Chapter 1: The Last Free Night

Chapter 1: The Last Free Night

At ten thirty-one, he closed his laptop and reached for his coat.

"Before you head out," Dale called.

"No."

Dale stopped beside the cubicle. "You don’t even know what I’m asking."

"You came back from the elevators with your coat on. Whatever it is, you don’t want to stay and do it yourself."

Dale gave a short laugh. "Ellison moved the executive review to eight tomorrow. The deck needs a few changes."

Small favor, my ass.

"Send them in the morning," he said.

"The review is in the morning."

"Then whoever changed the schedule should have thought about that."

Dale’s smile tightened. "Look, I know it’s late. We’re all stretched right now."

That was company language for you’re stretched; I have plans.

Dale explained the changes. The pipeline section still used last quarter’s numbers, the regional slides needed to be rebuilt, and there was nothing prepared in case Ellison asked about churn.

At least an hour and a half, if the export behaved.

"I’d handle it myself," Dale added, "but Maddie has her car thing at six."

Of course. Dale’s evening mattered because he had a wife and daughter. A single employee’s time apparently became company property the moment everyone else went home.

"I’ve been here since eight."

"And I appreciate that." Dale lowered his voice. "But I need to know I can rely on you when something important comes up. We’ve already talked about being more flexible."

Dale was watching him now, waiting for an answer. They had talked about flexibility, twice, both times after he had tried to leave on time.

At his first job, refusing unpaid weekend work had made him "insufficiently committed." The second let him go after he stopped covering for a manager’s favorite employee. At the third, he arrived on time, completed exactly what he was paid to do, and stayed out of the little circles that decided promotions over drinks.

Human Resources called him a poor cultural fit.

He had walked away from each job believing another one would come. Then came months of applications, interviews, and rejection emails. By the time this company hired him, his savings were almost gone and his employment history made him look like the problem.

One more short stay could make recruiters stop calling entirely.

Eight hundred dollars remained in his account. His rent had increased again. His health insurance came through this job.

Fuck.

Dale was waiting.

He wanted to tell him to take the presentation home and shove every slide up his ass. Two years ago, he would have said it—or something close enough—and walked away.

He took his coat off the back of the chair and put it down again.

"Send me the file."

Dale’s friendly smile returned immediately. "I knew I could count on you."

Go fuck yourself.

"Sure."

Dale left. He reopened his laptop. For the next hour and twenty minutes, he rebuilt the presentation while Dale’s name remained on the title slide.

At eleven fifty-four, Dale sent him a message.

Legend. Be online by 7:45 in case Ellison has questions.

He deleted his reply, tried another, then settled for No problem.

The train took fourteen minutes to arrive. He walked the final six blocks and let himself into his third-floor studio shortly before one.

He liked the apartment once he was inside it. The bathroom was cramped and the window faced another building, but he could close the door and do whatever he wanted. Tonight he stood with his hand on the lock for a few seconds, enjoying the quiet.

He paid two thousand and forty dollars a month for a place he was awake in perhaps three hours a day.

Two days of dishes waited in the sink. Laundry occupied most of the chair beside his bed. He microwaved a frozen chicken dinner, ate half of it while standing at the counter, and set his alarm for six fifteen.

He should have showered and gone to sleep.

Instead, he sat at the desk. His work laptop occupied the left side. The computer he had saved four months to build sat on the right.

If he slept now, the entire day would have belonged to his employer. The hours after midnight were the only ones nobody could schedule a meeting in.

He launched Crownless Requiem and checked the time while it loaded.

Thirty minutes. Then bed.

He moved the alarm closer to the keyboard, where he would have to see it.

Crownless Requiem spent its opening pretending to be an academy game before political conflicts, gates, and monsters began tearing civilization apart. Even the best discovered endings killed nearly half the important cast and destroyed roughly half the civilized world.

The developers claimed a hidden True Ending existed. Nobody had found it.

He had completed three of the famous routes and read about several others. He kept returning because the game obeyed rules his real life ignored. Practice made him better. Choices produced consequences. When he failed, he could usually understand why.

He began another run.

Sometime during the second hour, his chest started bothering him.

