by Nino Cipri
Chapter 8: Changing the World, One Room at a Time!
At the top of the stairs, the fuzzy panic in Derek’s head started to clear. They needed to get somewhere safe, and they needed to hide. They couldn’t do either alone.
“Hide us?” he shakily whispered to the defekta around him. He could sense them so much better now, the tiny movements that gave them away: the breaths they held, the weight of their attention. They weren’t overtly friendly like the SVINLÅDA or helpful and comforting like the sleeper sofa. They’d heard Derek’s pleas earlier, done the smart thing and hidden, sometimes in plain sight. They were all sizes, all shapes; flat modular walls, hefty floor lamps, and tiny strings of bulbs. A rosy purple chaise longue regarded him warily, while a fake ficus plant waved at him in agitation. These defekta’s first concern was their own survival; Derek couldn’t fault them for it.
“We just need time to figure out a plan,” he begged.
Derek could hear the stairs rattling behind them.
“Please.” The word dragged out of him, sharp-edged and catching on his throat and tongue. Darkness squeezed his arm.
In front of him, a full-sized corner KLÄDHÅL wardrobe blinked its eyes open at them, then slid open its doors. As Derek ducked into it, he noted that it was much sturdier than when he had assembled it, the plastic structure now like bone, and that the plywood backing had transformed into thick and leathery folds of skin, sparsely furred where he pushed through them, exiting out the other side.
He helped Darkness out through the narrow slit—trying not to think too hard about what purpose that orifice served. A modular wall rolled forward, propelled by a handful of decorative wooden STAVA letters, and Derek and Darkness slipped into a showroom on a totally different track of the store. Even if Dirk still had the map with all of Derek’s shortcuts, even if he ran at full speed, they’d bought themselves a few precious minutes. The STAVA letters slipped the wall back, smoothly working as a team to bolt it into place.
He gave Darkness a quick once-over, trying to remember what they’d done while examining him for a concussion. Their jaw and cheek were swelling and discolored, mottled red and purple, but their eyes were shining happily.
“I broke his nose. I broke Dirk’s fucking nose.” They grinned triumphantly, uncaring or maybe not noticing the blood pinking their teeth.
Derek suppressed the shudder that tried to work its way up his shoulders as he remembered the wet snap of cartilage. “I saw. You’re lucky he didn’t do the same to you, or worse.”
“It’s not luck when a friend saves you from getting the shit beat out of you,” They gingerly touched the bruises blooming on their face. “This is definitely the best and worst shift I’ve ever had.”
“Me too,” he said.
“I fucking knew the rooms were changing around on me. Sorry, I’m just feeling very vindicated right now. In the grand scheme of things, we’re probably fucked, but I was right and I got to fuck up Dirk’s face.”
“We can celebrate when we’re out of here,” Derek said, though he had no idea how they would do that. The doors were still locked, Dirk was still chasing them. They still had nowhere to go.
“We need to get back to Dex and Delilah,” Darkness said. “I’m not going anywhere without them.”
“Can we trust them?”
Darkness stared at him, turning their head to see him better out of their unswollen eye. “Of course you can trust them.”
“There’s no of course,” he reminded them. “Why would they go against the company just to save a bunch of defekta?”
Derek’s pulse was picking up again, banging against his ribs, blood pounding in his throat. Why couldn’t this be simple? Why couldn’t they just get from point A to point B?
Darkness had unmuted their earpiece and chimed the other two members of the inventory team. “Guys, where are you?”
“Customer service desk,” Dex answered. “Got you two on the shoplifting cameras, but not Delilah.”
“Bathrooms, I think?” Delilah answered. “By the new VIP lounge. I can hear that damn toilet lurking. Where are you? Are you okay? What happened?”
“We don’t have time to explain,” Derek said, too anxious to let Darkness launch into the full story. “Dirk is—he’s—”
“Is he dead?” asked Dex. “Is it too much to hope that the toilet ate him?”
“Now there’s a thought,” Delilah mused. “Maybe we can let them loose on each other.”
