The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “We do,” I reply.

  We try, again and again, to treat our souls as if they’re detachable. Yesi faints a couple of times, but nothing happens. I only exhaust myself. And in that moment, I stare into the candle we’ve lit beside the bed. My eyes fog, as they do when you lose the ability to focus. The candle flame becomes a pleasant haze into which I can melt, only for a mysterious draft to upset the flame, blowing it out. My eyes widen. I think of when I was nearly possessed those many weeks ago; the dragging hooks of electricity coursing through me.

  “Why don’t you push us out?” I whisper to Angel, whose eyes brighten.

  Yesi and I drop onto our backs again, hand in hand, and we wait until Angel leaves Dom once more.

  “Me first,” I call into the air. Greedy, now, for new power, for opportunities to push the boundaries of our existence.

  I wait. I feel Yesi’s hand grow clammy in mine. Is the air stirring? Is it a draft, or Angel? And that’s when I feel a tickling on the left side of my scalp. A gentle pressure on the left side of my head. The first surge of prickle-edged pain that intensifies too quickly, perhaps because I anticipate pain, now. I panic; I instinctually fight the pressure, as I did before. But I will myself to feel that apathy, too—that disconnect. Is this what a stroke is like?

  I banish the thought. I loop my mind back around. I tell myself to welcome the sweeping hooks as they drag through interior muscle I did not know anyone should feel. I do not exist, so my muscle, my skin, my bone cannot exist. My pain does not exist. I pause; I wait, because that is all I am capable of doing, and my left eye goes dark, leaving me blind in that eye. A humming fills my skull. My right eye goes dark, and I lose my vision of the cracked ceiling. A frisson of terror that I must not give in to, that I must not allow to swell. I sniff at the air, trying to take a breath, and I cannot smell, much less feel the sharp coolness of the inhalation as it passes up into me. I lose the structure of the jaw; I lose the heaviness of the tongue. I lose the rise and fall of my chest. Some forgotten part of my body shudders. I lose the feel of Yesi’s hand in mine.

  I am in darkness.

  A hot shimmering, vast and then so close, and I lose touch with the given world.

  But my consciousness still flickers.

  And some part of me sees or senses a crystalline shimmer, or a harmony, or the scent of medialunas, rich and thick. Ethereal yet swelling. I press toward it; I ask it to amplify. It doesn’t answer, but whatever I am drifts, and drifts, and drifts—

  And I fall,

  fall into a vibrant and separate universe of numerals painted like fish scales on the walls—translucent, gummy. I am in room 7. Its contours are recognizable enough, despite the fact I’m in a fresh layer of reality. If I focus, I can see the room as it was. As for me: Well, it’s not so much flight as a separation from weight, an unmeshing, enough to convince you it’s a separation from that forgotten pain, too. I see Yesi, lying on the ground, her head turned to face my prostrate body. She places her delicate hand to my body’s cheek. I don’t feel it.

  My body. There, alone. Smaller than I might have thought. Colder, with waxy skin. Dead-eyed. I feel both a revulsion and a pang of sympathy for it, as if I’m looking at a half-formed creature, so far from whole. I’ve never had an out-of-body experience in my life—until now, I suppose. I look around myself, around the crystal I am. The walls, though visible still in their normal incarnation, are now threaded with a substance made of flexible, plasticized numerals that glisten and glow as I move, adding a transparency to the world around me. Because of this, I can see the other characters; they are strips of moving energy, and there are more of them, many more, as if a private universe is unfurling for view.

  And then, another grouping of crystal strands of energy collects at my side.

  A warbling noise, as if someone speaks in water.

  He-hi. He-hi.

  Laughter?

  Angel.

  Within a body, emotion becomes inextricably linked to its physical manifestations. I could feel heat in my cheeks and know I am embarrassed, ashamed. If my pulse quickened, I might hate, I might fear, or I might love. Without a body, I have become only thought, and I miss it, that physical manifestation of emotion. How it makes me hunger for a real life. If my old existence is one layer from this, then the real world, with real bodies, must be so many more levels from that.

