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1.
Fluixon has perfected the start of the game. And it is a game, every time. Cut down a tree. Put together some inadequate tools. Use those tools to create better tools. Sometimes he goes underground, walking through vast dark caves to try and find supplies that’ll give him an edge in their eventual fight to the death. Once he found an enchanted golden apple. Another time he lured Saparata into an ancient city and got to watch as Saps blundered his way through the shriekers, blitzed by the Warden’s sonic cry. It always feels good to be the last one to die.
But he’s got an unlucky spawn this time around. When the world generates around him in chunks, Flux finds himself in a stony plain, gravel crunching beneath his feet. There are very few trees, and the ones that are within eyesight are scrawny and stunted by wind. Usually Flux finds himself in an oak or birch forest, where food and supplies can be found at every turn. But the universe is weighted against him this time. Bad odds.
Flux only has stone tools when Saps finds him at the base of a mountain, squinting upward to try and map the best route up. He feels Saparata’s presence before he even sees the other man approach, in the same way a prey animal knows its being stalked.
“Hey,” Saps says. He’s grinning, like he always is. Sunlight squints off his iron armor. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Flux sighs. “What are the odds?”
“Don’t get snippy with me, it’s not a good look on you.”
“You’re so arrogant.”
“Who, me?” Saps is rocking forward on the balls of his feet, and he doesn’t look the slightest bit upset at Flux’s disinterest. “I’m not arrogant. It’s not arrogant if I’m just really, really good at the game. You’re telling me that you don’t even have iron yet?”
“Unlucky spawn,” Flux mutters, which is true.
“Sucks for you. Wanna hear where I ended up?”
Flux hefts his pickaxe over his shoulder and starts the climb upward. “Not particularly.”
“Don’t run away from me!” Saps keeps pace with him easily, clawing his way up the gravel slopes. “You’re just upset that you got unlucky, but it happens to everyone. Don’t be so bitter about it.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You’re throwing a tantrum. Just let me kill you and then you get another shot at it. I’ll make it super quick this time, I promise.”
Flux pauses, halfway up the hill. He’s not prone to believing Saparata even at the best of times, but it really is an unlucky spot. He’s not even sure what he wants from reaching the top of this mountain. Emeralds, maybe, but what good will emeralds do in this world?
He turns around. Saps is a block beneath him, hand already on the hilt of his sword.
“Promise?” Flux says.
“Promise,” Saps grins.
2.
Every reincarnation is disorienting, some more than others. Fluixon’s body aches in sting-hot pulses, the burn throbbing beneath his skin before ebbing away. He blinks open his eyes to the sun. He reorients himself. He touches a hand to his side, as though expecting to see scar tissue from where Saps tore him open last. But his skin is, as always, smooth and untouched.
Saps had pinned Flux down and butterflied him open like he was a scientific specimen. And then he’d left Flux there, agonized and bleeding out, lifeblood smearing underneath him. I’ll make it super quick, he’d promised, before dragging it out to an excruciating length.
“You fucking liar,” Flux says aloud, and then he pushes himself to his feet.
Sometimes he wakes up on the beach. Sometimes he wakes up in the plains. At times, he and Saps are inexplicably spawned into a world consisting of nothing but a train station and a train, pulsing through a snowy black night. Other times, Flux and Saps get seemingly spawnlocked into the same world, wandering past old crafting tables, old villages they’d plundered, unable to escape the same chunks. Sometimes they’re alone; sometimes they’re surrounded by other people; sometimes they’re surrounded by an entire budding civilization. Sometimes they spawn right beside each other. Other times, they spawn a million blocks apart and find each other after months.
It doesn’t matter, because the thing about infinitely-generated worlds is that nothing is permanent. Infinite has always been another word for meaningless.
The only constant is Saparata, Flux’s very own heat-seeking missile. There are many dangerous things about Saps, but by far the most dangerous is simply how well he knows Fluixon. It would be difficult to not know Fluixon, at this point, after cycling through what must be a million universes by now. He understands the things that Fluixon does not yet know about himself. When they spawn into a new world again, whatever uncountable number they’re on this round, Flux knows he’s short on time. Because Saparata is a heat-seeking missile, who finds Flux time and time again. Who has one goal, across every reincarnation: to murder Flux.
So by nature, Fluixon has the same goal in turn: to kill Saparata.
This time around, Fluixon is on a beach. Waves paint themselves against sand. The air is wet and humid, drifting from a nearby rainforest. When he looks around, scouting for the nearest tree, Saparata is already there.
“What are the odds?” Saps beams.
“Stop stealing my good lines,” Flux says. He’s irritable. He still has vestigial pain from bleeding out on the side of a cold windswept mountain, and he’s the sort of person who holds a grudge. “Are you going to kill me like this? Barehanded? Planning to club me to death with a tree branch?”
“I was actually thinking we would go mining,” Saps offers. “Make it a fair fight. Pinky-promise?”
Saps breaks promises like wishbones. They mean nothing to him. Still, Flux repeats, “Pinky-promise?”
“Of course,” Saps lies.
They split apart before long, Flux slipping from his leash before Saps realizes he’s stopped holding it. With his newfound freedom, Flux heads north. He finds a nation up there, a group of people who are insistent on building a bridge to another island. Flux is bored enough to ingratiate himself into their group, reasoning that the more people around him, the more likely it’ll be that Saparata can’t get the jump on him.