“No,” Derek hissed. He wasn’t going to let Dirk near any of the defekta, not even the egg chair toilet. “He’s our problem. We have to deal with him.”
“You don’t think we’ve tried?” Delilah said. “We’ve been dealing with him for months. Try to even imagine what that’s like, Derek.”
Derek did imagine it; all the careful ways that the other three watched out for each other, bit back their words and didn’t argue when Dirk lashed out, but kept each other’s spirits up. He’d known that they were broken somehow but hadn’t understood what broke them. But maybe his urge to be the solution was correct; he just couldn’t do that alone.
“Stay where you are,” he told Dex and Delilah. “We’ll make our way over to you.”
He muted his earpiece again, then held his breath to listen. Dirk was getting closer, but he’d need to get all the way to the front of the store before he could turn back toward them. Derek could hear dozens of defekta in between those two points. The disorientation is by design, Dirk had said. What if they took over the design? Made the disorientation work for them?
“This is our store,” he whispered to them.
He could feel the defekta’s attention, their curiosity. They’d heard the promise of death in Dirk’s footfalls through the store. They’d heard the pain he caused to the defekta, to Derek, and now to Darkness.
Hiding wasn’t a solution. It didn’t even resolve their fear; the longer you hid, the more afraid you felt, the larger the possibility of getting caught loomed, more inevitable with each near escape.
But the defekta had lived day and night in the labyrinth. They were the labyrinth, designed to ensnare unwary customers with diversions and digressions, pulling them off their intended paths.
“We know it better than he does,” Derek said. He was finally able to speak in both his voices and say the same thing to speak with purpose and mean it with his whole heart. And the defekta heard him; they were hanging on the harmony of every word.
“Help him get lost,” he said. Then, because it was polite, he added, “Please.”
All around them, the store came alive. Not just between them and Dirk, but in all sections, even the ones they’d scanned and cleared, defekta seemed to shake themselves awake and begin to move.
(Was that how the defekta spread? One voice entreating others to wake, so the silence wasn’t so toxically lonely?)
The labyrinth of showrooms started twisting and changing in a strange, collective choreography, furniture shifting and snaking past the rearranging walls. If the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope could be translated into sound, Derek thought, that’s what it was like.
When the store was busy, there was a hum of sorts, almost a song that threaded through the blanketing noise of a hundred small sounds. Even before Derek had started changing, before he became defective, he heard it. Derek would find himself stopping during his shift to listen to the store, marveling at its layers and complexity. And like nearly everything did, it had reminded him that he was alone, a point of silence and stillness at the heart of it.
But now he knew that he was inextricable from the tapestry of sound, the living and chaotic symphony. Now that same hum of activity filled the store. It wasn’t the same without the dozens of customers wandering through the showrooms, cranky and lost and entitled. It was better, more focused; a chorus of voices instead of an unrehearsed mob of disparate notes.
“Holy shit,” he heard Dex say in his earpiece. “Uh, guys? Is this normal?”
Derek could feel the rest
of the inventory team as points of stillness, with the defekta orbiting around them warily without getting too close.
“No, definitely not normal, but it’s not like normal was any good,” Delilah said, though she still sounded alarmed. “Are we in danger?”
“It’s okay,” Darkness assured them. “Just sit tight. We’ll come to you.”
“Awesome,” said Dex. He sounded enthused for the first time since Derek had met him. “This is so cool.”
“Dex? Dex!” Delilah said. “Do not put this on SnapYap.”
“Too late, I’m definitely putting this on SnapYap. This is like, content gold.”
Delilah sighed. “Forget it, I’m—”
Delilah fell silent as, through her earpiece, the rest of them heard a warped version of “Clair de Lune.”
“I think the egg chair toilet decided to join the party,” she whispered.
Derek pulled his earpiece out and shut his eyes, trying to pinpoint the toilet. It was close to her, closer than Delilah probably realized. It wasn’t moving toward her, though, not breaching the diameter of stillness the defekta had left around her. Derek couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be listening. Observing, the same way that Derek had.
