In 4,000 BC, man learned how to use horses for travel. Then came the chariot, the boat, the wagon. Trains popped up in 1825 and cars in 1885, connecting the land, then planes in 1919 connected the world. And now, in 2043, teleporters connected the universe. Travel that was once impossible could now be completed in seconds through ‘blinking,’ so called because you’d blink your eyes and be someplace else entirely. Like human fax machines, teleporters connected to each other and allowed the data of the average human to be transmitted around the world, and even some areas off-world like the International Space Station. Such a bound of technology revolutionized the world, connecting humanity in a way never before possible.
Marvis Beakly didn’t care about all that. Just as those born in the era of car and plane travel didn’t give much thought to how they got around, the 24 year old man had no special fascination with the method of his daily commutes. He saw it as only a tool, an appliance like his microwave or showerhead. He only knew of a world where people blinked instead of drove; for the last few decades almost everyone used them, and all the other modes of transit had slipped into the world of conspiracy theorists, crime lords, and hipsters.
Today was like any other day. At 7:30am Marvis awoke, dragging his tired body out of bed and into the bathroom. He emptied his bladder in the toilet, which informed him as he flushed that he should have two glasses of water with breakfast. He gazed at his face in the mirror, watching through bloodshot eyes as the mirror analyzed his features and displayed over his reflection the areas he needed to fix-up. It alerted him that his hair needed combing, so he combed it just enough for the alert to vanish. The timer ticked down the seconds he spent brushing his teeth for an ideal clean, and the growth prediction software informed him that he could wait another day to trim his beard without looking unkempt. He wandered back into his bedroom, grabbing his pile of clothes from the tray of his automatic dresser and pulling them on as the full-length mirror alerted him to any wrinkles or stains. There was a line of discoloration on one of his pant legs, but he didn’t care; who would pay attention to a difference so small, anyway?
After grabbing his automatically-balanced 304kCal breakfast from the slot of the pantry, he reclined in his body-conforming chair and watched the feed that had been generated for him based on previous Internet activity. One video showed a dog and cat befriending a rhino in a sanctuary. A post went into great detail about the historical discrepancies in the latest virtual reality shooter. A recruitment image for the Teleportation Protection Force flashed by. Marvis rewound down his feed, investigating the poster. It showed a unified world covered in teleporters, with a row of people in front of it shooting down a mass of sinister-looking silhouettes, which he assumed to be the blink-terrorists. Ever since most of the world’s governments agreed to join the United Nations following the popularity of cross-national blinking, terroristic groups aimed to destroy that unity through the targeting of public teleportation nodes created by the UN. He used to have absolutely no interest in such things, but in the past few weeks Marvis found himself feeling a bit more patriotic than usual. He still wouldn’t join the TPF, but maybe he’d be a little more vocal about his support.
The 7:55am alert came up on his screen with the usual beeping tones, snapping him out of his thoughts. There were still a few blueberries left in his bowl, which the trash can berated him for as he tossed them and placed the dishes in the washer, but he didn’t want to use any more time eating. His lack of a commute time didn’t give him any additional time awake during the morning; it just made him sleep later.
He walked into the side room, where he kept his personal teleportation node, skimming his eyes over the machine’s console to ensure that it had enough power running and there were no critical errors. He didn’t really understand what half of the symbols or lights meant, but they were green as usual, so he didn’t have to. If anything had actually been red or blinking or otherwise not-normal, he’d have to wait for a technician to blink into a nearby public node and make their way to his home, then wait even longer for the problem to be fixed. Just the thought of waiting so long tired him out. Thankfully, his private node was working exactly as intended. He went into his favorites, selecting the node for his workplace, and stepped into the chamber. The door closed automatically behind him, sealing him into the metal cylinder. He noticed a few scuffs on the inside of the door; he’d have to remember to get those polished out later. A ring of green light rose up and down the chamber, scanning him on all sides. Some other lights flickered on and off, though Marvis wasn’t sure what they were for, and barely even noticed them. The usual loud whir of energy began, powering the node for his trip.
Marvis snapped back to reality, digging in his pocket for the source of the noise. Pulling out his phone, he tapped the notification and pulled the auxiliary screen panels out, making the device three times larger so he could better see the screen. A video feed from the teleportation room of his work popped up, showing someone slipping out from one of the nodes, wearing the usual work clothes along with sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, moving their head only slightly as if they didn’t want to be too obvious in searching the room. A nearby node lit up and they jumped, darting out of the room.
Marvis chuckled at the invader’s almost comical response. If Security wasn’t after them already, they sure would be now. “What an idiot,” he mumbled to himself. “If you’re gonna sneak in somewhere, at least-”
His mumble stopped. All thought stopped. His eyes locked onto the lit node, on the opening door, on the person walking out of it. A person with briefly combed but messy hair, a full bush of a beard, and pants with some discoloration down the side. Himself.
How? How could he be there, but also here? He looked around the node for any sign of things not being normal, but all the lights looked the same. The whir of energy continued below him without pause. It all seemed normal, but this couldn’t be normal. Another him was walking around his work, there was nothing normal about that!
He pulled up a second window on his phone, opening his node connection app. A coworker had told him to get it in case anyone unauthorized tried to use his node, since it would send real-time information about the node’s activity. The logs popped up.
> 07:56 - NODE ACTIVATED.
> 07:56 - NODE CONNECTED TO “MY_WORK”
> 07:56 - SCAN ACTIVATED.
> 07:57 - SCAN COMPLETE, READY TO TRANSPORT.
> 07:57 - TRANSPORTATION COMPLETE.
His eyes locked onto the final log. Transportation complete. Well, it sure as hell wasn’t!
Another node lit up on the video feed, and he watched as the ‘him’ in the video walked up to his coworker. “Janice, how’s it hanging?” the video-him said, voice exactly like his own.
“Oh, Marvis! Are you okay? I got an alert saying there was some kind of trespasser before blinking over.”
“Really? I didn’t see it, but I’m okay. There’s been a lot of those alerts lately though. You know, I’ve been considering joining the TPF, helping stop stuff like this.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This person looked like him, talked like him, but something was off about his mind. There was no way he’d actually consider joining the TPF, even with his increased patriotism as of late. That imposter wasn’t him; how could Janice not notice the difference?
Another light went off on his tablet. He looked down, then immediately wished he hadn’t.
> 07:59 - RECYCLING MATTER.
His body went cold. The node around him lit up in color as the various lights brightened, and he could feel the vibration beneath his feet as the whir below him grew louder than before. He felt his hair rise as the air in the chamber changed, heating up as it prepared for the recycling process. The adrenaline rushed through him, making him slam his fists against the door, kicking it, tackling it. Nothing worked. Besides a few scuffmarks, the metal around him ignored his attempts at escaping completely. He fell on the ground, eyes falling on the tablet beside him, the video feed taunting him with images of another him chatting to his coworkers, smiling, laughing. He grabbed the tablet, holding it right up to his face.
“That’s not me,” he called out to his coworkers in the video, voice breaking as tears poured from his eyes. “That isn’t me, I’m still here, I’m-”
I was told to try and find myself
As if I were a dropped pair of keys along a hiking trail,
And if I were to ever move forward, I’d have to stop and look,
Searching my memory and my thoughts to find
Where I had misplaced myself.
Perhaps I am my body,
For it is mine, and I can move it at my will.
But, if I were to chop off my hand, would it also be me?
Am I to think I’m also my skin, my blood, my liver?
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
Perhaps I am my brain,
For it is where I feel to be, watching behind my eyes.
But, if it were copied down to atoms, would that also be me?
If my brain were split in two, would I be two of me?
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
Perhaps I am my neurons,
For their network is how I perceive anything at all.
But if they age and lose their strength, do I stop being me?
And if I replace them one by one, when would being me end?
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
Perhaps I am my memory,
A construction of events that tell my story.
But I don’t remember being born, or the words I said last year.
And if I were to forget it all, I would still continue to be.
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
Perhaps I am my consciousness,
A continuous stream of awareness in the world.
But, if I were copied in full, with each thought and memory,
And they continued ‘my’ consciousness, would they really be me?
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
Perhaps I am nothing,
A trick of the light, a mirror with no reflection.
I cannot find myself because there’s no one there to find.
I cannot be an ‘other’ because there’s nothing to separate me.
Perhaps I’m not there after all.
I don’t know if I can find myself.
If those keys exist at all, they’re lost along that hiking trail.
So I’ll walk on, becoming someone new in each moment,
And when I reach a point where the path is locked before me,
I’ll break down the door instead.
Every day, it just goes on and on. No matter what I’m doing, what I’m focused on, that voice just keeps talking, like the world’s most tedious and frustrating narrator. My head’s been filled with those endless words for weeks now, and it shows no signs of stopping.
Usually it’s just chatter about useless things. It’ll comment on my breakfast, on the weather, on how this commute to work compares to the last. I’ve tried to turn up the radio to drown it out, but somehow it manages to talk over that, too. It talks over the TV, my coworkers, sometimes even my own voice! It’s not even interesting things to listen to, either. ‘Oh, sure is sunny today, huh?’ I know it’s sunny. I can see it’s sunny. Why must it insist on making me listen to its useless commentary?
Sometimes, though, it decides to be cruel. I was talking to Alexi about our project, and mentioned the cancel button being on the right, but Alexi said that it’s on the left. So I looked, and yes, Alexi was right. Case closed, right? No, that damn voice would not let it go all day. Not only that, it also started taking jabs at how I presented myself during the talk, saying that my voice didn’t sound assertive, that I hesitated too much when I speak, that my fly may have been unzipped the whole time and I would have been too stupid to notice. It loves calling me stupid, I’ve found.
It also loves trying to predict what I’ll do, which is probably the trait I hate the most. Like a few days ago after work, I noticed the gas was running low, and it said ‘time to go to the station, and maybe grab some soda there, too.’ I would have loved to get soda, but that voice bossing me around just ruined it for me. I still want that soda, but don’t want to give the voice the satisfaction.
I tried to figure out my situation on the Internet, but it’s been useless. One forum talked about demons rambling in our ears, but I don’t believe that any demon would have the patience to debate between two colors of tie for three hours. A blog brought up the idea of it being aliens, but I don’t have any metal fillings that they use to transmit their voice, so that was a dead end. A comment mentioned the CIA, but I’m not an American, so I’m probably safe there.
Yesterday I decided to open up to Morgan about all this. I vented about everything, about the tedium, the harassment, the unceasing nature of it all. I let it all out, not sparing a scant detail, to make sure I was understood.
“Oh, you mean, like thinking?”
I’m still mad writing that. Thinking? Really? Does Morgan think I’ve never experienced *thinking* before? I know what thinking is, thank you. Tell me to think of a pink elephant, and my mindscape will conjure the great beast of the savannah in a light red hue for my viewing pleasure. Ask me where my keys are, and the strings of thought will shoot out, wrapping around the image of my keys and bringing them to the movie clip showing me placing them on the kitchen counter, along with a few arrows or a circle for emphasis. Leave me be for a while, and the world behind my eyes will light up in a symphony of color, the strings dancing through the vast expanse and grabbing onto whichever shapes and feelings suit my fancy, letting my mind wander from the weather to an old friend to that time I almost fell off the roof during a drunken dare.
At least, that’s how it used to be. As I write this, the voice is telling me that I haven’t had those images and feelings in quite some time. I tried to recall where my keys were, waiting for the strings to leap to work and bring the images to me, but instead I just heard that voice say “on the kitchen counter, as always.” It’s telling me that the strings are gone.
I refuse to believe it. Morgan must have been mistaken, thinking this rambling voice is like thinking. I’ve only had this happening for a few weeks and I can hardly stand it. How could someone deal with having a voice inside of them, narrating their thoughts constantly, for their entire life?
We built ourselves as a house of cards
Constructed upon the table, rising piece after piece
It would fall, but when it did, we simply started again
The cards undamaged, rearranged but whole
With time, our tower stopped falling
Those long-standing cards turned into a solid glass
For we thought that they would never fall again
Until a single bump
brought it all
crashing
down
The shards of our expectations scattered across the floor
Some looked away and proclaimed the tower’s strength
Some held cards in the air where the tower once was
Just to let them fall, the broken base growing between us
We watched as those before us struggled and lied
Until we could take it no more
And told off those who denied
And fought off those who corrupted
And plunged our hands into the shards
And let the edges tear our skin
And soaked the table in our blood
Finding the paper cards hidden beneath the fragments
Pulling them out, blood and glass stuck to their form
Starting the base of the tower anew
And so we built ourselves as a house of cards
Constructed upon the table, rising piece after piece
It would fall, but when it did, we simply started again
The cards undamaged, paper stained but whole
Time was broken. Just before, time worked properly; she entered the parking garage at the usual time of 11:53pm, taking the expected seconds to climb the stairs and round the corner, her watch ticking away at the expected intervals. As she went through the motions, her eyes wandered around the dark concrete, looking out between the pillars into the city night. Her eyes jumped from one pillar to the next, just barely noticing a shadow flowing out from one nearby.
Suddenly, time sped up. The shadow became a man and she hit him hard with her purse, all in the span of an instant. A gun fell one moment, and the next she felt it in her hands, aimed at the man, his eyes wide with shock.
In that moment, time slowed, a second stretching into eternity. A ring of darkness surrounded the two as they locked eyes, both acutely aware of the weapon between them. She saw the man’s eyes skim around her body, darting from point to point, taking advantage of the creeping moments to look at every little thing, to find every bit of information he could use to judge her. Despite the weapon aimed at him he looked calm, almost confident.
“What, you think I’m too scared to do it?” she asked, gun steady in her grip.
“No, quite the opposite. I think you’re terrified because you know you can.”
She felt the warmth leaving her skin as the world shrank all around her. She shook her head, trying to shake off the feeling, trying to force the damning feeling of comfort and familiarity in holding the gun out of her. She forced her feet harder down on the concrete, trying to latch herself to the moment, to reality.
The lights flickered. Her body trembled, the gun threatening to fall from her grasp. She used all her strength to keep it up, her small hands wrapping tightly around the handle. The gun felt like nothing she’d experienced before; everything about it, from its weight to its cold metal form, screamed out to her, saying “I’m too dangerous, it’s wrong to touch me, it’s wrong to use me,” but she had to hold on despite those screams, because if she dared let go, the screams would be replaced by ones far worse.
She blinked, forcing her eyes to focus on the man in front of her, kneeling on the ground with arms raised. She towered over him physically, but felt his eyes piercing deep inside her mind. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m right, aren’t I? In fact, based on how you’re holding that gun, how you’re looking at me, I’d venture to say you have before.”
The bulb above buzzed and flashed. The man loomed over her, brows furrowed and mouth curled in a snarl, the muscles of his arms tensing in an act of rage and intimidation. A flash of color shot from behind her, placing itself between her and the man. The color transformed into the shape of a woman, shielding her.
“Please, leave her alone, don’t do this,” the woman cried, her voice shaking.
She blinked and the woman vanished in that moment of darkness. The kneeling man’s eyebrows raised slightly, his eyes focused intently on studying her face, her reactions.
“Who was it? Was it someone you hated?”
“I don’t-”
“No, no. It was someone you loved, wasn’t it?”
The lights flashed in her eyes as the enraged man’s body lunged at the woman, grabbing her wrist and yanking her body towards him as she yelped in pain. “You think you can get out, huh? Think you can pull a fast one on me? How about I take you back downstairs, and we’re gonna see how many ways there are to break bones, how does that sound?”
“And I’ve got some knives I’d like to break in,” another man’s voice said from the shadows, his body shifting into the light with a grimace, grabbing onto her other arm. “I bet I can get quite the prime cut out of you.”
A third man watched from nearby, eyeing the woman up and down, face contorting in pleasure as his mind silently wandered.
She looked away from the third man, eyes shut in horror. When she opened them, the kneeling man seemed to be holding back a chuckle. She felt a flicker of rage amidst the confusion spinning deep inside her, her feet unsteady and mind clouded. “The fuck are you-”
“Did they deserve it?”
One of the dim bulbs above her flared with a sudden brightness. As the gun weighed down her tiny arms, she heard its voice shift, replying to the three men before her with every step. “I’m too dangerous” became “I’m dangerous enough,” “it’s wrong to touch me” became “it’s brave to touch me,” “it’s wrong to use me” became “it’s right to use me.” The words changed from a scream to a chorus, a chanting for the righteousness that only it could provide.
She forced herself to look back at the scene. The woman fought to free herself from the men, but their grips held her exhausted body tight, even as she pulled and twisted with all her remaining might. The men watched in amusement, until one broke the silence. “What about the kid?” he asked, his eyes moving toward her. “She’s got-”
“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” another replied. “You, go grab her while we deal with mommy dearest.”
A falsehood, though he didn’t know he told one. She had seen the single bullet herself as the woman put it in just minutes ago, before they had been caught once more and dragged into a moment’s eternity. All they wanted was to be free from this darkness. Why did they want to keep them away from it all so badly, to inflict such harm on random victims, to keep them away from a world of light and good? Her brain couldn’t conceive of any answer besides simple evil.
Her eyes and the woman’s met. She stared at those eyes, those shaking eyes sunken into a pale face, stretched and mangled in absolute horror. Those eyes knew what would soon happen to her and couldn’t stand the thought. They would take anything else against what was to come. Anything.
She needed to save her. She had the way. In an ideal world, she would shoot all the evil from the world, but this moment confronted her with knowing this wasn’t an ideal world. It was a world filled with evil, more evil than her righteous friend could fight. She had to separate the woman from the evil, so evil could no longer harm her.
“How did it feel?” the darkness asked. “To pull the trigger?”
The trigger fell, sending out a blaring ring that the voices sang to in a deafening symphony. The lights rose into a blinding white, the figures behind them transforming into silhouettes. The woman’s shape shot backwards, fragments of shadow shooting out from her as the form went limp and fell to the floor, vanishing in the light. The shapes of the evil men stood in stark contrast against the light, frozen in time with their hands empty.
She turned and ran, the blaring light and evil shadows stuck behind her. She did it. She saved the woman from the world of evil. Mom was free.
The light vanished in the distance, leaving her running in a world entirely of darkness. She ran across the universe in that moment, as far as that trapped moment in time as her legs could carry her. As she felt her feet giving out on the concrete beneath her, she shut her eyes, letting herself stop running.
Her eyes opened and the world returned. A red car glinted in front of her under the hazy parking garage lighting, waiting for her command. As she opened the door and slid inside, she glanced at her watch. 11:54pm. The seconds ticked away as expected, time operating as normal as she turned the keys and began to drive. Her car rounded a corner and her eyes descended on a dark heap in the middle of the garage, surrounded by an expanding deep red. The heap took the form of a man, clothes torn and messy from a life without shelter, his pale face stretched in surprise and horror behind his gray and ragged beard. She felt time creeping slower with every moment she allowed the sight her attention.
She looked away. Time marched back into place, and the garage resumed its dimly lit atmosphere. She took a deep breath, adjusting her heavy purse on the passenger’s seat and steering her car away from the scene. She hated those eternal moments, but they were worth it in order to bring those hopeless souls peace from such an evil world. Just like Mom.
Denotes a fictional and aesthetic genre based on the noun to which it is suffixed, usually involving ahistorical or anachronistic technology and its effects on society.
I often wonder what my living self thought of the world. Customer satisfaction with PSI Industries is at a solid 93% and holding, so odds are I was one of the billions of people who used PSI tech on a regular basis. Still, I can't help but hope that I wasn't one of those people. I admit I may be a bit biased, being dead now and all, but a genderless presence can dream, right?
My first memory is a fading light. I've been told that's normal, fine, okay, just-dandy, and nothing at all to be concerned about. Since finding out the common trope of the dead walking into the light in order to find peace, no amount of synonyms for okay seems to quiet the unsettling nag in me, the one telling me that a fading light is not at all normal, fine, okay, and so on. Once the light vanished, the world appeared to me, or I suppose I should say re-appeared, on account of the whole living-then-dying thing. I awoke in an unkempt apartment in one of Boston's still-standing brownstones, to the voice of the still-living man I'd soon learn was one of PSI Industries's many customers. As was explained to me, I failed to pass on (which was normal, fine, okay, et cetera), and the man, Yehya, was my 'living volunteer' who help me find out what held me to the living world so I could find peace. What kindness, I thought, that a living person had such altruism in his soul to help the dead. I wonder if I was so trusting while alive.
It's hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before PSI Industries. From what I've been able to gather, the leading tech giants of the world had been focused on Artificial Intelligence, trying to create computers that could think and learn like people. That race came to a screeching halt when the irrefutable proof of ghosts came out. After all, why create a machine for complex tasks when the dead can do them for you? Now, the world basically runs off of ghost labor. We're the security for your homes, the planners of your day, the walkers of your dogs. We cook, we clean, we organize, and I'm sure more than one living person has used a ghost to attend to their more personal needs. We're the invisible force that runs the world now, all in hopes that whoever bought us from PSI Industries can uncover what's tethering us to the world in order to release us.
Did you notice the problem with that last statement? I didn't, for a long time. Yehya started small with his requests, like turning off the computer at night if he forgot. Then he started asking me to cook his ramen for him, which felt like far too simple a task to delegate to someone else. This led to cleaning the apartment, doing the shopping, telling him what he had to do each day, and whatever else comes out of his spoiled mouth. I suppose it could be worse; I could have been bought by some sweatshop making the same sweater for eternity, or a factory with no breaks, ever. I've heard some of the living using us in such ways, since ghosts don't have rights. We're not people in their eyes, not anymore.
I'm thankful that Yehya gave the the task of doing the shopping, since it let me leave his apartment. PSI Industries must have hated the idea of ghosts ignoring their assigned living person and wandering off to solve their own mystery, so each customer has a PSI-Anchor, which we ghosts are attached to. Without the permission of the living person, we cannot move beyond the walls of the building they occupy, or beyond a radius of about twenty yards if the Anchor is outside. If you thought of owners and dogs with that description, congratulations because you're totally spot-on with that. Anyway, with Yehya's permissions set on the PSI-Anchor, I was allowed to leave the brownstone and wander in the outside world for an hour each day, where the pieces started to fall into place.
As ghosts, we're invisible to the living, but not to each other. I was the only ghost in the brownstone, but outside, I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of other souls around the city. The living's movies always show ghosts as semi-transparent people, but we look to each other more like wisps of light and mist emanating from a quasi-human shape. We can be hard to spot, even to each other, but once I focused on seeing others against the harsh lights of the living world, I noticed just how many of us there are. There's a ghost at every stoplight, one part security and one part technician. Children running through the streets have ghosts for protection. Business-folk have two ghosts, if not more, following their every step, communing with each other about their affairs. It's as if a whole second world is blanketed over the first, just as active and populated, but entirely unnoticed.
I became good friends with Morgan, the store ghost who was lucky enough to remember parts of their past. They were a parent of two, twins. They don't remember their partner's face, but they say that the thought of them fills their being with a warmth unlike any other. Despite knowing all of that, they were no closer to moving on than I, and seemingly resolved themself to an afterlife of retail. Their owner, I mean 'living volunteer,' kept pushing off their questions about looking more into their life with excuses about how busy he was, how much the business needed him, and several more I've chosen to forget on account of being so mind-numbingly stupid.
I told Morgan that I'd ask Yehya to help them after he helped me. "You do that," Morgan said with a chuckle, "I'll be waiting." I see now that it wasn't a chuckle of gratitude, but amusement, the same chuckle a parent gives a child when they babble on about things they don't yet understand.
Keeping to my word, I did ask Yehya. We're invisible and inaudible to the living, but the PSI-Anchors, along with keeping us nearby and having a light Anchor blink when we're present in the same room, also have a recording function. The current version picks up a lot of static and unrelated vocalizations, but it gets the job done.
Through this feature, I told Yehya a bit about Morgan, and how busy the shop owner was. "I bet," said Yehya, focused on his online shooter game.
I asked if he would be willing to help Morgan once I moved on. "Sure," said Yehya.
I asked if he had found any new information about what may be keeping me here. "Not yet," said Yehya.
I asked if he had an idea of how long it would be before he got more information. "Dunno," said Yehya.
I commented that it had been so long since he volunteered to help, but he hadn't done anything at all yet, despite me helping him with anything he asked. Yehya put the device on mute.
Morgan laughed at me when I vented my frustrations. It's a laugh I can still hear as clearly as I did then. "Why would he help you? He paid money for you, and you do everything he wants. Helping you means you leave. Why would he, or any of the living, want that? C'mon, open your eyes."
That's when it all made sense. Of course a society reliant on an invisible labor force would never willingly give that up. But why hadn't ghosts revolted? "The living aren't stupid," Morgan said. "They know to let us go, eventually. But they're trickle-truthing us, giving us a little bit every so often to keep us hooked, making us think that they're out solving our mystery. Between tolerating that for a few decades or being stuck for eternity, which would you choose?"
Based on my immediate internal response to that question, I can conclude that my living self hated binary choices. I was, and still am, an Option C, screw-it-all kind of thinker. However, rebelling against the binary in such a way requires a level of awareness and forethought I didn't yet have. I told Morgan I'd figure out a way to move on without the enslavement of the living. "You do that, and I'll buy you a drink," Morgan said with a chuckle. I chuckled too. Thinking of a ghost with money or a drink seemed just as comedic as a horse at the bar.
I decided I'd need to learn more about the world, but that proved to be much more difficult than I thought. Computers and smartphones have an anti-ghost barrier around them, preventing us from accessing the Internet. Likewise, certain buildings have the same protections, one of which is libraries. Yehya only allowed me out of the brownstone for an hour a day to shop, but even with such a short time, I managed to piece together some information from the ghosts of the area. Ghosts that could go outside and commune with others were generally aware of the truth of their situation, but had resolved to stick it out. Some believed that doing well at their assigned tasks would convince the living to free them sooner, and had an anecdote or two about others being shown such special treatment. Others had rumors of ghosts who revolted, and now suffered an eternity of darkness without rest in prison-like devices designed by PSI Industries to contain "troubled souls." No one I spoke to had ever seen one of these so-called PSI Jails, but the idea of them caused an undercurrent of fear in the ghost world. There were some who spoke of PSI-Guns, PSI-Poisons, and more, but such accounts of objects harming or destroying ghosts were scattered and unreliable. I wanted to believe the same of the PSI-Jail, but something primal inside of me couldn't help but fear that PSI Industries had such technology.
