Chapter Text
“What’s ‘Among Us’?”
Alex was in hell.
“Why haven’t they specified ‘to the death’?” T.J. asked. “It’s no fun if it’s not fatal.”
“Among Us is always to the death,” Alex said. “Magnus, how do you not know Among Us?”
Magnus had the audacity to look annoyed. “Homeless, then dead, remember? I missed out on TicTac and Vine too.”
“It’s TikTok.”
“Whatever it is, I missed it.” He pouted. Alex tried to pretend that it made him look stupid, but her traitorous brain was mainly just flashing CUTE in big neon letters.
“You didn’t miss it, it’s right here!” Halfborn pointed to the sign, like they hadn’t just read it out loud. “It’s by floors—wait, that’s no fun.”
“It’s a smaller game than regular death matches,” Alex said. “It wouldn’t work with hundreds of thousands of einherjar playing together.”
“So we have to kill each other?” Behind Halfborn’s slumped shoulders, Mallory was grinning widely.
“Alex, please explain Among Us to me,” Magnus pleaded.
He looked stupid. His hair was messy. His fly was undone, but he would never believe Alex enough to check if she tried to tell him.
Gods damn him.
“It’s a video game. Multiplayer. You play as little creatures in space suits and go around doing tasks.”
“Around where?” Magnus asked.
“Video game?” T.J. repeated.
“Tasks? You mean work?” Halfborn looked horrified.
Alex was definitely in hell.
There was an Among Us Information Session in the afternoon for those einherji who’d been lucky enough to die before its release. Alex almost got dragged into going, but luckily she was able to shape shift quickly enough that Halfborn couldn’t grab her, and even if she had ended up slashing one of Mallory’s arms so deeply her training knife scraped against bone, she had made it to her room. Not even Magnus’s annoying little pleas outside her door swayed her. Nope! If she was participating tonight, she would not be forced to sit through Helgi trying to explain “sus” memes from the twenty-first century to dead Vikings for two hours.
And she was participating tonight. Magnus made sure of that.
“Oh, light of my un-life, my love bug, my buttercup, won’t you murder our hall mates with me?”
“I hate you,” Alex told him through the closed door. “I’ll murder you.”
“My sugarplum? My cutie-pie? My love? Oh, I actually like that one. Can I call you ‘my love’?”
“No.” Alex was not blushing.
“My babe, my nut—nutter butter, oh my gods—my honey bunches? Sweet pea? I could go on, my love, I’ve got sixty-five of these bad boys in front of me thanks to a Southern Living article and another sixty-seven thousand pages of Google results to get through.”
“If I agree to play, will you stop?”
“Hm. Can I keep calling you ‘my love’?”
Alex groaned. “Fine.”
“Yes.”
“But that means ‘babe’ is off the table!”
“Dude.”
He’d left to go to the Among Us Information Session twenty minutes ago, and Alex still hadn’t moved from her position with her back against the door. She was afraid that if she tried, some sort of einharji-torturing Norse monster would break through it to drag her there, too.
“Hell,” she repeated. “Absolute hell.”
Then she thought of Magnus calling her “my love,” all goofy and in a horribly offensive British accent—but completely sincerely—, and she buried her face in her hands and screamed.
“Oh my gods, look!”
Magnus was holding up a piece of yellow fabric so disgustingly bright it made Alex’s head hurt. She hoped it was not what she thought it was. Please, to whatever deity watches over stupid war games based on real-life multiplayer apps, I am begging you, please don’t let that be a spacesuit.
“They gave us spacesuits!”
Alex thought about killing herself so she could spend the night regenerating instead of suffering through this hell.
“Absolutely not.” Mallory seemed to be having the same idea. “I am not wearing any of those. How are we supposed to kill each other if we can’t even move properly?”
“I’m going to kill myself,” Alex announced.
“No! Alex, you promised!”
“I hate you. I hate you so much,” she told him.
“There’s even a lime green one for you,” Magnus said, holding it up.
There was a pink flower headband that went along with it. Alex was going to do it. She was going to kill everyone in this room and then herself.
She put on the headband.
“There, see!” Magnus was smiling so widely she could see the gap in his molars—a lost tooth from when he was younger that, for whatever reason, Valhalla hadn’t replaced. “You look great! Here, I’ll help you put it on.”
He tried to hold the legs of the suit open so Alex could step into it. She stepped on his fingers instead.
“I can do it myself.”
She could not. She struggled for five minutes before she called Magnus back over.
“Having trouble?” He was smirking.
“Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “Help me.”
