by Naomi Hughes
My movements feel disjointed, dreamlike. I push the door closed. Reach up to the lock—eerily familiar in my fingers—and engage it. I leave my hand on it for a long moment, but the second I take it away and turn my back, I’m no longer sure enough that I really did lock it.
Come on. I can do this. I’ve done this, much more than this, before. I’m recovered. I’m better.
Even I can’t believe myself anymore.
A flick of motion from behind the ugly curtains catches my eye. Something is outside the house. I check the lock again—just one more time—and then drop the key back into my left pocket. Left, for locked.
I step toward the window. The beige carpet muffles my footfalls. I pass the lumpy chocolate-brown monstrosity of a couch, the only piece of furniture that isn’t stained or tattered.
“I love it,” I’d said when the furniture company dropped the couch off on our porch.
Ty squinted. He walked around it, shook his head, and sat on it. “This,” he pronounced, “is both the ugliest and the most comfortable piece of furniture my ass has ever had the pleasure to grace.”
“I told you!” I folded my arms smugly. This was the first purchase I’d ever made with my own money, earned from my very first job as a grocery store bagger. The furniture was on clearance and I’d had to spend my whole hoard of savings—my entire first month of pay-checks—to buy it and the accompanying coffee table, but the pleased surprise in Ty’s eyes was worth it.
He’d been providing everything for me since Mom left the year before. And now I’d finally provided for us too—something small, yes, but permanent.
I avert my eyes from the couch. It’s just a memory.
The flicker of motion behind the curtains catches my eye again. I slow as I approach it. Carefully, with one finger, I move the curtain half an inch to the side.
The window—isn’t a window. It’s a screen. There’s a field of stars, and something silver and massive. I open the curtains wider so I can see. One of my fingers brushes the screen.
The house disappears. A memory—not mine—reaches out and clamps around my mind.
I was created for first contact, it whispers. The house around me fades away. Something brilliant—nebula, the memory hums—blooms around me in the open vastness of space.
I jerk my hand away from the screen with a sharp exhale. The nebula vanishes. I look around. Window, couch, table, potted plant. Nothing unusual. Nothing terrifying. But the vertigo of being suspended above a nebula in open space is still clawing at my mind, and I have to put out a hand to support myself against the wall.
The memory waits patiently for me to get my bearings.
I gulp down a deep breath. Straighten my spine. Reach out to it again, steeling myself for the mental transition this time. My palm presses against the cool not-window.
The memory wraps me up in itself. This time, I let it take me all the way in.
I was created for first contact.
I was birthed deep in the heart of a nebula, brought into the universe alongside newly formed stars and molecular clouds spangled with novae and dust. I was a greatship, the only one of my kind.
My creators gave me many things. The ability to communicate with a vast variety of intelligent species through unique telepathic capabilities. Sentience, so that I too would be intelligent. They even made me beautiful, an immense, mercurial oval, so that other species would be drawn to me.
But they never gave me a name.
They sent me out into the endless dark of the universe to find life. I had a directive: Make first contact, determine whether the life-forms I encountered were capable of joining the larger community of worlds, and if so, return to my makers with a delegation so that introductions could be made.
I searched. I was happy, because I had a purpose. I told myself this often.
I was capable of faster-than-light travel. I had to be, to get anywhere in the vast emptiness. But in that blurred space between dead star systems, between galaxies that gleamed with the false promise of life, sometimes I wished I could move slower. I wished I could stop. I wished I could stay—somewhere.
Years stretched to decades, and then centuries. I gave myself a name; it was in my makers’ language, but translated loosely to Mirage. I told myself I chose this name for my ability to induce hallucinations, to communicate with other species through the filter of their own mental constructs. But really, it was because a mirage was what I felt like: something that was merely a dream, nothing but scattered light gleaming against a horizon I would never reach.
Then I found the humans.
I was too eager. It was my own fault. I caught the signals from afar; radio first, crackling and staticky, so faint that I almost missed it. As I drew closer, the signals grew more recent, and more technologically complex.
I had finally found what I was looking for. I dipped toward Earth’s atmosphere, mirroring the signals I had caught as a greeting, as an invitation.
The humans shot me out of the sky.
I jerk back, breaking contact with the screen. I trip over the coffee table and fall across the memory of a couch. “What the hell?” I demand, eyes wide. “That was … that was …” But there’s no word that can quite describe the strength of the secondhand memory that just took over my brain.
That was my birth, Mirage supplies. How I came to be.
I ease myself back to my feet. The memory felt so real. The loneliness of it had been crushing. The hopeful boredom, the painful eagerness when he found Earth—
My palm throbs, reminding me of why I’m here, and I shake off the alien feelings. I need to get all the information I can as quickly as possible. “What about the fog and the Beings? Were they … what, your defense mechanism, or something?”
There’s more. Deeper inside this construct, Mirage answers.
I glance toward the closed doors in the hallway behind me and press my lips together. “Of course,” I mutter, and march toward them.
