Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  “You don’t deserve it,” Gray said again. “Not after what you’ve done.”

  Taren turned his back, escaping from the judgment in the figment’s gaze. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  But a second figment appeared in front of him. A twin of Gray. Same accusing stare, same menacing growl: “You think you deserve to survive?”

  Taren stumbled back. He whipped around to find the first figment still standing there. “What did you do?” it asked.

  “I did what I had to,” Taren shot out. “I woke the sleepers. I fought the machine that keeps us trapped.”

  He turned away, trying again to escape. But now a third figment appeared as if born from the fog, its clothes wet, its face traced with dripping water.

  Like the water that had dripped down the cavern walls.

  Dripped, and turned to tar.

  The third figment stared at Taren in horror, its eyes wide. “What did you do?”

  Taren raked his fingers over his own fog-wet arms, sick with guilt. “I took a spot on a ship, just like you did. And I survived.” He wished the fog would swallow him. It draped itself over his skin like a creature with a cold embrace. “You didn’t survive and I did—it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  Misery pounded in his chest like a second heartbeat.

  “You survived,” the dripping figment said. “And now you must pay for it.”

  Taren shook his head. “You don’t know anything.” How could I ever pay for something like that? “You’re not real. You don’t understand what it’s like—”

  “You think you deserve to survive?”

  The words came from the figment to his left this time. Taren turned and gave it a sharp shove. “Stop saying that.”

  “What did you do?” asked the figment to his right.

  Taren turned again, lashed out with another shove. “Stop.”

  The third figment said, “You survived. And now you must pay.”

  “Stop.” The word erupted from Taren as he turned toward the Gray who had last spoken. He surged forward to shove the figment with more strength than he knew his shaking body could muster.

  The figment jerked back. Too late, Taren realized that it had been standing at the railing.

  It tumbled over, its face a mask of shock.

  Taren’s heart exploded in his chest. The rest of him turned to stone as he watched the figment fall past the railing, nothing to stop it from hitting the concrete-hard water below. One minute there, the next minute swallowed by fog.

  For a moment, Taren couldn’t move or think or even breathe. Then, the other two figments flew to the railing as if they could stop what had already happened.

  Taren turned toward the base of the bridge tower that loomed over him. His breath came in searing gasps as he found a handle and yanked open the utility door and stepped into what he hoped would be the cradle of his stasis bed.

  He woke to the hum of machines. His chest heaved as he pushed away the plastic shell over his bed and then got to his feet.

  How easy to feel, in this distant place, that it had all been a bad dream.

  That wasn’t Gray. It wasn’t anyone at all.

  He made his breathing slow, his gut relax. He slid open the panel.

  Beyond, a new nightmare: all the lights had died.

  18

  LAKE

  The doorway led from the cavern into a dark forest. Deep shadows. Purple light. The leaves overhead were darker than any leaves Lake had ever seen, plum shades that cooled the blood boiling through her veins.

  “Where are we?” Willow asked beside her.

  Lake remembered what Ransom had told her: one day, she’d go so far into the sim that she’d never come back out.

  She looked over her shoulder. She couldn’t see the door into the Battery anymore.

  Ahead: dense shadows, soft light.

  “We can’t go back to the Battery,” Lake said, as if that were an answer to Willow’s question. But it was true. The Battery was tar and death and horror. It was Taren, transformed into something she didn’t understand. Something angry and fearful.

  As if reading her thoughts, Willow said, “Taren attacked them.”

  “He thought they were figments,” Lake said, and could almost admit to herself that she was lying. “He didn’t think it mattered.”

  “They weren’t figments.”

  “I know.”

  “He knew Eden wasn’t—”

  “He thought he had to wake her any way he could.” Maybe he had been right. “And he didn’t know, until he used it, what it would be like. Remember when he asked us the odds of someone surviving it?”

  Willow walked in silence for a long moment. “But once he saw, he didn’t stop.”

  Lake didn’t have a reply for that.

  She moved slowly, the lead box heavy in her arms, the tar roiling just inches from her skin. Every time she looked at it, she saw it coating the sleepers in the Battery, erasing them from the sim. What did you do, Taren? She shouldn’t have taken him to the Battery. She’d seen that he wasn’t ready, that something had been eating at him.

  “We need a place to hide this,” she said. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, hated it being so close to her. And she didn’t want anyone else to find it and use it on any more sleepers.

  Willow darted forward. “Here.” She knelt next to a tree whose trunk seemed to be shedding a layer of soft bark-skin. It split easily when she tugged, revealing harder bark beneath.

  Lake eased the box to the ground, never taking her eyes from the squirming tar. She pushed the box under the tree’s open jacket of bark, and then Willow let the bark fall over the box.

  “Come on,” Lake said, holding out her hand to help Willow up.

  Willow just stared up at her for a long moment, her gaze clouded with the same shock Lake still felt. Then Lake leaned forward and grabbed Willow’s hand, because if they stayed like this, they’d start to unravel, two more unjacketed trees.

  They walked farther into the forest, away from the hidden cache of tar, following a trickling stream. In Lake’s mind, images played over and over: tar like a sheath over crumpling bodies, Taren’s pained grimace.