This is how he inexplicably winds up as the vice-president of a country he’ll never remember, and Saps ends up as a loner on the other half of the world. Fluixon is petty and cruel, and a part of him wants to draw this world out as long as Saparata had tortured him the last round, so he uses every newfound advantage he has. He frames Saps for a dozen murders, puts several hits out on his head, nearly bankrupts his country in the process, tracks Saparata half-across the world just to wind up here, at the opening archway to a colosseum floor.
“You’re such a bitch,” Saps says, when Flux approaches to be in earshot. “You could have ended this early on! You could have just come down to my stupid island!”
“You left me there for hours!” Flux snaps. “You promised you would make it quick.”
“No way you’re upset about that,” Saps laughs, advancing on him, “You sore loser.”
To his chagrin, Flux is slow on his feet, wounded from the last battle he was in. Saparata gets to him first. His sword bursts through Flux’s ribcage and guts him like a fish. Flux should be used to this by now, but the pain takes him by surprise. He coughs wetly. Blood gurgles, spills like oil from his hands clutched to the wound.
Saps wrenches the sword back out. He pretends to be merciful. “Want me to end it quick? I mean it this time.”
Flux isn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “No,” he rasps, “I just love bleeding out, don’t you?”
“You’re so cute when you’re dying,” Saps grins, and like usual, he leaves Flux to die the slow way.
3.
People are fooled by Saparata’s nice person act. He pulls off genial and sweet remarkably well, but Flux knows the truth. He sees the glint in Saps’ eye and the way he lingers, one hand comfortably on the hilt of his sword, as he smiles and chats up world leaders, train conductors, or whoever else happens to share the world with them. It irritates Flux that no one else manages to see through the Prince Charming act. Even last time — when Fluixon tried a dozen different ways to have the world do his dirty work for him — everyone called Saparata innocent.
Reincarnated again into a new body, Flux is boiling over with fury. The odds are skewed against him as usual, which only makes the fury worse. He can’t quite put his finger on what’s changed about this universe, but something about this world appears less… blocky? Less pixelated than usual. The crafting recipes he recalls aren’t working. He finds himself with a campfire between his palms, unsure as to how he’s made it.
“Hey,” Saps says from behind. “This one’s a bit laggy, isn’t it?”
Flux does the first thing he can think of: crafting a knife and slashing it across Saparata’s chest. It jerks, moving slower than usual, the spray of blood staggered and jittery like a series of photographs splintered before his vision.
“Dude,” Saps says, “You’re like, glitching out right now.”
“I can’t believe they called you innocent,” Flux scowls, slashing again. “You are the furthest thing from innocent!”
Saps’ tone is reasonable, on the edge of patronizing, as he parries every one of Flux’s blows. “You did kinda frame me, you know.”
“No one understands you like I do,” Flux snaps.
That, at least, makes Saps smile: thin, greedy, and pleased. This is the same face he wears when he watches Flux bleed out, when he touches his palms to the slick-wet muscle of Flux’s diaphragm, when he teases him by drawing out his death long and slow. “Are you flirting with me?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Oh, I’m the asshole?” Saps’ face is all mocking skepticism, pointing down to his bleeding chest. Flux grips the knife tighter and moves to swing again, but it’s comically easy for Saparata when Flux is lagging out like this. His motions are sharp and fluid. He twists his arm around Flux’s, yanks hard, and disarms him in one clean motion.
“Not fair,” Flux tries, scrambling back, because he really is glitching out for some reason, “I’m literally being DDoSed right now.” But it’s already too late. Besides, no one ever cares when the world is unfair to Flux. The knife comes down hard. It’s jagged and messy. It hurts. Saps wants to cleave him apart. There the blade goes, finding its home time and time again, buried deep inside his body, all the way to the hilt.
4.
“I think it’s just us in this one,” Saps says, before Flux even registers that the reincarnation has occurred. He cracks open his eyes to a familiar blue-square sky, hot-wet earth beneath his palms. Leaf mulch and soil leave stains behind on his fingers; an average oak forest, then, yet another procedurally-generated universe. Saps is sitting cross-legged, methodically tearing apart a daisy. Pale wet petals flutter to the earth like snowfall.
Flux eyes him, then starts collecting wood. For a pleasant hour they work side by side in silence, sharing the same crafting table. Saps offers some of his cobblestone. In turn, Flux gives him half a stack of cooked fish.
“Well,” Saps says at last. He’s always impatient these days. “Wanna spar it out?”
“I’m so tired,” Flux says.
“Who isn’t?” A beat. “We could make it fun, somehow.”
“We could farm.” Flux etches drawings into the soil with the tip of a polished stone sword. “We could both make a pair of hoes. Start tilling. Let’s make a valley of wheat. We could terraform this whole biome and then bleed out together into the irrigation system.”
“Ugh, you’re so lame.”
“I hate looking at your stupid face,” Flux says, which is mostly true.
“You love my stupid face.” Saps stands up and holds out a hand to Flux. “Really, let’s go do something fun. Something new. You ever killed the Ender Dragon before?”
“Yes,” Flux says. “A thousand times.”
“Want to kill it with me?” Saps is bouncing like an overexcited child. “You think we can speedrun it?”
Is there any better reason than simply to try? Flux has lost to Saparata three times in a row. It feels like a new low, although three times is far from his worst losing streak. Flux shrugs and takes Saparata’s outstretched hand, allowing himself to be pulled upright. “Sure,” he says. “Let’s go kill the dragon.”
