She came closer. I could hear her breathing. Real ears were so sensitive, like antennae that picked up on everything whether I wanted them to or not. My heart beat quicker now, each pulse accompanying the two syllables that repeated over and over in my brain.
Mo-ther. Mo-ther?
Could it be she was already here? That we were together?
My hands went out to explore the wall that was really a face. I willed all my energy to my eyes, opening them. Little by little, things came into focus, like an infinitesimal number of pixels arranging themselves into a three-dimensional hologram. The light was dim, but I was finally able to make out the other person in the room.
First I saw the color of the woman’s skin, which was dark, dark like the earth that has baked in the sun. I tried to fix the blur, tried to make the image of her nose and cheekbones and mouth become sharp, and eventually I got a clearer picture. This woman, with her dark skin and golden-colored eyes, her bone structure, strong and beautiful. She wore a smile on her face.
There was no doubt now. This woman was not my mother.
There was nothing familiar about her. Nothing at all.
“Skylar,” she said to me then. “Don’t worry, you’re safe,” she went on. “I am your Keeper.” And when I didn’t respond—I didn’t because I couldn’t speak, not yet—she added, “Welcome to the Real World.”
15
Lost
I TRIED TO sit up. I couldn’t. My brain swam with dizziness and my head throbbed. It wouldn’t stop pounding. I focused my eyes on the outline of a chair near the bed. It was too dark to see anything else clearly in this tiny room.
The Keeper put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
Touch in the Real World was heavier, sturdier, but not in a bad way.
“Don’t push yourself,” she said.
My mind reached into the past, searching for information about my presence in this room, about how I got here, but the search turned up nothing, my memory a vast desert of smooth white sand. I was so tired, too, everything about me aching and sore. Was this what it was like to live in a real body? Pain with every movement? Exhaustion so consuming I could barely open my eyes or form a single comprehensible word?
What was I not remembering?
It was as though my mind had been erased, all except for a series of long, strange dreams.
A crowd, a speech, an ocean, a boat.
The Keeper adjusted the bedspread that covered me. Smoothed it out with her dark-skinned hand, folding over the edge until it made a sharp crease. “What are you thinking, Skylar? I can tell your brain is going. The words are all right there. Try to let them out. Use your mouth. Your tongue. Your breath. It will come. You can do this. You’ve done it before,” she added.
I have?
My mind seemed disconnected from my body and all of its parts. I moved my head up and down and my jaw open and shut, trying to speak, blowing air out of my mouth. “Hvvvvvv.” My lips vibrated against each other, my throat dusty with pain.
“You’re almost there.” The Keeper reached for a small, square towel and wiped my forehead. “In the App World you use your mind to speak, but here you use your mind in conjunction with your body. Let go. Speaking is instinctual.”
The suggestion of instincts seemed to flip an invisible switch. Sounds, syllables began to form in my mouth, my voice rough and hoarse, like I’d scraped the insides of my throat. “Hv. Hv. Hv. Have. Have. How.”
The Keeper’s eyes were wide. “You can do this. What are you trying to tell me? What do you want to know?”
Energy shot through my thighs to my toes, my knees twitching and shaking, every muscle in my body throbbing.
“Do you want to get up? We make sure all the body’s muscles are movement ready before Service.” The Keeper hesitated. “At least we did until the border closed. Lucky for you, that was very recent.”
The word border lodged in my brain and opened a geyser of memory. The border had closed. Service was canceled. I’d unplugged illegally. Trader, Lacy, Adam, Sylvia. Not Sylvia. Rescuing Rain from the Real World. That was what I’d needed to remember.
Yet.
Something was missing.
Something important.
The reservoir dried up, the geyser petering out.
“Huh, huh, how,” I tried again, stuttering along. I tested my lips, my tongue, my vocal cords, until eventually I got the words I wanted so badly out of my mouth and I got them right. “How long have I been dreaming?”
The Keeper’s eyebrows arched. She studied me. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, carefully, a strange look on her face.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, the words falling freely now, the sounds rolling across my tongue and dropping from my lips.
“That’s enough for today,” was all the Keeper replied. She moved away in the darkness. “You need your rest.”
“My mother,” I said, the next time the Keeper entered the room. My body still ached as though it were laced through with a permanent App Hangover—and maybe that’s all this was—the effects of a lifetime of downloads suddenly stripped away. My mind kept shutting down with sleep, leaving large swaths of time painted black. I couldn’t manage to make my legs work so I was left to lie there, waiting for the Keeper to return, testing my memory, poking through all the holes.
