The Nice Voice in the Game

The game was called Deepwater, and the whole point of it was building.

You landed on an island with nothing at all. Sand, stones, a few crooked trees, and rain that came in off the sea whenever it felt like it. If the evening went well, by the end of it you had a roof and a fire. If it went very well, you had a bridge.

Vihaan had been playing since March. He was good at the building and bad at the fighting, which meant he needed teammates. Teammates on Deepwater were mostly eleven-year-olds who shouted.

He was also, and this was well known, a boy who built doors.

Not gates. Not walls with a gap in them. Proper doors, with hinges and a handle, standing on their own in the sand with nothing on either side of them. He put one at the top of every hill he climbed. He put one on the sand facing the sea, and one in a field of grey stones where there was nothing else at all. He had never explained this to anybody, because nobody had ever asked.

Kestrel did not shout.

He turned up in a random lobby one Tuesday in July. Within about ten minutes he was the best teammate Vihaan had ever had. He waited. He explained a thing once, properly, and then never again in the voice people use the second time. That first evening Vihaan walked off the edge of a half-built bridge and lost every bit of stone he was carrying. Kestrel said nothing at all about it. He came back down the slope with a spare hammer, dropped it on the ground, and typed:

“Bridges. Very dangerous.”

After that they met most evenings on the flat rock by the water, where the gulls stood in a row on the wet stones and would not move for anybody.

Kestrel gave him things. A better hammer, twice. Two hundred lengths of rope, once, for nothing. He showed Vihaan a trick with the ladders, and Vihaan showed it to three boys at school, who did not believe him until he did it.

In the second week Vihaan put a door up on the ridge above the camp, out of habit, and turned round to find Kestrel standing behind him.

“Nice door,” Kestrel typed.

The week after that, Vihaan came online to find a door already standing on the beach, waiting for him. Blue. Somebody had painted it.

The questions came in ordinary places, in between other things.

How old are you? That one came while they were waiting out the rain under a roof they had built themselves. Eleven, said Vihaan.

Which class? That was over the fire, with the rain still coming down hard on the roof.

Which school — my cousin lives in your city. That was while Vihaan was counting stone.

Which side of the city, near which traffic signal? A week later, out on the half-finished bridge.

Is that your own phone, or your mother’s?

Do your parents check it?

Kestrel said the Deepwater chat was rubbish, which was true; everybody said so. He asked whether Vihaan had the other app, the one everybody had. Vihaan said he was not allowed it. Kestrel said that was fine, no problem at all, and they went back to the bridge.

Then, on a Thursday, with the bridge two planks from finished, Kestrel typed something else.

“don’t tell your dad about me. parents get weird about this stuff. he’ll make you delete the game”

Vihaan read it twice.

He had his hand on the mouse, and he noticed that he had stopped moving it.

He sat there for a while. The fan went round. The chair had one arm that had come loose in April and had stayed loose ever since. On the desk there was a plate with two biscuits on it and a bottle of water with no lid. Also one school shoe, which had no business being on a desk at all.

Downstairs somebody was opening and shutting the fridge, over and over. That meant his father was doing the water bottles for the morning. He did eight of them every night, and lined them up on the top shelf with the labels facing out.

Vihaan went down the stairs. The hall light was on. There was a wet patch on the kitchen floor under the fridge door.

He told it badly. He started in the wrong place, with the ladder trick. Then he went back to the beginning. Then he said the thing about the school. He said the bit about his father last, which was the bit he had come down to say.

His father stood at the open fridge with a wet bottle in one hand and the cap in the other. He put the bottle in. He shut the door. He dried his hands on the cloth hanging off the handle.

“Show me.”

They went up. His father sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed his reading glasses up on his head. He only did that when he was going to be there a while. Vihaan scrolled up to July and let him read the whole thing.

It took about four minutes. Once, near the end, his father made a small sound in his throat.

“Okay,” he said.

He asked two things. Had Vihaan told him the name of the school — yes, he had. Had Vihaan sent any photographs — no, he had not.

“Okay,” his father said again.

Then he asked Vihaan to show him where the block button was, because he had no idea. Vihaan showed him. They blocked the account. Then they hunted about for the report button, which was in a stupid place behind two menus, and reported it.

The whole business took less than two minutes. It was, Vihaan thought afterwards, unbelievably boring.

His father stood up and stretched, and something in his back clicked.

“You want to keep playing?”

Vihaan said yes.

“Then keep playing.”

At the door he stopped, with his hand on the frame.

“Come and tell me the boring things also,” he said. “I like the boring things.”

Then he went back down to finish the bottles. Vihaan heard the fridge door go twice more, and then the tap.

The next evening he sat down at the desk and opened Deepwater. The list of names was one name shorter. He looked at it for a minute. Then he joined a random lobby, the way he had in March.

There were three of them in there. One built too fast and kept running out of stone. One was clearly about eight, and typed hello roughly every ninety seconds. Everybody ignored it except Vihaan, who typed hello back each time. Nobody said anything that was not about rope, or nails, or where the next post should go.

They got the bridge finished at about nine o’clock. That had never happened before. Not once, since March.

All four of them walked out to the middle of it and stood there in a row over the water, doing nothing at all. The rain had stopped. There were gulls on the rocks at the far end. Back on the shore, the fire was still going.

Then Vihaan built a door, right there in the middle of the bridge, with the sea on both sides and nothing at all to keep out.

“why is there a door,” somebody typed.

“no reason,” typed Vihaan.

He opened it, and walked through it, and came out the other side, which was the same side.

Somebody typed gg.