We held each other as the blood crept across the floor.

  Jesse was shuddering, incoherent, suppressed sounds spitting between her teeth. I couldn’t feel my body, and yet I could, and I thought Jesse might crush me with the force of her devastation.

  “It needed to be done,” I said, hollowly.

  “I know,” she replied, her voice equally empty. Her eyes were dry. She examined the bloody knife in her hand as though wondering how it got there. “That was easy. Easier than some animals I’ve had to put down.”

  The blood ran low, pooling on the floor. Like a four-limbed creature, we ungracefully scooted backwards across the tiled floor, away from the advancing red. Gathering herself, Jesse stood, lifting me with her, and we walked slowly towards the throne room door. Was I helping her stand, or was she helping me?

  She smelt of exhaustion, and of woodsmoke and the roasted chestnuts they sold every autumn on the street, tempting me every evening on my way home from work. I would prop my bicycle against the nearest street sign and join the gaggle, gathered around the giant, hissing wok, watching the old vendor skilfully paddling the nuts and charcoal beads back and forth. If the night was especially cold, I was cycle away with the chestnut bag tucked down the front of my jumper, trying to get home before the heat grew too much and burnt my chest.

  Why did I think of that now, with Jesse’s weight, Jesse’s breath on me? Why did my chest burn?

  A storm was rolling in outside, the kind of storm that brings oppressive heat, huge grey clouds, and heavy, fat raindrops. Few but powerful.

  “I… wish this were over,” Jesse said softly.

  “Me too.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Yeah.”

  She hugged me suddenly, burying her face in my hair. I gripped her back as if I were about to fall.

  “If I die,” she began and I snapped, “You won’t die. You won’t die.”

  “If I die,” she repeated again, steadily, “there’s a lighter in a pocket inside my shirt. It can burn anything. Once you light it, the fire won’t stop for a hour. Take it.”

  “That –”

  “Mik Tsaam.” She levelled her dark brown eyes at me. “I’ll be dead. I won’t need it anymore. I hope you won’t ever need it either, but…”

  “What makes you think I’ll live longer than you?” I burst out.

  “I don’t,” she said plainly, and I felt weightless, untethered from my body. “I’m saying if.” But her eyes drifted from mine to the brilliant halo circling my head.

  I thought about the items that I had, about what I could leave for Jesse if I were the one to go first. But there was nothing. Everything that was useful was class-bound. She must have seen the distress on my face, because she said, “It’s alright. It’s alright, Mik Tsaam.”

  “It’s not. I hate this. I hate this so much.”

  There were sounds outside the palace. Raised voices, indistinct. The ring of metal and running people. We looked towards the window, seeing nothing but the incoming green clouds, our hands clasped.

  “We… We should go and…” I began. Instead, we stared sickly into the raging sky.

  A concerted shout went up. And another.

  Jesse’s hands became transparent. “They did it,” she laughed, shakily. “That’s… I’m…”

  It was just me and the lobby. My hands clenched thin air, but they were still damp.

  I checked the Kill Feed compulsively.

  There was no-one left to die, except five. Five players. Three scenarios.

  Would there even be anyone left in the end?

  I thought about the lighter in Jesse’s pocket.

  Had she told anyone else about it? It didn’t see that she was particularly close to any of the other players, but I thought of her calling Peach ‘cute’ in the Third Scenario…

  But Peach and Calvin…

  But then Calvin and I…

  I screamed aloud and ran a lap around the lobby, like an animal in a cage.

  Ah, what was the point? Why was I acting like this? Was I missing Tommy so much that I was desperately trying to fill his space with a new person to be my friend?

  Besides, when this whole thing ended, we would all go back to our ordinary lives, separate from each other, I at the administration desk at the university, Jesse in the forest with the kids she taught, with friends around her that I knew nothing of…

  Ordinary life. Could I even go back there?

  Could I walk back into the university, on campus with the trees swaying in the coastal breeze, surrounded by students living lives that knew nothing of the blood I’d seen, the things I had done or had been done to me, sorting papers and applications and –

  I flung myself through the eighth door like it was a window.

  I opened my eyes to a world underwater.

  A bright ocean greeted my eyes, a brilliant blue that I had never seen before. Rising up around me were hundreds of glowing jellyfish in incandescent columns, and I hung silent in their angelic presence, struck dumb with awe.

  Wait, no, I did recognise this blue.

  I was in an aquarium.

  And not only that – as I looked left and right at the glass columns stretching out in all directions – this was Ocean Park. In Hong Kong.

  I was home.

