by Patrick Ness
The Driver spies the baton and runs toward it. Seth jumps to his feet throwing himself again at the Driver, knowing it won’t work but having to try, having to at least try –
But this time the Driver is ready for him. It spins around, its fists up, catching Seth in mid-leap, knocking him hard across the side of the head, hard enough to drop him to the ground.
Seth’s vision disappears in flashes of light. He’s dimly aware of the concrete below him, his forehead pressed against it, his suddenly distant body twisted in the fall.
He’s unable to move properly, unable to get his arms and legs to do what he wants, but he rolls over just enough to see the Driver hurrying toward the dropped baton with those freakily silky steps it takes.
He sees Tomasz scream out and throw himself at the Driver.
He sees the Driver cuff Tomasz across the crown of his head as if he were no more than an annoying wasp, sees Tomasz crumple to the ground.
He sees the Driver retrieve the baton and turn back to where Seth lies helpless.
Here it is, he has a moment to think. Here is my death.
The Driver approaches, closing in fast.
I’m sorry, Seth thinks, but he doesn’t know to who or why –
But the Driver stops beside Regine. It makes a complicated motion with its arm, and the baton disappears into an invisible sleeve. Seth tries to make himself rise again, but new pain thunders through his head and he feels as if he might black out. He slumps back to the ground.
All he can do is watch as the Driver kneels and puts its arms beneath Regine’s body. It stands, lifting her tall, heavy frame with an ease that would be laughable if it weren’t so horrific.
The Driver turns to him one last time, Regine in its arms, its face as unreadable as ever, and the last thing Seth sees before unconsciousness claims him is the Driver taking her body away.
“Wake up,” he hears distantly, like someone calling from the next street over. “Oh please, please, please wake up, Mr. Seth.”
He feels taps on his cheeks, muffled by the bandages still somehow on Tomasz’s hands, taps too small to hurt, but large enough to be noticeable.
“Tomasz?” he says. His mouth and throat feel as if they’re covered in feathers and sticky toffee.
“It has taken her, Mr. Seth!” Tomasz exclaims, nearly hysterical. “She is gone! We have to find her! We have to –”
“She’s . . .” Seth says, barely able to lift his head.
“Please,” Tomasz says, pulling on his arm. “I know you are hurt, but we have to stop the Driver! It will kill her!”
Seth looks up at Tomasz, squinting at the pain in his skull. “Will kill her? It didn’t . . . ? She wasn’t . . . ?”
“She was gone and out,” Tomasz says, “but she was breathing. I swear she was breathing –”
“You swear? Tomasz, are you sure you aren’t mistaking –”
“Her light was blinking.” Tomasz flashes his fingers fast. “Blink-blink-blink-blink-blink. It has never done that before, Mr. Seth. It never come on even once. And it was red. Not like ours.”
“Why did it take her?” Seth asks, forcing himself to sit up, his head spinning. “What’s it doing?”
Tomasz gasps. “Maybe it is going to reconnect her.”
Seth looks up at that. “Reconnect her?”
Tomasz grabs the sides of his head with a cry. “I figure it out, Mr. Seth! We are not supposed to be here! You said it yourself. We are a malfunction. We are accidents.”
Seth breathes through his mouth, trying not to vomit. “And it’s trying to fix those accidents. It’s a kind of caretaker or something. Putting us back where we belong.”
“It will put her back into her old life!” Tomasz shouts. “Where she is supposed to be dead!”
“Why didn’t it just kill her here, though? She said it killed the woman she met.”
“Maybe Regine only thinks her friend was dead when the Driver took her away.”
“Oh, hell,” Seth says. “It’s going to put her back. . . .”
He thinks of Regine, big, angry, brave Regine, being thrown down the stairs by a man she was trying to fight, a man she shouldn’t have had to fight.
And she was going to be put right back there. A world where she was dead.
Seth gets to his feet, Tomasz helping. Seth looks down at him, at a face he knows will go to hell and back to save Regine. Save Seth, too, probably.
He isn’t Owen, Seth thinks, but he’s Tomasz. And she’s Regine. And we’re all we’ve got.
“Let’s go get her,” he growls. “And let’s put that son of a bitch down once and for all.”
“I think it went to the prison,” Tomasz says, grimacing at the pain in his hands as he lifts the bike. “I heard the vehicle start up again and drive away.”
“Why wouldn’t it go to Regine’s house?” Seth asks, concentrating on keeping upright. “That’s where her coffin is.”
“I do not know,” Tomasz says again. “Maybe it is only supposed to look after those in the prison. Maybe it thinks that is where we are supposed to be.”
“It was waiting for us here. It was waiting to take us back.”
“Yes,” Tomasz says. “Maybe it knew you would come here. Maybe it learned your memories when you got zapped.”
“Oh, shit, I hope that’s not true.”
“We are needing to be hurrying now.”
“I’m coming,” Seth says. He takes a few steps and loses his balance but catches himself.
Tomasz looks at him, worried. “You must be okay, Mr. Seth. You must. However badly you are feeling, we have to get her. There is no other choice.”
