JoshuaCole374
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Chapter 77: Trust
🕑 Added 2023-11-28 13:00:06 +0000 UTC“So you did know,” Lena said.
Erin blinked. “I –”
“Right from day one.” Lena squared her shoulders. “You knew it was real.”
“It was such a small change, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of it being an error in measurement, or that my thermometer connected to my phone somehow, or...” Erin backed up against the blinds. When they rattled, she jumped.
“But that’s not,” Lena said, “what you believed.”
She hadn’t raised her voice or charged across the room, but her level steps had brought her nose to – well, chin – with Erin.
I stepped forward to – what?
Not for the first time, I thought Lena might be going too far, but not that she was wrong.
Donica spared me having to decide by physically wedging herself between Lena and Erin. “Does it matter? We all know what the situation is now.”
“I think it kinda does.” I winced at the sound of my own voice.
Erin and Donica both looked at me. One scrunched in on herself, the other leaned forward with a glare. I’ll let you guess which was which.
“Certainly,” Miguel said, “it paints your apology in the hospital in a different light.”
“Hospital?” Zhizhi murmured.
“I’m sorry!” Erin bowed her head. “You’re right. I... won’t say I believed Third Eye was real from the outset, but I wanted to. Wanted it badly enough that I couldn’t trust my findings.”
I leaned back. Willing to let it go.
Lena wasn’t. “Okay, but that’s not a reason not to tell anybody. It’s a reason to tell people you’re not sure.”
“Like you have?” Donica asked.
Lena’s head tilted. “I’m not the one out here asking Zhizhi to sign NDAs.”
“But you’re the one with the channel,” Donica said. “You could share the demonstration you just gave us with, effectively, the entire Third Eye playerbase. Shall I look forward to that video?”
Lena averted her eyes. They passed over me and I reached out to her, but she looked beyond to where Bernie stirred in his pet bed.
“She’s right,” Erin said. “I’ve given you no reason to trust me. You shouldn’t trust me. I didn’t think anybody would get hurt. But, even if I had, I don’t know if I would have risked the game being shut down.”
“I forgive you,” Miguel said.
Erin’s head tilted.
“Once again, it is –” He chuckled. “– water under the bridge.”
“How can you of all people say that?” she asked.
“I, of all people, am in a position to. Of everyone here, it sounds like Cameron and Donica are the others who had an unpleasant experience with Third Eye. Perhaps they feel differently?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen enough of what Third Eye does, good and bad. It doesn’t matter why it’s important to you, I trust that it’s a good reason.”
Donica put on a smile. Erin glanced back at her.
And Donica hesitated.
I got it. If Miguel had asked me the same question when the last thing I’d done in Third Eye was visit the construction site, my answer might’ve been different.
Donica obviously cared a lot about supporting Erin, but I didn’t think she’d confronted how much Erin had known – how much Erin could’ve told her – until just now.
“I understand better now how you feel about this game.” Donica picked her words like she was disarming a bomb. “We’ll have to talk about that while I drive you home.”
Erin swallowed.
“Whether I think it’s a good thing or not,” Donica said, “you know I have your back. If you had told me from the outset, I think I would’ve tried to stop you from playing because it would sound deranged. After tonight – and the other night – I don’t know what to think about it.”
“That’s the central point,” Joon Woo said.
I’d sort of forgotten he was part of the conversation.
Erin tilted the tablet so she could look down at him, and the rest of us looked his way as well.
“If the first thing I heard from you was that Third Eye was actual magic,” he said, “I wouldn’t have heard a second thing. It’s an absurd claim.”
Slowly, Erin nodded.
“There was a point where you probably should’ve told the team,” he said. “After you had our trust, but before anyone got hurt.”
She flinched.
“But I’ll be damned if I know when that was,” he said. “Without a demonstration like tonight, it probably would’ve just made the rest of us worry about you getting too into the game.”
“Even so,” Erin said, “I can’t ask all of you to keep trusting me.”
“Hey.” Lena reached out.
Erin blinked at her outstretched hand. Slowly, she raised her own and let Lena clasp it.
“You didn’t ask,” Lena said. “I did, and you answered. That’s good enough. They don’t call it trust because you know the other person’s telling the truth, that’s just knowledge. Trust is when you have to believe it.”
Erin stared at her hand in both of Lena’s. Her shoulders trembled. She whispered, “What did it feel like, when you got your Reactant?”
“Honestly? That was like the tenth craziest thing running through my head at the time.”
“It feels like you’re transfigured,” Joon Woo said. “Like you become your avatar.”
“So you felt it, too,” Erin said.
“At the time, I dismissed it as a consequence of the sound quality,” he said.