He’d unpack that later, when there wasn’t a homicidal supervisor running around.
“Can you help us?” he asked the defekta. He was reasonably sure he could navigate the maze himself, but didn’t want to risk running into Dirk. “We need to go to the center of the store.”
Down by their feet, a fake plant—standing on its fronds like they were spider’s legs—waved its ceramic base, gesturing for them to follow it through the ever-shifting labyrinth. Before they could reach the others, Derek was distracted by a strange hum, a dissonant note amid the harmonies—like the same melody played in a different key.
“You don’t hear that, do you?” he asked, pausing in a space that looked like an art deco drawing room had collided with a cottagecore kitchen. “It’s like—I can’t describe it, but it’s weird. Out of place.”
“The furniture is alive and dancing, Derek,” said Darkness. “This is all weird.”
Derek was still trying to find words to describe the exact definitions of this particular weirdness when Darkness gave a punched-out huff of surprise.
“What is it?”
Darkness pointed at a white bathroom vanity, reaching a stubby marble leg forward to prod at a wall that was stretching and sagging, like some unseen force was pressing it out of shape. It looked threadbare somehow; Derek could just barely make out the shapes of things moving on the other side of it.
He still didn’t understand until Darkness said, “Maskhål. Or the beginnings of one, maybe.”
Of course. And it wasn’t the only one: Derek could hear thin spots singing all over the store, with wavering pitches that rose and fell to their own alien cadences, all of them distinct from each other and from the intimately familiar song of his store. The tangled layout of LitenVärld’s sales floor already put a lot of stress on reality; the rooms and paths moving on their own must be stretching it to the breaking point.
“Nobody wander off, okay?” Darkness said into the comms. “The maze just got a lot bigger.”
* * *
At the customer service desk, Dex had his head bent over his phone, not even watching the monitors, which was possibly why he didn’t notice their approach until they were a few feet away. He flinched, bringing up his INVENTERA halfway to a shooting position before catching sight of Darkness. Derek’s nerves, soothed by walking through the store as defekta danced joyfully past them, started jangling again.
“Dex!” Darkness hissed. They punched him in the arm. “Someday you’re going to walk into traffic with your nose stuck in that thing, and none of us are going to stop you.”
“Fine, that’s fair, but look!” He waved his phone at them. “It’s been like three minutes and my post is blowing up. I’ve gotten two hundred reposts on two different platforms and forty new followers.”
Sensing minimal interest from Darkness, Dex turned on Derek, shoving his phone entreatingly at him. Derek played the video, which was only seventeen seconds long. It started with blurry CCTV footage of the sales floor breaking into choreographed movement, like one of the old Elvis films that played on a loop in the Rockabilly Hideaway suite. Then it panned up, to show the area right in front of the customer service desk. It was a wider panorama than you got in most of the store, where the twisting walkways between rooms only let you see a narrow few feet ahead. From behind the customer service desk, though, Dex had been able to record a few seconds of dozens of defekta moving together in a coordinated dance, then set it to an incongruously perky pop song.
Dex took his phone back, scrolled down, and laughed breathlessly. “Holy shit, three hundred reposts.”
“If you’re able to tear yourselves away from social media for a second,” Delilah whispered tensely, “I’m kind of pinned down here.”
“Shit, right,” Dex said, shoving his phone back in his pocket. He picked up the INVENTERA from where he’d left it on the counter and, showing significantly more sensitivity than Derek would have thought him capable of, noticed that Derek flinched. “Uh, you okay?” Then, catching sight of the bruises on Darkness’s jaw, “Wait, what the fuck happened to your face?”
“Dirk,” Darkness answered simply.
“ . . . I’ll fucking kill him,” Dex said mutinously.
“You’ll have to get in line,” Delilah said, apparently listening to their conversation.
“Maybe it can be a group effort. Our first real team-bonding exercise.” Darkness reached over and plucked the INVENTERA from Dex’s unresisting grip. “Also, new policy: ditch the INVENTERAS.”