Months into my servitude, Yehya decided to re-try his hand at college. The nearest campus was too far for me to ever reach with my hour time limit outdoors, but after a few weeks of studying his schedule, I came up with a plan. The PSI-Anchor had the same anti-ghost barrier as phones and computers, so I couldn't touch it directly, but with some clever 'accidental' bumps to the desk as I swept, I managed to knock the PSI-Anchor into his backpack. The next day, I sat beside Yehya on the subway, hoping desperately that he wouldn't look into his bag and see the PSI-Anchor's light blinking, revealing my presence. As expected, he didn't touch his textbook-filled bag at all, opting instead to play flashy games on his phone the entire way.
I have no doubt that I learned more than Yehya during that day at the college. I still couldn't access the library, but so many classrooms had their own bookshelves, and students often left their notebooks lying around the dining hall or the gym's locker room. I drifted through the walls of the college, stopping to hear the contents of lectures, then moving on if the topic was irrelevant to my needs. Whenever I found an empty room I read as much as I could, flipping through the pages and darting my vision around the pages in order to quickly find out if the information would help me or not. If a living person walked in on me, they'd see books open and pages flying as if stuck in the winds of a tornado, and immediately know a ghost was to blame. Thankfully, no one did.
I learned several important things that day.
First, the anti-ghost barriers were all thanks to a material called black tourmaline, which had been touted as an anti-spirit mineral for centuries. Turns out the ancient living got at least something right. In order to stop the ghosts from interfering with Internet-based devices, each one has a crystal of black tourmaline inside, usually near the battery or power source of the device. For buildings, the crystals were placed at each point of the doorways or windows.
Second, one of the PSI Industries offices was located in Cambridge, the area just above Boston. It had once been an office in a Harvard start-up building, but the discovery of ghosts and the invention of PSI technology led to Harvard devoting the entire building to their needs.
Finally, upon purchase of a 'loaded,' or ghost-attached, PSI-Anchor, the living is given a message with all of the details about the dead, including a proposed timeline to reveal each key element. These messages are emailed to each customer from PSI Industries.
This knowledge led to a plan, a third option in response to Morgan's obey-or-suffer binary. I still felt woefully under-informed about the way of the world, but despite that, I couldn't handle the thought of quietly obeying a world like this anymore. It would take focus, and practice, and a whole lot of luck, but I would carry out my plan.
When I told Morgan about it, they didn't chuckle their usual semi-condescending way. They made no noise for a while, their wispy form standing still, the emotion emanating from them a strange mix of concern and awe. After a while, they chuckled, and spoke. "If you can do that, forget the drink, I'll buy you a whole damn bar."
It took a bit over a month for the pieces to fall into place just right. Yehya left his smartphone on the top of a cabinet, just under a shelf with his game-replica swords and props. All it took was one screw pulled out to topple the entire thing over.
Yehya's attention broke from his game mid-match, for the first time I ever saw that happen, at the sound of the crashing shelf. Swearing, he ran over to the rubble, assessing the damage. "What the... Ghost, you better fix this," he shouted into the air. Looking back at the objects scattered around the area, he finally noticed his phone, screen shattered.
He picked it up in a panic, hitting the sole button on the device over and over. "Oh come on, no, no, no," he mumbled as his fingers ran over the screen. "What am I supposed to do on the T now?"
Just as expected, Yehya wasn't the type to go out to the phone store to get the screen replaced; he only ever left the apartment for the college, and every day he debated with himself aloud about whether he should bother. He tried to get me to do it, but after reminding him that I couldn't touch the phone, he gave up without realizing that he could have put it in a box, bag, or really any other container for me to interact with. Instead, he turned to online tutorial videos, resolving himself to fixing the screen on his own.
I returned from my shopping a short while later with a new screen and some special tools, as listed by Yehya as he parroted the videos. With an overabundance of confidence downloaded from online, he began to take the phone apart piece by piece. I watched with enough stress to re-kill me as each part came undone, looking at each component for what I needed to find.
There. Right when I noticed it, I flung the water bottle by me across the room, slamming it against the wall. Yehya jumped and turned around to look at the source of the sound, and in that moment I raised the tweezers I had stolen from the bathroom and yanked out a tiny black circle from next to the battery.
"I hate these neighbors," Yehya grumbled as he turned his attention back to the phone pieces. With his vision turned away, I brought the clamped tweezers as low as I could manage to the floor and darted into the bathroom.
Staring at the tiny black circle, I felt a deep, repulsive presence emanating off of it. I knew black tourmaline repelled ghosts, but I didn't realize just how disgusting it would feel being near it without the encasing metal of the electronics they protected. It felt as though the wisps of my being were being clogged with tar, and, despite not needing to breathe, the sensation still felt suffocating. I could only stand to look at it for half a minute maximum before tossing the stone into the toilet and flushing it down.
"Don't waste water," Yehya yelled.
I returned to his side just in time to see him powering on the phone and breathing a sigh of relief. Now the fun would begin.
Over the next few weeks, I got quite a stash of embarrassing photos and videos through the phone while Yehya wasn't paying attention. It took some practice to use, but I had every night as he slept to figure it out. The Internet was way more complicated than I anticipated, but I managed to figure out how to use email and post on Instagram, which is all I needed.
When I felt I had enough, I told Yehya to take me to PSI Industries. "What? No, no. Why would I ever listen to you?"
I grabbed the phone and pulled it away from his reach. "Wha- you're not supposed to-"
I started playing one of the videos I had taken of him wiping himself with a delivery box, and remarked that it would be such a shame if it were posted online. "How, how did you-"
I pulled up another of him using an aimbot in one of his games and commented that it would be so awful if it got emailed to his opponents. "A-are you blackmailing me?"
I only got five seconds into the third video of his nightly ritual before he agreed to bring me to Cambridge.
"This is stupid," he mumbled on the T heading to PSI Industries. "You know they've got anti-ghost blocks on basically everything, right?" I used his phone to type that it was certainly a good thing he wasn't dead then. He replied with some expletives, and one of the other passengers shuffled a few seats further.
Waiting outside the building made every second feel like an hour. My question on 'what would happen if a PSI-Anchor went into a blocked building' was answered as Yehya posed as a Harvard potential and got a tour of the PSI-Industries office: I became stuck in the 25-yard zone outside of the building's walls. The wait was awful, but the view in Cambridge felt more natural, less polluted, than the section of Boston I had spent all of my afterlife in. I tried to focus on that silver lining rather than thinking about what was taking Yehya so long.
Suddenly, my awareness blurred, and I felt myself moving rapidly before coming to a sudden stop. I found myself in a dark office, with Yehya crouched behind the desk, his hand holding five dark, revolting-feeling cubes. The PSI-Anchor on the floor blinked, alerting him to my presence, and he tossed the cubes to the side. That experience answered the 'what would happen if a blocked building suddenly became a not-blocked building and the PSI-Anchor was inside' question I didn't think to ask.
"I broke the window crystals and the PSI-Indicator for this room," Yehya whispered, "so you can be in this office, but anywhere else will trip the alarm. I also took out the crystal in the desktop." He moved to leave, and I asked where he was going. "I'm going home. I'll find a way to crack this new code you put on my phone, and the next ghost I get won't be this annoying." Before I could move, he stepped outside of the office door and vanished from view. I felt tempted to follow, but the thought of alarms stopped me, and my PSI-Anchor in the building meant that I couldn't leave out the window. I had no choice but to see my plan through.
Thankfully for me, Meg Odel of Public Relations was a very trusting woman, and left her desktop open despite stepping out of the room. After watching Yehya mess with his computer, I was far more familiar with their workings than phones, and found a database of the ghosts under PSI Industries in a matter of minutes.
Now or never. The database had an email group option for information and updates pertaining to PSI devices, so all I had to do was email out the information of the ghosts to each customer, and ensure they'd open it when the ghost could see.
I typed out the perfect email subject line: "IMPORTANT INFORMATION - OPEN FOR GHOST AND LET READ." All caps, to grab attention. In the email, I put some dummy text about how PSI Industries is so great, about how their volunteers are working hard, blah blah. Then, in the middle of the text, where someone skimming wouldn't notice, I put information tags, which would be replaced with information from the database for each email recipient. If it worked right, someone like Morgan's owner would open the email, vaguely skim it, and let Morgan read it, and Morgan, paying more attention, would notice the bullet points about themself that the owner had been sent scattered in the dummy text. With that information, ghosts wouldn't need the living anymore; the ones who didn't pass on immediately would know exactly what to do without any other help.
The door opened, and at the sound of a single footstep, an alarm blared. The woman in the doorway stumbled back in shock, and I caught a glimpse of a PSI-Indicator on her person. With the alarm going, I knew I only had moments to do what I needed to do. With a rapid move, I sent out the email, then moved to the window with Yehya's email account that I had opened with his information. A quiet ding played below the alarm's blast, and I saw an email pop up from PSI Industries with an all-caps subject line. Living people flooded into the room as I clicked it.
Then, nothing.
That's where I'm at now. Nothing. Nowhere. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel. I can't remember what happened after I clicked the email. Did I read the email and pass on, and this is what passing on is? Or did the people that came into the room put me into a PSI-Jail like the street ghosts warned? I don't know, and despite me thinking it all out like this, I don't feel any closer to the answer. I don't even know if my email did anything. I like to imagine that society came to a screeching halt when the working dead rebelled, but the more I think about my plan, the more I see the flaws in it. What if the company immediately sent out another email saying not to open mine? Or what if the living actually took the time to read and noticed the hidden information, or the ghosts couldn't be bothered to read and missed it entirely? Still, I like to think that even if I didn't free the ghost population, I at least made the living think twice about using us as their tools.
I feel pretty content with what I've done, and now I get to rest without being bossed around every hour of the day. Even if this isn't the eternal rest, it will do, at least for now. Ask me again in a century.
'It's mild.' That's what they told him during his first try. Mild, adjective, definition: of less than moderate severity. Mild was a salsa without any heat. Mild was the weather when all you needed was a light jacket. Mollydrop was anything but mild.
Nico was no stranger to altered consciousness. He first started drinking at 14, and things only went on from there. He stole his brother's joints at 16, and met his dealer several months later. He had journeyed the cosmos on DMT and peeled apart every layer of his psyche on LSD. He went into his trips with a buzz and went out with a fuzzy high. On select nights he joined his friends in a round of snorting or injecting a cocktail of drugs, depending on the occasion. No matter what he chose, he loved the feeling. He loved the rush of heroin and the bliss of ecstasy, the selfishness of alcohol and the selflessness of psychedelics. After years of all these feelings, he thought he'd felt it all.
Which is why, when his friend Zach came into their den with a bottle of liquid and a request to try, Nico was all for it. "It's mild," Zach said as he poured a bit into a shotglass. "That's what Ryan told me, anyway."
Nico learned two things in the next moments: one, that Ryan was a fucking liar, and two, that the strange liquid, which he later learned to be called 'Mollydrop,' contained feelings he never felt from any other substance. Right when the liquid touched his tongue, he felt the warmth run through him, as though his mouth had been blessed with some sort of new string of reality no other drug allowed him to experience. The warm feeling flowed through every vein in his body, but he felt the most intense focus on his mouth, the ridges of his lips, the bumps of his tongue, the smooth walls of his teeth. He could feel it all, and he felt more connected to his own body than with any drug prior.
"Holy shit," Nico said, feeling the reverberations of his vocal chords send ripples through his entire being.
"I know right," Zach replied, running his finger along the wooden table in front of them, a bit of the liquid dripping off of his fingertip.
"You didn't drink it?"
Zach looked up. "You did? I just wanted to try the touch thing first." A pause. "Oh shit, I didn't tell you. Ryan said the way you take it changes what it's like, like, entirely."
"Just touching it got you high?"
Zach giggled, still fascinated by his finger, now rubbing it against the arm of his chair. "Ryan said there's a different high for where you put it. Like you put it in your mouth, and now your mouth is high. Just like my finger!" He wiggled his finger and giggled some more.
"It's a good feeling," Nico said, leaning back in his chair and feeling the saliva building up under his tongue. Each word he said felt more significant than ever before, gifted with a cosmic weight he couldn't before conceive.
A sudden buzzing made the pair jump. On the table, Zach's phone vibrated, the name Claire showing clearly on the front screen.
"Dude, Claire's calling," Nico said.
"Can you answer it? My finger can feel the composition of things and it's really distracting. A phone would be even worse."
Nico shrugged, used to the antics of the intoxicated, and answered. "Yo," he said, admiring the force of the single syllable as it left his lips.
"Hey, is Zach around?"
Nico watched Zach as he stared intently at his finger, now rubbing each button of the remote one at a time. "He's busy, call back later."
"I really need to talk to him."
"I said he's busy."
"Ugh, of course. Are you two off getting high again?"
Nico felt a twitch of anger break through the warm embrace of his high. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nico, I'm not trying to fight, I-"
"No, no," Nico demanded, the warmth fading, replaced with an uncomfortable tingle in his bones. "Tell me what that was supposed to mean. If you have a problem with me, say it to me, not your Facebook wall." With each word, the static faded, but each moment between them brought it back with greater intensity.
An uncomfortable silence followed. Nico stared at the phone in his hand, trying to get his glare through the screen as the discomforting static feeling grew, spreading from his bones to his veins, branching out through his entire being. Zach continued to admire the feeling in his finger, taking in nothing else around him.
"That's what I thought," Nico hissed, the growing static now becoming unbearable. "How about you do something more productive with your time instead of bothering Zach."
"I just want to talk to my brother."
"Go jump in traffic." Nico hung up before she could respond, wishing in that moment that modern cell phones could somehow be slammed to show anger. Right after he gave his final word, warm waves washed away the static, forcing it to retreat from everywhere it infected, and the cruising high resumed. "She knows you're high, dude," he called out to Zach, now in the other room.
"Eh, who cares. This isn't middle school; sisters don't have any power over me."
Nico nodded, lying back and focusing on the feeling of his high. He wanted to remember every moment, so he could compare it to other experiences properly. It didn't have the lack of consequences that came with alcohol; he instead felt a greater weight to his actions, a new power to his will. The world didn't warp and change around him, and yet he felt re-positioned, shifted to a new reality with new rules, a reality where his desires and choices mattered. The waves of warmth reminded him of heroin, but every time they receded, they returned stronger than before, and his body felt not tired, but completely recharged.
"Man," he said, feeling the words dripping out of him, "you said this Mollydrop has different highs, right? We're doing this shit again. Ryan's place, tomorrow."
---
Tomorrow changed into today, and Nico prepared a q-tip with dabs of Mollydrop, just as Ryan instructed. Somehow Ryan's house was less organized and tidy than his, but he did his best to ignore the stains and crumbs covering every surface. For a drug den, it was in an acceptable state. He'd experienced worse.
"So you did the mouth high yesterday," Ryan said with a chuckle. "How'd that go? Do anything fun with it?"
"Honestly, I just sat around my house. It felt incredible, though."
"But did you talk to anyone?"
Nico shrugged. "Just Zach, really. And Claire called, but that wasn't anything."
Ryan prepared a bit of the liquid in a shotglass, swishing it around. "Not going to tell me what it's like, huh? Fine, I'll see for myself."
Before Nico could respond, the pair heard the unmistakable squeak of the front door, followed by footsteps. In moments, Zach appeared and fell into the corner piece of the couch, eyes drooped and skin pale.
"Holy shit man," Nico said, leaning over to his friend. "You look like the walking dead! Did this shit do that to you?"
Zach slowly shook his head. "Claire..." he mumbled.
Nico stopped himself from groaning at the name. "She posted some bull on Facebook again, didn't she?" No response. "I'll go deal with that, buddy, I'll-" His eyes froze his mouth. His phone screen glowed with Claire's profile, showing her wall covered in posts from friends. He saw hearts, and crying emojis, and paragraphs of heartfelt emotion. His eyes latched onto a single post, reading only RIP.
"She got hit by a car yesterday," Zach said, his voice void of emotion. "Right in the street. Guy said she was just... jumping around there."
"Jumping? Why would she-" Nico's heart sank, remembering his final words to her. He shook the thoughts out of his head. It was just a badly timed insult, no way she would actually listen to him. No one would take something like that seriously.
"When's the funeral," Ryan asked apathetically, brushing some crumbs off a nearby cushion.
"Now," Zach replied, reaching for the bottle of Mollydrop.
Nico grabbed his arm and pulled it away, keeping his hand around his friend's wrist. "Then what the fuck are you doing here, man?"
"I have to do it again. Today, Ryan's place," he replied, his eyes staring forward, completely unfocused.
Nico felt Zach's hand force itself toward the bottle. He kept his grip strong, pulling it away. "I know you're grieving, but you can't just skip her funeral to get high!"
"I have to do it again. Today, Ryan's place," Zach repeated, his voice growing stronger.
Ryan tapped his shotglass against the edge of the glass table, making it ring out loudly. "The man wants to do it again, let him do it again," he declared.
"I have to do it again. Today, Ryan's place."
Nico sighed and let go of Zach's arm. He was no stranger to self-medicating; many of the people around him got into the culture through some loss or another. He was a small minority, intoxicating only to learn of the thrills of life, and had hoped that Zach would stay the same.
Immediately Zach grabbed the bottle and poured some of the contents on his hand, letting it run and drip off of his skin. Ryan nodded and poured back a shot, tossing the shotglass onto the table with a clatter. Nico, feeling dirty about letting Zach take a dose, raised the soaked q-tip and dabbed it into his ears, longing for the warmth he felt the day before to take away the guilt.
As if on cue, the warm feeling buzzed through his veins, with a slight vibration ringing in his ears. It felt good, as though something had taken his ear and massaged it, stretching it beyond its normal limits, giving it a blessing like his mouth had previously. He felt himself slip into a new reality, a new state of being where his influence extended beyond what it could reach before. The warmth flowing through him brought with it a feeling of significance, and he couldn't get enough.
"Hoo fuck, that's a good feeling," Ryan said, rubbing his lips against each other.
Nico looked over to Zach, who stared intently at his hand as he rubbed his kneecap over his jeans. "Is it feeling good for you?" He leaned in closer, trying to be as supportive as he could for his friend, no matter how poor his grieving process was.
Zach's mouth opened and closed to form the word 'yes,' but Nico heard something else entirely. "I can feel the parts of her in me. The genes that we shared."
Nico shook his head, half expecting it to shake off the high. He didn't remember any hallucinations the previous day. Did taking it a different way add that?
"Hello. Helloooo," Ryan sang out in different pitches and volumes. Nico looked over at him, watching his mouth. On the tenth 'hello,' his mouth again formed the word again, but Nico heard something else. "What can I do now? Show me what I can do now!"
Nico looked away, the difference in visual and sound disorienting his senses. He focued instead on the warm pulses surrounding his bones. The nagging tingle from yesterday had reappeared beneath the warmth, but he refused to give it power, focusing only on the waves pulsing through him.
"Ugh," Ryan sighed, falling back into his seat. "It feels amazing, but..." His mouth stopped moving, but his voice continued. "I know there's more to it than this."
"More to it?" Nico asked, unsure of whether he was answering Ryan or a hallucination.
Ryan perked up. "Did you hear that?"
"Yes?" Nico questioned, unsure of how to react.
Before Ryan could reply, Zach got up from his seat, reaching for the bottle once again.
With lightning speed, Ryan was back leaning forward on his seat, finger pointing with all the aggression he could muster into one extremity. "Hey, hey! You've used enough. That shit's not cheap, you know."
"I have to do it again. Today, Ryan's place."
Ryan groaned. "Quit saying that! You're in mourning or whatever, but forget about Claire, it's ruining my buzz."
Nico glared. "Ryan-"
"What? It's true, I know you're thinking it." The two exchanged a glare. "Zach, how about you take your mopey self into the kitchen to get us snacks, huh? And cheer up while you're at it."
Before Nico could open his mouth to protest, Zach was on his feet and walking to the kitchen.
"There, that's better," Ryan said, resting back once more.
Nico shook his head. "That's fucked, man."
"Hey, he chose to get high instead of facing her body or whatever. His bullshit doesn't give him a free pass to waste our high with doom and gloom." He wriggled himself deeper into the sagging cushions. His mouth didn't move, but Nico heard his voice all the same. "Oh that's so much nicer. All of that tension was making my bones buzz, but now it's back to warm city."
Nico tried to relax himself, pushing away the familiar static under the waves of warmth inside him.
After several minutes, Zach returned, tossing a pile of chip bags and juice boxes onto the table. "Those felt amazing," he exclaimed, admiring his hand. "There were so many contents, and I could feel them all!" He bounced back into his spot in the couch, his sagging eyes back to normal with a spark of life and enjoyment.
"Of course," Zach said with a giggle, his mouth stuck in a grin. "How could I not feel good like this?"
Nico forced himself to laugh along. "Yeah man, I guess. You just seemed really fucked up earlier about Claire-"
"Quit bringing her up," Ryan snapped.
"Who?" Zach stared at Nico, face blank.
Nico tried to open his mouth to repeat her name, but the word snagged in his throat. He felt the sound grow barbs and dig into his flesh, refusing to go any further. "You came here so fucked up," Nico managed to say, fighting the feeling.
"I guess," Zach shrugged, "but I can't remember why."
He tried again to say her name, but his throat closed every time he tried, and his lips refused to part.
Zach looked back at his hand, his mouth unmoving but his voice speaking all the same. "Probably some girl I pumped and dumped, she's not important."
Nico's heart began to race, and the static buzz in his bones grew stronger, revealing itself as the warm pulses faded. Something was horribly wrong. Was it him? Did the new use of Mollydrop change the high so radically that he'd lost his connection to reality?
No, that wasn't it. He thought back to the start of the high, to a very specific feeling that he hadn't felt so clearly on any drug before. The feeling of slipping into another reality, of his will being more powerful than ever before. On all his intoxicated odysseys, there was always a quiet thought behind it, acting as a disclaimer that the things he experienced came only from the drug, and not from the truth. This feeling didn't have that quiet thought.
"Ryan," Nico forced himself to say, breaking out from his thoughts, "where did you get this stuff, anyway?"
Ryan laughed, the sound echoing in Nico's skull. "You wouldn't ever believe it, mate. Someone gave it to me!" He giggled again, completely missing Nico's wide eyes. "Some guy near the tracks tossed it my way. Told me it was more than he could handle, that he wasn't ready for so much power. What a wuss, giving up good shit because it was too good."
"What did he mean by power?"
"As if I kno- Zach! Quit touching that shit, man. Go touch something else."
Zach's hand immediately jerked away from the nearby shelf and shot away, and he followed behind it, body stumbling as though being pulled.
Ryan leaned back again. His mouth didn't move, but Nico heard his voice all the same. "He called it the God's Drink, and now I feel why! I wish it were real and not some high. The shit I'd do..." The sourceless voice trailed away as Ryan smiled to himself, eyes staring off in fantasy.
Nico's heart began to race. Thoughts of Ryan's previous babblings, of his bar fights and his threats, all flooded his mind. His temper was matched only by his drive to be the top dog. If he felt even half of like Nico did, he felt like a god, on top of the world, with a significance to his will. Nico tried to fight the thought that it was more than a drug-induced feeling, but as the static grew inside of him, he couldn't. With his words, Claire went in traffic. With Ryan's words, Zach forgot her, and he couldn't remind his dear friend of who she was. His ears could hear what others didn't say, and Zach felt things beyond what they could perceive. Through Mollydrop, he heard the truth, Zach felt the truth, and Ryan... he said the truth, no matter what he said.
"Bro, you look like you've seen a ghost!" Zach leaned in close to him, grin plastered on his face. "C'mon, don't be a party downer. What're you feeling?"
"I'm great," he lied, the static consuming the inside of his being. As he stared at Zach, he realized that he had to escape. They both had to, before Ryan caused more damage. Zach already couldn't remember his own sister. With any sarcastic comment, Ryan could do much worse than that. They couldn't risk it. "I was just thinking that maybe we could take a walk, see what things are like outside."
Zach bounced up and down, smile unmoving. "That sounds like such a-"
"-horrible idea," Ryan sighed, rolling his eyes. "There's always another high for that. Quit thinking about outside."
With those words, all thoughts of the outside vanished. Nico fought the feeling, trying to retain some motivation to leave, but in his mind, the world beyond the house faded into an unending darkness, as if part of a forgotten dream.
The analog clock on the wall ticked with increased intensity. 5:45. Based on his trip the day before, they only had a half hour before the Mollydrop wore off. If they couldn't go outside the house, they would have to survive being inside of it with an ignorant, self-assured god.
"Want to watch some TV?" he suggested.
"Why would you want to not focus on the warm feeling right now? There's no way TV can compare," Ryan said with an eye roll. As he spoke, a faint buzz came from his pocket. He pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen, rolling his eyes. "Ugh, I have to take this." With visible reluctance, he wandered into the other room, starting his conversation with a harsh 'what' before the door between them slammed.
In their sudden solitude, Nico saw a chance to warn Zach of the looming danger. He didn't spare a second before launching into a hurried summary of his findings.
Zach stared at him, head leaned to the side. "Dude... the fuck?" Despite his confused voice, the grin stayed stuck on his face. "Did that shit leak to your brain or something? Why do you think Ryan can control reality with words?"
One word could prove what he said was true, but that one word lodged into his throat, constricting his breath until he gave up attempting to speak it. He decided to go another route. "You trust me, right?"
"Of course, man."
"You know I've been high, like, a lot."
Zach laughed. "You're a master at it."
"Then trust me when I say I have reason to believe this, and it's not just the high talking, okay?"
