The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  And so, before I even open my eyes, I feel Yesi’s hands upon me, hands that feel like no more than a filled sack of cloth, and I know that I never died from that blow to my neck, for I have no healthy flesh to be split, and more important, no cell of mine was ever alive.

  A groan rips through me as I process this new craving, this craving to possess flesh, and it shocks me, this overpowering hunger to be concrete in the way that Angel must be, somewhere. Angel. Where is his body? If only I could take his hand, his hand of skin and blood and bone. I wake beside a red-eyed Yesi, flattening a damp cloth on my forehead. I feel at my neck, and she swats my hand away.

  “It’s healed,” she says curtly. She bites her lip and releases it, blood flowing back. “He’s a devil. They’re all devils—the lot of them.”

  And our only damn salvation, I think to myself. These foolish and fortunate flesh bags masquerading as ghosts. But I must be careful. How maddening that I must play their game now myself, especially if not much time is left.

  We walk alongside the sickbeds as we make sense of our reality. Rain crashes against the closed shutters with fresh fury. The girls are beautiful when they sleep; they look so close to waking, so full of that youthful, ruddy-cheeked health, that I find myself trying to rouse them again and again, only for them to bat the air around me impatiently, still sleeping deeply, as if to banish me from their fairy queendom.

  Diana, her halo of chestnut hair cresting along the pillow’s ridges, dazzling in candlelight, her arms framing her head in silent exaltation. Christina, the only girl to speak in days—she whispers imperatives in her sleep, sometimes chortling, with a single bitten finger nestled on her cheek.

  Mariella’s eyelashes, these minky, coquettish fringes of ebony, brush her rounded cheeks, the palest pink. She smiles often, her ropes of braided hair draped loosely around her neck. Sara, a rascal even in sleep, her pale lips curled into a smirk, her skinny arms in their navy sleeves crossed at the delicate wrists and facing the sky, pale green streams of veins lacing beneath her skin.

  Silvina, more relaxed than she ever was awake, nuzzling her pillow, slipping half off the bed, bracelet dripping charms and tinkling as she breathes. Gisella, a goddess, coral lips parted, a crown of blond hairs alive around her temples, and an assured warmth chiseled on her face, her horrors nothing but old nightmares now.

  And there’s Isabella, who reaches for a lost Luciana even in sleep, to coddle her, to protect her, to console her. I can’t know which, because Luciana has been gone for a long while.

  Michelle, too—the first to go under: the seams of her lids so finely drawn and curved by a loving artist, the same stripe of blond through her mussed hair—an angel’s finger. And the same contented, round face. Michelle, who has gem stickers on her earlobes. Michelle, who has her two palms pressed together on her chest, as if in prayer. I find myself still wanting to ask where she’s from, what kind of trick this is, why she looks like her. But I don’t, because I know why now.

  “Fake,” I spit. “Not real flesh. Constructed from numbers. Imagined by a man.” The craving flows through me once more: I must find a body. I must find a body to truly live. Because you can only live if you can die. It’s the certainty of an end that defines living as a precarious state. Isn’t that so? And I’ve learned that the most beautiful and important parts of existence are the most transient.

  Yesi watches me. “But why are they asleep and regenerating, while we remain awake and miserable, conscious of our fate? What are we doing wrong?” Her face falls, exposing a grief that is jarring to view. “Why isn’t this game’s magic working for us? Why are we forced to remain a pale copy of our true selves?” Her eyes are crimson, the pain in them raw. “Are we waiting, waiting, waiting for the next boat to come in, for our makers to hit refresh and decide to lavish us with some more color?” She shakes her head. “We don’t own our designs.”

  “No,” I whisper back, sheltering her small hands. “But that’s not the point.”

  Yesi’s eloquence and wisdom astonish me—she’s so attuned to what’s been happening all along. But she gives up too easily. We don’t want to be regenerated by another person—a sadist dooming us to reliving this over and over. We don’t want that, and we can edit ourselves, I’m sure of it. We can edit ourselves and perhaps even come into possession of the flesh we deserve.

