The Last Friday

The house breathes. Red knows this because he's lived through eleven of these games, and the walls still make a sound like lungs expanding when the clock strikes midnight on the last Friday of the month.

He's standing in the east wing, third floor, where the wallpaper peels in strips that look like fingers. His team is behind him — four of them, nervous, checking their phones even though the signal dies at 12:01. Red snaps his fingers. A butterfly materializes: purple wings, a single white spot near the thorax. It hovers, innocent, before it detonates against the far wall. The blast is silent. That's the worst part. The game absorbs sound.

"Two teams on the floor below," says Mira, his second. She can hear heartbeats through walls. "One's weak. The other..." She pauses. "I don't know. I can't read them."

Red doesn't ask why. The game master chooses leaders. He didn't ask to be chosen at sixteen, didn't ask again at seventeen, and now at nineteen he's stopped asking. He swipes his hand downward. Red aura flashes across his palm, across his vision. The door to the stairwell locks — not physically, but conceptually. No one can open it now unless he swipes upward, or until 2:00 makes everything irrelevant.

"Let's finish this," he says.

They descend on the weaker team like the game wants them to. It always wants violence. Red snaps twice — butterflies bloom, explode, bloom again. He snaps them away before the third detonation, conserving energy. His team is winning. Mira's found the enemy leader, pinned him in a corner. Red raises his hand to swipe, to lock the room, to end it—

The wall explodes inward.

Not his butterfly. Something else. A team of six where there should be two. They wear masks made of mirror shards. They don't speak. One of them looks at Red, and Red's hand freezes mid-snap.

"New team," someone whispers. "They weren't on the roster."

Red doesn't care about rosters. He cares that the mirror-masked leader is walking through his locked door like the lock was never there.

"Fall back," Red says.

They run. Red swipes downward at every door they pass, locking them, buying seconds. They reach a bedroom at the end of the hall — ornate, dusty, a four-poster bed like a coffin. Red locks the door. Leans against it. Listens to the mirror team methodically break through his seals, one by one, like they're reading a manual.

"How are they doing that?" Mira asks.

Red doesn't answer. He's already planning the next lock, the next escape route. He'll snap his fingers, send a butterfly through the window, blast an exit—

He snaps.

Nothing.

He snaps again. No butterfly. No purple. No white spot. Just the dry click of his fingers.

He swipes downward. No red aura. No lock.

"Red?" Mira's voice is wrong. Too high.

The door splinters. The mirror team stands in the frame, six of them, patient. The leader raises a hand. Not to attack. To show Red something — a mark on their palm, a symbol Red doesn't recognize, but somehow feels like he should.

"Run," Red says, but his legs won't move. Not because of them. Because his body knows what his mind hasn't accepted yet.

For the first time in eleven games, he is powerless.

And the clock on the mantel reads 1:17.