Chapter 49
Patch notes
Player One
Asher came around the corner from the attorney’s office after signing off on the probate plan for Marianne’s estate and Paul was in the hallway, wearing the face of a man who had done something he couldn’t take back and was waiting to find out what it would cost him. Maybe he broke the coffee maker again?
“Where is Levi?” Asher asked.
“Fifth floor.”
The two words emptied Asher’s chest and filled it with something worse than the ache.
The ache was absent — Levi not being in the room, the flat water, the thin air.
This was the opposite. Levi was in the building.
Levi was in the room with the beds and the ventilators he read about in dozens of panicked texts from Paul after he woke up.
Ventilators were a trigger for Levi. He didn’t need to see people in that state… what the fuck was Paul thinking?
I could kill him too…
He didn’t finish the thought. His legs were already moving. Past Paul, who pressed against the wall to let him pass the way Paul always pressed against walls when someone with the last name Kane needed him to move.
He took the stairs, his bad leg protesting on every step, the wound not healed enough for stairs taken two at a time but his legs didn’t care about the wound right now. Levi was involved, and where Levi was involved, nothing else mattered.
Third floor. Fourth floor. Fifth.
The hallway to the c-suite. The keypad. The door.
He stopped, panting and leaning on his arm brace.
The ventilators were audible through the door. The hiss-click chorus. Six machines breathing for six people. And on the other side of the door, in the room with the machines, was the only person whose presence had ever made the disconnection go quiet.
He’s in there. He’s seen them. He knows.
Asher put his hand on the door. He could feel — or imagined he could feel — the specific change in air pressure that meant Levi was on the other side.
If I open this door, he will look at me and his face will be the face of a person who knows what I’ve done, and what I’ve hidden. That face will decide whether I keep him or lose him, and I cannot control which one the face decides.
Levi was on the other side of this door.
Levi was on the other side of this door.
The thought repeated and did not become information.
His chest was wrong. His hands were wrong.
He pressed his palm harder against the door because the door was something his hand could feel, and the feeling was a fact and he needed facts.
He thought about Levi’s laugh behind his hand.
He thought about the bite. He thought about the sound Levi made when Asher’s mouth was on his neck, and the morning breath he loved, and the weight of Levi’s head on his shoulder during a documentary being narrated wrong.
.. He thought about the way Levi said dovey, always almost like it pained him to say.
Asher knew he hated saying it. Asher still loved it anyway.
If he leaves, the name leaves. Nobody else will ever call me that. That piece of me will cease to exist. The person who could be loved.
I never even wanted this.
I can’t. I can’t go back to the version without this.
I’d rather die.
His hand was still on the door. He could hear, faintly, a sound that might have been Levi’s voice. Talking. To the bodies. To the people in the beds who couldn’t hear him.
I should have killed them when Paul told me…
The thought sat for two seconds. Then the logistics caught up: families.
Missing persons reports. Six employees of a company whose CEO went comatose in his own machine.
Investigators. Questions. The kind of attention that would have put Asher in a room with people who asked questions for a living and Asher was good at rooms but not that good and not for that long.
He took his hand off the door.
He waited.
He stood in the hallway and waited. His leg hurt. His chest hurt. He didn’t sit down. Sitting down was the wrong shape for what was happening. He stood with his back near the wall, not leaning on it, and the ventilators breathed through the door and Asher waited.
He waited for forty minutes.
The door opened.
Levi came out and his expression was the one Asher had been afraid of.
It was stripped raw, scrubbed clean of every defense by something he couldn’t unsee. His eyes were red. His cheeks were wet. His jaw was set in the way that meant he had been crying, stopped crying and was holding the stop in place through sheer force of will.
He looked at Asher.
Asher looked at him.
The ventilators hissed through the open door behind Levi. The hallway was fluorescent. Neither of them spoke.
Then Levi hit him.
The fist connected with Asher’s jaw, not in the practiced punch of a person who had ever been in a fight.
