Back in the drawing room again, the scene was a repeat of the night before. Only this time, Ginny had her arms folded, and the anger on her face burned all the habitual fear out of it.


    Standing either side of her, Maika looked annoyed, but Lee was the worst: her face was contorted to almost mask-like proportions with rage.


    Chad almost wanted to laugh. Then Lee spoke.


    "Care to explain what the fuck ''AI Writing Slave'' is, Woodham? Because whatever it is, it''s shooting out a bazillion error messages on your laptop right now."


    His legs wanted to turn and run, to rescue both his tech from useless idle spinning and his own self from the confrontation. But his accelerating heart, his gritting teeth, his clenched fists, they all got the deciding vote: fight, not flight. "Who the fuck went into my room?"


    Ginny had the gall to speak, not losing any volume with nerves this time as she answered, "I popped my head in to see if you were asleep, when I saw the huge wall of notifications popping up. I can''t believe you, Chad. I thought you had more self-respect than that."


    Maika clicked their tongue, and it took all Chad had not to step forward and deck the guy. "You fucking knew anyway," he growled in Maika''s direction. "Why didn''t you just tell them?"


    "You what?" Kirsten shouted at Maika.


    As always, his hands came up to placate Lee, open in front of his chest. <u>Their</u> chest, Chad reminded himself, then thought, wait, why the fuck do I care? Fuck his pronouns.


    "I guessed, earlier today," Maika admitted. "I confronted him about it, but decided not to say anything because... well, it''s not relevant, is it? We were all mad at him as it was. Besides, Gin, I thought you overheard part of that conversation anyway?"


    "What?" Lee seethed at Ginny, and this time the snooping little bitch did flinch.


    Her eyes flicked over to Maika. "Oh. No, sorry. I thought I''d heard all your conversation by accident, but I must have walked up in time to hear the end of it. The part about the ghost, and how he''s not doing okay... I didn''t hear anything about AI."


    Conniving little cow. He fixed her with a glare, and she glanced at Kirsten like the pathetic lost lamb she was.


    Kirsten closed her eyes, raised her hands to her temples, and let out a frustrated shriek that would have put a boiling kettle to shame. "Right. You know what? I don''t care anymore. I''m getting us flights out of here tomorrow. We can''t stay here, and I sure as hell can''t stay more than another night in the same place as him." She whipped out her phone and started thumbing through her security lock. "First class for us three, but you can go in economy."


    "Fine, then leave!" Chad shrugged, trying to bring his voice and aspect down a few notches. She had no control over him. No need to get all hot and bothered. "You three leave, but I''m staying here. I''ll take over paying for the place. I''m good for the cash."


    Kirsten peered at him over her phone. "You want to be alone? With the ghost?" She shook her head. "No, you know what, I don''t care. I said I don''t care. Be haunted if you want, it''s none of my bloody business. Right. Plane tickets." She threw herself down on an armchair. "I assume you lot are coming back with me?"


    Maika hesitated, then sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, let''s go home. I''m curious about the ghost, but not enough to ruin my mental health over it."


    Ginny gaped at Kirsten, lips flapping like a fish out of water. Her eyes flashed towards Chad, then back to Kirsten. He had the distinct impression that she wanted to stay for some reason, but the idea of staying here with him was the dealbreaker. He couldn''t help himself: he spoke.


    "What is it, Vince? Wanna stay here and cosplay some more? Sad you''re leaving the place where you finally wrote something other than that sad lesbian self-insert-character drivel you''ve been writing since uni?"


    After a moment of watery uncertainty, Ginny''s eyes hardened. That was new. "Nah. I don''t want to spend another minute longer than I have to with ChadGPT over here."


    As Ginny stalked over to Kirsten''s side, Maika snorted and chuckled, and Kirsten sniggered. "Good one, Ginny," she muttered, and continued scrolling through her phone.


    This was how it always was. The three of them, gathered around that chair, just like his brothers winging his father as they assembled for the kill almost every night of his teens.


