Chapter 5 Luca

Avery's POV

Luca Ferretti showed up with two coffees the next morning and no explanation, knocking on the cottage door at seven thirty and standing there with a cup in each hand. He had a smile that was too easy for someone I barely knew, and I opened the door and stared at him for a full three seconds before he pushed one of the coffees into my hand. "I don't drink coffee," I said, and he laughed and told me everyone drinks coffee when they've been up all night coding. "You've been in the lab until ten every day this week," he said. "I've seen the logs."

I took the coffee and I didn't ask how he knew about the logs or why he'd brought me a drink when we'd exchanged maybe ten words since the beginning of the semester. "I'm not a stalker," he said. "I'm in the gaming club. I saw your name on the sign-up sheet. Your project sounds interesting." I told him it wasn't done, and he said he knew that was why he was here. He walked into the cottage without waiting for an invitation, and I closed the door behind him and watched him look around the small kitchen with the stacked boxes and my laptop still open on the table. He moved like he was comfortable everywhere, like no space had ever made him feel unwelcome.

"You want to see it?" I asked, and he nodded. I pulled up the game on my laptop and watched him play, and he took the quiet path first. He chose silence over confrontation and waiting over forcing things to move faster, and his character reached the final branch and turned around. He looked at the screen for a long moment and then clicked the option to wait. "That's not how most people play it," I said. "Most people choose the fight." He leaned back in his chair and looked at the code on the screen. "Most people aren't paying attention," he said. "You've built something here. The narrative structure is solid and the mechanics work. The only thing missing is the ending."

I told him I knew that, and he said I didn't know what happened when they turned around and I told him no, I didn't. "I can help you figure it out," he said, and I looked at him for a long moment. He was sitting in my kitchen like he'd been there a hundred times, like he didn't have anywhere else to be and like my problem was his problem and he wanted to fix it. I didn't know him well enough to trust that, and I asked him why he was doing this. "We've never talked before," I said. "I don't even know what your last name is." He told me it was Ferretti, and he said he was doing this because he liked my work. "I liked it when I saw the demo at the club meeting," he said. "I liked it when I saw you working on it in the lab. I figured you could use someone who understands what you're building."

I couldn't argue with that because it was true. I'd been working on this game alone for weeks and I was stuck, and I needed someone else to look at it and tell me what I was missing. "Okay," I said. "Show me what you mean." He pulled the laptop closer and started pointing at lines of code, explaining what he thought the ending needed to be. He talked about narrative closure and emotional resonance and the kind of payoff that made a player feel like the journey mattered, and I sat there listening and taking notes because he actually made sense.

Jaxon arrived twenty minutes later, and I heard the kitchen door open and looked up to find him standing in the doorway with his football bag and his carefully blank expression. He looked at Luca and then at me and then at the laptop open on the table with the coffee cups and the way we were sitting too close for two people who barely knew each other. "Transfer kid," Jaxon said, and I noticed his voice didn't sound angry. It sounded like he was taking notes. Luca smiled and said Avery's friend, and Jaxon looked at the screen and asked what it was. I told him it was a project for a competition, and Luca said it was for the Student Tech Competition and that I'd been working on it since the beginning of the semester.

Jaxon didn't say anything for a long moment. He stood at the counter with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and his attention fixed on the screen, and I watched him watch the game and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. "Can you show me how it works?" he asked, and Luca laughed and asked if he wanted to play the game. Jaxon said he wanted to see what I built, and I looked at Luca who nodded and moved away from the laptop. Jaxon took his place at the table and looked at the screen for a long moment before he started playing. He took the quiet path both times, the same one Luca had chosen, and he picked silence over confrontation every single time. His character moved through the game like someone who'd been navigating impossible choices his entire life, and he reached the final branch and he turned around without hesitation and then he sat there waiting because I hadn't built the ending yet.

"There's something missing," he said, and I told him I knew that. "I don't know what it is," he said, pushing the laptop away and looking at me. "But I'll know it when I see it." He left without saying anything else, and I watched him go through the kitchen door and into the garden. Something had shifted in the room, something I couldn't name and didn't want to examine too closely. "Interesting," Luca said, and I asked him what he meant by that. He just shrugged and said Jaxon Ryder didn't usually show up in the tech lab, and I told him he didn't usually do a lot of things. "So what's the deal with you two?" Luca asked, and I told him there was no deal, that he was just the son of the family who owned the house and I was living on the property. "Sure," Luca said, and I could tell he didn't believe me.

That night an anonymous text arrived on my phone, and I opened it to find the same unknown number with a new message. You think he's helping you, but you don't know what he's really doing. I stared at it for a long time and then I took a screenshot and added it to the folder I'd started keeping on my laptop. I went back to work on the game and I didn't think about the text or Jaxon or any of it, but the words were still there in the back of my mind when I finally closed my laptop and went to bed.