Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  Then she had to face it: she shouldn’t have let Ajay step through that door without anyone holding on to him.

  She turned, searching for him.

  She hated being right.

  Ajay had found another stick, a long one perfect for tipping into the lead box and bringing forth a trembling clump of tar. Before Lake could react, Ajay touched the tar to the length of cord she held. She quickly dropped the cord. It fell to the ground in two pieces, her claim on the box severed.

  “Back away from it,” Ajay said, pointing the tarry stick at her.

  “Fine,” Lake said, stepping toward Willow and Taren. “I wasn’t going to use it on you, though.”

  “No—just on everyone at the Battery,” Ajay sneered.

  “Not even them.” Lake stared at the tar on his stick. “Are you going to use that on me?”

  “I’m going to take you to the Battery. Isn’t that what you wanted? I’m going to let them figure out what to do with you, so you can’t hurt anyone else.”

  “I don’t hurt people.”

  They looked at each other over the lifted stick. The only thing that moved was the tar squirming on the end of it, and the scrub shuffling in the wind. And Lake’s heart, pumping madly inside her chest.

  “Then what do you do with them?” Ajay finally asked.

  I could show you. If I thought you were ready.

  Was he ready?

  “I’d never use tar on anyone,” Lake said. “Where did you get all of it?”

  “It gathers in places. All around San Francisco. It drifts in on the wind, from the blast site.”

  “You think it’s from nuclear impact?” It wasn’t fallout. Wasn’t ash or dirt, either. It was something unique to the sim, clumps and strings of broken code.

  Then again, maybe Ajay was right, in a way. The tar had always seemed to Lake to arise from horror and confusion, and what else had birthed those feelings but their memories of the warheads that had sowed the Earth with doom?

  “They said on the news that nothing would grow for years.” Ajay watched the tar squirm on the end of his club. Lake thought she could hear it sizzle against the cool air. “They said the soot from firestorms would hang in the air and block the sunlight and make everything die. And then one day, the skies would clear, and the world would get warmer, and things would grow.”

  All around them, the green of new growth mingled with the muted gold of wind-dried grass. Fennel shot up like feathers from the hide-back of the hillside. Deer tracks marked the dried mud along a trickling stream, the only bit of art Lake had seen in ages.

  “But in the meantime,” Ajay went on, “people would starve, world governments would collapse. Local governments would spring up, probably scary ones made of people who just like to hold guns.”

  Even seabirds were calling from overhead, or complaining to one another about the smell of smoke the four of them had brought with them. “Seems pretty nice here, though,” Lake said.

  Ajay squinted at the ruffled scrub and the water trickling along a muddy rut. He peered at thickets of wild fennel as if he were studying the face of a stranger.

  Willow nudged Lake and pointed at a pair of young trees shading a tiny shack, just a hut of tied branches with a makeshift door—the door they’d come through minutes ago. Taren saw it too and shuffled his feet like he was thinking of escape.

  But Lake couldn’t help noticing how Ajay was reading the scenery, confusion mapped on his face. How he held his terrifying stick out to the side as if he could barely stand being near it.

  “The Battery must be close,” Lake said. “Must be a decent place to live with all of this right outside your door.”

  “I…” Ajay’s shoulders drooped. “Sometimes I wonder why we’re still living underground when…”

  “Does anyone ever talk about leaving?” Lake asked. “Leaving for good?” Do you want to leave? Come back with me to a failing ship, no grass or trees at all?

  Ajay shrugged. “Where else is there to go?”

  Oh, I could tell you. But she’d learned early on—this couldn’t be rushed.

  “I’ve been all around,” Ajay went on. “Collecting the tar. I’ve seen hellscapes you couldn’t imagine—dead forests of gray trees, fields of skeletons half-buried in ash—”

  Lake couldn’t stand to hear more. “That’s not the only thing waiting for us. There are other places to go.”

  Ajay looked from Lake to the green hillsides. He lifted his face to the sun and closed his eyes for the briefest moment. “No one seems to know how long we’ve been living in the Battery,” he said. “We’re down there, in the dark, barely knowing when it’s day or night.”