    "Cowards," he shouted. "Cowards, the lot of you. But I''ve known this ever since that night. You might have talked a big game, Lee, but you made me do all the dirty work. And you two... you were the ones closest to Tess. But you couldn''t even bring yourselves to help. Too busy blubbering, ya big girls'' blouses. Don''t you know how much it fucked me up?"


    "They were your drugs, Chad," Ginny murmured.


    Chad stepped forward. Maika stepped in front of Ginny, intercepting him. Chad backed off, but threw his words over Maika''s shoulder. "My drugs, which your stupid bitch sister stole."


    Ginny burst into tears at that. Maika moved to comfort her. As he wrapped his arms around her and put his chin over her shoulder, the waterworks were starting in his eyes too. Weak.


    "You would have gone to jail, Chad," Kirsten said, laying her phone in her lap. Compared to the other two, she was made of steel. He nearly admired her for it, except he was too pissed off. "Just you. We all panicked that night, but ultimately, you''re the one who would have gone down for it. Not us. Except by covering for you, to protect your reputation and your scholarship and your perfect little middle-class white boy life, we tied our fates to yours. You would think that would have made you eternally grateful to the three of us. But instead, you''ve gone down such a dark path that none of us is even much interested anymore in putting in the hard yards to rehabilitate you. So here''s my advice. Stay the fuck out of our lives, after tonight. Never speak to us again. Forget about what happened that night, just as all of us will. Be at peace, and leave us in peace. If you ask me, it''s more than you deserve."


    "Fuck you, Lee," he said, pointing down at her. "Fuck all of you. Get the fuck out of my holiday house tomorrow morning. I don''t want to see any of you ever again."


    "Fine by me," Kirsten smiled with her mouth, eyes glaring. "Goodbye and good riddance."


    Chad stomped out of the room, tromped up the stairs, and slammed the door to his bedroom.


    "Fuck!" he whispered, heading straight for his laptop. He clicked the notification, tried the remote desktop to reach his AI server. It was down. "Fuck, fuck fuck!" He whipped off a support ticket to the server administrators for a restart of his machine.


    Pacing around the room as he waited, he grabbed at his hair to stop his hands from punching the wall. Then he rushed back over and checked on the state of his other servers. Everything else was going fine. The fifth Detective Inspector Greenwich novel was coming along nicely.


    Not enough.


    He jabbed at the keyboard until he was in his analytics pages. Sales were good. His star was on the rise.


    Never enough.


    He patted his jacket pocket out of a long, long lost, but still ingrained, habit.


    But no, it was empty. Had been for a decade and a half now. But fuck, he wished it weren''t. He needed to score right now, to take away the rabbit-in-the-snare feeling.


    They wouldn''t expose him, right? Not for the cover-up, that would damn them all too. But for the AI. Surely they wouldn''t. Kirsten had said as much just now.


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    But what if she changed her mind? What if Maika or Ginny decided that her promise didn''t count them, or that their grievance went beyond that, went full scorched earth tactics? It''s what he would do, except he didn''t have anything on them. Well, he could make each of their lives hell with the help of a certain crowd online, that was for sure. But there would absolutely be a dip in his sales if he did that. Making Lee a target of racial harassment, or Ginny the target of the transphobic zeitgeist, or Maika a target of either (or both): any of that would forever put him in that basket with all the deplorables. Right now, C. T. Woodham was a neutral value proposition, only masculine-coded perhaps through dint of his gender, his main character''s gender, and the gritty dark crime content which appealed mostly to a male audience (according to his analytics). But the margin was thin enough that losing large swathes of female readers would hurt him. Not to mention that, if he leaned on the racial or queer aspects of any of his former friends, he''d lose non-white readers and queer readers. He didn''t have great visibility on his sales by ethnicity, sexuality, or other orientations, but still... you never knew, these days. If he became controversial before he was a mainstream big name, then it would tarnish him forever with that. He wasn''t in the position to go there. Not yet.