“Of course, my love.” He was still smirking.
She stepped on his fingers again.
Floor Nineteen was soon decked out in Hotel Valhalla’s version of an Among Us spacesuit: the jumpsuit (disgustingly coloured), their headbands (ridiculous), and a set of glasses (ugly) that projected their tasks and designation in front of them. Alex already had a headache.
“In the information session,” T.J. was explaining, “they were saying that the tasks they’re giving us will actually be tasks around the hotel, not just on our floor.”
“I think this is just a fancy way for them to make us do chores,” Mallory said.
T.J. ignored her. “It means we’ll be around people from other floors.”
“Who we’re not supposed to kill,” Halfborn added helpfully.
“So only people from Floor Nineteen are fair game.” T.J. held something out to them all—bibs. He was holding out five racing bibs with 19 printed on each of them.
“Absolutely not,” Mallory said. “The spacesuit is bad enough.”
“We have to,” T.J. said. “Otherwise, the other floors are going to keep killing us, and we’ll never get to kill each other.” He was pouting, and unlike Magnus, he didn’t look stupid doing it. “You want the chance to kill Halfborn, right?”
Mallory scowled and grabbed a bib from his hand. Halfborn cheered and followed suit.
Alex decided to accept her fate. She grabbed a fucking bib.
“Didn’t you all go to the information session?” Alex grumbled, trying to wrestle the bib over her headband. “Why is T.J. the only one who knows what’s going on?”
“Only one person from each floor got pulled aside after,” Mallory explained. She had taken off the top part of her jumpsuit, exposing a plain white tank underneath, and was in the process of tying the arms around her waist like some sort of belt. “For the bibs and stuff, apparently. And the rules.”
“I wanted to go, but they wouldn’t let me,” Halfborn said.
“Good,” Alex said.
“I’m not done!” T.J. interrupted. He’d pulled out a map. Where had he gotten a map?
“I got one for each of us,” he explained, passing them around. It was a map of one of Hotel Valhalla’s floors from above, with a big red arrow pointing to the beginning of the hallway that would lead to that floor’s einharjar’s rooms. It helpfully read: BUTTON HERE. “In this Among Us, any member of the crew can call an emergency meeting if they see anything suspicious. Here, pressing any of these buttons—there’s one on every floor—will bring everyone back to where we’re standing right now for a meeting. Except dead people.”
“Where do the dead people go?” Magnus asked.
T.J. thought about it.
“Where do you usually end up after war games, moron?” Mallory hissed.
“They did say something about faster healing,” T.J. muttered, shuffling through the pile of papers in his hands. Did he take notes? “Something about a ‘med bay’?”
“Does this hotel even have a med room?” Alex wondered out loud. The only instances of healing she’d seen in Valhalla had been either Magnus or the simple act of decapitating anyone with any injury greater than a paper cut. They healed faster and more completely that way.
“It’s on the map.” Halfborn was holding his sideways, so Alex wasn’t sure how trustworthy she could consider this answer.
Mallory looked over his shoulder. “That’s where the Great Hall is supposed to be.”
“Aha!” T.J. had a slightly crumpled index card in his hands, held up for everyone to see. “Accelerated healing! A new Hotel Valhalla perk!”
“Pretty sure we already have that,” Magnus pointed out.
“‘Complete regeneration within twenty minutes,’” T.J. read.
“Nevermind.”
“Oh great,” Mallory said, “are there going to be multiple rounds of this, or something?”
“‘A minimum of five rounds,’” T.J. read.
Mallory groaned.
“‘But floors may choose to continue beyond this!’”
“Let’s agree on only five,” Alex said quickly.
“Let’s see how it goes,” Magnus countered.
She glared at him as best as she could through the blue tint of her goggles. At the corner of her vision, a red light was blinking; shifting the goggles on her nose, she could see it was a timer.
ROUND 1 STARTS: 1 m 09 s
“I don’t feel like I have a good enough grasp of the rules,” she blurted.
“Has this timer been here the whole time?”
“I’m pretty sure it just started.”
Halfborn was squinting. Alex was pretty sure his glasses were on upside down. “Where are you seeing a timer?”
“Rules!” T.J. said, producing more sheets of paper. He shoved one of these sheets into each of their hands to join their maps. “Helgi gave me sheets of the rules. Apparently they’re hard to remember?”
“This one just says ‘kill,’” Magnus said.
“They dumbed down the instructions just for you,” Mallory said.
Alex skimmed the list. “You know, I still don’t feel—”
“TEN!”
