy that fancied playing a swashbuckling space-pirate queen, and that if I ever revealed my feelings to her, they'd be crushed pretty quickly.

Somehow it was easier to live in hope that she was everything I thought she was, but only admire her qualities from afar. Finding the truth, even if it meant the possibility that she felt the same way, and that she was an actual she, had too many risks, could destroy too many dreams. It was easy to pretend, and since we all played virtual reality games nearly every waking minute of our lives, pretending came natural.

Gregory Knapp opened up his waistcoat and checked the vials he carried on the velvet inside of his jacket. There was only one left, a grey cloud floating in the thin glass tube. Steam was a product that you could only get in the steampunk worlds, and considering it could change a hand into a cannon in only a matter of seconds, it was pretty expensive. 'I'd rather we didn't deplete the last of my resources,' he told Bella. 'Especially when it's the only thing we've got left that we can consider a way out.'

'He's right,' Strader said. Whenever he spoke, his eyes narrowed, as if he were scanning a crime scene, speaking his thoughts aloud as he went through the normal detective motions. 'We need a get-out-of-jail-free card. Knapp can blow us out through pretty much any wall we come up against. I say we don't use it till we really, really have to.'

'Agreed,' I said. I'd taken off my helmet now, the heat forcing sweat into my eyes. 'You should probably stay behind us, Knapp. I'll take the front. Anything attacks us, I can take the most damage.'

'Don't worry, honey,' Bella said to Knapp, grinning. 'I'll keep you safe.'

'Where now then?'

'The tunnels,' Strader said, putting on his hat and shoving his hands into his trench-coat pockets. 'It's wetter, but we know we can take what's down there. The Sludge are harder to kill, but they won't overwhelm us like the skeletons.'

Bella grimaced. 'You mean the sewers? Knee deep in shit so old and foul it became fucking sentient? No thanks.'

'Remember that swamp planet?' I said. 'Where you needed us on that heist? I swallowed so much mud that I could still taste it a week later. You owe me.'

She shook her head, closing her eyes. 'Fine...'

Strader nodded down the hallway, to the room we'd cleared out earlier. We'd have to go back on ourselves for maybe a quarter of a mile till we reached the openings to the sewers, but it wouldn't be too dangerous. We'd mostly killed everything we'd passed so far. 'Westfall, you take point,' he said. 'And put your helmet back on. Someone takes that head of yours off, I still owe you a favour, and Knapp doesn't get his Steam for at least another couple of days.'

I nodded and did as he said. Usually, Strader took charge, coming up with the plans, delegating roles. It's why whoever Strader was in real life chose a film noir cyberpunk world as their home, it appealed to his/hers blunt, logical mind.

We moved through the dungeon slowly, wary of what might be waiting for us, even in the places we thought were safe. The Ruined Undead Dungeon was infamous for keeping enemies locked away until the second, or maybe even third, time you passed them. At any moment, something could lunge at us, or a trap could spring that we'd failed to notice the first time.

Or, as we discovered just seconds later, we could wander across another group.

It happened a lot – fewer times in the more remote parts of the game, but enough that there was a shared etiquette amongst players. Most of the time, if you came across another group, you kept your guard up, but only to be safe, and certainly not to be aggressive. Most people, especially in places like the Ruined Undead Dungeon, simply wanted to go about their business as you did yours. After all, they weren't exempt from the laws of the Game – if they died, they had to start all over again. And when it came to fighting other players, there was no way to gauge how powerful they were, or what kind of special abilities their weapons had. Gone were the days when you could see if someone was a lower level than you, and therefore fair game – here were the days when attacking a fellow player was literally a stab in the dark.

Murder was perfectly okay, but few people actually practised it. If you played alone and came across a much larger group, chances are you'd at least be robbed (certainly, Bella had practised that many times aboard her ship), but outright killing wasn't a pandemic, at least in our worlds. There were other realms where people liked to fight each other, but we rarely visited them. I'd killed, both to protect myself, and for no other reason than to be a dick, but it wasn't as simple an act as say my father, or his father may have experienced, killing players on a game he played through a screen and a controller. They would have been detached, the lines between what was made up and what was real easily distinguished. But in the Game, where virtual reality very well could have been reality, actually killing another human being was hard. Sure, they'd re-spawn, and it didn't hurt, but you still pierced flesh, you still saw their panicked eyes close as death overtook them.