    So that couldn''t happen. He couldn''t self-cancel, and they couldn''t cancel him, not when he still had so much left to give. He had huge plans. DI Greenwich was just the tip of the iceberg. With the help of his multifarious AI slaves, he was finally going to get his sci-fi manuscript to where it should have been years ago. Then he was going to branch out into epic fantasy. Then, horror - and then, like his idol Stephen King, he was going to finally reveal the secret: that it was all tied together, it was all a big multiverse with him in the middle of it, and how clever he would look then.


    But none of that was going to happen if they revealed him.


    He crouched on the ground and moaned into his knees, arms over his head, rocking back and forth. Even as he was in that position, he couldn''t help but reflect that it was the sort of position he would have been in some thirty years ago, crying in his bedroom after his brothers and father tore into him for the tiniest perceived weakness.


    Three against one. Always, his life kept coming back to this simple equation. He was so sick of it.


    But here it was happening again: and who was to say that they weren''t faking it, still? Just because, since last night''s argument with them, he had felt a presence in his room, had known that he was being watched, well... that proved nothing. They could be watching him. This could all still be their trick.


    Except he''d dreamed her. A waking dream, as he wrote. She saw him, the ghost of Emilie, and she judged him through a lens of her time, and she was frightened of him, and that...


    That was the worst part. Because of who he was, she wasn''t even going to give him a chance. Just because she''d been murdered by one angry white dude, Emilie looked at him now and saw danger in him. Refused to make a deeper connection with him.


    "Fuck," he murmured into the hollow made between his thighs and body, certain this was all a sign that he was going crazy.


    No. It had to be them.


    Groaning as he uncrouched, Chad clenched his fists, resolved. As his vision adjusted to the light after the darkness of his self-made cave of sorrow, the room appeared for a moment in red. He made up his mind.


    There was one secret in the house which had revealed itself to him, which the others did not seem to know about yet.


    The walls.


    With a snigger, he slipped out of his shoes but kept his socks on. Then he opened his room''s closet, and removed the panel at the back. Laying it aside, he turned on his phone torch, and bent his tall body through the small secret entrance to the world beyond the walls.


    I will find their secret means of spying on me. Then they''ll regret fucking with me.


    The space was just wide enough for a slim man like himself to slip through, sometimes having to turn his body sideways at tighter junctions. Cobwebs abounded, slung like hammocked bridges between pale-brown planks of wood. It was a good thing he didn''t have dust allergies, though he still raised his t-shirt over his nose to prevent a potential sneeze giving away his presence.


    He began in the direction of Kirsten''s bedroom. Hers was on the same level as his bedroom. She''d be so paranoid if he moved a few things around while she wasn''t in the room. It''d be great.


    Images of retributive violence flashed in his mind - stealing into her room for other purposes entirely - and he stumbled blindly into a rafter at head level. Stifling a cry, and clutching his sore forehead, he crouched again and breathed into his knees in order to catch up with himself.


    What the actual fuck had that just been, that thought? He''d never thought anything like that before. That was ten kinds of fucked. Was he really so mad at her, at all of them, that he''d stoop to that?


    "Nah," he breathed out, shaking his head. "That ain''t me." And yet he couldn''t help but think that maybe Emilie had been right - if his imagination of her looking at him and assessing him unworthy had been real, and not some self-hating delusion. It wouldn''t be the most unlikely thing, writing a character who hated him. DI Greenwich would probably have found him dull, or annoying, or distasteful if it were ever possible to meet.


    He stood again, his thighs aching from all the crouching, and tiptoed towards Lee''s bedroom. His intentions were pure jackanapery now, consciously discarding the vile suggestion of earlier. He would fuck with her mind, and nothing else.


    As he found the secret door to the back of her closet, an odd feeling crept down the back of his neck.


    Someone''s coming.


    He was sure of it. Behind him, Emilie stalked the secret path between walls, a kitchen knife in hand, an avenging spirit protecting the women in the house -


    Chad hurried through the gap and into the bedroom, shutting the secret panel with his heart thudding in his chest.


