Back in Alex's bathroom on Tuesday morning, the green word BEGIN was still hanging in front of his face.
He reached out and pressed it with one finger, the way you'd press a button on a screen. His finger went right through it.
"Begin," he said. He tried "Yes," and "Start."
Nothing happened that he could see.
He tried the obvious things.
"Status," he said.
Nothing.
"Menu."
Nothing.
"Character sheet."
Nothing. He stopped himself before he got to "inventory."
'Fine... no menu. It shows things when it wants to. I'll learn the rules the hard way, like every good game.'
He sat down on the side of the tub and watched the words. About an hour later they faded, until there was nothing in front of him but his towel rack.
He texted Sam. He couldn't let Sam see his teeth. Not yet.
--Alex--
Can't come in today. Sorry. Feeling weird.
--Sam--
You never take a day.
Fine. The cake is mine now.
'Okay. New character. Let's see the stats!'
He threw a tennis ball at the wall above his bed and caught it one-handed. Left hand, right hand, faster and faster, until he wasn't even watching it anymore. His hand just went to where the ball was about to be.
He went for a behind-the-back catch, missed, and the ball took the lamp off the shelf.
***
He checked the mirror a lot that day. Way more than he'd ever admit.
His face was still his, just a better version.
He scrolled back through his photos and found one from the shop last winter. Sam had an arm around Alex's neck, and both of them were laughing at whatever a customer had just said.
Alex's mouth was open in the picture. His teeth were square, ordinary and a little crowded at the front, the way they'd always been.
He held the phone up beside his face in the mirror.
In the photo, his canines were the same length as the teeth next to them. In the mirror, they came down about a millimeter and a half longer, and they ended in a point.
There was one more thing.
On his right hand, a thin dark line ran under the skin, the color of a bruise. It started where the split by his thumbnail used to be. It ran down toward his wrist. It didn't hurt, and it didn't wash off.
It was about as long as his thumb. So was the piece of black metal that had been on his desk on Monday night and was gone on Tuesday morning.
'No. No, I can't think about this right now!'
He shoved the hand in his pocket and went to fix the kettle's loose cord instead.
***
In the afternoon he went out for groceries, mostly to see what would happen.
For two years the woman at the bread counter had sold him the same loaf without once looking up from the register. That day, she looked up. She gave him his change and kept staring.
"Did you change your hair?"
"No."
"Well, it suits you."
Alex walked into the door on the way out.
'She noticed. A woman who never looks at anybody noticed. Sam's going to notice in about four seconds.'
He went home along Wall Road, the long street at the foot of the East Wall. He could see every rivet under the nearest wall light, forty meters up.
In the store he'd kept his hands in his pockets. The alley behind his building was a different story. Nobody was back there, just the trash cans and the fire escape, with its bottom ladder hooked up out of reach so kids couldn't climb it.
He set his six bags down by the trash cans, put the loaf on a can lid, bent his knees and jumped.
His right hand closed on the bottom bar of the ladder, a good three meters up. He hung there by one arm and waited for it to hurt.
It didn't. He pulled his chin up over the bar, let himself down and did it again. And again. He did eleven one-handed pull-ups in a row, mostly because he kept expecting the next one to be hard. At the Residence he'd never managed a single one with two hands.
'Is this how strong people feel all the time? They just walk around like this?'
He dropped, landed without a sound, and laughed out loud in the empty alley.
After that he carried all six bags up four floors in one trip and stood at the top, waiting to be out of breath.
He waited.
He wasn't even breathing hard.
***
The food was wrong.
He fried four eggs for dinner, and they barely tasted of anything. The coffee smelled amazing. In his mouth, it was warm water.
He ate enough for two people and stood in his kitchen next to the one chair, just as hungry as when he started.
'How does that even work? I'm full!'
At midnight he ate the rest of the loaf.
'This is like eating a photo of bread... a really good photo. Still a photo.'
***
On Wednesday, Alex went to work.
Sam's shop was one room plus a back room on Wall Road, between the pharmacy and a place that sold tires. The sign over the door said REPAIRS. Under that, PHONES TABLETS RADIOS. Under that, in a different paint, ALL MAKES.
Sam had run it for nineteen years. He'd hired Alex two years ago on a weak reference letter from the Residence.
Alex kept his top lip down over his teeth when he talked. He'd practiced it in the mirror for twenty minutes before he left.
"You slept," Sam said when he walked in.
"I always sleep."
"You always lie down." Sam had the cash book open and his glasses pushed up into what was left of his hair. "This is different. Don't ruin it by telling me how."
He handed Alex a tablet with one corner pushed in.
"Customer says it fell off a desk."
Alex turned it to the light. The case was dented in a neat half circle, about the size of the edge of a table. Or a head.
"Customer threw it at somebody," Alex said.
"Customer says desk."
"High desk."
"Very high desk." Sam wrote in the book. "Forty for the screen. If he argues, sixty."
Sam was forty-one and always tired. He never argued with a customer's story. He'd kept Alex on even though Alex was late almost every week.
There was a second business in the back room. Sam had never explained it, and Alex had never asked. It had to do with a blue cooler under the workbench and a man who came on Thursdays.
Alex slid a blade under the edge of the tablet. It felt good to have work in his hands.
The clips let go one by one. He could hear each tiny dry tick before he felt it.
The blade slipped.
Sam was reaching in at the same moment to hold the corner, and the bent edge of the case opened his thumb. It was a cut about a centimeter long. It filled with red.
Alex smelled it before he saw it.
Everything else in the shop went quiet, even the radio on the shelf. There was only the smell, warm and metallic. He swallowed, and swallowed again.
His eyes went from Sam's thumb to Sam's wrist, and up to the side of Sam's neck, under the jaw, where the pulse moved.
He didn't decide anything.
Distance. Angle. How hard.
His weight was already on his front foot. One more second, and his teeth would have been in Sam's neck.
Alex threw himself backward into the shelves so hard that a box of chargers came down.
"Hey. Hey!" Sam had his thumb clamped in his other fist. "It's a scratch! You've gone gray. Sit down before you fall down."
"I'm fine."
"You don't like blood? You've worked here two years and I never knew that."
"I'm fine."
Alex wasn't facing him. He was counting chargers on the floor. He kept counting until Sam had tape around the cut and the smell got weaker.
'That was Sam. And I was going to...'
Low on the left side of his vision, right where a health bar would sit in a game, a word appeared in green.
EAT
It stayed about as long as it took to read.
Alex laughed. It came out too loud.
"What?" Sam said.
"Nothing. Chargers."
He picked them up. For the rest of the day, he kept the workbench between them.
Around four, Sam spoke to the cash book without looking up.
"If you're sick with something I could catch," he said, "I'd like to be told."
"I'm not," Alex said.
He had no idea if that was true. Sam's thumb was under three layers of tape by then, and Alex could still smell it from the other end of the bench.
The green word came back, in the same spot.
EAT