They emerge out of their portal several thousand blocks from spawn. This far from the original generation point, Flux knows, universes start to crack in odd ways. Chunks glitch, disappear in shimmering gaps. Structures splinter. Strongholds spawn deep-set in bedrock where you can’t find them. Fluixon glares, pickaxe in hand, shouting back up to the lush cave where Saparata is getting sidetracked. “It’s not here! I swear it’s not here!”
“Well, strongholds don’t just disappear, there’s always one!”
“This is so fucking cursed,” Flux mutters. Deepslate dust coats his hands. It always makes him cough.
“Keep digging!” Saps calls down, not listening to him.
“I’m on a losing streak,” Flux says aloud. “I hate being on a losing streak.”
Saps laughs overhead. Flux decides in that instant to quit. He’s not above quitting, not when plans don’t go his preferred way. He misses worlds that are more populated. He had a strangely good time, a couple worlds ago, even though that colosseum duel was humiliating. He pillars up, takes the portal back into the Nether, and reroutes to spawn the long way. Saps bitches and moans the whole way, but Fluixon appreciates the opportunity to fixate on a goal other than murder. It’s rare that Saparata doesn’t want to kill him instantly, so Flux often doesn’t get to experience this: the sharp, silver-clean focus that comes with accomplishing a task.
They make it to the End before long. Saparata gets the final blow on the dragon, then turns and spears Flux through the heart in the next instant, ripping the sinew from his muscle, aortic valve blowing clean-open. Flux drops to his knees and coughs up red. The spear rips back out with a wet suck.
“Damn, I wish I was opped in this world,” Saparata mutters to himself, as Flux feels his body fall, life draining. Saps paces back and forth, and the fact that his attention isn’t even on Flux is the worst cruelty thus far. “I’m gonna go find that damn stronghold, and then I’ll sleep, and then we’ll reset. Maybe your losing streak will end next round. Sound good?”
“Fuck you,” Flux says, gurgling through blood clots, and then he dies.
5.
Saparata seizes him by the straps of his armor in the middle of a birch forest, shaking him like a misbehaving dog. Rose bushes flutter around them in shades of pink-red, and Flux flinches back before he realizes that Saps isn’t planning on killing him. He’s just laughing hysterically. “Four fucking blocks, Flux! You were four blocks away! Why didn’t you just keep digging?”
“You’re joking,” Flux says. Saps only laughs harder, and Flux recalculates. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. I went back to the original hole, and I dug back down, and —”
Flux is prepared this time. He slips the dagger from his sleeve and guts Saparata at the precise spot where his iron chestplate ends. He twists the hilt cruelly, and Saps’ mouth opens in a sick hitch of pain, hands trembling, muscles tensing. His feet slip. He stumbles but stays upright by clinging to Flux’s armor.
“Fuck,” Saps gasps, and Flux jerks the knife back out. But Saps doesn’t miss a beat before continuing, voice thin and tight with pain, “So I dug back down, and I followed the deepslate all the way, and you know what I found? The smallest stronghold ever. It had maybe three rooms. And you were four blocks away from the entry staircase —”
“Stop talking!” Flux snaps, annoyed, thrusting the dagger back in, again and again and again until the whole world smells like hot rich iron. “Can you ever shut the fuck up, Saparata? Can’t you ever let me get one over on you?”
“Cut my throat next time,” Saps wheezes, teeth outlined in blood. “Do it, pussy. You won’t.”
6.
One of the bright flat superflat worlds. Nothing but the two of them and sparse structures, villages pockmarking the vast emptiness. They walk for a thousand chunks, seeing nothing but various sheep and slimes. It’s lonely, but Flux feels less alone with Saparata there.
Saps builds a house. A barn, really. Flux decides it’s the ugliest thing he’s ever seen and sets about tearing down the roof to create something better. It’s pleasant, really, this sort of domestic arguing: Saps saying he knows how to build, Flux tossing wood blocks down at his head. A part of Flux wouldn’t mind doing this forever.
Then night falls. Mobs burst to life around them. Flux is in the middle of joking about how Saparata should never be allowed to design roofs when he hears the familiar snap-draw of a bow. The skeleton’s arrow catches Saps in the hollow of his throat.
“Oh,” Flux says, numb.
“Shit,” Saps says, in that last minute before he dies. His voice is torn apart. “This takes all the fun out of it.”
“Right,” Flux says, watching as Saps crumples like a leaf. “It really does.”
7.
Fluixon wakes up in the waiting room of a train station. He straightens; there’s a ticket in his hand. He shows it to the conductor and boards. They call him Jan as he navigates to his room, and Flux supposes it isn’t the strangest thing that’s happened. He hasn’t been on the train in a long while. He’s almost forgotten the different aliases it forces him to take on.
The train is, as always, taking a straight course into a dry cold night. Snow falls in sharp, fast splinters of white. With not much else to do, Flux starts searching for Saparata. Saps should be easy to recognize by now, with his distinctive white hair and the peculiar moles on his face, but when he asks, “Does anyone know where Saparata is?” the other passengers stare at him blankly.
“Oh,” someone says at last. “Silas? The professor?”
Professor sounds somewhat familiar. Flux has forgotten how the rhythm goes, this many rounds spent without spawning back at the train. “He wears glasses, if that helps.”
“Definitely Silas,” someone corrects. “It’s funny that you know him by his last name. Do you two know each other?”
“Not at all,” Flux lies. “Does anyone know where he was last?”
“I think I saw him at the bar,” someone says, puzzled.
“I’m sure he was just at the back —”
“— or no, on the roof?”