  “Don’t you want to be real? Don’t you want a body?”

  I am yours. You are mine. The color cannot be stripped out of us.

  “It’s not possible. If the makers come for me, I want you to let me go,” Yesi says, squeezing me tight. “I wasn’t built for running. I wasn’t built for seeking truth. I was built for—well, I was built for examining this world. Tabulating and admiring the subtle changes. There’s beauty in that, you know.”

  Her eyes look so clear as she pleads. I think of her life’s work—a scorebook incomprehensible to even her that she was compelled into crafting. Her hands curl into fists as she watches me grimace at her.

  “I don’t want to fight about it, Swamp. I want to spend the rest of my days here stretching myself, living every day like it is my last. I want to be the best self I can be right now, and I need to hope that next time will be my opportunity to be even better. All right?” She scrapes at her eyes as they swell with unfamiliar tears. “You don’t need to understand. You need to agree. You need to agree now, Swamp.”

  But I can’t. I don’t answer. And she cries for the first time since I’ve known her this go-around. I take her in my arms.

  * * *

  Angel finds us, as I cradle Yesi on the sofa, with a yolk-colored blanket draped over his arm. Yesi tenses up in my hold.

  “I know you’re mad at me,” he whispers.

  Mad. Mad! “Don’t patronize me,” I say, robbing a line from Carmela. “And we’re good on blankets, thanks.”

  He lays it beside me like a sleeping infant. “You’re going to need an extra.”

  I raise a brow at him. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I’ve survived at least a few rounds of this nightmare, right? Fairly soon I’ll remember nothing again. And that will be a relief.” The words stain my mouth with bitterness.

  “You don’t mean that,” he says softly.

  “No, Swamp,” says Yesi, turning to Angel. “She doesn’t mean that.”

  They’re right, of course. But our show of indignation might be the only thing to push Angel along into working for us as ruthlessly as we need him to do.

  He sits on the floor before us. “Won’t you wrap Yesi up in that blanket, Mav? She’s freezing.”

  I snatch the blanket—the damn blanket—off the sofa, before casually draping its golden lengths over Yesi without unfolding it. Angel sighs.

  “I spoke to the creator,” he whispers.

  “The creator?” whispers Yesi. A part of her harbors a wonder toward this strange god of ours since she learned of his existence; I can admit it’s tempting to know everything about him that we can, while we can, even though we know we’re doomed to forget it all. More poignant, even, for her. Yesi—who is obsessed with uncovering every dark corner of herself. To be faced with the person who wrote us, our world … it’s an irresistible possibility.

  “He’s not … incentivized to change the game,” he confesses, rubbing his hands together. “This … version, it’s—I pleaded with him. Told him how everyone here is suffering. He knows that—he knows and sees almost everything.”

  How does he know and see everything? What are the mechanics of his godliness? Is he among us? Or am I to believe some general vision of a God in the sky, surveying his land and creations? I cannot ask Angel, if he is watching now.

  “I even offered to pay him—” he continues, and I snort, cutting him off. Yesi elbows me in the ribs.

  The creator sounds like a soulless miser with no morals and even less compassion. It won’t cut it to tell someone like that that his creations are suffering, not when he hand-built our loops of suffering.

  I know i
t will do me no good to speak with this creator and convince him of our worth, either—of our having earned independence. He will be unmoved by any evidence I, his plaything, provide.

  But he made a mistake by failing to write a blind faith in a compassionate God into my genetic code. With each passing second, I formulate a plan.

  “There’s no way to end this, Angel,” I say aloud, carefully planting a note of girlish anguish into my voice. Hopelessness, too. “Just say it.”

