by Alice Reeds
“At some point, I don’t know, I guess I just thought I deserved it,” she said after a break, her words even more hesitant now. “When I failed, punishment followed. It’s always been that way.”
“Like a dog being beaten into submission.”
“And I couldn’t bite the hand that fed me, couldn’t stand up to him no matter what. He made me believe things simply looked this way, and if anyone tried to challenge his methods, it made it only worse.”
And I dared lament having a father who didn’t care when she had a father who treated her this way. It didn’t matter if Briola told him to do this or not. A sea of shame swallowed me, cold and biting. I’d gotten into petty fights with my father every once in a while, when he decided to care for a minute, but I’d always known the worst I would get was a brief burst of his anger, some yelling, cutting remarks, but that was the extent of it. He hadn’t cared enough to want to hit me, or maybe he had enough of a backbone to know that hitting your child was on the other side of the line a parent should never cross.
Fiona turned around to face me, her back almost against the wall, her left hand resting on my shoulder, her eyes so clear and searching as she met mine. Gently I touched her cheek, pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, marveled at how she leaned into my touch, sought it out as though starved.
How could her father look at her and deliberately cause her that kind of pain, breach her trust so severely? I couldn’t understand it. Nothing would ever excuse it or make it okay.
“You deserved better than someone like him,” I said as I looked her in the eye, hoping she believed me.
“I know, maybe,” she said and briefly closed her eyes. “It’s funny how it took a fake plane crash on a deserted island and ending up in Poland for me to see how wrong he was. He made me stronger, I don’t doubt it, but he also made me afraid, and I blamed myself for it instead of him.”
“None of this was your fault.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
I wanted her to believe me, but I knew you couldn’t undo years of hurt with just a few words, a few days. I could reassure her, and I would, but pushing her into seeing the truth even clearer, it wouldn’t be the right thing, either, would it?
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told about this. Really told.”
“Thank you for your trust,” I said, and really meant it. I didn’t know what exactly I’d done to deserve it, but I would prove to her that she could continue trusting me. Part of me wondered if she trusted me only because Project EROS made her feel safe enough to do it, but a stronger part of me wanted to believe her trust was genuine instead of made by design. “He’ll never be able to hurt you again. And neither will Briola. Somehow, we’ll make it out of this alive and together. And no matter what happens, I’ll always be on your side. I’m…I’m sorry for not believing you about Leon.”
Back on the yacht that took us away from the island, Fiona had warned me that something wasn’t right about Leon. But I’d been stubborn and so blinded by my memories of him that I hadn’t believed her, even had a fight with her about it. This apology was long overdue, I knew.
“He’s your brother, so it made sense for you to hold on to the way you remembered him and wish things were different even if they aren’t,” she said. There was genuine understanding in her eyes and a soft smile on her lips, just barely visible in the little bit of light coming in through our window. “We made it off the island, and we’ll make it out of the Villa, too. And once we do, we should go on a date—a real one this time.”
“I doubt I’ll be able to afford any chic restaurants, but you probably wouldn’t like that anyway, would you?” She answered with a grimace. “How about ice skating? Fall is coming.”
“I’d love that.”
There it was, the telling sign of her considering kissing me, her eyes wandering toward my lips. I smiled and leaned in, met her halfway, her lips so soft and inviting, her hand on my neck, her body moving closer, so warm and yielding beneath my touch. Goose bumps spread across her skin. and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because my hands were cold—they weren’t.
“Thank you for listening,” she finally said, sounding a little breathy.
“Only for listening?”
“Don’t get too ahead of yourself.” She rolled her eyes playfully. “You’re not that good.”
With a smirk, I leaned in and kissed her neck. “Is that so?” I challenged, and then moved on to her collarbone and up the other side of her neck toward her jaw and cheek. The little, almost shy moan of hers was too delicious, made me feel drunk and high at the same time, and I smiled against her skin.
“Fine,” she said, giving in, her smile a sight to behold, “maybe you are. But only maybe.”
Chapter Nineteen
Freighter
“Did you notice how it doesn’t get dark?” I asked, my eyes cast toward the clear blue sky. We’d gone outside again, this time thankfully without encountering any more alarming sounds or figures, and sat with our backs against the building in a small patch of shade. The ocean below was still just as unnervingly silent. “So much happened today, but the sun is still high. It should’ve gotten dark a while ago, yet it hasn’t, and we should’ve gotten hungry, yet we haven’t.”
“Maybe less time passed than you think?”
“Considering how warm it is, chances are rather slim that we’re north enough for the day to be endless during summer, meaning that it should be dark, eventually.”
Fiona stayed silent for a moment before asking, “What’s your theory?”
“I don’t have one beyond the fact that everything feels off.” I turned my head to look at her. “When we woke up, I thought that we should be on a ship, or a yacht, but we aren’t. And then there are all these memories I can’t place, some of them distorted, and some straight-out impossible.”
