Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  “Did we live here?” Willow asked. “A long time ago?”

  Lake tried to sort through her tangled thoughts. “Did we live in a lost world hidden in the sim?”

  Is that why I dream about this place?

  “I think I only go where you take me in the sim,” Willow said. “But I’m not sure. I have a hard time remembering.”

  “I have a hard time too.” Lake thought of something Taren had once said. “It’s like when you have different dreams one after another. You might remember the last dream, but not the earlier ones—not really.”

  “You think we lived here, but we forgot?”

  Lake touched the felt blanket. Looked at the low table where she and Willow had feasted on tree fruit. Touched the bark-wall she had woken next to every morning.

  I do remember. “Yes, I think we lived here. You and I. I think this was home when I first arrived in the sim.”

  A home for a sleeper and a figment.

  Her memories of it came needling to the surface of her mind. The weight of the blanket over her at night, Willow’s sleeping face in the twilight glow. “Someone made this place for us to live.”

  How many shelters sat under the trees? A dozen? More? How many people had lived here?

  Lake moved to the doorway, pushed the flap aside. What does it matter? But she was tearing through the camp now, pushing farther into the trees, taking in the sight of shelter after shelter—

  Dozens of them. Enough for a hundred and fifty people.

  We all lived here.

  Someone made this place to be a home for every sleeper on the ship.

  But who would do that? It was the most dangerous thing possible, making a home that sleepers would never want to leave. Worse than bunkers, worse than childhood bedrooms or warm kitchens. A beautiful dream that no one would trade for reality.

  And yet …

  We did leave. We pushed into other pockets of the sim. How?

  Willow brushed up next to her, leaned her weight against Lake’s arm. “I found something in one of the shelters.” She held out her palm, where a silver badge gleamed: a pair of wings sprouting from a star.

  Lake took it with trembling fingers. “Captain’s wings.”

  “He didn’t die in stasis.”

  “No, it doesn’t look like he did.” Lake studied the badge as if it might reveal something, help her make sense of the thoughts churning in her mind. “He was here, with the rest of us. Living in these shelters at the heart of his own sim.”

  She lifted her gaze to the shelters, and then to the billowing canopy overhead. Such a strange and lovely place. The most complex pocket she’d ever seen in the sim.

  An intricate world created by a talented architect.

  The most talented the sim had ever seen.

  White water churned in Lake’s head, in her stomach. She closed her fingers so tight over the badge that the wingtips bit into her flesh. “He made this place. The captain.”

  Who else could have invented such a complex pocket in the sim but the creator of the sim himself?

  “Pied piper,” Willow said. “Leading everyone into the depths of the sim.”

  “He must have known we’d have a hard time leaving a place like this—but he made it anyway.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Lake wanted to go back to the dreamy shelter, crawl into the bed, forget everything else. She wanted to stay here with Willow and pretend no other place existed. But she knew what she needed to do.

  The breeze shifted the canopy, and Lake caught sight of the promontory she and Willow had climbed down from. She forced herself to start in that direction.

  “Where are we going now?” Willow asked, following.

  “To find the captain. He didn’t die in stasis like I thought. He was here in these shelters, and now he’s somewhere else in the sim.”

  “You know where.” Willow’s voice dipped. “Don’t you?”

  The canopy cast its blue light on Lake’s skin, and she had to remind herself that she wasn’t underwater, that she could breathe.

  “You can’t go there, Lake. You swore you never would.”

  Lake kept up her determined stride. “It’s the only place left in the sim that I’ve never been to. Which means it’s the only place he could be.”

  “The door you’ve never been through—the door in the middle of the desert,” Willow said. “You know where it leads.”

  The roar of the distant waterfall echoed through the trees like a warning.

  “To a simulated version of the ship,” Lake said.

  “If you go there, you won’t be able to get out. You won’t be able to tell that you’re not awake on the real ship.”