  If I just walked out the front gate, I could keep walking until I reached my apartment, couldn’t I? Who cared that it was tiny, that I really needed to find a new roommate soon or I would be broke, that the aunties who lived upstairs kept me awake every night with the crash of their mah-jeuk tiles and the children downstairs screamed all day? I would be home.

  It isn’t real, Mik Tsaam. You don’t exist in this version of the city.

  But what if… I just want to see…?

  I began to walk from the Sea Jelly Spectacular building, my walk speeding to a jog, jog to a run as I dodged people and lit-up columns of jellyfish in the dark. I could see the growing light where the entrance was.

  “Maria! Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  I almost crashed into a middle-aged man near the entrance. With a moustache and a genial smile, he steadied me as my eyes reached for the sunlight beyond the building. “It’s dangerous to run. Did something happen?”

  “Oh… that… I realised I left something… I left the iron on at home!”

  “Oh! Maria, it’s almost closing time – how long has it been on? Is there no-one at home who can turn it off? One of your neighbours? You said Madam Tang feeds your fish sometimes when you’re on holiday.”

  Madam Tang? Fish?

  “Here, I’ll sort it. I have her number from the time you were sick and she called me to let me know for you. You just relax, Assistant Manager!”

  Oh.

  This really isn’t home.

  “Why don’t you go back to the office and sit down for a moment?” He began to walk away, already pulling out his phone, and I followed in silence, stepping out of the fluorescent lights and dark shadows into a sunset spilling orange over the streets. He hopped into a little buggy and waited until I stepped into the passenger side, talking on the phone all the while.

  Driving between the park visitors created a little breeze that ruffled my hair as I leaned back again the seat, every part of my being crying out that I was home home if only I could just…

  How long had it been since had last visited Ocean Park? I had gone at ten years old with everyone, with Tommy and Calvin and Poppy and Rohan and Wai Meng. Calvin’s birthday. We had an icecream cake and watched the dolphin show, and Poppy got mobbed by so many pigeons after the crumbs from her pineapple bun that she dropped it and ran away crying.

  At fifteen, in the kind of indifferent casual way of teenagers that age, I went by myself on a day I was supposed to be at school, drinking taro milk tea in the stands of the seal show, chewing the tapioca pearls and relishing the pain in my cheek where Mother had hit me with the wooden spoon that morning. I had the hood of my sweater pulled down, but a seal waddled up the steps and planted a gentle, whiskery, salty kiss on my injured cheek, and it took everything I had not to throw my arms around its silky neck and cry.

  I was twenty when I last went, I think. Just Tommy and I. Poppy was on a date. Calvin was working. Lee Wai Meng was playing tennis or in a painting class or at a concert. Rohan had already begun to drift away.

  We ate egg waffles, chocolate-flavoured for me, traditional for Tommy, pulling each puff from the pastry and eating them separately, and drank yuen yeung, that particular mix of coffee and tea that would always be the taste of nostalgia for me.

  Tommy was already built like a panda then, a guy who couldn’t be small if he tried, and I was fresh from walking away from my mother for the first time, but not the last. How many times since then did I come back? How many times since then did I leave again?

  But for that magical afternoon, I was free, and my best friend sat next to me, looking out over the bay.

  “Let’s get you some tea,” my colleague said. “Madam Tang said she would look for you, since she has a spare key.”

  Parking the buggy, we walked up to the administration building.

  “Come on, come on,” my colleague urged me, and I hurried to the door, feeling unsteady as a passenger on a boat. My thoughts were finally catching up.

  Firstly, there were only three players connected. Me, Peach, and Calvin. Aside from cursing this horrible lineup, I wondered where the other three had gone.

  Secondly, this was the first time we were in a modern setting. At least it was a setting I could understand but –

  Thirdly, the number of bugs in this scenario were concerning. Not only was the scenario name extremely glitchy (I had read ‘Little Mermaid’ in there, right? But what was a ‘soul cage’?), but so was the name of the NPC beside me.

  And my tasks – souls in the water? What was a merrow? Was it also a typo, and I needed to help marrows? Vegetables???

  Anxiety was a pair of shackles around my ankles that made my steps drag and stumble. By the time I reached the break room, I was shaking and my colleague was repeatedly saying “Oh dear” and patting my back as he passed me some black tea, the yellow label of Liptons dangling over the edge of the mug.

  I could hear the sound of Hong Kong traffic in the distance, the horn of the ferry, and if I closed my eyes, everything would be fine.

  “Maybe you should go home after all, Maria,” the colleague with the glitchy name said. I opened my eyes and it seemed like I could see glitchy text all over his face, around his eyes and mouth. “It’s almost time to clock off, anyway,”

  I closed my eyes. “I wish I could.”