Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  A young girl sitting across the table silently chewed a protein bar. Lake had rescued this girl from the sim days ago. A week ago? Hard to keep track of time on a failing ship. She’d found the girl in an empty house, waiting for parents who would never come.

  Was she any better off now, waiting to leave the ship?

  The girl broke off half the protein bar she was eating and held it out to Lake.

  Lake hesitated, surprised. “Thanks.” She tapped her half against the girl’s. “Cheers.”

  The girl was maybe thirteen—Willow’s age. Eyes held that same challenge and curiosity. Probably had strong opinions on which music was the worst, which books the best, which Pop-Tart flavors were better cold or hot. Lake was willing to hear it all.

  “You remember me?” Lake asked her. Is that why you’re sharing your food?

  The girl shrugged. “Sure. You come in here, sit by yourself. Leave alone.”

  Lake winced. “But you don’t remember…” Of course she didn’t remember Lake rescuing her. Lake was always careful to change her appearance when she went into the sim. Otherwise, people like Kyle would catch on and lock her up. “Never mind.” Disappointment mingled with the loneliness Lake thought she had done so well at squashing.

  She shifted her attention to the view-screens. “Best view around.” She gazed at the glowing curve of Earth and imagined herself looking through tall panel-windows. White swirling clouds, as beautiful from above as they had been from below.

  Her throat ached at the thought.

  How much longer until I’m under them?

  “He likes it too,” the girl said, and Lake shifted in her seat to see who the girl was pointing to.

  The boy from the tiger yard.

  Someone had shut him into a private dining room currently serving as a makeshift holding cell. He stood with a shoulder pressed against the glass door, staring at the distant view-screen, trembling so hard it was a wonder the glass didn’t shake. Fresh out of stasis, and no one had bothered to feed him.

  He caught her staring. Raised one shaking hand to press against the glass.

  Lake looked away, rattled. But he couldn’t have recognized her. He only wanted help.

  She couldn’t give it to him. She was trying to keep off everyone’s radar. Sorry. She’d rescued him from one cage only to get him locked in another.

  She chanced another quick look. He was so weak. Don’t do it, she told herself.

  But she got up and slinked to a drink dispenser. Hope he likes algae smoothies. Nothing quite like the feeling that you’re drinking a fish. He wouldn’t be able to keep much more down. He’d been getting all his meals through an IV.

  She set the drink on the table someone had pushed in front of his cell to barricade it shut. Then she dragged the table from the door, wincing at the squeal of metal scraping over metal.

  “What are you doing?” someone barked.

  Kyle again. He strode over, his glare undercutting her sense of accomplishment at budging the table.

  “Did you ever have a pet?” Lake mustered the nerve to keep dragging the table. The boy behind the glass stood straighter, watching her progress with wide eyes. “You know how they die when you don’t feed them?”

  Kyle shoved the table back toward the door. “He’ll be fine for a few hours. Take the fight out of him.”

  “Fight? He obviously just got out of the sim.”

  “The new ones always try to go right back in.”

  Lake glanced at the boy trapped behind safety glass. Skinny and sad. They always looked like that when they first woke up. It almost made her feel sorry for saving them. “So you’re going to keep him in there until…?”

  “Until I feel like letting him out,” Kyle said. “He gets trapped in the sim again, we’re that much worse off.”

  “So explain it to him.” Lake turned to the boy behind the glass. She owed him eye contact while she delivered the bad news. “We’re going to die unless everyone gets out of the sim so the ship will let us go home.”

  The boy broke her gaze but didn’t otherwise react. Hard to process anything when you were exhausted.

  Kyle slapped the glass so that the boy jerked back. “They never understand. They think it’ll be easy to get out again.” Kyle crossed his arms, somehow looked authoritative even in his sweat-stained ship-issue uniform. Maybe he’d been captain of a sports team back at school and all uniforms were the same to him. He spoke at the glass. “You know anything about avalanches? Ever heard of people dying because they dig downward instead of toward the surface? They get tumbled around in the snow, get disoriented. That’s how the sim is. Even when you know you’re in a simulation, you end up losing your bearings and digging yourself in deeper.”