"Yeah, alright," Zach said with a shrug. His voice continued without his mouth's help. "He clearly thinks it's real, and following along won't get us hurt or arrested. Let's see where this goes."
Nico resisted the urge to correct Zach on the urgent nature of the matter. He had agreed to listen; on what pretense wasn't exactly important. "So you understand that we need to make sure Ryan doesn't say anything that'll fuck with us, right?"
Before Zach replied, Ryan kicked the door back open, laughing as he swung his phone around. "Dumbass landlord finally gets who's boss around here," he said as he snickered. "Fucker deserved it" sounded from under the laughs.
"Ha ha, yeah," Nico said, trying and failing to sound genuine. "Bet he did."
"Yeah, totally," Zach chimed in. "You should tell us about that and absolutely nothing else."
Nico glared at his friend, but Ryan had managed to miss the strangeness of Zach's statement entirely. He began rambling about missed rent and threatened violence, noting multiple times how it totally wasn't his fault that everyone around him had serious attitude problems. The two nodded in agreement whenever Ryan looked their way for confirmation on how cool and badass he was.
As the rambling continued, Nico stared at the clock. The second hand taunted him by ticking slower than he ever remembered, drawing out into minutes, forcing him to sit with the uncomfortable static and the dread of Ryan's words. He previously hated listening to Ryan talk about himself, but it was as close to the warm pulses he could get with the fear of reality being changed constricting every part of his being.
"And then I told him- wait. Yo, Nico!"
Nico snapped back into reality. "I totally agree man, what a jerk," he replied.
"You weren't listening, asshole. What, that clock's more important than my life?"
"No, I-"
"Then what were you thinking about, hmm? Tell me!"
"I'm thinking about how you can control reality with your words and I don't want you to use it on us."
The room fell completely silent for what the clock recorded as two seconds, but the three felt as hours. The silence broke as Zach began to laugh.
"Man, he-"
"Zach, punch Nico."
The static intensified to searing pain along Nico's cheek as Zach's fist slammed into his face. He stumbled down, grabbing the side of the table to prevent himself from falling over completely. From the corner of his eye, he saw Zach staring at his hand, face pale, and Ryan breaking out into laughter.
"Holy shit, dude, you hit him full force," Ryan managed to say between laughs.
"I was... humoring you," Zach said unconvincingly, still staring at his hand with wide eyes and the permanent grin.
"Oh really? Take that bat over there and hit yourself in the balls."
Nico lowered his head to avoid seeing the next few moments happening behind him, but the sound told him everything he didn't want to know. He forced himself to turn, seeing his friend crying on the ground with his hands between his legs, and Ryan standing over him, shocked face turning into a sadistic grin. Ryan's eyes moved from Zach to Nico. His mouth didn't move, but Nico's ears still heard him. "I wonder if I can make these bitches kill each other."
Panic set in. With every new thing Nico heard, the static inside of him grew, and he felt as though his body couldn't contain it any longer. If the feeling didn't kill him, Ryan's truth-speaking would. Either way, Mollydrop would be the end of him.
Mollydrop. His eyes shot to the bottle on the table. He felt a sudden spike of warmth in his chest, spurred on by a wild idea. If he drank it too, he would have truth-speaking. He could command Ryan to remain silent. He would be free. Ryan's eyes followed his as they moved, widening with a similar conclusion.
The two lunged for the bottle. Nico, having the advantage of being closer to it, managed to grab it and pull it up to his lips. Ryan grabbed it moments later, pulling it away and opening his mouth to speak. Nico slammed the bottle into his mouth before he could, then jerked it back with all his might. Ryan forced himself forward, pushing Nico off balance. Both refused to let go of the bottle as Nico fell, and it tilted, spilling its contents all over Nico's face.
Nico felt the warm liquid spill all over his face, getting into his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears. It splashed across his body and ran down to soak his clothes. With each drop that hit him, a small vibration rippled through him, compounding and increasing in intensity, bringing waves of warmth with it. The feeling quickly surpassed anything he felt before, changing from comforting heat to blazing fire, burning through his body as though it were a dry wood, erasing all feeling as it moved. His ears heard a faint static, which began to rise in volume, starting to form voices he knew, ones from his family, from Zach, from Claire. Each one layered on the last as the volume rose, changing from a whisper to a crowd to an unintelligible soundscape. His eyes remained wide and unblinking, but the world around him warped and changed, layers peeling back and dissolving, starting with Ryan's skin and the wallpaper around them, then going further, and further. Once every layer of his reality vanished, he fell into a new one, which too was stripped away, until he could only see both everything and nothing, swirling all around what used to be him in an endless vortex. He felt himself falling through realities, dissolving them with his presence until they, too, began to fall. They fell and fell, until there was nothing left to fall to, so he fell into nothing, fading away until he, too, became nothing.
---
"Holy. Shit. That was so wild!" Zach started laughing as he forced himself up off the floor. "Wish I hadn't hit my balls, though."
"Yeah, sorry man, you know how it is when I'm high," Ryan shrugged from the couch. "A quick nap did me good, though. And it seems to have done you good, too."
"Yeah, good thinking on the benzos, things were getting a bit weird at the end." Zach turned to face Nico, lying on his back on the ground nearby. "How about you, Nico? You took quite a bit right to the face. How're you feeling?"
Nico didn't respond. His eyes stared into space, with his mouth hanging slightly open.
Ryan leaned over and put his fingers on Nico's throat. "Breathing, and got a pulse, too. He just needs to sleep it off."
"Totally," Zach agreed. He leaned in close to Nico, patting his chest. "Don't worry buddy, we have plenty left for you when you come to. You have so much more to experience!"
She loved watching the butterflies burn. She didn't quite understand why. While some might assume it was due to the contrast of beauty and destruction, or perhaps from a message about the fragility of nature, her young mind didn't yet have enough understanding of itself to come to such conclusions. She quite liked that she didn't have to think about it; regardless of whether she chose to analyze her love or leave it be, the butterflies burned all the same. Her lighter needed only to lick the tip of a wing for a moment before the flame spread, covering the intricate patterns on the wing's surface and turning the creature into a fluttering ember in seconds.
"You must be careful," she was warned when she first got the lighter from a cluttered junk drawer at the age of ten, "because flames spread faster and further than you'd expect."
She heeded the warning at first, lighting only picked blades of grass and the occasional leaf. As she burned more, she became bolder, gathering clumps of grass and leaves to burn against the dirt all at once. One time, she lit the pile to watch it turn to ash, and saw a single butterfly flutter out, trying desperately to escape the flames, only to be hit by an ember and consumed. She was addicted to the sight ever since.
One night, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, she found a small bush covered in flowers and filled with butterflies. It only took a bit of gas and a spark to set them all ablaze.
The next morning, she awoke to find a butterfly sitting on the tip of her lamp, wings opening and closing in the morning light through the window. She took out her lighter to burn it. The flames licked the wing, but the butterfly didn't respond. She pushed the lighter closer, but still it sat and lazily fluttered its wings. The lighter itself hit the butterfly, finally prompting it to flit in the air around her room, still living and notably not burning from the lighter's flame.
Her father entered the room, grin on his face as he walked toward his daughter to bring a welcome to the new day and an invitation to breakfast. As he approached, the fluttering butterfly spun around him, landing softly on his exposed forearm. He yelped, his arm jolting and sending the butterfly back into the air. She prepared to make a joke at his expense before she saw her father's arm: where the butterfly landed, he now had a deep red burn, shaped exactly like butterfly wings.
Her father tried to grab her, to pull her out of the room with the strange butterfly, but every time he came close to her, the butterfly landed on his skin, burning him with the same shape. Unable to bear the pain any longer, her father left the room, leaving her with the butterfly.
It was not only her father who got burned. When she came to the kitchen to check on her father, the butterfly landed on her mother, her siblings, even the family cat. No one who came close to her was spared. Unable to deal with the burns on her family any longer, she grabbed a spatula from the cupboards and smacked the butterfly with it, splatting it against the wall. It sizzled and smoked against the paint, leaving a charred circle around its remains.
When she woke up the next morning, two butterflies fluttered around her.
Her family tried everything. They tried to kill the butterflies, but they were too fast and burned their skin in retaliation. They tried capturing them, but right when no one was looking the butterflies would escape their cages and, again, burn their captors as punishment. They took her to the doctor, but after the first burn he refused to see her again, kicking them all out of the office. In the end, they chose to cover themselves in layers and layers of clothes, protecting every inch of their skin in fabric to avoid the butterfly's touch.
The people outside didn't fare any better. Whenever she went out, the butterflies followed, lingering around her, waiting for someone to come close. When they did, a butterfly would soar down and land on them, leaving them with a burn of their own. Her friends from school, her teacher, even the kind cashier from her favorite ice cream shop all got the same treatment. Some people withstood more burns than others, but they each, one by one, learned to keep their distance from her.
The butterflies never burned her. They let her crush them, rip them, and drown them. They let her capture them in bottles and boxes. Those methods worked, for a time. Each time a butterfly died, two appeared in the morning. Each time one was captured, an additional one would be in containment come sunrise, until the container burst with the sheer number of butterflies. The two became four, then eight, then more and more, until she found herself surrounded by the butterflies, their burning wings creating a barrier between her and everyone around her.
As she grew older, she did her best to work around the butterflies. The container method let her have periods of normalcy as the butterflies multiplied inside a jar or suitcase, but inevitably they would burst out, the swarm larger than before, burning all who got close to her in the time of their imprisonment. Killing them worked for shorter periods, and made her feel more in control of her situation, but each morning would remind her of how wrong she was.
She reached the age of romance, and she warned those she held interest in of the butterflies. Some didn't believe her, then quickly left after their first burn. Others took precautions like her family had, covering their skin with layers of fabric to keep the wings away. Some lasted a week in that condition, others managed months, and one even made it to a year, but eventually they all overheated from the mounds of clothes and had to remove them, finally feeling the burn they feared all along.
By the time she reached adulthood, she had a cloud of butterflies waiting around her. Even when she stole glass bottles from the recycling bins around town and pushed as many butterflies as she could into them, even more fluttered around her. With their newfound numbers, the butterflies could now burn things around them, not just the living. One particularly bad burst of bottles inside of her apartment burned it to the ground, leaving her without a home for a short time.
At this point, no one dared approach her. Unlike before, when she could approach someone new and have a small sense of normalcy, people now had heard of the butterflies, and avoided her long before she met them, if she ever got the chance. Even her family, resilient as they were, could no longer stand the layers of clothes to see her, and wished her a tearful farewell.
Completely alone and rejected by all she knew, she chose to leave her town, venturing off into the mountains to seek solitude from others, to completely remove herself from the false hope of being close to others. As she stood atop a mountain and gazed all around, she noticed some of the butterflies around her acting strangely. They perked up, as if snapped out of a dream, and fluttered away into the trees, further away from her than she ever saw the burning butterflies go. She followed a few to see where they went, and found them landing on flowers and trees, lazily enjoying the sunshine. One flitted around a deer, and she winced in empathy for the deer's coming pain. The pain never came. The butterfly landed on the deer's back, opening and closing its wings, burning nothing.
She noticed, in that moment, that all of the butterflies that flew away from her shared the same wing pattern, while the others had patterns of their own. With an idea in her mind, she ran back to civilization, using the library to look up different types of butterflies. As she thought, the butterflies that flew away from her and lost their burning powers were those native to the mountains she traveled through.
For the first time in many years, she felt a hope.
She matched every butterfly around her to a species and a native region. Some took her just outside of her home, and others took her across the globe, but she knew it needed to be done. Every minute of her day, every dollar of her wallet, went into her studies or her travels, releasing the butterflies bit by bit into their native habitats. More people got burned along the way, but the number shrunk with each set of butterflies released, and she refused to kill or contain any more and allow their numbers to grow again.
After years of hard work, her family opened their front door to see her standing with a grin they long forgot, and without a butterfly in sight.
Her parents rejoiced at seeing her once more, taking her up in their arms and wetting her shoulders with their tears. Her siblings, however, still cautiously kept their distance, and the family cat refused to enter the room where she stood. Each of them had light pink and white scars along their bodies, each one in the shape of the butterfly's wings that burned them so many years ago. She accepted the caution her siblings and pet displayed to her; their scars meant that they could never forget the pain they went through when she was near.
Her passions renewed, she found a new home, away from the tales of her past, and began a new life. Every so often, a new butterfly or two would appear around her once more, but she knew how to be rid of them as they popped up. She found a friend, who became a lover, then a husband, then a father with her. He knew not to get close to her when the butterflies appeared, though he did make the mistake on occasion. He accepted the burns for what they were, believing that his love was worth the occasional pain.
Her son did not fare as well, for he didn't understand why he got burned, no matter how many tearful apologies he got. At the young age of ten, he discovered a lighter in his mother's junk drawer, and soon after learned a way to distract himself from the thoughts of his burns. On the eve of his thirteenth birthday, he found a nest of dragonflies at the nearby pond and lit it ablaze, watching the dragonflies dart over the water as they turned to ash.
The next morning, he awoke to see a dragonfly zipping around his room.
People rarely think about life until something reminds them it's not a guaranteed and permanent thing. In this moment, Daniel was thinking quite hard about mortality after a reminder in the form of a speeding SUV. As it entered every degree of his personal space and collided with his person, Daniel jolted from the thoughts of video game strategies and potential online play insults after a very physical jolt sent him flying over the hood of the car. He wanted to shout at the driver, to stop them from speeding away, but found that his body refused to respond. The only thing that still seemed to be in his control were his eyes, which he chose to close in order to avoid seeing any of his blood seeping onto the road and into the cracks and crevices around him.
He felt no pain, which was both nice and terrifying. If he felt nothing, something was very seriously wrong, but on the other hand, he quite hated the feeling of pain. He couldn't decide whether he was lucky or unlucky to be hit by a car painlessly. He decided to be glad he didn't have to lie on the road unable to move and also in pain; just one of those was bad enough.
In that moment Daniel realized he was well and truly fucked. The back-roads of his town barely saw activity; the fact that both he and an SUV occupied the same road, let alone the same point on that road, was the epitome of poor luck. By the time another person came by, he would be-
"Would you like to keep going?"
-dead! He'd be dead. He'd died quite a few times in games, but never really thought about it in real life. Why would he? He still had so much left to do, and had expected a good sixty or seventy years to get it all done. He was getting around to it, albeit slowly. So he had-
"Would you like to keep going?"
-dropped out of college, so what? He couldn't help that the finance board messed up his loans so he couldn't continue. And so he spent all his time gaming, so what He couldn't help that there weren't any good jobs around him at the moment. He'd fix those things later, he had time. Well, he was supposed to, anyway. He needed 100 years, not 25. It wasn't his fault he didn't get around to-
Daniel felt a sudden pain that felt remarkably like a kick to the face. When he opened his eyes, he found that he had, indeed, been kicked in the face. The offender stared down at him, eyes hidden in the shadows from a cadet hat's brim, an open button-down waving in the wind as though it were a cloak.
"I'm not asking again. Would you like to keep going?" The figure tilted its head, awaiting a response.
Daniel tried to open his mouth, to respond with something, anything, but it refused. His eyes darted around the figure, trying to figure out who had found him so quickly on such an abandoned path.
"Oh, wait, you can't talk, can you? Then blink twice if you want to keep going."
Were they messing with him? What kind of messed-up person would make a dying man ask for help in order to not die? A sudden gust of wind blew some dirt from the road into his eyes, and he reflexively blinked.
"Excellent. Let's go."
---
Daniel opened his eyes, but the darkness remained. He tried closing and opening his eyes again, but still he saw nothing. He rubbed his eyes with his hands, as if to wipe the darkness away. He then realized that his hands were moving and notably not sprawled out on pavement. After a quick check, he learned that all of his body parts regained function, and he currently stood.. somewhere. Somewhere dark, with a hard floor.
Did he die? Was this death? "Seriously?" he asked aloud to no one in particular, pleasantly surprised that he could speak at all.
His emotions quickly went through many options, ranging from fear to relief and back again, and after a few rotations settled on his personal favorite: anger. How dare that douchebag SUV driver hit him, and then just run off. And how dare that douchebag figure mock him as he was dying! What kind of monster just watches someone die? That thought brought with it a brief memory of him binging videos from the Watch People Die forums, but he quickly concluded that videos and reality were totally different things, so what he did was fine, and the figure was unquestionably a massive dick.
He threw an arm out in frustration. It collided with an unseen wall, making him swear in pain. After a minute of wandering in the darkness, he determined that he was probably in the middle of a thin hallway. Daniel, taking control of his circumstances, followed the corridor with a hand running along the wall, walking in a direction chosen entirely at random.
The darkness in front of him vanished all at once, revealing a large dome-shaped room. Looking back, he saw what appeared to be extremely dark clouds, as if they were made of shadows themselves, lingering in the doorway he just passed through. He didn't like thinking that he spent so long wandering in that air, whatever it was filled with.
His eyes wandered around the room, taking in all he could. Abstractly-formed glass structures hung from the ceiling, lit with an array of blue and violet lights above. The walls were covered in what appeared to be mirrors, but the reflections showed people wandering around the room and interacting with each other, and Daniel saw nothing like that around him. Directly in front of him he found a small bar, with bottles of various kinds on a shelf behind it, glowing a pale white from a lit platform beneath them.
"Hello?" he called out before immediately regretting it, feeling like a horror movie protagonist calling out into the clearly haunted basement.
"Hello!"
Daniel jumped back as someone popped up from behind the bar. Not just any someone- that someone, the figure who he saw on the streets.
"Good, you've made it. I get tired waiting, ya know? Now sit down, sit down!"
Daniel's anger returned as he looked at the person in front of him. He had no doubt this person was the one from before, with the stupid voice and the stupid hat and the stupid maybe-shirt-maybe-cloak style they were going for. And what was with the symbols stitched all over their clothes? It looked like something Hot Topic would come up with to try and look mysterious and edgy to preteens. Despite his anger, he had a strong feeling he should listen to the only other person in the area, and one familiar with it at that. Reluctantly, he sat.
The figure smiled a grin that, for a moment, looked too big for their face. "Nice to meet-"
"What the fuck." Daniel stared at the shadowed area where the figure's eyes would be, noticing the darkness flowing like a plume of smoke stuck to one place.
The figure tilted their head, the darkness making whisps of shadow as it moved with them.
Daniel gestured around him, repeating his previous statement in physical form.
"Well there's no need to be rude," the figure said with a heavy breath and a deep drink from a glass beside them. "Here, I'll do it. Nice to meet you, I'm-" The figure's mouth moved, but what came out was a strange garbled mess that Daniel couldn't hope to remember, let alone repeat. "And you're David Thorne, our latest applicant, and you think it's nice to meet me. Would you like a drink? Yes you would, thank me very much! Would you prefer metal or jazz?" The figure turned, looking at the bottles behind the bar. "I've also got some country," they added, clearly disgusted with the idea.
Daniel wanted to repeat his previous question again, but he had a very strong feeling that it wouldn't lead anywhere, and would only make stupid Gibberish-name make less sense. Maybe this was a dying dream, he thought. Games and movies loved that gimmick. "Surprise me," he said, choosing to play along.
The figure clapped with a grin. "Ooh, I like your style," they said as they pulled a bottle out from the lineup and poured a metalic blue liquid into a stump crystal glass in front of him. "Alternative rock it is. Vocal or instrumental?"
Daniel mentally flipped a coin in his head. "Vocal," he shrugged.
The figure pulled a drawer out from beneath the bar and, with a pair of tongs, dropped three round gray objects into the glass. "Cheers," they said as they held up their own glass.
Daniel hit his glass against theirs, intentionally hitting a little too hard to try and get theirs to spill. It didn't work, but the attempt still satisfied him. Without thinking, he took a deep sip from the glass.
As soon as the drink went down his throat, he felt his heart thump to a drum beat as his bones twanged with guitar riffs. The bass pulsed through his veins, and the vocal track rang in his throat and up to his teeth. He felt the music ring through every part of his body, and though he didn't hear any sound outside of him, his insides roared with what he could only define as alternative rock. The intensity of the feelings went down quickly, but the buzz of the track continued inside of him, almost at a murmur.
The figure slammed its glass down, neon green drink splashing with the impact. "Damn, I love EDM. I prefer instrumental though, the vocals are too repetitive for my tastes. Gets on my nerves."
"The fuck is all of this," Daniel managed to say once the feeling of the vocals in his throat reduced.
The figure tilted its head. "You don't know? Well, there's no need to be a cranky asshole about it."
Daniel opened his mouth to protest, but his throat tingled with a particularly strong vocal section of a song.
"This is the-" the figure spoke a long series of words that made absolutely no sense. "You said you wanted to try again, right?"
Daniel nodded. He didn't exactly mean to indicate that earlier, but he wasn't about to look a gift figure in the mouth.
"Well, here's your chance. If you pass, you'll get another go. Easy enough, right?"
"What is it, a way to judge people?" Daniel's Catholic upbringing immediately sprang to mind.
"Something like that," the figure said as they wiped down a part of the bar. "You'll be tested against the strongest force in the world, and if you pass, you live again. Get it?"
Daniel thought for a second. The strongest force in the world? He thought about what he knew of religions. Temptation was a clear choice; the Bible made note of the temptation to sin in man as being a powerful force, beaten only by a faith in God. "So I'm fighting against my temptation, the sins in my life? Does that make this Purgatory?"
The figure shrugged, taking another sip of the neon green drink.
He sighed in relief. He didn't praise the Lord each day or anything like that, but he had lived a decent life. No sex before marriage, or sex at all for that matter. No stealing, since obviously piracy didn't count. He took the Lord's name in vain basically every night in his online games, but hey, no one's perfect. He didn't expect to make it to sainthood or anything, but he felt ahead of the bell curve in terms of basic human decency.
"So if this is Purgatory," Daniel thought out loud, "then people who would go to Heaven actually are reincarnated, and people who go to Hell.. what?"
The figure drank again. "Quit mumbling, kid, you'll ruin the bass drop."
"Am I being judged now? How do I know when I've passed or not?"
The figure jerked suddenly, hitting the glass and sending it tumbling off of the bar. "Damn it, I just said not to ruin it with talking," they shouted through gritted teeth.
"Then give me answers," Daniel demanded, slamming both hands on the bar and pulling himself up so he and the figure stood at around the same height.
In that moment, the lights on the ceiling changed colors, changing the the glass structures beneath them from a pale blue to a vibrant purple-red. A whooshing noise came from somewhere else in the room, but Daniel couldn't tell where.
The figure sighed. "We could have had a nice time waiting here. Why must you applicants always be so aggressive?" Their hand hovered over Daniel's drink. "Are you gonna finish this?"
Daniel shook his head.
"Cool," the figure said as they downed the drink. A shiver ran through their body. "Damn, that did not go together as nicely as I thought," they mumbled as they tossed the glass behind the bar. "Alright, it's go-time, part one. You ready?"
Daniel, completely not ready, nodded.
---
Daniel followed the figure through a series of confusing hallways. As they moved, the clouds of darkness behind them crept closer, but the darkness in front of them pushed away, keeping them in a constant visible space. They turned left, then went forward for a while, then left again, and another left..
"Are we just going in circles?"
The figure grumbled something about a ruined bass drop, completely ignoring the question.
After several more minutes of walking, the darkness again rushed away from in front of them, revealing a new, larger room. The darkness lingered on top of the room, clinging to the ceiling and blocking Daniel's view of anything above a dozen or so feet. From his limited perspective, the room appeared to have six columns holding it up, formed in a semi-circle along the other side of the circular room. As they got closer, a bright white circle of lights lit up in front of the columns.
"That's your cue," the figure said, prodding Daniel with their elbow. "Knock 'em dead. Or, you know, whatever."
Daniel swallowed hard, feeling the lingering effect of his earlier drink in his saliva, and stepped forward.
"Daniel Thorne?" a voice boomed from above the shadow clouds.
Daniel jumped from the volume of the voice. "Yes, that's me," he replied after regaining his composure.
"Welcome to-" the gibberish went on for a while. Daniel struggled to keep a straight face for the entire duration. "-We will ask you a series of questions about your life. Answer them honestly. Are you ready for your questions?"
An interrogation on his life. Of course an afterlife test would be about sinning. That would be the perfect way to investigate his sin-laden temptations. "Yes," he said. He focused on remembering his upbringing, reassuring himself that he hadn't sinned badly enough to warrant a trip to Hell.
"Question one. Have you ever held two carrots at once?"
Daniel paused. Carrots? The Bible didn't say anything about carrots, did it? "I think... yes?"
Suddenly, he heard intense murmuring between multiple voices in the darkness above, and a sharp inhale from the figure behind him. Before he could ask anything, the voice from above continued.
"Have you ever used blue ink on gray parchment?"
"I... don't... think so?" Daniel said, honestly unsure.
A gasp slipped out from the clouds above before the next question was hurriedly asked. "An apple is to heights like an orange is to what?"
"Is that some kind of joke?" Daniel snapped, feeling his anger returning.
He felt a hand grab onto his arm. The figure pulled him backwards, making him stumble out of the circle. "We'd like to take a recess," the figure yelled up to the shadowy clouds. Not waiting for a response, they dragged Daniel out of the room and into the hallway, surrounding them both with the hall's dark fog.
"What are you thinking," the figure hissed, "insulting them like that? Do you want to fail the test?"
Daniel pulled his arm out of the figure's strangely weak grasp. "That can't seriously be the test. There's no religion that cares about carrots or pens! And what is that comparison supposed to be? There's no way I'd know that, it's not fair at all! It's-" He trailed off mid-sentence, interrupted by a sudden bout of laughter from the figure. "What?" he shouted over their uproar.
The figure took some deep breaths to gain control of their laughter. "Hoo boy, sorry, you were just so funny with all that 'it's not fair' whining."
"You said I'd be up against temptation! How is any of this related to temptation, or sinning, or any of it?"
"Temptation?" The figure began laughing again. "I said you'd be up against the strongest force in the world! Where did 'temptation' come from?"