The squeal of the loudspeaker had Alex clamping her hands over her ears. Across from her, Magnus looked similarly pained; his eyes were wet. When he saw her looking, he grinned.
“NINE!”
She glared at him. It was his fault she was in this suit. It was his fault she was spending her afterlife playing Among Us, of all things.
“EIGHT!”
Helgi sounded way too excited about this whole thing.
“SEVEN!”
Magnus’s suit was a bright, blinding yellow; similar to that of the Banana Boat (appropriately). Except his stupid suit came with a headband, too, and it was a halo. Hovering there attached by two translucent wires, casting a faint shadow across his face.
“SIX!”
It kind of suited him. The fucking halo.
“FIVE!”
He was still grinning.
“FOUR!”
Looking at Alex.
“THREE!”
It was less of a smug grin now. Just a smile. Like he was just happy, looking at her.
“TWO!”
Alex smiled back.
“ONE!”
She was going to kill him first.
HV RULES OF AMONG US
- One (1) unique weapon per individual (participants will all have hotel-issued knives; any alternate or additional weapons must be provided by the participant and are subject to confiscation at the gamemaster’s discretion).
- No killing of other floors. Participants may only kill members of their own floor, as denoted on the “bib” each player is wearing.
- The map includes the entire hotel, but nothing else. Travel between the Nine Worlds or to the outskirts of Valhalla (eg. exiting the hotel) is not permitted and will result in disqualification.
- To “win,” the crewmates of a floor must complete all of their floor’s assigned tasks.
- To “win,” the imposter must kill all of their floor members.
- Interfering with or completing the tasks of another floor is prohibited.
- While participants are welcome to defend themselves, you may not fatally harm or kill your floor’s imposter.
- If a floor meeting is called, someone must be eliminated before the game will be allowed to resume. Eliminations are carried out by those floor members present in meetings in whatever way they see fit.
- Only a floor’s imposter is allowed to use the hotel’s designated shortcuts.
- Only the imposter is allowed to kill.
- KILL.
IMPOSTER, Alex’s goggles flashed.
OBJECTIVE: KILL.
To her right was a list of tasks, greyed out. One said SCAN IN MEDBAY; another, EMPTY HALFBORN’S TRASH CAN. The goggles had helpfully added a disclaimer over the list: To avoid detection as the imposter, pretend to complete tasks in between killings! Alex wasn’t sure how she could just pretend to empty Halfborn’s trash, but she was sure she wouldn’t be the only one avoiding that. Below the list, though, was what had grabbed her attention—with the bright red text on the button proclaiming SABOTAGE.
She wanted to press it, but the rest of them were right there.
What sort of sabotage? She wracked her brain for scraps of Among Us knowledge. Wasn’t one of them a nuclear reactor meltdown? Had Helgi managed to get a nuke into the hotel?
“Gods, that was loud,” Mallory was grumbling, rubbing at her ears. She had a distant look in her eyes that told Alex she was reading the text on the inside of her goggles, too; the text that would be telling her she was a crewmate, and that she had work to do. “Ugh. ‘Empty Halfborn’s trash’? Seriously?”
“Where do you see that?” Halfborn had taken the goggles off and was inspecting them from the outside. As he turned the inside of them towards the group, his status as a CREWMATE was displayed.
“Well, that’s one down,” T.J. said quietly. He had his rifle slung over one shoulder, and a glowing, golden dagger at his hip. Neither had been there a minute ago. Taking a closer look at the rest of their circle, Alex noticed they’d all been supplied with weapons: identical golden daggers at each of their hips, and their weapon of choice otherwise. Jack’s hilt was visible over Magnus’s shoulder, and Mallory’s pair of knives had joined the dagger in her belt. A weight in Alex’s own hands told her that if she looked down, she’d see her own garrote there.
The only one exempt from the weapon gifting (aside from the dagger) was Halfborn, which made sense, given his penchant for tearing things apart with his bare hands.
“Do we vote him off now?” Mallory asked. “Or just kill him?”
“Why are you killing me?” He called Mallory something in Old Norse that Alex guessed wasn’t flattering, but she could never be sure with them. “Crazy! I haven’t done anything!”
“You just flashed the entire floor!”
Halfborn looked down. Mallory hit his goggles out of his hands.
“Not—flashed, flashed! You showed us your goggles!”
“I’m confused,” T.J. said. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be—”
“Goggles?” Halfborn repeated.
Alex wondered if she should just stab one of them. But, no. If she was doing this, she’d do it right. The whole shebang. Gaslighting. Psychological manipulation. Betrayal. She was going to make them all trust her and then watch the dawning realization come to their eyes right as the life bled out of them.