“Impossible?” Fiona frowned. “Like the Berlin ones?”
“We both have them,” I said, and she nodded, slowly. “What do you remember before we woke up here?”
She leaned her head against the wall, her eyes wandering, indicating that she was reaching for those particular memories in her mind, trying to recall them. “An island, I think, and a yacht, yeah, just like you said. But then I also have other memories from that villa we talked about, different rooms and fragments of people, conversations and emotions. They make no sense, though…”
“As if all of that isn’t bad enough, we also somehow hear things and see things but can’t find their source or any actual traces of anything having been there to make those noises. What could all of this mean?”
“We’re losing our minds? The implants have fried our brains?”
“Wait, what?” A light turned on in my mind. “What if that’s it?”
She frowned again. “What’re you talking about?”
Sitting up a little straighter, my thoughts slowly rearranged themselves in my mind, the puzzle pieces moving into the picture they were meant—or not meant—to turn that little bit clearer. We’ve dealt with something like this before, what if we were doing it again? Could that be?
“Remember the name of the ship?” I asked.
“The strange German name you can’t actually expect me to be able to pronounce?”
I chuckled and nodded. “Katzengold, meaning ‘cat’s gold’ in English. More commonly known as fool’s gold.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dictionary, but how is that supposed to help us?”
“Fool’s gold is something that pretends to be of value while it actually doesn’t have any real value at all. An illusion, basically, no?” She nodded, but hesitantly, her eyes squinted as she tried to figure out where I was going with this. “What if this ship is our fool’s gold? What if all of this is just pretend, a simulation essentially, like the bear on the island, remember that? We see the shadows, hear the hammering and scraping and whatnot,
but it isn’t actually there.”
“Not to, like, go against your theory,” she said, “but there’s a difference between making us believe there’s a bear in our actual reality and essentially turning our reality into the bear, along with a bear.” She raised her hand and touched my arm, then the wall behind us. “I can feel you just as much as the wall and the floor, but we couldn’t touch the bear. It disappeared when it was about to come into contact with me. The freighter didn’t—doesn’t. The hammering doesn’t just stop when we get near it, and neither do the shadows. What if those really are caused by people, but they simply know the ship better than we do, so they know how to keep themselves hidden?”
“They’re not magicians. You can’t just disappear out of a metal room with only one entrance. Besides, what about your tattoo?” I continued. “Isn’t it strange that it suddenly flipped around? As far as I’m aware, tattoos aren’t able to do that in real life. You’d have to get it lasered and then redone, a process I’m fairly sure you’d remember, and there would be scars there. But there aren’t. Or our sudden knowledge of things we had none of before. Oh, and the paper with Leon’s writing on it.”
It sounded absurd, all of it, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it could be possible. How and why anyone would do it…that I couldn’t explain. What purpose would something like this serve?
Restless, I got up, Fiona following a moment later, and slowly began to walk toward the containers. Gradually the mere concept of reality was losing its meaning the farther we went and the more time passed. While a simulated world seemed cool in movies like TRON, this one was more like a waste of everyone’s time. Why create it just to trap us here? There had to be some other explanation, but what if there wasn’t?
“If you’re right,” Fiona began and then paused, slowed down just a little, and bit her lower lip while the conflict inside her pulled her brows together, her eyes darkening, “and this is nothing but a simulation, then what’s the reality? Which of our memories are the ones seeping in from what is actually happening right now?”
The million-dollar question that had a million different answers. Chances were none of what we remembered, or thought of as memories, were our actual reality. Maybe all of it was just memories of other simulations that glitched their way into our minds and pretended to be something they weren’t.
“My memory might be deceiving, but someone helped us off the island, right? What if, somehow, something similar is happening again?” she wondered. “That note in your brother’s handwriting didn’t just appear out of thin air, right?”
“It could make sense,” I said, though really, did any of this? “It would mean the clues have to be pretty small things so the actual people running this wouldn’t notice. Like the note and the very name of the ship in German, someone knew I’d eventually understand it, if we’d find it, and your tattoo. Maybe those are clues as well?”
Briefly, part of me wondered if perhaps Leon was the one helping us, but that couldn’t be it, could it? He wasn’t on our side, at least according to the bits and pieces of him I could recall. In fact, he was against us, he threatened us, and even tried to harm us on the yacht.
“Let’s suppose all of that is true and this really is a simulation,” she said, her right hand touching the containers as we passed them, an absentminded motion, and then stopped again. She briefly narrowed her eyes before raising them to meet mine. “What the fuck is the reality we’re actually living in, then?”
Chapter Twenty
The Villa
“You weren’t at dinner,” I said, and Ivy’s and Wakaba’s heads whipped around toward us at the sound of my voice.
“You can’t scare people like that, asshole,” Wakaba said, her hand on her heart.