  Lake thought about how it had felt to wake from the sim not half an hour ago. That first gasp of breath, Willow’s name on her parched lips. He wasn’t wrong.

  Lake pointed her algae shake at the prisoner watching from behind the glass. “I don’t think he wants to go back into the sim. I think he’s just thirsty.” She moved the cup from side to side and the boy’s gaze followed it. “I’ll keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Kyle crossed his arms again, considering. “Always out, never in,” he said finally. That obnoxious motto again.

  “Like burps and farts,” Lake said with a smile.

  Kyle looked more annoyed than amused.

  But he didn’t stop her when she went back to dragging the table.

  The moment she cracked the door open, the boy behind it grabbed the cup from her.

  He made a face at the taste. “Yeah, I know,” Lake said apologetically.

  He downed the rest and leaned heavily against the wall, exhausted. “Thanks,” he croaked.

  “How do you feel?”

  “About right, for a dead person. I’m assuming this is hell.”

  “No…” Lake looked back, past the turmoil of the eatery, to the screens that showed Earth’s distant surface. “That’d be what we left behind when we got on this ship.” Smoking craters and impact fires and blackened skies.

  “We left.”

  “The lucky ones did.”

  “And then … I was in a simulation?”

  “You leave stasis, then you enter the sim before you fully wake up. It’s supposed to show you what Earth’s like now: war over, skies clear.” She pointed at the distant view-screen he’d been staring at earlier, where white clouds still swirled. “But it didn’t get everything right. The sim’s broken. Like the rest of this ship.”

  “The ship’s…?” He couldn’t seem to bring himself to finish the sentence. His hand shook so much Lake thought he might drop the cup. “What do you mean?”

  “The ship was never meant to be an emergency bunker. It was supposed to be for exploration. You know the guy who made the virtual reality app Paracosm? He had this ship built so he could, like, boldly go. But I guess it wasn’t quite finished when the war started and we all hurried aboard.”

  The boy’s legs shook. They weren’t used to holding him up. Lake thought about telling him to take a seat, that all the news she had was bad news anyway. But he was pressing up against the wall as if he were trying to get as far as possible from what she was saying.

  “I was trapped in there, wasn’t I?” he asked. “In the sim.”

  Lake gave him a sympathetic smile. “Now you’re just trapped on the ship. Until everyone gets out of the simulation. The ship won’t let us leave until then. Won’t let us access most of its areas, let alone the shuttles. We’ve got a whole group of volunteers trying to beat down the doors to the shuttle bay on a twenty-four-hour rotation. But I’m pretty sure those doors can withstand a lot more than homemade battering rams.”

  This was usually the point when the newly rescued went back to slumping. The boy just gave her a determined grimace. Fine, he could join battering-ram duty when he found his strength. She wouldn’t stop him from wasting his time.

  “How do we get people to wake
up?” he asked.

  Lake’s shoulders stiffened. A normal question, she told herself. It doesn’t mean he knows it was you in the sim. “We let them figure it out on their own.”

  He eyed her like he knew she was lying.

  Lake ducked his gaze. She leaned forward and took the empty cup from his trembling hand before he could drop it, noted the stars tattooed on his forearm—some constellation. “What’s your name?”

  “Taren.”

  “Don’t try to go back into the sim, Taren. Forgetting reality feels nice for a while, but in the end, it only makes you more miserable.” Trust me.

  He stared at her a long moment, and Lake couldn’t decide whether he believed her. The new ones usually didn’t. “What’s your name?” he finally asked.

  “Lake.”

  “Why did you look at me that way before, Lake? When you were eating at the table? No one else bothered to notice me.”

  Her skin itched. He’s going to figure it out. And then they’ll put me in here. “I have an eye for potential organ failure.” She shrugged. “Just—don’t go back into the sim. If anyone finds out, they’ll lock you up for good.”