"The Bible says that's the greatest force against the faith in God."
The figure cocked their head. "I don't know anyone named Bible, but they're dead wrong about all that. The actual force you're up against-" the figure leaned in uncomfortably close, the dark whisps under their cap brim still hiding their eyes- "is luck."
"Luck?" Daniel repeated, rage flaring. "How can you have such a big test based only on luck? That's not fair at all!"
"You really think life is fair?" The figure shook their head. "Everyone's lives are based entirely on luck. Some folks are lucky enough to be born into loving families, or at least rich ones. They're lucky to have the opportunities they use to succeed. And some people, they just aren't lucky at all. They're born into terrible circumstances, or simply don't have a way to achieve what they desire in life. Maybe they want to be a gymnast but have a spine defect, or they're a natural genius in a country with no schools. No amount of natural ability or training will change the limits that luck sets for them." The figure held back a snicker. "No matter how hard you try, or train, or prepare, or plan, you can't beat luck. That's why it's the most powerful force in the world."
Daniel leaned against the wall as the figure spoke, taking their words in, trying not to let his anger take control of him. He felt his veins throbbing in his skull.
"And that," the figure continued, "is why we test for it here. You can be an incredible scientist, or the strongest weightlifter, or whatever you want, but if you don't have luck, it'll all be for nothing. Why would we waste our resources on the unlucky, on those who can never reach true success?"
"So," Daniel said, taking deep breaths, "those questions, they're just to figure out luck?"
"Certainly. Only a very lucky person would answer in a way They like."
"And if I fail?"
The figure's uncomfortably wide grin returned as they snickered to themself.
From the figure's ramble on luck, Daniel knew he wasn't in any Catholic version of the afterlife, but visions of Hell sprang to mind all the same. He couldn't go back into the question room; he didn't get off to a good start, and the test was too random for him to have any faith in a rebound.
"Okay," the figure sighed, as if reading Daniel's thoughts. "You don't like the question system, I get it. It's a bit too long winded for my tastes, too. How about we speed things up?" Before Daniel could respond, the figure pulled a twenty-sided die from their pocket, the numbers wavering and flickering on the smooth dark faces like swaying stars. "Roll above 10, you win. Below 10, you lose. Easy, right? Gets right to the point."
Daniel paused, staring at the die. "You want me to bet my life on a die roll?"
"Basically," the figure shrugged. "Doesn't really seem like it's worth the whole song and dance, don't you think? I mean, you were what, 25, with nothing going for you? Giving your unlucky self a chance at all is pretty generous if you ask me."
A surge of adrenaline washed through Daniel's veins, mixing with his pent up rage and jump-starting his drive for action. His muscles screamed for a response, and he obeyed without hesitation by sending a tight fist straight into the figure's face.
The collision caused the figure to fall backwards, sending their cap flying and the die in their hand to tumble onto the ground. Daniel's eyes followed the motion, seeing how the darkness rushed away from the hat as it landed next to the die, the rolled 1 glowing brightly on the topmost face. Daniel's adrenaline-soaked mind quickly connected the hat to the movement of the dark clouds in the hallway, and made a choice that could only be described as the 'flight' response in fight or flight: he grabbed it and ran.
"You-" The figure screamed a series of English obscenities mixed with sounds of screeching static and gibberish that clearly had some obscene meaning. "They're gonna fail you now, y!"
Daniel kept running, the darkness rushing out of his way as he navigated the series of hallways. He remembered from their way to the testing room that they only took left turns, so if he only took right, maybe that would bring him back someplace he knew.
He breathed a huge sigh of relief as the darkness dispersed and revealed the bar room where he met the figure previously. His legs vibrated, still feeling the impact of each step during his run. He could feel in his muscles that they didn't have much running left in them; he probably ran more in the past minutes than he had in the entirety of his life combined. Before he could calm his racing heart, he heard the voice of the figure from behind him, shouting in the garbled language that grated on every nerve of his body. He felt a sinking feeling in his chest as he realized that the figure, a native to wherever he was, would catch him sooner or later.
"Well," Daniel said under his breath, anger burning from the figure's comments on his life, "before they get me, I can give that dick hell." The motivation of self-preservation paled in comparison to a newfound motivator: petty revenge.
Daniel used the last of his energy to run to the bar, swinging his arm and sending each and every bottle on the lit stand tumbling to the floor. He grabbed the buckets on the shelves and tossed them across the room, scattering the gray spheres all over the floor. The images of people in the mirrors turned around to look at him, as if judging his movements, so he threw some of the bar tools at them to break the glass. He found some extra bottles and threw them too, for good measure. If he was going to go out, he would make things as unpleasant as possible for the figure.
The figure rushed in before Daniel threw the final bottle, howling in rage.
"What- did you break it all? You idiot, don't you know that'll-"
Daniel did not, in fact, know what the destruction of the bar would do. As the liquids seeped into the floor below, the foundation felt the effects of the music playing in every crevice of its surface. The tiles below bounced with each pound of bass, the concrete cracked with the impacts of drums, and the voices of the melting vocal cubes screamed over each other to create a symphony of howls to accompany the destruction. As all the instruments from each bottle took effect in the flooring, it cracked and jolted, pounding it to pieces and sending those pieces into a void of nothingness below.
The instinct to survive returned to Daniel. The doorway he just came from still had the figure in it, shrouded with the fog of darkness creeping in from the hallway. Directly in front of the bar, he saw another doorway, the one he had first appeared in after his death. With each passing second, the floor broke and fell, leaving expanding holes between him and the hall. If he ran, he'd probably fall. If he stayed, he'd fall for sure. The irony of relying on luck after getting into these circumstances escaping a test of luck wasn't lost on him, but he decided to be angry about that later.
With a deep and possibly final breath, Daniel ran. He felt his legs screaming at him as the voices all around him screamed their distorted tune, but he ignored them all and kept going. His hands gripped harder than they ever had, one to the darkness-repelling hat of the figure, and the other to the sole remaining bottle of musical liquid, in case he needed a final weapon. He ran into the darkness of the hallway, the sounds behind him fading away. The darkness in front of him rushed in whisps around him as he kept going forward. With each step, the clouds of darkness in front of him seemed to lighten, getting lighter and lighter, until he found himself surrounded by a white so bright he couldn't help but close his eyes.
---
"Daniel? Daniel! Ma, I think he's coming to!"
Daniel opened his eyes slowly, letting them adapt to the bright white lights. The fluorescent bulbs above him flickered against the white ceiling almost painfully. As his eyes adjusted, he looked around to find himself in a hospital bed, with tubes and wires hooked up all along his arms and chest.
"Daniel," a familiar voice said. His eyes moved to the side, making eye contact with his sister, then his mother. His mom ran her fingers along the side of his face. "My sweet Daniel, it's going to be okay. You... they hit you pretty hard, and you were out for a while, but they say you're gonna be okay."
"Yeah," his little sister said, tapping her hands on the side of the hospital bed, "the doctor said you're lucky someone found you!"
"Found... me?" Daniel managed to wheeze out, his throat painfully dry.
"They found you and called the hospital. They even left you a gift, for when you get well." She gestured to the other side of the bed.
Daniel's eyes moved, then froze. On the bedside table to his right, there was a deep black cadet cap, a bottle of liquid, and a note.
Lucian rolled his eyes yet again, setting a new record for number of eye rolls in a single car ride. Grace, sitting beside him in the driver's seat, set a new record for times she pretended not to notice her boyfriend's attitude. Both accomplishments were made in a tense silence as the car meandered down the streets, going seemingly on its own will as its inhabitants focused entirely on the matter at hand.
"Babe, I just want you to be-"
"Healthy, I know," Lucian scoffed.
"It's just a cleaning, there's nothing to be afraid of," Grace said.
"I'm not scared," Lucian immediately responded, the volume and intensity of his words calling the statement into question. "I just... I hate the scraping. Scree scree, like they're digging in your skull! And don't get me started on all the water and air tubes they stick up in your business-"
"Tubes in your business? Are you sure your last dentist was human, not some probing alien?" Grace asked, unable to resist the call to innuendo.
Lucian couldn't help but chuckle. "Okay, it's not that bad. But I still don't like it, it makes me feel like I can't breathe." He gave her a side eye. "You nose-breathers would never understand."
"That doesn't really have the same insulting ring as 'mouth-breather,' you know."
"I tried."
The silence returned, noticeably less tense than the one that filled the car minuted prior.
Grace put a hand on Lucian's, moving it from his crossed-arms position and bringing them both to rest on the seat divider between them. "You've got this. I know you do."
A smile formed on Lucian's face and managed to stay there for more than a passing moment, a great feat for his less-used facial muscles. "I guess I can do it. For you."
The car slowed and stopped, parking directly in front of the door to a large, remarkably unremarkable gray building. If not for the small gold and black sign reading 'EAST FALL DENTISTRY,' it could easily be mistaken for abandoned property. The graffiti along the walls certainly didn't help with that assumption either. Lucian noted that it wasn't even the cool kind of graffiti; it had color and flair, sure, but the lettering looked completely wrong. He couldn't tell if the letters were very bad English or a different system of symbols entirely.
Unable to delay his exit any longer without arousing suspicion, Lucian moved to slide out of the car. Grace's hand, still lightly resting on his, grabbed it and used it to pull him closer for a small peck. Lucian reciprocated with a kiss of his own, then made his way into the building.
Grace smiled to herself, rolling her eyes in amusement. "Men," she mouthed to herself, amazed by the continued existence of the male gender despite having a shared disgust of all things medical. With a final head shake, she drove off, leaving her boyfriend to fend for himself against the forces of medical establishment.
---
Lucian kicked a bit under his chair, watching the fish in an uncomfortably large tank as they ambled about in the water. He hated fish, and he hated waiting all the more. The only thing he hated more at the moment was hearing his name mispronounced, which, as luck would have it, happened just two minutes prior thanks to an apathetic receptionist.
The fish bobbed through the water, eyes glazed over. Lucian wondered to himself if their seeming non-interest in everything was due to contentedness or boredom-induced dread. He watched a specific silver fish, the most active of the bunch, as it made its way to a bubbling treasure chest beside some fake kelp and a hollow log. The treasure chest stood out as a very unrealistic addition to the otherwise natural-looking aquarium, but perhaps he was just uninformed about the number of bubbling treasure chests on the real ocean floor.
As he considered how much money it would cost Animal Planet to edit out all treasure chests for the sake of publicly perceived realism, he noticed something stir in the hollow log. He got up, moving himself around the cylindrical glass, in order to get a better view inside.
Just as he did, a blur shot out of the log, directly toward the fish. Lucian had no time to process the event until the silver fish vanished from view, replaced with a trail of blood.
"What the-" Lucian said with a jump. He looked over at the receptionist, tapping away at her computer. "Are the fish supposed to eat each other?" he asked across the room.
The receptionist looked up, rolled her eyes, then went back to work.
He moved closer to the tank, looking into the log. Inside, a large fish face munched away on the small silver fish, sharp teeth slicing the silver fish into smaller bits with each move of its jaw. Lucian couldn't help but stare as the silver fish slowly vanished, flesh and blood sucked into the sharp-toothed mouth of the hidden log fish.
"Luck-ian Hay-wood?" a voice called.
Lucian looked over to see a short woman leaning out from the nearby doorway. "Loo-shen," he corrected, already at his quota for name corrections for the day.
"Right this way, Mr. Haywood," the woman said, gesturing for him to follow her into the medical labyrinth beyond the single swinging door.
He reluctantly followed, noticing with great annoyance that she made no effort to correct the pronunciation of his name. The two made their way through the array of halls and rooms, turning left and right far too many times for Lucian to keep track. He couldn't help but feel like they went in several circles, but each turn continued on into new territory. Despite every room they passed being empty, they continued walking, much to Lucian's annoyance.
"This room here," the woman said, gesturing into a room seemingly at random and after far too long.
He nodded and sat down in the chair, trying not to look at the intimidating number of sharp objects lying out around him. The woman went through the basics with him, asking about dental history, allergies, and far more that he simply didn't care about.
"The doctor will be in soon," she said after typing up some notes in the room's computer, grabbing her clipboard back from the counter.
"Wait," Lucian asked. "You're not going to look at anything?" It had been quite a while since his last dentist visit, but based on what Grace said and his own foggy memory, the first dentist would do some general checks, and the doctor-dentist came in after.
"Doctor Kan prefers to do the first appointment on his own," she said, not looking at Lucian.
"But-"
"He likes to build a rapport," she said, interrupting his next question with the answer. "He'll be in shortly." She left immediately after, not giving him a single moment to try and reply.
Lucian sighed, now alone with himself and his thoughts. His eyes wandered, inevitably noticing the far-too-sharp objects all around him. His empty mind taunted him with thoughts of the objects scraping at his teeth and inside of his gums. Once that lost its shock value, his mind moved on to the image of the sharp-tooth fish from earlier, leaping from the tank and biting at his fingers. He shook the thoughts away, hoping that the dentist would appear soon.
"Luck-ian!" a voice called out from behind as the door creaked open.
"Lucian," he corrected, turning his head. What he saw made him second guess his own eyes, if only for a moment. Out of all the things he expected his dentist to look like, 'ripped' was not anywhere close to his list. As the dentist swung around the back of the chair and towered over him, he couldn't help but feel like he was a co-star in the start to a porno.
"Luck-ian Haywood, good to meet ya," the dentist Dr. Kan said with a smack to the back of Lucian's chair. The tone of his voice made it sound like Kan was smiling widely, but the doctor's mask hid the lower half of his face. That was all that was hidden from view; the uniform Dr. Kan wore looked two sizes too small, and with ripped sleeves to match. Lucian couldn't believe that only the sleeves had ripped so far; the rest of the fabric looked like it could go with a single flex. "I'm Hunter Kan, and I'll be your dentist! So what brings you here, hmm?"
"My girlfriend said so," Lucian said.
"I hear that," Dr. Kan said with a laugh. "So no problems?"
"Not one," Lucian said, echoing his response to the woman earlier.
Dr. Kan fell into the office chair, somehow not breaking it from the momentum of such a muscular mass. He tapped away at the computer, mumbling to himself as he skimmed through the records. "So how was the wait? Not too long, I hope?"
"No," Lucian lied. He paused, thinking back to the waiting room. "Are the fish supposed to eat each other?"
Dr. Kan laughed. "Of course, it's the circle of life! What makes you ask, hmm?"
"A fish in the log ate one of the silver fish."
"Ahh, the Snakehead. Excellent hunters. That one makes us go through quite a few fish! You'd think they'd learn not to go near the log. I guess prey just isn't that smart." He shook his head as he spun the chair to face Lucian. "A shame, too. Hunting stupid prey must get boring."
Lucian mumbled a half-hearted reply, unsure of whether fish could actually get bored.
"Well, let's check out the teeth, shall we? The ol' chomper?"
Dr. Kan pushed Lucian's head back as the chair sank down. With one hand bringing the light above Lucian's head and the other on the tray of tools nearby, he instructed Lucian to open wide and close his eyes. Lucian didn't recall ever being asked to close his eyes before, but did as he was told regardless.
"Oh my, how dull!" Dr. Kan said aloud, seemingly to himself.
"Dull? Wh-"
"Don't talk while I'm checking this out, please. I'm not like other dentists; I won't ask you about school or vacation as I'm scraping away." He paused, his finger running along Lucian's lips and pulling them away from his gums. He tapped at some of Lucian's teeth with one of the sharp instruments, making him freeze up in response. After what seemed like eternity, the tapping stopped, and Lucian could hear Dr. Kan slump back in his seat.
"You came for a cleaning, right?" Dr. Kan asked. Lucian nodded, eyes still closed. "Look, I'll be honest with you, your teeth, they aren't looking good. I don't get how you eat anything with them, really. But it's nothing we can't fix," he added after noticing Lucian's changed expression. "It'll just be a bit more... intense. We'll have to use numbing agents and all of that. Or we could knock you out, if you'd like."
"Right now?"
"Preferably."
Lucian paused, thinking. He really didn't want to deal with more dentist work than he had mentally prepared for that morning, but he knew that Grace would judge him if he left the office without having anything done, especially since she had to drive him out of her way to get to the cheapest office in the area. "Okay," he decided. "I'd want to be knocked out, though," he added, noting to himself that he didn't have to masquerade as a brave soul without Grace around to impress.
"Excellent!" Dr. Kan said with a clap of his hands. "We'll get everything set up." He got up and started to leave, but turned his head back with a pause. "I think you'll really like our work," he said with a smile in his voice, before leaving Lucian alone in the room once again, giving him some space to mentally prepare for was was yet to come.
---
"I'm proud of you, babe," Grace said, sitting across from Lucien at their apartment's small dinner table.
"Mhmm," Lucien mumbled. He put one of the pills Dr. Kan prescribed for recovery into his mouth and forced himself to swallow it, grimacing the entire time.
"I mean it. I hope you understand now what happens if you don't go to the dentist for over a decade. Maybe now you won't need me to stay on top of it."
Lucien rolled his eyes, but nodded. The plastic surrounding his teeth made talking much harder than he expected, but thankfully Grace knew him well enough to understand him regardless. He pulled his veggie smoothie closer to him and put the straw between the plastic pieces, trying to find a good way to get his lips around the straw without crushing it.
"You've only got to wear the protection for a few days, right? That's not so bad. And your teeth will be so nice after!"
He gave up on his drink, letting the straw drop into the glass. He needed a diet anyway.
Grace got up, bringing her plate to the nearby sink. "And think of all the steak you'll be able to eat this weekend with your shiny new teeth," she said over the sink's water rushing loudly onto her dishes. "Just promise to not eat it all like the last barbecue, okay?"
He got up and kissed her cheek. He noticed just how nice she smelled, standing so close to her. He felt a sudden urge to give her a love bite, something he usually only felt in the energy of bed. He let himself go, rubbing the edge of her ear between the plastic pieces.
"Aww, you're so sweet," she said. "But I didn't hear a promise."
He shrugged, pulling away and pointing at the plastic around his teeth with a head shake.
"I know you can still talk in those, you hoe," she said, giving him a kiss on the lips.
He continued to tease her with a refusal to reply, following her to the couch in the living room. She fell over the arm of the couch in her usual position. Before he could think to resist it, a sudden urge made him jump up on top of her, holding her down and staring at her from above. His stomach growled.
"Ooh, is someone still hungry?" she asked, wiggling her hips under him.
Lucien felt an excitement rise from deep within him, something he couldn't remember feeling before, and yet something innately familiar. Usually he overthought any intimacy beyond handsiness, getting caught up on details and subtle movements, but in this moment, he felt as though his body could get exactly what it wanted without thinking about each step. Excited by this idea, he let himself follow whatever urge came to mind, focusing on the feeling of pleasure and thrill.
"Where is this coming from?" Grace asked at one point in their romp, clearly enjoying his newfound dominance as much as he was.
Continuing his non-vocal teasing from before, he instead gave a growl as he held her down. His stomach growled right after. He pushed the thought of food from his mind as he focused on just how fun and right it felt to follow the urges as they came. Perhaps this is what they mean by fucking like animals, he thought to himself as he did just that.
---
Three days came and went, and Lucien couldn't wait until Grace returned from work. He had the perfect steak recipe all set up for their backyard barbecue date together, and after three days of eating nothing but bits of smoothie, every mention of food made his stomach ache and jaw grind in anticipation. No amount of dominant sex could replace the basic biological need of eating, though it did help him pass the time. Plus, being so close to Grace during their encounters let him get breathfuls of her scent, which intoxicated him more than he ever remembered before. It seemed to make his urges stronger and make him feel even hungrier, though for what he wasn't entirely sure.
He still had a few hours before she got back, and as he waited, the performance nerves started creeping up on him once again. He hadn't actually gotten a chance to practice the recipe at all; what if he couldn't get it right, or it tasted awful? He hated the thought of failing or making something sub-par in front of her. He silently wished that the certainty he felt in the bedroom would help him here, but he couldn't help but think that wouldn't be the case. As he took his last prescription pill and forced it down, he came to a decision.
"I'll practice," he mumbled to himself as he pulled out one of the spare steaks in the fridge. "Just one, so I know it's good."
He started the grill in the backyard and got to work, seasoning and grilling the single steak. The smell was intoxicating, and his stomach growled yet again. He felt an urge bubble up from inside yet again, and he pulled the steak from the heat. Logically he knew it would still be rare, and he never really liked rare meat, but he found himself craving it more than ever before. A lack of food would do that, he guessed to himself.
Originally he planned to bring the meat inside and take the plastic teeth protectors off in the bathroom before eating, but now, staring at the steak sitting directly in front of him, he knew he couldn't wait any longer. He pulled off the protectors and let them fall onto the patio. He noticed that he hadn't thought to bring a fork or knife outside, but he knew that the walk to the kitchen to get them would be far too long. Using the barbecue tongs, he brought the steak up to his mouth, ready to pull and grind for that delicious bite. To his surprise, his teeth slid right through the meat, sending a bloody piece of steak directly into his mouth.
Ecstasy filled his body as the meat moved around his mouth, slicing into pieces between his teeth. He felt none of the resistance he remembered or expected from eating in all of his years prior. The ease of eating, combined with the overwhelming aroma of the steak, led to him being unable to hold back as he shoved the entire steak into his mouth. For a moment he worried that his urge had led him to literally bite off more than he could chew, but yet again he realized he had no need to worry as his teeth managed the mouthful with ease, sending the meat into his starving stomach.
Once he finished the steak, he knew he couldn't possibly stop at one. He pulled out another steak from the fridge, and another, and another. At first he forced himself to wait until they reached at least rare, but by the third steak he couldn't stop himself from pulling them off earlier and earlier, until he found himself eating them entirely raw. He expected a decline in flavor as they became less and less cooked, but instead, he found himself loving it even more. The blood and thickness of the meat filled his mouth and made him grunt with the overwhelming feeling of satisfaction.
Ten steaks later, he ran out of meat to consume. The feeling of pleasure and satisfaction wore away, leaving an almost painful pit in his stomach as the hunger returned. He needed more.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. A squirrel darted into the yard, on its regular hunt for acorns. He recognized it as one that Grace regularly pointed out, calling it 'Neighbor Nutty.' As he watched it wander through the grass, he felt an urge, no, a need, bubbling up within him. The raw steaks were delicious, sure, but they were rather uniform in texture. It would be nice to experience something new. In a moment, the urge turned from thought to action. It was much easier than he expected, almost disappointingly so.
As Neighbor Nutty crunched between his teeth, he heard a scream from behind him. He turned to see a neighbor from the apartment complex, staring at him in horror.
"Luck-ian! What the fuck?" she shouted, holding her arms up in a sort of defense. "Have you gone mad, Luck-ian?"
He felt a pang of a new urge strike at every nerve inside of him each time the neighbor mis-pronounced his name. The urge spread like a fire, and he felt his muscles tensing, teeth clicking together as Neighbor Nutty slid down his throat.
She barely made it to the second step of the inside stairwell before he caught up with her, sinking his teeth into one of her legs. Just as he expected, they slid right through her flesh, leaving a crater right on her calf. She collapsed with a scream, still trying to climb the stairs using her arms and working leg. He ignored her struggle, continuing to rip pieces off of her, filling his mouth and throat with the hot flesh and blood.
A flash filled his vision. In instinctual rage, he leapt up above her and bit down on the back of her neck. The body beneath him went limp instantly, the blood pouring off of each step in tiny waterfalls. Her hand opened, dropping her cell phone onto the stair beneath it.
He picked it up, noticing it was open to the camera app. The thumbnail in the corner showed something that looked like him, so he tapped it, seeing the picture she captured of him in his final moments. His fingers ran along his mouth, confirming it as the truth. Between his lips were two rows of sharp teeth, the back ones his own sharpened to a point, and the front ones entirely replaced by pointed fangs. His entire face was thinner than he remembered, and as he looked around his body, he realized that he could see each muscle much clearer than before, as if they were straining against his skin. He turned the phone's camera to the selfie function and checked out his body, admiring his new teeth and blood-covered physique. Something deep inside said he shouldn't feel as good as he did about it, but the admiration for himself snuffed out that voice as quickly as it came.
He continued to bite and swallow chunks of the neighbor's flesh, clothes and all. As he did, he found himself annoyed with how little of a fight she put up. He thought back to the past few days he spent in bed with Grace, remembering the times during their romps when she playfully fought back against him, to make him work for what he wanted. Those times felt so much more satisfying than the others, and this felt even more satisfying still. A feast after a true challenge, he concluded, would be the most pleasurable feeling of all. He wanted it. He needed it.
His watch buzzed. He looked at it, and only then realized how much time had passed. Grace would be home soon.
He smiled, running his tongue over his wondrous teeth. Grace would be much more fun than the neighbors. He felt the hunger return, and he still didn't know if it was a hunger of lust or consumption. That didn't bother him, though. Either way, she would be a hell of a hunt.
"Time to get us some grub! Now remember kids, play smart, play safe, and don't go into my office!"
The trio of kids mouthed the words as their father said them. After hearing him say the exact same words more times than they could count, which was not just because they hadn't learned numbers above 50, they could hear it in their minds and parrot it back with no effort whatsoever.
To any other children, the addition of "don't go into my office" would inevitably lead to just that. The Morrison children were no different. The third time they heard that phrase, curiosity overwhelmed them and led to a clumsy romp through the forbidden space. It was then that they found... nothing. Absolutely nothing. Papers here and folders there, but none of the secret pet dragons or superhero supplies that they expected with all of their naive hearts. They went in a few times more, just in case, but after several journeys into the room proved to be a waste of time, the three gave up entirely. They could not tell their father that they had absolutely no interest in the boring room, however, because then he'd know they had seen it and found it boring, so they instead gave bored glances at one another as their father went down the hall and vanished out the front door.
"What now?" asked Marco, with the confidence and leadership that he gathered in his twelve lived years.
"We could play Princess Criminal," Maria offered, testing the waters with her brother, knowing the two year age gap between them could lead to her ideas being veto'd for no other reason besides her comparative youth.
