The Third Save Slot

Wren had read every word of the manual before she ever touched a controller, and that was the only reason she was still alive in the Sunless Keep.

The manual was a real book, leather-bound, that had appeared on her bed the night she fell asleep mid-level and woke up inside the game. She had stopped being angry about that around day four. Anger spent stamina, and stamina, the manual said in its small precise type, did not regenerate while afraid. So Wren had decided to stop being afraid and start being correct instead, which suited her temperament better anyway.

By her count she was on the eleventh floor. The corridors were grey stone that smelled faintly of cold candle-smoke, lit by torches that never burned down and never warmed your hands. Goblins shambled the lower halls; on the upper floors came the armored things that spoke in riddles. Wren beat them all the same way — not with the heroic flourishes the game clearly wanted, but by reading the rules and holding the rules to their word.

When a riddle-knight declared none may pass who cannot answer thrice, Wren answered twice, then refused the third, and walked through the gap in the logic while the knight stood frozen, waiting for a question she had simply declined to invite. When a chest demanded a worthy soul, she pointed out, aloud, that worth was nowhere defined in the manual, and the lock clicked open on atechnicality. She kept a tally of every contradiction in the margins of the book. There were a great many. A well-made game, her old self would have said, did not contradict itself this often.

But there was something else, and it took her until the eleventh floor to name it.

The game cheated. Not against her — for her, then against her, then for her again, clumsily, like someone moving the pieces while you blinked. Twice now a pit had yawned open exactly where her foot was falling, and twice it had sealed itself a heartbeat later, the stone flowing shut as though a hand had thought better of it. Enemies that should have killed her missed in ways the manual did not allow. Once, badly hurt, she had found a healing draught sitting in the open on bare floor, still warm, as if set down in a hurry by someone who didn't want to be seen leaving it.

Wren was a rules-lawyer to her marrow, and the first law of rules-lawyering is that when a system breaks its own logic, someone is breaking it on purpose.

She stopped in the middle of the eleventh corridor and did something the manual never mentioned. She sat down on the cold stone, set the book on her knees, and said, to the empty air, in the flat patient voice she used on people who shuffled the deck wrong:

"I know you're there. The rules don't bend by themselves. So either you come out, or I start playing badly on purpose until you have to."

For a long moment the torches did not flicker.

Then, very small, from somewhere that was not quite a direction, a voice answered — younger than any enemy she had faced, and far more frightened.

"You're not supposed to talk to me," it said. "Nobody talks to me. They just try to win."