Flux ignores them. He gets his hands on a revolver, somehow. He makes his way to the far back train compartment, where he finds an open door to the flat bed. There, he hears a scream cut short. The sound is sharp, cutting through the screech of wheels on the tracks, the brakes hissing as they depress, world flickering past. Someone Fluixon doesn’t recognize comes sprinting towards him, blood splattered across their face.
“It’s the professor,” they gasp, eyes dilated, as though Flux didn’t already know that. “The professor, it’s the professor —”
They shove past Flux, tripping over their own fear. The train door is left open, wet chunks of snow spilling inside. Flux keeps a hand on his revolver and listens: no sound of Saparata. Only the sound of wet, ragged breathing, the familiar sound of a body right before it dies.
It’s bait. It couldn’t be more obvious bait, and yet here Flux is, edging his way out into the open air. Wind whips past. It wicks away the worst of the smell, but blood is still hot and wet against his feet. Two dead bodies are convulsing in death. There’s a third slightly ahead, throat torn open.
Flux knows he’s falling for the bait, and he still can’t stop himself. One hand on the carriage for balance and the other on his revolver. With an unerring certainty, Flux knows that Saps is on the exact opposite corner of the shipping container from him.
Like clockwork, Saps calls, “I know you’re there, Flux!”
Flux flattens himself against the other corner. In times like this, it’s wisest to keep silent.
“Fluixon,” Saps calls again, more plaintive. He says his name Flu-ix-on, not Flux-ee-on, the only person in any universe who has ever pronounced it correctly. “Stop avoiding me, I miss you!”
Flux is petty enough to say, “That’s not my name, Professor!”
Saps laughs, which makes him sound insane. “Sorry, Jan.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Flux snaps. “You know this isn’t how the game is supposed to go. Killing four people at once is just plain stupid.”
“Oh, come on,” Saps groans, “I couldn’t find you anywhere. You were hiding from me. Why are you so upset with me?”
It occurs to Flux that they may have been unintentionally dodging each other. Flux probably shouldn’t feel this flattered by the knowledge that Saps was looking for him in turn.
“You died,” Flux says, which is perhaps the dumbest reason to be upset. “I was supposed to get you, and you let a skeleton get you first.”
A beat.
“Well, it’s not really my fault if the skeleton has better aim than you,” Saps says at last.
“That’s not the point!”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to murder me. It was an honest mistake.” Saps is expectant, as though waiting for a response. When Flux remains silent, he continues, wheedling, “You’re so possessive about it, you know? It’s almost like you really care about being the one to put me six feet under. Even though nothing changes, nothing ever changes! Don’t you ever want to do something different? Something new? Didn’t you have fun, looking for that stupid stronghold? Playing all those games with me, framing me for all those dumb assassinations? Sometimes I feel like you’re almost starting to care about me.”
“First, I feel nothing about you at all,” Flux says, voice startlingly cold. “And second? I do not have bad aim.”
He rounds the corner and fires his gun.
For a split-second Saps appears astonished. He stares at Flux as though he’s never seen him before. One hand raises to the hole punched through his chest, then his body pitches backward. The blood looks like ink in the dull night. Branches from pine trees reach outward like arms, as though it’s possible to catch him before he falls.
Saps doesn’t speak. Fluixon stands over his dead body and fires four more times into the motionless chest, just to be completely sure.
8.
This is how it goes: one person murders the other, and the other person falls asleep afterward, and the world restarts. The dead body comes back to life. The alive body wakes up in a new universe. Fluixon has never tried to stay awake after murdering Saparata, mostly because he thinks it would result in a fairly boring existence. He’d fall asleep before long anyway. Or he’d go insane from sleep deprivation. Either way it’s not worth it, because if Fluixon is being entirely honest with himself, Saparata is what makes this endless monotony somewhat bearable.
That is, until he wakes up with a cuff around his wrist.
It’s ice-cold iron, the sensation so sudden and bitter it feels almost like a burn. He shoves himself up to find a sunny, bright warm day. Clear pink morning. This world is smaller than the rest of them; Flux can see the glittering world border a couple dozen chunks away. He looks at his wrist, realizing the cuff is linked to a chain. It clinks softly against metal, leading all the way to —
“You have got to be kidding me,” Flux sighs.
“No way,” Saps says, on the other end of the chain. He’s bleary-eyed, one hand still raised to his chest as though feeling for a long-vanished entry wound, but he’s staring at Flux with that same wide, astonished expression. He jerks on the chain hard enough that Flux has to yank back to avoid being pulled off his feet. “What kind of — did you do this? While I was asleep?”
“I didn’t —” Flux splutters. “Why would I ever do this?”
Flux understands that it’s more than a chain. He feels the thin, trembling presence of Saparata’s health beside his own. It’s an odd sensation, feeling someone else’s heart beat inside his chest. If he kills Saparata here, he kills himself too. Neither of them will win without losing at the same time.
“Please,” Flux says miserably. “This has to be a joke.”
Saps, for some ridiculous reason, has started to laugh. He laughs so hard he doubles over on himself, and something crisp and light flutters in Flux’s chest. He tamps down hard on it. He wishes for an axe, or a revolver, or a spear, or a knife of some sort, anything that can pop right through Saparata’s trachea and stop the sound.
“This is perfect,” Saps is giggling, “It’s so perfect, you literally can’t get rid of me! You know, I was running all over that damn train trying to find you — were you avoiding me? I bet you were avoiding me.”
Flux grits his teeth, because it’s actually the opposite of what he was doing. “As soon as we get unchained —”
“Oh, you’ll go back to running away from me? Or you’ll come after me and try to take my head off again? Ooh, I’m so scared. I’m shaking in my boots.”
