Focus

Day 5

Cause of Death

The fourth day had ended before Sara could run out of the city, which seemed to be exactly what she wanted to do. Today, however, she took on a different countenance. The sadness she had expressed over the loss of Mark and Evan was nothing compared to the expression on her face at that moment. She was sitting on the side of the road, turned away from me, and with no intention to look at me. I felt horrible, namely because all I could think of is what our Game Master hadn’t said about Sara. I’d wanted to hear it, which was terrible of me. She was distressed, and I had no idea how to help her. I wasn’t meant for this, to be the helpful type, I had never been cut out for it. What was I supposed to do?

“Umm…” I said as I approached her. “Are you alright?”

Sara shrugged it off. “I’m fine.”

Okay, now what?

I suddenly realized just then why I wasn’t as freaked out as I was supposed to be. This Sara, collected and quiet, was the same Sara I had seen at practice each day. This was the Sara that I was used to. I’d always been fine with her then, I should just be fine with her now. I wasn’t though. I’d seen a change in her over the past few days, and to see her sink into that girl I knew… it was painful.

I clenched my fists, I wanted to scream in the air. What was I supposed to do? Couldn’t someone just tell me how in the world I was supposed to get her out of this rut? Our lives were on the line here, she couldn’t be like this, but I was being no help at all.

Fortunately, the mission mail distracted me.

“Ignite love at the Gateway. You have 300 minutes, fail and face erasure—The Reapers,” I read.

We both winced as the timer appeared.

“Ignite love at the Gateway?” I asked. “What sort of mission is that?”

“A stupid one,” Sara muttered, still sitting on the curb.

“Right,” I said. “So… should we…”

She got up without a word, and still I didn’t get the chance to see her face. Wordlessly I followed behind her, but there was something strange about this day. First of all, it was late in the evening. Perhaps this was to help us with our mission. Most young couples came to the Gateway at night, it was a good date scene. So… what exactly were we supposed to do? Ignite love. The thought was beginning to stir into my mind. This mission, this was unethical if it consisted of what I thought.

“Want past this wall?”

Sara had gotten a hundred feet ahead of me, she was already at one of those wall Reapers and demanding passage. I quickly ran to catch up to her. I still couldn’t see her face though, she was positioned in the perfect angle as to avoid my eye contact.

“Erase these Noise,” said the Reaper.

He called down a few symbols, and before I could get the chance to look at Sara we were engaged and she was on the other plane. I looked to see the shark Noise and a few wolf Noises. Great. Still, I wasn’t about to get bested by these things again. No Jim around to save us, this was entirely on me.

But then it hit me.

I could barely feel Sara. If we had been in perfect synch the other afternoon, we had made a complete turnaround today. The feeling was incredible, I felt totally helpless without that feeling of intimacy. She had been a part of my soul in each fight up until now, and now I felt completely alone. Could I fight like this?

I didn’t have a choice. I had to fight, but it was more difficult than any other fight up to this point. Sure the shark Noise were frightening with one bite spelling erasure, but I kept fighting. It looked as though I was tossing paperclips at them. I don’t know how long the fight took, but much longer than it should have. I was about ready to give up the ghost when the Noise vanished into thin air at my hand. I looked at the timer to see it had taken almost ten minutes. Far too long to erase a few Noise.

“Wall clear,” said the wall Reaper as he walked away. “Here, take a few of these for completing the challenge.”

He tossed us some more pins. They each had different images, and no doubt different psychs. I wasn’t going to complain about upgrading our repertoire, but it wasn’t the pins that were on my mind. Sara was already taking off through the Gateway. This was it, we couldn’t do this anymore.

“What’s your deal!” I yelled at her as I ran to catch up with her.

I grabbed her shoulder and turned her around, expecting to see tears. There was nothing on her face. It was that same placid expression that she had always wore at practice. The expression said she was perfectly fine, just normal, but now I knew that face was a lie. How many months had there been something there that we hadn’t seen? She could have been suffering and no one would have been the wiser.

