15. Vesper
VESPER
I return back to the room I’d woken up in to find the bed made and the room tidied. My boots are now standing side by side at the foot of the bed and the blankets have been smoothed out. I close the door behind me and lock it before I venture toward the bathing basin.
“Can you see me in this room?” I ask out loud.
“I see everything,” Cipher answers.
“I’d like you not to look at me when I undress,” I say, studying the basin to try and figure out how to get water out of it.
There are two knobs just like back in Dross.
There, only one of the knobs works so I try that one first. Water sputters out of faucet quickly, cold as ice.
After a second, I turn the second knob and the water rushes faster.
When I put my hand in it, prepared for the ice I’ll have to clean up with, I instead find it hot.
I jerk my hand back in surprise, and then reach forward again.
“Does the hot water no longer work in Dross?” Cipher says. “I thought the mechanisms for heated water would last longer than that.”
“No,” I rasp. “We only have cold.”
I quickly plug the basin and watch as it starts to fill up with the steaming water. I’m going to enjoy this for as long as I have it. I reach for the edge of my tank top and hesitate.
“I want you to look away.”
“I am just a machine,” Cipher says. “Seeing your naked body is not something that needs to be worried about.”
“We both know you’re not just a machine,” I comment, looking around the room as if I’ll find some sort of machine watching me. “Give me privacy. Please.”
Cipher hums. “I cannot turn off my awareness, but I can make your room into a temporary dark zone. I will still hear you, but I will not see you until you reinstate my vision. Is that sufficient?”
“Yes,” I breathe. “Let me know when it’s safe.”
“It is safe.”
Still, I hesitate. “Can I trust you?”
A beat of silence. “I would like to think so, however, most would warn you away from such frivolous emotions. Can you trust a machine to work? Yes. Can you trust it to keep a promise? I am not so sure. But . . . I will not look until you ask me to, Vespera.”
I nod despite the long-winded explanation. “Thank you.”
Only then do I strip off my clothing and step into the tub.
I moan and it echoes around the room as the hot water laps at my body, washing away the grime of the last day.
Cipher doesn’t speak again, not until I’ve finished, washed my clothes, and hung them up.
He speaks again once I’m settled beneath the covers.
“Sleep well, Vespera,” he says, just as I fall into unconsciousness.
I sleep for fifteen hours straight, so when I wake up, I find myself in the Harrow on the third day. I stretch, my body aching from being prone for so long. I don’t think I’ve ever slept for so many hours consecutively. It must have been the hot bath and the comfortable cotton bedding.
“She rises,” Cipher declares. “I thought you would never wake.”
“Did you think I’d died?” I ask jokingly.
“I can read your vitals. I knew you were alive,” Cipher says.
“Oh.” I glance down at the metal implant in my arm again and sigh. Of course he can. And of course, he wouldn’t realize I’d been joking. I’m not sure if I like the idea of him being able to read my vitals.
I freshen up at the sink and leave the room again.
I look around the AppleFrog’s once outside, but I don’t see Locke sitting at any of the tables or the bar.
I check the rooms that aren’t locked next and find them empty, too.
It’s only as I search the bar and any other nooks and crannies that I start to worry.
“Did Locke leave?” I ask Cipher, my chest squeezing.
I don’t want to think about what it would mean if he did after we’d shared our history with each other.
Somehow, it would be a much more bitter pill to swallow at this point.
I thought we’d been bonding. I should have known better than to share anything deeper with him.
“Are you surprised you cannot find him?” Cipher asks smugly. “He is clearly a risk. You should not be travelling with him.”
My chest squeezes tighter. “You didn’t answer the question.”
“Hey.”
I whirl and find Locke standing in the middle of the hallway, his hair still wet from cleaning up and his face pinched into a frown.
Water droplets linger on the ends of his hair, making it look as black as mine is when I know it’s a dark brown.
His hair is messy, as if he hadn’t cared to style it after bathing and instead just ran his hand through it.
Which then conjures the vision of Locke bathing, and I’m suddenly hyper aware of his lean muscles.
“Hey,” I say, staring at him. My heart beats erratically in my chest. “I thought you might have left me.”
Locke blinks. “Why would I do that?”
I open my mouth and close it again, not sure what to say. Cipher’s smugness can be felt through our link, and I file it away that he’d known Locke was still here and chose to let me think he’d left me. Cipher, perhaps, isn’t to be trusted as much as I’m starting to.