Basically, it was murder, and every cell of my body knew that was wrong.

Bella straightened as she saw the other two players from afar. She slipped out her flintlock pistol and held it at her hip. 'Remind me, fellas – is it hunting season today?'

'We should let them go,' I said. 'Focus on getting the loot. I've been slogging through this place for too long now.'

Gregory Knapp pursed his lips. 'It's no lie that I am in desperate need of funds, and as of yet, the hunt through his torrid dungeon has proved fruitless. Even if they're carrying little, it could supplement my needs if we prove unfortunate today.'

'Basically,' Strader drawled, 'he needs the cash. I say we jump 'em. Besides, they might have information about this place that we can use.'

Bella winked at me, gifting me that sly grin. 'Looks like you're out-voted three to one.'

'Whatever. Let's just get it over with.'

Strader pulled out his revolver and followed Bella, who usually took charge when we held people up like this. She'd built her vast fortune stealing from space vessels both programmed into the game, and from actual real players. In her world, there was a vast, complicated network of trading routes that had made some players very, very rich – and when players like her stole from them, it made them very, very rich too.

One of the players was clearly the host – he wore similar medieval armour to the stuff I was wearing. Fully plated, gleaming steel, wearing a helmet adorned with dragons wings and a long red cape clasped with to the breastplate by small metal clips that looked like dragon claws – he made an impressive figure.

The other was full cyborg – half his face a series of interlocking metal pieces, the other pale white flesh. One eye spoke of humanity in its green-blue glint, the other of industry with a smoky red glow. He was topless, his torso mostly metal, except a strip of muscle creeping up his side just above his hip. Around his elbows he wore spiked pads that had probably been the misery of countless foes.

Bella stepped down off a large step and interrupted whatever conversation they were having. 'Okay, okay, we all know what's going to happen here. I can either point my gun at you, say some mean stuff, and you beg for your lives, or we can just get this over with quickly and go our separate ways. I want anything and everything that isn't vital to you in a pile on the floor there.' She circled them, grinning menacingly, taking a certain glee in being centre stage. Whoever the real Bella was, they fancied the life of a dramatic rogue, and lived up to the challenge well. 'C'mon, quick, quick, I haven't got all day.'

The two players watched her silently. The cyborg's semi-metal face showed little emotion, and the knight's helmet completely covered theirs. If they were scared of us, or even just annoyed, they didn't show it.

Bella stopped, pointing her pistol at the cyborg, the smooth barrel just a few centimetres from his metallic temple. 'Boys, I said I haven't got all day, and I meant it. I'm being nice here, letting you keep the essentials, but anything that's shiny, that might fetch me a pretty penny, I want it on the floor, in a pile, and I want it now.'

Strader pulled off his hat beside me, rubbing his short hair, letting out an impressed sigh. Whoever Bella was, male, female, the girl of my dreams or some creepy sixty year old guy, there was no denying that they didn't play the part well. I was hit by that same doomed adoration I had for her, and lamented that if I ever did meet the real her, she'd be far from the ideal I fantasied about in my mind.

Unless she was more or less the Bella we saw, but of course, I was far too cowardly to actually discover that. There's a lot to be said about blissful ignorance, even if it is self imposed.

'We're not alone.'

Bella blinked. We all did. The voice that had spoken, coming from the tall, impressive knight, was female. It was slow, deliberate, heavy with the weight of confidence and strength. It was the kind of voice that neither of us had, not even Bella.

Strader shoved on his hat. 'Okay,' he whispered to Knapp and I. 'We've been stupid. Get ready to fight, and failing that, get ready to die.'

The knight hadn't moved, nor had the cyborg. Somewhere in the open dark room, water dripped between moss strewn bricks. 'You can come out now.'

From the shadows, other figures emerged; another knight, wearing light armour, carrying a sword that crackled with electricity; a red haired woman that grinned with fanged teeth; a rough looking man wearing a dusty long coat, carrying a revolver in one hand and cowboy hat in the other.

'Oops,' the red haired woman laughed. She was from a world I'd never visited before – one where vampires had supposedly been selected as the crews for ships sent out into the distant stars, their long life spans much easier to cater for than generation ships. That was the background of that world, at least – whatever they got up to after that was anyone's guess. She was grinning at all of us, her blood red hair tumbling across pale, bare shoulders. 'Seems you've all danced a little too close to the fire, huh? Now it's time to get burned.'