  He wants to leave. He’s ready. “So you have been thinking about leaving.”

  Taren tugged at the back of Lake’s jacket. “Lake,” he said, in a voice low enough that Ajay wouldn’t hear. “We can’t get to the Battery without him.”

  “It can’t be far now,” she said over her shoulder.

  He caught her arm, pulled her closer so they could keep talking. “We don’t know that.”

  Should she wait? Let Ajay take them right to the door? What if the Battery wasn’t nearby at all and Ajay had only brought them here to corner them?

  Chances to free people from the sim were so rare. But maybe Ajay could wait a little longer, could keep dealing with the tar and ash and uncertainty that had been his steady diet this long …

  She shook her head. “No, that’s not how this works. We don’t keep people who want to go.”

  She waited for Taren to let go of her arm. He seemed to think that holding on would help her come to her senses.

  His expression finally softened. He nodded in agreement and let go. But she caught the shadow in his gaze that said he thought they might regret this.

  He probably wasn’t wrong.

  “I’m going to take the tar back to the Battery,” Ajay said. “And then we’ll be safe down there.”

  “No one’s safe around tar.” Lake watched the black stuff creep closer to Ajay’s hand.

  “We won’t use it on each other.”

  “Who else will there be to use it on, when you’re all locked in?”

  Lake pored over Ajay’s ash-speckled face, his ragged clothes, loose-tied sneakers. His jacket, one empty pocket gaping open, the other zipped shut and bulging.

  There’s always some object that shows what they’re hung up on.

  Lake eyed his zippered pocket, studied the circular bulge. A watch? “When did your watch stop? Or did it ever work at all?”

  Ajay looked stricken. He shifted his tarry stick to his left hand so he could grasp his lumpy pocket with his right.

  “Why don’t you take a look at it?” Lake suggested. “Take it out of your pocket?”

  The lines in Ajay’s face deepened. “The zipper’s stuck.”

  The stick he held had grown shorter this whole time, and the tar ate away at it still. In a minute, it’d reach Ajay’s hand. “Did someone give you that watch?” Lake asked. “As a gift?”

  Ajay’s shoulders sagged. “I was supposed to wait for my cousin. One hour, and then we’d escape together. To … to a ship, I think.”

  He’s remembering. Lake allowed hope to creep in.

  “He gave me his watch and said he needed one hour to find his friends and tell them goodbye,” Ajay went on. “But I got scared. I left without him.”

  Taren’s shoulders jerked.

  The tar, I know. It crept lower still, so close to Ajay’s skin.

  “We all left someone,” Lake said, and Taren made that jerking movement again, so maybe it wasn’t the tar upsetting him.

  Willow just pulled at the ends of her jacket sleeves.

  “Who did you leave?” Ajay asked, his voice hard, like he didn’t believe her.

  Lake closed her eyes, blocking out the sight of Willow shivering against the building wind. “Everyone. That’s all we did—left people.” She opened her eyes because she remembered, suddenly, some small bit
of lukewarm hope: Ajay might have someone on the ship. A friend, maybe even his cousin. “What’s your cousin’s name?”

  “Shawn. Shawn Singh.” Ajay’s fingers toyed with the zipper on his jacket. “He’s not in the Battery. He’s not anywhere, no one’s seen him.”

  “I’ve seen him,” Taren said.

  Lake turned to him in surprise. She wondered if he were lying, but the excitement in his eyes said otherwise.

  “I can’t say we got off to a great start,” Taren said. “But he’s on the ship, he made it okay.”

  “He—what?”

  “I’ve seen him,” Taren said again. “He’s waiting for you, I swear. You’ll see.”

  “He’s—?” Ajay frowned. But he was toying with the zipper again, and this time it budged. His fingers slipped through the opening.

  Then he froze. Lake kept her gaze on the tar so near his skin.

  “I keep having this weird thought,” Ajay said. “Stupid, maybe. Did any of you ever play VR games in Paracosm?”

  Lake and Taren exchanged glances. Why yes, Lake thought.