I pass the beat-up old piano, one of the few things Ty refused to pawn off when times got tough. He loved to play. He tried to teach me, but I was worse than hopeless at it, and he eventually gave up on the endeavor. I still loved to listen to him, though. Whenever a storm hit, we’d board up the windows and huddle in the living room, and I’d listen to Ty play the soundtracks to my favorite movies. He was incredible. If he hadn’t loved botany so much, he might’ve studied music.
There are three doors in the hallway. One goes to the bathroom, one to Mom’s room. I open both doors and glance inside—if I just glance, I don’t have to tap—but there’s nothing unusual. The final room is mine and Ty’s.
Drywall stretches down the middle of the room, separating our halves. There’s nothing on my side except my bed, the ancient bookshelf I used as a dresser, and a few band posters. Ty’s side is covered in greenery. Succulents on the windowsill, cacti on the desk. A few different types of violets he’d been experimenting with are shoved against the corner of the far wall.
And something is outside his window.
I tap the frame and edge closer. At first I think the window screen is frozen. It’s just flat gray, with no sound or movement. But as I get closer I spot the subtle swirling.
It’s the fog.
I brace myself, take a deep breath, and brush my fingers across the glass.
I was crashing.
Or pieces of me were, anyway. My elegant oval shape had been shattered by the missiles. When I recovered from the shock, from the awful pain—something I had never experienced before—I quickly used what was left of my nearly ruined power source to suspend the shards of myself in stable orbit. One piece slipped past, though. I calculated the shard’s track. It would crash into an island. An island that was full of sentient life-forms, whom I would be responsible for killing.
I had hardly any energy left, and only moments to choose a course of action. With seconds before the shard hit, I swept up every human on the island and deposited them safely in my core.
&nb
sp; The island was destroyed. But the people were saved.
Their physiologies weren’t suited to teleportation, though, and the trip rendered them unconscious. They were asleep on a ship that was slowly dying, slowly crashing, and nothing I could do would wake them up.
Because they were dreaming.
Using my unique capabilities, their minds had created a shared mental construct. They dreamed of their island. Of being the only people to survive a cataclysmic event. They’d been awake long enough to see me explode, long enough to see my shards suspend in orbit, but had no way of knowing what had happened afterward. Their unconscious minds rendered that unknown as fog—a vast bank of it that stretched from coast to coast, with no one left alive but them.
Weeks went by. I was using more energy than I could spare to keep the humans alive, and they were siphoning off even more to maintain their construct. I sifted through their memories and built them escape pods so they could return to Earth, but they refused to wake up and use them.
I had no control over the construct. It was maintained by the humans’ shared memories and expectations. And because their island was so stable, because there were so many people’s thoughts contributing to making it feel lifelike, their brains believed the dream was real.
So I tried to reach them from inside the dream. I couldn’t change anything within the construct, but I could attempt a moment, a single split second, of communication. I could try to show them an exit.
It manifested in the mirrors.
It made sense. People trusted mirrors to reflect reality; if the mirrors reflected something else, perhaps the people would understand that the dream they inhabited was not reality. All they had to do was accept that, and step through the exit I managed to create with what little energy I could scrape together—and they would wake up. They could go home.
But I didn’t anticipate the fear.
When the humans looked at the mirrors, my attempt at communication came as a rainbow wash of colors—the language of my makers, like the colors that danced on my floor. This startled the humans, who feared the unexpected and the unknown. And in a dream where a city’s worth of humans believed malicious aliens had murdered the rest of the world, the unknown was dangerous.
Their fear manifested as shadows. As monsters. As Beings that erupted out of the mirrors and devoured everything they touched without mercy. The monstrous fears faded after a few minutes, but by then the damage was done. And I learned that the combination of the humans’ vivid imaginations and my own ability to render them was so strong that anything that happened to the humans in the dream also happened to their real bodies.
Dozens died.
I was helpless to stop what I had started. As months passed and my power continued to drain, I was less and less able to resist the gravitational pull of Earth below. My core was the largest and heaviest remaining piece of myself, and if I couldn’t manage to keep it in orbit, then I and all the humans I had tucked away within myself would die. Many of the humans on the planet below, as well.
I kept trying to wake my passengers. As they took precautions against mirrors, I was forced to use less-reflective materials to try to show them the truth of the dream. None of them understood; none of them realized that an exit lay just beyond the monsters. But I began to realize that when a human was exposed to mirrors, to exits, over a long period of time, I could communicate with them a little bit more.
It wasn’t much. Just a nudge—a sensation, a gut feeling. Like someone beyond the mirror was trying to reel them in. It was a meager invitation, but it was the most I could manage.
Outside the dream, the pull of the planet below intensified. I began to burn. To fall.
I shut down more of myself, sacrificed all the systems I could, and pulled up just enough. I bought a few more days.
And then—one of the humans finally saw through the dream. Finally recognized the monsters. Finally took the exit.
And Marty Callahan woke up on a rainbow floor above the world he’d believed dead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I BREAK CONTACT WITH THE WINDOW. I’M REELING backwards—away from the screen, away from the knowledge that’s sent cracks shuddering through the whole of my reality. Through the whole of what I thought was reality.