"Ugh, I don't wanna," Max groaned back, accepting that, at age seven, his ideas would never be listened to, so all of his power went into complaining about the current options his two older siblings debated.
Marco nodded. "Princess Criminal is for ten year olds," he explained to the ten-year-old Maria. "We've got to go on more mature adventures than that!"
"Mature?" Maria asked. "Do you even know what that means?"
"I do! It means there's guns and swears and stuff! I saw it on the back of Dad's videogame," Max shouted, beaming with the pride of sharing knowledge.
"We could go into Dad's office again," Marco wondered aloud.
Maria and Max groaned continuously, leaning closer to Marco and getting louder until he got the point.
The three ended up collapsed on the couch, all watching whatever Marco, as the Remote Overlord, wanted to watch. The past few months led to this exact scenario playing out on repeat. Their mother's later hours at work and their father's chores after he came from his job left an hour gap where neither parent ruled the household. At first the sudden freedom filled them with unbridled joy, but after a few weeks the freedom became normalcy, the desire for adventure fading away in routine.
Just before Max could complain for the eighteenth time about the show Marco chose, the front door creaked open. They heard the familiar sound of high heels dropping onto the floor. The force that the heels hit the ground always gave them an idea of just how much nonsense their mother had dealt with that day. Judging by the harsh clack followed by a bit of clatter, her day had been exceptionally annoying.
"What a day," their mother sighed as she made her way to the living room. "How're my kids doing? Are they behaving over here?"
"Marco's making us watch turd," Max whined.
"That's not how you use that word!" Maria complained.
"This show is good and he's just trying to annoy me!" Marco shouted.
"Never change, kids," their mom said with a laugh.
When their father returned minutes later, the five of them sat down for the dinner he had bravely ventured out to get: pizza and pasta. Their dad monitored the boxes and take-out bowls as they piled food onto their plates, reminding them to come back for seconds instead of taking too much and letting it go to waste. Their mom sat at the table with a single slice of cheese pizza, eyes unfocused.
"I'm sorry," their dad said, seemingly unprompted. "I planned to cook the hamburgers tonight, but-"
"It's not that," their mother said, looking up and returning to reality. "It's just... work stuff." She said the second part after a hesitated look at the children around her, all only listening to the sound of their own chewing on the cheesy carbs around them.
Their father took his seat next to his wife, with only pasta on his plate. The kids never understood how a man could not like pizza, and at one point doubted whether he really could be their dad because of it. Once their mother commented that his dislike meant they could have more pizza to themselves, they quickly dropped the subject, allowing him to enjoy pasta in peace once more. "More rude support tickets again?"
"That's a given, sweetie," their mom said with a muffled laugh. "No, it was Ian again."
Their dad put down his fork with a furrowed brow. "What happened this time? Is HR involved?"
"He snuck a book into my purse when I wasn't looking." She sighed. "He didn't sign it though, so I can't prove it was him. But he did it, I know it. He's always trying to give me gifts like he's some kind of sugar daddy!"
"Is Dad a sugar daddy?" Max asked through a mouthful of pizza.
"Does that mean he's made of sugar?" Maria asked, eyes wide.
"No kids," their father said, trying to hide a wide smile. "A sugar daddy isn't made of sugar, it's like... a guy who gives you gifts."
"Like Santa!" Marco proudly concluded.
The two parents tried hard to stifle their laughs as they told the kids to forget the whole thing. At first their young minds refused to let it go, but after a quick bribery to the tune of a whole extra cookie after dinner each, the three ate their cheese and bread products in relative silence.
---
Just before bed, Maria skipped her way toward the shared bathroom, looking forward to playing with her new singing toothbrush. Between her room and the bathroom were many doors, but only one was partially ajar: the parent room.
"Let's just throw it away," she heard her mother say.
"But what something more happens?" her father asked. "It could be evidence."
"I can't prove it was him, though."
"Maybe we should take pictures at least?"
Maria loved pictures. She especially loved pictures of her, all dressed up in the fashion of the kid world. Tonight she donned a horse-pattern nightgown, one of her favorites ever since her aunt remarked that it made her look even cuter. She bounded into the room with a huge smile. "I want a picture!" she declared, ready to model.
"Oh sweetie," her mom said from her seat on the bed, wiping her sleeve across her puffy eyes. "We weren't talking about that kind of picture."
"But we can take some pictures of you tomorrow, if you want," her dad added.
Maria turned to face him and agree to his proposal, which is exactly when she noticed something in his hand. A small book, with painted vines along the spine. Between his fingers she could make out the image on the cover being some sort of wizard stand-off, with one of the characters standing next to a beast she couldn't identify. "A book!" she declared as soon as her brain worked out what she saw. "I want to see!"
Her parents shared a concerned glance. During that moment of distraction, Maria ran up to her dad and tried to grab the book from his hands. Pulling it down, she could see the cover clearly: two characters, a knight and a wizard, fighting against another wizard next to a huge beast, the colors of the characters bright and vibrant, standing out clearly from the dull, aged material of the cover.
Her dad quickly pulled it away and held it up, out of her reach. "Woah now, this book is your mother's," he said.
She turned to face her mom. "Mom, can I see the book?"
"You want to read it?" her mom asked with surprise. None of her children showed any sort of interest in reading before.
"Does it have magic in it?" Maria asked, ignoring the question entirely.
Her dad brought the cover down to face level, investigating it. "I... guess?" he answered, with all the certainty of a student who hadn't studied at all for a test.
From Maria's point of view below him, she could only see the back cover, which, instead of English, had a blurb area filled with little nonsense symbols. Whatever the language was, it was clear that her dad couldn't read it either. The mystery only increased her interest and excitement. "I want it!" she began to chant, a trick she saw her friend use in a supermarket to get a candy bar once.
"Is it even appropriate?" her mom asked over her chant.
"I don't know, the back's not in English. Must be a misprint or something." her dad shrugged.
"We can't just give it to her, what if it's all blood and gore?"
"Blood and gore!" Maria chanted even louder than before.
"Maria, Maria, honey," her dad said as he got down on his knees, now on eye level with her. She quieted down. "How about... I read it first? And then we'll give it to you. Just to make sure it won't bore you, okay?"
Maria considered his idea. "Okay," she decided after minutes of internal deliberation.
"Perfect!" He got up, placing the book on the top of a shelf drawer above her reach. "Now how about you get to bed?"
She complied, mind swimming with ideas about wizards and beasts battling it out on the pages of the book.
"Are you really going to read that?" she heard her mom ask as she exited the room.
"Yeah, why not? It's ours now, might as well. You can tell Ian that your husband is loving his gifts!"
Maria heard a groan from their room as she closed the bathroom door. Moments later, her toothbrush brought the tunes of Miley Cyrus directly into her skull, driving out all thought of the book.
---
The weekend came and went as it always did for the Morrisons. Their mother, off work for a blessed two days, would take the kids, unencumbered by the demands of the educational behemoth, out on trips to the movie theatre, or the park, or the mall, or anywhere else they could imagine and reach in their decade-old minivan. Their father locked his office and went to work, emerging only for bathroom breaks and to grab a bit of whatever their mother left out for him. The kids understood that their dad didn't have a weekend like they or their mom did, so they did their best to find other places to be so he could have the house to himself as he worked on things they didn't entirely understand.
They returned from school on Monday to find that, instead of being out to greet them in the living room as usual, their dad was nowhere to be found. After a quick look through the house, they determined one place that he could be which they had not yet checked.
Marco hesitated, but gave the office door a knock. "Dad?" he called out, two siblings hiding behind him, too scared to speak, but too curious to leave.
"What?" a voice barked out. The difference of tone between this voice and their dad's usual speaking voice made them instinctively back up and huddle closer together.
"Dad, we're home," Marco said. "Are you still working?"
No response.
"Dad, what's for dinner?" Max yelled, his fear outmatched by his short attention span.
A few seconds passed in silence. Suddenly the door swung open, their father barging out, his clothes hanging loose on his body and covered in stains. His eyes, bloodshot and with deep bags under them, stared down at the trio of kids, now shoved up as close as possible to each other. "Food, food, I'll get the damn food," he mumbled as he walked around them, put on his shoes, and went out the front door.
It took several minutes before the kids felt safe enough to release their protective huddle on one another.
"Why is Dad mad?" Max said through tears.
"Maybe his work is bad," Marco pondered aloud. "Or someone messed with his computer stuff again, he hates that."
"Maybe he doesn't like the book," Maria added.
The two brothers looked at her. "Book?"
"He's reading a book for me," she said, a hint of pride showing through her voice. "He's making sure it'll be good before I see it!"
The brothers glanced at each other. Why didn't they get a book?
"Well if it made Dad so mad it must be awful," Max sneered, trying to bring Maria down a notch.
"Is not!" Maria declared, feet planted firmly on the ground.
"Is too!" Max said, accepting her challenge.
Before the war could begin, Marco put a hand up between them. "Guys. Guess what?" he said.
The two couldn't resist the allure of the age old question. "What?" they said in unison.
"Dad didn't say not to go into his office this time."
The three stood in silence for a moment, all looking at one another. Previously, their dad always said not to go into his office, and when they went it was boring. This time, he didn't say not to go, which is the opposite of the usual. Following that logic, the second statement, the status of the office, would also be an opposite. The three reached the same conclusion at the same time. Clearly something cool was in the office.
The siblings forgot their previous fear of their dad's strange behavior as they rushed into the office.
"We're not going to find a dinosaur," Marco said as he turned on the lights, trying to prevent hopes from getting too high.
"You don't know that!" Max yelled from near the bookcase, unwilling to change his expectations.
Maria hopped onto the chair behind the desk to get a good view of its contents. "My book!" she yelled. The others ran over to it as she picked it up from its place in the middle of the desk, losing track of which page her dad left it open on.
"What's it about?" Marco asked, entranced by the action-packed cover. A wizard and a knight fighting against a snarling beast and a... ghost? Marco couldn't really tell what the faded character next to the beast was supposed to be. Unlike the other characters, the one next to the beast had faded somewhat, making its features hard to identify.
"I don't know, but Dad says there's magic in it!" Maria said with a huge smile.
"Well then, I wanna read it," Marco shouted, reaching out for the book.
"No way, it's mine," Maria refuted, using her added height on the desk chair to keep it out of his reach.
Max lost interest and walked away, continuing his search for dinosaurs, or at least their eggs. Even a footprint would be better than nothing, and it certainly would be better than reading. He did enough of that in school.
Marco groaned, realizing Maria had height advantage, which trumped his age advantage. "Can we read it together?" he asked.
Maria hmmed and hawed for a bit, making Marco squirm as she dramatized the act of thinking. "Yeah okay," she agreed. "But I get to turn the pages!"
Marco reluctantly agreed, and she dropped down off the chair and took a seat on the floor. Marco sat beside her as she opened the book and the two began to read.
---
Marco blinked and found himself outside, in the middle of a dirt path. People bustled around him, mostly walking, but some on wooden carts pulled by strange creatures. The building around him were made from stone with straw rooftops, and each one had a tent with various products underneath, such as food or pots. As he looked around him, mind still adapting to the sudden change of scenery, he felt someone pull him to the side.
"Marco!" Maria yelled from beside him, forcibly turning him to face her. He immediately noticed her clothes, before a simple t-shirt and skirt, but now a colorful robe.
"Maria!" he replied. "Where are we?"
"I don't know," she said with worry. She started speaking again, but instead yelped and hid her face in his chest. He looked over to where she had been looking and noticed one of the large lizard-like creatures pulling a cart nearby.
"Wait," he said, suddenly struck by a realization and pushing her away to see her face. "Those things were on the book! On the cover!"
She made herself look over the shoulder at one, but only for a moment.
"We're in the book!" he concluded confidently.
She looked at him blankly. "That's stupid."
He rolled his eyes. "C'mon, let's check it out."
Maria pushed herself closer to the wall between the two fruit stands around them. "Why?" she asked.
"Well," he thought out loud, "we don't have to sit around and watch TV today because we're here. It's like vacation, and with no one telling us what to do. And Max is home in case Mom and Dad come back, and he can cover for us."
Maria nodded, won over by this perfect logic. "Okay, but I don't like the lizards."
"You're gonna touch a lizard."
"No."
"I'll make you!"
"No!"
"Hey!" The two siblings jumped at the gruff voice of a large man hanging over the side of the stall beside them. "What're you kids doing over here?"
Marco's eyes darted around the stall the man leaned out from. "We were... deciding whether we wanted an apple or banana." Maria nodded, catching on.
The man chuckled. "Well you can do that from over here," he said, gesturing them to the front of the stall. They obliged, choosing one of each. In truth they didn't like either, but the stall had no chocolate items, or any sweets at all.
"That's 12 zel," the man said, picking up the fruits from their respective boxes.
Marco chuckled nervously. He didn't have any dollars, let alone whatever a zel was.
"Will this do?" Maria asked. Marco and the man looked over to see her holding a large golden coin.
The man nearly choked upon seeing it. "Yes, yes, that'll do quite nicely!"
"Where'd you get that?" Marco asked her quietly.
Maria shrugged. "My pockets are full of them."
---
Marco and Maria quickly learned the value of a dollar, or in this case, a zel. The coins in their pockets made everyone they met treat them like royalty, which the two were sure to take absolute advantage of.
"We wanna go on an adventure," Marco declared as he and Maria played with the swords of the guards in a tavern. "Who can we fight?"
"There is a pickpocket running loose in town that you could hunt down," one of the guards remarked.
"No, not a person!" Marco complained. "A monster!"
"Or someone evil!" Maria added.
"Perhaps Ryoth, the cave beast master. He loves the darkness and meat, just like the cave beasts he raises. He's been quite a bother for the kingdom."
"Is he the one on the cover?" Maria asked.
"I have no idea what that means," the guard shrugged. "Besides, I'm not sure if that's a quest for two eight-year-olds."
"I'm twelve!" Marco said, blatantly offended.
"And I'm ten," Maria said in a proud stance.
"And we'd pay for an army," Marco said, jingling the coins in his pockets. The metal loops of his chain-mail shirt clanked along with them.
The guard sighed, but gave up his corrections. The money these children threw around clearly indicated royalty, and their clothes matched those of nobility learning the ways of the sword and magical crafts. Since their king couldn't remember which of the neighboring kingdoms had royal kids, it was best to treat them well until a messenger came looking for them.
That night, the two collapsed on the beds of the tavern, exhausted from their playing through the town.
"This is a good vacation," Maria said.
"We need something to fight!" Marco said, swinging an imaginary sword in the air with what little energy he still had in his arms.
"Tomorrow," Maria said, turning away from him in bed.
"Tomorrow," Marco mumbled back, quickly falling into a deep sleep.
---
"Guys! Guys! Guys!"
Marco and Maria opened their eyes and found themselves staring at Max. His face was inches away from theirs, shouting at full volume.
Marco shoved Max away, sending him tumbling backwards.
"Guys," Max repeated, now starting to cry, "that was so mean, you're both mean!"
"Then don't shout at us," Maria scoffed.
"I'm gonna tell Dad you were hiding from me in the office," Max threatened, forcing back tears.
"Hiding?" Marco put a hand in front of Maria's face to interrupt her next verbal jab. "Why do you think we were hiding?"
Max sniffled. "I was looking around, and you were reading, and I turned around, and I looked back, and you were gone," he said, each 'and' making him talk faster and louder, "and I was looking for you, and I couldn't find you, and I was yelling and looking all over the house, and, and, and that was mean, that was so mean!" At the final word he began bawling.
Maria and Marco looked at each other, then at Max, then at the book. Before he could act, Maria ran over to Max and towered over him. "We weren't hiding, dummy, we were in a book."
"I'm not a dummy," Max complained, "and you're a liar."
"Am not!" Maria protested.
"Am too!" Max yelled, still crying.
The two continued their stand off, so Marco took that moment of distraction to snatch the book off of the floor and investigate it further. The knight and wizard on the cover looked oddly dull compared to the vibrancy of the dog-beast and surrounding vines. He turned it over and tried to read the back cover, but the random symbols made no sense at all.
A door slammed shut.
The three jumped, jolted from their respective thoughts, and shared a glance. Simultaneously, they threw the book back on the desk, moved things back to generally where they were before, and bolted out of the office.
---
As the days went by, the Morrison children's father chose to work from his office full-time, keeping the door locked shut for almost every hour. "I can't have any more intrusions," he said to the kids after a hefty scolding the night they found the book. After that he stopped getting the dinner food entirely, and about a week in began sleeping in the office instead of upstairs with their mother. Nothing their mother said changed a thing, and the three could only watch as their mom became bitter and drained from the ordeal.
Two weeks later, their father had an announcement. "I'm going to be a dog breeder." Their mother protested, but in the new family dynamic, his word was law. Not two days passed before he had several dogs locked up in the office, walking them in the dead of night. At first the children loved the idea of having dogs, but the dogs only barked and snarled whenever they saw them. The children quickly became afraid of the dogs, thankful that their dad seemed to want them all to himself.
As each day felt more strained and tense than the last, Marco and Maria found themselves craving the world of the book. They stayed up after bedtime to tell Max about what they saw, telling him about all of the adventures that awaited if he went into it too. He agreed to go with them, but the three never got the chance; their father never left the office door unlocked, and even if he did, the snarling dogs kept them at bay. To try and keep their minds at ease, they both pursued new after school activities; Marco chose to try karate, and Maria opted for learning magic tricks to show at the next school talent show.
After a month of changes, the children awoke from their sleep to a clamor downstairs. They heard frantic barking, starting loud but becoming softer and softer. As the barking faded, the shouting began. The three kids met up in the hallway and slipped their way down the stairs. The living room lights were still on, the TV still droned on without an audience, and the fireplace's flames crackled away on scorched wood. They directed their attention to the kitchen door, where they heard the voices.
"You have to get them back," their dad's voice shouted, the rattle of pots and pans following closely after. "If any of those dogs are hurt, by God, you'll be paying for it!"
"Those dogs are better off in the shelter than with you," their mother's voice replied, breaking. "I can't believe what you've become! What happened to my husband?"
The trio approached the kitchen door, leaning closer to hear the conversation.
"Damn it, am I not allowed to have dreams? Ambitions?" their dad said.
"Hurting dogs and locking them in an office is not a dream, it's a nightmare," their mom said. "And it's not one that I'll be exposing the kids to any longer."
The three kids visibly winced as the argument continued, their mom talking about living at Grandma's and their father screaming obscenities and insults too personal to re-tell.
Max, ready to cry, moved away from the door. "I don't want to live with Grandma," he said through sniffles. "She smells, and her cats are mean."
Maria patted his back. "It'll be okay," she said in her best reassuring voice, trying to hide her own tears.
Marco noticed something around them. "Guys," he whispered, "what if we lived in the book?"
Max and Maria stared at him as he pointed to something nearby. Their eyes followed, all three seeing the office door fully open, the doorknob hanging loosely from the wood.
"We'd be rich and have adventures forever," Maria said, the realization making her smile despite her tears.
"What about Mom?" Max asked.
"She can't come, she'd bring Dad too. She can live with Grandma," Maria said.
"We can't just leave Mom!" Max protested.
"Stop being a dummy," Maria replied.
Marco held his hands up, stopping his siblings. "We'll figure it out when we're in the book. But we need to get it now. Before Dad sees."
The three nodded in agreement and quickly slipped into the office, the arguing voices of the parents becoming loud but unintelligible background noise. They clicked the lights on to find the office in near ruins. All of the lamps laid across the floor, most of them with cracked, unlit bulbs. In the dim lighting from the remaining lights, they saw the damage. The bookcases and desks sat in piles of wood and paper, covered in bite marks. The rug reeked of dirty dog smell, and the papers from the desk laid across the floor like bedding. A large heap of tattered fabrics and book remains covered one corner of the room, with a person-sized indent across the middle of it.
"Did the dogs do this?" Maria asked.
"Did Dad do this?" Max asked.
"I think they both did," Marco answered, voice shaking.
They all forced themselves to touch the dirty, stinking papers and fabrics around what once was the center desk, digging through uncomfortably damp materials for anything that looked like the book.
"What if Dad or the dogs destroyed it?" Max asked.
Marco and Maria shared a glance. "Maybe," Marco said, "but we've got to look anyway."
Maria pulled up one of the fabrics on the corner pile and yelped in surprise. "It's here! The book, it's okay!"
The others quickly swarmed to her. They stared at the cover, once again entranced by the action. The knight and wizard remained clear to see, but the beast and the character next to it were faded significantly, barely visible against the coloring of the cover.
"Are you ready?" Marco asked. Maria nodded. Max whimpered. "Okay, then let's go." He opened the cover.
As Marco opened the book, Max couldn't stop thinking about leaving his mom behind with their mean dad and all of the angry dogs. He imagined her sitting on their beds crying, wondering where they went. He'd rather live with Grandma and the smelly cats than leave her behind and make her cry. Max closed his eyes and kept them shut, overwhelmed with the thought.
He heard a thud next to him. When he opened his eyes, his siblings were gone, leaving only the book behind. He picked it up, investigating the faded characters on the cover.
"Hey!"
Max jumped up to see his father towering in the doorway, face contorted in fury, the shadows on his face stretched and intensified by the dim lighting from below. His heart stopped, and he held the book firmly to his chest.
"That's mine," his father growled, stepping closer to him.
Max's feet worked before his brain caught up, and he found himself sprinting across the room, dodging his father's hands and escaping the office. Once out, he saw his mom, face in her hands, standing by the fireplace. He immediately ran up to her, stuffing his face into her leg and sobbing. He tried to explain what was happening, but his words became garbled and lost through his tears and snot-filled nose.
His mom pulled him close, staring up at his father. "What is wrong with you?" she shouted, moving the two of them away from his father's hulking figure.
"Give it back," his father snarled.
"Give what-" his mom started, then paused, noticing the book held between her and Max through the force of his hug. She grabbed it and pulled it up, holding it in one hand and keeping Max close with the other. Her eyes skimmed the cover, noticing how dull it looked in the firelight, then raised them to look his father in the eye. "Is this where all of this is coming from?" she asked, her breath heavy with repressed anger.
"Give it back," his father repeated.
"He's been hiding it," Max managed to say. He tried to tell his mom more about the book, but his sniffles and quick breaths kept interrupting him.
"Is this what this is all about? Ian's stupid gift?" She scoffed. "What is this, some messed-up expression of jealousy?"
"Give it back."
"Do you think I wanted him to give me things? To get so obsessed with me? I can't help what he does! You know I love you, I-"
"I don't care about that," his father barked. "He can fuck you for all I care!"
His mom stopped, then slowly nodded. "I see." Staring directly at his father, his mom flicked her wrist, tossing the book directly into the flames beside her.
Max's heart froze. For a second, both he and his father didn't respond, couldn't respond. That second, seeing the book that contained his siblings, felt like eternity. After that eternal moment, time resumed.
"No!" he heard his father scream, heavy footsteps getting closer to him and his mother.
Max shoved himself away from his mother, sending her to the floor, and grabbed the side of the book. His fingers burned, but he kept his grip and pulled it out of the flames, swinging it back. The flames of the book followed and lit the room, making his father stop running and step back, blocking his eyes with a growl. He hit the book against the rug in an attempt to put it out. The rug ignited, but the book's flame fizzled and died, leaving the rest of the book intact.
"Give it back," his father hollered, blocking the increasing light of the flames with his arm.
Max's feet once again responded before his thoughts, and before he could acknowledge the danger of the situation around him, he found himself outside in the darkness, sprinting into the woods behind their house, away from the increasing smoke emerging from what used to be his home.
---
Maria and Marco opened their eyes and found themselves back on the dirt road, surrounded by the bustling activity of the old village.
"We did it," Maria cheered, "we're back!"
"Where's Max?" Marco asked.
The two looked around, seeing no signs of their little brother anywhere.
"He must have chickened out," Maria scoffed.
"Then we have to go back," Marco said.
Maria rolled her eyes, but nodded. They walked up to the guards, as they did in their last quest. "We need you to lead us to the inn so we can sleep," she said proudly, remembering their treatment before.
The guard didn't move. "Are your parents at the inn?"
"No, but we have-" Maria stopped mid-sentence. She patted her pockets, but found them completely empty. Looking down, she realized her clothes were not the flowing robe she remembered, but a dirty fabric tied with rope. Her eyes widened, and she looked to Marco for help.
Marco felt his pockets but found they, too, were empty. His clothes, too, were changed, from chain-mail and metal pads to the same dirty fabric Maria wore.
"Run along, kids," the guard said, gesturing them away. "Go find some merchants to beg from or something."
The two obeyed, unsure of what else to do. An hour later, they managed to find a nearby field to lie in without any disturbances.
"We'll sleep here," Marco said, "and return to Max, so he can come with us."
"But we don't have the money," Maria said with a huge frown.
"Maybe we'll have it next time," Marco reasoned.
The two closed their eyes. It took several hours, but they managed to drift off to sleep. They later awoke to see the darkening sky, stalks of corn blowing in the breeze all around them.
Maria jolted up. "We're still here. Marco, why didn't we go back?" she asked, eyes watering.
"I don't know," he said, voice barely above a whisper.
"What do we do?" Maria asked, staring at him.
He held onto her arm, pulling her close. "I don't know."
The two stayed huddled together in the cornfield as night fell, holding each other close as they cried in silence, their hearts falling and falling with no end in sight.
---
After running for longer than he ever had, he stopped in a small cave down a rocky ravine, catching his breath. He couldn't go back. His father wanted the book, and his mom wanted to destroy it. He couldn't let either of those things happen, not with Marco and Maria inside of it. He looked at the book, checking the damages in the moonlight. The cover took most of the damage, with the wizard and knight characters barely recognizable through the scorch marks. Some of the pages were equally unrecognizable.
Cold, tired, and alone, Max finally gave in to the idea of entering the book world too. Their father and mom would never find it in the woods, and it would stay safe in the little cave. He took a deep breath and opened the book, reading the text in the dull moonlight.
