by Patrick Ness
“We?”
“Everyone. All of us.”
Seth starts to ask more, but she stops him. “Did you used to go online? Before you woke up here?”
He gives her a confused look. “Of course, I did. What kind of question is that? You couldn’t get through life without your phone or your pad.”
“And that’s true everywhere, it seems,” Regine nods. “Even Poland.”
“I was not in Poland,” Tomasz says, irate. “How many times I have to say? Mother came over for work. And Poland is online quite fine, thank you very much. Very advanced country. I am tired of you always –”
“Anyway,” Regine says. “We think that sometime, eight or ten years ago, if you go by the dates on the stuff you find here, everyone went online.” She blows out another long line of smoke. “Permanently.”
Seth furrows his forehead. “What do you mean, permanently?”
“Oh, I know!” Tomasz says. “It means a thing like choosing to do it forever and forever.”
“I know what the word means –” Seth says.
“Everyone left the real world behind,” Regine says, “and moved to one that was entirely online. Some completely immersive version that didn’t look like being online at all, so much like real life you wouldn’t know the difference.”
But Seth is already shaking his head. “No, that’s insane. That kind of crap only happens in movies. You’d always be able to tell the difference. Real life is real life. You wouldn’t just forget about it.”
“Ah!” Tomasz says. “She has theory about this, too. She thinks we made ourselves forget. That way we worry less and we don’t miss it.”
Seth frowns at him. “You said you didn’t believe her. You said this was hell.”
Tomasz shrugs. “It is. But hell you make for yourself is still hell, maybe.”
“And you expect me to believe this?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Regine says. “You asked for the truth, and this is it, the best that makes sense. We stuck ourselves in those coffins –”
Seth starts. “You guys woke up in them, too?”
“Oh, yes,” Regine says. “They’re not coffins, though, really. All those tubes, all that metallic tape stuff. It’s to keep us alive, isn’t it? Keep us fed, take our waste away, keep our muscles from dying, all while our minds think we’re somewhere else.”
“I couldn’t even see when I got out of the coffin,” Seth says. “In fact, I didn’t even know there was a coffin until I went back upstairs a couple days later.”
“Upstairs?”
“It was in the attic. In my old bedroom.”
Regine nods, as if this confirms something. “I woke up in my sitting room,” she says. “As confused as you were. Didn’t even move from where I fell for at least a day or two.”
Seth looks down at Tomasz, but Tomasz doesn’t offer his own story, just drags his toe along the floor once more. “Rain is coming,” he says.
They look out. Clouds are indeed rolling in fast from a distant horizon. Another weirdly tropical storm on the way.
“It is quiet, too,” Tomasz says.
Seth listens. The sound of the engine has gone while they were talking. There’s only the wind, blowing in the rain clouds that will at least finish any fire. Another convenient thing, he thinks.
“What you’ve said is impossible,” he says. Regine makes a tutting sound, but he continues. “But everything here is impossible, too. The emptiness. The dirt. The world growing old with no one in it.”
“Except us,” Tomasz says.
“Yeah,” Seth says. “Because that’s the question, isn’t it? There weren’t any other coffins in my house or any of the houses on my street. If the world put itself to sleep, where is everyone?”
Neither of them answers.
And Seth realizes he already knows. It has all the inevitability of a story.
“The prison.”
Tomasz studiously avoids his eye. Regine ignores him, too, but then finally gives him a resigned look.
“We can’t,” she says.
“Can’t what? You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, I do, and I’m telling you we can’t.”
“We really, really cannot,” Tomasz says, pleadingly. “Really.”
Seth is annoyed at their sudden resistance. Ever since he’s been here, the prison has loomed. In the distance or over a hill or even just the knowledge of it out there somewhere, unseen. The source of everything that set his life down a path away from the one that could have been good, that could have been happy.
He’s avoided it, by sheer, gut instinct.
But now that they’re telling him he can’t go, it suddenly seems like the one thing he must do, the obvious thing. Because if this is a place his head made up so he could accept his death or if it really is some kind of hell where he’s been sent, then either of those things would mean the prison is important. A place where answers might be found.
But also, if Regine is somehow right and this is the real world, then that means it’s where his family is.
Right now.
“Show me,” he finally says. “Take me to the prison.”
“Oh!” Tomasz says, pulling the mass of his hair with two fists. “I knew this! I knew this would happen.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Regine says. “The Driver won’t let us anywhere near it.”
“But it obviously isn’t at the prison all the time,” Seth says. “It goes out patrolling or whatever.”
“It’ll know you’re there and it’ll do more than punch a hole in your chest.”
“A hole that’s healed oddly rapidly, don’t you think?” Seth thumps his chest, then winces at the bruise. “We could find a way in.”
“Please do not make me,” Tomasz says. “Please do not. Not again.”
“Again?” Seth says.