Which, gods, sounded horrible when she put it like that.
Look, everyone wanted to corner Magnus somewhere and kiss him and then stab him to death a little bit, right?
Speaking of.
Oh, fuck.
Magnus was gone.
They left Mallory with Halfborn, trying to teach him how to keep the goggles on. Before they did, T.J. had very pointedly explained to Mallory how suspicious it would look if Halfborn turned up dead, to which she said, “I’m not the killer, though I might stab him anyway,” and T.J. had to point out that that didn’t make her seem any more trustworthy. Throughout it all, Alex had waited by the elevator and thought about trying to kill all three of them before going after Magnus alone, but decided against the idea. Even though the rules said no killing the imposter, she didn’t expect anyone to abide by that, and Halfborn could tear her spine in half with a single hand.
And now it was her and T.J., in an elevator. Prime killing territory. Except T.J. had his damn rifle pointed at her and wouldn’t drop it.
“Nothing personal,” he kept saying.
“It feels personal,” she said, just to see if he’d put it down.
He didn’t. In fact, he ignored her. “This is suspicious, right?”
“What?”
“Magnus. Running off. That’s suspicious. He just left. Do you think he’s the imposter?”
Alex wanted to point out that it would have been more beneficial for him to have stuck around and left with one of them—like she was doing—and that disappearing like this was probably exactly what it would take to succeed as a crewmate, but didn’t, for obvious reasons. Instead, she took her chance and agreed, “Probably.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
“He probably didn’t know what to do with it, so he just ran. He’s probably waiting for us to split up so he can kill us easier.”
“Right! Okay.” T.J.’s eyes were bright. “So we stay together. You and me, and Mallory and Halfborn.”
Shit. “If we trust each other, then can’t you put the gun down?”
She smiled her best “you can trust me” smile. T.J.’s hands tightened on the gun.
“It’s just in case,” he said. “It’d be very easy to kill me in here.”
It was such close quarters, the bayonet on the rifle was almost brushing against her nose. With every floor they passed, the car shuddered, knocking his aim off. Just that little bit.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “It would be.”
They passed Floor 12.
They passed Floor 11.
They passed Floor 10.
“Hey,” T.J. began. “Do you think—?”
She threw herself at him.
She knocked the rifle right out of his hands. “Al—!” he started in protest, but she was behind him, garrote around his neck, before he could finish the word. He fought; he threw his head back, kicking out against the opposite wall of the elevator for leverage, and her nose broke in an explosion of blood. She kept her grip, the taste of blood flooding her mouth, swaying on her feet from the pain of it. T.J. stopped reaching for a rifle that wasn’t there and seemed to remember his dagger, and for the first time, Alex did too. He’d gotten it halfway out of its sheath when something finally caught, and Alex pulled the garrote tight.
T.J.’s head hit the floor of the elevator just as it announced their arrival to the ground floor with a cheerful ding.
“Asshole,” Alex mumbled at him through a mouthful of blood. Her head was spinning.
The doors slid open to reveal a group of einherjar wearing Floor 2 bibs. They looked to have taken to the jumpsuits with enthusiasm; half of them wore matching face paint, and every single one of them had it on correctly.
They took in the scene—Alex, covered in blood, holding a garrote; the headless body on the floor; the discarded rifle; the splatters of blood on the elevator’s walls—with no small amount of horror.
“I think we’ll get the next one,” the nearest one said.
“No need.” Alex stepped out, wiping her boots on the lobby’s welcome mat, and tried to pretend the way they all stepped back didn’t please her. “I’m all done in there.”
She left them staring at T.J.’s cooling corpse, and went to find Magnus.
One down.
Barely ten minutes into Round 1, and the lobby was already a mess.
Alex weaved around dismembered corpses, discarded headbands, and pools of blood and other fluids (she didn’t want to think about those too much) on her way out of the elevator, one hand cupped protectively around her broken nose. Every moment jostled it and sent a fresh spike of pain through her head, but the bleeding was slowing quickly. Before she killed Magnus, though, she’d have to clean up.
As she passed the front desk, someone on the other side of the room decided to start shooting crossbow bolts, and the einherji to her right went down in a spray of blood. She dropped to the ground, wincing, and dragged herself behind the desk for cover.
“No random killings!” Helgi was already behind the desk, a megaphone in his hands, trying to reason with the crowd. “A reminder to einherji that you are only permitted to kill—”
There was a wet thud as the crossbow bolt embedded itself in his chest. He looked down at it, scowling.
