The house wanted him to sit.
Malik stood in the kitchen doorway, reading the set.
A table he’d never bought, dressed in pale blue cloth.
Two chairs that had arrived while he’d been out, spindle-backed, period-perfect, waiting.
A roast chicken the Hex had assembled from nothing sat under the too-even light, steam rising in a loop, the same curl of vapor resetting every three seconds.
And her.
She stood by the stove with her back to him, humming something bright and empty.
Dark hair pinned up.
An apron he’d never seen, pale yellow, tied in a bow he could tell from the doorway was factory-perfect, no human hands behind the knot.
She turned, and her face was pleasant and generic and wrong, the smile arriving a beat before the rest of her expression caught up.
“There you are, darling!
Supper’s ready.
Won’t you sit?”
The pull came like a hand on his shoulder.
Gentle.
Insistent.
A script reaching for his mouth, his hands, the place at the table that was his.
Sit.
Smile.
Call her by a name the Hex will give you if you just let go.
Malik’s teeth started to fizz.
“I” His voice came out thin.
He tried again.
“I’m not hungry.”
Her head tilted.
The smile held.
“Of course you are.
You’ve been out all afternoon.
A man needs his supper.”
The pull sharpened.
The chair scraped an inch toward him, soundless, like the floor had offered it up.
The roast chicken’s steam curled, reset, curled.
His hands wanted to reach for the table.
He could feel the Hex filling in the rest of the evening around him what he’d say, what she’d say back, the comfortable patter of a husband home from a day that had never happened, married to a woman who’d never been born.
He thought: I could just sit.
He thought: It wants me to sit so badly it built her to ask me.
He thought: If I sit I won’t get back up as me.
Malik threw up the card.
He didn’t know he could do it deliberately.
The last time it had fired on its own, a reflex, the system saving him when the boundary had reached to erase him.
But now he reached for it himself that warm sub-audible hum in his back teeth, the tone of a screen parked between stations and pulled it forward, full field, every frequency.
The room rolled.
Not the floor.
The air.
Like he was watching the kitchen on tape and the tracking had slipped, the image juddering, a held frame trying to refresh and finding static where the next one should be.
The pleasant woman’s smile flickered.
Her hand, lifted to gesture him toward the chair, strobed between two positions, the Hex trying to decide where she’d been a second ago and finding the feed empty.
He held.
The card sat at the front of his vision now, crisp and deliberate, the test pattern he’d only glimpsed at the edges filling the space where his performance should be. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Bars.
Tone.
The words PLEASE STAND BY, clean and impersonal, the system’s flat answer to the script reaching for him.
The woman tried again.
“Darling”
Her voice cut.
Came back.
Cut again.
The word “darling” arrived in his ears three times, each one a different pitch, like the Hex was playing the line from three different takes and couldn’t settle on which version he was married to.
Malik stood in the doorway, locked in standby, and watched the room try to pour a role over a signal that had gone fully, defiantly inert.
It couldn’t.
The pull battered at the card.
He felt it the same patient, everywhere pressure that had tried to write him the first night but this time it had nothing to grip.
He wasn’t performing.
He wasn’t there.
He was a screen between programs, technically on, empty of content, and the Hex’s script slid off him like water off glass.
The pleasant woman’s face went strange.
Not angry.
Confused.
Her smile thinned at the edges, and under it Malik saw the thing the Hex had poured into her shape trying to parse a husband who wouldn’t load.
She took a step toward him.
“Won’t you”
The lights rolled.
The chicken’s steam juddered, curled, reset wrong, curled backward.
The pale blue tablecloth flickered at its edges, and for one frame Malik saw the table bare underneath, no cloth, no dishes, just a wooden surface that had been dressed this morning and couldn’t hold the costume while he refused to play.
He held.
His chest went cold.
Not cold like the boundary that had been an airless nothing, the edge of the world where signal thinned to drowning.
This was slower.
A cold creeping in from his ribs, spreading.
The hum in his teeth thinned.
The warm carrier tone that had been holding the card steady started to grain, a fizz behind it, static creeping in where the feed should be clean.
The system was bleeding him.
He’d thrown up the Full Card to freeze the pull, and it was working, but holding it was costing him the same thing the pull would’ve taken.
Not his role.
His signal.
The piece of him that was Malik and not the broadcast, draining to keep the test pattern lit.
The pleasant woman took another step.
Her edges flickered.
She was unravelling, the Hex pulling her back because a scene with no husband was a scene with no wife, but she tried one more time, her voice thin and wrong and almost pleading.
“Please.
Won’t you just”
Malik held.
The kitchen rolled hard.
The light browned at the edges.
The roast chicken dissolved mid-steam, there and then not, and the pale blue tablecloth folded in on itself like a set being struck, and the woman the shape the Hex had conjured to ask him to sit flickered once, twice, and was gone. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The room went silent.
Malik stood alone in a kitchen that was just a kitchen again.
Dim.
Empty.
The table bare.
No wife.
No dinner.
No script.
He’d won.
He let the card drop.
The crash was immediate.
His knees wobbled.
He caught himself on the doorframe, teeth chattering, the warm hum in his back teeth gone thin and sour.
The cold had spread to his fingertips.
He checked the nick through his eyebrow still there, faint scar, real and had to check it twice because his vision greyed at the edges the first time and he couldn’t tell if he’d seen it or imagined seeing it.
The card had saved him.
It had also nearly emptied him.
At the edge of his vision, private, the system flickered a terse lower-third:
STAND BY
And under it, colder:
SIGNAL WEAK
Malik slid down to sit on the kitchen floor, his back against the doorframe, and laughed once, dry and airless.
He’d thrown up his only real shield and it had held the Hex off, and the cost was the same thing the Hex would’ve taken anyway: himself, one frequency at a time, bleeding out to keep the static lit.
Armor that also wounded.
A countdown, not a shield.
He sat in the dim kitchen and thought about the pleasant woman’s face as she’d unravelled, asking him to sit, please won’t you just sit, the Hex trying so hard to finish the scene that it had dressed a whole evening around him and still couldn’t make him pick up the script.
He’d refused it.
He’d won.
And he was colder now than when he’d started.
The card sat at the edge of his vision, crisp and steady again now that he’d dropped the hold.
The test pattern.
His mark.
His home state.
He looked at it and thought: How long can I hold before the hold stops holding?
The bars were clean.
For now.
But at the edges, faint, barely there a grain he hadn’t seen before.
A texture like snow creeping in from the sides, the same grey static that had warned him at the boundary.
The card was rotting.
Not much.
Not yet.
But enough that he could see it, if he looked.
Malik sat on the cold kitchen floor and checked the nick one more time still there, still his and waited for the warm hum to smooth back, and tried not to think about how many more evenings the Hex would try to give him, or how many more times he could refuse before the card he threw up to save himself stopped coming back clean.
The house ticked around him.
Empty.
Patient.
Waiting.