“I woke up there,” Tomasz says unhappily. “So many coffins. And you do not know who is in them or what they are dreaming or if they are even alive.” He’s holding his hands together, wringing them, the first time Seth’s ever seen the word actually demonstrated. “And my mother.”
“Your mother?” Seth asks when Tomasz doesn’t continue.
But Tomasz says nothing, just shuffles over to Regine, who stubs out her cigarette and embraces him so he can cry again against her stomach. “He was running from the Driver when I found him,” she says. “We barely got away. It was a week before I could convince him I wasn’t an angel or a devil.”
“I know the feeling,” Seth says. “What did he mean about his mother?”
“Not everything is your business. I’ll tell you what we know and what we think, but there’s stuff that’s private.”
“You’re saying everyone’s at the prison?”
“Well, not everyone in the world, obviously. But a lot of people from this town. There’ve got to be other places, but who knows where they might be? Or what’s guarding them.”
“But we could –”
“We’re not going to the prison. It’s the one place here you don’t go.”
“You went there when you found Tomasz.”
She stops at that. “Becca had been killed. That woman I met. I didn’t know what else to do.”
He looks at her now, more closely. “So you went to a place you knew was dangerous?”
She picks a bit of ash off her tongue and asks him, deceptively simply, “Where were you running to this morning?”
There’s a long silence at this. Regine brings the still-snuffling Tomasz to the front of the cigarette counter, and they sit down on the floor against it. Tomasz leans into her, closing his eyes.
“Why would everyone be there,” Seth asks, “if I was at my house?”
Regine shrugs. “I was at my house. Maybe they just ran out of room. Or time. Maybe some people had to make do with what they had.”
“Seems like a pretty inefficient way to arrange things.”
“Who says it was arranged?
Maybe they were in a rush and had to cut corners.”
“How do you mean?”
“Have you seen the world?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. “Where are all the animals? Where did all this dust and mud and decay come from? That’s way more than just eight years’ worth. When did that fire on the other side of the tracks happen, before or after? What’s with all this freaky weather?” She shrugs again. “Maybe the world was just getting too bad and we finally had no choice but to leave it entirely.”
Lightning flashes so bright they all jump, even Tomasz with his eyes closed. The world holds its breath, then a long roll of thunder peals, quickly followed by the pounding of rain against the glass, hurling itself against the storefront as if all it wanted to do was come in and seize them.
Tomasz falls asleep with his head in Regine’s lap. Seth gets some cans of food and sits next to Regine. They eat with plastic spoons, trying not to wake Tomasz. The rain keeps slamming down outside, so hard it’s like they’re underneath a waterfall.
“I don’t remember rains like this,” Regine says. “Not in England. It’s like a hurricane.”
“There’s too much wrong with your explanation,” Seth says, struggling to swallow his room-temperature spaghetti. “Why would I be in my house, but not my parents or my brother?”
“I don’t know. We’re having to guess at everything. Like how is it that the coffins are powered through that one connection at the bottom, but there’s no electricity anywhere else?”
“Yeah, I saw that, too.”
“And this.” She taps the back of her head. “A connection point that doesn’t pierce the skin?”
“But if that kind of technology is here,” Seth wonders, thinking of the metallic strips, too, “why didn’t we have it in the online world? Why didn’t we bring it with us?”
“Maybe we wanted things simpler, easier.”
“Your life was simple and easy?”
She gives him a harsh look. “You know what I mean.”
“Well, it’s certainly simpler and easier having you here to explain it all to me. Pretty useful, wouldn’t you say?”
“Back to the me and Tommy aren’t really real thing? You want me to slap you again? Because I’d be more than happy to.”
“The rain that puts out the fire and also traps us here so we can talk,” he continues. “A chest injury that heals fast enough for me to get away. It all just sort of works, doesn’t it?”
“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”
Tomasz shifts on her lap, sleeptalking in Polish: “Nie, nie.” Regine moves her hand to wake him, but he settles back down.
“He’s having one of those dreams, isn’t he?” Seth asks.
“I expect so.”
“What do you dream about?”
“That’s private,” Regine says sharply.
“Fine, sorry, just you mentioned your father . . .”
They eat in grumpy silence for a few minutes.
“So what about this?” Seth says, thinking. “If the whole world is online, how did dying make us wake up here? Wouldn’t we just reset or something?”
“I don’t know,” Regine says again, “but people still died there, didn’t they? My Auntie Genevieve died of pancreatic cancer. And my father . . .” She clears her throat. “But if it was meant to be real, so real we’d forget we ever lived anywhere else, then even death would have to work, wouldn’t it? Maybe our brains couldn’t accept it otherwise. You die online, you die for real, because that’s life.”
“But we didn’t die for real.” Seth’s getting angry again, thinking about what happened to Owen, what happened with Gudmund, what happened to him. “And why would we do that anyway? Why would we live in a world where that shit still happens? If we were supposedly in a place so perfect we forgot we moved there –”
“Don’t look at me. My mother married my bastard of a stepfather in that perfect world, so I have no idea.” Her hand goes unconsciously to the back of her neck. “What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they’re going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.”