“You’ll be punished for that!”
He hit the ground next to Alex’s feet, and she watched him choke on his own blood as he glared at her. Helgi didn’t like her because he was transphobic and Loki-phobic, as Magnus liked to joke, and Alex didn’t like him for the same reasons. She flipped him off, but his eyes were already glassy.
From beyond Helgi’s body came a whimper. Someone was crouched behind the front desk’s coffee maker, wedged between it and the wall.
Alex sighed. “Hunding?”
“Ms—Mr—Fierro.” Hunding tripped over the greeting like he always did, but she couldn’t say she didn’t appreciate the effort.
“It’s Ms right now,” she said, “but you don’t need to be so formal.”
Another crossbow bolt hit the wall. Hunding jumped.
“I don’t suppose you have a chocolate bar for me?” Hunding asked.
Alex was confused, until she glanced back at her tasks. Sure enough, there it was: BRING HUNDING A CHOCOLATE BAR. There was even a smiling emoji next to it. But like all the rest of Alex’s tasks, it was greyed out.
“Sorry, Hunding, but I don’t think I’m allowed to actually do tasks.” She held up her bloodstained hands and garrote as proof. “I think Magnus should be around, though.” She hoped he was around.
“Ah, yes. Well, I hope he makes it to me.” A spray of blood arced over the front desk, and Hunding winced.
“I hope he can find you,” Alex added.
Hunding looked worried. “Am I too well hidden?”
She wanted to say that she didn’t think he was meant to be hidden at all, but the harder he was to find for her floor members, the easier it’d be for her to win. “No, actually, I think you’re great here. But what are you going to do about Helgi?”
She kicked him to illustrate her point.
“Leave him there, I guess,” Hunding admitted. “He’ll regenerate.”
“Not take him to med bay for ‘accelerated healing’?” she asked. She didn’t even try to hide her smile. Goading Hunding into admitting his dislike of Helgi—and better yet, into acting on it—was one of her favourite pastimes.
Hunding didn’t smile, but she could hear the edge of humour in his voice. “No,” he said firmly, “I think the med bay is too full right now. A shame. I tried.”
Alex laughed. It seemed the crossbow bolts had stopped flying—for the moment, at least—and the action reminded her of how badly her nose hurt, and how much blood was caked onto her skin. “Well, I’m off.” She took care to “accidentally” kick Helgi a few more times as she clambered to her feet, keeping low to avoid getting shot in the head. “I’d say I hope Magnus makes it with your chocolate, but I am out to kill him.”
“Of course you are,” Hunding sighed.
It was a straight shot from the front desk to the hallway that would lead her towards the Great Hall (a.k.a. the med bay) and she made it without getting killed, though she could hear the clang of metal-on-metal and a gurgled breath of someone else drowning in their own blood behind her as she left. Gods, she hoped Magnus hadn’t gotten caught in anything like this. It’d be so unsatisfying to find him already dead.
She passed a door marked WASHROOM and backtracked. She’d found what she was looking for; and thank the gods, it was vacant.
There were more washrooms further down, closer to the med bay, but they were public—separated into MEN and WOMEN, with stalls and urinals and changing tables, even though there weren’t any babies in Valhalla. The segregation bothered Alex, sure, but not so much that she actively avoided those bathrooms (she just used whatever one she was feeling most comfortable with at the time). But single-stalled gender-neutral bathrooms just had so much more going for them: the cleanliness; the smell; the lack of other people listening to you pee; the gender-neutrality; the excellent cover it provided to wash the blood of the man you just murdered off of your hands—in a game of pros-and-cons, gender-neutral washrooms would always come out on top.
There were now flakes of blood on this particular washroom’s floor, but that was negligible.
She went straight to the sink after locking the door, meeting her own eyes in the mirror and wincing. Both of her eyes were red and swollen—she’d have black eyes for sure—and her nose was swollen to twice its size and smeared across her left cheek. She could barely tell where it ended and the blood began. She tried to touch it, to see if she could put it back into place, but the wave of pain it sent through her face had her quickly veto that idea. She settled for cupping handfuls of cold water in her hands trying to rinse off the worst of the blood, focusing on the areas that made the least sense for a broken nose (how was she supposed to have gotten blood in her hair?). The splash of blood down her front couldn’t be helped, but she could explain that away well enough thanks to the broken nose.
She was only regretting how she’d killed T.J. a bit—she must’ve nicked an artery before she decapitated him fully, though she’d been too blinded by pain to notice in the moment. Still, he was dead, and better yet, no one had seen her. No one knew. And she still had a few tricks up her sleeve.
