Chapter 32
Ready Player
He heard them before he heard anything else.
Two voices, low, arguing — not whispering, just compressed, the volume pushed down into their chests.
Paul and Marianne. Paul was closer, maybe two feet to his left, and his hands were doing something near the top of his thigh that hurt.
Marianne was further away, her voice angling up at him from a chair.
His mouth was medication dry. Someone had been deciding what went into his blood for a long time. The air tasted like nothing. His chest was tight behind his sternum; he knew what it was and he wasn’t going to think about it yet.
The voices were giving him more than the room would.
“— pulling up in ten minutes,“ Marianne said. “Help Mr. Mercer into the wheelchair. The documents are signed.”
“Did you tell him about the drip?” Paul said. Silence. “Marianne…did you tell him?”
“It’s in the discharge paperwork. He’ll find out when he reads it.”
Paul made a sound — a short, hard, nasal exhale. The pain in his thigh faded, then resumed. Something metal was set down near his left side, harder than necessary, clinking against glass…or maybe hard plastic?
“We’ve kept two people drugged for three weeks,” Paul said, still hushed but not hiding it anymore. “We’ve done physical therapy on them and they can’t even feed themselves because of the hyoscine I’ve prescribed...”
“Asher will do what I tell him to do. He always has. I will talk to him and we will put this mess behind us.”
Asher.
He didn’t like how she said that name.
“You saw the footage,” Paul said. “Both perspectives. All of it.”
The footage. What a strange way to describe what happened in there.
He’d been inside it doing the things it contained, and hearing someone reference it from outside, from a room with tile floors and humming equipment, felt wrong.
The things he’d done were things he’d done.
He would do them again. He would do most of them differently, because he’d learned over the resets.
Where is he?
“And?”
“You don’t think Mr. Mercer is in danger?” Paul scoffed. “From your son?”
“It was a game,” Marianne said.
“Your son raped that boy.” Paul’s voice was flat…not angry flat, though. Tired. “More than once. I don’t care if Mr. Mercer didn’t fight him off every time. Nothing about what happened in there was okay.”
No…that’s not what it was.
It wasn’t.
Marianne clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Clearly we didn’t watch the same footage. Everything Mr. Mercer did in that game was his choice. It was a game. It did not matter.”
“The system was designed to make every sensory input physically and emotionally real. You helped design it. So don’t —”
“Which is why we are paying for his care in perpetuity.” Her voice closed over Paul’s like a door on a foot. “If Mr. Mercer has difficult feelings about choices he made in a video game, he can discuss them with a therapist we have vetted. Go be actually useful and get a wheelchair.”
Fire spread into his veins. It was so warm….
He came up slowly from the haze, cold gloved fingers cleaning the thing on his thigh that burned. He opened his eyes to the hideous plaster flower ceiling he had grown to hate. Still here…
I don’t think I like this.
He turned his head and saw Marianne beside the bed in a paper apron over her cashmere, working on him with that stern look on her face. There was a basin on the mattress by his hip. Soft pink, the kind that came in a stack at the supply station. Gauze, tape, the metal tools…a scalpel.
She glanced at him once as she finished the bandage, still silent.
He didn’t look down at the wound because he knew it was going to be bad—he could feel how hot his leg was, how deep the damaged tissue ran.
That was going to be an issue. Marianne peeled off her gloves and dropped them on top of the gauze, then the paper apron over her head, and dropped that on top of the gloves.
Then she crossed to the chair by the window and sat down.
She left the basin on the bed. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. The word she’d been putting on him since he was small. It never had warmth underneath it. It was a management tool, like his medication schedule or his quarterly appointments — she applied to keep him organized.
“Marianne,” he rasped. She didn’t correct him, which meant she was being careful with him today. She only skipped the correction when she needed something. “Where is Levi?”
“I’m so glad you’re awake and lucid,” Marianne said with a smile on her face that made her look like she was in pain.
“You’ve been doing beautifully with therapy.
