A Gamer's Guide 346

Outside, the hallway is dark and quiet. After a day full of kids filling the house with running and shouting and squealing, hearing nothing but silence is almost a blessing. In the end, I do prefer silence over lots of noise.

Now, where did Holly say I was going to sleep again? The second floor, down the hall…

Absently, my feet begin to move. I’ll be sleeping in the same bed I woke up in. The same bed I woke up from fainting in. My mind wanders back to how Rice told it. Last night, I fainted. Me. There’s no reason to distrust her honesty, but the thought that I could faint eludes me. Isn’t my unconsciousness resistance in the immunity now? Not even a sledgehammer to the head could make me pass out, even if you were to hammer at it for hours on end! And still…

I look down at my hand. A nearby window, not boarded up or broken, lets a pale stream of moonlight flitter in, striking my hand. Somehow though, it almost looks like the moonbeam is passing through my hand, leaving only dust in the shape of a hand. I clench my hand.

…Am I no longer real? Is that it? Somewhere deep in my skull, despite years of not dying, not fainting, a part of me remembers what it’s like to scrape my knee and bleed. A part of me thinks that wounds of that size take weeks to heal—not seconds.

It must be what Hunter told me. That little part of my brain remembers, and now, it’s making itself heard. I can faint.

A hollow question echoes back at me from deep inside my skull.

What else can I do?

The question goes unanswered, because as I turn a bend, I find myself face-to-face with someone who probably doesn’t want to see me.

Down the hall, leaning against the doorpost of my bedroom, stands Glyph. Now, I would love to assume that she’s doing this simply to ensure that I go to bed at night. That would make sense, and would correctly paint her as a reasonably paranoid woman who wants to keep the kids safe. That makes sense. But when she turns to look at me, her eyes stern but not cold, I know that this assumption is incongruent with the truth. After all, why do it herself if she fears me so much? If that were the case, I’d be facing a spear-holding Holly, not an unarmed Glyph.

She turns to me, her eyes gleaming in the tawny light. “Hey,” she says.

“Um… Hi? Good evening?” I have no idea what I should say here. She doesn’t smell afraid or anything, but I can’t tell what else I’m dealing with here. Had she been armed, that would have meant that she came here with the intention of doing away with me, or something similar. But this is different. “Sorry about spending such a long time with Lett,” I say, hoping that my blind shot might at least hit in the vicinity of her intention. “If he didn’t tell you, then I wouldn’t mind retelling how we met and why he seems to like me so much.”

Her face set in a stonelike mask, I can’t tell if my guess hit true, or if she even heard me at all. Completely ignoring everything I said, she takes a step away from the door, her arms at her sides, not quite tense. “Could we talk for a moment?”

It takes a moment for her request to sink in. “Of course,” I say, mildly bewildered. “I don’t mind at all. Is it something…?”

She moves over to me, and then walks past me, waving for me to come along. Although I can no longer make even a half-guess as to her motives, I follow along, purely on instinct. She didn’t even tell me to, and I still… Am I really that much of a dog? I guess so. Like the puppy I continue to be, I amble after her all the way over to a little door at the very end of the hallway, which she brings me into.

Before this place became a church, this room must have been some sort of withdrawing room, complete with a porcelain fireplace. In front of it sit two armchairs, the leather cracked and mouldy. Glyph doesn’t seem to mind it though, as she sits down in one of them, sighing slightly. I follow suit, placing myself in the other one, simultaneously too close and too far away from her. As she begins lighting a candle, I let my eyes move around the room. There’s a bookcase filled with old, rotted books; an ornate table missing two legs; a couple of broken chairs in the same style; and various paintings hung on the walls, all of them in some stage of decay. The most striking aspect would be the darkness. Creeping vines have covered up the windows almost fully, leaving the room in a state of complete blackness. It’s honestly impressive that Glyph was able to orient herself despite it.

With the hiss of a matchstick, the darkness suddenly recedes, and I turn to watch her lighting a little candle and placing it on a small table that sits between us. By candlelight, her face looks odd. The last time I saw her, I could’ve sworn she was younger than thirty, but now… Ignoring the hollows of her eyes and the pronounced wrinkle between her brows, there’s something in her eyes that seems far more aged than even her face. Something that intensifies sevenfold as she leans out, her eyes meeting mine.

I want to say something. The silence is so damn awkward, but I can tell that this isn’t a situation wherein I speak first. This is her conversation. I watch in silence as she musters her strength.

“If you saw Hitler at a café, what would you do?”

“If I—” I blanch. “What? You mean…?”

She swallows audibly, nods, and says, “Adolf Hitler. The man who caused the holocaust, started the second world war, and led to the agonizing deaths of millions.”