One was blinking at her from where she’d left her goggles on the counter. SABOTAGE.
After Magnus, she reasoned with herself. She didn’t know what it did, and her only goal for this round was to kill Magnus herself. And, re: kiss him while doing it, maybe. Like a slasher movie where the boyfriend’s the killer; the stab-them-in-the-back-while-kissing-them was a classic for a reason.
She rinsed her mouth, spitting blood into the sink. From the corner of her eye, she watched something on her goggles’s display change.
“No way,” she breathed.
EMPTY HALFBORN’S TRASH CAN had just crossed itself off the TASKS list.
Hotel Valhalla must have done tasks differently. They gave all of Floor 19 the same tasks, which Alex had known, but not only that: they crossed them off on everyone’s screen when completed. Which meant Alex’s screen looked like this—
SCAN IN MED BAY
EMPTY HALFBORN’S TRASH CAN
FIX THE COFFEEMAKER
REPAIR HOLE IN WALL ON LEFT STAIRWELL LANDING, FLOOR 17
BRING HUNDING A CHOCOLATE BAR
—and with every task that crossed itself off, she’d know exactly where her victims were at that moment.
“Too easy,” she told the mirror.
She fished through her pockets for an elastic and combed her wet hair back with her fingers to cover up the bigger mats of blood, tying it up and securing that damn headband; thick strands of it still fell into her eyes, but with the bulk of it out of her way her vision was much better. She took a page out of Mallory’s book, too, and folded the sleeves of her jumpsuit up to the elbows—which had the combined benefits of concealing the bloodstains there as well as leaving her hands free for more murder. All the while, she had an eye on her goggles, waiting for another task to disappear.
C’mon, Maggie, she thought, it’s been long enough.
And just like that—like he’d heard her—another task was gone.
SCAN IN MEDBAY
She laughed out loud, breathless from the pain. Magnus was right around the corner. She put her goggles back on, even though they pressed on her nose in a way that brought tears to her eyes, and unlocked the door, stepping out of the washroom to find (and kiss, and kill, in that order) Magnus—
—and found herself back on Floor 19.
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” she said before she could think better of it.
Mallory raised her eyebrows. “Not happy to see us?”
Her hand was still hovering over a big, red button. Alex had forgotten about the damn emergency meetings. But why had she called one? Had they managed to find T.J. already?
She looked at Halfborn, and her question was answered: yes, they had found T.J. Halfborn was holding T.J.’s rifle and looked pissed. But his glare wasn’t directed at Alex—rather, he was looking just past her …
“Hey, guys,” Magnus said.
For reasons Alex assumed had something to do with the bloodbath in the hotel’s lobby, Magnus was also bloodstained—mostly on his legs, like he’d been wading in it, but there was a fresh bruise forming under a laceration across one cheek and dried blood crusting a tear in the shoulder of his suit. He scratched the back of his neck in the way that meant he was nervous, wincing.
Alex had to pretend to staunch blood from her nose to cover her smile. This was too good. Too perfect. Less satisfying than the “stab him in the back while kissing him” plan, but Magnus had a way of always ruining her plans, anyway; she could save that attempt for another round. Anything that ended this round with Magnus thoroughly betrayed and dead sounded good to her.
“Sorry for, uh, running off like that,” Magnus said.
Alex blurted, “Magnus is the imposter.”
Gods, she wished she could frame the expression on his face.
“Wait—Alex, what—?”
“He was waiting in the elevator.” The pieces fell in place as she talked, shocked at how well they fit together. “He killed T.J. and tried to kill me too, but I ran.” She made sure to wince every so often to draw attention to the mess of her nose, but for good measure, she added, “He broke my nose.”
“What? No, Mallory—she’s lying.” Magnus tried to step forward, pleading, but a flare of golden light stopped him. Belatedly, Alex realized they were standing in a circle of runes set into the floor, separated into quintants. “She killed T.J., not me! I don’t even know if he’s really dead!”
Apparently he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Halfborn said.
There, right next to Halfborn in the fifth section of their floor’s circle, was what Alex had left of T.J.’s body in the elevator—severed head and all.
Magnus’s face. Priceless. Pretending to be horrified, Alex covered her grin with her hands.
“That—That wasn’t me.”
“Alex’s story checks out.” Halfborn shrugged, like what can you do? He, too, was grinning, despite his friend’s corpse; but that was just Halfborn. “We found T.J. in the elevator.” He shook his head. “Cold, Beantown, cold.”