“Kill yourself,” Flux says helpfully. He tries to walk in one direction, but Saps plants his feet in the ground so Flux is stuck in a six-block radius. He fumes, feeling his ears go red. Saps is bigger, taller, and stronger, all brawns instead of brains. So Fluixon finds himself simply along for the ride. He’s full of melancholy, dragged into a cave, picking his way around the delicate obsidian edges of a lava pool, contemplating jumping in.
“Come on, you’re being so boring,” Saps says. “Loosen up a bit. Look. Here’s a diamond.”
He gives Flux a diamond. Flux throws it in the lava to spite him. Then for good measure, he throws his pickaxe in as well, because he knows Saparata will give him a new one. On cue, Saparata offers another pickaxe: iron, polished to a silver sheen. Flux considers putting it through his teeth, then decides he doesn’t want to mar Saparata’s pretty face at the moment.
Saps is generous in this universe. He offers a hand when Flux wobbles on the way out of the cave, points to footholds in the wall. The ravine opens into dazzling bright sunlight. A river carves lazily through the boxed-in world.
“Well?” Flux tries. “Want to stab me and get it over with?”
“I feel like torturing you some more,” Saps decides.
“Is this karmic comeuppance?” Flux wonders aloud, as Saparata yanks him down to the riverbed, searching for sugarcane. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“Shoot me?” Saps suggests. “Stab me? Kill me a million times?”
“You’ve done all that to me. And worse.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Saps sighs. “Ever since the skeleton, you’ve been acting weird. You’re being skittish. You’re like a feral cat.”
“I’m not,” Flux starts to say, but he’s spared from answering when Saparata’s attention is diverted in the next instant. He’s spotted other players. A group of people are huddled together, chains interlinking different pairs together. Flux recognizes some faces: people from the train, people from that old nation he was part of. He can’t exactly recall their names.
Saps has a thin, greedy smile on his face. “We could totally TNT-minecart them,” he whispers. “They’re all so close together.”
“You’re insane,” Flux hisses back.
Saps’ tone goes wheedling. “Think about how funny it would be.”
Unfortunately, that’s what pushes Flux out of his melancholy. It gives him a task to concentrate on, regardless, a task that isn’t oriented towards murdering Saparata for once. Saps already has a solid amount of gunpowder from wandering through caves, and he and Flux uproot pockets of sand to piece together an explosive. They sneak around the back end of the other group, at the base of a mountain. Saps frowns, fidgeting with a loose piece of redstone. “This stupid powered rail isn’t working.”
“Let me look at it,” Flux says, going to push him out of the way. He’s got more experience with redstone than Saps does.
“Oh my god, you control freak, I can do it —”
“Get out of the way. You’re clearly useless.”
“Am not.”
“Evidently you are, otherwise it would be working —”
“Stop messing with it, you’re just gonna —”
In a horrible moment, Flux forgets about the chain linking them together. He tries to move around Saps and trips right over the stupid thing. And he falls face-first into the primed and loaded minecart.
It’s as though time freezes, watching his outstretched hands press up against the delicately-organized redstone, triggering the detonation. He opens his mouth, though to say what? Saps, run, get out of the way?
But he doesn’t have enough time to say anything. He barely has enough time to recognize the minecart blowing up. He just has a single fragment in which the world turns sharp hot red, in which he has the absurd, unknowable impulse to yank Saps away from the explosion.
9.
Fluixon wakes up in a bus.
His mouth tastes like gunpowder. He stumbles off into hot daylight, hands running all over himself, as though to check that he’s still in one piece. It’s been a long time since he’s died in such a gruesome way. He’s mortified at himself, stumbling away from the other passengers before any of them can catch him. What a fatal, humiliating mistake.
Flux ends up trailed by someone — Thomas, he thinks. He recognizes Thomas’s face. He’s a recurring character in other universes, though Flux finds it hard to grasp the details of whatever time they’ve spent together. Regardless, Thomas follows Flux like a lost puppy through the decaying world. Vines crumble over old, rusted cars. Buildings loom like gravestones overhead. They cast long, graying shadows across vast expanses of streets. Flux is certain that Saparata is in this world, but if he is, they haven’t found each other yet. It’s possible they’re traveling in opposite directions, though it seems unlikely. One way or another, they always manage to stumble into the other.
The reunion happens later that night. Thomas and Fluixon wind up following the torchlight of other stragglers. Thomas scouts ahead to make sure it’s safe — the zombies in this world carry spears, for some odd reason, moving with a frightening speed — while Flux checks over their supplies. He joins the group before long, and there he is. Saparata. A backpack slung over his shoulder, holding a lantern, glowing like the moon.
“Hey,” Saps says, beaming.
Flux glares and turns away, but Saps catches up to him. In the trunk bed of an old rusted car, Saps wraps a hand around his upper arm to keep him in place.
“Stop running away,” Saps says. “I tried to catch up with you at the bus, but you disappeared.”
“Don’t I deserve some alone time?” Flux lies.
“Yeah, but not from me.” Saps’ tongue pokes through his teeth. He lowers his head to Flux’s ear, and his breath sends a shiver rippling down Flux’s spine. “I can’t believe you would blow me up. Joint suicide is a low blow, even for you.”
Flux finds himself oddly speechless. He manages to bite out at last, “I — me? That I would do that to you? That was obviously your fault.”
“Well, you messed with the powered rail.”
“You’re the one who came up with that idea in the first place!”