  “Remember how people used to freak out and say that one day, we’d all get stuck inside VR and it’d be the end of the world?” Ajay cracked a smile. “One good thing about nuclear apocalypse—it proved them wrong.”

  Lake could hardly breathe, watching the tar creep. She gave Ajay a tight smile. “Sure did.”

  Ajay smiled back at her. He slipped his right hand into his pocket and drew out the watch.

  Done.

  Lake stepped toward him, pushed his left arm down so that he dropped the stick into the box of tar. His eyes flashed as if he suddenly realized what had almost happened, and he leaped away from the box like he’d been scalded.

  But Lake didn’t give him time to think about it. She turned him toward the shack under the trees. “Shawn’s waiting for you.”

  She picked up a rock, walked to the door, and marked it with an X. Her way of letting him know: this door is special. It’ll lead you out of here. She envisioned the ship waiting for him on the other side, and then opened the door for him.

  Ajay glanced at the watch in his hand again. Lake wished she could take it and wind the time back, so Ajay would feel like the hour he’d been told to wait for his cousin had never passed.

  At least Ajay would be with his cousin now. He stepped through the door and vanished.

  The three of them were alone with the crate of squirming tar.

  14

  LAKE

  Willow came running over the crest of the hill just as Lake turned to search for her. “I see it!” she called, her jacket flapping behind her. “The Battery!” She pointed back the way she’d come.

  Lake and Taren exchanged hopeful glances. But then Taren said, “How will we get in without Ajay? At least if we had gone as his captives, he would have gotten us inside.”

  Lake thought of bad food on a broken ship. “I’ve had my fill of being a prisoner, personally.”

  Willow had caught her breath now. “Taren could make himself look like Ajay. They might let us all in if he tells them we’re hoping for shelter.”

  Lake stared at her, stunned. Taren gaped. Then he said, “Did a computer program just come up with a good idea all on its own?”

  Lake winced. But Willow just rolled her eyes and said, “Thanks, Taren. Anything you’d like to contribute?”

  He still seemed ruffled, but in the end, he went to make a pocket where he could exchange his face for Ajay’s. Near the shack nestled under the wind-stirred trees, he felt nearby for an invisible wall. Lake marveled at the way he pushed against the curtain of air. The hills beyond proved to be nothing but a backdrop, their edges caving as Taren pushed. In a moment, he had created a concave large enough to swallow him from sight.

  The boy who reemerged looked nothing like the boy who had gone in. Taren pulled at the sleeves of his jacket—Ajay’s jacket—and said, “Did I get it right?”

  “Try a little more panic in your eyes,” Willow said. “Ajay seemed committed to that emotion.”

  “You look great,” Lake said. She hesitated, and then said, “Did you change the tattoo on your arm?”

  Taren’s brows contracted. “I’m wearing a jacket. No one will see it.” He clasped his hand over the sleeved arm, as if to protect it.

  “That’s not what I meant. I was just thinking—before we go into the Battery, you should have a plan for remembering you’re in the sim. Something to keep you grounded.”

  Taren glanced at Willow, Lake’s something that kept her grounded, and his gaze clouded over. “Figments don’t keep me grounded.”

  “I’m talking about your tattoo.” Lake tried not to resent the way he’d looked at Willow. She moved close so she could roll up his sleeve. “You could change the pattern of the stars so that when you look at the tattoo, you’ll know there’s something not right about it.”

  Taren’s arm went rigid under her hands. “I got this tattoo with my brother.”

  His injured tone made Lake back off. “Okay. It was just an idea.”

  “Whatever.” Taren went on rolling his sleeve, a little stiffly. “That was a different lifetime, right?”

  Lake wondered if she should apologize. But Taren was already turning back for the pocket he’d created. He disappeared into it and came out with his arm rigid at his side. Tattoo altered, Lake guessed. Taren gave it one quick glance, his face tight, like he was checking a wound.

  Lake focused on using her foot to nudge the box of tar toward the pocket Taren had created. When she had it safely hidden, she turned back to find Taren squinting in thought.

