Chapter 4
Clippy, but as a Romanceable Character
The corridor to the briefing room was long and the ship was louder here — ventilation running hard, a pressurization sequence cycling somewhere deep in the structure.
Levi walked and swallowed, the bruises at his throat objecting while he tried to figure out what the hell he was going to say.
He only knew what he had learned from Owen.
Figure it out. You figured out the sanitarium. Figure this out.
Everyone was already there. Owen had his data pads arranged in the semicircle that was apparently just how Owen existed in this world.
Zoe sat beside him with a handheld, already taking notes on something.
Jasper was in the corner doing something with a cable that probably had a purpose, but there was also a good chance that he was just messing with it so he could look like he was doing something when the captain came in.
Tyler was standing because Tyler was always standing.
Maddie looked up at Levi from the end of the table, her eyes snapping to Levi’s throat, then to Asher, then she started tapping on her scanner. “You look worse than you did earlier. Are you okay?”
“Cryo,” Levi said quickly.
“You’ve said that already.”
“It was a really bad cryo.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Maddie asked, not looking up from her handheld. “Medically.”
“I’m fine, Maddie.”
Asher took the seat farthest from the porthole and gestured to the empty seat beside him.
Levi looked around the room again and realized what this was meant to be — the first real checkpoint of the game.
Sit in a room, absorb information, figure out what the scenario wants.
The sanitarium had the van and the lobby.
The forest had everything before the meteor shower.
This was the same thing with better lighting, and he needed every second of it, but it quickly became clear he was not going to get every second of it because Elliot was already walking through the door.
“Mercer.” Elliot’s voice cut through his thoughts. Levi watched him walk in, and his stomach sank. “A word before Captain Reynolds gets here? It’s about the briefing.”
“Can it wait?” Levi asked, glancing back at Asher.
He’s mad again. We made it down one fucking corridor before Elliot fucked it up.
“Thirty seconds,” Elliot insisted, staying near the door and crossing his arms.
Every second Levi spent managing this was time he wasn’t spending on the scenario.
Every second Elliot spent being concerned was a second closer to Asher deciding to solve the concern permanently.
And the briefing — the one thing in this loop that might actually tell him something useful about the game — was going to happen despite Asher’s jealousy and Elliot having become the equivalent of Clippy as a romance option.
Levi could feel Asher’s gaze boring into his back as he walked over to Elliot and tried to angle himself so Asher would be able to see the distance between them. It probably wouldn’t help, but he had to try.
“I know what happened between us didn’t mean what it meant to me,” Elliot began, pitched low enough that the room wouldn’t catch it. “And that’s fine. I’ve made my peace with that.” Levi’s mouth opened and nothing came out, because there was no version of this conversation he was equipped to have.
“But I know what you look like when you’re okay,” Elliot continued, “and I know what you look like when you’re not, and right now you’re not.
I don’t think it’s cryo.” He glanced at Levi’s throat and his jaw tightened.
“I need you to know that I care about you, and I don’t hurt people I care about. ”
You need to stop talking before he decides you’re a problem he needs to solve, and this time he’ll feel justified about it.
“Elliot.” Levi kept his voice down and tried to make it land. “I need you to listen to me. I’m okay, and I need you to go sit down.”
“I can help you,” Elliot insisted. “You know I can help.”
“Please.” The word came out harder than he intended, sharpened by the awareness of Asher’s attention making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Go sit down. We can talk later. Not now.”
Levi heard the chair move.
He didn’t look. His shoulders sagged, and his gaze dropped to the floor — not in defeat exactly, just the specific exhaustion of watching two problems converge that he’d been trying to keep separate. Three words on a corridor floor, and now this is what they cost.
“I’m going to need you to step back,” Asher said over his shoulder, so close that the warmth of him hit Levi’s back.
“Kane—”
“Step back.” Asher grabbed Levi’s wrist and tugged him backwards.
“You don’t give me orders. I outrank you on this vessel.”
“I’m not asking again, Elliot. Step back.”
The room had gone very quiet. Owen’s tapping on his data pads had stopped. Jasper had put down the cable. Tyler was still. And the briefing — the checkpoint, the information, the thing Levi actually needed from this room — was evaporating while two men stared each other down over his head.
A woman in her mid-fifties with short silver hair stepped through the doorway beside them.
She had the kind of posture that moved entire rooms out of its way, and the expression on her face as she took in the tableau — Elliot and Asher squared off across Levi, the rest of the crew at various stages of pretending not to watch — did not change.
“Gentlemen,” she said without inflection. “Seats.”
Asher pulled Levi back harder as he took a step away from the woman and Elliot.
“Captain Reynolds.” Elliot immediately stood straighter, turned toward her, and gave a salute.
So that’s the captain. Levi watched her set a tablet on the table and look at the room.
“Let’s use the time we have,” Reynolds said, taking a step back, her arms clasped behind her back. “Dr. Mercer. Walk us through where you are on the specimens.”
Every eye in the room turned to him, and Levi suddenly felt like he was in high school, about to give a book report on a book he had only read the back of.
You can do this. It’s like an unconventional boss fight. Except the boss is a middle-aged woman with good posture, and the weapon is a question I don’t have the answer to.
Levi thought about seventeen pods. About electromagnetic signatures, proximity responses, and the sensor alert that got dismissed. “The preliminary read is…” He stopped and took a steadying breath. “The sensor alert yesterday—”
“Was logged as a malfunction due to crew,” Reynolds said, her eyes flicking to Jasper.
“Right, but we shouldn’t overlook the possibility of other causes.” He was buying time, and she narrowed her eyes at him like she could tell he was buying time. “Before we open anything, I’d want to run external sensors on each unit individually, because if the electromagnetic signature is—”
“What specific readings are you expecting, Dr. Mercer?”
Silence.
He had the words but not the science behind them, the shape of expertise without the architecture, and Reynolds was looking at him like she was going to slap him, because she asked a simple question, expected a simple answer, and was now noting the length of the pause.
“I’d want to see—”
The alarm hit the room like a physical thing, blaring a full emergency klaxon loud enough to wake the dead. The screens on both walls switched simultaneously from schematics to alert displays, red washing across everything, a single location pulsing on the ship layout.
Cargo hold. Bay Seven.
Inciting event. There it is. The scenario just started.
And underneath the alarm, from somewhere deep in the structure, came a sound that was not mechanical. It was the blare of something that had a throat.
Reynolds was already moving. “All hands—”
“Levi.” Asher’s grip closed around his arm just above the elbow, firm.
Reynolds went through the door with Elliot, Owen followed behind her, Zoe and Maddie grabbed kits from the wall mount, and rushed from the room with Tyler and Jasper. The team moved toward the source the way a team was supposed to move.
But Asher wasn’t looking at the door.
He was looking at the porthole, out at the black of space and the stars and the slow rotation of the asteroid, and for one second his expression was something Levi had never seen on him before, but it passed so quickly he couldn’t find a name for it.
“Asher, we need to go with them,” Levi said, standing.
Asher’s eyes snapped back to him. “No.”