    He went to the door to the corridor, and peeked out. No sound of any feet approaching. He turned around and closed with her writing tablet and notes. Take them? That''d fuck her right up. Disorganise them? Sure, that would fuck with her too.


    But as he was thinking about what to do, idly lighting up the screen of her writing tablet to take a peek, what he saw stopped him flat.


    He read the first paragraph of her ghost story again and again, trying to parse it.


    "Nah," he murmured, then backed off from the tablet, the desk, back into the closet and into the walls.


    That was fucked. Why had she written that? That wasn''t what she''d said she was writing. Well, no. No, Emilie was on that page too, so she was writing about Emilie as they had all said they were. But that bizarre opening paragraph...


    What was she thinking?


    Maybe I''m not the bad guy in this house, Chad reassured himself. Maybe she is orchestrating something here. Not what I thought, but...


    He realised he was stroking his own arms, as if he were chilled, as if he were an upset child. Disgusted, he threw his hands away from him, in his rage whispering at himself the word his brothers and father had called him all those years. He slipped further away from the back of Kirsten''s room.


    Maybe he should warn the other two about Kirsten before they left. Sow some discord... or save their lives, if there was something more sinister behind those words. If he found Ginny''s room, he could use the typewriter to leave an unidentifiable message.


    He passed through the secret ways, peeking through the holes in the walls to find room after empty room. At first, it was nothing to panic about. He ascended the steep internal steps at the northwestern corner of the house to get to the next storey. But Ginny''s room was nowhere to be found on this level either. The longer he looked, his spine grew stiffer and more tingly with the feeling of pursuit.


    Emilie was looking for him - and so was someone else. Someone with breath like a raging bull. Someone with fists dripping red.


    Someone who felt a kinship with him.


    Chad hurried, tearing his clothes against loose nails, bruising his bare arms as he pushed through the gaps between the walls. He had to warn them. Fuck every bad thought he''d had about them: these were his friends, his only friends. He should have leaned on them, should have talked through the painful times with them, instead of bottling it up, instead of listening to those who said that people like them were the problem. He had gotten too used to living in two divergent mindsets: that the rules of the world were fucked up and against him; and that his friends were exceptions to the rules even if everything about them was what he was supposed to hate. He''d let the first narrative slowly consume the other, and now here he was, chased by two ghosts, not sure which one should catch him, nor which one would be less cruel to him if they did.


    He ascended the ladder into the top floor, giving up on the hope of finding Ginny''s room. Maika''s room would do fine. He''d write the guy a note, warning them. No way would Lee bring herself up here, into their tobacco-smelling den with drugs in the closet.  Maybe he was wrong about her, and about what she''d written on her tablet. It could have been imagination; it could have been the power of a human-crafted opening line. But it wouldn''t hurt to warn Maika, just in case it wasn''t that.


    And just maybe, there was still time for them. He could apologise to Maika, repair the friendship. Learn from them. Fuck, he could even troll for good, if he allied himself with Maika. He could take a selfie of himself and Maika kissing, send it to his brothers, as one last confusing ''fuck you'' to them before cutting off contact for good. That''s what he''d always wanted to do, leave the two of them with their toxic cookie-cutter wives in his dust. He could push back against the real problems in the world with his shitposting, rather than contributing to them. Ginny probably knew some trans shitposters Chad could learn from. He''d always admired the way they''d fought back online with humour as a weapon, with nails and teeth bared.


    Because their lives were at stake. And his had never been.


    Not until right now.


    He came to Maika''s closet, the shine of an electric lamp and the trickle of water within giving it away. Of course, the hydroponics setup. Chad took a moment to calm his shaking hands, deep breaths in and out, ignoring the sense of something chasing him through the warren, cornering him. It wouldn''t do to fuck up Maika''s setup while climbing through the gap. He breathed out one last time, and removed the panel.


    Exposed wires; uncovered water; that lazy son of a -


    The light of heaven is bright; but when it becomes too bright, perhaps that is hell instead. It all happens so fast, it''s impossible to say.