Maya looked up, her eyes wide. "Where did you learn that?"
"I should..." he started, and the sentence ended. He didn't have the words anymore. The code had consumed his charisma points like a slot machine eating quarters.
The thoughts came flooding back, faster than any code could block them. She doesn't mean it. You forced it. You cheated. You didn't earn this. You're not him. You're the guy in the pajamas at 11:47 PM. This is all stolen valor.
He found the in the living room. A girl named Maya was trying to roll a joint on a copy of Ulysses . Her hands were shaking. In the normal game of Leo's life, he would have catalogued this as a reason to leave— she's too high-maintenance, too messy, too something . But the code had silenced the internal QA tester. He just sat down.
"Wow," she said. "That was..."
He turned. He walked. He didn't run, but it was close. He left Maya on the porch, her "Hey—wait!" dissolving into the bass line of a song he would hate forever.
Three hours later, he was there. The house was a Victorian monster on the edge of campus, every window blazing, bass thrumming through the foundations like a second heartbeat. He smelled spilled beer, clove cigarettes, and the sharp, clean terror of possibility.
Then, the code started to glitch.