But Marianne had been in the room. Marianne had seen it too. And now she was sitting across from him, calm and dry-eyed and certain, telling him it didn’t mean what he thought it meant. He had three weeks of Asher against years of Asher’s mother. She knew him best.
What if he didn’t love me?
What if it was all just what the game did to him in there?
You promised him…
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and took in a breath that didn’t go all the way down. “Fine,” he said. “Give me the papers. I want to go home.”
What the hell am I going to do? Hunt him down when I can barely hold a glass?
What can I do?
A woman in a gray suit came in to witness him sign documents. Marianne walked him through each section.Initial here. Sign here. Date here.The pen was heavy and expensive, and his signature looked wrong at the bottom of every page — too small, too shaky, the handwriting of a man who had lost twelve pounds and didn’t know what day it was.
“Thank you, Mr. Mercer,” Marianne said, clasping her hands behind her back after the papers were signed and the witness left with them. “My husband will come by this evening about yourdischarge. You’ll be sedated since this is a secure facility, but Paul is an excellent doctor. He’ll take good care of you.”
And then she just…left.
The room was very quiet.
She’s lying.
The thought came up fast and hard.
She’s lying. I saw him. I saw him rip the tube out and try to stand and say my name and reach for me across a floor he couldn’t cross. She’s lying.
He held on to it. He held on to it the way he’d held on to Asher while they ran from monsters and aliens. He held onto it the way he held on to Asher in the resort, in the ship, in Dr. Faine’s quarters.
She’s lying because she’s afraid of what happens if we’re in the same room.
Levi almost believed it.
Then the rest came.
He’s the CEO of the company.The thought arrived the way his worst thoughts always did — not shouting, just settling.He built the system. He’s a neuroscientist’s son. He’s Asher Kane. He’s a person with a last name and a company and a mother who is a doctor and a life that existed for years before I showed up in a headset. What am I?
Bait.
He tried to hold on to the image of Asher reaching for him, but the thought would not fade. What if the attachment was the system? What if the system had built a feeling out of proximity and adrenaline and fear and called it love, and Asher’s brain — the brain of a CEO, a builder, a man who had created the thing that created the feeling — recognized it for what it was when he woke up?
I chewed off my own tongue because I loved him, but she’s telling me it didn’t matter.
There’s nothing I can do anyway. I’m no one, and I was no one before the game.
Maybe she’s right.
The thought was so heavy he couldn’t hold himself up against it. He slid down in the bed until his head was on the pillow and the tube pulled at the tape on his face and the ceiling, with its pressed flowers, was directly above him.
He had saidI love you,for the first time in his life, to someone other than family before he killed himself over and over for that person…to save that person from a hell of their own creation…
And it didn’t matter.
The flowers on the ceiling were still there. Four petals. Four petals. Four petals.
He wanted to go home.
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