We spared no expense on equipment to prevent as much atrophying as possible.
The team is very pleased with your progress.
We needed to keep you both under mild sedation while the sessions ran — your neural patterns needed time to stabilize after the —”
“Where is Levi?” Asher asked again.
She stopped talking and did the look — the one that came before every decision she’d ever made about him.
She moved from her chair with a sigh and sat on the edge of his bed; the hand she placed on his forearm was cold.
It had been cold since he was a child — cold checking his forehead, cold on his wrist, cold steering him into offices; years of her hands on him and not once were they warm.
Levi was always warm. Even the thought of him was warm. It made Asher feel like he was going to throw up sometimes and he loved it.
“The boy from the stream went home,” she said. “He’s going to be fine, Asher.”
“I want to see him.”
“I know you think you do,” Marianne said in her soft voice, the one she practiced in family counseling twenty years earlier.
“But he doesn’t want to see you. He’s been through something very traumatic and he needs time away from anything connected to the experience.
I spoke with him myself. He was very clear.
” She gently squeezed his forearm. “What you’re feeling for this young man isn’t — it’s going to resolve. I promise you.”
She was lying.
He didn’t reason his way there. He didn’t weigh evidence or run probability.
His body had the information the way it had the location of the scalpel — present, certain, and not up for debate.
She was lying about Levi not wanting to see him.
She was lying about what he felt. She was telling the truth about the discharge, because that had the texture of a thing she’d already done and couldn’t take back.
He promised he’d make me remember…he promised. So either he was lying, or she made him lose hope. He’s loved me since we met in the forest. He didn’t lie…but he’s so sensitive…she did something. She’s always fucking doing something.
Levi is alone somewhere right now thinking I don’t want him.
The ache in his chest from the deaths at the resort came back so hard he couldn’t breathe.
Levi was out there. Levi was in a car or an apartment or a room somewhere, and Levi had been told his boyfriend didn’t love him, and Levi — who had bitten through his own tongue to save them, who had held a knife to his own throat and said I love you too—was alone with that lie sitting inside him, and every minute Asher spent in this bed was another minute the lie was working.
“Thank you,” he said, forcing his shoulders to drop and his breathing to steady. “Can I have some water? Please?” The please was a tool. She trained it into him at four and he’d been using it on her ever since. It made her move. Seven seconds — that was what the word bought him.
“Of course, sweetheart.” She let go of his forearm and turned toward the pitcher on the side table.
His right hand moved.
Slow. Deliberate. The atrophy in his arm was real and he worked with it rather than against it, the way he’d work with any tool that had been poorly maintained — patience, not frustration.
His fingers found the handle in the basin.
The scalpel was lighter than the ones the game had given him — thinner blade, less weight in the grip, a debriding tool rather than a surgical one.
He liked the lightness. He liked that Marianne was probably thinking about a lecture she was about to give him and not about the basin.
His hand went under the blanket. The scalpel went with it.
Marianne fucking loved to lecture.
He drank the water she gave him, and the water tasted wrong.
It would taste better if Levi were in the room.
Sweeter, maybe. Everything had been better in the game when Levi was next to him — the air, the water, even the dust in the air.
Levi made things taste like things. He made the previously unbearable bearable… Without him, the world was bland.
Asher even liked how strangely Levi ate: little bits of everything at different times.
Asher always ate one thing on his plate until it was gone before moving onto the next thing, because flavors and textures mixing in his mouth was unpleasant.
Levi ate like a person Asher would have hated, like an insane person. He loved Levi more for it.
“Thank you,” he said. He handed the glass back to the woman who sent Levi away. The please had been a tool. The thank you was the decoration.
He decided he would give her a chance.
Not for her. For Levi. Because Levi would ask him later — did you try talking to her first — and Asher wanted to be able to say yes.
“I want you to get on the phone,” he said. “Call a car. Take me to him. Or I’ll go myself.”