Levi’s thumb was inside his fingers, which was wrong, and the impact traveled up Levi’s wrist in a way that made Levi gasp and shake his hand immediately after.
But the punch was real. The force was real.
Asher’s jaw snapped to the side, the inside of his cheek split against his teeth, and he tasted blood.
He didn’t try to block it or flinch. He just took it.
I think I earned that.
“You lied to me,” Levi said in the same soft voice he used before he cut his own throat in the resort.
“I never lied to you.” The words came out immediately and certain because they were true.
The rule was I won’t lie. The rule did not say I will volunteer everything.
The rule said ask me anything and I’ll answer honestly and Levi had not asked the question that would have required the answer Levi just learned.
They had abandoned that whole structure as soon as Levi agreed to live with him.
“You told me the NPCs were amalgamations.” Levi’s voice was shaking but the blade was still in it. “Horror archetypes. You started to say nothing based on — and then you asked me about dinner with Paul. You redirected me.”
“There were different NPCs before…they just took their places. I didn’t lie. You never asked if they were real people.”
“That’s the same thing, Asher.”
“It’s not.”
“The same thing,” Levi said, his lower lip trembling. “I asked you about Jasper. I told you he’d be a good friend to have out here. And you…you sat on that couch and you let me say that when you knew he was—”
“Yes.”
“When you were cooking me eggs? When you were feeding me ice cream? When you were tying my hands to the bed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think about telling me?”
Asher looked at Levi. At the red eyes and the wet cheeks and the jaw holding the crying at bay. At the face that might be the last time this face looked at him.
I won’t let it be the last time. He’s not allowed to leave. But this will be better if he stays willingly.
“No,” he said honestly. “The only thing that matters is you. I don’t care about them —”
He stopped. His jaw was working. The blood from the split cheek was in his mouth, copper and warm.
“I thought about killing them,” he said.
Levi stared at him, and the look on Levi’s face was the look of a person staring at the full shape of something they had been touching the edges of in the dark. All of it. The complete architecture that was Asher Kane.
“They went in to save you,” Levi’s voice broke on save.
“Every one of them. Tyler and Owen and Zoe went in because they wanted to bring you home and you killed them until their brains stopped working. And then Jasper and Maddie and your brother went in and the same thing happened and you — you didn’t know, I know you didn’t know, but Asher, they’re in there —” He pointed at the door, his hand shaking.
“They’re in there right now! Breathing on fucking machines, Asher, because they loved you enough to try to save you!
And…and the game you built destroyed them for it. ”
The word loved arrived in Asher’s chest and tried to find somewhere to sit.
There wasn’t a shape for it. The shape would have to be a room he didn’t have built yet — they came in because they loved me?
— and the room wasn’t there, and the thought tried to settle into the absence of the room and slid off, because there was nothing to settle onto.
The word stayed in his chest, restless, looking for a place.
He felt himself fail to hold it. The failure was physical. The word was somewhere in his ribs and he could not get his hands around it from the inside.
People don’t love me. Only Levi. I only care if Levi loves me…
I have to make sure Levi still loves me.
“I’ll go back in,” Asher said softly.
Levi’s mouth closed.
“The system was built for me. It responds to my neural patterns. If anyone can reach them — if anyone can reactivate them, bring them back — it’s me. I’ll go back in and I’ll —”
“NO!” Levi said it with such force he stumbled forward, just a bit closer to Asher. “You’ll get lost again! No. Absolutely not. No. You’ll be in there alone killing people who are trying to help you and I’ll be out here —”
His voice broke completely.
“I’ll be out here alone,” Levi said weakly, looking between Asher and into the room, then he shook his head as a sob bubbled out of him. “No. No. No, Asher, I won’t let you. You’ve never respected a single no from me, but just this once…No.”
He pressed his hands against his eyes, his shoulders shaking.