“I didn’t kill him!” Magnus threw up his hands. “Of course her story checks out, she killed him! I went straight to the Great Hall!”
“Med bay,” Alex corrected, just to be petty.
Magnus gave her a look that said he was thinking some very, very rude things about her.
Laughter bubbled up in her chest, and she had to spit out some more blood to conceal it.
“Sure,” Mallory said. Her expression hadn’t changed at all. “That’s where you ran to right away? Without saying anything to anyone?”
“Yes!”
“And that’s where all that blood came from?”
Magnus looked down, surprised, like he’d managed to forget he was covered in blood. His next protest was halfway between a sigh and a sob.
“Would you believe me if I told you that it’s from another floor? That someone got killed right next to me in med bay?”
“No,” Halfborn said immediately.
Alex almost felt bad for him, this was going so perfectly.
He tried one more time. “Remember what Helgi said?” he asked Mallory.
“He said a lot of things,” she admitted, “and Halfborn was talking over half of them.”
Halfborn laughed.
“He said Among Us was a game of manipulation and betrayal!” Magnus pleaded. Alex’s ribs hurt with the effort it was taking not to laugh out loud. “How would running away help with that, if I was the imposter? I was trying to keep myself safe from the actual imposter and finish our tasks so we could actually win!”
And honestly, it was a good plan, Alex thought sympathetically. Not good enough, though.
Mallory scoffed. “You couldn’t have emptied Halfborn’s trash before you left?”
“It wasn’t that bad!” Halfborn protested.
Mallory gagged at him.
“But you see what my plan was!” Magnus said.
“Sounds like your plan was to wait for us to split up, and then kill us one-by-one,” Alex said. “Y’know—like you did.”
It was the final nail in the coffin; she could tell from the blankness of Mallory’s face and from the manic grin on Halfborn. Magnus just looked at her, angry, sure, but more than that just done. It was almost as good as watching him bleed out would’ve been, the way the light in his eyes dimmed at the betrayal.
Gods, this was fun.
“How do we do this, then?” Mallory said. “Do we vote?”
“I vote for Magnus,” Halfborn said, putting a hand in the air.
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Magnus grumbled. “I vote for Alex.”
“Vetoed,” Mallory told him.
“You can’t veto me!”
“I also vote for Magnus,” Alex added.
“That’s three-to-one,” Mallory summarized. “If T.J. hadn’t been brutally murdered, I’m sure it’d be four-to-one.”
“I—didn’t—kill—him!”
The only thing that could’ve made this better, Alex thought, was if Hotel Valhalla could give them spectators. If a little ghostly T.J. could’ve been hovering nearby, watching this unfold. Gods, it was hilarious. Alex felt hysterical. Magnus met her eyes and mouthed something very rude, and she finally had to give into the urge to smile.
“Do we just … kill him now?” Halfborn asked.
Instinctively, they all looked to T.J. His corpse deflated a little bit more and did not answer.
“I’m seeing the flaw in only giving one floor member the rules, now,” Alex deadpanned.
“I say we kill him,” Halfborn offered.
Mallory shrugged. Alex said, “Sounds good to me.”
“Guys.”
Magnus tried to back out of the circle, but the runes lit up again, keeping him in place. He shrugged Jack off his shoulder.
“Oh, what’s going on here?”
“Magnus killed T.J.,” Mallory said. “You’re not allowed to fight back.”
“We killed T.J.?” Jack repeated. Alex thought, Oh, fuck. “I think I’d remember—”
The circle shifted abruptly from red to gold, and that same ear-shattering voice from before announced, “VOTES CAST.”
“Took them long enough,” Alex muttered, trying to conceal the fact her heart was beating itself out of her chest.
“Wait,” Mallory said. She was looking right at Alex. “I’d like to change my—”
“VICTIM: MAGNUS CHASE.”
Magnus laughed nervously. “I don’t like that language.”
“Now do we kill him?” Halfborn asked.
“FLOOR MEMBERS HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO EXECUTE VICTIM.”
“Guys,” Magnus pleaded. “C’mon—Mallory. You know I didn’t do it. You think I could do that without Jack? We know that beheading is Alex’s thing!”
“That’s a stereotype, and harmful,” Alex told him.
“How!?” he sputtered.
“Kill?” Halfborn asked again.
“One second,” Mallory said.
“No, Halfborn, kill him now,” Alex countered.
“I said one second!”
Magnus took another step back, and this time the runes let him step out of his quintant.
“If Jack didn’t kill T.J., then it had to have been Alex,” Mallory told Halfborn.