Seth stops for a moment, closes his eyes, and opens them again. “I know,” he says. “We’re not sending her back to die. No matter what.”
He takes a deep breath and forces himself to walk more steadily. He moves faster and then faster again, until he reaches the bike. He swings his leg over the seat, feels himself swoon a bit, but rides it out. “You are okay?” Tomasz asks, climbing up behind him.
“Okay enough.”
“Do you know what you are doing?”
“I know how to ride a bike, Tomasz –”
“No,” Tomasz says, his face pressed into Seth’s back, holding on for the journey about to start. “Do you know what you are doing right now?”
“What? What am I doing right now?”
“You threw yourself at the Driver when it attacked her,” Tomasz says. “I saw it. You did this knowing you would probably be killed yourself. And now you are going to save her, knowing how strong it is, knowing what it can do. You are going to try and save her anyway.”
“Of course I am,” Seth says, irritated, trying to get his feet up on the pedals without tumbling the two of them over.
“This is who you are, do you see?” Tomasz continues. “You are not a boy who hands his brother over to a murderer instead of yourself. You are a man who will save his friends. You are a man who does not even hesitate to save his friends.”
“My friends,” Seth says, almost asking it.
Tomasz squeezes him. “Yes, Mr. Seth.”
“My friends,” Seth says again.
He starts pedaling, fighting to keep the bike level with their combined weight, but pedaling faster and then faster again.
“She will be there,” Tomasz says, over Seth’s shoulder, saying it like a prayer. “We will be in time.”
“We’ll save her,” Seth says. “Don’t you worry.”
He pedals along, dodging the taller weeds, thumping over deep cracks. They’re riding through the neighborhood toward Seth’s house and the prison beyond.
“Watch out!” Tomasz says as a startled pheasant flies up from under a blast of weeds. Seth swerves, nearly toppling them, but he’s feeling stronger now, focused on a goal. He’s going to get them to the train station. They’re going to ride down that path beside the tracks and go as far into the prison grounds as they can get –
And then what?
> Well, he doesn’t know the answer to that yet, but all they need to do now is get there. He speeds up as they turn down the street his own house is on.
Whatever is true, whatever this place is or isn’t, whether it’s all in his head or whether this really is the way the world turned out, he thinks about what Tomasz said.
His friends.
Yes, that felt right. That felt real. Friends that he couldn’t possibly make up, with lives that he’d never imagine.
Whatever the other explanations were, Tomasz and Regine felt real.
And then he remembers what Regine said, saying it to himself firmly, like a vow.
Know yourself, he thinks, as they sail past his house.
And go in swinging.
They carry the bike up to the train station, take it over the platform and down to the brick path on the side of the tracks. Tomasz loops his hands around Seth’s waist again, and they ride the short distance to the break in the wall.
“Almost there,” Tomasz says nervously as they get off once more and take the bike through.
“I don’t suppose you have a plan?” Seth asks.
“Aha!” Tomasz says, grinning desperately. “Now you are asking. After seeing Tomasz make so many brave escapes and have so many clever ideas. Now you are giving him credit.”
“So do you?” Seth says, setting the bike back down on the other side of the maze of broken fences.
“I do not,” Tomasz says sheepishly, and Seth thinks he’s never looked younger.
“How old are you really?”
Tomasz looks at the desolate sprays of grass growing up in the prison ground. “I was about to become twelve before I woke up. I do not know how old that makes me here.”
Seth grips his shoulders, making Tomasz look him in the eye. “I think it makes you a man here. From what I’ve seen anyway.”
Tomasz just looks back for a moment, then nods gravely. “We will rescue her.”
“We will.” They get on the bike and race down the hill. The buildings surrounding the square seem smaller in the sunshine as they approach. No hidden shadows that could contain endless spaces.
Nope, Seth thinks, the endless spaces are all hidden underground.
“Why would they build it under a prison?” he wonders aloud as they ride. “Of all places, why here?”
“A prison has to be safe, maybe?” Tomasz says. “And this place would have to be, too, for all the people to sleep. It makes a kind of terrible sense.”
“When do you think we’re going to find anything here that makes good sense?”
“I do not know, Mr. Seth. I am hopeful for soon.”
They reach the end of the path, bumping on weedy ground as they approach the first main building. “I can’t hear the engine anymore,” Seth says.
They get off the bike and peek around the corner into the square, but there’s nothing to see, nothing surprising anyway. The buildings look even harder in daylight, more unflinching.
“Do we think she is down there?” Tomasz asks.
“Where else?” Seth says.
Tomasz nods. “Then I will ask you to go in and get her while I try to locate the vehicle.”
“What?” Seth asks after a startled moment. “Are you crazy?”
“It must be around here. This is clearly where it parks.”
“And you’ll do what with it?”
“I do not know! But now we have nothing. It might be something.”
Seth tries to answer but can’t think of anything to say.
“Just keep the Driver away from her,” Tomasz says. “I will try to find something to help. And if I cannot . . .” He shrugs. “Then I will come back and we will both go down fighting.”
Seth frowns. “We aren’t going to go down.”
