Carson goes to Swedish First Hill. The knife missed everything important.
In my ear, AURA counts down. Session-termination authority unlocked. Please select execution method.
A menu opens behind my eyelids when I close them.
Ninety-nine selectable replays. Each one a distinct mode. Each one of mine.
Stairwell fall.
Sedative cardiac event.
Smoke inhalation.
Blunt-force vehicular.
Hypothermia.
Drowning.
Surgical hemorrhage.
I look at the list. My stomach turns.
Atlas is next to my hospital chair. His hand finds mine.
"You don't have to look."
I shake my head.
"I have to."
These are not data points. These are roads I walked.
I tap the first one.
The corridor light dims. The door to Carson's room opens of itself.
He is sitting up in bed in a hospital gown. He sees me.
"Wren."
The next second the floor under his feet is Session 1's stairwell. He is in the dress I was wearing — a thin white dress, not for stairs. He is at the top step.
I am at the bottom.
He looks down at himself and I watch the recognition arrive.
"This is — "
I say, "Where I died the first time."
AURA, flat: Begin Session 1.
An invisible hand puts him down the stairs.
Bone hits tile in a way you can hear in the building's framing. He rolls to my feet. He is making a sound that is not language.
He cannot die in here. He just keeps experiencing.
The replay ends. He is back in the hospital bed soaked in cold sweat. He grips the rail. He is breathing in pieces.
"Wren — that — that hurt."
I look at him.
"That was the first one."
I do not put him through them all in one night.
Cheap.
Day two I select sedative.
Inside the replay he is the one with the wineglass at the kitchen island. I am on his side of the table. He drinks because the script makes him drink. He convulses on the kitchen floor with his nails clawing the grout. He calls my name twenty-six times before his throat closes.
I sit on the cabinet ledge and watch the whole thing.
Day three is the basement.
The smoke comes through the gap at the bottom of the wine cellar door. He hammers the wood from the inside with both palms. He is crying.
"Wren, open the door — Wren, please — "
I am in the doorway in the corridor.
I give him back what he gave me.
"You only belong to me if you die in my hands."
He goes down on his knees in the smoke. His sound is not a sound a person should be able to make.
When the replay ends he comes up out of the bed and a teaspoon of red comes up with him.
The hospital can't find anything wrong with him.
The Hale grandfather drives himself to the brownstone. He pushes past the Pace housekeeper.
"Maren Pace. What have you done to Carson."
I am at the kitchen island. Atlas is in his chair beside me. I have a pill case open. He has the morning's dose under his tongue, refusing to swallow because it is genuinely awful.
I take his jaw in my fingers.
"Down."
The grandfather sees this and his color climbs.
"You sit here playing house — "
"Carson isn't well. Take him to a doctor."
"The doctors find nothing."
"Then take him to a priest."
The grandfather raises his hand to me.
Pete catches the wrist mid-arc. He does not look at the man at all. He looks at Atlas.
Atlas swallows the pill. He looks up.
"Granddad. Don't touch her."
"You'd lose the family for this woman."
Atlas's voice is flat.
"The family never wanted me."
The kitchen is silent.
The grandfather's color shifts.
Atlas almost smiles.
By the time I get to Session 54 he has dropped weight off his face.
I do not want to select it.
My finger hovers over the option in the menu for a long time.
Atlas, beside me, says, "You can skip it."
I shake my head.
"I can't."
"Why."
"Because that child never made it into the world. Someone has to hurt for them once."
The replay opens.
Carson is in pajamas in the courtyard rain. The flagstones are slick. His abdomen seizes and he doubles over with both arms across it.
In the same courtyard, just beyond him, ghost-Sloane is in his arms. Ghost-Carson has his back to ghost-me. Ghost-me is on her knees on the flagstones with the rain coming through her dress.
Ghost-Carson is saying, Sloane is fragile. Stop scaring her.
Real Carson sees this.
He breaks toward ghost-me. He tries to lift her.
His hands pass through her body.
She is on her knees in the rain with her face the color of paper. Blood threads from her dress into the standing water on the flagstones.
Real Carson is screaming, "Stop kneeling — Wren, stop kneeling — "
No one hears him.
Ghost-Carson, bored: Are you done performing.
Real Carson goes down. The cramps take him to the ground. He wraps both arms around himself and shakes.
He understands now that she was not performing.
The replay ends.
He destroys the hospital room. Not because he is angry. Because he hates being alive.
He calls me.
I take it.
His voice is unrecognizable.
"That child — "
"Don't talk about him."
He is crying.
I have never heard Carson cry like a person who has lost everything. He has the sound right.
"Wren. I have no right to ask for forgiveness."
I am calm.
The contract is working on Atlas.