  She slipped back out the open door, dropped the cup on a table, and left the eatery, forcing herself to take it slow under the weight of his gaze.

  3

  LAKE

  The sim was shrinking.

  With every person who woke, a section of it closed for good.

  So why was it still so full of empty pockets?

  Lake wandered a neighborhood where the houses sat at drunken angles, their foundations cracked in soggy soil. Every door along the street stood open.

  “Where did they go?” Lake wondered aloud.

  She sat on the tilted porch of an empty house, her head in her hands. It was getting harder to find pockets of the sim she hadn’t already searched. And the pockets she did find were lonely places, full of gloom and silence.

  But there was one place she could go that she knew wouldn’t be empty.

  She got to her feet and turned toward the unfamiliar house whose porch she’d been moping on, wishing now with her whole heart that it was her own house. She closed the front door, waited a beat, opened it again.

  It should have led her into a stranger’s cobwebbed home. Instead, Lake stepped right through to the backyard, as if the front of the house were a movie-set façade.

  Not just any backyard, either.

  Her own. Patchy lawn, birch tree, and—

  “Willow.” Lake’s breath went out of her.

  There was Willow, kneeling in the middle of the yard, holding an ordinary garden spade like an ordinary person.

  Her small, wiry frame was bent with determination. Brown hair mostly free from its ponytail, pointed chin smudged with dirt. Jacket hanging off one shoulder in that way she’d started wearing it.

  But it’s not really her. It’s just the sim.

  Lake stepped onto the grass, and it gave under her feet just like real grass. The jasmine along the back fence thickened the air with sweetness. Bees droned, unseen. In the shade of the birch tree, Willow smoothed a patch of dirt with her garden spade. She pushed messy hair away from her face, just like a real person would. The sun shone, birds whistled. So real.

  Lake tried saying what a real sister would say: “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, dummy.”

  “Everywhere but the backyard of the house I live in?” Willow said, cracking a smile. “Who’s the dummy, then?”

  This isn’t real. Willow’s messy hair hanging like smoke around her face. Her bare feet glowing in the sunlight at the edge of the birch’s shade.

  “Mom’s going to be mad that you were digging in her yard,” Lake said.

  “I buried something.”

  Back home, Willow always did stuff like that. Collected shells from the nearby beach and hid them in her drawer, found sticks in the garden and made fairy houses under the bushes. “That’s not going to make Mom any happier.”

  “I like knowing there’s a secret under the dirt,” Willow said. “I like that there’s something in the world that only I know about.”

  Lake held out her hand and helped Willow up, astonished that Willow’s palm against hers was enough to tame the fierce loneliness she’d felt only moments before.

  From her sister’s wrist hung a blue bracelet of knotted thread, matching Lake’s own. Strange, how something so insubstantial could keep them tethered to each other.

  “Come on,” Lake said. “If you’re done burying treasure.”

  Willow tried to turn back to the house, thinking they were going inside. And the sim would have obliged her, if Lake wanted it to. It would re-create their home, right down to the scuff marks on the kitchen tile.

  But Lake said, “Not in there. I can’t…”

  Willow gave her a questioning look.

  “I can’t go in there,” Lake said. It was a vault she’d never get out of. “Let’s use the gate.”

  She led Willow to the tall fence and lifted the latch on the gate.

  “We’re not going to the pier again, are we?” Willow asked. “It’s creepy when there’s no one else there. The carousel looks haunted—all those sun-bleached horses.”

  “No. I’m tired of empty places.” Lake opened the gate, picturing the place she wanted to go next.

  “I buried something,” Willow said before Lake could steer her through.

  “You said that already.”

  “I like that there’s something in the world that only I—”

  “Please, Will.” Lake pressed her eyes closed, unnerved. “You’re repeating yourself.”

  Willow sighed. “You think everything I do is annoying.”

  Lake tugged Willow’s jacket back onto her shoulder. Willow slipped it right back off. Just like the real Willow would.

