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Reiteration

It was Marshie’s room.

The teen girl’s bedroom. Though presently, she was nowhere to be seen. Owen saw all of it was the same otherwise: the bed, the computer. Still bloody handprints on the floor. Still a glitching spray of pixels on the monitor.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Nick, you need to see this.”

He felt Nick behind him already. “Hey, isn’t that—”

“It’s her room. The girl, the dead girl. We’re back to it.”

“Okay. That’s weird.”

Owen almost laughed. “It’s not weird, it’s—it’s a good thing. An amazing thing. It means this place isn’t infinite .”

“How d’ya figure?”

“The chances of cycling to the same room again are infinitesimal—if this place is endless and infinite. But we found her room again.”

“And again, that’s good how?”

“Nick, it means we might see our friends again. There’s an actual chance we’ll run into them. It also means—maybe there’s a way out. That this isn’t just some unspooling nightmare but a…a system, a design, a blueprint that makes sense somehow, to someone. Like Lore said: a game. Just a really fucked-up one.” In which we’re the player characters. And if there are player characters, that means…

Nick, still seeming to be uncomfortable after the end of their confrontation, muttered an “okay” and then added, “But let’s cycle past this fuckin’ room.”

“No,” Owen said.

“What?”

“I want to go in.”

“The fuck? Why?”

Because I want to try something.

“Just trust me.”

And then Owen stepped through into the dead girl’s room.