Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

about in the world, you have a reason to live. You have something to believe in. That, really, is LJ’s entire philosophy. But what happens when your faith in people is shattered?

What’s going to happen to me?

The only person I can trust anywhere is Femida. I crossed half the world and broke into a prison for her, and she’s followed me everywhere without asking a single question. But here I am.

I see my whole life as if it’s one of those old movies, only movies don’t convey all the pain, all the suffering, or all the humiliation. They don’t make you remember the worry. But that’s neither here nor there.

I see myself getting hit, and my memory tells me that’s the first time I broke a finger. How scary it was to hide from the other kids in the heat conductor pipe. How my heart jumped into my throat, how sweat dripped from me in the unbearable heat. My broken finger wobbled from side to side, the shock keeping me from feeling the pain. But even that wasn’t Hell.

There was the pain I felt when I saw my parents die. When Rosie’s body flew through the air above me.

The bloody world and Talamei’s white skull did nothing—it’s in those moments that I sense LJ. He takes the pain for me.

Hell.

My first day in the game, the taste of mama’s porridge. Her grumbling about me not cleaning up after myself, the smell of father’s tobacco. His worn clothing, his short stubble, the wrinkles on his face, the fishing rod, the way we fished together—that’s my Hell.

Again and again, I relive those moments. Each time, the memory cuts deeply. I remember how mama’s food tastes, how father smokes out on the porch when nobody can see him. I remember them worried about me at the tournament—how much they loved me. I even remember father beating me, I remember crying, and those memories are the most dear and valuable I have. Everything ends with the smile on mama’s face as she holds my sister in her arms. They’re standing in the doorway of our house on Feng Island.

***

Figiraldina Elmaro crawled out of her med capsule and headed to the shower to wash off the solution. Her parents had her older brothers over, and Fiji didn’t want to get in the way of the conversation they were enjoying.

Her mother carried a tray of food into the room and opened the panoramic window in the ceiling. Earth, the blue planet, the cradle of humanity was right there in all its grandeur. For the last three years, Fiji had walked around with a scowl on her face, unwilling to talk about Project Chrysalis. Something unpleasant had happened.

When she stepped out of the shower, she saw the bowl of hot soup on the table. The voices of the Elmaro men hotly debating something wafted in from the kitchen.

“What are they being so loud for? Did they lose the battle again?”

“What’s that tone for? What happened?”

Sitting down at the table and looking up at Earth, the girl took a deep breath.

“Mom, Sagie’s been missing for a month in his tree in the astral. It grows faster than I can cut it down, and that isn’t even the worst part. Isaac lost his mind. It began when he and Slender started playing hide and seek, but then they moved on to chasing each other around. When Slender got tired of the game, Isaac won. They’re hanging animal corpses on the trees together now.”

“What animal corpses? You’re in the astral.”

“When Sagie shut off, the plants around him started growing like crazy. An hour later, an enormous tree sprouted right where he was lying. Our island started growing, too—it’s several kilometers across now. And the tree everything started from just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We’ve been in the astral for nine months already.”

“What’s the problem? You told me yourself that Sagie is regenerating his body, and that’s a pretty long process as far as I know.”

“Dangerous, too, and it ended three weeks ago. Until he wakes up or leaves the astral on his own, they can’t force him out of the game. That’s the main problem with being in the astral. Also, I made a stupid mistake, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.”

“Fiji, what did you do?”

“Sagie goes beyond normal, even rational behavior. When we were in the ship on the way to the resort, I tried to introduce another way of control to make things a little more predictable. He didn’t just refuse; he let me know that he thinks on a completely different level. I’m not good enough to predict his behavior. Mom, I–”

“Trust your intuition.”

“But he–”

“Trust your intuition. Your brain works faster than your consciousness, and it accounts for factors and data that you don’t. You’re just learning how to use it now, so don’t worry. The skills you have, your abilities, and the art of leveraging them are all just developing. Difficulty doesn’t mean you’re at the limit of what you can do. Experience is the great healer, and you know very well how abilities expand.”

Fiji sighed deeply. The stress faded away, and her thoughts fell back into their usual order.

“Fiji, the astral dulls your senses, forcing you to work exclusively with your mind. It isn’t a good idea to stay there that long.”

The girl and her mother looked out the panoramic window. Somewhere up there on Earth, a boy in a med capsule hadn’t woken up for a whole month.

***

The crown of the tree parts, and my frail body falls out of it. My head is spinning, my arms and legs aren’t doing what I tell them to, and I can barely control my streams of consciousness. I almost puke, only there’s nothing in my stomach—a fact that it reminds me