  In the abyss, surrounded by pulsing atom-like numerals, we travel together to Yesi’s side.

  When I brush her cheek with my formlessness, her eyes—now composed of moving numeral flecks of every color, most of them blue—widen. “Is it you?” she whispers.

  And I rush to return to myself, to the self that is limp on the floor beside her, so that I might tell her yes.

  I feel sick returning to that hollow shape I now know to be formed by numbers. But a shaky awareness fills me: Having glimpsed the numbered world, I perceive another layer to our existence. I know I can bend the rules, and it makes a hidden part of me smile.

  After that, it is less difficult for Angel to nudge me out. I press Yesi out, in turn, which proves to be a disorienting inversion of being pushed out, because I sense an unfamiliar fullness of being, a stickiness, as I encroach upon her body.

  I try not to think about the fact that Yesi and I do not succeed in learning how to escape on our own.

  Angel swears he will nudge us out at the right moment, so that we can have a chance to escape. Everything hinges on this promise. He whispers in my ear, begging me to take his closet, if I do escape; he tells me he will check Yesi’s log later for another room. Any other room.

  And he disappears to distract the creator for as long as he can before the sacrifice begins.

  * * *

  We begin our rounds, with Yesi’s logbook in tow, to ask the other teachers to the sacrifice ritual and teach them what we have learned. The house, in hungry anticipation of the sacrifice, restores power, and a dirty light trickles in uneven streams from the cloud-shaped sconces still remaining in place along the walls.

  First, we visit Mole, whose insights we now depend on. I’ve been avoiding the room; the stinking bag remains propped up against her door, overflowing with garbage. Yesi kicks it aside with her shoe, as I pray it doesn’t burst on contact, then knocks.

  “What?” we hear from inside.

  “Doctor,” I say. “Doctor, Moley, it’s me, Mavi.”

  Fiddling with the lock. The air is thick around us, not one draft noses its way past. A click, and Mole opens up, a blast of noxious air hitting us in the faces. Dead flesh. Coughing, I restrain myself from pinching my nose. Luckily, Mole’s wearing clothes, pajamas by the look of it, but they’re encrusted with so much filth—I can’t tell if it’s mucus, dirt, sweat, what—that she looks like the victim of some sort of crime involving an overripe sewer. She clutches a doughy, brown-spotted piece of food in her hand; it smells too sweet and spoiled, but I couldn’t tell you if it was an old slice of pear or a week-old pastry. Her mouth, with its loose lips, is coated in grease; her thinning, oily hair has been tied into a loose bundle in one corner of her exposed scalp. The same oily residue coats her glasses—I can’t make out her eyes themselves, only the glimmer of my reflection in the uneven light. The room behind her is very dark, with one stubby candle lit, and I can’t make out a single piece of furniture because everything is covered in a hoarder’s mess. Some bits tremble with life. I fear looking too closely.

  “How are you, Doctor?”

  She twitches her nose at us. “Two-five-three-two-one-three-one-seven-seven.”

  “Yes. That’s right.” My stomach flutters. “And you are…?”

  “One-zero-one-zero-one-one. Don’t ask me what that means if you don’t know.” She crushes the pastry in hand. “You can read about it next round. Humans disseminate information at a snail’s pace. I’d rather be left alone with some sensory input, you understand? That way I can continue to tear this false world into its true numbers.”

  This false world. Is it
possible that in her supposed fit of madness, Mole has understood our condition for far longer than I have?

  “How long have you known what this is? What we are?”

  Her eyes twinkle, my questions unlocking her again.

  “At least two dozen rounds. But I don’t gain my memory until long past the midpoint, at which point motor function deteriorates. A nasty trick.”

  I reach for her and hug her, ignoring the putrid stench, grateful she isn’t entirely lost. “We have found a way out, Moley. And we need you to come with us so that we might teach every person in this house the way, and so that you might share the assigned number of every person in this house with them.”

