Red caught sight of us looking and waved uncertainly.

  “He hasn’t… done anything wrong.”

  “Yet.”

  “Is something up?” Red called over, an apprehensive edge to his voice.

  “No, we’re just thinking,” Peach said. “Sorry, you just happened to be there.”

  “Ah, good. You had me worried then. So… Now what?”

  “We’ve found our fortune, I guess,” I said, looking at the somehow still-full jug of golden water in my hand. “What was the second task? ‘Find the truth of your parentage’?”

  “We’re probably royalty or something,” Red guessed, shrugging. “Isn’t that always how these stories go?”

  “Yeah, but we can’t just guess that. We have to prove it somehow.”

  “How?”

  The million-dollar question. Where would we even start? I looked at Peach, but she shook her head. “Sorry, the scenario only told me information up to when one of you would get the three things. I don’t know anything else.”

  “We should split up,” Rohan said.

  “What?”

  “There are three items. We should take one each.”

  “What?”

  We all stared at him. He glared defiantly back.

  Red was the first to speak. “Actually, he has a point.” Everyone turned to look at him now. He held up his hands peaceably. “Think about it. We have no idea what we’re supposed to do next. By splitting up, we can investigate more places at once.”

  “Have you never seen a horror movie?” Peach asked.

  “We’re not in a horror movie,” Red pointed out.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “I don’t think we should do that,” I said to Rohan.

  He shrugged and jerked his head at Red. “You agree with me, right?”

  “Seems like we agree on something for once.” Red shrugged. “Sorry, Maria, I’m with Rohan.”

  “How the hell do you know my name?”

  “… Maria called you by it on like, the first day.”

  Rohan glared at me. Peach clung tighter to my arm as if to protect me from his eyes.

  His gaze transferred from my face to the jug in my hands. Red was staring at it too.

  Peach glared fiercely at them. “Don’t you dare! Maria got everything! You guys just turned into rocks! You’d be dead without her!”

  “We don’t know that,” Red pointed out. “What if someone else got this scenario later and managed to beat the task?”

  “And what if they didn’t bother turning you all back into humans?”

  “But that didn’t happen.”

  As Peach and Red bickered, I tried to reason with Rohan. “Shouldn’t we work together?”

  He wouldn’t look at me.

  “What if you get in trouble again, Rohan?”

  “Give me the water, Mik Tsaam.”

  “Don’t do it,” Peach begged. “Or at least wait until you can get another jug or something somewhere. Then you can all have a bit of it.”

  “What is it, Rohan?” I pleaded. “Please tell me-”

  “Stop trying to lead everyone’s lives for them,” he said.

  I couldn’t breathe. Peach was calling to me but there was a rushing in my ears.

  I knew it. I knew I was a meddling idiot. I knew I was stupidly empathetic. I knew, I knew…

  Was it really so bad, to care?

  Numbly, I held out the jug.

  “Mik Tsaam!” Peach wailed, shaking me. Rohan took the jug from my hand, almost dropping it as he fumbled.

  And he turned, and walked away, until he was out of sight.

  Red sighed, and picked up the silver branch where Peach had dropped it. The leaves sang as they shook back and forth.

  “Well, I guess I’m taking this one. Sorry, girls. I’m sure you’ll be okay. We’ll see each other soon, yeah?”

  He set off in the opposite direction to Rohan.

  I sat down. “I’m an idiot, Peach.”

  “No, you aren’t… Actually, yes, you are. Why would you do that?”

  I stared into space helplessly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. All this time I’ve just been… What have I even been doing?” I paused. “I guess I still have that ham sandwich…”

  “Maria, you’re not responsible for them. You’re just hurting yourself trying to save them. You’ve got to stop.”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Kneeling in the dust, I grabbed Peach’s hands and stared wildly at her. “How? How do I stop? Tell me!”

  Peach gently wrapped her arms around me, and I began to cry. “I’m so weak… Why am I so weak…?”

  “You’re not weak, Maria. You just care a lot. Maybe too much. You don’t know when to stop. You don’t know how to say no.”

  I don’t know how long we stayed there. The sun was beginning to set when I finally pulled away.

  “Sorry… I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

  “It’s okay. I…” I realised Peach’s eyes were very pink too. She scrubbed at her nose. “I think I needed to cry too. We’ve kind of been through a lot.”

  “What happened in your first scenario?”

  She shivered. “It was The Little Match Girl. I was the little girl… I… thought I’d freeze to death. That’s what happens in the original story, you know. Luckily L- an administrator saved me.”

  “An administrator?”

  “Yeah, I met one in the scenario. He doesn’t have any clue what’s going on either, but he seems to have some more powers than the normal players do. His name was… well, his username was ‘Your Father’, but he told me his real name was Lee Wai Meng.”

  Wai Meng! I gaped at her.

  “I know him. He’s an administrator?”

  “Yeah, it seems he can interfere in any scenario he’s in, to a certain extent. He’s been trying to see if he can get in contact with anyone in the outside world.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really understand what he was telling me.”

  Typical. But I couldn’t help laughing, slightly hysterically. Maybe Wai Meng could do it. Maybe we could get out. That guy was like a dog with a bone once he decided on something.

  “I hope they’re okay,” Peach said, looking back and forth between the two directions the boys had walked off in. “Where do you want to go, Maria?”

  “Home.”

