The room was all white. Walls, floor, ceiling. One window. Two chairs, a table, a timer counting down from sixty minutes like a threat.
Sherry was in one chair. May was at the window, looking out at nothing, which wasn't nothing at all. Outside the glass was a projection, an illusion of what the world might have looked like if the catastrophe had never happened. Green, ordered and people moving freely in open streets.
May knew it was fake. She was looking at it anyway. Twenty minutes gone. Neither of them had said anything useful.
"May." Sherry broke it. "We need to actually try something if we're going to make any progress."
"Fuck leveling up," May said, without moving her eyes from the window.
"You don't believe it's possible."
"Negative chance," May said. Her voice was very flat and final.
"You have probability manipulation," Sherry said. "Manipulate the chances."
May turned just enough to look at her. "Negative. After manipulation."
The tone underneath was clear enough. We are not friends. Stop talking to me and maintain the distance.
Sherry sat back. The timer ticked. Maybe she had a plan with Abram, Sherry thought. And I walked straight into the middle of it without thinking.
"Are we going to spend an hour in a white room not speaking to each other?" Sherry asked.
"Why did you even choose me?" May turned fully from the window, and whatever flatness had been there was gone now, replaced by something with edges. "You thought your little boyfriend was going to pick me so you got there first. Right?"
"He's not my boyfriend."
"Whatever the hell he is," May said. "Don't use me to manage your issues with him. I'm not interested at all."
"I can understand why you're upset," Sherry said carefully. "But I didn't choose you to block whatever you two had planned. Someone asked me to make sure Abram didn't get a partner, and I thought..." She stopped. "I thought you were the one he wanted."
May stared at her. The silence stretched long enough to have its own weight.
"Liar," May said. "Who's so interested in Abram's life that they'd ask you to do their dirty work?"
Sherry opened her mouth. Closed it. She could feel the name sitting on her tongue, heavy and not ready to be said out loud yet.
"He was in the library yesterday," she said instead, measuring every word carefully. "Someone approached me. Gave me today's lesson plan. Told me to make sure Abram ended up without a partner." A pause. "She said it would be better for him."
"She?"
Sherry didn't answer.
May looked at her for a long moment, then raised her middle finger with the casual ease of someone who had done it many times and felt no particular way about it. "Fuck you, bitch. You don't understand anything."
"Is this about Abram?" Sherry asked.
May laughed hard. The kind of laugh that doesn't bother dressing itself up.
"Girl, come on."
"I know you two have been sleeping together," Sherry said.
May laughed harder.
"I have never slept with Abram," she said, when she was done. "Not once. Not even a little bit. Sort your life out."
Sherry looked at her. May's eyes were completely steady. No defensiveness. No tells. Just the flat certainty of someone stating something obvious.
She's telling the truth, Sherry thought. And then the pieces started shifting.
First night. A voice through the wall, low and female. She had filed it as May and moved on without questioning it. But hearing May now, the specific texture of her voice, the way she hit her words, nothing matched. The voice through the wall hadn't been May's.
Second night. A different voice again. She had noticed it was different and still convinced herself it was May because it was easier than the alternative.
Two nights, Sherry thought slowly. Two different voices. Both not May.
She looked up at the ceiling. There, blending almost perfectly with the white, a small dark eye. Camera. She had nearly missed it. She kept her face still and looked back down.
Two girls, she thought. In two nights. The boy I've known for three days.
"So you chose me because of this," May said, quieter now, not done with the conversation, "I knew something was off about you the first time I saw you."
Sherry absorbed that.
"What are you trying to mean?" she asked.
May looked at her, then back at the window. Done talking. Sherry let it go. She had enough to think about.
Then May spoke again, because May was not the kind of person who left things where they were.
"Tonight," she said, with the energy of someone who had decided to make a point, "I'm actually going to sleep with your not-boyfriend. Just so you can stop imagining it and deal with the real thing."
Sherry looked at her. She had no response. No move. Nothing. She looked at the timer. Thirty two minutes remaining.
When does this end, she thought. When does this specific minute of my life become a different minute.
The projection outside shifted, the fake peaceful world rearranging itself, and Sherry sat in the white room and quietly accepted that the boy from the plain was a mystery she had significantly underestimated.
The timer kept ticking. Twenty-nine minutes left. Neither of them spoke.
Somewhere else in a white room, the same white walls, the same floor, the same ceiling, the same camera watching from the corner, sat Abram Nadez and Daphne.