“I know you are trying to be brave for me, but we might. That is a risk when you are fighting with death. You do not always win.”
“But we’re going to today,” Seth says firmly. “There’s no way we’re going to let that thing take Regine. Just no way at all.”
Tomasz grins. “She would very much like to be hearing you talk this way. Yes, she would be very much liking this indeed.”
“Tomasz, I can’t let you –”
But Tomasz is already backing away, still grinning. “How funny that you continue to believe I am in need of your permission.”
“Tomasz –”
“Go find her, Mr. Seth. I will not be far behind.”
Seth makes an exasperated sound. “Well, don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
“I think we are in a place where all risks are necessary,” Tomasz says, and takes off running.
Seth watches him go, his stumpy little legs crossing the square and disappearing around the far corner of the building opposite, where the van emerged the last time they were here.
“Stay safe,” Seth murmurs. “Oh, stay safe.”
He takes a deep breath for courage, then takes another, and runs across the square himself. He’s half expecting the Driver to leap out from somewhere, but the sun is shining down on every corner and he sees nothing. He reaches the prison door and listens. There’s no buzz of an engine, no sound of footsteps.
No sound of Regine arguing or fighting or struggling.
He opens the door. The milky-glass inner door and stairs are the same, glowing with light. He steps through the first doorway and edges to the second.
Still nothing but the electric hum coming from downstairs.
He crouches low as he takes a few steps down. Then a few more. He reaches the turn in the stairway. His heart is thumping away in his chest, so hard he wonders for a crazy moment if the Driver will be able to hear it too.
And then there’s a scream.
Regine.
He runs down the rest of the stairs before he can even think to stop.
He pounds through the lower corridor, tearing around the final corner and into the vast room, his blood rushing, his fists actually up, ready to fight.
Go in swinging, he thinks.
But he can’t see her. From this little platform, it’s just rows and rows of coffins, like before. He sees the one he opened, now closed and sealed like nothing ever happened. The vast room stretches before him, and he remembers the cameras on the display flashing through endless farther distant rooms.
She could be anywhere.
“Regine?” he calls out, his voice swallowed by the huge empty space.
There’s nothing. No response. No further screaming.
He turns to the milky panel on the wall to see if he can get it working again. It lights up under his touch, smaller screens within the larger one, scrolling rapidly through information that makes no sense and is often too fast to read anyway, plus changing pictures from the cameras, too, taken from all through the complex.
But at the very center of the screen, one image is remaining steady. An open coffin, somewhere out there in the vastness.
Regine lying inside.
The Driver standing over her, wrapping her in bandages.
“No!” Seth says, pressing the screen wildly, trying to find any information that’ll tell him where she is. There’s a grid map next to her, like the ones he saw before, but it could be anywhere and the coordinates are written in a way he can’t understand. 2.03.881, it says, which could mean anything. Room two, row three, coffin 881? But what does that tell him?
He looks out at the room, thinking he’ll just have to chance it, he’ll have to run until he finds her and do whatever he can to stop –
She screams again.
He whirls back to the display. Regine doesn’t seem to be resisting the Driver or even know that it’s there. Seth watches as she screams once more, the sound reaching his ears separate from the image, coming from deep within the recesses of the huge building.
“You son of a bitch!” he shouts at the image, the Driver going about its business, ignoring Regine’s fear, ignoring whatever it is that’s happening to her. “I will kill you. Do you hear me? I
’ll kill you!”
He slams his fist on the screen.
And it changes.
Her name pops up in a box. REGINE FRANÇOISE EMERIC, it says, atop a list of facts. Height, weight, her birthday, then a date that could be when she was put online.
And one more date, listing itself as DISCONNECT.
The date she was thrown down the stairs. It has to be. The date there was a mistake and, instead of dying, she woke up here.
ORIGINAL CHAMBER OUTSIDE PROTECTED GRID, he reads. That must be why the Driver brought her here instead of her house. Years too late, it was bringing her inside with everyone else.
Another line pops up, blinking red: LETHE CONNECTION PENDING.
“Lethe?” Seth says. “Why would it . . . ?”
He scans the screen again. There’s so much data surrounding Regine’s screen it’s hard to figure out what any of it means. He presses LETHE CONNECTION PENDING and another screen pops up.
The disconnect date is there and below it, RECONNECTION TIMECODE.
Seth reads it.
Then he reads it again.
“No way,” he whispers.
The reconnection date, the time she’s being put back online –
It’s before her disconnection date.
The Driver is placing her back in time. It’s putting her back before she died. Only a few minutes, but definitely before.
“How?” Seth says, pressing more and more buttons, trying to find some answer. “How is that possible?”
It’s a program, he thinks. That’s all it is. A program everyone’s agreeing to, a program everyone’s a part of –
But still just a program.
If Owen was a simulation, then who knew what could go on in there? Who knew if the present and the past were even the same online? He’d relived his own past, after all, over and over again in the dreams. He’d been right there in Tomasz’s too.
And if Regine’s death had been a mistake in the system –
Maybe the system needed to fix its mistakes.
Maybe it could place her back to a time just before her death, so she’d go through it again, but properly this time.