  Lake’s stride broke. She leaned against the soft bark of a tree, catching her breath. “I have to go. I have to find out—”

  “What?” Willow put her back against the tree so that Lake was looking into her blue-tinted face, the face of a ghost.

  “Why he made this place for us,” Lake said.

  “A nice place to wake? A home?”

  “A trap. A very pretty grave.”

  Willow looked back toward the shelters. “But no one is here.”

  “He didn’t dig deep enough.”

  Overhead, invisible birds called from the branches, their low whistles a long-forgotten music.

  “I need to know, Will.” Lake dug her fingers into the soft outer layer of bark. “I need to know if the reason he made this place is because it wouldn’t matter if we never left it. We’ve been sleeping for decades, waiting to go back to the surface. Waiting to go home. I need to know why he believes we never can.”

  Fear darkened Willow’s eyes. “If you go there, you might never come back out.”

  Lake pushed away from the tree. “Then I’d better say my goodbyes.”

  21

  RANSOM

  The toothpick bridge lay in ruins on the bar, a jagged mess no less terrible than when it had stood upright. Half-broken or half-built, depending on what Ransom might do with it next. At the moment, he could think of it only as a fence between him and the stranger who had just burst through the door of the pub.

  “Is Lake here?” the stranger asked, his gaze roving the room.

  Ransom’s heart jerked sideways at the mention of Lake’s name. “Who’s asking?” He moved toward the bat he kept propped against the empty ice bin.

  The stranger’s gaze snagged on Ransom, focused, unfocused. Something was wrong with this guy. “Taren,” he said. “I was with her in the Battery.”

  Ransom kept the bat low, out of sight. “You were there?”

  Confusion lined Taren’s brow. He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Oh. I looked different. But that was me. I’m her friend.” His voice went up a little so it was almost a question. “Do you know where she is? Have you seen her?”

  Ransom let go of the bat. His palm had gone sweaty anyway. “Shouldn’t you know where she is? What happened in the Battery?”

  Taren came and braced himself against the bar, as if he were about to be sick. “We … got split up. I saw her go through a door.”

  “I didn’t see any doors down there. Just empty doorways, thanks to Eden’s paranoia.”

  “I think Lake made one. With the tar.”

  It was Ransom’s turn to grip the bar. “But Lake got out?”

  Taren nodded. He sank onto a stool and hunched over the bar as if giving in at last to long-felt exhaustion.

  “And now you can’t find her.” Ransom touched an empty glass under the bar and wished there were something in it, even just water to cool the heat blossoming through his head.

  “We had a plan going in,” Taren mumbled to the bar. “But it didn’t work. We were trapped.”

  Ransom was having a hard time following. And the hollow tone of Taren’s voice had him nervous.

  “Everything went wrong,” Taren said. “Eden’s soldiers started coming at me. So I fought back.”

  “And Lake left without you?” Someth
ing wasn’t adding up.

  Taren lifted his head. He glanced at Ransom like he was surprised to see him there, like he’d only been talking to himself.

  Maybe he is. Maybe I’m not here at all and I’m only kidding myself. The amount of time he’d spent in the sim—his whole life, it seemed. It was more real to him than reality.

  “She escaped,” Taren said. “I fought. With the tar.”

  Some long-dormant creature awoke in Ransom’s chest. It slithered around his heart, wrapped around his rib cage.

  Taren sat frozen, his eyes heavy with despair. “Do you know anything about tar? What it does?”

  Ransom’s stomach roiled. Yes, he knew.

  Someone had followed him here once. When? He couldn’t remember. Time felt slippery to him. Ransom had had to fight the guy off with a bat, even as the guy came at him with the tar squirming in a lead cup.

  He looked to the end of the bar now, where tar still glinted deep within the wood, boring its way downward like a worm. He thought he could hear it chewing.

  He’d seen tar once before, too. He’d seen what it could do to people.

  The creature in his chest slithered down into his stomach and coiled there, cold and heavy.

  “You shouldn’t use it,” he told Taren. “It’s the worst thing you can do.”