One page passed and he still sat in the cave. He turned to page two and experienced the same. As he kept reading, he remained painfully in reality, and learned what, and who, the story was about. He tried to cry, but found he had no tears left in his body. His nose ran and his breath jolted with sobs as he read, but his eyes stayed painfully dry. His fingers burned, his eyes burned, but most painful of all was the burning in his chest, as he realized in those moments just how alone he truly was.
The fourth part of school began with as much excitement and joy as the last three had begun, which is to say none at all. The first part, morning classes, only had a mild buzz of enthusiasm as the halls filled with mumbling voices, spilling the latest news of who said what through texts and Internet memes the night before. Lunch followed as the second part, which would be an excellent time if not for the new rules preventing students from leaving the cafeteria without supervision. They all had Jamie Winston to thank for that, after a stunt involving Coke, Mentos, and, when those didn't give a satisfactory result, a cigarette and a fire cracker. The third part, afternoon classes, had all the dull expectations of the previous parts, without the drama of morning classes or the sub-par food of lunch to look forward to. All of these lead to the fourth inevitable part of the school day: detention.
Jamie tapped their pen on the desk, trying to get their taps to sync perfectly with the second hand on what was probably the last analog clock that could actually give an accurate time. That would probably end soon. The single nail holding it to the wall, after years of unquestioned servitude, would one day give out and fall, taking its time-telling master down with it. Well, if the school's walls didn't go down first.
"No tapping! What did I say about the tapping?"
Jamie rolled their eyes, showing just how absurd they thought the command was despite their outward obedience. Wasn't an hour of sitting in an empty, unused room with a clock from a long-past era and a teacher aged about the same punishment enough?
"Now don't roll your eyes at me, you. You're the one who got yourself put here."
Technically, it was the system who did the putting. All Jamie did was make the science of Coke and Mentos more interesting. Before Jamie could give a snarky one-liner about that, as all teens love to do, the intercom system by the clock sparked to life, summoning the human-disguised dinosaur to an office on the floor above them. The teacher obeyed without question, reminding Jamie of a dog running when it heard the command 'come,' not thinking of all why it should obey at all. Jamie didn't much care for dogs, so they had no problem thinking of the teacher, who they also didn't care for, in that frame of mind. They vastly preferred the independence of cats, who obeyed no one.
The empty classroom quickly bored Jamie, so they did what they did best- the first thing to come to mind. With a quick jolt to the window's frame, the 'child-proof' locks clicked open, proving that the high school should have sprung for 'teen-proof' locks instead. The window slid open with ease, and Jamie jumped out, sliding between the school's brick exterior and the hedges around it until they made it to the back of the building, where their buddies all gathered every day to trade smoke brands and determine which part of town they'd loiter in that day.
If Jamie had listened to the announcement given on the intercoms just a few minutes prior, they would have made a note that every authority figure in the building had been summoned to the back parking lot. Jamie, as usual, did not give their full attention to the words, so they got caught completely off guard as they slipped out from literal weeds into metaphorical ones.
---
"All you had to do was sit in a chair! How could you mess that up?"
Jamie replied to their father's tirade with the trademark move of those their age: an angst-filled shrug.
"Please," the principal said, as if attempting to relax a toddler, "sit down." He did, once again proving to Jamie that the all-encompassing system created by the illusion of authority turned teenage independent cats into adult obedient dogs. "Now, to review, Jamie got five months of detention for the... incident. We're barely two weeks in. Jamie, care to explain?"
Jamie hated to reduce the impact of their signature move by using it too often, but they couldn't resist thrusting their angst through their shoulders at someone so high up the imaginary authority ladder.
Their father huffed. "If you keep this up, you'll be thirty years old with no degree and no job! Do we need to ground you too? Is that what you want?" As if a workaholic authority-kiss-ass dad and mother of twin toddlers could ever keep Jamie's free spirit contained. They liked not having a plan for the future. Plans were just another form of systematic containment; living moment to moment suited the independent soul far better.
The door flew open, sending a jolt through the room. Jamie, used to the slow and predictable nature of these meetings, couldn't help but uncross their arms in surprise at the sudden and unexpected event, but quickly regained their composure.
The school guidance counselor, known to the hormone-fueled student body as Lady Tits, strut into the room, her dress's collar giving an excellent view of her namesake. Jamie's eyes caught on the cleavage, unable to unhook themselves.
"I'm very sorry to intrude," Lady Tits said, with a little bounce at the end of her sentence, "but when I heard about Jamie again, I thought I'd re-introduce my idea." She turned to Jamie. "You're not a fan of being all cooped up in a classroom, right? What would you say if you could spend detention another way?"
Her proposal interested Jamie more than her figure, but just barely. They managed to release their eyes from the low-cut dress and look up, eyebrows twitching. Jamie always tried to raise their eyebrow in times like these, but their muscles betrayed them. Still, that didn't stop them from trying.
Before anyone could ask for clarification, Lady Tits placed a large binder on the principal's desk with a comedic thud. She sat on the edge of the desk, legs crossed and hands holding down her dress, and began. "As the school guidance counselor, part of my job is understanding the students and their needs, especially those who are having trouble reaching their full potential. I've been working my way through many studies, which you-" she gave a pointed glance to the principal- "can review in this binder here. The studies clearly show what should be obvious to us in the education profession: detention does nothing. Students don't spend that time feeling bad about what they did or learning for the future, it just leads to brooding." Her next glance targeted Jamie. "And as we know, brooding only leads to bad behavior in the future. So what I've done is designed a new system: the Remedial Employment Experience, or R.E.E."
Jamie tried to stifle a laugh as they made the connection between the acronym and the sound of a screeching frog.
"And what is this R.E.E.?" their father asked.
"I'll put it very simply, and explain after." Lady Tits leaned toward Jamie, putting her assets on full display. "Jamie, you're getting a job."
---
Jamie leafed through the comically large binder, mumbling a number of profanities to themself. The binder, in addition to the 'studies' Lady Tits collected to shove in the principal's face, contained a long list of 'remedial employment experiences' that Jamie could choose from to partake in instead of attending detention. In all truth, they would prefer to sit in the room for the rest of the year rather than become a part of the capitalist system without the monetary benefit of capitalistic labor, but Lady Tits made a strong argument for having them be the test run for the detention-replacing system.
Their phone buzzed with snarky comments and linked memes once their friends caught wind of the 'screeching frog experience,' asking what job they'd be stuck doing.
"Just pick something you're interested in," Lady Tits had said during that meeting. "Consider it practice for your real future," the principal added. Neither of these statements helped Jamie, who prided themself on not having future plans.
Jamie prepared to reply to the group chat with a list of the lamest jobs they found, which was hard to quantify since they all were pretty terrible, when one caught their eye.
"Graveyard Assistant. 9pm to midnight, Monday through Wednesday. Assist the groundskeeper with miscellaneous tasks and keep watch over the property."
Jamie couldn't believe that such a job existed, and their friends in the group chats couldn't either. After several observed benefits revealed themselves, including having a secret drinking spot and scaring the more cowardly students by making them stay over on the grounds, Jamie knew they made the perfect choice.
---
The bike lock click echoed across the hills, making Jamie realize just how quiet the last ten minutes of their ride to the outskirts graveyard had been. The feeling of solitude only pleased Jamie all the more, making their heart pound with anticipation as they left their bike on one of the few still-standing fences and approached the main building. Jamie had to assume that the building was the main one, anyway, since it was the only building in view, made from the same gray stone that stuck up from the ground in slabs across the surrounding hills. The wood door groaned as it opened, acting as a thematic alarm system for anyone inside.
"Yo," Jamie called out, their voice booming in the surrounding silence. The interior of the building was as bright as an abandoned basement, with all the cleanliness of a barnyard after a tornado. The shadowed forms of various tools lay scattered along the floor and walls, with piles of grass clippings and tree branches piled in an unrecognizable system around the room.
Jamie thought back to their last social interaction, if family could be defined as a social experience. Their mom read off the directions to the graveyard from a print out, another vestige of ancient technology that now only served to show the previous generation's wastefulness of resources. Left, right, forward, whatever. There could only be so many graveyards up north of town, after all.
A loud clang rang out, not from Jamie's doing. They turned and leaned out of the old building toward the source, and noticed a tall figure on a nearby hill, form surrounded by moonlight.
"Hey! Are you the boss or whatever?" Jamie called out.
The form rose its head and turned, dragging a tool in its hand along with it. The tool rose and waved.
Perhaps the groundskeeper was hard of hearing, or lost its voice in some sort of graveyard-related accident. Jamie had imagined the job to be vaguely creepy, but they began to consider that perhaps they underestimated how much of the unsettling feeling of graveyards in movies was based in reality. Nevertheless, they slid down the stairs and approached the figure. The proximity and shifting of visual angle allowed Jamie to identify the tool the figure used as a large shovel, forcing itself into the ground and tossing loose dirt and rocks as it rose. The figure wore a tight dress shirt and pants, as if they planned to finish up their work here and head right over to the spring gala.
"Are you the boss around here?" Jamie asked again, still speaking loudly in case they couldn't hear well.
The figure's eyes looked to Jamie as their body continued to work. "Something like that," they replied slowly. "What brings you here?"
"I'm doing that anti-detention thing for the school. They're giving us jobs because they don't want to pay the teachers for detention-sitting or whatever."
The figure let out a low laugh, as if someone took a regular laugh, slowed it down, and added a bass underlay in preparation for an EDM mix. "Ah, to be young again." They paused their digging. "So that means you are here to assist me?"
"Guess so."
"Very well," the figure said. "Go get a shovel and come back here. We have much to do."
The two dug in silence as the moon rode across the sky, moving so much smoother than the second hand of the analog clock Jamie was accustomed to. The lack of noise began to ring in their ears, consuming the space around them. Their breathing and heartbeat rose to max volume in comparison, making Jamie painfully aware of the noises their body made to keep them alive.
"So," Jamie said to break the silence, "how much does this gig pay, usually? I don't get anything since it's a punishment."
"The satisfaction is pay enough," the figure replied, "and I hope you grow to think of this not as punishment, but as giving back."
"Sounds like something my dad would say," Jamie grumbled during an eye roll. "So do they actually not pay you?"
"The dead have nothing, and belong to no one."
Jamie didn't understand, but decided to drop the topic. They probably were getting paid by the government or something and didn't want to explain.
"It is finished," the figure remarked, examining the edges of the grave they dug together with long fingertips.
"Cool, so am I done?" Jamie turned to face the figure, but quickly realized their solitude in the bottom of the grave. Their heart began to race as their eyes darted around the hole. In a panic, they jumped up and grabbed protruding roots, using them to pull themself out of the hole and onto the cold grass above. They jumped up just in time to see the figure approaching the hole with a large black bag.
"We are not yet finished," the figure explained. "They deserve more respect and patience from you if you are to help them rest."
The figure motioned to Jamie to grab the top portion of the bag, while the figure held on to the back. Together, they led the bag to the edge of the hole. Before Jamie fully realized what they were doing, the figure told them to let go, and the bag fell into the hole, opening slightly at the top during its descent. Two glazed over eyes stared up at Jamie, sunk deep into a pale, thin face, with its mouth hung open, eternally caught mid-word. The rest of the body remained hidden from the bag, but Jamie's mind filled in the possible details at lightning speed.
"What the-" Jamie jumped back, catching themself pre-swear. "You didn't say we'd be burying bodies!"
"What did you expect?" the figure asked, without a hint of sarcasm.
Jamie fumbled with their words for a moment. "I mean, don't the bodies get buried, you know, at funerals? With the family and everything around? Not, you know, the dead of night, alone?"
The figure gave a long, forlorn sigh. "For those that are remembered, yes. But there are a great many who die forgotten, their names never to be spoken again, their stories lost at the end of their life. I am the one who remembers them, who gives them their final farewell, in place of any others in this world."
"So you bury people with no family or anything?" Jamie asked to clarify.
"Essentially. No one deserves to move to the next life without recognition."
Jamie's eyes skimmed along the empty hills around them, gravestones accented with the light of the moon, acting as beacons for each and every ended life surrounding them, then came to rest on the body below. They avoided looking into the eyes again, but their eyes moved to their long, ragged hair, their scarred skin, the hint of dirty and ripped clothing just barely revealed at the edge of the bag. The person, whoever they were, appeared homeless, or poor at the very least. And, according to the figure, they had died alone and entirely forgotten. Jamie's heart felt a pang of soreness from the thought.
They kept their mouth shut as the figure began reading from a tiny purple and gold book held entirely in one hand, saying the dead's name and speaking of her life. The words shone on the story as rays of the sun, basking it in the light of loving parents, and honest efforts, and wonderful talents. The sunshine then began to dim in the clouds of economic hardship, becoming darker still as the clouds moved on the winds of personal loss, bringing with it the thunder of grief. The rains of drug use poured down on the story, washing away the stable rocks of family, friends, and home. The rains poured down and the waters rose, and in the end, she drowned.
The figure closed the book, sending Jamie back to reality. They wiped away the stray tears quickly, not wanting the figure to see.
"Tears are a compliment," the figure replied to his thought. "They mean that you care."
The two worked in silence as their shovels moved the dirt back into the hole, moving the body away from the light of the moon for a final time. The two stood by the fresh mound of dirt in silence as the skies above continued to move around them. Jamie could hear their heart and breathing again, but they didn't care so much this time.
"It is late," the figure finally spoke. "I suppose it is time for you to go."
"Yeah," Jamie mumbled, unable to speak any louder.
"I wish to give you something, as thanks for helping me tonight."
Jamie opened their mouth to protest, to explain they only came from obligation, but the figure motioned for their silence. Their long fingers slid into one of their front pockets and pulled out another book, red in hue but otherwise identical to the book the figure read from previously. Their hand extended, and Jamie's hand reacted without thought to take it into their own. Their fingers ran along the wordless cover, making note of the golden patterns on the cover and bands along the spine, adorned themselves with tiny symbols they'd never seen before. Their thumb ran through the pages, expecting pages of information on funeral proceedings and the like, but found them all empty. They looked up, ready to attempt speaking once more, but found themself alone in the expanse of the cemetery.
---
Jamie returned home from their first night on the job to find their mother crying and their father on the phone with the police. They got a call from the cemetery director, their mother explained through tears, asking where they were, since they never arrived for the job. They expected as much, as tardiness is in the nature of teenage rebellion, but when their friends claimed they went to the job and hadn't seen them since school, worry consumed them. They cried of joy, then later of frustration as Jamie repeated the same story over and over, despite there being no cemetery so far from town. The police even checked the region to be sure that no one had set one up as a prank or something more sinister, but their searches, even with Jamie leading the way, found nothing.
Melina Ludwig, the school's guidance counselor for seven years after a brief stint in law, refused to give up hope in her R.E.E. program. She convinced the principal, Robert Brown, who once spent a month backpacking across Europe, to give it a second chance. The two requested that Howard Winston, Jamie's father and manager of a nearby warehouse, and on the off chance of his absence his mother Emilia Winston, who gave up her maiden name of O'Brierly after a long argument with her at-the-time-future-in-laws, drive Jamie to and from the job at the cemetery, to be sure of their whereabouts.
On the first day Jamie asked the groundskeeper Matthew Swint, who hadn't graduated high school due to his now ex-girlfriend's demands, when they would bury a body together. They got only a hearty laugh as reply, and spent the hours pulling weeds and chasing rabbits away from the flowers that loved ones left behind.
Over the weeks that Jamie worked, their mind routinely returned to that night, performing a ceremony for someone the world forgot. Sometimes people would visit a grave during Jamie's shift, and they would feel a pang of sadness for the ones who would never have someone look back on their memory. They hated seeing the flowers, too; they only reminded them of the emptiness between the rows of graves they had seen that night.
Despite the claims that the R.E.E. would help Jamie, their grades and focus only got worse in class. They focused instead on socialization, catching other's attention and absorbing as much as they could from observing and speaking to others. Their dreams filled with the image of the woman's face, mouth hanging open, eyes sunken and void. They would look into her grave and see their own face instead, visited by no one but the figure, reading off words of solitude and despair. Despite trying to fight the feeling with social graces and get-to-know-yous, the feeling of meaninglessness and absence of direction plagued Jamie, who now more than ever felt they lived without a future waiting, trapped in a story without a plot.
One night, almost two months after their experience, Jamie got a text relaying that both of their parents, who met during an Irish bar dance two years before marriage, couldn't make it to pick them up. They snuck a bike in the storage shed and made their way back home on their own, trying to remember the twists and turns that marked the way.
As they rode, they felt an increasing warmth in their left pocket. They worried about the cause, thinking of overheating phones and possible fires, until they realized that their phone rested safely and cooly in their right pocket. Stopping the bike, they pulled something they never went without from the left pocket: the red book from that night. The golden marks felt warm to the touch, and as their fingers ran over them, Jamie felt a deep feeling that they never felt before, giving them direction. They followed the feeling to the path's ledge, where, just beside the road, their eyes locked on to the silhouette of a human figure, crumpled and limp in the gravel hillside. Their eyes traced the ground from the figure to the road, marked with thick lines and circles of deep red across the pavement, telling the story of a single life-ending impact.
The book felt as if ablaze, but not painfully so. Jamie opened it, as they had a thousand times to observe the blank pages, only to find them now filled with line and lines of symbols saturated with meaning their eyes could now understand. When their view rose, they saw the familiar sight of gravestones lining the hills in the distance, surrounding a single building that appeared glowing in the night's dim light.
Jamie's eyes moved from the book, to the graveyard, to the body. In that moment, they knew what to do. Their story had found its plot.
Finally, a moment's peace. Kian leaned back in his dorm room chair and pushed his shoulders against the wooden frame, stretching them apart in preparation. Any physical activity required some form of warm-up; bodybuilders, endurance runners, swimmers, golfers, they all let their muscles stretch out beforehand for maximum efficiency. Sure, he wouldn't be running a two minute mile or two hour marathon sitting on the rickety chair of a dimly lit room, but he still planned to be active, just in a more focused, precise manner.
He leaned forward, letting his eyes fall onto the unopened sketchbook before him. It sat under the single desk lamp's spotlight, almost glowing with how white its pages still were. That would soon change. Kian had to make that change. When Kiara from class AR101 asked him about his artistic history, his mouth made some big claims before his brain could remember that anything more than a stick figure never turned out right on the page, and even the stick figures had about a 40% success rate. He sighed. If Kiara saw his current work ability, she'd realize his lies and never see him the same. If he was to keep up his position in her eyes, he'd have to do a lot more practice than the homework required.
With a triumphant breath in, he grabbed the pen, borrowed from his art-loving father, and flipped the sketchbook open. The pen's side glinted in the light as his hand positioned it for optimal drawing, the symbols on its side almost flashing with the movement. Kian took a moment to appreciate that he had access to pens that were far more fancy and expensive than those that banks and other school sponsors gave out by the fistful. This pen didn't need to advertise anything on it, not even itself; it knew it was good quality. The glyphs on the side were a decoration, nothing more.
The pen glided across the paper as Kian lightly sketched out the shape of the tissue box hidden in the shadows of his desk. At times he wished for an eraser, but the professor of AR101 made it very clear on the first day of class that learning to draw without an undo ability would help them greatly in the end. He focused on remembering all the advice that the professor gave during her lecture, about the basic forms of objects becoming refined over time as the strokes became darker and more defined.
A phone alarm beeped, signaling the end of his hour of drawing. Kian leaned back again, taking in the full view of his sketch. It was awful. Truly hideous, even by his standards. The lines of the box didn't match up right, there was no sense of perspective, shadows seemed random at best and intentionally misplaced at worst. He considered trying again, but once his pen stopped moving, he felt a deep ache in his hand. He clearly hadn't stretched enough for this feat after all.
With a defeated breath, he decided to try again in the morning, before class. If he woke up early, he would have time for a second attempt before AR101.
---
Kian did not wake up early. He made the mistake that all freshman of college do: believing that their still-growing bodies will accept being jolted awake by a phone alarm at a ridiculously early hour to get work done. By the time that his body accepted wakefullness and let his eyes open, he had twenty minutes to get to the art studio on the opposite side of campus.
As he slipped through the studio doors five minutes late, he tried to calm his heart, beating quickly both from running and the worry that Kiara would see his work. That was an unfounded worry, he reasoned to himself. He just needed to not sit next to her, so she wouldn't see his sketch as the professor went around.
"Kian Ruker," the professor called out as he tried to slide into a seat in the back. "There's no need to be shy on the second day. Come up here, sit with the rest of the class."
Professor Romera tapped her pen on the front of an open spot at one of the studio tables. Kiara's studio table. Of course.
He could say no, or just leave, he thought. But no, in reality, he didn't truly have those options. His body would never let him be so free-willed, and his brain would shut down from the social pressure of rebelling. After a moment's pause, his feet brought him to the free seat, slumping down in an attempt to be as unnoticeable as possible.
"Kian, you made it!" Kiara whispered to him as Professor Romera continued talking about expectations and whatnot. "I can't wait to see what you did."
He gave a quick nod and turned away, trying not to let her beautiful eyes see his face turn red.
After ten minutes of talking that felt like an eternity sitting on an electric chair, the professor announced that she would be looking at the hour-timed practice sketches from the night before. A uniform rustling of papers sounded out as the students pulled out their sketchbooks. Kian briefly considered claiming to have lost his.
"Here you go, Kian," Kiara said with a glowing smile, handing him his sketchbook from under his seat.
"Thanks," he stammered, plan ruined.
Professor Romera towered above them, looking down in judgement. "Kiara, good work. You really have an eye for form. Your shadows are a bit disjointed, but that's nothing that practice won't fix. Try to use a very harsh light to get a good idea for where they land next time." She turned her head. "Kian, please open your sketchbook."
The thoughts of refusing, running, or even eating his terrible work came up in quick succession, but his hands betrayed him through their obedience of authority. The sketchbook opened, cover slapping down on the table, reminding Kian of what a guillotine would probably sound like as it thudded on the wooden block beneath its victim.
"Oh my..." Professor Romera said.
"Well, I-"
"...this is excellent work!"
Kian jolted a bit, completely caught off guard as he stared up at her.
"You clearly have a lot of practice with art. Honestly, you may be above what AR101 can teach you. What's your experience?"
"He was the senior art lead at his high school," Kiara said, echoing his lie from their last class. "Now I see why!"
"I do as well," the professor said with a chuckle. "But don't get cocky now, there's always ways to improve." With that, she continued down the line of tables, giving feedback on all the sketches in the open books.
Kiara gave him a light hit on the shoulder, catching his attention. "You really are talented! To be honest, I didn't think of you as the artistic type before, but maybe you could teach me some tricks later?"
Kian stammered out an agreement, and Kiara giggled happily. Was he crazy? Why did everyone think his terrible drawing was good? Did he really understand art so badly that he somehow made a great art form, like Picasso? He turned away from Kiara and looked down at his sketchbook to try and piece together the puzzle. Instead, he saw another mystery.
A near perfect photo-rendition of his tissue box filled the page. Light cross-hatching of lines, evenly spaced, filled the areas of shadow in a way that balanced perfectly with the lightening of lines in highlighted areas. It looked less like a drawing and more like an Instagram filter designed to make photos look hand-drawn.
Professor Romera began addressing the class again. She told them to put their sketchbooks away, so they would focus on her lecture. Kian did as instructed, but his brain wandered the entirety of class, trying to find some explanation that made sense.
---
As Kian sat down in the back of the campus cafeteria, he pulled his sketchbook out from his bag and flipped it open to the perfect drawing. Did he somehow switch sketchbooks with someone? No, this was clearly a rendition of his tissue box, bent side and all. To be sure, he pulled the cover back over the drawing. Clear as day, the name section read KIAN RUKER. A green sketchbook, 100 pages, opening from the top, with his name, and his tissue box's likeness. It was his, all right.
He pulled his pen from his pocket and decided to draw something new. The pizza slice in front of him looked like a good choice. He had no plans to eat it; he grabbed it out of habit but lost his appetite from the whole sketchbook business. For the next half hour, he focused intently on transferring its likeness to the page, experimenting with the cross hatch method the new tissue box drawing used. It turned out terribly, of course, but it did look a bit better than the attempt from last night.
"Hey!" a voice called out from behind him. He closed the sketchbook immediately, turning back. The table behind him greeted a passerby, the group shouting at each other about fraternity plans and annoying professors.
Kian sighed, mentally reprimanding himself for being so jumpy. He opened the sketchbook to resume his pizza drawing. There was no need to finish it, he quickly learned. Just like the tissue box drawing, the pizza had become photo-realistic. This time, however, there was another change. Just beneath the pizza, Kian saw the words "looks good" written in a handwriting completely unlike his own.
He paused, considering what to do. His rational brain said to throw the sketchbook in the trash and be done with it, but he felt a deep curiosity well up from places in himself that he hadn't felt in years.
"Thanks, it's pretty good," he wrote on the page, just below the previous comment. He closed the sketchbook, waited a moment, and opened it back up again.
"It's been a while since I've had pizza," a new comment read.
His heart skipped a beat. He looked around, seeing all the people around him. He felt a strong mix of concern and security; he worried that someone would see what was happening, but felt safe knowing that if any strangeness happened, he would not be alone in the dark woods or the basement or something. After all, what horror story begins in a crowded cafeteria? Well, he didn't actually know the answer, seeing as he hated horror, but he had a good feeling that they didn't favor crowded and brightly lit areas.
"Who are you?" he wrote, closing the sketchbook and opening it again.
"Did you like my work earlier? Kiara liked it, I bet."
His heart sank into his stomach. "How do you know about that?"
"Relax, I'm helping, aren't I? It gets awfully boring where I am."
"Where are you?"
"You wouldn't understand, so stop asking."
Before Kian could reply, his eyes caught sight of the clock, arms pointed at ten past one. MA100 started five minutes ago! All thoughts about the talking sketchbook flew out of his mind, replaced with the hurried rush of putting everything away and sprinting to the lecture hall.