“Woah,” Alex interrupted, “we decided—”
“But Magnus ran away!”
“Yeah, and Alex killed T.J. in the elevator.”
Halfborn blinked. “Should I be killing Alex?”
“No,” Alex said.
“I did not kill T.J., for the record!” Jack added helpfully. “I’m honestly not even sure who that is!”
Magnus pointed at T.J.’s corpse.
“Oh.” Jack tilted to the side slightly. “I thought his name was Thomas.”
Magnus looked confused. “Technically, it is—”
“TEN SECONDS REMAINING TO EXECUTE VICTIM.”
“We want to change our vote!” Mallory yelled.
“That’s not allowed!” Alex yelled back.
“VICTIM HAS ALREADY BEEN DETERMINED. THE VOTING PERIOD IS OVER.”
Mallory sighed.
“So can I or can’t I kill Magnus?” Halfborn asked.
“Sorry, Beantown,” Mallory said. “I’ll kill her for you.”
“Not allowed to kill the imposter,” Alex reminded her. She tried to smile in an intimidating way, but her internal monologue was just: FUCK. Where the hell was she supposed to run to, now?
“Is that a no?”
“THREE.”
“At least make it quick?” Magnus said.
“TWO.”
Alex’s eyes found the SABOTAGE button again.
“ONE.”
A gun went off—T.J.’s rifle, specifically. Halfborn wielded it with no skill, but still managed to take half of Magnus’s skull off. He stood there for a moment, swaying, with bits of his brain stuck to the elevator doors, before his body got the memo he was dead and he fell.
As soon as he hit the ground, the circle of runes disappeared.
“Fuck,” Alex said—out loud, this time.
Halfborn pointed the rifle at her. Mallory spun her knives and threw herself across the circle in Alex’s direction.
Alex thought, This better be something really fucking dramatic, closed her eyes, and hit SABOTAGE.
It was something really fucking dramatic.
It was a fucking bomb on their floor.
From what little Alex remembered of Among Us in Midgard, SABOTAGE meant something like “the lights go off!” or “the nuclear reactor starts to melt down!” or “the oxygen is off!” along with “you’ve got sixty seconds to fix it before it actually kills anyone!” Sure, Alex was hoping for something a bit more dramatic than the power going off, but even that would’ve given her a chance to get away. She wasn’t actually thinking that Helgi had managed to find a nuclear reactor. She definitely wasn’t thinking that the only option to sabotage was “blow up your entire fucking floor!”
There was no chance for them to stop it. No countdown, no warning, not even a little red glow on Alex’s map to warn her she was about to blow herself all to hell. Nope! Just SABOTAGE, all enticing.
It blew Mallory to bits. Literal bits.
The bomb was right under the emergency meeting button, and at the same split second Alex’s finger was landing on SABOTAGE, Mallory was leaping around the button’s stand to get at her. Even if she’d been able to watch it back in slow motion, Alex didn’t think she’d be able to tell exactly what happened. The button cracked, shot off the pedestal like a cork from a bottle, and the pedestal exploded outwards in millions of shards. Close as she was, they slashed Mallory to bits—and then the explosion itself hit her, a wall of hot air going hundreds of feet per second, finishing her off. All Alex could really make out of her was a spray of blood and red hair and the glint of her knives as they survived the blast and were flung to the side, only narrowly avoiding Halfborn.
And then the blast hit her.
She was pretty sure that, in Among Us, the sabotage wasn’t supposed to kill the saboteur, but this one did anyway.
She hit the wall so hard she heard something in her spine crack, pain racing up her back; and then came the debris, chunks of plaster and shards of the button and its stand, hundreds of tiny pieces embedded themselves in Alex’s chest and face. Her nose didn’t hurt so much, anymore, now that she was trying to blink glass out of her eyes. She realized, belatedly, that her goggles had shattered too—all that was left of them was a loose elastic around her neck.
She coughed up blood. One of her lungs wasn’t working.
Halfborn hadn’t fared any better, though he was still mostly intact; he lay against the wall to her right, neck bent at an awful angle and a huge chunk of what had previously been Floor 19’s—well, floor—embedded in his gut. His neck had to be broken, right? But still he met her eyes and grinned. And only then did he die.
Alex coughed again. Her vision was blurry (probably the glass) and everything hurt, but she managed to celebrate, anyway, by flipping off the bodies of her floormates.
“Got you,” she reminded them.
Her next cough popped something loose in her chest. The last thing she remembered was a piece of golden debris rising out of the crater where the bomb had been and flying towards her face, screaming, “DIE!”
Then she did.