“Same here,” I said. “It felt so real, I told myself I had to be imagining it.”
“I didn’t,” Erin whispered.
She looked down at the tablet in her hands. Sighed.
Donica touched her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this. It’s none of their business.”
“It’s ridiculous that I’m pretending like it’s some big secret, Donica.” Erin shrugged her hand away. “It’s been fun. Being me, with people who don’t know better. But it’s selfish. More, it’s ridiculous. Anyone in this room has enough information about me to know after Google search.”
Behind me, Zhizhi made a little humming sound.
Erin squeezed her eyes shut. “The moment I got my Reactant was the first moment I ever felt comfortable in my body.”
A lot of things clicked. Why her voice sounded like it came from a speech coach’s studio. Why she’d dressed androgynously except when she was going to what she’d expected to be a private party. Why she didn’t want people poking into her business. Why she seemed so pleased by compliments to her avatar, and uncomfortable at compliments to her. Why her avatar looked so much more different than anyone else’s that I’d seen.
What Third Eye had offered to put that contented smile on her face.
If I did that Google search she talked about, I wouldn’t find social media pages for Erin Marshall. I’d find them for Aaron Marshall.
Lena squeezed Erin’s hand again. “That’s... a lot of trust.”
Erin tried to find a place to look that wasn’t at any of us, but our apartment was too small.
Lena spread her arms. “Hug it out?”
Erin looked up sharply. She swallowed. I felt like an idiot for not putting it together when I’d seen her Adam’s apple bob before, and like an asshole for noticing it now.
Her voice was almost inaudible. “Yes, please.”
Lena hugged her. Donica patted her shoulder. I stepped forward, and when Erin flicked a glance at me and gave a little nod, I put an arm around each of her and Lena’s backs. Miguel joined us last, wrapping us all up.
A laugh bubbled out of Erin’s throat. “Now we really must look like a huddle.”
Lena groaned. “One. Track. Mind.”
That got the five of us laughing.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Zhizhi leaned against the counter. She raised a foam cup of coffee in toast. “I don’t think I’m a close enough friend to join the group hug.”
“We’ll have to work on that,” Erin said.
Now it was Zhizhi’s turn to laugh. “Loving the optimism. Seriously, though. If you need your name kept out of anything to feel safe, that’s no problem for me. That’s not part of the broader agreement, it stands as long as you want it to.”
“Thank you.” Erin tried to give a little bow, which didn’t work with all of us clumped together.
Lena backed off to let her do it, and that seemed to be the cue to break the huddle. I gave Erin’s shoulder one last squeeze, then stepped back alongside Lena and laced my fingers through hers.
Donica backed against the blinds and ran her fingers through her swept back hair. An even better big sis than I’d realized. I wondered how many other ways I’d misjudged her over the years.
Miguel was the last to step back. When all of us were out of the way, he took Erin’s hand in Lena’s place. “You were wrong about one thing.”
She looked up sharply.
“It was not selfish,” he said.
“To put people in danger?”
“To wish to feel like yourself.” He tugged her hand upwards like he was going to offer to kiss it.
She yanked it back. Pressed it to her chest and looked down at it. Murmured, “Thanks.”
Looking down also put her eyes on the tablet. I saw her bite her lip.
“I agree, of course,” Joon Woo said. With the way Erin held the tablet, I couldn’t see his face, but I thought there was a tension in his voice I hadn’t heard before.
Erin certainly seemed to think so. The smile we’d put on her face faltered. I was pretty sure she had a crush on him; a few of the things I’d seen in the Discord had suggested the interest might be mutual. If his interest was in her avatar, not her, where did that put them?
She said, “I should’ve told you.”
“Whether it’s about Third Eye or yourself,” he said, “how much you tell has always been your choice.”
Maybe we’d both imagined the tension?
No, because he continued. “I do want to make one thing clear, though.”
My eyes narrowed. I felt Lena’s shoulders tense. I saw Donica’s jaw clench.
“What you felt when you got your Reactant,” Joon Woo said. “That’s a lot more intense than a change of clothes or hair. Or a thermometer rising a few degrees.”
Erin nodded. “Yes.”
“If Third Eye can make you feel like yourself?” he said. “That’s fantastic.”
She bobbed her head.
“If it can make you be yourself,” he said, “if it can change your body that fundamentally, at first for a moment but I assume you’re hoping for more than that?”
Another bob. Hesitant this time. None of us spoke.
“That’s also fantastic, for you, as far as it goes.”
Lena put her hand on her hip, which might have emphasized her words more if the tablet had been turned so he could see her. “Exactly. What’s your point?”
“It’s also,” Joon Woo said, “fucking terrifying.”