At times like this, we all knew what was going to happen. The two hosts of this world, the female knight and I, would be protected at all costs, whilst everyone else tried to kill them. We were the links to this world – sever us, and the rest of the party was defeated. It was like a game of chess, plus chaos and blood.

Bella moved first. She shifted her pistol from the cyborg's head to the knight, her gun glowing blue, the high pitched whine pitching up as she held down the trigger. If she hit them, it'd be game over. We'd win.

She never did.

The cyborg's spiked elbow pad exploded. There was a loud bang, a small cloud of smoke, and then the horrific image of Bella staggering back with spikes of metal jutting out of her chest.

She staggered, her arm swinging, the pistol still glowing, the whine reaching a crescendo. When the plasma spat out from the barrel, it hit the cowboy square in the forehead. One second he was there, the next he was a cloud of smoke that vaguely resembled the shape of a person.

It was at that moment that all hell broke loose. Strader shoved me aside, dragging out his revolver, firing at their host, who was already darting away. The cyborg struck Bella in the chest, driving a spike deep into her heart. The sound she made as she hit the ground caught me even amongst the blaring chaos surrounding us. Respawing was out of the question for her, at least until we either left the dungeon, or I myself died. Either way, we were without her, three against four.

They weren't good odds at all.

Gregory Knapp, with only one vial of steam left, wasn't much help either. He put himself between the other players and I, but without his hand cannon, he was just a wall to be easily bypassed. Strader was our only real hope. If they mistook his unassuming, detective outfit and standard revolver as a sign that he was only just starting out in the game, then they might live to regret it.

'In cover, now!'

Without thinking, we darted beneath some low walls. Filthy water ran down the bricks, pooling at my knees. Knapp hunkered down beside me, cradling his last vial, waiting for the go ahead from Strader.

A go ahead that never came. We heard the same bang from earlier, the same small explosion that had turned Bella into a human pin cushion. I shoved my head up quickly, then collapsed back down beside Knapp.

'Strader's not shouting at me, Westfall! Why's he not shouting at me?'

'The cyborg – it pulled the same trick on him that it did on Bella. He had time to warn us, but it's just us now.'

'Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken–'

I jabbed my mailed finger at the vial of Steam. 'It's time for that get-out-of-jail-free card, Knapp.' Over the wall, I could hear them calling out to us, a gun cocking, a sword slicing the air. 'You know what to do,' I said. 'I'll distract them.'

He nodded, yanking off the lid, throwing his head back, necking the Steam. As I span up from the ruined, damp wall, I could see the gears in his hand beginning to pull back his skin, the cannon ready to jut out.

I just had to last long enough for him to get a clear shot.

There were four of them left – the two knights, the red haired vampire, and the cyborg.

The second knight attacked me first, the one in the lighter armour, their host stepping back, watching beside the red haired woman. It was less a fight than a show for them now, with their clear advantages. I'd been in their position before, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there was only one way this would go.

The lighter knight was quick, nimble, and attacked with almost endless energy. Electricity spat along the long blade, arcing in small yellow bursts of lightening. Even though I knew the laws here were tweaked slightly, I kept expecting for the electricity to explode down our swords and through our armour the second we met. But it didn't, and we clashed together, the force shattering down our arms.

I was slower than I was used to, but the heavy armour meant that I could soak up the damage and wait till my opponent got tired. I parried, blocked, span when he darted around me, meeting his attacks as best I could. Whatever was taking Knapp so long, I didn't know, and I could afford to think about it.

Sweat started to break out on his skin. He lunged at me, and with one swift move I stepped aside, batting away his sword. If he hadn't been exhausted, he might have been able to recover from his misstep. Rising my blade, I cleaved the knight in two, blood that wasn't real spraying over my hands.

The cyborg bulled into me like a steam-train.

We staggered backwards, hitting the soaked cobblestones hard. I tried to roll away, but his heavy steel hands closed around my wrists like vices, holding me down as a grim grin peeled back across his face. At times like that, it was hard to remember that it was just another normal human being playing a game that was attacking you. At times like that, death seemed very real.

I rose my knee up hard, crushing his testicles. Pain wasn't something you really felt in the game, but your body reacted in the same way regardless. If you were shot, you fell back, if you were stabbed, you clutched at the knife, and if you were hit in the bollocks, well, you curled up in a ball and cried.