“What?” she asked, annoyed.

“There’s something wrong with you, you’ve been acting weird since yesterday,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she replied as she turned away.

I stopped her again. “No you’re not! Don’t do this, why are you always doing this?”

“Always doing what?” Sara turned to me. “How the hell am I supposed to know how I act when I don’t have all of my memory? How am I supposed to feel, why am I supposed to fight when I can’t even remember who I am?”

Her anger startled me, but to tell the truth, I was pissed. “You are infuriating! You always have been. Each day you come to practice and act like you’re above everything, like nothing in the world can touch you, but you’re a liar! You put up this face and push the rest of the world out just because you feel a little down? Damn it Sara, I want to help you. You’re my partner, and I trust you, but how am I supposed to trust you when you’re keeping all of these things from me? I can’t do this, you have to help me help you.”

“Well, you can’t,” Sara turned away. “So let’s just go do this mission and get this week over with.”

I stopped her again, and this time, angry, she slapped me for it. There we stood, her in shock at her own action and me stunned by the stinging pain in my now red cheek. I shrugged, waved my hands and turned away. I was done. So I didn’t get a shot at life, to be honest, I didn’t even think we would make it until day five, but that isn’t what irritated me the most. I had seen a new side of Sara, and it was like she had just died. The GM had killed her yesterday, and I was left with the same sour girl I had always known, and that killed me. If she was lost, then I had nothing left to fight for, no reason to keep up this struggle.

Good grief, I was actually starting to care about her.

“Jared,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Sara walked around me and looked at my face. She slapped me, it was nothing serious, and yet girls always had to do this. Examine the injury, that motherly instinct. I didn’t think Sara had that in her. She touched my cheek, and I could then see a change in her. Eyes swollen with tears, and she blinked hard to fight them back, but they fought through.

“I’m sorry too,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said those things. It’s just that I don’t know what my entry fee is, I don’t know if I have anything worth fighting for, but seeing you here… Sara, you’re so different than in the RG. I want you to have that second chance.”

I guess it was the wrong thing to say, she immediately started bawling.

“I don’t deserve that second chance,” Sara said as she turned away, and she started walking in circles as she spoke. “Jared, I don’t know what you meant to me, and… oh what does it matter? You shouldn’t be fighting for me to get that second chance because I don’t deserve it. I died in a car accident…”

“I think you mentioned it,” I said.

“I walked out in front of the car.”

My eyes widened. “You what?”

“I hated myself!” Sara said. “Not just that, I hated the world. I hated everything… I didn’t want to be in the world anymore. Yesterday with that guy… I tell you, if he hadn’t been in the RG and me in the UG I would’ve erased him myself! His mind, he was completely playing that girl. She did something sort of dumb, thinking he was cheating, which he was, but he managed to cover it and make her think she was wrong. Then he toyed with her to get her to plead to take him back for sex. It was utterly disgusting!”

I could feel it. There was hate just emanating from her. Hate and pain and rage, but underneath it all was sadness and heartache.

“Someone treated you like that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Some guy, some idiot, but he made me think he was more than that. I believed him, until I caught him making out with another girl. Ever since that day, my eyes have been opened. I saw men as callous beings… I hated them. I just could never bring myself to ever fall into that same trap again, but everyone was trying to push me into it. I just couldn’t handle the stress anymore, the demands made on me because I’m a girl.

“I felt trapped,” she sat down. “All of my friends telling me to get into a relationship, but every fiber of my being telling me to avoid people. Then, coming here, realizing my most valuable possession… was you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think. I was done. I wanted to die, and now here you are risking your existence to save someone that doesn’t want to be saved. I’m sorry… I just don’t want to go back!”

Sara sat down on the street, trying to brush the tears from her eyes. She cursed as they kept coming, and I took a seat next to her. I didn’t know what to think. Neither of us really wanted to live, should we try?

We should, or she should. She had a made a change here, and her life in the RG could be better because of it.