“That isn’t an explanation.” We’d gotten along well so far, yet their absence had been unsettling, my mind jumping to conclusions, ready to say See, I told you so. Fiona had been antsy ever since, a frown taking up residence between her brows, though she hadn’t explicitly said anything.
“Could you, like, sit down first?” Ivy said. “You’re making me nervous.” She pointed at the two cushions on the floor across from them. We sat down, and I noticed a blank piece of paper lying between them and us. “We missed it because Doc B decided to keep us longer, asked us about you and all.”
“Oh?” Fiona said, the sound coming across like a challenge.
“He just wanted to have a chat, plain and boring,” Wakaba said. “We told him we’re friends now. We also told him you’re fine, acting normal, friendly, all cool.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Doc Bowie asked them about us. It was just a matter of time, considering the staff were keeping watch. My shoulders and muscles relaxed. They had a perfect chance to rat us out, but they hadn’t, or at least I chose to believe so. Sign number four that we could trust them. My friends at home wouldn’t have hesitated if they’d seen something to gain by telling Doc Bowie.
“Interrogation over?”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” I said, honestly. “I’m new to this friendship thing.”
Wakaba waved me off. “All forgotten. We’ve got more important things to discuss, right? Time’s ticking.”
“Definitely,” Fiona agreed.
“We have a list of the personnel, though it’s not complete. Just those whose names we know,” Ivy said. She turned the page over, revealing a bunch of different names with their functions next to them in brackets.
“Those whose names we don’t know are either irrelevant, or too relevant, but we’ll try to figure out more,” Wakaba offered, sounding hopeful.
“This is great.” I smiled. “Quick question, do you know of a woman named Gail?”
“One of the guards had that name, but she’s been gone a while, besides that, nope, no one named Gail.”
Were we wrong after all, our minds playing tricks? But we’d both seen her, then again, we’d also both seen the bear, which hadn’t been real, either. Maybe, just maybe, we were lucky and she really wasn’t there anymore. I decided to hold on to that option and push all others aside, ignore the possibility that she could be among those whose names Ivy and Wakaba simply didn’t know.
“Moving on,” Ivy said and looked at the page. “Who is your night guard? Since we didn’t get to it last time.”
“Despite having punched him and apologized to him, no idea what his name is,” Fiona began. “He’s, like, maybe in his late thirties or something, balding, dark brown hair, freaky light blue eyes, a bit chubby… Any of that ring a bell?”
“Dawid,” Ivy said, raising a brow. “I’m pretty sure that’s him.”
“He’s a softy,” Wakaba added. “At least according to the other staff members. Heard them talking about him.”
“Told you it’s practical to have her around.”
Wakaba shot her a look that said You serious right now?
“What’d they say about him?” Fiona asked.
“Something about issues at home, maybe, though definitely connected to his wife.” Wakaba shrugged.
An idea slowly formed in my mind. “Maybe I could use the issues with his wife to win his trust. Perhaps we could gain something from him, a favor or something, who knows what it could be good for later down the line? To get out of the Villa we’d have to get past him, so better to have him on our side than against us, no?”
Fiona smiled and then leaned forward a little, into our circle. “Doesn’t seem like it, but he can be very charming.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second,” Wakaba said, shifting a pointed look from Fiona to me. Part of me worried that this, us, wasn’t entirely possibly at all due to my charm, the thought leaving a bitter taste on my tongue.
We spent the remainder of our time trying to figure out which people on the list we’d have to pass and which could be an issue if we slipped up. How exactly we’d make it
out was still beyond me, but eventually we’d get there—we had to. There wasn’t much time left. But if a group of prisoners could escape Alcatraz, we could escape from the Villa.
…
“Oscar, could I talk to you for a second?” Leon asked just as we were about to pass him in one of the hallways on the ground floor. Ever since he showed us the videos, he hadn’t sought out any kind of contact with me, even less so after he’d led me out of the medical bunker after we saw our files. So his request now put me on edge, the temptation to deny him burning on my tongue.
Fiona looked up at me, her expression searching. I nodded faintly at her. “I’ll see you upstairs,” she said, squeezing my hand just a little, and then walked off without even as much as looking at Leon once.
Leon waited until Fiona rounded the corner into the entry hall and disappeared out of sight. For the first time in my life, I disliked that there was no one around except for Leon and me. Wordlessly, he took my arm and led me away, down another hallway and into a room marked Staff Only. It wasn’t more than a storage closet, the ceiling lamp orange and relatively weak, creating shadows across Leon’s face that made him look menacing.
The gun on his hip didn’t help much, either.
“What do you want this time?” I asked, already completely over this conversation.
He just stood there and stared at me for a moment, seeming unaffected by my words, his hand still on my upper arm. Then he said, “I’ve been keeping an eye on the two of you.”
“Right. You mentioned that.” A part of me hoped he had for all the reasons I knew he hadn’t. “Because they tell you to.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m your brother, that’s why.”
I almost chuckled at the absurdity of him actually saying that. “You stopped being my brother a long time ago.”