I didn't give him a chance to even do that. His hands jerking back, I grabbed for my sword and shoved it through the strip of flesh at his side. Somewhere in the real world, another player of the Game was locked out until the rest of his group either won or lost.

You might not be using your real muscles, but tiredness can hit you, and it can hit you hard. Pushing the cyborg's heavy body off me, I staggered up from the ground, breathing heavily. My arm was numb, the amour suddenly weighing ten times more than it had before the fight. The only thing I could do at that moment was take off my helmet and look around, shouting, 'Knapp? Knapp, where the hell are you?'

There was no answer. Well, not one that I wanted anyway.

A pale, slender arm snaked around my neck, locking me in place from behind. Lips parted beside my ear, and a soft breath washed over my neck. 'Looks like your friend has left you all alone,' the red haired vampire said. 'Face it, you've lost.'

The other knight, the tall imposing female that was hosting their group, stood in front of me. Her helmet was on the floor, revealing a stern face, that had about as much emotion in it as if she'd still been wearing the helmet. She looked at her sword, then to me, then to the beautiful woman behind me.

'I–'

Something exploded into me, hurtling me backwards. I hit the ground hard enough that my breastplate collapsed in on itself, rolling for what seemed an age, the cobblestones and dark ceiling revolving around my blurred vision a hundred times a second. I must have hit a wall or something, because the ceiling crashed to a stop above me, and the ground stopped moving.

I blinked. My armour was forcing down into my chest, but it was just a distant buzz that I could feel, and not the agony that I should have been. There was blood on my breastplate, the colour of the vampire's hair. Groaning automatically, I glanced to the middle of the room.

A cloud of smoke was curling along the cobblestones, which were smeared with blood. I glimpsed things in the dark corners that could have been body parts, or nightmares getting ready to pounce.

Knapp appeared above me. He offered his hand and grinned. 'You flew, Westfall. You actually, really, flew.'

He pulled me up, and for a long time I simply blinked, my mind unable to cope with both what had happened, and how little my body was responding to it. As Knapp had said, I'd been flung across the room, my amour caving in on me. My body felt something, but it wasn't pain, just a bearable replacement of it that the Game used to indicate injury. My brain still couldn't quite understand why I wasn't keeled over in agony.

Eventually, I managed to say, 'You blew the knight up.'

He nodded, looking at his hand. 'I had a little trouble. One of the gears got caught in my skin and jammed. When my cannon was actually ready, you were a few seconds away from being impaled by that knight. In the nick of time, is the phrase I think you're looking for.'

I only semi-registered that he wasn't acting up, and that he was speaking as the real Gregory Knapp, whoever that was, probably would have. 'The red-haired lady...the vampire...?'

Knapp narrowed his eyes. 'Gone, Westfall. When the knight died, that was it. They've got to start this place all over again.'

I forced myself to nod. Yes, he was right. Whatever my brain thought it should be feeling, it was getting in the way of sense. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. A useless gesture that did absolutely nothing, but we humans are programmed like that. We perform rituals even though there's nothing in them.

Knapp grinned at me. 'So, my good friend, what now?' He'd slipped back into his old voice seamlessly. 'Our comrades won't be able to join us, not unless we start over also. Shall we brave this ruinous dungeon alone, or–'

'I think we should get Bella and Strader,' I said, glancing around at the chaos Knapp had caused. A few feet from where the knight had been blown apart, something glinted in the dull light of the room. I walked over and picked up the helmet with the dragon wings decorating it. 'Besides, this has got to be enough for a couple more vials of Steam, surely?'

He took it from me, turning it over in his hands. 'It certainly looks it, dear fellow. Come, then. Shall we depart?'

I nodded, my head still ringing. The lines between reality and the virtual reality the Game constructed had never seemed more blurred. Whether it was through my brain struggling to sort through the information that was real and what wasn't, I didn't know, but things seemed easier, clearer.

I thought of Bella. Of what she was in this world, and what she could be in the real one. Was the person she portrayed completely fictional? Was she even the same age? Was she female, and if so, were all the grins and smirks that she reserved for me real?

I didn't know, but at that moment, with everything around me in a peculiar sort of haze, for the first time, I didn't care. Whether she was or wasn't didn't matter any more. Or, it did, but that the outcome didn't scare me. One way or another, I'd know the truth, and there was a certain sort of peace in that.

'Come on,' I said to Gregory Knapp, sheathing my sword. 'I need to ask Bella a question.'