Magnus Chane and the Conquest Protocol

Jordan moved before she even understood what she was seeing. “Chane!”

She dropped beside him as he crumpled to the floor, one hand catching his shoulder while the other reached under his arm. “Chane? Hey. What the hell just happened?”

Nothing. His body was still. Too still.

“Chane?”

She pressed two fingers against his neck: no pulse.

Her hand went to his chest: no heartbeat.

For one long, horrible second, Jordan simply stared at him.

Then training took over. She rolled him onto his back, lowered herself beside him, and started CPR. Hands interlocked, heel of her palm against his sternum, and she pushed.

“Come on.” Compression, compression, compression, counting under her breath, the numbers keeping her from thinking too hard about what she was actually doing. “Come on, Chane, come on—”

She tilted his head back between sets, breathed for him, went back to compressions. She didn’t know how long she had been doing it anymore — a minute? Two? Five? — it didn't matter. The room had narrowed down to Magnus, her hands, and the awful absence of a heartbeat underneath them. Every time her arms started to burn, she pushed harder.

Again.

Again.

Again.

“Come on, Magnus. Please. Come on!” She kept going. “Come on, Magnus. Don’t you dare die on me!”

Nothing. She checked his pulse again. Still nothing.

She went back to compressions. “Come on.”

Her arms were shaking now. Sweat had started sticking her hair to her forehead, and her knees hurt against the floor.

She didn’t stop.

Six minutes. Six full minutes of her hands on his chest, and the only sound in the room was her own ragged breathing and the count she kept losing and restarting. Six straight minutes of trying to force life back into someone whose heart had simply stopped.

And still, nothing changed.

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. His skin was turning cold and clammy under her palms.

Eventually, Jordan’s arms simply couldn’t keep going. And somewhere along the way, she knew — he was dead.

Magnus Chane was dead, on the floor of his own dorm room, and there was nothing she could do to change it.

Her hands remained against his chest for another moment before she slowly pulled them away.

Jordan sat back against the side of his bed, chest heaving, staring down at him.

She’d seen people get hurt before. She’d seen people get knocked out. She’d seen people break bones. She’d seen people bleed. She’d seen enough bad things in her life that she knew how to keep her head when things went wrong.

She’d never seen someone just… drop dead.

Magnus had just been standing there. He’d been talking to her, snapping at her. He’d been begging her to leave. And then… he’d screamed and keeled over.

Then he was just lying there.

Still.

Dead.

Jordan stared at the floor.

“Fuck.” The word came out quietly.

She swallowed hard. How the hell am I supposed to tell Alex?

The thought arrived with a physical force that nearly knocked the air from her lungs — Alex, who loved this idiot with the kind of devotion Jordan had spent months making fun of and secretly happy for, Alex who was going to have to hear this from her, Jordan Hale, who’d been standing right here and hadn’t been able to stop it, hadn’t even understood what was happening until it was already too late.

Her hands curled into fists. She could already imagine Alex’s face. And somehow, that was worse than the body lying in front of her.

“Fuck,” she said again, voice cracking a little as she looked back at Magnus on the floor.

She looked away. But she didn’t cry.

Because Jordan Hale didn’t know how to cry. Jordan Hale would look for something to fight rather than cry over things. But there wasn’t anything to fight. So she sat there, breathing heavily, staring at the floor under her half-folded legs, trying to figure out how she was going to tell Alex when…

She heard a gasp, and her head snapped up just in time to see—

Magnus bolted upright with a sound like he’d been drowning and just broken the surface, chest heaving, hands clutched at his own heart as if checking for the beat that hadn’t been there just moments ago. His eyes were wide and unseeing for a second before they focused, found her, lingered for one long moment, and then looked past her toward the desk.

“Magnus?!” Jordan’s voice cracked. “Magnus, what—”

He was already lunging for his phone, hands shaking too badly to unlock it properly on the first two tries.

***

Alex was sitting on her bed in her pajamas, her phone clutched between both hands, for what felt like hours.

She knew what time it was. She knew what probably had happened by now. And she knew that there was nothing she could do about it. And yet, still, she’d already checked the time three times in the last ten minutes.

So, when her phone rang and she saw who was calling, she answered before the first ring even finished. “Hey. Is it over? You okay?”

“Yeah.” His voice was rough and breathless. “I'm alive. But…” Something in the pause that followed made her stomach drop even as the relief was still landing. “…You need to come over right now, Alex. Jordan’s here. She saw it. We need to tell her everything.”

She was already moving before he finished the sentence, phone wedged against her ear, grabbing a jacket off the back of her chair and throwing it over her pajamas as she yanked her door open.

“I’m on my way! Stay with her, don’t let her leave—”

She hung up somewhere around the stairwell and just ran.

She sprinted across campus, barely registering the cold air against her face or the people she passed — including the figure she nearly collided with near the quad, someone tall, someone she had a feeling she vaguely knew, murmuring an apology she didn’t have time to actually process before she was past him and still running, jacket flapping open over pajamas.

The guy stared after her before pressing his phone back to his ear. “I don’t think she even noticed it was me, Em.” A pause as the other line said something. “Yeah, I’m on my way back to you. If they started before I get back, start a recording for me.”

***

A few minutes later, Alex let herself into Magnus’s dorm with the spare keys he’d given her months ago to find him sitting on the floor across from Jordan, both of them looking shell-shocked in entirely different ways.

She went to him first, pulling him into a crushing hug as if to remind herself he was still alive. Jordan watched them from across the room with a complicated expression, but she didn’t say anything.

Eventually, Alex pulled back and finally turned toward Jordan. “Okay. I suppose this conversation is long overdue.”

It took a while — nearly an hour — to get through everything.

