The slot kept glowing.
Karl sat on the edge of the bed in a room that cost more than his apartment’s yearly rent, hands loose between his knees, staring at something nobody else in the house could see.
Sixty Hearts. One empty ring under Charlotte’s name, patient as a held door.
[Charlotte would like to know what he intends to do with them.]
’You already asked.’
[Charlotte states she is not rushing the Administrator.]
[Charlotte states this four seconds after the previous message.]
He almost smiled.
The numbers were the problem, not her.
Seven thousand and change in the account, a thousand more sitting on top of it from tonight, and thirty-one grand still standing on the other side of the room with its arms folded. Every quest so far had paid better than any job he’d ever been rejected from.
That was the part he kept circling. If sixty Hearts went into one hero instead of two, if the thing the system called interaction actually opened all the way, then maybe the next reward wasn’t a choker in a box. Maybe it was the whole wall coming down.
’What happens if I put all of it into you.’
[That information is restr—]
[Charlotte requests the Administrator do that.]
[Charlotte withdraws the request. Charlotte states it was a neutral observation.]
From the floor came a long, muffled groan.
Elsa had been face-down in her cushions since the third loss, occasionally saying words into the fabric. Karl had caught about half of them. Something about hook range being illegal and tanks not being allowed to have opinions.
"Rematch," she said, finally rolling over. Her hair had given up entirely. "Tomorrow. Best of five. I’m writing it down so you can’t pretend it didn’t happen."
"You already lost three. Isn’t this the part where you give up?"
"Dammit, I can’t deny that you are a really good player, Karl." She sat up, cross-legged, and pointed at him with total seriousness. "You beat a cold Trisla; next time i’ll just pick a counter-hero."
"Sure."
"Say it properly."
"Next time, pick a counter hero."
She narrowed her eyes at him, then apparently decided to accept it, and got to her feet like she’d remembered something better.
"Okay, come, let’s watch a movie together."
"It’s almost midnight."
"Which is when movies are best, everyone knows that." She was already crossing to the shelf under the window, pulling a projector remote out of a drawer of things that were clearly not stored anywhere on purpose. "You got jumped today, you ate my dad’s cooking, you beat me at my own role in my own house. You don’t get to leave on that. Sit properly."
Karl didn’t move for a second.
It wasn’t the movie.
It was the arithmetic that happened in his chest without asking, the one that pointed out that he had not sat in a room with another person for no reason in about four years. Not since before his mother’s hours got cut. He was good at leaving rooms. Staying in them was the part he’d stopped practicing.
’This is fine,’ he thought. ’It’s a movie. Watching movies with people is normal, right?’
[Charlotte notes the Administrator’s heart rate.]
’I will find a way to turn you off.’
The lights went down, and the wall opposite the bed turned into a screen.
...
He couldn’t have said what the movie was about.
Elsa sat down beside him on the floor with her back against the bed frame, close enough that her shoulder found his arm every time she laughed, which was often and usually at the wrong parts.
She’d dragged a blanket over both their legs without discussing it. She smelled like whatever expensive thing was in the bathroom he’d used, which was a strange thing to notice about a person, and he stopped noticing it on purpose about six times.
Somewhere around the twenty minute mark, he realized she wasn’t watching the movie either.
He caught it in the light off the wall. Her head turned toward him, held, then turned back a half second after he shifted. Then again. Then a longer one, where she didn’t bother turning back at all, and he kept his eyes forward and let her.
’Sixty Hearts,’ he thought, because it was safer. ’Thirty-one thousand. Two months, minus eleven days. If the bracket pays ten and the system pays whatever it pays for winning it—’
"You’re not here."
He blinked. "What do you mean? I am right here."
"Your body’s here. You’ve been staring at that wall like it owes you money." She pulled her knees up under the blanket and rested her cheek on them, still facing him. "You do that a lot. Somebody says something and you go somewhere and come back with a whole plan you’re not going to tell anyone about."
"I was thinking about the tournament."
"Liar."
"I was thinking about money," he admitted.
Elsa was quiet a moment. On the wall, someone was shouting at someone else about a boat.
