by Alice Reeds
“But how do you fit into the story?” I asked my mother. “You were dead.”
“I was supposed to be.” Hearing her say it made me sick—saying it myself was one thing, hearing her do it something completely different. “But Alessia found documents on Briola servers about my impending assassination and saved me. Though just like her, I couldn’t go back anymore, either.”
I was so upset when my mom had said she had to leave, but she promised she would be back before I even knew she was gone, that she would come back with a gift from France for me, a piece of her past. I believed her and thought that if I behaved my very best, she’d come back sooner. Instead she never came back at all.
“We’ve been working together ever since,” my mother said and exchanged a look with Alessia before returning her attention to us. “We watched from afar, unable to say a thing, no matter how hard it was, though we knew it was even harder for you, Panda.”
I couldn’t even put into words just how hard it’d been, but I didn’t say it. We all suffered enough, this story bringing up enough pain as it was, my heart unable to take more. At the same time, I could barely grasp what they were telling us, everything that happened behind the scenes, our mothers devoting their lives to us even if they were an ocean away, their love bigger than any threat and distance.
“What about Leon?” I asked.
“When the right time came, we found a way to contact him,” she explained. “Once he believed us and we told him about the papers your father signed, he didn’t hesitate even for a second before he agreed to join us in any way he could. He was willing to do whatever it would take, no danger or risk too great, in order to keep you safe however we could.”
I’d called him a traitor, said he was dead to me, yet he’d done so much for me. I was the worst brother, ungrateful in ways I never even thought I could be, but how could I have known? One day I would find a way to thank him for this in a place far away, a future much happier and better than our present. I always hoped Leon loved me as much as I loved him, and now I knew he did.
A question pushed itself to the front of my mind. “If you know about all this, know where we are thanks to Leon and what Briola are doing, why haven’t you done anything about it?”
Alessia and my mom exchanged a look and while Alessia sighed, my mother said, “It’s not as easy as you might think.”
“Why not?” I was painfully aware of just how much I sounded like a child. It felt like the end was so close, yet so far away still, the puzzle having only grown in size instead of shrinking.
There was a knock on a door, and my heart slammed into the pit of my stomach with the realization that it was on our end, not theirs. Fiona and I exchanged a panicked look, her eyes wide. She hissed a curse, and I silently agreed.
“Quiet,” I said toward our mothers, and then slipped the tablet under our mess of pillows, hoping that it wouldn’t make a sound. There was no way for us to explain the tablet if we got caught with it.
The door swung open to reveal Pamela’s smiling face and annoyingly friendly eyes. She was the last person I wanted to see.
“Hello, you two,” she said and stepped a little farther into the room. “I won’t bother you long, just wanted to see how you are.”
“All good,” I said and forced a smile I hoped looked cheerful and innocent.
“Doctor Bowie said you seemed a little off today.”
Oh no.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” she said. “Remember, if there’s anything on your minds, I’m always here for you if you’d like to talk about it.” There were several things I wanted to talk about, but most certainly not with her.
“That’s very nice of you, Pamela, and we appreciate your offer,” Fiona said sweetly. “But everything really is totally fine. I’m not sure what Doc Bowie might’ve meant. I couldn’t fall asleep last night, so I was tired this morning…maybe that’s what he noticed?”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Kellie.” I almost believed the concern in her voice. “Was there any specific reason for that? Would you like me to get you something to help you sleep?” She’d like that, wouldn’t she—push some kind of pills on Fiona and make her more placid.
“No, no, it’s really fine,” Fiona assured her. “A one-time thing.”
“Okay, well, should you change your mind, I’m sure we could find a way to help you,” Pamela said with a smile. “If that’s all, then I’m glad there is no reason for us to worry.”
“None at all,” I confirmed, willing to say anything it would take to get rid of her already.
“Good.” She stood there a few more seconds, time dragging on, and just looked at us, as if assessing us, before she inclined her head and left.
I released my breath and relaxed. Hopefully she’d forget about this instead of watching us more closely.
“That was fun,” Fiona quipped, and let her head fall against my shoulder. Resting my head against hers, I tried to slow my heart and waited a little longer to make sure Pamela really was gone before reaching beneath our pillows to pull out the tablet.
“Who was that?” Alessia asked once we came back into their view, though it took our camera a moment to adjust to the change in lighting.
“Just a member of the staff,” I said, dismissively. “Our caretaker or whatever.”
Our mothers nodded, stayed silent for a moment as though either waiting for us to continue or to decide if they should ask more questions. I wanted to talk about many things, but Pamela wasn’t one of them.
“You were trying to tell us why things aren’t that easy when it comes to taking down Briola,” I said, unwilling to just leave that question unanswered. It was important, far more than Pamela or the lies we fed her.
“While it’s true that we know a lot, your location and pieces of things here and there,” my mother began, “there are still many things we don’t know, things we need to know in order to make a move against them. We need more evidence, more documentation, more witnesses, and just…more than we have now. It’s simply not that easy.”