  “How are we going to know who in the Battery is a sleeper and who’s a figment?” he asked. Lake found it weird to hear his voice coming from Ajay’s mouth.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lake said, checking the toe of her boot for stray tar. “We just need the one dreamer. I’m guessing it’ll be whoever’s running the place.”

  “And after we figure out who the dreamer is?”

  “We figure out how to wake the person. Honestly, they usually tell you what’s keeping them in the sim. You just have to listen.” She noticed the way he still held his tattooed arm rigid at his side and felt a stab of guilt for ever having suggested he change it. “Look around for an object that ties to whatever’s bothering them.”

  Taren fixed his gaze at a spot just above her head. “That’s what you did with me. Was I easy to figure out?”

  Was it regret in his voice? Resentment? She couldn’t understand what was going on with him.

  “No,” she said. “You were easy to care about. That’s why I stuck with it.”

  His shoulders relaxed. But his gaze was still hard.

  What did you expect? she asked herself. Did you think he’d thank you for dragging him from the last place he felt safe?

  Her heart sank. You think he came into the sim just to help? He’s still bruised, and he’s looking for something to heal him. Or …

  She remembered him at the overlook, his jaw clenched, his gaze fixed on the spot where she’d seen a figment jump the railing. A figment that had looked quite a bit like him, only older, more muscular.

  Or something that’ll bruise harder.

  Lake had a bad habit of that herself, pressing on her own bruises.

  “Are we going?” Willow asked, hands on her hips, impatient.

  “Yeah,” Taren answered.

  Lake swallowed her nerves. “Wait, I should tell you.”

  Taren’s shoulders went rigid again.

  “It won’t be easy to wake the dreamer here,” Lake said. “Any dreamer who can create a pocket big enough to hold forty-plus sleepers has to be seriously deluded by the sim.”

  “You said we just had to look for an object. And listen to their sad story.”

  “Finding out why they won’t leave the sim is one thing. Convincing them to go is another.”

  Taren blew out a breath. “You didn’t feel like mentioning this earlier?”

 
“I was focused on finding the Battery earlier. One problem at a time, you know?”

  Taren looked back at the pocket he’d created, the concave where Lake had stashed the tar. “We could find a way to get the dreamer out here, into the pocket I made. Then I could walk out that door over there”—he nodded at the shack under the trees—“to exit the sim. The pocket I made would close, the dreamer would wake, their pocket would close too. Then—everyone’s out of the sim.”

  “Everyone who’s inside the Battery, at least,” Lake said. It wasn’t a terrible idea. “Which might actually be everyone who’s left in the sim.”

  “How are you going to get them to come out of the Battery and walk into the pocket you made?” Willow asked. “You have Girl Scout cookies or something?”

  “Haven’t figured that out yet,” Taren said. “Maybe something will come to me inside the Battery.”

  Lake chewed her lip. “Maybe. We’ll make it plan B.” She started up the hillside, toward Willow. “Anything bad happens, just get out the nearest door, okay? We can regroup and come back later.”

  Behind her, Taren said, “Later.” An edge to his voice.

  Lake turned to give him a questioning look.

  “With the state the ship is in,” he said, “later isn’t really an option.”

  Lake went on following Willow, trying not to feel the weight of Taren’s words. The thing was, she knew from experience one important truth: you can’t rush it.

  But she also knew what the fear in her gut told her: the chaos on the ship was only getting worse with each passing moment.

  They had to wake the Battery’s dreamer, and they had to do it now.

  What if I can’t do it? Even with Taren’s help?

  She wished Ransom were here. She wasn’t sure how much help he could be, but at least when he was around, the scrabbling in her chest eased.

  At least I’m not alone. She watched Willow’s jacket flap behind her as she walked.

  They crested the hill, and the hulking Battery came into view.

  Thick concrete walls jutted from the hillside, splayed at an angle and barred by double gates. An enormous entry to an underground fortress, like a wide mouth into the earth. Shadowing the gates was a huge semicircle overhang of concrete like the palate of a monster.