Lovely Darkness (Creeping Beautiful)

Sasha comes back from kid duty just as Cerene is getting ready to head to her room, and she lets out a little sigh, thinking she needs to go over everything again, but I put up a hand. “I got it. Go rest.”

“Got what?” Sasha asks.

“We’re gonna cover Cerene’s shift tonight so she can sleep. I’ll explain everything.”

Sasha doesn’t argue. “Don’t worry about a thing.” She soothes her with a calm smile.

Even though Cerene wasn’t looking all that tired when this whole idea started, I think the idea of sleep is growing on her. Because she gets the fuck out with nothing more than a smile and a nod.

“Well,” Sasha says. “Did you plan on getting us alone with him? Do we have diabolical schemes cooking? Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“No.” I wave my hand in the air. “This kinda just happened after Cerene told me Doc has more files on our patient here.” I point to the box of folders that Cerene brought me to look through. “It’s something else,” I say. “I had an idea in the kitchen.”

Sasha goes over to a little table with two chairs set up in the far corner and takes a seat. There are a few magazines and some word search and crossword puzzle books scattered around the center. She picks up a magazine and begins flipping through it. “Spill it, Merc. I’m all ears.”

“OK.” I take the second seat across from her and lean forward on the table. “But it’s gonna sound crazy.”

She rolls her eyes. “There is a man with a split personality in a makeshift hospital room over there. We’re staying in a giant mansion owned by secret shadow government assassins and the little girl I just put to bed needed to tell me where all the guns are stashed in the house just in case I needed them before she would go to sleep. I think I’ve heard it all by now.”

“Fine. You’re super hip and down with anything. How about this? What if…” I pause. Mostly to keep it dramatic, but also—I’m a little bit nervous about what she’ll think of this.

“What if what?” Sasha demands.

“What if we’re in the fuckin’ Matrix?”

She cocks her head at me. “Your big idea is that we’re in the Matrix?”

“No. Not exactly. But yeah.”

She laughs. “Merc—”

“Not like in the real Matrix, Sasha. But what if we’re involved in something, only we don’t know we’re involved?” She’s still cocking her head at me. “Eh? Right? You see it, right?”

“No. Sorry. You lost me.”

“We’re in the Matrix, only we don’t know we’re in the Matrix. What if, after all these years thinking we got out, we find out we never got out?”

Her eyes narrow. “Well. That’s… disturbing.”

“Right? What if there’s someone out there pulling our strings the same way we pulled other people’s strings?”

“The puppetmaster has a master.”

I point at her. “Exactly. All this time I thought I was Morpheus, but I’m Neo!”

“The puppetmaster is a puppet, with a puppetmaster.”

“Yes.”

“The puppet—”

“OK, enough with the puppets.”

“Got it. No more puppets or Matrix.” I open my mouth to say more but Sasha puts up a hand. “I’m playing with you.”

“I know.”

“I get what you’re saying. What if… the mindfuckers got to the mindfuckers?”

I nod.

After a couple seconds she says, “OK. Let’s look at this logically. If someone was mindfucking you, what are they getting out of it?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t like the idea that I’ve spent the last ten years thinking that me and my family were safe and now I come to find out we weren’t. They played us.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Merc. This is a thought experiment. If they did play us, and we’ve done things… according to their plan, all the while thinking it was our plan, then what is the endgame?”

I point to the table. “This, Sasha. This is the endgame.”

“This room, these people… which part of this are you referring to?”

We both look over at Donovan. “Him,” I say. “He’s the endgame. I mean, what are the chances, Sasha? That we all end up here in this house, with this… whatever he is—”

“Well.” She cuts me off with a sigh. “Here’s something I haven’t thought about in like… twenty years.”

“I’m almost afraid to hear what comes next.”

She squints her eyes. Like she’s thinking deeply. “I do have a point of reference for what you’re describing. Back when I was little—like maybe nine? Ten? Back when I was still the daughter of a Company arms dealer, I remember this one time when a group of men came into the antique mall. My dad went white. I’m talking… sheets, OK? I didn’t have my booth across the aisle back then. I was just hanging out, right? So I was close.”

“What kind of guys were they? Like assassins?”