  Taren’s hands shook on the bar. “They might be okay. They might have survived. I didn’t mean to hurt them, I just wanted to get out. Do you think they might…? Do you think they’re okay?” He looked at Ransom, his gaze pleading.

  But Ransom had seen tar, and what it did to people. What it did to those who touched it, and what it did to those who used it. “Sometimes it wakes them. Sometimes it sends them into shock and they don’t survive.”

  “How often? Do you know? If I used it on five people…” His throat moved as he swallowed. “Ten…”

  Ransom tried to tamp down his disgust. “You can’t do that again. Don’t ever use it.” Images flashed in his mind, and he tried to push them away. “You think it’ll save you, but tar destroys. And if you use it enough, you become the destroyer.”

  Taren shook. His chest heaved. Misery rolled off his skin and choked the air like smoke. “Do you know how I got on this ship? How we all did? Not by luck—that’s what everyone says, but it’s not true. I might have been given a spot on board, but I chose to accept it. I knew by taking a spot I was dooming everyone who didn’t get one. But I went along with it anyway. Because I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.” His gaze went heavy with dread. “It’s the selfish who survive.”

  Ransom looked at the coin on the bar top, the one he’d made, with the billowing tree. “No. Not even them.”

  He’d tried so hard to lock the memories away. He thought he’d left them behind in that lost world at the heart of the sim. “I used the tar once,” he said, “to defend myself.”

  Taren went still, tense.

  “But it didn’t save me.” Ransom’s mouth filled with the metallic tang of regret. “I’m still here in the sim, marked for death like everyone else.”

  “I’ve never seen you on the ship before,” Taren said slowly, as if the realization were only just coming to him. “Didn’t Lake say you were a sleeper?”

  “I used to think it was only a matter of time until all the sleepers in the sim woke. But they never will. As long as one person is stuck in the sim, everyone else is doomed.”

  “I can help you wake.”

  Ransom gave him a rueful smile. “Lake tried.”

  “There’s more than one way to wake a sleeper.”

  The lights flickered, responding to Ransom’s unsteady nerves.

  “You ever wonder why you spend your time in an empty pub?” Taren asked him. “Why there’s nothing here to drink, no people or music—”

  Ransom flicked his head and a piano started playing in a back room that didn’t exist. He knew what Taren was trying to do: use confusion to wake him.

  But Ransom was no ordinary sleeper. Unlike other sleepers, he knew he was in a simulation.

  Taren hesitated, thrown off by the music. “You never eat, never sleep. Never see any change in this place from day to night.”

  Ransom offered him a steely smile. “That game doesn’t work on me. You can’t wake me to a reality I already know about.”

  “You walk through doors,” Taren said, his voice faltering, “and they lead somewhere they shouldn’t.”

  “I wait and wait,” Ransom said, taking over for him, “for the sim to dissolve, the ship to die—and me to go with it.”

  Taren swayed on his stool, lapsing into confusion. “You know about the ship? You know you’re in a sim—but you don’t wake. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  At the end of the bar, the tar bubbled up from its wormhole.

  Taren stood, transfixed by the sight of it, and edged down the length of the bar to the tiny wormhole. “I’ve never seen you on the ship,” he said to Ransom, “but you know you’re in a sim. Do you ever leave? Are you real?”

  The tar bubbled higher out of the wood, responding to Taren’s confusion.

  Taren’s gaze went unfocused. “I’ve walked through doors that lead to places they shouldn’t lead. Walked out strange exits, onto a dying ship. I’ve seen things that shouldn’t exist. My own brother—” He broke off.

  But it was enough. His confusion sent the tar bubbling over. A stream of it trickled down the bar, carving a line in the wood, snaking under the broken toothpick-bridge to where Ransom stood.

  Ransom scrambled back. He’d never seen someone do that before—use their own confusion to create tar. His gaze snapped to Taren, who seemed to have shaken off his confusion. He was looking down at his own forearm, and where tattooed stars formed a scattered constellation.