“But how did we end up here, then?” Seth persists. “How come this world isn’t filled with people who died and just woke up?”
“We were supposed to die in this world, too, I think. But I fell down the stairs and hit my head in a certain spot. You drowned and hit your head in the exact same spot. Tommy –” she looks down at him, still sleeping –“well, Tommy says he got struck by lightning, but I’m guessing that whatever it was is something he doesn’t want to remember, so fair enough, but still, the same spot. Some malfunction right at the point of connection that overloads the system and instead of killing us, disconnects us.” She shrugs, suddenly out of energy. “Or that’s what we think anyway.”
She runs her hand lightly over Tomasz’s wild hair. “It was his idea, actually, even though he keeps saying he doesn’t believe it. Lots of good guesses in that funny little head.” Tomasz presses himself closer against her, sleeping on.
“But if everything that happened to us isn’t real,” Seth says, “if everything we know was just some online simulation –”
“Oh, it was real, all right,” she says. “We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real.”
Seth thinks back to Gudmund, thinks back to the smell of him, the feel of him. Thinks back to everything that happened this past year, good and bad and very, very bad indeed. Thinks back to what happened to Owen, to the frantic days when he was missing, to every small bit of punishment he received from his mum and dad in the years that followed.
It sure felt real. But if it was all somehow simulated, how could it have been?
And if he was here, right now, where was Gudmund?
“We shouldn’t go back to our house until dark,” Regine says. “We could take turns sleeping, one of us keeping an eye out.”
At the thought of this, Seth feels how tired he is. After staying up nearly all night, after the run, after the adrenaline rush of the day, it suddenly becomes some sort of miracle he’s even managing to keep his eyes open.
“All right,” he says. “But when I wake up –”
“When you wake up,” Regine says, “I’ll tell you how to get into the prison.”
“You have to forgive me,” Monica said on his front step before even saying hello. “I didn’t mean it. I was just so angry and –”
Seth stepped out into the cold, closing the door behind him. “What are you talking about?” he said. “What’s going on?”
She looked at him fearfully. Yes, there was no other word for it. She was frightened of what she had to tell him. He felt his stomach turn to ice. “Monica?” he said.
Instead of answering, she looked up into the sky, like help might be found there. Stupidly, Seth found himself looking up, too. It was freezing, had been for the weeks leading up to Christmas, but without any snow falling. The sky was a collection of gray smears, like the snow was too angry to fall.
He looked back at Monica to find her crying.
And he knew.
Because it could only be one thing, couldn’t it? It could only mean that the one good thing in his life was about to end. All that was left was finding out exactly how it was going to happen.
“You and Gudmund,” she said quietly, her nose running in the cold air, her breath coming out over her scarf in white puffs. “You and fucking Gudmund.”
She looked almost childlike in her ultra-thick winter coat and knitted hat with the red reindeer across it that she’d worn in cold weather from when it was far too big on her growing head u
ntil now when she didn’t even wear it ironically. It was Monica’s red reindeer hat, as much a part of her as her hair or her laugh.
“It makes sense,” she said. “Looking back. If you’d asked me before, I’d have even wished it.” She smiled at him, her eyes sad. “Wished it for you, Seth. Something that could make you so happy.”
“Monica,” Seth said, his voice barely audible. “Monica, I don’t –”
“Please don’t say it’s not true. Don’t do that. Before everything turns to shit, please don’t pretend it wasn’t a real thing.”
He frowned. “Before everything turns to –”
“Hello, Monica,” his mother’s voice boomed as she came out the front door. Owen clattered out behind her, wrapped up like a mummy, thermos in one hand, clarinet case in the other. “Why are you making her wait out here, Seth?” his mother asked. “You’ll freeze to death.” She smiled at Monica, a smile that disappeared when she saw Monica’s face. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” Monica said, forcing cheerfulness and wiping her nose with her glove. “Just a winter cold.” She even coughed into her hand.
“All right,” Seth’s mother said, clearly not believing her but using a tone that said she was willing to be fooled. “All the more reason to go inside then. The kettle’s still hot.”
“Hi, Monica!” Owen said cheerfully.
“Hey, Owen,” Monica said.
Owen waved the thermos. “We made hot chocolate.”
“Yeah,” Monica said, forcing a laugh. “You still got some on your mouth there, kiddo.”
Owen just smiled back and didn’t even attempt to wipe the chocolate from his lips.
“Seriously,” Seth’s mother said, pulling Owen toward the car. “Go inside. Much warmer.” She waved as she got into the driver’s seat. “Bye, Monica.”
“Bye, Mrs. Wearing,” Monica said, waving a single glove.
Seth’s mother watched them both with a serious look on her face as she and Owen drove away.
“She calls it a kettle,” Monica said.
“Monica,” Seth said, pulling his arms around himself, and not just because the cold air was cutting straight through his flimsy shirt. “Tell me.”