The man in the foster home, Daddy Tom as he liked to be called, let him in without a word and said nothing as Billy trudged wearily to the bedroom he shared with a boy named Marshall.

Daddy Tom smirked as Billy came in, but to Billy’s relief he didn’t insist on seeing what was in the bag. In the morning an only-slightlyrested Billy walked out onto cold streets beneath threatening clouds.

He needed to think, and he needed to figure things out. Everyone from BZRK Washington was dead. They hadn’t really liked him anyway, and the feeling was mutual. The Washington BZRKers kept telling him they’d let him play the game, but they never did. He heard about biots, he knew what they were, they’d let him see some very weird video. But they had not given him a biot.

It was in online gaming forums that he had first heard from someone calling himself Lear. Billy had posted some impressive numbers, and he’d let it be known that he was a foster kid, unconnected, sick of where he was, looking for …well, looking.

Joining the Washington BZRK group had set off an uproar, with some of the others demanding to know what the hell was going on if they were down to recruiting children.

Well, they were all dead, weren’t they? And he was the one walking around with their credit cards and their phones and their pads. So much for being a child.

The others had died like newbies. They had barely gotten off a shot, like this was the first time they’d ever really played an FPS game. They’d been surprised and they had panicked.

Newbies.

And he was the child?

Suddenly he saw that house again in memory, the common room

with the twisted tangle of bodies on the floor and blood all over the walls and the stink of urine and feces.

He threw up thinking about it and looked up to realize he was throwing up within sight of the White House. How weird was that? It made him feel …well, something made him feel …strange, sick, like he wanted to be even sicker. But no, he wasn’t having any of that.

He stopped and sat on a park bench and searched the phones for Lear. Lear was the big boss, right? Well, didn’t Lear owe him now? Who had killed all those phony cops? Not the so-called adults. Billy. Billy the Kid.

BANG! Hole. Smoke. Blood.

That was new, that’s what still made him feel wrong: real blood.

And real death, which was so much dirtier than the gaming version. A car went past, horn blaring, and he realized he’d stepped into

traffic, like he had lost consciousness or whatever, like his brain had

stopped functioning.

He reached the far curb, shaking. His lungs felt congested. The

wound in his side burned with fresh pain. He had put some Neosporin and Band-Aids on it and managed to sleep with a couple of Advil.

But now, walking, walking, the scab that had formed was chafing. He

looked under his jacket and saw blood staining his shirt. There were tears in Billy’s eyes, and he couldn’t explain why. The

pain was bad but not that bad.

The rain started then and he ran to shelter in an office building’s doorway. There were some people there smoking cigarettes.

He ignored them, and they ignored him. He continued thumbing

through the calls made and received on the phones but found nothing that looked like it might be either to or from Lear. Then he started

on messages. Also nothing.

That first phone had used 1111 as its password, which was just plain dumb, but breaking security on the second phone was more time-consuming. Any time he guessed wrong he was shut out for a while. It was going to take all day. Then, he knew the answer: 2975,

because on the alphanumeric keypad 2975 spelled out BZRK. “Smart,” he muttered sarcastically.

Of course no one was going to have “Lear” in their address book,

that would be too much to hope for. And unless they were complete

idiots they’d delete calls to or from Lear. But they could be slightly

less stupid and yet still forget to delete the number from their trash. The rain stopped and he headed off again. There was always the

fear that some well-meaning adult would begin to wonder what a kid

was doing standing with the smokers in the shelter of the building. The second phone also yielded nothing.

He had plenty of cash, so he bought a couple hot dogs and a Pepsi

and wolfed it all down in a steamy, overheated diner. It was well past

lunchtime, though you couldn’t tell from the gray-on-gray sky outside. And then, on the third phone, he had something. It was in the

trash, as he’d expected. A number. He Googled the area code, curious because it had a strange number that began with a plus sign. The

prefix was a country code, and the country in question was Japan. Time to make a decision. If he was still part of BZRK—and where

else did he have to turn to—then he had to contact Lear. So he composed a text.

DC got burned bad. But they didn’t get me. Billy the Kid. He hit Send.

Then he added, This is not my phone.

He hit Send again. And waited. Nothing.

He wanted to cry then because he had halfway convinced himself

that Lear—if this was really Lear’s number—would instantly respond

and come to his rescue. But nothing, and the diner was shutting

down, the cook had begun to clean the grill.

So Billy went back out onto the darkening street, heading toward

the big green space on his map app.

Rock Creek Park, as the name implies, runs along Rock Creek

at the western edge of the city. He figured he could find a place to