“That’s such a boring intro Zoe, give us something exciting.”
She sighed, like the question itself was inconvenient. “I like tea?”
The man behind the camera laughed. “Oh my God, never mind.”
She failed, Levi realized. He felt sick.
Cut.
A hallway. Marianne was walking toward the camera, a clipboard in her hand, her hair pulled back. She looked different — younger, warmer, the lines around her eyes softer.
“Have you eaten?” she asked the cameraman. “You need to eat. Asher’s in one of his moods and nobody else is going to remind you.”
The voice behind the camera: “I’m fine. I had a —”
“You had coffee. That’s not food. Go eat. I’ll tell Asher to behave.”
She walked past the camera. The interaction was ten seconds long. The Marianne in the hallway was not the Marianne from the hospital room. This was a woman reminding someone to eat lunch. This was a person.
Levi’s eyes were stinging. His hand was still over his mouth.
Cut.
A break room. There was a man on a couch with his feet up, in a beanie, with a vape pen in his hand, the cloud dissipating toward the ceiling. He looked at the camera with the lazy, amused expression of a person who was comfortable everywhere.
“Jasper Rodriguez, software engineer.” He took a hit, held it, began to exhale, and coughed the rest out. “I’m working on the AI’s adaptive learning module. I teach the machine how to learn from the player. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on and they didn’t even drug test me.” He grinned. The grin was the grin from the game, the face Levi had seen across campfires and in safe rooms and in the moment before Asher stabbed him to death with a screw driver.
The nausea climbed into the back of Levi’s throat and sat there, and his hand pressed flat and hard against his mouth, and he did not look away.
On the screen, Jasper sat up. His face changed, the lazy expression turning bright and energetic. “Dude! Dude, I gotta get you on camera. You’re the VP. You’re the one putting this whole thing together. Get over here.”
Jasper grabbed the camera. The footage swung — blur of the break room, the ceiling, a doorway — and then it settled. Pointed at someone standing in the door.
Levi’s breath stopped.
The jawline. Asher’s jawline. The same bone structure, the same angle, but on a different face — younger, softer, a face that smiled easily and was smiling now with the embarrassed half-laugh of a person who didn’t like being on camera. His eyes were different from Asher’s — both the same color, no mismatch — and his shoulders were narrower and his presence in thedoorway was the presence of a person who took up exactly the amount of space he was supposed to take up and no more.
“Introduce yourself,” Jasper said from behind the camera.
The man with Asher’s jaw looked at the lens. He smiled.
“Hi. I’m Elliot Kane. I’m Asher’s half-brother — we have the same dad. I do the sound design because that’s what our dad did. Audio engineering.” The smile widened. “Asher secretly hates me, but I’m going to make him a billionaire by making this thing distributable. So I think he’ll forgive me for existing.”
He had Asher’s jaw because they had the same father… and he did sound design because their father did sound design and he was the VP, and Jasper was behind the camera, and they were friends. They were all friends…they were all real…
Where are they?
Where are they right now?
The cold thing that formed in his stomach at Maddie’s face and deepened through everycutfinally crested, and Levi made it to Paul’s wastebasket before that morning’s toast came back up.
He knelt on the floor of Paul’s office with his hands on the rim of the wastebasket and his stomach heaving and the video still playing behind him — Jasper’s laugh, Elliot’s voice sayingAsher is a genius— and his body emptied itself the way it had emptied itself in the apartment and Asher’s house, over the sink, except this time the emptying was not about food. It was about every death he watched in the game and every face he filed underNPCand every detail of a person Levi had taken advantage of without once wondering whether they belonged to a person.
They were all real.
48
Paragon or Renegade