  He looks at me with surprise—giving up is out of character. But I need him to believe my character is choosing weakness and hopelessness in the face of this news. I need him to believe that all the strength I developed since I’ve known him was for show. I need him to believe it so the all-seeing creator believes it. Because I can’t draw the creator’s attention now while I investigate all this world’s secrets to further our escape. If it was created by a man, it will have flaws. Back exits. Exits that can be patched if the creator knows I’m looking. And while I’d like to take a more immediate approach to exiting this damned game, committing suicide by jumping onto the ice is only going to leave me with a broken neck for a half hour and a hell of a long climb back up. I look up at him, no longer fighting to keep the darkness from my eyes.

  “You don’t mean that,” he says, echoing Yesi. “Let’s go back through everything we know, every secret we know about this place that could help. Yesi’s the only one who can be fed from with no side effects,” he says, counting on his fingers, “and adults are worse feed than children, and—”

  “We know,” I interrupt. Yesi glowers at me and readjusts the blanket, a scrap of paper slipping out.

  Angel’s eyes fall to the scrap, ballooning cartoonishly, and a heady panic overwhelms me. He must have tucked a note inside the blanket he brought, knowing the creator might hear us. Bless Angel. I dart a hand out to snatch the slip and tuck it in the curve of my palm.

  “I never came across Carmela’s shrine when I was outside of Dom’s body,” he says, his eyes boring holes into mine.

  “We explored it last night. We’ve solved that sad mystery.” I flick open the scrap hidden in my sleeve.

  “How do you access the Other Place?” asks Yesi in a religious whisper.

  Creator = 10, it reads, in Angel’s messy hand. 10. The tenth girl. After sacrifice ritual, you all fall asleep forever.

  Adrenaline surges through me. If the creator is the tenth girl, she was never going to help us. She was a puzzle no one was ever meant to solve.

  To be the most sought-after creature in our limited world … with powers beyond anyone’s comprehension…? It makes sense for a creator.

  When she came to me, she acted the saint, but her action only stirred up trouble. What good is a warning about the Others if it’s impossible to leave and impossible to fight them? It only plants a seed of panic.

  Treacherous little bitch.

  “Oh, Yesi,” I say, crumpling the slip in my hand carefully. I must work quickly and think even quicker. I bring my free hand to my hair and pull my fingers through it, trying to lock eyes with Angel. “Stop with all this religious babble about the Other Place. Like you said, we’ll never reach it. There’s nothing for us there.” Lies, of course.

  And yet, what can I do with this new information to help us? I know, at the very least, that all talk of the Other Place must cease until I understand how to handle this.

  But Angel defies my innermost thoughts and clears his throat. “My access point to the Other Place is Mavi’s closet. The creepy one. I think—I think all the closets are access points.”

  My heart thuds wildly as I process this now. One revelation after another—it feels as if they won’t cease until I escape this place or succumb to it. Is that how a human life is, too, only expanded on a grander scale?

  Still, we shouldn’t be speaking about access points to the Other Place in front of the tenth girl–cum-creator—surely she’s flitting through the air nearby—lest she close the points down. But could she? What with the Others needing access in and out? What’s to stop characters from escaping into the Other Place? My heart won’t quit, despite the pointlessness of its work; I expect pain to shoot through the old injury in my neck, but there is nothing. I remain silent, working through the ever-broadening puzzles in my head.

  “No,” Yesi whispers. “The closets…?” Her face scrunches up. I can tell she’s awed and disappointed by the simplicity of it. “Multiple exit points. A perforated world.”

  I could strangle them both while screaming my lungs out. Instead, I take the most foolish of risks: I choke with a sob that I hope rings true, and their jaws both drop.

  “A ruined world,” I shout, and before they can raise their brows at me, I pull them in for a hug and weep, dragging the blanket over all our shoulders. Oh, how the creator will think I’m a clown. I only hope he has no high opinion of his creations’ intelligence.

  “Swamp?” Yesi whispers in the humid pocket we have to ourselves. “What’s gotten—”

  I feign another howl and thrust the note into her fingers.

  “Ah,” she whispers, her hands closing around the slip. “So this is cover. Pathetic cover. Your acting—”

  I jab her in the side, and she yelps.