“Look at us,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders, trying my best to be comforting and not aggravating. “Both a couple of morons thinking that dying would be better than living. I think I know the purpose of this game though. They toy with us, they make us think that life isn’t worth living to divide the weak from the strong. There is a victory for those that win, but I doubt anyone ever wins due to the fact that they are just like us. They question themselves, and then they give up.”

I stood up. “Sara, you’ve changed here, and maybe I have too. We just gotta keep going. When we come back to life, we can change it all. We have the power to do it, and we can’t give up just yet. Come on. I want to find out what was important to me, will you help me, Sara?”

She brushed the tears from her face. “I guess I can,” she stood up and laughed. “I guess if you were my entry fee, I should be willing to put forth the effort for you. I just… lost sight, and if you hadn’t helped me find out what my entry fee was, I may never have found it.”

Yet another awkward moment.

“Well, these young couples aren’t going to ignite with love themselves,” Sara said. “Time to play matchmaker.”

“How do we do that?” I asked.

“First of all, I think we need some phrases for imprinting,” Sara said. “Come on, let’s scan as many people as we can and see if we can’t pick up anything that will get saved to our phones.”

This change in Sara took me by surprise. She was really ready to take charge, and I was more than willing to follow. Certainly enough, we found our phone nearly exploding with all of the messages we were able to save by picking them from people’s minds. Now we just had to use these messages to make people fall in love, which was just wrong. Still, what else could we do?

“So, we just start matching up our words to people’s thoughts?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Sara said. “There’s music playing all around the Gateway, we need to make the appropriate mood music. I think we have a few messages that we can use to change the music. That way, when we imprint, the message is more likely to stick if the mood is right. Otherwise they just might ignore it.”

She certainly had this all figured out. For a girl that despised men, she seemed to be in quite the romantic mood. So, we did exactly what she said. Found the guys in charge of the music, got it changed to something more moody. Next on the list, change the trends. We could keep track of the trends on our phones, and we needed to change them to some more mood appropriate threads.

There was nothing more amazing than watching our work unfold. People flocked to stores, changed their clothes, suddenly the air was filled with romantic tunes. The scene was set up and all we had to do now was due the fine tuning. Really, it was all a matter of mix and match. Some girl has a thought of what she wants her guy to do, and then we pop that thought into his head, BAM. Instantaneous romance. It was almost how sickening some of these people acted. Scenes cut straight from a movie, and we were the ones making them.

The couples began to pair up, but was it working? We had yet to lose our timers, so there had to be more. Just how many couples did we have to set up in order to beat this mission?

“What more?” I asked. “We’ve got love bursting out of every single teenage couple here.”

“There’s one we haven’t.”

I looked around and noticed one girl we had yet to touch, and no doubt for good reason. It was Megan Ririe, Sara’s friend. This was terrible. Did we actually have to influence our friends in order to complete this mission?

“We have to do it,” I said. “That guy she’s with, that’s the one she likes?”

Sara nodded.

“Let’s get to work.”

“No.”

“What?” I turned to her. “We have to… I mean, it’s just one.”

“I just mean not that guy,” Sara said. “I read his mind… she wouldn’t like him if she knew what I had seen.”

“You want us to get her to fall in love with some guy from scratch?” I asked.

“Yup, I got him picked out,” Sara pointed to a guy. “I think that guy will do her nicely,” she turned to me. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I was just staring at her. “That’s disgusting. Totally manipulating your friend’s feelings.”

“You have a better idea?”

I shrugged. “I just know we don’t have a lot of time, working with a guy she doesn’t even know. We have thirty minutes left. We can’t really afford to take unnecessary risks.”

Sara smiled. “You’ll help me right?”

Trust your partner.

I sighed. “I’m with you.”

First mission of the night: break Megan away from the guy she is with. I felt totally sadistic popping things into both Megan and the guy’s mind to try and coerce them to part ways, at least until I read his mind. I was slightly more cooperative after that. When you’re on the cross country team, your fellow teammates are like your family. No one messes with your teammates or else they mess with all of them, no matter if you hang out or only see each other at practice.