“And you’re the one who tripped over the chain,” Saps shrugs. “You’re so stubborn, you know that? You will never admit to messing up once in your life. Do you think you’ve ever been honest about anything? Or are you just going to keep lying the whole rest of your miserable, eternal life?”
It strikes Flux like a slap to the face. He stumbles down from the truck bed. He doesn’t want to be alone, so he fists his hand into Thomas’s sleeve, wrenches him away from where he’s been chatting with other passengers from the bus.
“We’re leaving,” Flux says.
“Hang on,” Thomas is saying earnestly, “My presentation —”
“Nope. We’re leaving.”
“See you around,” Saps says, sounding unconcerned.
Thomas is quieter this time, tripping over a vine snaking across the roadway. At last, tentatively, he says, “So the two of you — do you know each other?”
“No,” Flux says. “We do not.”
“He’s coming up with a cure, you know? He was mentioning that before you, uh. Showed up.”
“He’s a liar,” Flux says, still marching determinedly onward. “Whatever Saparata tells you is a lie, Thomas, and you can never forget that.”
Thomas startles, but clamps his mouth shut and hurries after Flux.
There are a thousand, a million things to do in a world this vast. Fluixon could meet up with other stragglers from the first bus, could start a farm, could loot through every last building to try and find supplies. He could go along with the idea to set up a hostel, maybe, which Thomas had mentioned with a sort of naive, jittery anticipation. He could turn right back around, face Saps, and tell him something that wasn’t a lie.
But what could Fluixon even say? Sorry I tripped over the chain, maybe. Sorry for trying to protect you from that explosion. Sorry that I’m the only person allowed to murder you. Sorry that I’m jealous over a damn skeleton. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard?
Instead, at night, Flux creeps outside of their shelter and lays down on the cool pavement. Evening blooms before him in fantastic starry colors. He keeps his eyes fixed on the vast glittering spray of light as the zombies find him. It’s peaceful, death at the hands of someone other than Saps. It’s simultaneously the worst pain he’s ever felt. Being eaten alive is not fun.
Flux prays that Saps sleeps soon. He doesn’t want to come back to this world for a long, long time.
10.
On the train again, Saparata has his wire-rimmed glasses perched low on his nose, his necktie sloppily loose around his neck. He’s turning his ticket over and over in his hands, eyes running over the train station. Flux keeps himself hidden behind a pillar. Saparata’s face goes tight in frustration, then he rushes to catch the train before it departs. Flux boards at the back, finds the bar first — he would like a strong drink, the strongest they have to offer — and goes to find his room.
Poison clenches tight around his throat. He chokes on the hot venom of it. His world goes spotty and black, and the glass falls from his hands, crunches into pieces beneath him. He dies in a green haze, hands coming up to grasp uselessly at his throat, thinking the whole time that this has got to be the most embarrassing death of them all.
So Flux does not see when Saps manages to get his hands on a gun. He doesn’t see Saps stalk the whole train looking for him, peering around corners, eyes glinting, pupils blown-wide. He’s trigger-happy. He’s a heat-seeking missile, searching for a body that has already lost all warmth.
“Flux,” he calls softly, entreatingly, a tone of voice Flux has not heard and will not hear, because he’s dead, “I don’t really want to play hide and seek right now, alright? I’m sorry for pushing hard about the lying thing, I just think that maybe it would help if you —”
Then Saps stumbles over a body dressed in Fluixon’s clothes, wearing Fluixon’s eyes, staring glassy and pale up at nothing. There is shattered glass beside him, the long stem of a martini glass still intact.
“Twice in a row,” Saps mutters. His face crumples. “Go figure. You petty, vindictive...”
So Fluixon does not see how Saparata scowls, straightens, then turns away, determined to find whoever got to Flux before him. Fluixon does not see Saparata atop the rushing train, tie whipping in the wind, lights flickering, snow falling like television static, hunting, always hunting, as night turns deep and vivid. Flux does not see when Saparata aims his gun and fires directly through a killer’s skull. And he certainly does not see how Saparata loads the final bullet, turns the revolver around to his own chest, and fires again.
11.
Fluixon wakes up on the beach.
“I missed you,” Saps sighs. “The last two rounds have been such a bust.”
“Not this again,” Flux sighs, and he closes his eyes shut. He’s tired. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He misses the Saparata who stalked him like a vengeful angel, who slit his throat without remorse, who took great pleasure in taking Flux apart slowly, trembling, measured, watching his heart crack open from his chest. Flux doesn’t know what to do with this Saparata: the one who searches for him, asks Flux to tell him something honest.
He feels, rather than sees, Saps fall down beside him. Flux senses his presence in the way a magnet might be oriented towards its opposing pole. “You ever thought about maybe just… not doing it?”
“That would be crazy.”
“But it would be new.” A beat. Saparata is waiting, though for what, Flux doesn’t know. “Don’t you want to try something new?”
“I want to kill you,” Flux says, which is mostly the truth. “I want to take your head off with an axe. Or a guillotine. I’d love to end back in one of the purge worlds, or one of the prison worlds, where I could put you in solitary confinement and watch you go insane. I want to explode you with fireworks. I want to tear your heart from its ribcage and eat it.”
“...okay, sick,” Saps says. “Riveting stuff.”
“Let me have my fantasy.”
“Your fantasies are boring. Why not do something cool? Want to build a nation with me? You had fun the last time, when you were plotting assassinations and all that.” A beat. “Let’s try democracy for a change. I’ll be your president and you can be my second-in-command. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Why can’t I be first-in-command?”