Real life truly wasn’t like the movies, the solution to our problem not something we’d find with a single link and a tablet, though this was a stroke of luck. Fiona, Leon, and I were on the inside, but they were on the outside, so there had to be something we could do to help figure this out.
This wasn’t a plan they were winging but something carefully crafted over more than a decade, and I could only imagine how hard it had to be to fight against an underground behemoth like Briola. They probably were like a hydra—cut off one head and be faced with two new ones. Which would make all of this only more satisfying if we succeeded.
Taking over the conversation for a little while, we told our mothers about everything that happened so far, the map we’d made and the list of staff we’d compiled, that we’d gotten on Dawid’s good side, or at least made him think of us in a more favorable way. We told them about the bunkers and the floor that held the computer room Dawid took us to.
“Have you made any friends at the Villa?” my mother asked once we were done. The question felt too mundane for our conversation, like the sort of thing a parent would ask after your first day at a new school.
“Two girls,” I said, “about our age and also from America. They’re really nice and on our side, part of our plan, so to speak.”
“Is one of them named Ivy Carver by any chance?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Freighter
Blood ran down my arm in two streaks from what looked like an angry graze in the little light we had. I swallowed heavily, my mind blank and my knees a little weak. It certainly didn’t look like something simulated. Last time, on the island, the simulation couldn’t hurt us. Yet the pirates just did. This was bad.
Closing the distance between us, Fiona carefully took my arm and moved it just enough to have a closer look,
anger and worry painted across her face.
“It’s nothing major, right?” I asked, my voice a little unsteady. “It’s just a graze.”
“It’s not nothing,” Fiona said, her voice close to a whine. “Those bastards.”
Using a piece of metal she found on the floor, she cut away a piece of her shirt to make a bandage. While she put it around my arm, I tried my hardest not to complain or make any kind of pained noises, though it hurt more with every passing second as my adrenaline wore off, but the expression on my face must’ve given it away. Fiona apologized over and over.
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure if I tried to reassure her or myself at this point.
“Nothing about this is okay!”
“It will be though”—it had to be eventually, one way or another—“so no need to worry about me. This won’t kill me; it just hurts. And we have other things to worry about, like checking if those pirates are still around.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “Okay.”
Figuring out what was going on and how to escape all of this, which memories real and which fake, was much more pressing, and I preferred to focus on that than on the pain in my arm.
“Am I the only one who thinks this was too easy?” I asked as we walked outside and slowly traced back the route we’d taken during their chase. After those two instances of the hammering and shadows, I wanted to see those bullet holes, gather all the proof we could for this being real. Not that my wound wasn’t a convincing enough argument on its own, but still, something about the entire thing didn’t sit quite right with me.
“Easy?” Fiona exclaimed. “They shot you!”
“That was just bad luck, I’m pretty sure, and not their skill,” I said. “A piece ricocheted off the metal next to me and that grazed my arm, not the actual bullet. They missed. I was just in the wrong place, I think.”
Fiona shook her head. “They were like fucking storm troopers.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know what a Stormtrooper is.”
“I’ve seen the memes,” I said, and then quietly added, “though I’ve never seen the movies.”
Fiona looked at me with her brows pulled up, mouth slightly open in shock. “Wow,” she said, drawing out those three letters as though there were twenty of them. “If we ever make it off this freighter, or out of the Villa, whatever, I’m making you watch all of them.” I blinked back at her, unsure what to make of it, if it was a threat or an offer, possibly both. “But the point I was trying to make is that Stormtroopers are really bad at shooting, like they somehow always miss even if they’re close with an open shot. Just like those two pirates, or however many there were.”
“Exactly. It felt too easy, like they weren’t really trying to hit us, or catch us,” I said and leaned against the railing, warm enough that I could feel the metal on my back through my shirt. “And they disappeared suspiciously quickly.”
The longer we walked, our eyes on the deck for the most part, the absence of any traces of bullets, or bullet shells, became odder. They shot at us so many times, and we heard the bullets meet the metal deck, the containers, and yet, nothing. And more nothing. Thinking we’d perhaps just taken the wrong alley, we tried another one, looked around further, and still found exactly nothing at all.
It was like the hammering all over again, the sound had been there but not what caused it, like an auditory illusion.
Or part of a simulation.
Slowly a memory crept up on me and pushed itself into the front of my mind, the image of the two of us running away from a building at night, the sound of shots being fired behind us, my voice as I argued with someone, and finally…
“They shot me.”
Fiona squinted her eyes at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I mean the real me, the one at the Villa. That’s where the pain came from earlier, why the graze is in the exact same spot.”
She regarded the thought, looked away for a moment, her face showing confliction. “That means this really is just a simulation and…things from the real world are seeping over because we’re glitching? Do you think this proves it?”