  She remembered him asking how many of the Battery-dwellers were figments. But couldn’t he see, hadn’t he heard her calling out to him? They weren’t figments. They were sleepers.

  What did he do?

  Wake the sleepers?

  Or jolt them to their deaths?

  Her lungs hardened again. She almost couldn’t breathe at all.

  Willow slipped her hand free of Lake’s and walked ahead, drawn by something Lake couldn’t see. “Come look,” she called back.

  The stream they’d been walking along had widened, and Lake heard what was up ahead before she saw it. The trees parted, and there was Willow at the top of a waterfall, at the edge of a precipice, like she had come to the world’s end.

  Lake stood next to her and marveled at what lay below.

  A land of trees, blue in shadow. Or no—their leaves were dark, even in sunlight, like the trees Lake and Willow had just emerged from. In one direction, the forest gave way to golden tundra. In the other, to a dark, ice-capped ocean that seemed to swallow almost all light. And cutting through the middle: a river fed by the waterfall, so that the whole place seemed divided between day and night.

  A lost world.

  A strange place, and lovely. Born from a powerful imagination, the dream of someone deep in sim-sleep.

  The sun on the horizon wasn’t a sun but a glowing orb wedged into the dome of the sky. The trees below were not trees but ballooning umbrellas of leafy membrane. The world below had come from a dream so deep, Lake feared the dreamer would never wake.

  “Who do you think made this place?” Willow asked. “It seems like what a person would make if they’d only ever heard someone describe the world and had never seen it for themselves.”

  The sun, an orb-like lamp. The ocean, a sheet of darkness.
The river, a dividing line.

  So strange. And yet …

  Have I been here?

  Willow gazed down at the landscape as if into the face of someone she thought she’d never see again. “They made it so beautiful.”

  Lake’s heart went into her throat. Yes, it was beautiful. Beautiful and vast and complex. So much more so than the Battery.

  “This is what’s killing the ship, isn’t it?” Willow asked. “It’s straining the sim so much it’s shutting down the ship’s systems.”

  And taking us with it.

  Willow turned to her, backed by the wide, curving sky. “How are we going to close it?”

  19

  TAREN

  Darkness had swallowed Taren.

  He reached for the outer wall of the stasis chamber he’d emerged from, trying to ground himself, praying he hadn’t fallen into some pit of emptiness.

  His hand found the solid wall. He caught his breath.

  “Lake?” he called into the darkness, not caring who else might hear him.

  Had she returned from the sim? She’d stepped through that impossible doorway. It didn’t make sense, but he could picture it in his mind, even jumbled as his thoughts were.

  Was she here now, hiding from him in the darkness?

  “Lake? Are you there?”

  He imagined her crouching between stasis chambers, listening to his hitched breathing, ignoring his calls. Afraid, angry.

  “I’m sorry.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. “For what I did.” Opened his eyes again, but he might as well have kept them closed. What had happened to the lights?

  Maybe the ship was in its last throes. Maybe it wasn’t going to break apart like a cracked egg. It was going to slide into darkness and silence until there was no dividing line between life and death.

  He clutched his arms around himself. “I just wanted to wake the girl.” The muscles in his legs seized, and he had to lean against the wall of the chamber. “If you’re there, please say something. Please?”

  He strained for the sound of breathing, for the whisper of bare feet over the steel floor.

  The machines hummed. At least they were still working.

  He turned back the way he had come and groped for the door of the stasis chamber. Maybe Lake hadn’t left the sim after all.

  His throat ached, and he remembered now that he’d left water outside the door of his chamber before he’d gone in. He knelt, felt for the cup. But he couldn’t find it, and the failure was too much to bear.

  He abandoned the task, brittle with despair. The lights are out, and I’m all alone.

  He forced himself back into the stasis chamber. He’d go back into the sim and find Lake.

  Would she understand why he’d done what he’d done?

  Without her, you’re all alone.

  Would she understand that they had to wake the sleepers?

  They had so little time left.

  20

  LAKE

  Lake climbed down the promontory, gripping tree roots and then rocks, trying not to think any more about what Taren had done. Lowering herself into the belly of the sim while her heart sank, sank.

  At her back, the distant globe of light sent slanting rays that never shifted. The globe was stuck in place, a frozen sun.

  I’ve been here before. I remember this place.

  How can that be?

  Above her, Willow clambered over rocky ledges, faster and faster until Lake had to warn her, “Go slow, Will.”

  “What does it matter? Figments can’t get hurt.”

  Lake’s heart took another tumble. “I don’t want to see you fall.”

  They passed into deep blue light, sunlight filtered through the strange canopy. It caught the droplets in the air from the waterfall and made them glow. Lake dropped to the dirt and almost expected the thick air to slow her descent. It smelled of cedar and cinnamon and the mineral tang of wet rock.

  Willow followed her through the trees, the chilly mist. They found the river, a silvery ribbon. On the opposite bank, a rocky slope drank sunlight so that to look across the river was to peer into near-darkness.

  This is what it would be like if you could walk the world faster than the sun rose. Day to twilight to night.