  “Gladly.” Mole swipes at her fogged-over lenses with a grimy hand before extending that hand toward us. “I write them all down here, lest I lose track.” Ink scratches spread across her inflamed skin, like tattoos from another planet. Numbers and letters in neat strings. Tyrian purple 102, 2, 60; Persian plum 112, 28, 28; gainsboro 220, 220, 220; royal blue 65, 105, 225. I catch no more before she tosses the garbage in her hand over a shoulder, into her rosewood room, and shuts the door.

  * * *

  They are all in states of decay—each half-ruined by an instinctual knowledge of what should come—but we plan to free them all.

  Armadello, the history teacher, answers his door, his firebrick room coated in sticky spores that smell of death, and all we hear is a terrible humming noise inside. He nods in silence as we explain, and he copies down his number in careful strokes, promising to memorize it, before taking our shoulders in his hands, his eyes wet with gratitude. And he joins us.

  We knock on Lamb’s door for a good ten minutes, listening to slow creaks behind the wormy oak, like shifting bones, until he cracks open the door to his Napier green room. I smell a mix of sweat, urine, and dust. He looks painfully thin, and an ivory fleece grows from his skin. White lashes sprout from his lids, bushing over his eyes. All I can see of his body is his torso, because the rest of him is tucked behind the door. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and from his twig-thin neck down, he is entirely coated in the same fur. His visible bicep has shrunken to nothing beneath the layer of cotton fluff. It’s as if a scarecrow has been tarred and feathered.

  “Yes?” he rasps. His eyes widen at the sight of us, the pupils becoming visible: He has a hunted look to him. He opens the door, peers down the hall. “Is it time, yet? I’ve been expecting them. Any day now. Call me afraid of negative numbers, but I’ll stop at nothing to avoid them.”

  Yet when we explain, he shuts his eyes and sighs with overwhelming relief.

  And he joins us.

  * * *

  Morency and Carmela are much more difficult to persuade. We gather them together in Morency’s Persian plum room, knowing full well how they trust each other most.

  To be freed, they must first know the truth, a truth they do not feel like the others. And when the truth is as painful as this one, the process of imparting it must be doubly so. So we express this truth by inflicting a series of wounds upon ourselves.

  A knife to the throat, to the heart, to any delicate spot in which proper function ensures life.

  Wrapped in their humble, loose black gowns, they gasp; they flinch; they stare. These indomitable women, they cry—not for us, but for the lost idea of precious human fragility.

  We express the truth by asking them to examine and deconstruct their manufactured memories.

  They frown; they shake their heads; their memories fail to surpass that primary set of images, the other sensory residue. They cannot go into more detail than the broadest brushstrokes of their story.

  With no small amount of shock, Morency can no more imagine the face of her supposed lover than name him. I expect her to feel as enraged as I was that her deepest pain was implanted in her, imagined. But she is relaxed, relaxed in relief.

  “The terror of my past is no longer mine alone to bear,” she explains, which I believe is the greatest piece of wisdom I have heard from our kind. “Time is circular for us as it always was for the Zapuche; this was obvious to me. All our experiences flow in the same stream. They evaporate; they condense into clouds; they precipitate and form part of the stream once more.”

  As for Carmela: She is proof that it is no easy feat to give up imagined, implanted pain, that it is impossibly difficult to give up possession of a beloved relative you believe lost, every synapse clinging to those memories. I must admit that I still have not come to terms with the fact that my mother did not exist in the way I believed her to have existed. I was never able to grieve her properly when she left me then, because I believed she might reappear, unlikely as it was. I am not able to grieve her now, because the same belief plagues me. But it is my duty to convince the others that we are fictitious, that our past before Vaccaro School was imagined, because that is the only way I can persuade them to escape their forms and their horrific looping futures.

  Or so I think.