“Because you didn’t come up with the idea first,” Saps says. Flux can hear the grin in his voice. “Besides, you have some experience being a vice president.”
Flux opens his eyes at last. The sun is hot and dry. This beach is less humid and green than most of the other beaches he wakes up on. They’re at the edge of a vast desert, sweet and yellow and wide-open. When he stands, he can spot sandstone poking far over the edge of the known world.
“Alright,” he acquiesces, because he can tell that Saps won’t give up on this idea easily. “I’ll be your second-in-command.”
He regrets the decision several months later. It’s a sick, icy terror, hearing the crunch behind him and feeling his whole body contract tight like a fist. He’s running before he knows it. Falling to his knees, scraping his skin raw against the sandstone.
“You fucking idiot,” someone is saying, and it takes Flux a long moment to realize it’s his voice, tearing from his chest, the sound a knife, “Why would you do this to me? You know how much I hate being left alone. You know it, you know me, you know me, why would you…”
The dead body does not respond, as dead bodies tend to do.
12.
In the next world, they spawn blissfully far from each other. Flux crawls into a hole in the ground and dreams of burying himself alive. Then he rights himself. There are better ways to deal with his anger at Saparata. Like raiding a pillager outpost, loading up his crossbow, and waiting. Saps’ figure crosses the horizon line, and Flux fires.
He misses. Saps’ face lights up like the bright side of the moon. “Flux!”
Flux loads up the second bolt. He fires again.
“Listen,” Saps is calling, getting closer, waving eagerly, “I can explain —”
Flux loads a third bolt. Third time’s the charm, he thinks, and he fires blindly. Hears the wet thunk as it strikes Saparata’s temple. Dead bodies don’t get the chance to explain things.
13.
“You’re really upset with me,” Saps says, words soaked through with pain. “Won’t you let me apologize?”
Flux is busy settling his full weight on Saps’ back so that he can’t possibly move. He fingers the knife, touches it to the base of Saps’ spinal cord. It’s cruel to torture him like this. But it feels delightfully pleasurable to flay Saps open. To watch him bleed. Saps jerks like a fish caught on a hook when Flux touches wet muscle. It’s payback for all the times he’s died and left Flux alone.
“You sadist,” Saps tries to say, but his words blur into a mess of delirious hurt, and he stops making sense after long.
14.
“Got it out of your system?”
This world is ice and snow, all blue-white and frosted over. It’s one of the strange purge worlds, though neither Fluixon or Saparata have ended up on the powerful side. Maybe that’s why Flux hasn’t killed him yet, because he’s not allowed to get his hands on a weapon without one of the government’s guards cutting his throat for it.
He could always strangle Saps. He could find a length of wire and garotte him. He could beat his skull in with the closest cinderblock. But he only sits with his knees pulled to his chest, tucked away in some stone quadrant somewhere, thinking morosely about the sandstone scraping his knees raw, the blunt weight of Saparata’s body in death.
What can he say to Saps that hasn’t yet been said? In an infinitely regenerating existence like theirs, almost everything has already been said. Sometimes, Flux thinks that Saparata might know Flux’s body better than Flux does himself. After all, one of them has seen the other torn-open, bleeding profusely, sweat-white muscle and fat, everything that lays beneath. Flux has never seen it for himself because, of course, he’s always died beforehand.
“I think so,” Flux says after a minute.
“Good,” Saps says. “I really don’t like it when you’re angry at me.”
“Don’t go killing yourself, then.”
Saps nudges his shoulder. “This world really sucks. Want to go find weapons and just end it quick? Maybe we’ll end up on the government’s side in the next phase.”
It’s an olive branch, though a weak one. “Hopefully I end up on the government’s side, you mean.”
“You’d love that. Lording power over other people.”
“You’re really annoying sometimes.”
Saps packs icy, wet snow into a ball. “Wanna bet I could nail Schpood with this?”
Who the hell is Schpood? Flux wrinkles his nose. He’s probably met the man before, but he can’t place a face or a voice to the name.
“I’m serious, he’s right over there.” Saps slaps more wet snow onto the ball until it’s dense and hard. “Hey, watch this.”
He lobs the snowball high up over his head. Like a gunshot, or a crossbow bolt, or a skeleton’s arrow, the snowball falls towards its target. Say what you will about Saparata, but at least he has good aim.
15.
Flux wakes up on the beach, scrabbling for purchase, breathing hot and heavy. His fingernails dig into wet sand, and he snaps upright. His heart bolts like a panicked animal. For a second he’s lost, displaced out of time, and the next —
“You moron,” he snaps, flinging a handful of wet sand in Saparata’s general direction. “You idiot, what the hell were you thinking?”
For once, Saps appears abashed. He goes pink. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“You are never thinking!” Flux shouts. “You’re stupidly impulsive! Why do you have a death wish, Saps? Don’t you know I’m always here? If you want to die so badly, just come find me!”
Saps flinches. “Is that what this is about?”
“Nobody gets to kill you but me,” Flux spits, and it comes out with such venom that it stuns both Saparata and himself into silence.
They stare at each other for a long moment. The soft rushing of waves echoes in and out of Flux’s ears.
When Saps is quiet for too long, Flux finds himself talking, the words spilling from him: “I carried your stupid ugly head around for days. They had some revival machine, and I just died in the end holding onto your goddamn skull.”
A flicker of a smile. “You stayed awake?”
Flushed, Flux falls silent.
“How long?” Saps presses, startlingly tender.
