People don’t love me. Only Levi. I only care if Levi loves me…
I have to make sure Levi still loves me.
“I’ll go back in,” Asher said softly.
Levi’s mouth closed.
“The system was built for me. It responds to my neural patterns. If anyone can reach them — if anyone can reactivate them, bring them back — it’s me. I’ll go back in and I’ll —”
“NO!” Levi said it with such force he stumbled forward, just a bit closer to Asher. “You’ll get lost again! No. Absolutely not. No. You’ll be in there alone killing people who are trying to help you and I’ll be out here —”
His voice broke completely.
“I’ll be out here alone,” Levi said weakly, looking between Asher and into the room, then he shook his head as a sob bubbled out of him. “No. No. No, Asher, I won’t let you. You’ve never respected a single no from me, but just this once…No.”
He pressed his hands against his eyes, his shoulders shaking. “If you go back in there and you get lost, I’ll be alone again. And it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt worse than the game and worse thanthe hospital and worse than the apartment because now I know what it’s like to not be alone and I can’t unknow it.”
Levi took his hands off his eyes. His face was wet and wrecked and the eyes underneath were the eyes from the forest — terrified and strategic at the same time. The eyes Asher had fallen in love with.
Asher stood in the hallway with blood in his mouth and Levi’s words in his chest and the words were in a language he barely spoke but understood — the language ofI need you and the needing is the thing that will destroy me if you leave.He didn’t know what to say.
“Promise me,” Levi said, taking a step forward, his eyes impossibly wide. “Promise me you’ll take care of them. The best care. Whatever they need. You’ll keep the medical staff and you’ll keep trying to find a way and you won’t —” His jaw tightened. “You won’t think about killing them again.”
“I promise.”
“And maybe — if nothing works…if nobody finds a way, maybe one day we try together. Both of us. We go in together and we find them and we bring them out. But not now. Not yet. Not until we know it won’t take you from me.”
Together.
We.
Both of us.
He’s staying.
The realization didn’t arrive as relief. It arrived as a pressure that climbed up out of his chest with nowhere to go, a heat in his face, a thickness behind his eyes he hadn’t felt since he was in the resort with Levi, watching him die over and over again. He blinked and the blinking didn’t fix what was happening to his vision. He raised his hand to his face and his fingers came back wet.
He looked at his fingers. The wet was wet. The wet was on his face. The wet was coming from him.
Oh.
Oh, that’s what this is.
I thought the game just did this.
It wouldn’t stop either. He stood in the hallway with his hand half-raised and the tears kept coming and he made a sound that wasn’t a word, and the sound was the same shape as crying.
Levi is staying. Levi knows everything and Levi is staying.
“Levi,” he said, and his chin felt wobbly trying to say just those two syllables.
Levi looked at him. At the wet face. At Asher Kane, standing in a hallway with blood on his lip and his hand still half-raised and water on his fingers, doing the thing that other people did all the time.
“Come here,” Levi said softly.
Asher didn’t move. His body had gone strange and he couldn’t make it do the simple thing.
Levi moved instead. He took Asher’s face in his hands, brushing away the tears with both of his thumbs. “I’m so angry at you,” Levi whispered as his thumbs continued to swipe across Asher’s cheekbones. “I’m angrier at you right now than I have ever been and I need you to understand that what you did — what you hid — I’m going to be angry about this for a long time. Maybe forever.”