---
That night, after journaling in his personal marble notebook, as he did every night, Kian pulled out the sketchbook. He felt afraid to in the darkness of his room, but he had to in order to do his homework. Plus, despite the fear, the deep curiosity still bubbled within him.
"Way to just run off on me. I thought we were bonding," the writing said on a new page. A small but very accurate drawing of a frowning face punctuated the sentence.
"Sorry," Kian wrote, thinking to himself how silly it felt to apologize to a piece of paper. "I was late for class."
"It's fine. I'm used to not doing much. Are you going to give me another crap drawing to fix?"
"No need to be rude about it."
"Realistic, not rude. It's just not your talent. We all have things we're crap at."
"What are you crap at?"
"Having a physical form, for one," the reply read, next to a small drawing of a laughing audience.
So it has a sense of humor, Kian thought to himself. "What should I call you?"
"Whatever you want, I don't really care."
He thought for a second. "I want to call you something. Is Estes okay?" He remembered the name from an art history project from high school, belonging to a photo-realistic painter.
"Cool, I have a name now. Estes it is. Whoopie." The final word had droplets drawn on it. It took Kian a moment to realize it was a visual version of words 'dripping with sarcasm.'
Before Kian wrote down his reply and closed the sketchbook, the ink of the page shifted, creating a reply before his eyes for the first time.
"Anyway, if you'd like me to keep helping out with Kiara, I'm gonna need a favor," Estes wrote.
A favor? Kian felt a sudden chill through his spine. "What kind of favor?"
"Don't worry, I'm not going to steal your soul," Estes wrote next to a drawing of a devil with an X over it. "We can talk about that later. Just say you'll be open to it, and I'll keep helping with your drawings."
Kian paused. On the one hand, offering a favor to a sketchbook sounded like a really bad idea. On the other, if the drawings suddenly turned back to crap, Kiara would never look at him again, and he'd have to suffer three times a week in class with her on top of the constant suffering of losing any chance with her.
"Okay," he finally wrote.
"Great," Estes wrote. "Now let's get drawing."
---
Over the next few weeks, Kian became rather fond of Estes. He already loved journaling, since he had done it every day for several years, but being able to write to something that replied immediately gave him so much more satisfaction. He kept up the personal journal out of habit, but opened up to Estes about some aspects of his daily life. Estes had a dry sense of humor, which Kian enjoyed, and while it never said so outright, it seemed to really appreciate having a view of the world outside of "the formless place," as Estes called it.
The drawing plan worked perfectly with Kiara. He sat down next to her each class, showing her the drawings that he started and Estes refined. He worried when she followed him into the cafeteria the first time in order to watch his methods, but between him distracting her with conversation and Estes working fast to fix his lines, she didn't seem to notice anything strange happening on his paper. She continued going with him to the cafeteria, less for drawing practice and more for just speaking with him.
After two months of hanging out casually, Kian was ready. With some encouragement and advice from Estes, he managed to keep his cool with her enough to ask her on an official date.
"Of course!" she said with her glowing smile. They arranged for a dinner that evening before the clock forced her to leave for class.
"Estes!" Kian scrawled down, hurried in his excitement. "She said yes!"
"I told you confidence is key," Estes replied, the words circling a drawing of a key.
"Thank you so much," he wrote back, feeling like a superhero with a secret ally.
"Do you remember what I asked of you before?"
Kian paused. The words from their last conversations had turned into later replies and drawings, so he couldn't look back to see.
"I asked if I could have a favor, in exchange for helping with Kiara. You're going out, so I think it's favor time, don't you?"
The memory came back to him. The last time he saw Estes ask about a "favor," he felt his heart freeze and race all at once. Now, however, he considered Estes a type of friend, always knowing what to say to help him out. "I remember," he replied. "What is the favor?"
"Come closer," Estes replied.
Kian leaned close to the page, expecting some tiny written humor from Estes.
His vision suddenly filled with the face of a wolf, lunging at him, teeth bared and mouth opening as it rushed toward his face. Kian flinched in shock, his hand jolting and sending the tip of the pen into his arm.
The wolf vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the image of a laughing child.
Kian pulled the pen out from his lower arm, shaking off bits of blood on the tip from where it pierced his skin. "Not funny!" he scrawled, the black ink mixing with the red.
"Sorry," Estes replied with a sad wolf image. "Just trying to prepare you for anything. Dates can be stressful, after all."
"There won't be any wolves."
"But there will be a romantic interest, and that's even scarier."
He rolled his eyes. "What about this favor?"
"I was just joking about that," Estes replied. "Go have fun."
Kian caught sight of the clock, noting that it was getting dangerously close to math lecture time. He continued to chitchat with Estes for the remaining few minutes he had before packing everything up and heading off. He spent the trip thinking about his later date, ignoring the throbbing in his arm where the pen had stuck into him.
---
The sun set and evening arrived, and with it came a feeling of absolute panic for Kian. His sketchbook laid open as he searched his dorm closet for something presentable, something that would really wow Kiara on their first official date. Estes filled the visible pages with types of acceptable formal wear for Kian to match with his belongings, since he never learned the names and functions of each type of clothing he owned. Like many college students, this was the first time he had to dress for a formal event without his mother's eye ensuring he didn't make a fool of himself.
Once he felt properly dressed, he wrote out a goodbye to Estes, with an added thanks for the fashion tips.
"No need for goodbye," Estes replied, "I'll be around."
Kian rushed out the door and made it to the pre-determined restaurant, a sushi place just off campus. As he arrived, he saw Kiara approaching.
"Hey," she called out, her blue dress shining under a nearby streetlight. Her smile shone like a beacon, out-performing every light source in the vicinity, and her eyes bore deep into him as they stared with what could only be described as pure, unquestioned happiness.
He stammered out some formalities as they entered the restaurant and took their seats near the back. Instead of sitting on opposite sides of the table, the two sat on the L-shaped bench so they sat close to one another, as they did in the cafeteria so many times.
"I always like the back," Kiara explained, "since it lets me see everything that's going on. I hope you don't mind."
"No, I like it too," Kian said, trying to control his smile.
As they looked over the menu and made some small talk about their classes for the day, Kian noticed the pain in his arm return. He felt a sudden throb and winced.
"I'm okay," he explained to Kiara's concerned look. "Just jabbed myself with my pen. Well, it was my dad's, really. But I carry it around for good luck." He pulled the pen from his pocket, letting the glyphs sparkle in the dim lighting.
"That's so sweet! Will you be able to see him over the break?"
"Well..." he paused, deciding how to phrase his next words. "I haven't seen him for a long while. He was an artist, but I guess he got too caught up with his work. He left one night and never came back." He quickly resumed his smile. "It's okay though, I was only one year old when that happened, and my mom is very good to me."
"That's such a shame," Kiara said, with not pity but empathy, which warmed Kian's heart. "I guess that's where you get your artistic flair though, huh?"
"Yeah," Kian lied with a laugh.
Dinner resumed, with the two talking as they waited for the sushi they ordered. In the middle of Kian explaining an event from high school, Kiara jumped a little and blushed.
"Kian! That's a bit forward, don't you think?"
He didn't understand what she meant at all; how is a story about high school forward? He noticed her eyes staring down, and he followed her gaze to her lap, where he found his hand gripping the top of her thigh. He jolted his hand back, feeling a throb in his arm.
"Sorry! I didn't, I mean-"
"Let's take it slow, okay?" Kiara said, red but smiling.
"Of course," he stammered back. She started talking about something else, but he couldn't stop thinking about what just happened. He had absolutely no intention of grabbing her, he wasn't drunk, or high, or too tired... so how did he not notice himself doing that?
"So be honest with me," Kiara said with a flirtatious glance. "How long have you liked me for?"
Kian paused to think of how to answer this question. The right answer was since he stumbled onto her Facebook profile through the college freshman's Facebook page, and that he saw a lot of her posts since she left them public. He couldn't actually say that, though.
"Woah, really! Wow, you really are something, you know that?"
Kian came back out from his thoughts to find himself speaking without his awareness. "I know it's creepy, but I just couldn't help myself, and it was all public," his mouth said for him. He grabbed his water and drank it, forcing himself to stop talking. Was this what people meant by first date nerves?
After several more lines of conversation, Kian now controlling the words he said, the food arrived. The waiter placed the large sushi boat on the table in front of them, and they stared in awe at all the sushi options that the boat offered.
"Time to taste test," Kiara joked as she clicked her chopsticks together.
Kian opened his mouth to agree, but found it suddenly filled.
"Wow, too hungry for chopsticks, huh?"
It took Kian a moment to realize that his mouth was filled with one of the sushi pieces, grabbed and moved by his hand. He took his other hand and pushed it down, quickly chewing and swallowing the piece so he could speak. "I'm just nervous I guess," he lied. "I need to go to the bathroom though, I'll be right back."
Before she could reply, he rushed away from the table and into the back, which thankfully had single-stall bathrooms. The lights of the bathroom were much harsher and brighter than outside, momentarily blinding him. He shook his head, as if shaking the light away, and opened his eyes to look at his hand. His heart froze.
Extending out from the pen injury, hidden away by a single bandaid, his veins rose up to to the surface of his skin, appearing to be a dark reddish color, creating a network of black branches reaching down to his hand and up his arm. He looked around the rest of his body, raising his shirt and pant bottoms, and found other areas with slightly dark veins, not as affected as his arm but clearly different than they should be. He looked up and stared in the mirror to inspect his face. As his eyes scanned his cheeks and lips, he noticed movement in the corner of his vision. His eyes moved just in time to see his affected arm, with his hand holding the pen, jab it down into his chest.
He yelled out in pain and stumbled back, pen sticking out of his body. Blood poured out as the inch of pen stuck inside of his muscle moved around with his jolting, leaving an expanding red stain on his nice shirt. He tried to move his hand to grab the pen and pull it out, but his hand stopped right before it, and refused to move and further.
"Sorry about this," he heard a voice say.
"What?" he said out loud, looking around for a source of the voice.
"You said I could have a favor. It would have taken far too much time to explain. I'm sure you understand." Kian realized as the voice spoke that he didn't hear it from around him, but inside his head, as thoughts his mind was having but that couldn't be controlled.
"Estes?" he asked, barely above a whisper. "But... but I didn't bring you here..." He racked his brain, but was completely sure that the sketchbook remained on his desk, where he said goodbye just before the date.
"You did, though." Kian felt his eyes move down against his will to the pen sticking out from his chest, throbbing with pain. "And you said I could have a favor, right? I just want to experience a few things, things that only a body can get you. You don't mind, of course."
Kian tried to move his mouth to protest, but his lips wouldn't move. He decided to try thinking. "People will notice," he tried to threaten with his thoughts. "They'll know something's wrong with me."
"No, I don't think so," Estes replied as Kian's body pulled the pen from its flesh without a flinch and began cleaning itself up. "I know everything about you, after all. I have years of information all saved up. All of your personal thoughts, all laid out for me."
Years? But he only had the sketchbook for a few months! The only place he had his personal thoughts, other than his mind, was his daily journal, but how could-
"Besides, it's not like I'm taking hold forever," Estes said with exaggerated assurance. "Just until the fun is over. I haven't had a joy ride since... how old are you again? A year less than that, I didn't keep track."
A year less than his current age. Kian's heart sank as his body threw the bloody shirt in the toilet and bandaged itself. His thoughts wandered to his father, to his nightly journal, to the pen, to Kiara...
Kian's body, no, Estes' body, gave a swift turn and returned to the restaurant, telling an elaborate lie to Kiara about tripping and hurting himself while getting a bandage from the waiter. Kiara snuggled up close to him, pouring sympathy for his situation and offering to help him eat. He felt an arm reach around her and hold her close. He wanted to shout out, to tell her that he was trapped, but he no longer had control.
"Besides," Estes added in thought as Kian felt his body smile. "You'll be able to watch and feel it all, so it's not like you're missing out!"
Jessica needed a plan. In exactly four months, three weeks, and two days, she would be attending the most important keystone event of her life so far: senior prom. She already had her attire and makeup options completely planned out and ready to be chosen based on her group's color scheme, thanks to some help from her more preppy friend Natalie. She even had a spreadsheet of every limo service in a ten mile radius, with information on prices, available seats, and customer ratings. As she went through her binder, re-organizing the pages in the bracelet subsection of the accessories tab, her eye glanced at a tab that she knew was woefully incomplete. No amount of personal research and sorting would help her fill it out.
She flipped over to the tab, labeled DATE. A single blank page met her eyes, taunting her.
Everyone else in her group already had boyfriends that they would take to prom. Some of them had been dating for an entire year and would basically die for each other, but most were very promising few-month relationships that were certain they'd make it to prom season. Even Kate, known for never dating a boy for longer than a few weeks, had a guy on the soccer team who already agreed to go with her if she didn't manage to find someone else in time. At Kate's relationship rate, she may have gone through every other boy in the school by prom. The thought made Jessica wince a bit.
"That binder isn't going to help you get a date," Natalie had commented when going over different kinds of nail polish after school. That's where Natalie was wrong.
Jessica grabbed her pen bag, sorted by line width and ink hue, and began making a table. With the help of the junior yearbook, she listed every boy in class, noting who was available and who was taken to the best of her ability. Every so often she'd make a quick call to one of the other girls to confirm or deny a rumor, but otherwise kept her plan to herself. In just a few short hours, almost half the time it took for her to figure out and sort her different dress style options, she had a list of possible guys.
She browsed the list, making additional marks to indicate her probability of getting a yes from them. Some of them would never agree; she wasn't athletic, or goth, or nerdy, so no one from those cliques would want to go with her. She did belong to the eco-volunteers and the brainiac groups, so someone from those areas would probably be much easier to get a yes from. Her friend group also opened a lot of possibilities if they gave her a good word in advance, though that would require letting some of them in on her search, which could backfire if she wasn't careful.
After careful consideration, she had her final list. None of them were particularly attractive or even interesting to her, but that wasn't the point. She didn't need a husband. However, she couldn't just ask a random guy from her list to the prom the day before either; that would look desperate, like she couldn't get a boyfriend at all and would take whoever just to save face. That wouldn't work, not at all. She needed to woo one of these boys so they could spend the four months, three weeks, and two days before prom dating, for all the school to see. Then, when the day came, they would both walk into prom, and everyone would whisper to each other about how good they looked together.
Tomorrow, Jessica planned, she would get more information on the guys in her final list. Hobbies, favorite food, any information that would help her approach them. She needed to woo them perfectly if they were going to be dating up to prom.
She closed her binder, running her fingers on the bedazzled cover. "This binder is so going to get me a date. Suck on that, Natalie."
---
Benjamin likes games. Russo likes EDM. Aden likes robots. Jessica noted each interest she could remember overhearing during her second lap around the cafeteria. Her friends tried to get a look at what she was writing so intensely, but gave up when Jessica threatened to write on their faces instead.
As she prepared for her third lap through the tables, someone caught her eye.
He meandered through the cafeteria, looking at all of the tables. He didn't have a tray, and didn't look to be searching for a seat. He just wandered, moving his gaze around the crowd. For a moment, his eyes met Jessica's. They stayed for a moment, then looked away as he continued walking through the tables.
Jessica's eyes didn't look away. She stared at him, waiting for a name to come to her, but none did. She filtered through the yearbook pictures in her mind, but she still couldn't come up with a match.
"Jess is staring at a boy!"
The exclamation shocked Jessica back to the table, where all of her friends stared at her with wide grins.
"Is that your crush?"
"Are you going to talk to him?"
"Do we need to get him over here?"
Jessica put her hands out. "No, no! I just.. who is he? I don't remember seeing him in the yearbook."
Kate laughed to herself. "Silly, that's.." Her voice trailed off. "Wait, who is that?"
"I think I've seen him in my math class," Natalie said with a lot of hesitation. "But I'm not sure. Could he be a new student?"
"This late in the year?"
"It's possible."
"Well," Kate shrugged, leaning into Jessica. "Guess it's up to Jessy to find out for us!"
"Yeah, go talk to him!"
"Go lay on some moves, girl!"
Jessica didn't try to hide her eye roll. She much preferred to be pushing someone else to chase a guy, not being pushed into chasing herself. Still, she somehow had managed to make it the past three years with only passing comments on her single status. It was only a matter of time before the group found a suitable target to push her towards. "I'll ask his name," she decided, "but that's all." She needed it for her binder, after all.
The girls cheered as Jessica got up, slipping her binder into her bag and out of the group's view. With a deep breath, she started toward where she last saw the boy. As she walked, she made sure to keep her ears open for more information on the others in her list.
She made two full laps around, but she couldn't find the new boy at all. She even took a risk and initiated contact with Aden, asking if he had seen someone of his description pass by. He replied that he hadn't seen someone of that description in the school ever.
Before she could make another lap to search, the school bell rang. Everyone got up at once and began gathering their things from the table for their next class. Jessica cursed in her head, but censored it as she whispered under her breath. She had a lot of information on the other guys, but now she knew there was someone she had absolutely no intel on. She knew that the empty box on her table would bug her immensely, but she would have to wait until after school to do anything about it.
---
Three days went by, and Jessica still had absolutely no information on the new boy, nicknamed by her group as The Cafeteria Ghost, or just Ghost when they texted. After the first day of Jessica not getting any information, the others all started asking around about Ghost. A few people had seen him in the cafeteria that day, and some of the sports players noticed him at recent games. Come claimed they had classes with him, but said he only came to class once in a blue moon, and that his name wasn't on the class roster. Even teachers didn't know who she was trying to describe when she asked about Ghost.
"Maybe he's one of those older people who comes back to high school to get the special diploma," Natalie theorized. "He may just pop in every so often to get work or take a test."
"Maybe he's homeschooled but hates it," Kate thought out loud. "So he sometimes escapes to get a true high school experience, but his crazy parents always find out and trap him again."
None of the theories satisfied Jessica. She wrote them all down in her binder anyway, along with a name, time, and statement from everyone she spoke to, in a new tab labeled GHOST.
"I'll find out who you are," she grumbled as she made a crude drawing of his likeness on the final page of the GHOST section. "And I'll do it fast, because you're using up my valuable prom date hunting time."
---
She didn't have to work fast to find Ghost, because the next day, he came to her.
On her walk home from school, she noticed him in full view, leaning on a fence by the sidewalk. He looked right at her as she approached, playing with a lollipop in his mouth.
"There you are, girl from the cafeteria. Jessica, right?"
She paused. How did he get her name before she could find out his? The idea bugged her.
"I'll take that as a yes," he laughed.
"And you are?"
"James."
"James what?"
"Just James."
She frowned. "You have a last name. Everyone does."
He shrugged. "So you're a student over at Bayview? What year?"
"Yeah, I'm a senior."
"That makes you, what, 16?"
"17," she corrected. "Are you a student? No one at Bayview knows you."
"Maybe I go somewhere else."
"Then why were you at Bayview?"
"Well," he said as he pulled out the lollipop and stepped closer to her, "maybe you could find that out over coffee?"
She opened her mouth to tell him off, but stopped. No boy had shown such clear interest in her before. Plus, she could check off the "find out about Ghost" and the "get a prom date" boxes off of her to-do with one event if she did this right. He seemed to be avoiding her questions out of flirtatiousness rather than malice, as a way of keeping her interested in uncovering his mystery. If she was being completely honest with herself, it was working. "Okay," she agreed after a minute's hesitation.
"Great," Ghost, now named James, replied, immediately turning away. "Cafe Nero, 4pm tomorrow. See ya there."
Jessica pulled out her phone, ready to tell her group chat of friends about what she learned about Ghost, but stopped herself. She didn't actually learn anything except his name, and they would latch onto the whole date thing and blow it way out of proportion. Best to wait until after the date and give all the updates at once.
---
Jessica sat down front and center in homeroom exactly two minutes before the start of class bell went off. She liked the routine of being in her spot early enough to organize her desk, but not so early that she felt restless waiting for the day to begin.
She heard a thump in the seat next to her. She looked over to see James Donahue, kicking his feet up on the desk.
"James," she scolded, "how many times do I have to tell you not to do that, especially in the front row!"
"Okay, Mom," James chuckled, moving his feet but still slouching back against his chair. "I guess I have to be on my best behavior before our special date, huh?"
She rolled her eyes with a smile. "Just try not to be too much of a slob."
"I guess I can do that. But if I do make a mess, promise me you won't try to organize the crumbs by size and color."
The teacher walked in, throwing her teaching manual on the front desk with a thud. "Okay, class, take your seats and I'll take attendance. Aaron."
"Here."
The list went on, each name getting a call of 'here' from somewhere behind Jessica. She loved watching the clock tick by as her teacher called out each name, creating a melody that only she could appreciate. The clock ticked to 8:15:43, and she prepared for her part of the tune.
"James."
"Here," James and Jessica said in unison.
The teacher gave a pointed look to Jessica. "Don't jump the gun, sweetie. You're next. Jessica."
"H-here," she stammered. She looked back at the clock, confused. Her name was always called at 8:15:43. Perhaps the teacher was talking a bit slower today? She had counted each exchange for the entire year prior, singing along in her head: Aaron, Beth, Bobby, Cameron, Ethan, Ida, then Jessica. She paused, and reviewed the list in her head. She definitely had it memorized that way, with Jessica after Ida, but where was James? Of course his name came before hers. She re-sang the list in her head, trying to put James in, but it felt unfamiliar, like it didn't belong.
"You okay?" James tapped her shoulder, looking at her with concern.
"Yeah," she lied.
"Try not to get too embarrassed. By the time we're having coffee later, you'll have totally forgotten about this."
The lesson started, and Jessica did her best to not think about the list of names chiming out to the ticking of the clock.
---
Three months went by after Jessica's coffee date with James, and she couldn't be happier. Despite knowing each other for years, she felt like she really only discovered him that day, as they talked for hours in the shop and on the nearby walking path. She didn't tell him about her original scheme to just get a prom date, of course. After the first few weeks, she realized that she did really like him, prom or not. Since that day she hadn't pulled out her binder at all, focusing instead on spending every afternoon in his company.
He was very good at sweeping her off her feet when they were together; he was intelligent, worldly, and quite the romantic. He never made dick or fart jokes like the other boys her age, and knew how to handle his beer at the basement parties. She didn't know a seventeen year old guy could be so mature, and if she did know, she never would have thought he'd show any interest in her. And yet here she was, the girlfriend of the most mature guy in school, experiencing so many firsts with him. He claimed to be a first-timer for many things they did together too, but it felt to good to her for just pure talent. She told him she didn't mind if he had experience before, but he never opened up about that. It bothered her a bit, but she thought it best not to disrupt such a good relationship over one minor thing.
The flyers for prom started appearing in the halls, and Jessica felt the prom fever return to her. She knew she had everything planned perfectly from all those months ago, but now it felt so much more real. James especially helped with that; knowing who she'd be walking through the door with made it all the more exciting.
She wanted to point out the fliers to James and talk to him about his prom desires, but he hadn't been in school for days. He wasn't even answering his phone. After the first day she didn't feel any worry, just a bit annoyed that her boyfriend couldn't be bothered to return a text. After day three, however, she began to actually worry that something may be wrong.
On her walk home from school that day, she kept staring at her text conversation with him, waiting for the 'typing' bubble to pop up and let her know everything was okay.
"Jessica!"
She jolted and turned around, seeing James rushing over to her. He grabbed her and pulled her in for a quick kiss.
"I am so sorry baby, I know you must've been so worried."
"Wh-where have you been?" She wasn't sure whether to be relieved he was okay, or pissed off that he wasn't in a hospital somewhere without cell reception.
"I've been sick."
"So sick you couldn't return a text?"
"That's what I'm so sorry for." He sighed, staring down at the ground. "I had to get rid of my phone. It got.. hacked, or something."
"Hacked?"
"Yeah, like people were monitoring it. It's happened before, remember?"
"That's why you don't have social media, right?"
"Yeah, exactly. Well this time they got my phone, so I had to break it."
Jessica stared at him while he continued to glance around the ground. "Why're these hackers trying to break into your stuff? What could a high school kid have that they want?"
"Well, I'm not sure it's that simple. But it's okay now, the phone thing. I'll make sure they don't try anything again. In the meantime, we'll still see each other in school, when I'm better. Okay baby?" He looked up at her, grinning his small reserved grin.
She couldn't help but smile back. "Okay, thanks for finding me to tell me. Get your rest."
"Thanks," he said with a kiss to her cheek.
As he left, Jessica felt her heart flutter. She didn't like these computer people targeting her boyfriend, but he'd figure it out. He was so good with computers, unlike her. He'd probably hack them right back and make them leave him alone for good.
---
After the sixth day of not seeing James outside of the sidewalk talk, Jessica couldn't keep all of her prom excitement to herself anymore. She called up Natalie, ready to plan her dress and color scheme, with or without James.
"Ugh, there are so many options," Jessica complained on the call. "And there's no way to sort them on this website! How am I supposed to compare?"
"What about the binder?" Natalie asked.
Jessica sat up in attention. Her binder! She hadn't touched it in months, but it had all the information she needed about the big day. After a short search of her room, she had it in her hands, bedazzled cover and all. "You're so right, thanks Nat. I have everything nice and sorted in here!"
The two went through each tab one at a time, starting from the dress and going into makeup, shoes, accessories, and even which limo seemed like the best choice based on their current plans.
"Okay, I think that settles our choice on drink selection for the pre-party," Natalie said with some typing on her end. "What section is next?"
Jessica checked the tabs and laughed. "My date tab, looks like. I don't need this one anymore; James is going with me for sure."
"See, I told you that the binder wouldn't get you a date. What's the one after that?"
Jessica's eyes flicked over to the next tab. She paused.
"Jess?" Natalie asked the silence.
"Sorry, I... I'm not sure..." Jessica stared at the tab. GHOST. She knew she made this tab at some point, but she couldn't recall when. "Do you remember what GHOST means?"
"It sounds kinda familiar, but I don't know. What's in it?"