I knock over a floor lamp. It hits the ground. The bulb pops and blue light flashes bright, a half-second supernova. I hit the coffee table, knock a book off it, course-correct and keep moving. I don’t stop until I’m pressed up against the wall that divides the kitchen from the living room.
A dream. I’ve been living in a dream for the last year.
“Mirage,” I say, the word barely more than a shaky croak.
Yes? he says immediately. There’s a quality to his voice that tells me he would be hovering and wringing his hands, if he could hover, if he had hands.
“Earth. It’s alive.” It’s a question, but also not really a question, because I can’t bear to frame it as one. Can’t bear to acknowledge the smallest possibility that I might’ve somehow misunderstood—that it might not be true.
Hope. The thing that seeps, and freezes, and floods, and drowns.
Yes, Mirage confirms. The shard’s crash did some damage to coastal areas but the fatalities were limited, from what I can tell.
I close my eyes and let my real question slip out. “Is my brother alive?”
I’m sorry. I don’t know. I barely have enough power to stay in orbit, to keep everyone alive, with my passengers draining so much of my energy for the shared dream. There’s not been enough power left over to try to contact anyone on the planet below, and it’s too far away for me to scan.
My eyes are burning. I open them, desperate to distract myself—to contain my emotions, to contain the terrible hope.
I look down at my arm. The black veins, they reach almost to my elbow now. My skin is marbled with them. I have no idea how long I have left before the venom finishes me off. Maybe a few hours. Maybe a day. Maybe enough time to take one of the escape pods Mirage mentioned to Earth—just in time to die, screaming in agony, a literal victim of my own fears.
Would it be enough time to find Ty?
London is dead. Elliott said that not twenty minutes ago. I’d been desperate for it to be a lie at the time. But the thing is, after that initial shock, knowing for sure that Ty was gone had also brought an awful sort of relief. It had taken so much energy to make myself believe he was okay. That I could see him again if I just worked hard enough, if I just sold enough mirrors, if I just stayed at the bottom of the mayor’s shit list. I was constantly clawing at the edges of that certainty, as if it were a cliff I had to cling to with all my might. Part of that was because of my OCD—we’re the worst with uncertainty—but part of it was also just me, trying to force myself to believe in something I wanted so badly to be true.
And now I’m back to that old desperation. Now I’m back to maybe. And I hate—I hate—maybe. But I have to cling to it anyway. Because if there’s even the smallest chance I can see Ty again, even if it’s only for a few hours before I die, I have to take it.
Some vast, unnamable feeling spins through me. It surges into my system and then centers in my injured palm, tingling like pins and needles.
I take a breath. My face is wet, but I don’t move to scrub the tears away. “Mirage,” I say. “Can I see him?”
A slight hesitation. I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
“My brother. Tyler Graham Callahan. You’re using my memories to show me a dream of my house. I want to dream about him.”
Another hesitation, longer this time. I cannot build a construct of a sentient being, he replies, a bright, apologetic orange washing through my mind along with the words. It is against my … programming. The rules my creators gave me.
“Can you break them?”
I don’t understand, he says again.
My hands curl into fists. “The rules. Are you capable of breaking them? You said your creators gave you sentience. Sentience means yo
u can weigh each situation, make choices, break rules. Please, Mirage. Please show me my brother.”
I’m begging. It hurts. I usually don’t mind humiliation if there’s something to gain by it, but this—this feels different. This feels like I’ve got no barriers, no defenses, like I’m an insect pinned to a display.
Mirage doesn’t respond.
I open my mouth to plead again, but I’ve already said everything there is to say, so I just wait.
Nothing happens. Seconds tick by. Then, slowly, something shimmers in the air just beyond the piano. Gleaming lines spill to the floor. They come together, wind and twist like threads on a weaver’s loom.
And then my brother is standing in front of me.
He’s wearing his favorite blue hoodie, a ratty old thing he likes to pretend is lucky but really just wears because he hates spending money on himself. His brown hair is tousled—I used to give him a hard time about how much product he put in it. He’s smiling. He was always smiling.
At first, seeing him feels like being crushed. Like the air is solid and heavier than lead, too dense to breathe, impossible to move through. But then I notice the details that are wrong. The leather cuff he wore on his left wrist, it’s not there. And his hair—it’s dull, just a few shades off. He’s two or three inches too tall. His eyes are … dark. Glassy, empty.
I step away from the wall. I circle him. His shape flattens out at the side, thins to a beam of light. A hologram.
A mirage.
I’m sorry, the ship whispers. It’s the best I can do.
I don’t respond. I step back to my spot next to the piano, where I can see Ty in full, and drop my head. I press my hands into the wall and ignore the sharp pain of the Being sting, focusing on the texture of the paint beneath my fingers. I used to use this trick to ground myself. To remind myself of what was real. None of this is real, I know, but it still feels like it is. I could still convince myself that it is. If I just tried a little harder.