  “Now what?” Willow said. All wonder lost on her, apparently.

  Lake turned to find her scaling a boulder at the edge of the water, and then realized it wasn’t a boulder but a webbed shell long ago discarded by some huge animal. Another mark of this place’s oddness.

  Lake peered past, into the trees, considering Willow’s question. This place is full of secrets.

  Willow shivered in the cool mist floating from the waterfall. “Do you think Ransom got out of the Battery?”

  Lake’s stomach twisted. He should never have gone there. “I hope so.”

  Willow looked at her for a long moment. “You weren’t trying to wake Eden. I could tell.”

  The air no longer felt cool and thick and magical. It collected on Lake’s bare arms like chilly glass scales. “I wanted to give Ransom a chance to get away. I messed everything up.”

  “Do you think Ransom got out of the Battery?” Willow asked again.

  “You’re repeating yourself.” Lake rubbed her hands over her damp arms, shivering.

  “He showed up in the Battery. He shows up when you want him to, doesn’t he?”

  Something chittered in the trees—birds or bugs, the sound pitched high so that Willow’s question seemed to go on and on.

  “There’s something strange about him,” Lake said. “He can’t leave the sim, he never tells me about his past.”

  “He shows up—”

  Lake cut in before Willow could repeat herself again. “Do you think…” She swallowed cold, wet air. “Is he like you?”

  “Like me?”

  “He only shows up where I go.”

  Willow gazed at the river. Its silver glow made her eyes flash. “Like me.”

  A figment.

  Lake crouched on the gravel bank. She felt like crumpling. The cold rocks bit into her fingertips as she put a hand down on either side to steady herself. “I don’t think he knows.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “He was just … there, on the beach, one of the first places I remember in the sim.”

  “But where did he come from?”

  Lake shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe he was a boy I saw once in real life and don’t remember. Maybe the sim does that—makes people appear from the deepest corners of your mind.”

  “Taren told me he had a dog in the sim that he didn’t have in real life.”

  “Ransom’s not a stray.”

  Willow wandered over and put her hand on Lake’s shoulder. “And even so, he follows you. Everyone follows you.”

  Lake peered up at her, wondering what she meant.

  “People, figments. You open doors, and they walk through.”

  “It’s never that easy,” Lake said.

  “They want the truth, and you give it to them,” Willow said. “You give it to them like it’s a gift and not a weapon.”

  “Is it a gift? A dying ship?”

  “They won’t be on a ship forever.”

  “I hope not.” Lake let out a shuddering breath. “But what about when we all go home? What’s waiting for us there, Will? I don’t know if it’ll be any better than what we have on the ship.”

  She pressed her cheek against Willow’s hand on her shoulder. And you won’t be there.

  The cold rocks at her fingertips felt oddly smooth, and not as cold as before. She looked down—and saw a plastic pipe under her right hand. One end was submerged in the water, weighted with piled rocks.

  She stood, tracing its length with her gaze. The other end of it disappeared into the trees.

  “What is it?” Willow asked.

  “A pipe. For delivering water. To someone’s camp, I think.”

  They followed it into the forest, where
it cut past trees and almost disappeared under fallen skeins of soft bark.

  “There!” Willow gasped, pointing.

  Under the trees sat a dome-shaped shelter. A frame of crisscrossing metal struts showed through a covering of stretched bark. A fine layer of dirt and bits of dried membrane-leaves sheathed all, evidence that the shelter had been here some time.

  Beyond, tucked behind trees: more shelters. A dozen, at least, all darkened with dirt and debris.

  Lake wandered among them, listening for signs of life, hearing only the rustle of the canopy overhead, the trickle of water through the pipe at her feet. Willow darted ahead and then stopped at the opening of a shelter, where a flap of bark hung loose.

  Lake followed, her steps heavier, reluctant. Is someone inside?

  Willow pulled back the flap and peered inside. A question showed on her face. She turned and gave Lake an uncertain look. Then she ducked into the shelter.

  “Will.” Lake hurried after her. She slipped into the shelter.

  Inside: two camp beds, a low plastic table, a floor of brushed dirt. A jug half-filled with water. A pile of fruit pits.

  “Look at this.” Willow lifted a pair of goggles from an open case and pulled them over her head. She fumbled with a switch at the side of one lens. “Oooooh. There are little marks painted on the tent.”

  “Let me see.”

  Willow handed over the goggles, and Lake pulled them on. On the underside of the bark-tent, tiny glowing specks appeared, painted constellations.

  “Someone painted stars,” Lake said, pulling off the goggles. “With infrared paint, I think.”

  She found that Willow was staring up at her, brow furrowed in consternation. “Lake.”

  “What?”

  Willow pointed.

  The low light cast a dreamlike spell. Lake felt as if she were watching herself move toward the bed. She lifted the bark-felt blanket to read the name stitched unevenly into the material.

  Her own name.

  Willow crouched near the other bed. Next to her, the corner of the blanket showed another name: WILLOW.

  Lake dropped onto the first bed—her bed? All her breath gone. Her thoughts churned faster than the water at the falls.