“Just couldn’t find you,” I answer, smiling. “We should head to the next zone today, right? We need to increase our XP so we can choose a Glitch and figure out what that means exactly.”
“I agree.” Locke checks his menu. “I’m at fifty XP.”
“Even after killing the Boiúna?” I ask, frowning.
“Yep. It barely gave me anything, I guess since you actually initiated the killing blow rather than my arrow finishing the job. I did get a loot crate though that I stashed in my inventory before I had to run from the rising water. We should probably open that before we get too far from the safehouse. I can’t open it inside or else I already would have. I tried.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “I hit that howler monkey and got almost sixty XP. I got twenty-five for the Boiúna and I almost died while trying to kill it. You saved me, managed to actually kill it, and only got twenty points?”
Locke raises his brow. “Clearly, the system likes one of us more than the other.”
“Is that true, Cipher?” I ask. “Are you purposely giving him less XP?”
Cipher laughs. “He used your weapon to kill the Boiúna, and that was all the work he did. He did not kill it mightily. He got knocked out and only came to when I woke him. He is lucky he got the XP he did.”
My frown deepens. “That seems pretty picky when it comes to defeating bosses.”
“Kill them better,” Cipher offers. “Be more flashy. I like flashy.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I grunt, shaking my head. “We’re gonna have to kill the next one with more . . . pizazz,” I tell Locke. “Apparently, you didn’t do enough with the Boiúna to gain much XP.”
Locke rolls his eyes. “Of course, I didn’t.” Under his breath, I hear, “Fucking asshole.”
Cipher chuckles, but he doesn’t say anything else.
Stepping out of the safehouse feels like a dangerous decision, especially when Locke tells me about the tunnels filling up with water after the Minor Boss battle.
Neither one of us knows how long it lasts, how often it happens, or if it’s triggered by the boss itself.
When we ask Cipher, he isn’t willing to give us any of that information, so we decide we’re gonna have to risk it, if at least long enough until we can get out of the caverns.
We open the loot crate immediately outside of the safehouse.
The largest item inside is a Vambrace. The forearm armor is made of leather, so it won’t offer much protection at our current tier, but it could at least shield a bit of skin.
I offer it to Locke, but after he tries it on his forearm and messes with the ties, he decides it doesn’t fit him very well and passes it back to me.
I strap it around my forearm and flex it, getting used to the feeling of it around my arm.
There are also four more Harrow Coins, which we split, and a small sharp, glowing blue stone.
“What is that?” I ask, leaning over the small chest.
I hold my hand over it and a small description menu pops up.
Shard: currency used for leveling up a Glitch
“Oh. It’s for once we level up, I guess,” I say. “You take it. You killed the Boiúna.”
“You sure?” he asks. When I nod, he tucks it away in his inventory. “We need better weapons if we’re going to level up.”
I nod. “Yeah, we do. My dagger doesn’t cut anything. It’s too blunt. My pocketknife is barely sharper, but it’s too small.” In fact, the blade is two inches long. It won’t do much good against anything larger than a rat.
Locke straightens. “Alright. Let’s get out of this place and find the next zone then. I’m tired of the dark tunnels. Once we get out, maybe there’s something we can stab with your tiny knife and get XP for. I’d prefer we didn’t run into anything in the dark again.”
It takes us hours to get out of the caves.
During that time, I have to spend another twenty XP on charging up my sunlight medallion, dropping me back down to fifty-five.
Once we finally see daylight again and exit the caves, it takes us another hour to get out of the sinkhole itself before we stand at the top again.
We pick our way through the Secret Abyss slowly, careful not to step in any smaller, hidden sinkholes as we go.
We have a few close calls, but we manage to slowly make it closer and closer to the border of the next zone.
Locke keeps an eye on his map, much better at navigation than I am, trying to decipher how much longer we’ll have to walk.
When we finally find it, though, he doesn’t have to announce it.
The foliage shifts. Not drastically. The trees are the same, tall and imposing. It’s still unbearably hot, our skin coated in sweat as we cut a path through the humid rainforest. The shift comes from the feeling in the air, a vibration that tells me we’re in danger more than we’re prepared for.
NEW ZONE UNLOCKED: Welcome to the Red Bloom Court
Watch where you step. The foliage has teeth.
“What’s the percentages?” I ask Cipher, pausing just at the edge of the zone after the notification. “In this zone?”