On Thursday the Tiger is dead.
It‘s not surprising to me. She was the only one everyone knew to be a vilger, and now there was no healer alive to protect her either. I walk to her room, and ignoring the red stains and organ-sludge smeared on the floor, it’s somehow quite tranquil.
She had taken some picture books from the library and piled them next to the nightstand. In the minifridge she’d preserved some leftover pancakes from another breakfast, having scavenged the tupperware from who-knows-where.
There’s nothing “useful” in her room, no divine revetions or secret diary as I had hoped for. But looking through her belongings, getting to know her by the objects with which she’d surrounded herself with, this search also serves as a kind of memorial service.
I say a silent prayer, and if I had the time and the courage, I’d return to Lily’s pce to do the same. In Lily’s suite, there would be meticulous notes in her drawers, rinsed-out coffee cans neatly by the sink for recycling, and soaked into the carpets there would be… there would be… Left adrift in my thoughts, a hoarse voice drags me back to earth.
“I’m surprised you came. Everyone else can no longer bear to look at the bodies.” The Rat sits next to me at the foot of the bed, looking upward, and his hood falls back from his shiny hair.
“But there are no bodies here, really.” I point out. “Only guts and blood.”
“Believe me, if we put all these pieces together they’d make a corpse. Maybe two,” Rat murmurs back.
“Hmph. This hardly looks nice, but surprisingly, it doesn’t even smell.”
This swirling bck and red muck looks like it should smell of rot and destructed dreams, but I catch whiffs of isopropyl alcohol instead—perhaps the same people who tidy the trial chambers at night had a hand in sanitizing this pce, too.
I turn my gaze upwards, and together the Rat and I stare at a decrepit ceiling. Since it’s painted bck, I can pretend its faded spots are gaxies and the little holes and pinpricks are stars. The Rat’s next few words come out as a soft hiss.
“So you really do want to win this game. How you pressed the Dragon yesterday was nothing short of magnificent; if people were just a little more perceptive, we’d have got him.”
A water stain streaks across the mottling; I consider it a shooting star.
“You’re wrong, Shinji. I don’t want to ‘win’ this game. I want to ‘live’ in it; I don’t like the blood or the bodies, but I’ll snatch any sense of happiness I can find even here,” I mutter.
The Rat looks at me as though I’m a pamphlet-bearing missionary who had just knocked on his door. I’m not religious, but it’s true that I just had a vision of how my life should be—
I used to think that many people are delusionally joyful. I still think that: objectively most lives are the stuff of corporate pnning rather than dreams.
But rather than try to stop being sad, I think I’ll allow myself to be happy. Even if my regrets will always overshadow everything else, even if everything I hate about myself is true, there are still little things that I still like and I can acknowledge that. I can hold those two emotions at once no matter their size, the despair and the joy.
“I don’t get you… I just don’t get you… whenever I think I understand you, you say something truly bizarre. Listen Snake, I don’t care about your moral philosophy or your psychological health. As another great mind once said, I only care if you’re ‘in it to win it’... are we gonna get this done?”
“We? You tried to kill me yesterday.” I scratch my eyepatch.
“That’s cause you were being a loser….”
“No, I was just being myself.”
Rat stubbornly offers a hand as he bites his lip. I look at his face without tension, without hate and notice that his hair is actually neatly done, with an outcrop of strands pushed aside and nice smooth lines behind it. But he’s already messing it up with his other hand, scratching, cwing, rending, as he waits for my reply.
I sigh, before taking his palm.
The Rat then passes me something that’s hard, ft, angur—his Card. On it is an image that I’d never seen in this game til now: a snarling beast, fur zig-zagging out as thought it were electrified. As an animal, its tin name is Canine Lupus; as a symbol, it’s a hostile role. The Rat just revealed to me that he’s…
“A wolf!?” I excim.
Why is he telling me this? Even worse, why is he showing me this? I wince, and scoot away, feeling the bedsheet’s friction rub against my skirt and skin. I touch his colr cautiously, then withdraw that touch just as quick.
“That’s not my card. That’s the Goat’s.” The Rat smirks. “I borrowed it from his body two days ago, but didn’t power it on til now. The Tiger showed us that you could expose other people’s roles without penalty, so I took a little looksee.”
“But I already knew he was wolf,” I pointed out. “If there were three wolves left alive today, the vilge would be outnumbered 3-3, and the game would be over.”
“Touché. But, Snake, this means we’re so close. There’s just two wolves left—”
“One of those two being ‘Dragon—’”
“And we can use my seer role to find out the other. I checked the Ox st night, and found out he was another vilger. Tonight, I’ll check the Rabbit or Horse, and we’ll know for sure who’s the st traitor between the two of them.”
“That does sound pretty easy…”
He smiles. Even though he’s not a wolf, in this bedroom’s harsh light he looks just as predatory and vicious.
“Well? Are you ready to do some Dragon hunting? Ox, Rabbit, Horse… let’s find them. Talk to them. Persuade them one by one,” Rat says. “If we’re dragon-fighting archers, those three will be our arrows. We just need two of the three to bring him down. Then, I’ll find the other wolf and we’ll finally win, simple as that.”
I completely agree with what he said; the best pns are the simplest after all. When there’s less to a pn, there’s less that can go wrong. And yet…
“You’re jinxing us,” I say.
“I’m not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not—”
My eyepatch has finally stopped itching.
