My eyes flew open. A person was crouching next to me, with dirty blonde hair dotted with muddy pink. I groaned and rolled onto my side. “Elias, can you hear me?” the person asked. Maggie. “What are you doing here?” I asked, then quickly sat up. “What did I do? How am I alive? How are you here? Is everyone okay? I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t me doing it. It wasn’t me, I didn’t want to. Or maybe I did. I don’t really know. I know I need to go.” I tried to stand up from the floor and run away, but Maggie pushed my shoulders back down. “Melissa sent me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. When I got here, you, well, you weren’t here. I mean, you were, but you were completely zoned out. I thought you were asleep. But then I realised you were on the floor, and you aren't crazy enough to choose to sleep on the floor. Are you okay?” I sighed. It hadn’t been real. I hadn’t gone all killer-Reaper. I wasn’t helping Eliet. I hadn’t been in an explosion. The base was fine. Everyone was alive. I hadn’t hurt anyone here. “I’m fine. I was just thinking about some stuff. It… it was a mistake to bring me here. You must know that. I can’t control it. Being here puts everyone at risk. And there may or may not be a communication device in my ear. I don’t really know what’s real anymore.”
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfeF6e73ANF
Maggie smiled and finally helped me to my feet. “There was. We got it out when we first brought you here. As well as six, small cameras. They were hidden quite well, I’ll give the Elite that. You’re clean. Don’t worry. The only thing we couldn’t get out was a tracking device and one portion of a control panel. They were too close to your brain, the risk was too great. But, we think we dismantled them. So you’re safe. The Elite can’t get to you anymore. Reaper is gone. You’re not a risk. You are now a valuable asset to T.R.I.B.A.U.M. Speaking of, Melissa wanted you to be present at a meeting between the leaders of T.R.I.B.A.U.M. I'm not even invited to the leader meetings. And I’ve become one of the most important general leaders for T.R.I.B.A.U.M. in the short time I’ve been here. The meeting is going to be held in the green room. It’s the second door on the right down the hallway connected to the silvery-blue door labelled 011-A. It’s on the main floor, at the bottom of the ramp.” I nodded. “When do I need to go?” Maggie checked her watch. “A half hour. In the meantime, do you want to come over to my room? It’s right next door, and Sammy is the next one after mine. You don’t have to.”
“No, I want to. I don’t know if seeing Sammy is the best idea, though. I think he hates me.” Maggie smiled sadly as we started walking out of my room. “We all hated you for a while. We hated Reaper, and we thought that meant we hated you, too. But I’ve started to learn that my friend, Elias, and a killer demon called Reaper are two different people, even though they share the same body. Sammy knows it too, but he’s taking a bit longer to show it.” I could understand that. If one of my friends randomly became a demonic-government-run murderer, I would probably feel a bit of hatred towards them, too.
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9MhMuYrbGl
Entering Maggie’s room, I saw it was the exact same as mine. The same couch. The same pillows. The same rugs. Even the same books. “Since Sammy isn’t here right now, do you wanna’ play some Golf? For old times' sake?” Maggie suggested, holding up a deck of generic black and white cards. I smiled. “Why not? Let’s see if all this mind-control and lab experimentation has negatively impacted my luck-based card-game playing skills,” I said light-heartedly. Maggie’s smile dropped, horror etched onto her face. “Too soon?” I asked with a shrug. She nodded quickly and dropped down next to the table, opening the box of cards to shuffle them. I smiled and sat down across from her.
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡh12Q1QRg5J
As we played the game, I couldn’t help but imagine what life could have been like if I never went to the woods the day we decided to meet up at the tree house. What if I’d been sick? What if I forgot? What if something came up at work so I couldn’t go? Would all of this still have happened? Just thinking about it made me feel empty inside. While everything that had happened was terrible, and by no standards good, it kind of felt nice. I had a story. I’d met people when I was younger who always said that they wished they got to have an adventure. They wished they could have stories told about them. Here I was, playing cards, with the knowledge that my story would maybe be told one day. But whose story? Mine, or Reapers? Reaper's story was one filled with death and destruction, while mine was smothered with trial and error, as well as mistakes. Which one was better? Did I even want to know? Did I want to know what life would have been like without all of this? It took me a minute to figure out my answer. No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to know what would have happened to me if nothing changed. I didn’t want to know what would have happened if something different had happened than what had. All I wanted to know was what I was like now. And I liked who I was now. Because Reaper was gone from inside of me. I was free. I was no longer a pawn in the Elite’s terrible game of chess. I was a piece from an entirely different game. And I was happy with that. “I call,” Maggie said, drawing me out of my mind. I flipped over my cards, revealing two aces, a two, and a red king. One point. Maggie flipped over her two two’s, ace, and red king. Two points. I won. “I guess not. Maybe Reaper is really good at cards,” she said. “I… I’m joking,” she clarified. I nodded. “Yeah. I know. Now I’m just Elias.”
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡa4Q9rVMe83
“Well, well, well, ‘just Elias’. Fancy seeing you here. Did Melissa decide you were no longer life-threatening and allowed you to roam around, as long as you stayed close enough to whoever was holding the leash? Or did you kill her and now you’re here for us?” I turned and saw Sammy standing in the doorway, his arms crossed. “Sammy, come on. You don’t need to be rude. He’s trying, okay? He’s not Reaper anymore. It’s time to let everything that has happened go. Just let it go,” Maggie said, trying to de-escalate the situation. “I’ll let it go when he admits that he’s a killer and only wants to see our heads rolling off our shoulders,” Sammy shot back, pointing at me. I bowed my head, his words cutting deep into me. “Elias, he doesn’t mean it,” Maggie said, trying to stick tiny bandages on a gaping wound. “No, Maggie. I think he does. Because he’s right. Even if I wasn’t the one holding the dagger or the knife, all of the people who had died because of the demons, all of their blood is on my hands. I know that, and I feel terrible about it. I never wanted innocent people to die. I was being controlled, it wasn’t my choice anymore,” I said calmly. It was true, and I hated that honesty was so important at this moment.
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5TEymnnaqH
“Sure,” Sammy said, shaking his head slowly. “Keep telling yourself that. I can’t be here anymore, so I’m going to go. I’ll see you guys later.” With that, he left. “Wait!” Maggie called after him. “Come back, let’s talk about this.” He didn’t. I pushed my cards towards Maggie. “I’m going to go, too. I’ll come back after the meeting.” She nodded sadly as I headed back to my room. I started to walk right, but then I looked to my left. Sammy was walking down the path. Against my better judgement, I turned away from my room and ran after him. “Sammy!” I shouted. He stopped and looked at me. “What do you want?” he spat. That made everything in my mind freeze. What did I want? I didn’t know. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was. Right? “I wanted to say I’m sorry. For everything I’ve done, and anything I might do in the future.” Silent tension hovered between us. For a minute, I thought Sammy might actually forgive me. I pictured him saying, ‘I know, and I’m sorry for being a jerk to you. Let’s go back to Maggie’s room and all eat cake!’ You can imagine how broken I felt when he said, “You should be.” And he walked away. I nodded. “Okay, then.” I turned away from him and ran back to my room.
214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjminy7OwkF
Shutting myself inside, I tried to calm my shaking breaths. I leaned my head against the wall, letting the cold seep into my skin. After a few minutes in the quiet, I straightened up. I had a meeting to get to. I was about to step back outside when I realised my clothes were disgusting. I’d been wearing the same thing for longer than I cared to think about, and hadn’t washed my hair in even longer than that. With a sigh, I started digging through the closet of clothes that would never fit me, looking for anything that I could wear to the meeting without looking insane.214Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLsi0jmc0rT
