Jinny crumbled. She breathed out shakily, then back in, her eyes glassy and moist. For a moment, the decorative robes and bulbous wand faded away, and all I saw was the scared person beneath it. Only, unlike me, she wasn’t scared of the system killing her or putting her in a situation she couldn’t handle. Jinny was scared of something else. She looked to the side and ran the sleeve of her robe across her face.

Talia pressed her head into Jinny’s side and glared at me as if I’d done something unforgivable.

“Nick doesn’t even know you’re sick, does he?”

Jinny shook her head fervently. “No. And he doesn’t need to.”

Ordinarily, I’d agree. That it was her business and no one else’s. But Nick had grown this attached to her in less than a week. Maybe that was unfair—maybe their friendship had been deeper than I’d realized previously—but it was still a massive structural flaw in a team that had seemed otherwise solid.

Jinny slapped her face suddenly with both hands, the impact loud enough to startle Talia. “Stop it. Stop crying, you idiot.”

I considered her situation. That hadn’t been able to pick up on it, alongside the volatility of this reaction. She must have buried it deep. Repressed it, potentially. “I get wanting to be strong. I’ve… had to be. For as long as I can remember. You get better at it. But there’s always a breaking point, where you can’t hold the despair back anymore. And once that levee breaks, you really need to talk to someone.”

“And who does the stoic, enigmatic Matt talk to?” Jinny asked. Her question was a barbed challenge. She was understandably irritated, probably expecting me to dodge the question.

“Therapists, mostly.” I answered point-blank.

When we could afford them.

“Oh,” Jinny said. She looked simultaneously nervous and crestfallen, as if she’d wanted to talk about this for some time, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Finally, she spoke again. “I went to the doctor to talk over… options, because of something unrelated. The most straightforward possibility was a surgery. I was really torn because it wasn’t an easy choice. If I didn’t do it, my entire life would have been torn apart. And if I did it, the result was something that wasn’t so easy to live with. There was all this pressure from both sides, from my parents—god, even from the doctors themselves. They act all indifferent, you know? But they always have an opinion. And they push it on you, only instead they frame it as ‘what’s best for you.’ All throughout the process, the one thing I was hanging onto was, at least I had a choice. That it was my decision, and no one else’s.” A dark bitterness seeped into her voice.

“Until it wasn’t,” I prompted.

Jinny smiled, still staring at the ground. “It was like cringing at the price of taking your car in for maintenance, only to find out both the engine and transmission are shot. When the clinic was doing my initial labs, they found something irregular. A murmur in my heart. A few referrals later, my biopsy results came back. Giant Cell Myocarditis. The bogeyman of all autoimmune diseases.”

“How bad?”

“Four, five months? If we did nothing. Even then, that elective surgery, that choice was made for me. Too much strain on my body otherwise. After that, they put me on the transplant list, but even before, I was looking at waiting up to a year. But there was a chance I’d get lucky.”

I considered my experience. My smoke inhalation and broken ribs that had miraculously repaired themselves. “And there’s no chance that being a User fixed any of this? The way it fixed Nick’s leg?”

Jinny’s smile grew brittle. “I had hoped. But no. I still have the same heart palpitations, along with a handful of other symptoms they told me to watch out for. And given everything that’s going on?” Jinny waved her hand, indicating the dungeon and the world beyond. “Safe to assume the transplant isn’t going to happen.”

Don’t be so sure.

There were still plenty of doctors, plenty of surgeons. And if the transposition event and subsequent happenings were anywhere near as bad as I suspected they would be, there would be plenty of newly emancipated hearts to go around.

It was a perilously dark thought, too dark to share.

“So, when you stepped off the platform…” I trailed off.

“When he found me in those tunnels? Nick led me out of the dark in more ways than one. He was so happy, so confident. He had so many hopes for the future. I guess it inspired me.” Jinny gave me a bittersweet look. “Maybe it’s naïve, but I always wanted to do something big with my life. I spent the month before the meteor grieving that it would never happen. That the most notable thing I’d ever achieve was dying alone in a hospital room. When I saw my title, and what it was giving me, at first, I felt cheated—and then I realized it was a chance. An opportunity to make a difference. Using that chance to save someone with a lot more time than me… well, it felt like as good an opportunity as any.”

Jinny didn’t seem to fully understand how valuable she was. In the short term, she was a powerhouse, sure, but in the long term? She’d be unstoppable. I pushed myself up to my feet carefully, flexing my muscles and tilting my body to see if there was any stiffness left. Once satisfied, I looked down at her.

“Okay. I’m not going to tell Nick—”

“Thank you!” Her worried expression was replaced with relief.

I stuck out a finger at her. “You need to. Sooner rather than later. We’ll try to find a solution, but he gets easily attached. If the worst happens, and he doesn’t know it’s coming, it’ll destroy him.”

Jinny tilted her head. “I doubt it’s that serious. I like Nick, but from what I know of his… dating habits… he probably sees us as a fling more than anything else. Which is fine.”

I shook my head. After Nick busted his leg, that might have been true. He went through something of a desperate phase, where he was endeavoring to prove he could still charm the pants off anything with two legs and a pair of X chromosomes. But he wasn’t the same person now. And he seemed far more invested in Jinny than in anyone I’d ever seen him with.

“Maybe, but you were his friend first. That matters to him more than anything else.”

Jinny grinned at me smugly. “You said ‘we.’”

“What?”

“Nick didn’t think you’d stick around for long. Figured he’d help you out with the User status, we’d stick together for a while, and you’d probably go on your way. But you just said that we’d try to find a solution to the problem. You’re thinking long term.”

More annoying than her smugness was the fact that I’d done it almost entirely subconsciously. Even now that I was actively thinking about it, it didn’t seem so bad. Nick, with his flashy, royal class would steal the spotlight, providing me with plenty of cover to operate undetected. And maybe—just maybe—there was a part of me that was tired of doing things on my own.

“Possibly,” I admitted. “But let’s just get through this trial in one piece first, yeah?” I held out my hand for Jinny to grasp and helped her to her feet. I went back and forth on whether to say anything more. To warn her not to throw her life away, simply because she valued others more than herself. In the end, I remained silent.

“Back in the first combat room, when the four of us were together…” Jinny started.

I froze.

“I saw nothing,” Jinny said. “I’m just happy Sae is okay.”

A safe rule of thumb is that two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them is dead. Normally, this would break that rule. I’d planned to blame the incident on but if she’d decided to bury it, there was no reason to over-explain.

Talia heeled at my side, looking between the two of us.

“You are playing a dangerous game.” She mentally whispered.

“I thought you liked Jinny.”

“That is why it is dangerous.”

I ignored Talia, and after ensuring that everyone was ready, pushed the door open. It led to a circular elevator that dropped straight down as soon as we’d all set foot on it.