Paulcamebacktothe office holding a coffee he wasn’t drinking.
He’d been gone forty minutes. He set the cup on his desk without looking at Levi and his eyes went to the screen, which was paused on the last frame of Elliot’s introduction, a half-laugh frozen in pixels.
“You watched it,” Paul said.
“I watched it,” Levi gasped, still hugging the trashcan to his chest.
Paul sat down. His hands were on the desk, shaking. He looked at his coffee. He looked at the door. He looked at every part of the office except Levi.
“Take me to them,” Levi insisted, pushing the trashcan away.
“Levi —”
“Take me to them, Paul.”
“You shouldn’t see this. Asher will know. He’ll know I —”
“Paul.” Levi used the desk to pull himself to his feet and his voice was steady in a way that surprised him — flat, the register he’d found in the game when things were bad enough that panic stopped being useful and the only tool left was the blade-edge of calm. He hadn’t heard this voice come out of his own mouth in the real world before. “Take me to them.”
“I can’t. I’ll be honest, I’m scared of what he’ll do, but it’s more than that, it’s that you shouldn’t have to —”
Levi grabbed a letter opener sitting on a stack of unopened mail at the corner of Paul’s desk. Brass, the handle smooth from years of use, the blade dull because it was a letter opener and letter openers were not supposed to be sharp. He picked it up the way he’d pick up a knife in the game, his body deciding before his mind. He held it loose at his side.
Paul went still. “Levi.”
“Do you know what I did in that game, Paul?” Levi’s voice hadn’t changed. The flatness sat in it the way the brass sat in his palm. “Do you know what I was willing to do to myself in there? What I was willing to let happen to other people? Do you know how much pain I endured in there?”
Paul’s hand drifted up to his scar.
“I’m asking you nicely, and I am asking you politely. I have not raised my voice and I have not raised this.” He lifted the letter opener — only an inch with a shift in the angle of his wrist — and Paul flinched. The flinch was a small one and a complete one, and it landed in Levi’s chest with a coldness that was new.He believes me. He believes I’ll do it. Which one of us is right?
“Paul. I like you, but if you do not take me to them in the next thirty seconds, I will hurt you. I won’t kill you and I won’t enjoy it. But I will hurt you enough that you take me. Do you understand?” Levi took a step closer to him.
“You sound like him,” Paul whispered.
“I know.”
“I —” Paul’s voice cracked. He looked at his coffee again. The coffee that was getting cold and that he was never going to drink. “I’ll take you. Put the — please put it down.”
Levi set the letter opener back on the stack of mail.
He had not realized, until he set it down, that his hand had been steady the whole time.
The door to the fifth floor had a keypad lock. Paul’s fingers shook when he punched in the code. He tried twice. The first time he got a digit wrong and the panel chirped; he closed his eyes and started over.
“You don’t need to see this,” Paul warned, his voice wavering.
“Open the door, Paul.” Levi felt numb from the ends of his hair to the tips of his fingers. He could turn back. He could pretend he never saw the video. He was good at pretending.
The door opened.
The sound hit first.
Mechanical breathing — the rhythmic hiss-click of ventilators, more than one ventilator, the sounds layered on themselves the way an echo layered, each machine slightly out of sync so the rhythm was almost a rhythm, but not quite. The hiss of pressurized air entering a tube. The click of a valve cycling. The soft mechanical exhale that came back out. Six of them, overlapping, filling a long cool room with the chorus of artificial respiration.
Levi’s chest closed. His feet stopped moving. The air in his lungs went somewhere that wasn’t his lungs and his hand found the doorframe, palm flat against the cold metal arriving as a fact his mind could hold on to while the rest of him stopped working.I know this sound. I have heard this sound. I have stood in aroom where this sound was the only sound and my brother’s chest was rising and falling and his chest had nothing to do with it.
He couldn’t breathe.