“Why are we ditching the only weapons we have against the defekta?” Delilah asked.
They dumped Dex’s gun and the one they’d taken off Dirk into the trashcan beneath the counter. “We don’t need them. Derek?”
Derek looked for the FALSKA artificial plant that had led him and Darkness here. It had hung back from Dex and the customer service desk, but came over when Derek called it. “Would you mind helping us get to the VIP lounge?” he asked.
Dex wheeled back a couple steps as the FALSKA approached, but Darkness grabbed him by the wrist. “It’s fine, don’t be a baby about it,” they said.
“Hey, fuck you, I’m not a baby,” he spat. But he was still obviously nervous, allowing Darkness to pull him along by the wrist as they followed the FALSKA.
“So, is he like the defekta whisperer,” Dex said to Darkness in what he probably assumed was an undertone.
“It’s not really whispering,” Darkness answered. “It’s just talking.”
“And listening,” Derek said. “That’s the important bit.”
* * *
The VIP lounge was in a slightly sunken part of the sales floor—unconsciously urging customers down toward it while making it more difficult to leave. The flood that Derek had encountered early in the night had pooled in the lowest part of the sales floor, surrounding the VIP lounge with a moat. The emergency lights beneath it wavered, throwing up shifting reflections onto its walls.
The defekta surrounding the VIP lounge had quickly adapted to the aquatic environment. Derek stepped gingerly into the water, not out of distaste for the cold water flooding his boots, but because he was distracted by a school of small fish darting around his feet, cutting through the water with a silvery glint. One seemed to pause before him, investigating his waterlogged boots. Beneath the murky water, Derek made out the smooth bowl and gilt handle of a soup spoon, which had sprouted tiny, transparent fins. It darted away with the rest of the school of flatware when Derek took another step.
The adaptations were startling. Elsewhere in the store, the defekta were either quick and mobile, evolving lanky limbs capable of darting through the shadows, or large and slow, but normal-looking. Long, tuberous shoots had sprouted from an ornately carved chaise longue, and its velvet cushions were
covered with a Technicolor array of tiny, blooming flowers. Creatures floated through the water: sets of prestige water glasses and tumblers propelling themselves like jellyfish, an umbrella stand with a Lichtenstein print that Derek knew cost over a thousand dollars undulating through the mud.
Dex had his phone out again, training the camera on a series of plants floating on the surface of the water, bright green with deep purple veins and wide-mouthed yellow flowers. They bore a startling resemblance to one of the throw pillow designs. Some of the smaller electric NUMINÖS candles crouched atop them like toads, letting out small, reedy sounds.
“Del?” Darkness whispered. “Where are you?”
“Crouched behind an armoire. Be careful, that toilet is fully stealthed, I haven’t been able to get a bead on it.”
“It’s probably hiding because it doesn’t want to get shot again,” Derek said, annoyed.
Derek could hear the strains of Debussy, and the others soon picked it up as well: the distorted, dissonant version of “Clair de Lune,” notes stretched and eerie.
At least to their ears. The toilet wasn’t trying to scare them, Derek thought. It was only singing to keep itself company.
Derek thought back to their earlier encounter; it had come far out into the store, searching for something. Had it been lonely like Derek? Had it remembered him from the night before, when he’d been sick in it? That was embarrassing.
“Hi,” he said to the toilet. The piano hit a sour note and cut out as it realized Derek was speaking to it, fading into a guttural growl that radiated threat. The toilet was fully camouflaged, managing to hide in nothing but shadows. Derek could hear the smaller defekta around him scatter for their own hiding places.
“Derek, what are you doing?” Delilah hissed.
“I’m sorry about what happened earlier,” he said, ignoring Delilah. “I couldn’t understand you, and I was frightened. I’m sorry you got hurt.”
It was terrifying to speak so plainly; to give up all the quirks of speech and body language that Derek had used to disguise himself, make him seem smaller, less strange, less needy, less like he was swallowing down a scream.