  “Why did you do that?” Ransom asked, eyeing the trickling tar again. “Are you going to use it on me now?” He wanted to reach for his bat, but that would bring him closer to the tar still snaking its way down the bar top.

  “No,” Taren said, a note of defensiveness in his voice. “You said no one could wake you. You said you’d die if you stayed trapped in the sim.”

  The tar etched a groove into the wood, a deep scar that would never come out.

  “I was going to give you a chance to use it on yourself,” Taren explained.

  Ransom’s stomach dropped.

  “I don’t know if you’ll survive it,” Taren admitted. “Is it better than being trapped here and going down with the ship?”

  Ransom knew what tar could do to a person. He’d seen it.

  He hadn’t known, until the moment he used it in self-defense, that he was capable of wielding such a weapon. Did that absolve him? Did his regret?

  The tar destroys, and I’m a destroyer.

  He wasn’t sure what else he was, but he knew he was that.

  Whenever Lake tried to ask him about his past, he could feel the memory of that act snaking around his heart. When she tried to save him from the sim, the truth hissed in his ear: he was too tainted to live in a world outside the sim.

  He had destroyed, and he would surely bring destruction with him.

  The tar wormed closer to the edge of the wood, and Ransom realized that he had stepped toward it, had lifted his hand …

  He jerked back. The glasses on the shelf behind him rattled and dropped to the floor.

  In the same moment, the door to the pub opened wider, and Lake stood staring in horror at the scene before her. She looked to Ransom, to the tar, to Taren backing away from the crash of breaking glass.

  “Lake, it’s okay,” Ransom said.

  Taren stood near the bar, mouth open, not saying anything. “You don’t have to use it on Ransom,” Lake told him.

  “No,” Taren said, “I wasn’t—”

  “He’s not a sleeper,” she cut in.

  The glass at Ransom’s feet popped and crunched as he stepped toward the bar, trying to pull Lake’s gaze. “Lake.” The sight of the tar forced him back again, and the betray
ed look in Lake’s eyes.

  “He never wakes,” Lake went on. “Never leaves the sim. Shows up in places where I go. Knows my thoughts, sees my dreams.” Her gaze fell on the coin still sitting on the bar.

  “It’s not true,” Ransom said, his throat full of broken glass.

  Lake shook her head, a pained look in her eyes. “Even Willow doesn’t try to tell me that.”

  Taren looked from Lake to Ransom, a deep line between his brows. “He’s a figment?”

  Stuck in the sim so long it feels like a lifetime. But Lake was wrong. Wasn’t she? Ransom’s legs went weak and he had to clutch the shelf behind him to stay standing.

  “The most complex figment I’ve ever encountered,” Lake said. “But that’s probably my own fault. I spent all my time with him when I first arrived in the sim.”

  Ransom tried again: “Lake—”

  “I came to say goodbye,” she cut in.

  “What?” A cold hand clutched Ransom’s heart. “Where are you going?”

  Something silver glinted between her fingers. “The captain is alive,” she said, opening her hand to reveal a winged badge. “I’m going to find him.”

  “Let me come with you,” Taren said, stepping toward her.

  But Lake drew back. “I’m going alone. I found something at the center of the sim. Something I need answers for.”

  “What did you find?” Taren asked.

  Ransom already knew. He’d seen it himself, long ago. “You found it?” he asked Lake. “Your world of blue trees?”

  “And a sun that never sets.” Lake studied him, deep in thought.

  “What are you talking about?” Taren asked. “What is this place?”

  Lake didn’t seem to have heard him. She backed toward the door, her face still lined in thought. “The captain knows.”

  Ransom wanted to stop her. He wanted to explain why he’d never told her about the lost world at the heart of the sim and what had happened there and why he’d been too ashamed to explain before.

  But he saw the way she kept her distance from Taren, now that she’d seen him use the tar.

  “Will I see you again?” Ransom asked Lake.