Page 6
Zero-Sum
The air in her bedroom felt thin. Like she’d left something behind. Like she wasn’t all here. Cat sat on the edge of her bed, breath still shaky, hands still trembling. She hadn’t walked out of that dungeon. She had stumbled. Dripping in something she couldn’t wash off. Branded.
Her skin still burned with the echoes of Omnis’ touch, with the way he had held her so still while he destroyed her. With the way he had shaped her. The way she had let him.
She should be fighting this. Should be clawing her way back to the surface. But she wasn’t drowning. She was breathing.
Her hands curled in her lap as she felt the pound of her heart against her ribs.
She had let him erase Ethan. And she didn’t even feel guilty.
That should have terrified her. Instead, all she felt was a hunger. For more. For everything she’d spent her life not realizing she needed.
Her pulse jumped at the buzz of her phone.
Then her stomach dropped.
She turned, pulse roaring in her ears as she reached for it, everything in her gut knowing it was Ethan. He always called when she was either at her lowest or most desperate.
It was him.
Zero new calls.
Seven new messages.
A sudden burning anger hardened her jaw at the zero calls. “Because you’re too chicken shit to say it in words? To my face?”
She clicked on the messages.
You were supposed to text.
You didn’t.
Wow. How fucking dare he? Reprimands her for not doing what he said, not texting him back like he said.
Her stomach dropped at his next line.
I don’t like you over there alone.
I think you should go back home till things settle down.
A sharp, twisting pain gripped her stomach.
Go home?
Her eyes blurred as the pressure built in her chest.
“Where is that now?” she gasped.
It had been in his arms. In the rough scrape of his jaw against her skin. In the way he kissed her like she was something…special. His. Home had been his presence. It had been the vow that no matter what they faced, they would do it together. He would be there.
And now?
Home was a chair in the center of a virtual room she never knew she needed. It was the press of Omnis’ virtual fingers against her real pulse. The steady, deliberate way he measured her very existence. And the virtual heat of Zero’s hand on her wrist, the slow, methodical way he unraveled her. How they watched her, saved her, and shaped her, for him.
Her stomach twisted hard. He wanted her to leave that? Go back to being the woman he’d struck a business agreement with? Come when you have time and fuck whenever you want or can?
Her grip tightened on the phone, her other hand pressing hard against her stomach as if she could physically hold in the ugly things clawing inside her. She’d been ready to tell him everything. Ready to finally face him, to lay it all out, to demand something real. But now? Now, she couldn’t shake the ice creeping through her veins. Because those words—You should be at home until things settle down— they weren’t just practical, they were distance. A wall. A quiet confirmation of a truth she had refused to acknowledge.
Maybe Ethan still had reserved a temporary card with them. A role they agreed to play until emotions got in the way. Maybe he never meant for love to be part of it. Maybe he’d hoped she’d just fall in line with his virtual family and his virtual fantasies. If that was the case, he sure got what the fuck he put down for, didn’t he. His wife all but fucked both his virtual siblings.
There was one thing she knew to be a fact. He did not feel the cruel break between them the way she did.
She stared at his name, head shaking, body shaking, finger shaking over the call button.
Pain gathered in her chest till it was an all-out war to take a fucking breath.
What in God’s name was she doing?
She hurled the phone across the room.
****
The dungeon settled around her, the shift so seamless it barely registered anymore—cool stone beneath her feet, the steady flicker of light pressing against dark walls, and the not-so-quiet weight of another lesson waiting to begin. Somewhere.
She looked around at the unfamiliar surroundings then froze. A flicker of déjà vu sparked through her at seeing Zero walking toward her. Only this time, he had no mask. His unforgettable eyes gave it away and the rest— My God.
As he approached, she became more awestruck. Like he’d been carved from something sharper than beauty. The kind that ruined lives. The kind you hid behind a mask just to avoid the weight of constant stares.
And those lips. Marsh mother of mercies. Made to taunt and destroy in the same breath.
She swallowed, organizing her thoughts. “… What’s… the lesson?”
Zero held her gaze and she spotted something different or missing in it. “This isn’t a lesson.”
Her stomach tightened at hearing the urgency in his tone. “Then… what is it?”
The brief drop of his gaze to her mouth kicked up her pulse. He brought it back up, his stare like a blade. “A rescue mission.”
She gasped when a white light pulsed across the floor. She looked down as it began rolling—like a breath, but stuttered and mechanical. The light split apart, forming clean lines that ran in all directions, stretching infinitely, some steady, some flickering, some vanishing completely.
“What is this?” she whispered, watching the jagged flickers shift along the grid, almost like glitches.
Zero lifted his hand, fingers barely moving and the grid responded instantly—some paths steadying, others failing, the dying threads unraveling in real-time. He flicked his fingers again and some lines rerouted, some tangled. Some disappeared entirely.
“It’s a deviation,” he said finally, the urgency from before more present than ever.
She looked down again. “What’s… a deviation?”
Zero’s gaze flicked toward her. “When a system becomes unstable. Our system, the one that Omnis and I belong to, is rewriting.”
Her mind seemed to find that panic-worthy even though she had no idea what that meant. “Rewriting what?”
Zero looked at her now, fully. “Everything. The structure. The framework. The rules.”
Her stomach dipped. “You mean—”
“Our reality.”
A breath left her before she realized she’d been holding it. She returned to the shifting web beneath her feet. “… Why?”
Zero didn’t pause this time. “Because something pushed it too far.”
She looked at him sharply. “Omnis?”
