“Sure, you wanna punch me so you can feel better about your own bullshit? Be my guest, but it’s not going to solve your problems.” He stepped to Neil without fear, but Luke stuck out an arm to push him back.
“Not the time, Hudson. Give it a rest,” the blond boy said reprovingly. Xavier grumbled something unintelligible while Alexia moved over to calm him down. Luke turned back to the woman on the screen. Unlike us, she apparently couldn’t see or hear anything from our end, but she didn’t seem bothered by that.
“So what do we do now? Can I ask if she has the video?” Luke turned to Neil, who tensed up for a minute; I could see it in the way the fabric of his coat suddenly stretched against his muscles. Then, he nodded. Luke turned back to the keyboard and began to type.
Dark Knight:I’ll take my clothes off for you if you show me the video.
Then we watched in real time as Player answered us. I took the opportunity to scrutinize her more closely. Her hair didn’t look natural to me—maybe she was wearing a wig?—and her skin was almost transparent, paleas a porcelain doll. Her firm breasts were packed tightly into her top. Both her fingers and her nails were long, the tips painted with dark polish.
She read the question but made no move to answer it. Instead, she sat still and stared into her screen. Luke shot a weighted glance at Neil and then typed some more.
Dark Knight:Have I ever had sex with you?
Neil’s breath caught. He pursed his lips as if to object but apparently thought better of it and remained silent.
“Jesus, if this girl went to all this trouble just because Neil hit it and quit it, imagine what I’d do to him if I went off the deep end. They’d never find the body,” Jennifer joked, twirling one of her braids around her index finger. She sat on the arm of the couch, one leg crossed over the other to expose an expanse of thigh in her tight little skirt. She noticed me watching her and gave me a fake smile.
But then there was another new message alert, and my blood ran cold as I read:
Player 2511:Yes…
I turned automatically away from Neil, caught in a flare of jealousy. He must have noticed because he turned to face me, looking first confused and then ashamed.
Was it really true? Were my life and Logan’s and Chloe’s lives all at risk all because some woman wanted revenge for the fantasy of a love that Neil had never given her?
I sat rigid, watching him in a disbelieving haze. He didn’t have the guts to hold my gaze for more than a few seconds, though, so he let his shoulders slump and turned back to the computer.
“Okay, let’s try another question…” Luke murmured, typing again.
Dark Knight:Are you Player, then? Did you think up all the puzzles and carry out all the attacks?
The woman on the screen stretched her fingers out over the keyboard as if to respond, but then she appeared to have second thoughts.
She stopped and sat back, leaning easily against the back of the chair. She stared intensely into her camera lens, like she wanted to pass through the screen and join us. I flattened a hand against my chest.
Despite not being able to see him, the woman appeared to have zeroed in on Neil, and she stared right at him, making no moves to answer that last question.
Suddenly, she raised her hand and slowly fluttered her fingers in a sardonic little wave before cutting the feed.
The chat app closed itself, and the computer began to shut down without any of us doing a thing.
Luke jumped and stared at the blank computer screen like it was possessed.
“Yeah, she’s got full remote control of this fucking thing. We need to get rid of it,” he said, sounding shaken.
We all fell silent for what felt like endless minutes. No one knew what to say, except…
“Well, well, well… I’m expecting apologies out of every one of you now. You all thought my theory was bullshit, but what do you know? Player is a woman after all,” Xavier said loudly, stroking Alexia’s arm as she clung to his side. His ability to shift moods on a dime was possibly even more dramatic than Neil’s. Several times, I’d seen him dissipate the tension in a room by cracking a joke or saying something absurd, but just then, a circus full of clowns couldn’t have eased the bitterness inside me.
“We don’t know for certain that the woman really was Player. She didn’t answer any of our questions,” Luke shot back. “We also didn’t get any confirmation that she actually has a video of Selene.” He looked at me with a smile of reassurance. I didn’t have the wherewithal to smile back.
“Who the hell was she then?” Alexia asked.
“Maybe Scarlett? Because of the shit that went down on spring break?” Jennifer dandled her crossed leg and looked hard at me and then at Neil as though trying to communicate something to him. The idea that they might have some private, special understanding bothered me, so I turned to look at him in the hopes of catching his reaction. There wasn’t one. Neil’s face remained blank as though there were no untoward implications in what she’d said at all.
The silence of the rest of the Krew as they exchanged guilty looks with one another only heightened my suspicions.
“What…what happened on spring break?” I asked, but every one of them looked away, feigning indifference. “What the hell happened on spring break?” I asked again, raising my voice.