"Yeah," she said. "That one I believe."
She let it sit. She didn’t ask what for, and Karl noticed that, the same way he’d noticed it in the cafe, and filed it in the same place.
Then, out of absolutely nowhere:
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
Karl’s head turned before his brain approved it. "What?"
"It’s a normal question. People ask it. D-don’t get the wrong idea." Her face turned red a bit.
"I didn’t know it was a normal thing to ask a person."
"Answer it anyway."
"No," he said. "I don’t have one."
"Huh." She nodded slowly, like a scientist receiving a result she had already predicted and was pretending not to have predicted. "Okay. Then here’s a deal."
"A deal."
"We need a fourth and a fifth. You know it, I know it, the registration slip knows it, it’s sitting in your pocket right now with a skull on it." She held up a finger. "I find them. Both. Real players, ones who can actually hold a lane, not charity cases. And in exchange, you owe me a wish."
Karl looked at her. "A wish."
"One wish. Anything I want, one time, no negotiating and no somewhat." She was grinning now, but her thumb was working at a loose thread on the blanket, fast, the way it had worked at the side of her cup. "What do you say?"
’She could ask for the mask,’ he thought immediately. ’She could ask for my name. My face. She could ask for all of it and I’d have to hand it over.’
And the strange thing, the thing that sat wrong in his chest in a way that wasn’t quite wrong, was that he didn’t hate the idea as much as he should have.
"Fine," he said. "Deal."
"Just like that?"
"You’d do it anyway. At least this way I get a roster out of it."
Elsa laughed, delighted, and then the laugh trailed off into something quieter, and she looked at him for a long second with the wall light moving across her face.
"You should probably know what you just agreed to," she said.
"It’s a wish. I heard you."
"Yeah, but you don’t know what I’d spend it on." She sat up onto her knees, and the blanket slid off both of them, and her voice went strange and light and much too fast. "So I’ll give you a sample. For the records. So it’s informed consent and all that."
"A sample of wh—"
She kissed him.
There was no gap between the sentence and it.
One second she was talking and the next she had both hands on his collar and her mouth on his, and Karl’s back met the carpet with a soft thud he barely registered, because she came down with him, elbows planting on either side of his head, hair falling around both of them like a curtain being drawn.
His hands did nothing.
They stayed exactly where they had been, palms flat, useless.
Somewhere very far away he was aware of the movie still playing, of someone still shouting about the boat, of the fact that his split lip stung and he did not care even slightly.
She pulled back an inch. Breathing hard. Her eyes were huge.
Then she kissed him again, longer, one hand sliding up into his hair, and made a small sound against his mouth that Karl was fairly sure she hadn’t meant to make and would deny under oath.
When she finally sat up, she stayed exactly where she was for about two seconds, straddled over him, staring down at him with her chest rising and falling and her whole face gone red from the jaw up.
Karl lay on the floor of the nicest room he’d ever been in and produced no words at all.
"Right," Elsa said.
She got up so fast she nearly took the blanket with her.
"That’s the sample. That’s, um, one possible use. There are others. Loads of others, obviously, I have a list." She was already at the door, talking at roughly double speed, not looking at him once. "You’re sleeping in here tonight, this room, that bed, don’t argue, the guest room’s cold and the heating’s broken and it’s fine, I’ll take it, don’t touch the second drawer, goodnight."
"Elsa—"
"Goodnight."
The door shut.
Karl stayed on the floor.
The movie kept going without him. He looked at the ceiling of a house that belonged to a world he was only visiting, and let the thought arrive properly, all the way, instead of shoving it back down the way he’d been doing since the cafe with the green awning.
’She likes me.’
The one who said somewhat and got flustered when she laughed and had thirty-one thousand dollars sitting on his chest every night.
’That’s a problem. That is a genuine problem, and I don’t even know why my heart is beating like this.’
[Charlotte has no comment.]
[Charlotte has several comments.]
[Bond interaction progress: 50%. Hearts remaining: 60.]
Karl closed his eyes and lay there a while longer, on the floor, with his lip stinging and a wish he now owed to a girl who had just made a very convincing case for what she might spend it on.