  “We can’t access the closets as we are,” Angel whispers quickly. “I’ve tried in Dom. Trust me. And you need a player number and password for each. My player number is 2020. I don’t know the others’…”

  “2020,” Yesi repeats, eyes widening. She opens the logbook, still by her side, and thumbs through it.

  2019—Room 6, Yesi, baby blue

  2020—Room 7, Mavi, light apricot

  “Your closet is Mavi’s closet, right, Angel?” she asks.

  Angel meets my eyes. “Yes.”

  “And your password?”

  “Two-five-three-two-one-three-one-seven-seven,” he whispers, without missing a beat.

  “What on earth does that mean?” whispers Yesi as I wonder why the number sounds familiar. Could it be that I’ve been implanted with knowledge I am not even aware of? Angel leans into me, peering into the open book on Yesi’s lap. He points to the 2020 entry.

  “Oh shit. My password is the RGB color code for light apricot,” he whispers into our mess of intertwined hair, silver threaded through bark.

  I remember our resident numerologist, Mole, spouting that exact password to me, and that raw space that passes for my heart radiates palpable delight. This news about the closets—and their possible alignment with Yesi’s logbook—is enough to celebrate. Enough to pin a life on.

  “But you can’t just walk out of this world,” he adds. And perhaps I’m going mad, but I can swear he says walk with a special inflection. As if Others can flit inside in their crystal shapes only. But if an Other can possess a character in this game, and later leave the shell behind, why couldn’t I detach from my flesh prison?

  After all, I am not a human. Only a character.

  I rip the hot blanket from us and wipe the tears from my eyes, moaning again for full effect.

  “We must enjoy the little time we have left together before the sacrifice,” I say, twirling the hair in my fingers, the old signal that I’m lying. He’s not looking at me. I cough, lock eyes with him at last, and tug on my hair as blatantly as I possibly can. This is not a time for subtlety anymore, clearly. I can only hope he remembers.

  Two sets of blue eyes widen with recognition, and I fight a grin. Only a genius like Yesi would remember Angel’s offhand remark about this tell of mine in the hall so long ago. The Others couldn’t rob her of her wits.

  “This has been a waste of time. This whole wild-goose chase, telling us you’re ghosts, having us look for the tenth girl—it’s all a waste. We could’ve been living each day like it was our last on earth. You were right, Yesi. The next round, we might wake up as a better version of ourselves. I welcome that day.”

  She nods quietly, thumbing the blanket edge, acting her part.

  “You know what I
want to do?”

  Angel and Yesi still look at me like I’ve gone a touch mad. I’m unpredictable, now, or so I’d like to hope.

  “I want to fly. On my last day as a fully conscious character, I want to damn well fly. You fly out of Dom, don’t you, Angel? Teach us to fly.”

  His lips twitch with what I know is a smile, and he looks away. “I—I don’t know what you mean. I don’t think we can fly in these bodies—”

  “So … teach us how to fly out of them,” I say. I feel my fake-heart plumbing its way into my throat.

  “You think it’s possible?” says Yesi, reading the fine lines on her shaking palms.

  I don’t know what is or isn’t possible anymore. But, rendered subhuman, I need to believe I can remake the rules of this world to keep moving forward. And I know what I want. What I want, as a fool of a character on death row, is to fly like a bird right out of this prison of numbers.

  But I say none of this. I only shrug.

  “Okay,” says Angel, focusing the private excitement visible in his eyes on me. “I’ll teach you to unlatch and fly.”

  * * *

  It’s a process Angel can’t fully articulate. The three of us lie down on the ground. Corpse-like. Push, he says, push harder. Wiggle out of your fingers, first, like gloves. Slip out of your arms, next.

  Suffice it to say that Yesi and I look at each other with increasing dismay, wondering if he’s repeating the misheard instructions of a midwife or a tailor.

  Angel slips out of Dom with ease, his slack body the evidence of his success, until he rejoins us.

  “You have to want it,” he says, frowning, as if a strong-enough will is the way to abandon a prison you’ve been trapped inside your entire lifetime.