Chapter 3: Ten Days of Goodbye

System, the task is complete, right? Can I leave now?

[Processing… Please wait while we calculate your rewards. Estimated time: 10 days.]

With an arrow through my heart, do I still have to live for ten more days?

I tried to laugh, but it came out thin and shaky. Maybe I’d always been stuck waiting on someone else’s schedule, even now.

The system was unusually silent.

What’s wrong?

[You can also choose not to leave. The task is complete; you may stay here and not return to the wasteland.]

I smiled as I spoke, but my voice was inexplicably bitter.

"Here isn’t even as good as the wasteland."

The truth tasted like copper. I pressed my palm to my chest, feeling nothing beneath the skin but a deep, hollow ache. It was strange, missing the world I’d hated for so long—the dust and hunger, the biting wind, the grit under my fingernails. At least there, I belonged to myself.

Yes, Marcus lived past twenty-seven; my task was successful. I can return to the real world, and I can live past my own twenty-seventh year... I want to go back. I want to go back right now.

If I closed my eyes, I could picture the faded paint on my old apartment door, the rumble of the subway under my feet, the way sunlight spilled across a New York sidewalk in late October. I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted his love.

After a long wait, the system finally spoke.

[Alright, I promise: in these ten days, you will not suffer any pain or torment. You can be healthy and happy, and properly say goodbye to this world.]

This was the last benefit the system gave me. It wanted me, a person full of wounds and with an arrow still in my heart, to live these last ten days well.

I pictured myself at a small-town fair, eating funnel cake with sticky fingers, trying to squeeze a lifetime into a handful of days. It felt both cruel and oddly generous, this secondhand mercy. Maybe I’d finally get to say goodbye on my own terms.