I nodded. “Plus, if the memories of Leon working with our mothers are also true, part of the actual reality happening alongside this freighter nightmare—literally, as in, maybe this is all happening while we sleep—chances are he added those clues, the paper and some best brother mug, to help us figure this out, get to this conclusion. How exactly the shadows and everything fit into it, I have no idea, but I guess they’re like the bear on the island.”
“The Villa is real then, like really real this time,” Fiona said absentmindedly and then leaned against the railing next to me, her head on my left shoulder. “Meaning that our mothers really are alive, well, yours at least, and mine just there. How is it possible that both reality and the simulation are so incredibly absurd?”
“If only we’d make it out of the Villa somehow, we’d be able to be with them.” The mere idea was outlandish, my mother was dead for the better part my life, and yet she was there again, alive and well. But we were trapped here, and at the Villa. “What could we do to help them?”
“Them?”
“The real us.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Villa
Sneaking the tablet through the Villa after the night bell had been tricky, and doing it during the day after lunch was completely different. I’d never been quite this thankful for oversize shirts and sweatpants before. Hopefully those watching us wouldn’t notice the change in style, then again, they gave me these clothes, so there was nothing too odd about it.
“Has coming here always been this nerve-racking?” I asked Fiona once we made it to our cave-like meeting spot.
“Probably,” she said with a shrug. “At least now we’re prepared to rob a bank or museum, since nothing can be possibly more killer than this on your nerves.”
I chuckled and then we sat down, waiting for Ivy and Wakaba to arrive. They did about two minutes later, giggling about something as they came around the corner.
“Where’d you get the tech from?” Ivy asked as they came closer, surprise in both of their eyes.
“That’s the reason for today’s meeting, among other things,” I said.
“Is it Christmas?” Wakaba said, amused, as they sat down.
“Dead-ass no idea what day it even is, but I’m pretty sure that’s still a while away,” Fiona said, “besides, Christmas isn’t a thing Briola would do. Too happy of an event.”
“Merry Christmas, these are your new owners, have fun,” Wakaba said and tried her best to imitate the way Doc Bowie spoke, though the fact that she didn’t even get close to it made it funnier.
“Anyway,” I said and straightened my back, “there are new details to discuss, and there are two people we’d like you to meet.”
“You made new friends?” Ivy asked, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.
“Our mothers.”
“Isn’t it a bit early for that yet? We’ve been together for only a week or so,” Wakaba said, faking shock and bewilderment. Ivy laughed next to her. “Okay, okay, enough with the jokes. Didn’t you say your mother sold you into this and the other is dead?”
“Stepmother,” Fiona clarified before giving them a very short summary of what our mothers told us the previous night. “They asked us if we made friends, and if we knew a girl called Ivy Carver. After we said yes, they asked to meet you, end of story.”
“Wait, what, how? That’s crazy,” Ivy said. “Also, none of it explains where the tech came from. I doubt they just sent it via snail mail and Doc Bowie or Pamela handed you an envelope.”
“My brother.”
Ivy and Wakaba slowly nodded, not quite convinced by my answer. I told them about our stunt with Dawid, the email, and finall
y the connection between our families and Leon.
“Insane,” Wakaba remarked. “I thought nothing could surprise me anymore. Congratulations.”
“So, they’ll be able to help us?” Ivy asked. “Also, hi, how do they know me? Will I get an answer to that?”
“That’s the plan, at least,” Fiona said, still ignoring Ivy’s question. “Maybe if we merge our efforts, we can make it happen before it’s too late.”
Wakaba looked away then, her expression morphing into something sadder, concerned. “Brandon is also on our side then.” I nodded. “Five of us against all the staff, amazing odds.”
“Odds of winning the lottery are shit as well, but someone wins it,” Fiona offered with a shrug.
“You ready?” I asked.
Ivy and Wakaba scooted closer to us, enough so we could all fit into the frame, kind of.
Moments passed before the screen flickered and the connection was established, our mothers coming into view. Glasses sat on Alessia’s nose while my mother smiled next to her. For a moment I felt like what I imagined people felt when they brought friends over and they were about to meet your parents for the first time, this expectation and nervousness coming with it, the question of what if my parents hate my friends.
“Hello,” Alessia said, speaking up first. She raised her hand and waved. “My name is Alessia Mayson. I’m Fiona’s mother.”
“And I’m Victoire Echo, Miles’s mother.”
“I’m glad to see you alive and well, Ivy,” Alessia said while Ivy frowned.
“Not to be rude or disrespectful, but how exactly do you know me, Ms. Mayson? I’m certain I’ve never seen you or heard about you.”
“Alessia, please, no need for such formalities. And while you’re right, you don’t know us, we do know your father. He told us about you.”
Ivy flinched at the mention of her father, her eyes going wide. Wakaba reached for her hand and smiled reassuringly.
“How?” Ivy said.
“We heard about his efforts to find you before Briola showed their ugly selves to him, so we approached him. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was happening, and just before our contact with him stopped, he asked us to look out for you, see if our kids would find you if they made it back to the Villa.”