“Four days,” Flux says, “Which was a mistake, by the way. Hallucinating is not fun.”
Saps blinks. “You’re serious?”
“You,” Flux says, stabbing a finger into his chest, “Are never allowed to do that to me again.”
“You’re telling me that you stayed awake for four days, carrying my head around, just so you could revive me for yourself? For your own sick pleasure?”
“You left me alone,” Flux snaps. “You know how much I hate being alone.”
Saps’ grin is delicious, all bite, like a dagger slipped between his third and fourth ribs. “I think you’re lying to me again. I think you just want me all to yourself.”
Flux is annoyed enough to correct him. “I want you dead.”
“I bet you hate it whenever I so much as talk to another person that’s not you. Does it kill you when I die to someone that’s not you?”
“I’d like to skin you alive, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Uh huh. Sure.”
“I’d do it slowly,” Flux says decisively, turning the image over in his head. “I’d make a healing potion. Several of them, actually, and I’d make sure you stay alive for as long as possible. I’d dissect you like a laboratory rat.”
Saps isn’t cowed by the fantasy. If anything, he’s only amused. The pink on his face isn’t from embarrassment anymore. “Was that your plan for when you revived me? Tie me down, pull me apart, watch me bleed?”
Flux doesn’t deign to respond to his teasing. His heartbeat flutters in his ears like a panicked bird. If he speaks, he’s only going to say something remarkably stupid and pathetic. So he turns, surveys the beach. He has been on a beach like this a thousand times. He has woken up in a world like this a million times. He has played it out in every way imaginable, and it strikes him now that not once has he really tried to live in a world where both of them stay alive at the end.
But that dream vanishes in the next moment. The mental exhaustion of the last four days has worn him down. “Why don’t you kill me and get it over with? Make it quick for once.”
“I don’t always want to kill you, for the record.” A beat. “Sometimes I want other things, too.”
“That’s just —” Flux flounders. “That’s just pathetic, Saps.”
“You’re telling me you’ve never even thought about it?” Flux frowns. Before he can think of a snappy retort, Saps beats him to the chase. His smile is blinding; it’s a little like looking into the face of the sun. “Come on, Flux, you can do it. Tell me one honest thing.”
Flux sits down heavily. He digs his hands into the wet sand to ground himself.
At last, he tries, “Do you think eternity ever ends? If neither of us kill each other, or if you don’t get yourself killed first?”
“If you don’t trip right into a TNT minecart, you mean?”
Flux glares. “Saps, what if one of these rounds, we die and stay dead? So what if we both live like normal fucking players? What if we stop playing this stupid game for once?”
Saps stills. Then he sits down beside Flux. The horizon line stretches endlessly before them, dark blue ocean meeting the soft blue sky. Saps’ fingers twitch, then he curls his pinky around Flux’s. “Is this your way of saying you want to try something new?”
“Maybe,” Flux admits. “I think I’m just sick of being left alone.”
The house they build in this world, in a pine forest at the edge of the ocean, is shabby and small. Saps can’t be trusted with building roofs, so Flux takes over the architecture. When night starts to burn its blackness over them, Saps crafts two beds and places them down. For once, both their weapons are on the opposite side of the room, tucked into chests where neither can reach it.
Flux isn’t sure what he expects when he lays down beside Saps. There are a dozen ways for Saparata to kill Fluixon in this position: choking him or strangling him or shoving a pillow over his face. Bludgeoning him to death with his bare fists. Shattering a window and cutting his throat open with a shard of glass. Using all of his dumb, brute strength to snap his neck.
But Saps wets his lips and says, “Can I try something new?”
“That depends,” Flux says. “Will it be fun?”
In return, Saps takes his face in his palms and kisses him. It’s a new, glorious sort of death: a feverish heat bursting like poison through his body, like an arrow skewered through his heart. Flux shivers as though on the verge of death. He’s warm and trembling all over, heartbeat rabbit-quick and desperate. For all the times Saparata has tried to murder him, this is by far the most painful and excruciating, the slowest, the most drawn-out any death has been thus far.
“It can be fun to try new things,” Saps mutters against his mouth. “Let’s do something we’ve never done before.”
“This is,” Flux says, “The exact opposite of ending it quick.”
“I can, if you want me to.” Saps’ hands are still cupping his face. Flux can feel the bloodheat coursing through them. “But I don’t think you really want that.”
“I think you just like torturing me.”
“Well, I think you like being tortured,” Saps says pointedly. “I think you’re actually starting to care about me a little bit.”
Flux feels scraped-open. It’s selfish, but he admits, “I think I want this world to last for a while.”
“So let’s make it last,” Saps says, as though it’s that easy.
A beat. Flux is achingly aware of how easy it would be for Saps to put his hands around Flux’s throat and squeezes. Make it quick. Move onto the next world. Keep the cycle going.
Flux says, “Promise?”
“Promise,” Saps agrees.
Saps breaks promises all the time. But he doesn’t now. Instead he slides back down into bed, closes his eyes. One hand is left curled half-open between their bodies. Fluixon has seen the way this hand wields a sword, a crossbow, a knife, a spear, a snowball, every weapon imaginable. He hadn’t imagined that it could hold another new, brutal form of violence. The tenderness hurts somewhere deep inside his ribs. Flux thinks this ache might be the one thing that Saparata can never cut out of him.
He closes his eyes. Sleep washes over his head. Flux doesn’t know what will happen in the morning, doesn’t know which of them will kill the other first. But he’d like to stay in this world for as long as they can manage it. He’d like to try something new.