He is not coughing through the night. Some afternoons he can stand from the chair without Pete's elbow. He gets ten steps. Then twenty.
He starts to perform the steps for me.
Study door to the couch. Couch to the window. Window to the kitchen island.
After every lap, he looks at me.
I last three laps.
"You want me to praise you."
He nods. "Yes."
I put down the file. "Good job."
His eyes pinch with a smile.
"You handle me like a child."
"Isn't that what you're waiting for."
He looks down. The tips of his ears go pink.
I look at him for a long second and remember the rooftop sentence.
Give me your life.
When he said it I thought he was a lunatic.
He is.
He is a lunatic in the most stupid possible direction.
The man tried to save me ninety-nine times and could not. He came back the hundredth.
I ask him, "If at the end I go home, what happens to you."
His smile fades.
"I send you back."
"Then what."
He doesn't answer.
I am suddenly angry.
"Atlas. I am tired of people deciding for me."
"I know."
"You don't." I look at him. "If you trade your life so I get to leave, you and Carson are the same person."
He goes white.
The sentence is heavier than I meant.
I don't take it back.
He looks at me a long time. Then he nods, slow.
"I won't trade."
"Swear."
He puts out his hand. He hooks his pinky around mine.
"I swear. I won't leave you."
A glass falls outside the door.
Carson is standing in the hallway.
He should be in the hospital.
He is looking at our hands.
His voice is dead.
He has driven himself out of Swedish with the IV tape still on the back of his hand.
He is in the doorway of the brownstone study and he does not come closer.
"I came to see you."
Atlas wheels in front of me.
Carson looks at his brother. His voice goes lower.
"Atlas. I'm sorry."
Atlas does not react.
Carson keeps going. "When we were kids. I shouldn't have locked you in the pool house alone."
I stop breathing.
Atlas's face moves a fraction.
The pool house at the Bainbridge estate. There was a thunderstorm. Atlas was nine. Carson was sixteen. Atlas had his first respiratory crisis on the floor in the dark.
Carson is remembering more than just my ninety-nine.
He is remembering himself.
"I was jealous of you," he says, very quiet. "Everyone said you were going to die. Mom still loved you more."
Atlas's hand goes white at his side.
"She didn't love me more."
His voice is very calm.
"She was guilty."
His mother almost died bringing him into the world. The Hales spent the rest of her short life passing the cost of her body onto her sick boy.
Carson did the same thing. He hated his brother for taking his mother and he envied his brother for being the one she said the name of.
He closes his eyes.
"I learned all of it too late."
Atlas, soft: "Late is late."
The line is a knife.
Carson sways once.
He looks at me.
"Wren. I'm not asking forgiveness."
"Then what."
He pulls a paper out of his coat.
"Share transfer."
I don't take it.
He puts it on the table.
"All my HALCYON shares to you and Atlas."
Atlas frowns. "We don't need them."
"I know."
He looks up at me.
"At the end of Session 99, before the reset, I heard Atlas say one sentence. I heard it before I lost it. I want to give it to you while I still remember."
My chest jumps.
AURA detonates in my ear.
Carson Hale! Discontinue disclosure of core rules!
Carson lifts his head. He looks at the air to my right.
He almost laughs.
"You've been in here all along."
AURA, ice: Core male lead privileges: frozen.
Carson buckles. His hand goes to his throat.
I take a step. Atlas catches my wrist.
"Don't touch him. The system is taking it back through him."
Carson goes down on one knee. His face is grey.
He pushes the document across the floor toward me.
"Sign."
I look at him.
"You think this buys it back."
He shakes his head.
"It can't."
A red bead comes out of the corner of his mouth. He smiles around it.
"I just finally get to do one thing right."
AURA, sweet: Maren. If you accept the protagonist-energy transfer, you cannot return to your origin world.
I freeze.
Atlas's color drops. "It's lying."
AURA, instantly: Bound parties are not authorized to interpret system rules.
I look at him.
He doesn't speak right away.
The silence is the worst part.
"Atlas."
He says, low: "Accepting the energy transfer gives you choice. To go home. Or to stay."
"What's the cost."
His lashes flutter.
"If you go home, this world closes."
"And the people in it."
No one answers.
I get it.
Close the world. Erase Atlas. Erase Pete. Erase my father in the version of him that came to my door at three a.m. in his bathrobe and asked if I had been alone.
AURA, smooth: Maren. You don't belong here. Going home is your only goal.
Yes.
Going home is what I came in for. I have died ninety-nine times to get back to a half-finished cup of milk tea on my kitchen table.
Now the door is in front of me and my hand isn't moving.
Atlas lets go of me.
"Wren," he says. "Choose yourself."
He smiles, with effort.