Jessica flipped open the tab to find dozens of notes: names, time stamps, statements, a drawn map with red circles on some of the rooms. All of the statements stated different claims about someone named Ghost, short for The Cafeteria Ghost. From what she could gather, he was a figure she and her friends saw in the cafeteria that almost no one recognized from the school. She relayed her readings to Natalie as she skimmed the pages.
"I... I feel like I remember that, but it's all so foggy. I remember talking to Bobby about someone like that, but... no, I couldn't have, there was no soccer that day. Did I see him some other time?" Natalie droned off, thinking to herself on the other end of the line.
Jessica kept reading the notes, becoming more and more confused. She remembered asking people about someone, but who was she trying to find information about?
She flipped to the last page, and her heart skipped a beat. She was no artist, but the likeness was clear. She looked down at the page, and the drawing of James stared back at her.
"Ah well, I guess it's not all that important if we never followed up on it, huh?" Natalie laughed to herself.
"I..." Jessica swallowed hard. "I need to call you back." Without waiting for a reply, she hung up the phone and threw it onto the bed.
Her memories fought with each other. She remembered seeing the boy in the cafeteria, having an investigation with her friends about his identity. But now, looking back on it, she knew the Ghost was James, someone she knew for years. But why did no one know about him in some of her memories? She thought back on her times with James. She saw his face in classes, and in crowds, but upon serious thinking, she couldn't remember a single specific event they shared together. She couldn't even remember him asking her out. She remembered the Ghost asking her out, appearing on her walk home and not giving her any information until she agreed to go out for coffee. But why would she have needed to go out for info on someone she had known for years? The more she thought about it, the more her brain pounded with contradictions.
Shaking her head violently, as if shaking her thoughts straight, she stood up from the bed and grabbed the binder. She couldn't figure it out on her own. She only knew one thing for sure: all of her memories otherwise felt fine and orderly, but those with James/Ghost fought each other the more she thought of them. Therefore, she reasoned, the only way to organize them was to see James and show him the binder. She needed to confront him about... well, she wasn't sure exactly what she would confront him about exactly, but she felt the need to do it all the same.
---
Jessica followed the GPS directions down the streets, driving slower than the speed limit. Even if she had more experience as a driver, the stress and confusion she felt tearing her up inside would have affected her driving all the same, she reasoned to herself as cars started lining up behind her. Adding her new driver status into the mix just ensured that she had to drive slow, in order to avoid making any huge mistakes. It also didn't help that she hated driving anyway; there was no way to go back and fix an error like one would on a test or in a binder. No edit, no undo. Real life didn't have those features, though she wished it did. Things would be so much easier that way.
Her GPS told her to stop in front of a house, and she obeyed. The house was three stories high, larger than any other houses in the area. Her one story townhouse would be completely overshadowed by the tower before her. As she unbuckled herself, she found herself glaring at the house. James never told her his family was loaded. In fact, he never told her about his family at all. She only had his address from a package he sent her once; she noticed his name on the return address, and made a note about it for later.
Binder in hand, she took a deep breath in, and rang the doorbell.
An older man, probably in his fifties, answered the door, opening it only a crack. Their eyes met, and, based on their eyes being almost identical, she presumed this man to be James's father.
"Mr. Donahue, I'm here to see James. Is he here?"
She heard a shuffle from beyond the door. "James, who is that there?"
"It's no one!" the old man barked back, then turned to Jessica. "You need to leave, now."
Jessica paused. James didn't tell her that he was a Junior, either. "Please, sir, can you find your son, or tell me where he is? It's urgent."
"I have no son, now leave!" He went to shut the door, but instead it swung open.
James Senior and Jessica both instinctively stepped away from the door, now in the hand of a man dressed in a white suit. Beyond him, Jessica saw more men in suits, all sitting in the visible living room.
The man motioned to James Senior, and he reluctantly stepped further out of the way. "What is your name, sweetie?"
"Jessica," she replied curtly. "I'm looking for James."
The suited man and James Senior exchanged a glance. James Senior winced, sweating visibly. "I presume James is someone your age. A friend?"
"My boyfriend, actually."
The suited man's eyes widened for a moment, but quickly returned to normal as he smiled. "Well, isn't that interesting."
"Look," Jessica snapped at the man, "is James here or not? I need to talk to him."
"Don't worry, he's here." The man looked back at the group. They nodded, and quickly left the room. "He's upstairs, second door on the right." He stepped out of the way, gesturing to the nearby stairway.
Jessica nodded and walked past the suited man, who watched her with a smile, and James Senior, who avoided her gaze and kept fidgeting with his hands, sweating visibly.
She walked up the stairs and down the hall. Opening the second door on the right, she saw only darkness. She stepped inside, hands tapping the walls for a light.
The door shut behind her.
---
Jessica heard the door shut, and swung around just in time to see the light vanish from the room. She reached for the handle, but her hands grabbed at air. She swung around, looking desperately for a source of light, but only saw darkness. She pulled out her phone and turned on its flashlight, but its beam didn't make contact with anything, even the floor.
Suddenly, a light turned on to reveal a single table below it. On the side closest to her was a chair, and on the other was the suited man and James Senior.
"Come, sit," the suited man said.
She didn't move.
"Please, sit. You will end up doing it either way, but I want it to be of your own will."
The words send a chill through her body. Did this man plan to threaten her somehow? She decided sitting would be better than escalating the situation, and did so.
"I just want to ask you some things. Can you tell me your name, and about yourself?"
She hesitated, but remembered the man's previous statement. "I'm Jessica Tolares, a senior at Bayview."
"How old are you, Jessica?"
"17."
"Damn, not even legal!" A voice rang out from the darkness. Jessica jumped up and looked around for a source, but all she could see was in the small circle of light around her. She couldn't even determine a direction; the voice seemed to come from all around her at once.
"Quiet, please!" the suited man called out into the darkness. He motioned for Jessica to sit, and she did. "Why did you come here today, Jessica?"
"My boyfriend lives here. Or I think he does. It was the return address on a package he sent me once."
James Senior started swearing under his breath.
The suited man chuckled at James Senior. "So tell me more about your boyfriend. You said you needed to talk to him, right?"
Jessica thought about her options. She didn't know if she should tell the suited man about her conflicting memory, about Ghost. She still didn't understand what was going on, but it was clear that they were looking for answers, and James Senior really didn't like it. "His name is James. We've been dating three months. I'm here to talk to him about prom."
"What does this dating entail, exactly? Have you been... intimate?"
Jessica looked away, face getting red.
"Oh my God, he's a code-fucker!" a voice in the darkness shouted.
"And with a seventeen year old!" another chimed in.
The darkness buzzed with voices and chatter, all overlapping into an incoherent static. Jessica held her hands up to her ears to try and stop the voices, but they echoed all the same, as though the sound were coming from inside her own head.
"All of you, quiet!" the suited man shouted again. Both he and James Senior were also visibly bothered by the sudden volume. It took longer than the previous time, but the voices died down. "What did James look like, dear?"
She stammered a bit as she regained her thoughts after the static. As she formed words to make her description, she fiddled with the binder in her hands, grounding herself by rubbing the jewels on the cover.
"What is that?" the suited man asked, interrupting her.
She looked down at it. "Just my plans for prom," she lied.
"May we see?"
"Well..."
"Let me correct myself. Please show us. Of your own will, mind."
Her body went cold again. 'Of your own will.' She saw no choice but to hand it over and hope he didn't investigate the tabs too thoroughly.
Her hopes went unanswered. "What is this GHOST section you have here? Doesn't look anything like prom."
She avoided his gaze.
"And this drawing here, this is of the Ghost character that no one recognized? Is it also of your boyfriend?"
Her heart skipped a beat. She looked up at him, starting to shake. "How did you..."
"Do you also have conflicting memories, dear? Like, for instance, remembering never knowing this guy, and then suddenly having known him for years?"
Before Jessica could answer, James Senior stood up with a sudden jolt. "Oh, come on! This is pointless. You're really going to believe that over me?" He gestured to Jessica with his use of 'that,' practically spitting it. "It doesn't actually know things! This could all be a bug, or a plant! I've been working here for eighteen years, and you're going to boot me over a bug?"
The suited man calmly closed the binder. "Jessica, is what I just said earlier true? Is James the Ghost? Are your memories confused about the matter?"
She couldn't speak, not after James Senior's outburst. She nodded.
"My final question, and then we'll be done." He gestured to the side. "Who do you believe this man is, and why?"
She looked over at James Senior, who stared down at her with a face contorted in rage. The sight made her heart stop for a moment. "He must be James's dad. They look a lot alike."
The voiced began shouting again, all variations of "holy shit," "I knew it," and "he really is a code-fucker."
The suited man smiled. "Thank you, Jessica. That will be all."
The light vanished, and the voices went with it. Jessica was left alone in the darkness for several seconds, until she too blacked out.
---
Jessica awoke on a hard surface in the middle of the darkness. As she pushed herself up from the ground, a single light appeared above her, revealing a table with two seats. Next to it stood a man in a white suit. At first she thought him to be the suited man from before, but he looked much older; his hair was gray instead of black, and his skin sagged from gravity and time.
"Hello again, Jessica," he said, voice so similar to the suited man's, but with a raspier breath. "How long has it been for you?"
She got up, shaking herself off. Her body felt refreshed, as though waking from a nap. "I don't know," she answered honestly.
"I see. Can you sit again?"
She did.
"I am going to do something never before done. I am going to try and explain what happened to you, and let you decide how you feel about it. I also expect you to tell me that, of course."
She didn't reply. She still couldn't make sense of the encounter with the young suited man.
"Do you remember this man?" The old suited man opened a laptop on the table, showing a picture of James Senior.
"That's James Senior, my boyfriend's dad. He was here before."
"Actually," he corrected, "this is James. The one you were dating, I mean. There's no Senior and Junior about it."
She stared at the screen. James Senior's eyes stared back, just like James's would during all their time together. She didn't know how to respond, so she didn't.
"I know this is a shock to you, and you're probably confused as to how you were with a fifty year old who appeared seventeen. He... altered your mind, so to speak. Put in wrong memories, made himself appear different."
"You mean, a drug?" She couldn't think of any other option.
"Sure, a drug." He didn't sound at all convincing, but went with that explanation anyway. "So your memories are all messed up and fighting each other because he messed with them."
No, that didn't make sense. "What about everyone else?"
The old suited man frowned. "He messed with perception and memory to get with you," he repeated, ignoring her question. "And, as you can see, he's clearly not seventeen when truly viewed. He abused the project, and used you for his own perverted pleasures, and-"
"Project?"
The old suited man stopped talking immediately. He took a deep sigh. "I'm going to cut to the chase here. I want to know how you feel about this. About what you think should happen to this man, legally speaking. And about whatever else you're thinking, really. We are building a case against him, and we already have your interview from before, but this will greatly help us out."
She took a long time before answering, forming her words exactly as she meant them. "You're clearly not telling me something. I don't believe he used a drug. He used something else, and I think it's whatever project you're working on."
"Ignore that," the old suited man growled, "and just tell me how you feel about this."
Suddenly, memories of James flooded her mind. Clips of their time together played in her mind without her control, forcing her to watch these situations she lived through again, except this time her loving, cute, mature for his age boyfriend was replaced with an angry old stranger, looking at her with James's eyes. As the thoughts came in, they became more real, as if happening before her eyes. She tried to shut her eyes, to cover her ears, to think of anything else, but nothing worked. Her three months with him turned into three months with the stranger. All of the fun, the dates, the first times, everything became replaced with an old man, grinning at her with a sick look of satisfaction.
She felt herself start crying, and as suddenly as they came, the memories stopped. The lit table returned, and the old suited man looked at her with a fallen face.
"I see," he said. "I'm sorry you had to experience that, but we needed to know how you would react."
"Well how the hell would you react?" she snapped, trying to look strong despite her tears.
The suited old man sat back in the chair, looking away in thought. "The same, I suppose. Well, that's all I needed. You will be returning home very soon, Jessica, don't you worry."
The light shut off, and the chair beneath Jessica went with it. She fell backwards, landing on the ground with a harsh impact. Before she could call out to the darkness, she heard the voices.
"Very interesting, it's all so convincing. I see why he got so wrapped up in all this."
"Shame he had to get so attached to one designed to be so young, though. We could have made real progress. I guess it's good he did this instead of real kids, though."
"Still, we can't let this get out. It'll be labeled as a world for pedophiles, and we'd lose all of our funding."
"I have a plan to deal with him, don't worry."
"And what about the one he messed with?"
"I think it'll be fine to do some edits and re-introduce into the current environment. Easier than revising the time history."
The voices cut out, and Jessica went with them.
---
Finally, the day had come. Senior prom, the keystone day in any teenager's life. Jessica brushed off some of the hairs on her dress as she left her room, greeting all her friends and their significant others.
"Jessy!" Kate yelled, giving her a huge hug. "Aw, I'm sorry you didn't find a date."
"It's okay," she sighed. "The time just flew by. Somehow I managed to make it these past few months without working on it at all."
Natalie walked over and gave her a hug too. "That's okay, we're all each other's dates for tonight."
Jessica's mom came into the room, phone in hand. "Jess, sweetie, didn't you have a list of all the limo services we could call?"
"I don't think so," Jessica said after some thought. "That would have been really good to do, though."
"Okay, I can just look it up online." Her mom turned to leave, but turned back around. "Now girls, before you take your pictures, I want all of you to remember to have an amazing time tonight. You only get one shot at senior prom, no re-dos!"
Jessica laughed to herself. She'd love it if she had an undo or edit button whenever something got messed up. Sadly, she didn't. After all, this was real life.
Austin scoffed. "If you're a chicken, I'm a worm, because I'll eat you for breakfast!"
The girl beside him, Emma, paused for a second. "Do chickens eat worms?"
He paused and shrugged. "I don't know, I'm just calling you a worm."
"Jackass."
"You started it."
She rolled her eyes and got back to pushing the crowbar into the bottom of the window, wedging it into the tiny space in the wood. "Just keep watch, okay?"
"Yeah, yeah," he mumbled, continuing his lookout over the expansive backyard property. No one on Earth needed a lawn garden with a fountain, let alone three. If there were a competition between rich people on the most pointless things to buy, the win would be a tie between this backyard and a lake filled only with 'diet water.' He'd be happy to settle for an average richness, the type where you can buy whatever you like from a restaurant without looking at the prices.
A sudden crack behind him made him jump a bit.
Emma snickered. "Chicken." She put the plain white mask over her face and carefully jumped through the now-open window.
Austin grumbled a bit. He hated working with Emma, but no one could get a window open quite like her. He grabbed the mask, a simple white mask you'd find at a party store for kids to decorate, and put it on before following her through the window of the mansion.
When he entered, his vision filled with valuables strewn all over the room. Fancy furniture, works of art on the walls, and table fixtures from all across the world were only some of the things that caught his attention.
"We don't want to make a mess," Emma whispered, repeating the obvious. "Only grab things you don't think she'll miss."
"How could someone so rich miss anything," Austin wondered aloud, pulling his heist bag over his shoulder to his side.
The two wandered the dark house quietly, using only a single light to investigate their surroundings. They had good intel that the one Miss Kaliel was away in the Bahamas for the week, and her butler and cleaning staff had Tuesdays off, but being careful wasn't optional. If they let themselves get lazy on one heist, they could slip up on another.
"Move quiet, grab fast, get rich," Austin chanted quietly, echoing their group's mantra.
Emma laughed to herself. "We do this heist whenever she's gone for the next few months and we'll do just that."
They grabbed only what looked extraneous, which was tough for Austin considering everything looked that way to him. Some extra silverware, a few small paintings from the hall, table decorations on tables crammed full of them, and more went into the pair's heist bags as they moved from room to room.
The final room they decided to investigate was the bedroom; grabbing anything from a bedroom was a larger risk since people tend to store very valuable items in there, but then again, valuable items were, well, valuable. Grabbing a pair of earrings or two probably wouldn't arouse any suspicion.
Emma and Austin split up, both taking one half of the room to quickly search through. Austin's half had the walk in closet, and while he had no doubt some of the clothes were of some value, he had no idea which ones those could be. He considered asking Emma, but she'd probably just insult him somehow. He decided to leave it be. He turned to exit, but a hanging jacket caught on his hand and yanked the flashlight from his hand, sending it onto the floor with a thud.
"Dumbass! Be careful!"
Austin ignored Emma's scolding, kneeling down to grab the flashlight. As he moved it up, he noticed a glinting as the path of light moved from under the bed. He waved the flashlight a little bit more, and the glinting continued.
"Okay, I'm pretty sure this necklace is safe to grab. Are you done yet?"
"One second," he mumbled, approaching the bed. He pulled up the sheet on the side to find only one object under it: a golden turtle, with a shell made from gemstones. The eyes sparkled with rubies, and strange glyphs wrapped around the gemstone shell, carved in a spiral.
"Come on, slowpoke, it's time to get going. Follow me or the window's getting shut on you." Emma darted out of the room on silent feet.
Austin threw the turtle into his bag and followed close behind.
---
"Nice haul, very nice!" The room chattered with agreement as Emma and Austin presented their grabs from the Kaliel mansion to their heist group.
"This painting is an original Heredia," one of them mumbled, investigating a picture of a landscape in a bronze frame.
"And these are quite beautiful, from Italy I presume," another remarked, investigating some vases.
"Is there anything else?" Their group leader, Marcus, looked less than impressed. "I mean, this is the Kaliel mansion after all."
Austin cleared his throat, interrupting Emma's would-be response. "I was able to find this. Hidden, but not something that would be missed." He drew the final object out of his bag: the golden gemstone turtle.
The room fell silent as the single overhead light made the gems shine with a surreal beauty, making colored shapes on the table around the turtle figure. Marcus' eyes widened, and despite his inability to smile, Austin knew he was impressed.
"When did you get that," Emma whispered accusingly through gritted teeth.
Austin shrugged with a teasing smile, which only annoyed her further, to his great amusement.
"Now this," Marcus said as he lifted the turtle, "is a find! One of these gems alone is probably worth at least a grand. Edmund." He pointed at one of the group members, who shot to attention. "Try to figure out these symbols, see if you can find an origin country. If this is some kind of restored ancient artifact, it'll be worth all the more."
---
Several weeks later, Emma and Austin were again outside of the Kaliel mansion, prying their favorite window open with Emma's favorite crowbar.
Austin tried to lean back on the wall during lookout, but his aching shoulders made it too uncomfortable to bear. The soreness in his shoulders and back had begun to even affect his sleep in the past weeks; sleeping on his back caused the pain to get worse, but he always felt like he was suffocating if he slept on his stomach. He didn't dare tell that to Marcus, though. The heists were paying more in a night than a regular job did in a month, and he refused to miss one for something as absurd as sensitive skin.
The crack of the opening window sounded out once more, but Austin didn't jump this time. He sneered at Emma, knowing that his resolve took away part of her fun. She jumped in through the window with her usual ease, and Austin went to follow suit. When he tried to jump off the ground, however, it felt as though he was carrying two Austins worth of weight through the air. He had to grab the edge of the window and force his way in with the grace of a baby rhino.
"Wow, what a fumble," Emma chuckled.
Austin shook off both the fall and her comment. "Let's just find some more stuff."
"You got it, Captain Fumble."
The two began their search once more for anything the mansion's owner wouldn't miss. They grabbed some books from the library, a few more sets of silverware, and Emma even figured out which pair of heels was nice enough to grab but bland enough for their owner to forget.
As they went through the halls, Austin felt the weight on his back growing. He was used to carrying a good amount of weight from the hauls, but this weight felt entirely different. His legs strained a bit on the stairs trying to keep up with Emma, and his brow started to sweat. Emma stopped several times to give him a chance to catch up with her as she darted with her usual speed.
"Dude, what's wrong with you? 'Move quick,' remember? Are you sick or something?"
"No, I-"
A sound echoed through the mansion, an all too familiar and heart-wrenching sound: the sound of an opening front door.
"Fuck!" Emma whispered harshly.
The two of them were around the middle of the third floor. They couldn't go down the front staircase, but certainly a mansion so large had more than one staircase, right?
"There's a back stair for the hired help," Emma said, as if responding to his thoughts. "Let's go, quickly!" She turned off her light and sped into the darkness.
Austin tried to run with her, but his legs refused. Each step felt like walking through a foot of muck, and if that wasn't hard enough, he also felt as though he strapped a boulder to his back. The slowness reminded him of nightmares where the dreamer had to run from an impending horror, but found themselves trapped in slow motion.
He made it to the stairs, legs about to give out. He knew they wouldn't move any more at their current carrying capacity.
"Emma," he called, as quietly as he could while still trying to get her attention.
After several terrifying seconds Emma reappeared from the darkness below. "Bastard, move your- woah, are you okay?"
He shook his head.
"Fuck, okay, uh... give me your bag, I think, no, I know I can carry it."
Her small frame showed otherwise, but Austin saw no other options. She slid up behind him and grabbed the bag, placing it on her other side and giving her the look of a pack mule. He felt his load lighten, but he still felt a painful weight on his back.
"Grab on to me, we're walking together."
The two took each step one at a time, hearts pounding. Emma's steps made no sound as usual, but Austin could hear each of his own steps with frightening clarity.
After what felt like eternity, the two made it back to the open window. It took a great deal of effort for Austin to move himself the small distance up and out of it, but somehow they managed to get out and back to the road, where their ride waited for them in the brush. Emma barked at the driver to drive, and he, hearing the reigned in panic of her voice, slammed on the gas.
---
Emma and the driver had to carry Austin into the hideout, where Marcus and the others waited for the usual heist report. When they saw the two carrying him on their shoulders, they cleared a table and let Austin fall onto his stomach on top of it. The group clamored up around him, asking if they had been stabbed or shot.
"What the hell," Marcus said, unsure whether to be enraged or worried.
"Something's wrong with him," Emma explained. "He could barely make it out of the mansion. And now there's blood, but we didn't get hurt or anything!"
"My back..." Austin whispered through strained breaths. The suffocating feeling of being on his stomach felt ten times worse than ever before, and his back felt as though it were ripping in two.
Marcus shooed the growing crowd away from the table, pulling out a pocket knife. "Okay, let's see what we've got here." He hooked a finger around his collar to pull it up and placed the knife under it, drawing it down and cutting the length of his shirt in two. The two sides of fabric fell away, and the room filled with gasps and murmurs.
Austin forced his head up and around to see. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a solid slab of blue taking up his right shoulder, glinting in the single light.
"Are those..."
"...gemstones?"
The crowd immediately swarmed around Austin, poking and rubbing the protrusions on his back. Each hand made Austin wince and yell out in pain, but the group didn't notice his cries over their complete fascination.
"Enough!" Marcus called out. The crowd snapped out of their frenzy and moved back again. "Edmund, help Austin wash off and take him to the sick bay. Frank, help carry Austin." No one moved. "Now!"
The two called names grabbed Austin and pulled him off of the table, leading him to the back stairway.
"While that's being settled," Marcus said calmly, sitting in his usual spot, "Emma, go over your finds, if you please."
---
Austin laid on his side in the sick bay, trying to find a balance between lying on the protrusions and feeling suffocated by them. As the others were washing him off, he saw himself in the mirror: his entire back, from shoulder to ass, was covered in large plates of color. They looked and felt exactly like gemstones, despite the fact that they erupted from skin rather than earth. Frank had spent an uncomfortable amount of time polishing these plates after the wash, but thankfully he left to give Austin some time alone to rest. He didn't get any rest, of course, but he appreciated being given the chance.
Marcus and Frank entered the bay, Frank holding a large brown suitcase with some struggle.
"How are you doing?" Marcus took a seat next to the bed as Frank moved out of Austin's view, shuffling through something.
"Hurt like a bitch before, but lying on my side seems somewhat okay," Austin answered honestly. "But like... what the fuck? What's happening to me?"
"Well," Marcus said with a chuckle, "it looks like you've got a gemstone shell now. Don't ask me how, I'm no scientist or man of faith. I'm a realist, and that's the reality of what's happening."
Austin was surprised by Marcus's ability to accept the completely irrational with a straight face. His calm and accepting-of-reality demeanor had made him the perfect leader of the heist group, but it felt much stranger in this context.
"Can it be fixed," Austin mumbled, unsure of why he'd bother asking a question no one knew the answer to.
"We're about to find out."
Before Austin could respond, Marcus got up and rolled him onto his stomach. The weight of the stones forced him into the bed, unable to move.
"Don't move," Frank warned, "or this'll hurt more than it probably will."
A loud bang rang out through the room, and Austin felt a piercing pain in his shoulder. He managed to turn his head just in time to see Frank wielding a metal spike and hammer, the spike aimed at the stone in his shoulder and the hammer rising into the air.
He tried to protest, but the hammer flew down again, jolting his entire body with pain. He couldn't take more than a couple hits until his head swam, making him lose consciousness.
---
That experience made Austin and the rest of the group learn two things: one, that the gemstones from Austin's body were the real deal, and could be mined; and two, that the stones would return to their shell-like thickness after several days.
"Don't worry," Marcus assured him one night, rubbing the gemstone on his shoulder. "You're getting a very good cut of this. Do you know how much you're worth now?"
The group would bring Austin extravagant food and other niceties from the outside to the sick bay, and while he appreciated the gesture, he simply didn't enjoy any of it. The food tasted bland and the gifts seemed hollow compared to the weight on his back that felt heavier and more suffocating with each time it recovered from Frank's mining.
"Maybe this one will be the last one," Frank commented once again. Every time he went to mine over the past several weeks, without fail, he'd make a remark like this. Austin knew no one believed it, but he didn't respond.
"Hold on one second with that," Marcus requested, shining the plates a little more with his new gold-embroidered handkerchief.
Frank moved away from the bed. He made a motion to lean on the wall, but winced in pain and quickly moved away.
Marcus got up from leaning over very slowly, straining against an invisible weight. "There we go, perfect. Okay, Frank, be sure to be thorough. We need all the gemstone we can get."