I’ll tell you, it was entertaining. The moment he began to “accidentally” pop out these rather suggestive thoughts, Megan’s face took on an entirely new look. I doubted we would get to keep our game phones when we came back to life, but that didn’t stop me from taking a picture of it. I’m telling you, priceless. Like the veil had been pulled from her eyes and she was seeing this despicable creature for the first time. And so, we managed to split Megan apart from her man, but this brought up a problem. Girls that have their hearts crush typically do not want to go running into another man’s arms… usually, but we had to make it happen. We didn’t need to make them fall in love, we just needed them to ignite love within the Gateway.

Sara was already working on the guy. Taking a quick glance of his mind, he had already noticed Megan, but he had also noticed she was with someone. He had some rather complex thought processes, and I pitied Sara for her process. It was interesting to see her work though. He noticed that Megan had drawn away from the guy, a little disgusted, and she was brooding as she walked around. The only reason she wasn’t on the phone calling for a ride was due to my imprinting, but the guy, man, he had the thought to go talk to her but felt as though he would come off wrong by talking to her right after that blowup. And thus, Sara began to persuade him otherwise. Stroke a person’s ego just enough and you can get them to do anything, and certainly Sara armed him with the words to win over her friend, even if just for a moment.

“Now we just enjoy the show,” Sara said as we stood back and watched. There was a grin on her face.

“So what’s going to happen here? He gets her number, they walk away, and we die because they didn’t ‘ignite’?” I asked.

“I wasn’t aiming for a phone number situation,” Sara grinned. “Just watch.”

I did, and it shocked me probably as much as Megan or this other guy. A spontaneous kiss, and yet you could see Megan’s face light up as well as the excitement in his eyes. Another movie scene, Sara had done it. Literally. My timer was gone at that kiss, and I wouldn’t be surprised if all of our work prior to this point had been useless compared to this moment. This time, as Megan was leaving the mall and calling for a ride, you could see she was walking on air as though she was floating on cloud nine. He looked as though he had just won the Kentucky derby.

“That definitely beat just getting a number,” I said.

Sara smiled. “I’ve seen enough chick flicks to know what works.”

“So, a girl that doesn’t care about love has spent her life investigating it?” I asked.

Her smile dropped a bit, but then it came back stronger. “If something such as love does exist, I want to know it when I see it.”

“You gotta live to do that.”

She nodded. “I know. I still feel like crap, throwing away my life on a whim, but maybe I needed it. I needed to lose what I value most in order to know what to do with my life.”

I smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Are you ready to live again?” Sara asked.

“Ready? No, but since when have I been ready for anything in my life,” I replied. “I doubt I’ll be ready in two days time, but I’m going to do it.”

“Me too,” Sara said. “If nothing more than to see the expression on our Game Master’s face when she no doubt set these missions up to break us.”

I smiled, and then we just watched the evening unfold around us. Everyone was in a dazed mood, romance floating in the air. The GM had certainly made us turn this into a romance novel. In a way it was sickening, but in a way it was enjoyable to see. Our mission involved doing something good for people, or at least Sara had made it into doing something good for someone. There were good sides to this game, and maybe more than we were seeing.

“Day hasn’t ended,” Sara said. “I guess the Game Master is going to bask in our masterpiece a little longer.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

She turned to me. “Come on, dance with me.”

I shot her a dark look. “Don’t get cute.”

“Can’t help it,” she smiled. “Come on, one dance isn’t going to kill you.”

“Ha. Ha,” I rolled my eyes. Then I held out a hand. “you better not be expecting me to be a good dancer.”

“You’re a runner, you’re just worried about keeping on your feet right?” she said. “I don’t expect anything more.”

And so we shared a dance to the music. We were in the middle of a crowd and yet completely alone, no one could see us. It wasn’t horrid, not unpleasant, and I actually had a little fun. We had made it this far, we might as well enjoy our victory for now. The GM would no doubt try to steal that from us later, but we were ready. Our minds were set, and we were in synch. Nothing was going to stop us from winning this game.