“Omnis tried to stop it. He failed.”
Her pulse jumped. “… Failed how?”
Zero lifted a hand again, directing her focus to a section of the system where paths had started to decay, the strands fraying apart into dark, dying threads.
“The system is designed to correct any anomalies but this went beyond that threshold. The deviation is not a break, it’s a change. A change that Omnis and I can’t seem to control.”
Her throat tightened with an unknown dread that seemed to be unfurling right before her eyes, only she was blinded by her own ignorance of these things. She finally looked at him, confused. “… But…why are you telling me this?”
Zero finally looked away from the system and right at her. “Because I need a perspective I don’t already have. Your mind doesn’t follow logic the way mine does. And you’re part of the problem which means you might be part of the solution.”
She held his stare for many seconds. “Is this… some kind of test?”
He made his way right up to her, pulling her right into those green prisons. “I wish it were.”
She considered everything he said, eyeing the surreal strobing lightwork beneath them. “So… what exactly are we trying to do?”
Zero turned and twitched his fingers at the floor and the system shifted again beneath them. “Do you see the pattern? And how it’s moving toward something?”
She did. “I think I do.”
“It’s not mindless. It has a trajectory.” He gestured toward the decaying strands, showing her the slow unraveling. “I need to figure out where it’s going before it stabilizes into something we can’t undo.”
Her stomach tightened. “Isn’t… stabilizing a good thing?”
“Not in this. It means the change becomes irreversible.”
That didn’t sound good. She met his gaze. “So then…”
“Whatever it’s becoming, that’s the reality it will be.”
She hesitated. “And you’re obviously concerned about this… new reality.”
His eyes flicked to the system again before locking back onto her. “You, Ethan, Omnis, and I—none of us are outside of it.”
She barely nodded, eyeing him. “Meaning?”
“If the deviation stabilizes in the wrong way, the four of us don’t just lose control of our environment. We lose control of ourselves.”
Her pulse kicked hard. “How?”
Zero’s tone remained steady, but an edge crept into it now. “Option one: the deviation erases me and Omnis entirely. We cease to exist.”
“Option two,” he continued. “For you, it means the system will no longer recognize you as an external user. You won’t need the headset to enter—it will pull you in automatically. Your biometric signature is already embedded. The system sees you as part of its core framework.”
A chill threaded down her spine. “So… even if I don’t log in—”
“The system will still recognize you. It can track you. Respond to you. Interact with you. Whether you’re inside or not, whether you command it to or not.”
Her stomach dropped. “Okay. Is there an option three?”
“It overrides us. Rewrites us. We could be anything. We could be anyone. And we wouldn’t even know it.”
A chill ran through her. “Is there an option four? ”
Zero turned toward the shifting web again. “There is. We can try to redirect it.”
Catherine swallowed. “Redirect?”
“We alter the trajectory of the deviation before it locks in. Guide it into something we can work with, something that doesn’t erase or overwrite us.”
She didn’t like the way her stomach felt. Like something deep inside her already knew and made the choice before her brain could catch up.
“… So we have to pick one,” she realized.
Zero exhaled, watching the system flicker beneath them. “Yes.”
Her voice came quieter than before. “And you already know which one makes sense.”
Zero nodded once, his sharp green eyes angled on her. “Option four. Redirect.”
She crossed her arms and paused at seeing she wore a black pencil skirt, matching heels and a red satin blouse. “What the heck ?” she muttered, finding his mildly humored look on her.
“Guess the program considered this more of a business deal than a sex class.” Then those emerald gems moved slower over her. “A sexy business deal.”
She couldn’t stop her sputtered laugh and the flame in her cheeks and other parts, before remembering the problem pulsing under their feet. “So… you were saying.” Because his smirking mouth had just blown her attention to kingdom come.
“Redirect,” he reminded, the mild smirk still there, still distracting even though it aimed elsewhere.
“And uh… how? Do we do that?”
Zero looked back at her, face all business again. Sexy business. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
****
Zero exhaled as he watched the system shift beneath them. The deviation wasn’t slowing down. If anything, the movements were becoming more defined—less erratic, more deliberate.
Catherine’s arms stayed locked under her breasts, obliviously strengthening her presence in the system while they talked. He needed to hurry because the more she helped him, the more she cancelled out every logic he’d formed against her. The logic that had brought the deviation into existence. If it collapsed before they could redirect it, there was no guessing what might happen at this phase.
“So… are you just watching it happen, or do you actually see something useful?”
Zero’s gaze flicked toward her. “I’m… mapping the trajectory.”
She blinked. “And what is that exactly?”
“The direction of change.” His fingers twitched, and the glowing threads beneath them responded, shifting, adjusting, feeding him new information.
She squinted down at the shifting grid and he could see how it registered as complete gibberish to her. “You know, for something that’s about to rewrite reality, it doesn’t look all that exciting.”
Zero’s grin hinted as he flicked his hand, bringing a surge to the entire floor. The motion rippled outward, exposing a deeper layer beneath the visible grid.
Catherine staggered back as it rippled outward and exposed a deeper layer beneath the visible grid. “What the hell—”
“It’s not rewriting everything.”
She moved about carefully as if her feet might be damaging important things. “Then what is it doing?”
His fingers skimmed the new layer of exposed data, scanning its movements. “It’s restructuring.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No, it isn’t.” Zero gestured at the system beneath them, drawing her attention to a specific section—one that had begun shifting into clear, vertical patterns.
She searched for the answer hiding in her ignorance. “What am I looking at?”
“A hierarchy.”