“Asher.” The warmth she forced into her voice thinned out. “That boy does not want to see you. How do you imagine you’re going to get there?”
His vision narrowed.
“What are you going to do?” Asher asked, his tone low as he held her gaze. She would blink eventually. She always did. “Lock the bathroom door on me again?”
Her face changed — the tightening around her mouth, fine lines appearing she spent a fortune trying to erase.
“I have given up my career for six months to manage this,” Marianne snapped, leaning closer and pointing a finger at his chest. “I have watched you waste away in a machine you built because you couldn’t be bothered to behave like a normal adult.
You will not speak to me like that in this room. Not after what I have done for you.”
“I’m only going to ask one more time. Take me to see Levi.”
“No. Do you hear me? Absolutely not,” she said through her teeth, jabbing him in the chest with one finger.
“You are going to stay in this bed and you are going to think very carefully about the choices that have led you to this moment in your life. You should be married, I should have grandkids, but instead I’m taking care of a thirty-five year old man-child who is recovering from playing a game for six months straight because you couldn’t just — “ She caught herself and shook her head. “You should be grateful you’re alive. You should be grateful there is anyone left in this world willing to take care of you.”
I tried.
“Fine,” Asher sighed. “Have it your way.”
She was leaning over him, her throat eight inches from his face. His arm was at maybe forty percent strength thanks to whatever they had been doing to him, but the scalpel was sharp and the angle was generous.
The movement was a single upward arc — right to left. The blade caught and then it sliced through.
It’s exactly the same as it was in the game.
Huh.
Her hand went to her throat, fingers pressing against the cut as if to hold it shut, and the blood sprayed over them and between them and down the back of her hand.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out of it that was a word.
Just gurgles and a wet gasp, then another, and then a sound that was smaller and wetter.
She went down against the side of the bed.
He watched her the way he’d watched the NPCs die hundreds of times — with interest, not urgency. The sounds got quieter. Then they stopped being sounds.
Asher sat up, the scalpel still in his hand because putting it down was not a consideration he ran, and scooted down toward an arm brace leaning near the foot of the bed. He fitted the cuff around his forearm and tested his weight distribution by standing slowly. It held.
Marianne’s coat was on a hook by the door, a long, ugly taupe thing made of wool, but it would do. He put it on and tested out doing a few more steps around the room
Brace, foot, foot. Brace, foot, foot. His right leg wanted to fold at the knee every third step and he didn’t let it.
He needed to be able to walk a little when Levi saw him.
Levi had to know he was still him and that Asher was going to do what he always promised to inside the game: protect him, care for him, and make everything good for him.
Though if he wants to fuck right away, we might need to postpone a bit…I think I need to eat first.
…I’ll make him dinner.
He was four steps from the door when it opened from the other side.
Paul stood in the doorway, looking down at a clipboard in his left hand.
Twenty-three years married to a woman like Marianne and he still carried a clipboard like it would protect him from something.
It never did. Paul was eternally a man who knew the right thing to do and did the easy thing instead.
Asher had known men like Paul his whole life. They were useful.
Paul’s eyes went to the coat.
Then to the gown under it.
Then to his Asher’s face.
Then to the scalpel.
Asher flicked the blade across Paul’s cheek — a short, lateral motion, two inches, skin and nothing deeper. Paul stumbled back, both hands going to his face as the clipboard hit the floor. “Ash-Asher?”
“Get me Levi Mercer’s address,” Asher said, adding a quick smile onto the request.
Paul’s eyes moved past him and held very still, the only color remaining in his face being the blood on his cheek, then nodded a series of short, fast, stupid nods.
Asher waited, his weight was on the brace and his arm shaking — not from what he’d done, that was already settled — from the atrophy.
Six months of nothing and his body was a tool that had been left out in the rain.
He was going to need to fix that. But he could still hold Levi in shaking arms. That was good enough for him. .
He was going to fix all of it. Get the address, get in a car, find Levi, and never ever let anything get between them ever again. He was going to fix everything.