“I’m not sure…” My head begins to shake. Is this a rhetorical question? Am I meant to wait for her to elaborate? I don’t…

“He orders a latte,” she says. Then, suddenly catching herself, she adds, “With oat milk. The barista takes his order, and he pays for his drink, and once he has the drink, he sits down and begins sipping while scrolling on his phone. If you lean over a bit, you can spot him looking at cat memes, chuckling at them every now and again.”

“That’s…”

“What do you do?” she repeats, her eyes flashing with intense focus.

“I don’t know,” I say sincerely. “I genuinely don’t know what I would do in that situation. Is he…?”

“He isn’t doing anything bad at the moment,” she says. “There is no direct hint that he’ll do anything bad in just a moment, either.”

“In that case…” Thoughts swirl in my head. I look down at my hands and twiddle my thumbs. It’s not like Hitler killed people himself, but it was still… Millions of deaths, on him. But… Brows furrowed, I raise my head to face her. “I don’t know what I would do.” However, and this is only a hunch… “I’ve got a feeling, though, that you know what you would do.”

She watches me tentatively. The candle flickers between us.

“I’d kill him.”

The darkness around us wavers, stretches, and deepens, all at once. More and more, until the little flame lighting up our faces is nothing but a dot in the corner of my vision. “I see,” I say, recalling the feeling of steel penetrating my chest. There’s nothing bitter in her face. Her words are just words. Likewise, her silence is only silence. “Do you want me to defend Hitler?” I ask. “Tell you that the holocaust wasn’t so bad, or that trying and failing to kill himself absolved him?”

“Not really,” she says. Some precursor to indignation rears within me, but before I have time to say anything, she continues, turning away from me to look at the room itself. “It’s weird. I thought I’d be much more afraid being alone with you like this. Honestly, it was scarier waiting in the darkness for you.” Without turning her face, her eyes slide back to look at me, watching me idly, as though I’m not even here. “Something about you is disarming, in a way. Earlier today, when you were talking with the kids, you looked right at home. Every logical part of my brain told me that it was bad and dangerous, but, emotionally…” Her lips twist into a frown. “I don’t hate you. I don’t even fear you. What kind of person wouldn’t hate Hitler?”

Normally, a nazi. But that isn’t the explanation here, is it? There’s no reason to be secretive with her. “I have a skill,” I say, “that makes me inconspicuous. That’s all it is.”

“No,” she says, a bit too quickly. “It’s not that. Holly sees it too, and that’s why she hates you so badly. Something about your face is disarming, which makes her even more alert than usual.”

She makes it sound like I’ve consciously moulded my face to make it easier to kill people or something. I still can’t fathom what it is she’s trying to tell me. “And you don’t feel the same way?”

“I don’t.”

“How am I supposed to react to that?”

“That’s not up to me.”

Should I just leave? This is grating. When is she going to tell me that I should do like Hitler in the bunker? Steeping my fingers, I allow my back to hunch down a little. Sure, it’s not like I need to sleep or anything, but I have a feeling Rice might still be waiting up for me. Wouldn’t want her to worry. Now, how do I disengage…?

“I don’t think you’re going to hurt any of the kids,” she says.

I blinks at her. “Pardon?”

Abruptly, she appears flustered, her hands wringing together atop her lap. “Holly told me not to say it,” she says. “But I can’t not say it. It’s just… I hate it. I hate that I can’t treat you rationally. Can you imagine it? Seeing Hitler in the café, and only thinking that he’s there for the latte? Feeling nothing but a sense of pleasant relaxation? There’s a dissonance between my mind and heart and I don’t know how to fix it. I was hoping that if we talked one on one, you might do something bad. Holly’s mad because of what happened by the river, but I know she was just being hasty. Somehow, I admire her for it. She was able to make you do something bad, so now she can connect how she knows you and how she feels about you. But I haven’t been able to do that. Not even now, when it’s just the two of us. If you wanted to, you could kill me, or threaten me in any number of ways. But you haven’t, and you won’t. I can tell. You’re…” She bites her lip, her face contorting into a brief grimace of utter loathing. “Nice,” she grinds out, finally. “That’s it. You’re too nice to do anything like that. That’s what I hate.”

In the past four years or so, I’ve been called a myriad of things. This, however, is a first. “Um… Thank you?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not a compliment. I wish you hadn’t been nice, because then my heart would be in line. Then I’d be able to point at you and scream and feel nothing but relief when you die. Now, though…” Her eyes move to her own hands, which she balls into tight, trembling fists. “I hate it. I hate that I like you. Damn it.”