“If you go back in there and you get lost, I’ll be alone again.
And it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt worse than the game and worse than the hospital and worse than the apartment because now I know what it’s like to not be alone and I can’t unknow it. ”
Levi took his hands off his eyes. His face was wet and wrecked and the eyes underneath were the eyes from the forest — terrified and strategic at the same time. The eyes Asher had fallen in love with.
Asher stood in the hallway with blood in his mouth and Levi’s words in his chest and the words were in a language he barely spoke but understood — the language of I need you and the needing is the thing that will destroy me if you leave. He didn’t know what to say.
“Promise me,” Levi said, taking a step forward, his eyes impossibly wide. “Promise me you’ll take care of them. The best care. Whatever they need. You’ll keep the medical staff and you’ll keep trying to find a way and you won’t —” His jaw tightened. “You won’t think about killing them again.”
“I promise.”
“And maybe — if nothing works…if nobody finds a way, maybe one day we try together. Both of us. We go in together and we find them and we bring them out. But not now. Not yet. Not until we know it won’t take you from me.”
Together.
We.
Both of us.
He’s staying.
The realization didn’t arrive as relief.
It arrived as a pressure that climbed up out of his chest with nowhere to go, a heat in his face, a thickness behind his eyes he hadn’t felt since he was in the resort with Levi, watching him die over and over again.
He blinked and the blinking didn’t fix what was happening to his vision.
He raised his hand to his face and his fingers came back wet.
He looked at his fingers. The wet was wet. The wet was on his face. The wet was coming from him.
Oh.
Oh, that’s what this is.
I thought the game just did this.
It wouldn’t stop either. He stood in the hallway with his hand half-raised and the tears kept coming and he made a sound that wasn’t a word, and the sound was the same shape as crying.
Levi is staying. Levi knows everything and Levi is staying.
“Levi,” he said, and his chin felt wobbly trying to say just those two syllables.
Levi looked at him. At the wet face. At Asher Kane, standing in a hallway with blood on his lip and his hand still half-raised and water on his fingers, doing the thing that other people did all the time.
“Come here,” Levi said softly.
Asher didn’t move. His body had gone strange and he couldn’t make it do the simple thing.
Levi moved instead. He took Asher’s face in his hands, brushing away the tears with both of his thumbs.
“I’m so angry at you,” Levi whispered as his thumbs continued to swipe across Asher’s cheekbones.
“I’m angrier at you right now than I have ever been and I need you to understand that what you did — what you hid — I’m going to be angry about this for a long time. Maybe forever.”
Asher just nodded.
“But I’m not leaving.” Levi shook his head, blinking away his own tears.
“Because if I leave I’ll be alone and you’ll be alone and they’ll still be in there, and none of it will get better.
And I promised — I promised myself on that stupid space station that we’d get out together, and we wouldn’t be lonely ever again and nothing would hurt.
I know that’s not how the real world works but I’m —” His chin trembled.
“I’m going to try anyway. To make it hurt less. For both of us.”
Asher’s hands found Levi’s wrists and held them gently, and when he breathed in, his chest stuttered like it didn’t remember how to breathe in properly. Levi’s pulse was fast under his fingers. The fast pulse meant Levi was scared, but he was scared and was staying.
“Let’s go home,” Levi said.
Three words. The three best words. Better than I love you. Better than the sounds Levi made in his room on the good sheets.
Levi’s hands dropped from Asher’s face, took Asher’s hand, and held it.
They walked to the elevator.
Asher’s hand stayed inside Levi’s the whole way down as the wet on his face dried and the new thing in his chest sat warm and bright.
And underneath the warmth, very quietly, a smaller part of him was already noticing what had worked.
The way his face felt when it did something new.
The crying he had not known how to do out here until he had done it.
The way his chest moved and his lip trembled.
The part of him that built things was taking apart what happened, sorting it into components, and the components were on a shelf now, in case he ever needed to assemble them again.