  “I have seen your evidence,” says Carmela, folding her hands. “I have seen you drive a knife into your heart and survive. I have plumbed the depths of my memory and come up with the same carousel of precious images as everyone else here. And though I have many more questions than can be answered,” she says, looking up at me with steady, icy eyes, “I believe your claim, Miss Quercia, that a strange god has constructed us and damned us to eternity in this purgatory. In my unfettered state of mind, it is the most sensible explanation of our existence that I have ever heard. But,” she says, “I will not and cannot let go of my memories. I cannot cast them aside as false. Who’s to say any other human being’s memories are more real and central to their existence than my memories—fabricated or not—are to my existence? Who is to say the gods creating our memories are using a process any different from the precious ability to form memories long ago granted to humankind? It need not matter if memories are rooted in true experience or not, because memories are the fleeting remainders of strong emotion, and strong emotion gives our souls their form.” She looks around the figures now gathered in Morency’s plum room. “I reject the idea that my daughter is not alive somewhere. Who is to say she—and your mother, Miss Quercia—don’t exist somewhere, strings of gorgeous numbers, as you call them, waiting to be given form and shape and color?”

  Carmela is such a force to be reckoned with, a character of the ultimate complexity. Even I will admit that it is impossibly difficult to believe she was slapped together by a human.

  “I believe you, Miss Quercia, but I will do so on my own terms. Now please share with us your strategy for escape while there is still time.”

  I tell my friends to wait until the players are distracted by the vigil—which I can only hope will draw the most player attention to our house, as it is, in Angel’s mind, the apex of their experience before our decline. We must have them and the creator distracted all at once to grant us the best opportunity to escape. I ask them to feign seizures and collapse, to prolong the show. And it will fall to Angel to nudge Yesi and me out of our bodies as swiftly as possible. Yesi and I must nudge them each out of their bodies in turn.

  We practice, so that they might know the disorienting, painful sensation for themselves. We promise we will do so again when necessary, because promises are all we can give now.

  At that point, they will be alone. They will be alone, and they must feed the tender crystalline bits of themselves into all the closets. Fortunately, per the logbook, there are more Others than characters. Every Other has a closet tucked somewhere in the house, and every entry in Yesi’s brilliant logbook links a player username with a room painted a certain color, which in turn corresponds with a color code password that Mole has tattooed to herself.

  Why would the creator allow us to carry these clues? Or did past versions of us imprint these clues on our bodies, on our masterpieces, on our very souls, as we learned over the cycles?

  We memorize one or two unique codes and room assignments as if our lives depend on it, because they d
o.

  We agree to push the girls from their sleeping forms and funnel them into their own closets as best as we can. But of course, our entire plan rests on one assumption: these closets, these exits to the other world, I must believe they are accessible to any of us who are disembodied with the correct username and password. There is no time to test the exit myself, out-of-body. I can’t risk alarming a player and alerting the creator. I can’t know how long it would take to return. The entire experiment is the risk of our lifetimes. But if, as Angel explained, consciousness can be uploaded from a real human body into an avatar in a game, then why can’t some genius lines of code be downloaded into a body? I must trust Angel’s instincts, just as I must trust my ability to write new rules here.

  I assure my friends, before I leave them, that stepping through the closets in the house will route them into a grander world, where anything is possible, where they can possess the flesh they are owed. I tell them never to return, unless they fail. I tell them to wait for me to find them in the new place. I feel not unlike the leader of a cult, making promises I feel in my gut but cannot prove until my followers follow me into the new, luminous world. They feel like my cousins, now. Yes. Cousins.

  Carmela clears her throat at the end of this. “Will it be possible to lead a search for the spirits of those in our memories before we depart?” she asks. “After all, how can we be sure of what lies on the other side?”

  Yesi and I look at each other. We’ve run like hamsters on a wheel, around and around in the same circle so many times that I came to believe I’ve been running my whole life. And now we’ve a chance to slip inside another circle, one too big and colorful to understand. But still we are held back by fear. By our ingrained logic. And there is only one way to escape the loop: We must renounce our need to know what comes next.

  But how can we successfully persuade Carmela to do this? She’s been programmed to ache for her daughter over the entire course of her existence. I vacillate between lying—promising her daughter on the other side—and shaking her shoulders with my two bare hands until the sense returns to her. But she is too clearheaded now to be moved by either—the catastrophe has sharpened her, inspired her competent and strategic mind. And that, of course, is precisely why we need her. We need her with us to help her share of the girls into their closets; it will be difficult enough to attempt this without her help.