  Back to my little apartment, the tiny box that cost most of my salary on the edge of suburban Hong Kong, where I could practically cook from my bed. Where I could hear my neighbours’ every movement at night. Where my little Miffy figurines were lined up in a row along my narrow windowsill, and a pile of papers blocked my door from opening fully. The little apartment where the smell of soy sauce and incense would never quite go away, but that suited me more than the stale cigarette smoke left by the previous tenant, and the sterile scent of cleaning fluid that characterised my mother’s house.

  “Where’s that?”

  I shook myself. “Back this way.”

  We walked slowly back along the path, hand in hand. It wasn’t long before we came across the old dervish. I smiled at him, nodding my head in thanks.

  “You succeeded,” the old man said, looking at Peach.

  “I suppose.” I had the wooden bowl in my hand. I held it out to him. “Thanks for this.”

  “Remember what I said to you before, child,” he said, taking it back.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Wait, one more thing…”

  I turned back to him politely, but I just wanted to be gone. I was tired, in so many ways. I wanted to close my eyes.

  From under his tattered umbrella, he produced two books, and held them out to me. “Please take one.”

  “What are they?”

  “One is a history book. The other is my journal. Perhaps one of them will be useful to you. You can have one of them.”

  The one in his left hand was bound with a leather cover, embellished with a shining flame that was partially rubbed off. The other was little more than a bundle of mismatched papers roughly held together with string.

  A history book? If Red was right and our characters were royalty, then perhaps there was some information there… I reached for the leather book in the dervish’s left hand, although I couldn’t help casting a curious glance at the journal. The completionist part of me itched to take it too, but he had clearly said to only take one, and I would feel bad taking so many things from someone who obviously had so little.

  I flipped the book open.

  And that was it.

  I closed the book and bowed to the dervish. “Thank you.”

  He waved me away, tucking his journal back under the umbrella. Peach took my hand again, and we walked together back towards the house where I had started the scenario.

  I didn’t remember much of the trip back. It was almost as if I had pressed a Skip Cutscene button, only we really walked for twenty days.

  Peach kept me going, keeping up a constant chatter to distract me from my thoughts. By the time we made it back to the house, I was sure her throat must be sore from talking, and occasionally, singing. She had a sweet voice. I could see why she was a popular streamer.

  And then… nothing. For days, we whiled away the hours. We visited the city, the market and the parks. In the mornings we would dress each other’s hair, and eat food we didn’t need, and sleep unnecessarily. Sometimes I heard Peach weeping quietly in the night. Sometimes she heard me.

  “What are you think about?”

  I was curled up on the sofa, listless in the heat, my head tilted towards the window, the empty blue sky, the small glimpse of the top of a palm tree waving at me.

  “One of those voices that was insulting me on the mountain… It was you, wasn’t it?” I looked up at Peach. She was pale and frozen.

  “Why?”

  “The… I’m sorry, Maria! The scenario wanted me to say bad things to you too, but I… I couldn’t do it! I said one thing and I hated it so much…”

  “If the scenario made you do it, didn’t you get punished for starting to encourage me instead of insulting me?”

  “It’s fine.”

  No-one ever said ‘it’s fine’ and meant it. Rohan hadn’t. Tommy often said it, and it usually meant something was up.

  “Did you get a penalty?”

  Peach twisted her hands. “I… I lost half my Dex points…”

  “Peach!”

  “I couldn’t do it!”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Why would you do such a thing? We barely even know each other?”

  “As if you wouldn’t do the same! Are you saying it’s okay for you to do it but not for anyone else?”

  I gritted my teeth. “What I did for Ro- for Dr Uchiha was different. We’re… friends.”

  “What kind of friend does what he did?”

  I chose to ignore this. “I hope he’s alright. I hope all of them are alright.”

  “Tell me about them?” Peach settled on the sofa opposite me.

  I sat up a little. “Three of my friends were with me in the first scenario. We all managed to get through it, but… A bunch of NPCs died… Do you think they feel anything?”

  “Does it really matter?” Peach asked. “The fact that you’re saying that means you probably feel bad about what happened to them.”

  I didn’t respond to that either, instead I said, “We’ve all been together for years. We became friends early in secondary school and kind of… never left each other. Although sometimes I wonder, now.”

  “I did notice things seemed… strained... between you and your friend.”

  “I don’t know what changed. Something… Somewhere along the way, Rohan just started becoming more and more isolated. He stopped being so open with us. He used to be so…” I found I was rumpling my hair in frustration. My scalp hurt. “I don’t know. Something happened to him, and I don’t know what.”

  “Have you ever tried asking him?”

  “Sure. But he would never say.”

  And I didn’t know how to make him tell me. Why wouldn’t he let anyone help him?

  Peach began to sing. She had a lovely voice, and it was one of my favourite songs, the kind of thing I would listen to on repeat until I fell asleep. I could feel myself drifting off as she sang.

  I don’t know how long she had been singing, but I jerked upright at the sound of someone climbing the stairs. Peach was looking into space, as if a dialogue box had popped up before her.

  The person climbing had a heavy tread. I could almost imagine what they looked like as they drew closer and closer. And when he appeared in the doorway, a richly-dressed, broad-shoulder man with a strong nose and an impressed dark beard and moustache, I was entirely unsurprised.

  “I heard singing,” he said gruffly. “A sweet singing I have only ever heard in a dream before… Are you, perhaps, in possession of the Talking Bird?”