“I—what?”
“I love it.”
What the fuck?
The laugh slipped out before Levi could catch it. His hand came up to cover his mouth, and that made it worse — the more he tried to stuff it back down, the more it climbed up his throat, because it was absurd, it was so completely absurd that his mind decided that it was funnier than it was frightening.
“I love that sound.” Asher’s eyes went wide, delighted. “I haven’t heard you do that out here either.”
Levi hadn’t. He knew exactly when he’d stopped. But he was still smiling when he asked, “How much did it cost to make the game?”
“Sixty million dollars.” Asher cocked his head, trying to find the purpose of the question. “Why?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Asher. You spent sixty million dollars building the most immersive game in the world and you forgot to include halitosis?”
Asher laughed. And the sound was wrong — not bad-wrong, just unfamiliar. Levi had heard Asher laugh in the game. Sarcastic. Cruel. Delighted in a way that meant something was about to hurt. This one had none of that in it. It was real, and it was human, and it came out a little rusty, like a door that didn’t get opened much.
“You’re back,” Asher said.
“I’m not back.” Levi felt his face go hot and looked away.This is weird. He doesn’t usually look at me like that.Except he did…Asher had always looked at him like that. Levi had just always had a wall up to take the hit.
“You’re a little back.” Asher reached out and pushed Levi’s bangs to the side, tucking the longer pieces behind his ear. “I missed you.”
Say it back.He missed Asher too. He missed Asher when he was gentle, and Asher when he was furious at a grapefruit lamp, and Asher pulling his hair, kissing him at the worst possiblemoments, calling him a good boy in that low voice like it was a fact and not a leash —
Think with your head, Levi. While it still works.
Because this was his chance. He could feel it the way he used to feel when he would reset and the pieces were back where he could use them. Asher was lit up. Asher was open. Asher was sitting inside the happy window that wanted to hand Levi things, and that part of Asher did not stay unlocked long. The part of Levi that had run the math in every reset, that had figured out the keys, that strategized on a spaceship while exhausted and hunted — that part was awake now too, and it was telling him tomove.
“Asher. I need to ask you something.”
“Anything.”
“Why did you make the game?”
Asher looked at him for a moment and frowned, then he looked at the window. “Because I wanted to feel something,” he said simply. “I’ve never felt things the way other people feel them. I’ve known since I was a kid. Something is missing. Or different. I don’t know which. Marianne tried everything. Medication, therapy, specialists. None of it worked. None of it made me feel the way I could see other people feeling.” He looked at his hands. “I thought if I could build a system that simulated intense enough experiences — fear, danger, pain — maybe something would break through. Maybe I’d feel it. Or at least I could stop wanting to feel.”
“Did it work?”
“Not the way I expected. The fear didn’t do it. The pain didn’t do it. The killing —” He paused, his eyes drifting up to the ceiling. “The killing was interesting. But it didn’t break through.”
He looked at Levi.
“You did.”
The two words hit center mass and Levi felt the air leave his lungs.
“The first time you looked at me in the forest with that expression — terrified and thinking at the same time— I felt something I’d never felt. I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t know the right word for it. But it was the first real feeling I’d ever had, and it came from you.”
I was his first feeling.
Levi sat with that, turning it over, waiting for the part of him that should have been afraid to catch up — and it did catch up, it was right there, because a man had just told him that killing people wasinteresting.There should have been no question in his mind on what to feel. It should have been fear, concern, disgust, and then more fear.
But something else was unfolding underneath it, slow and warm and entirely unwilling to be ashamed of itself.
I was the first.Not just first.Only.Asher had built a sixty-million-dollar machine to manufacture a feeling and the machine failed, but one scared streamer in a forest had done it without trying. Whatever Levi was to him, there was no second one. There was no replacing it, no recreating it, no other person on the planet who could walk up and be what he was to Asher.
And Levi — who had been no one’s anything for so long, background to his own life, the guy with the dead brother — felt that land somewhere low in his chest and his ribs closed around it.