  Lake’s heart squeezed. I shouldn’t keep coming here.

  She took Willow’s hand and turned to the gate. “Good thing I’d rather be annoyed by you than entertained by anyone else.”

  * * *

  No more lonely neighborhoods, Lake decided. Not today.

  So here was a pub. Scuffed doorway, high-backed wooden booths, dull copper walls. Muted piano music, as though someone were playing in a back room. Lake knew every note. Same tune every time she came.

  Same boy at the bar, now adding to a ceiling-high model bridge made entirely of toothpicks. Ransom had a gift for making his corner of the sim ordinary and dreamlike at the same time.

  Lake walked toward him, her worn boots hitting the wooden floor with a noise that made him turn on his stool. He leaned back against the bar, his shirt stretching over his chest, his body forming a long, sloping line. Lake breathed smoke that hadn’t been there a moment ago, saw the gloom in his eyes veiled through it. She pressed herself against the bar next to him. “Good day or bad day?” she asked.

  He intertwined his fingers with hers. The warmth of his palm melted some of her anxiety. “Want to guess?”

  Lake looked over his toothpick bridge rising from bar to ceiling. A jagged mass of splinters. “That the Golden Gate?”

  “Does it look golden.” His voice dropped on the last word. He drew in a mouthful of the smoke hanging in the air and blew it back out.

  Bad day.

  “How about I buy you a drink?” Lake said.

  He lifted her hand in his and kissed her knuckles. “Ah, but we’re all out of ice. Not to mention glasses. And anything liquid.” He nodded at the bottles lined up behind the bar, faintly wet but otherwise empty, rows of glass teeth.

  Lake sank back from him. “Why are you punishing yourself?”

  “Maybe I’ve got a limited imagination.”

  Pennies covered the pub’s walls in careful rows, glinting through the tracery of smoke. Ransom’s creation, along with the rest of the pub. “I’ll never believe that.” Lake trailed her fingers over his temple.

  He pulled away from her touch, apparently unable to escape whichever particular brand of gloom had o
vercome him that day. Or no—something else was making him uneasy. Lake followed his gaze to where Willow sat in a booth like she was waiting for service, the green of her jacket muted by swirling smoke.

  “Aren’t you going to say hi to Willow?” Lake asked.

  Ransom threw Lake a dark look and turned back to his toothpick bridge. “Why are you punishing yourself, Lake?”

  Smoke in her lungs, in her stomach.

  Ransom sighed. “Hi, Willow.” He balanced a toothpick on a bridge strut. It quivered, then stuck, like a magnet to iron.

  “He doesn’t like me,” Willow said to the smoke floating around her. She offered Ransom a catlike smile. “Is it because I’m thirteen and crashing your bar? Or is it the other thing?”

  “There’s no alcohol here,” Ransom pointed out.

  “So it’s the other thing. The not real thing.”

  Lake tugged on Ransom’s hand, desperate to redirect the conversation. “Don’t be upset about Willow. I can only spend so much of my time in the sim by myself.”

  He traced his thumb over hers. “So don’t spend so much time in the sim. You hang around fake people more than you do real people.”

  Lake got that feeling again: smoke churning in her stomach. “Someone has to clear the place out.”

  Ransom turned to work on his bridge, so Lake’s view was only of his tensed back.

  “Most of the pockets I find lately are empty,” Lake said. “Any idea where everyone’s gone?”

  “They must be grouping together.”

  “You haven’t seen anyone lately?”

  Ransom shrugged. “Don’t get around much.”

  Lake watched him add to his impressive sculpture. “Do you even try anymore?”

  “I try.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I wind up in the same few pockets. The beach where we met, a couple other places. The sim doesn’t work right for me.”

  “And no one comes here.”

  “No one except you.” He gave Willow a reluctant glance. “And her.”

  “What a nice bridge,” Willow said, an edge to her voice. “Did you do the pennies, too?” She peered through the smoke at the pub’s copper walls.