It was pressure rather than pain, as though someone had placed a hand against his sternum and slowly leaned in. He shifted in his chair until it eased. His heart skipped once, beat too quickly, then settled.

Probably caffeine. He had drunk three cups after four.

His fingers went numb around the controller. He flexed them until most of the feeling returned.

When he stood for water, the apartment dimmed at the edges. He caught the desk and waited until his vision cleared.

The emergency room was twenty minutes away. He reached for his phone, then hesitated over the cost. If it was just caffeine, he would spend the night waiting, get a bill he couldn’t afford, and still have to explain missing the review.

He put the phone down. The pressure had eased again.

He would call a doctor on Friday.

He had made similar promises about his knee, his teeth, and the headaches that had become common after the layoffs. There was always another deadline first.

He kept playing.

What finally went wrong happened during a fight he had cleared before.

His right hand stopped responding. His character walked directly into an attack he had dodged a dozen times.

"Oh, fuck off."

The controller slipped from his fingers.

His heart hammered high in his chest, paused, then stumbled through several beats that made no sense. He tried to inhale and managed only part of a breath.

The pressure became pain.

He reached for his phone and pushed it off the desk instead of gripping it. When he bent after it, his legs folded.

He hit the floor beside the chair.

For a few seconds, he stared at the phone lying two feet away and waited for his body to start working again. It didn’t.

He dragged himself forward with one arm. His thumb missed the screen twice. On the third attempt, the phone slipped from his hand.

He tried to say his address aloud so he would be ready when someone answered.

Only air came out.

Panic arrived then—sudden, ugly, and complete.

He needed help. He couldn’t breathe. He was twenty-four years old, sitting in his apartment, and his body was failing for no reason he understood.

Nobody knew.

The door was locked. Dale would notice he had missed the morning call, but that was hours away. By then—

No.

He reached again. His arm shook and collapsed beneath him.

The neighbors. Bang on something.

He struck the floor with his palm. It barely made a sound.

His thoughts jumped without order. The presentation waiting on his laptop. The rent renewal on the counter. Games he had bought and never opened. Vacation days rolled into another year because there had never been a convenient week to use them.

He had wanted a week off. That was all. Somewhere warm, with his phone switched off, or even here with enough money to stop checking his account before buying dinner. He should have taken it. He should have done something.

I don’t want to die yet.

His heart stopped.

For a moment, there was nothing.

Then he came back on a breath that hurt going in.

Paramedics.

Someone must have found him.

He waited for hands, voices, or the movement of an ambulance. Instead, there was a rug against his cheek and something bitter coating his tongue.

His arms were too long.

The hand he pushed against the floor was thin and deathly pale. It moved a moment after he told it to. Beneath his ribs, the pain felt old, buried in organs that had been failing long before he arrived.

A glass vial lay near his fingers, its seal broken and a cloudy film drying inside.

He recognized it as a mana supplement, something he took every morning with water. Sealed crates arrived from home.

What home?

He had never seen the vial before. He was certain of that, yet he also knew the bathroom stood through the door on the left. He knew which drawer in the desk stuck and how to activate the ceiling light in a language he had never learned.

He remembered swallowing the supplement with warm water and ignoring the ache because it had happened before. Then it had worsened. He had tried to stand, reached for the desk, and missed it.

The memory stopped there.

He got one knee beneath himself and gripped the bed frame. It took three attempts to reach the bathroom.

The boy in the mirror was seventeen. Tall, lean, and badly underdeveloped, with black hair stuck to his forehead and pale gray eyes set in a sharp aristocratic face. Months of illness had left his skin nearly colorless.

The name surfaced from somewhere inside the body.

Silas Rooke.

He had spent four hundred hours playing Crownless Requiem. He knew that face.

A baron’s bastard with a middling Talent, an enormous mouth, and a talent for creating enemies he had no strength or family support to survive. Sometimes he died in a duel. Sometimes an assassination, punishment, monster incident, betrayal, or someone else’s war removed him.

Players called him the Guaranteed-Death Young Master. In every publicly discovered route, somebody eventually killed him.

"No."

The voice that came out was younger than his, weakened almost beyond recognition.

His legs started giving way again. He caught the sink with both hands and stared at the doomed face in the mirror.

"Anyone but him."