They started at the beginning and took turns going over it: the System, the quests, the targets, the powers, the death penalty, and the Substitute Doll. Jordan had been told about some of his powers before; she’d also observed enough of their behaviors and heard enough rumors around campus and on the forums; but the full explanation put things into perspective. And thus, for the first time, she finally had the full picture.

“So what? All the girls you two have been having threesomes with… they were past targets?”

“Yes.”

Which meant, it didn’t take her long to connect that to her part in all this.

“So I was one of your targets, too?” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait, that didn’t quite line up. We knew each other for weeks before—”

“You were a target. But for a monthly quest,” Magnus clarified. “The goal was actually a threesome with both you and Alex.”

She laughed without humor, then whirled on Alex. “And you kept this from me?”

Alex held her gaze, then answered calmly but firmly. “Would you have gone along if I had told you?”

Jordan’s jaw tightened. “That’s not the point.”

“It is, though.” Alex didn’t back down. “Was there any chance you would have said yes to it if I’d come to you with the truth from the start? Or would you have refused on principle, before you even understood what was actually at stake?”

“You don’t know that.” Jordan’s voice wasn’t as sure as she wanted it to sound. “You don’t know what I would have done.”

“He would have died, Jordan. We didn’t have a doll back then. If I’d told you and you’d said no, he wouldn’t have come back like this. He’d have been gone. Forever.”

Alex’s voice cracked a little. Magnus put his hand over hers. She didn’t pull away from him, but she didn’t look at him either. Her gaze was still entirely focused on Jordan.

The two women stared at each other for a long moment.

Then Alex sighed. “I am sorry we’ve continued to keep it a secret from you even after the threesome happened. But I don’t regret keeping it a secret up until that point. And I’d still make the same decision if I could go back in time.”

Magnus raised a hand awkwardly. “This may sound like I’m making an excuse, but after your visit to the beach house, we’d really been meaning to tell you the truth. We’d just never found a good time or a good way to do it. It’s not exactly easy to bring up all this without sounding like lunatics.”

Jordan didn’t say anything back. She was staring at the ceiling.

As much as she still hated the fact they didn’t tell her, that they had kept this kind of secret from her, she knew deep down that Alex had been right. And she hated that more than she hated this whole situation.

If it was the present her, knowing all that she knew now and experiencing everything that she had now, including the helplessness nearly an hour ago, then maybe Alex could have been wrong. But if it was back then — before she came to know Magnus, before she learned the truth about her parents, before she started trying to open up? If someone had walked up to her and told her that Magnus was being forced into sleeping with her or he would die, she knew exactly what she would have done. She would have refused.

Even if she’d liked Magnus or trusted him, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d have refused simply because the choice would have been taken away from her. And Jordan Hale did not accept having her choices taken away. Not even if someone would die as a result. Or at least, that was what she’d believed… until she’d actually watched someone die in front of her merely an hour ago and couldn’t do a thing about it.

“Was the training even real then?” she finally asked.

Magnus blinked. “What?”

“The training.” She looked at him directly. “Was any of that even real? Or was it just an excuse to put me around you so you could seduce me?”

Magnus held her gaze, then slowly shook his head.

“It wasn’t… just an excuse,” he said. “It started as one, I won’t deny that.”

Her expression hardened slightly.

“But I mean, Alex’s grand plan had somehow just been: be myself around you.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So everything else was real.”

Jordan glanced at Alex, who just shrugged.

“I’ve… really come to see you as a friend,” Magnus continued, apparently doing that thing Alex hated where his mouth decided it wasn’t done blurting out just the right thing at the right moment again. “Someone important.”

“Oh fuck you, Chane,” Jordan muttered.

“Sorry!” Magnus looked up in alarm. “But I’m not lying, I mean every word.”

“Just shut up, Chane!” Jordan said with an expression that was about as close to flustered as Jordan Hale was capable of being.

Alex hid a smile.

“I… I need time to think.” Jordan stood up abruptly and glanced at the time. It was well past 1 a.m.

She walked toward the door. Neither Magnus nor Alex tried to stop her.

When she got to the door, he spoke again.

“Are we still on for training in the morning?” Magnus hesitated. “Or do you need some time away from me?”

She considered it.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll probably have more questions by then.” Jordan opened the door. “And calmer to decide whether I should punch you both in the face for this.”

Then she was gone, shutting the door behind her.

For a few seconds, neither Magnus nor Alex said anything.

Then Alex let out a breath. “Well.”

“Yeah.”

“That went better than I expected.”

Magnus looked at her. “She threatened us with violence.”

Alex shrugged. “That’s just how she shows love.”

“Allegedly.” He paused, then looked at her. “So, you staying the night? Or are you going back to your dorm now?”

Alex looked down at herself. “I’m not going anywhere. We’ve left our stuff in each other’s room for this exact sort of emergency, remember?”

“Right, by ‘this exact sort of emergency,’ do you mean me dying and reviving in front of your rival and you having to rush over in the middle of the night to explain a supernatural booty quest system to her? I didn’t think we actually planned for this exact scenario.”

She snorted and smacked his shoulder. “That’s because you simply lack imagination.”

***

Somewhere across campus, Dash pulled his earbud out slowly. Next to him, Emily did the same. The recording on the laptop in front of them had been paused, the audio waveform on the screen frozen mid-pulse from the last thing they’d heard.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“So,” Emily said finally. “We were right. About almost everything.”

Dash set the earbud down on the desk with deliberate care, like it had suddenly become something fragile.

“Yeah. And he just gave us more information,” he said slowly, “than we’ve managed to gather in months.”

“So, do we reveal our cards to them?”

He considered it. “Perhaps not yet. But perhaps we should at least approach Alex Reyes and her boyfriend with our recruitment pitch tomorrow…” He glanced at the time. “…Well, later today.”

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