The Keeper sat down on the bed, sending creases into the blanket. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“Help me find my family,” I said. “Please.”
The Keeper looked away. I tried to get her attention, but my limbs were too unsteady. But then I stretched and reached, and this time my fingers grazed the skin of the Keeper’s hand and she turned back.
“I’d like to help,” she said. “But it’s . . . complicated.”
I grabbed the Keeper’s arm. My fingers curled around it tightly this time. “What’s complicated?”
The Keeper hesitated, like she was trying to determine something. Then, “No one can find out that you’re here,” was all she said, before she got up and left the room.
“Do you know who I am? Who I really am? Tell me and I’ll give this to you.” Trader held an App away so I couldn’t reach it. He watched me, his eyes vulnerable even as he tried to bribe me. There was a smile on his face, like he was only playing.
I heard my own laughter. It was so loud in my brain. “Of course. You’re Trader.” I stretched my arms as high as I could, nearly touching the App, but Trader held it higher. He was shaking his head.
“I know who you are,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m Skylar. Now let me have the App!”
“No.” Trader lowered his arm. Leaned toward me. “There is more to you than you realize, just as there is more to me. And I know the real you.”
I stared at him, confused. “This is the real me,” I said.
Out of nowhere, someone else appeared.
Rain Holt.
“I need to understand,” Rain said, his mouth so close I could feel his breath. “How did you do it?”
“Don’t trust him, Skylar,” Trader said.
“What—” I started, but then I heard a third voice.
“Skye?”
Inara.
“You betrayed me,” she shouted in my head. “I’ll never forgive you. You should have trusted me. You shouldn’t have lied.”
I woke from the dream, gasping, my own hands clutching my throat.
I felt something at my lips, smooth and rough at once, tiny dents across its surface. The smell was tangy. I opened my eyes.
The Keeper smiled in the dim lighting. “Eat. You need your strength.” She held the food to my lips.
My stomach ached with emptiness, a real physical ache that gaped in my center. My lips parted until my tongue, with a mind all its own, brushed along the object’s edge. Before I could stop myself I closed my mouth and teeth around it and began to chew.
“Hmmmm.”
“Strawberries,” the Keeper said.
I gobble
d up one, then another, my hand digging greedily into the bowl. I couldn’t stop. They were unlike anything I’d ever downloaded. The sweetness, the tart bite of the seeds, the burst of juice when my teeth crushed the flesh—it was so different from what I’d eaten in the App World. A memory flashed as I swallowed another one. Mr. and Mrs. Sachs talking about pizza and peaches. How virtual food couldn’t compare to the real thing. And of course, this made me remember Inara.
Her words as I was leaving.
Her words in my dream.
You betrayed me.
The Keeper was about to say something else when a loud knock came from the other room, a rich hollow banging against rough wood. She got up and walked away to answer it, taking the strawberries with her.
I sat up, alert. Listening.
There was another knock, a short, thick thud.
Someone else was here.
My skin tingled and my heart started thumping so hard I thought it must be audible. I leaned forward, my eyes locked on the narrow view I had into the next room, watching as the Keeper pulled open a heavy wooden door. The arc of sunlight revealed was blinding, and I waited for my eyes to adjust.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I heard the Keeper whisper.
“I had to. You saw what she did! She shouldn’t even be here.”
The voice was a man’s voice, a young man really, or maybe a boy. The sound was familiar. The Keeper and the visitor talked back and forth, too quickly and softly for me to catch all the words.
Gripping the bed for support, I willed myself first to my hands and knees. When I felt steady enough, I put my feet on the floor, the muscles in my legs full of protest. Bracing myself, I began to straighten up, pushing my body into the wall. Everything about me hurt.
But finally, I was standing.
A wave of dizziness passed over me, the world spinning. It felt as if I was teetering on the ledge of a great tower. Instead of fear or vertigo, there came a thrill, a palpable awareness of the air touching my skin and the rough stucco wall along my back. I swayed, one hand flat on the bed, trying to steady myself. I shifted and, hanging on to whatever I could, moved forward. Curling my fingers around the edge of the doorframe, I pulled myself into the other room.
The boy was speaking. “My father—” he began.
The talking stopped. The Keeper and the visitor froze, watching me.
“Skylar,” the Keeper said uneasily. “You’re up.”
I didn’t respond. My attention shifted to the visitor.
He was of medium height, maybe a head taller than me. He wore jeans, the threads fraying at the very bottom, and on his feet were sandals, the kind with the thong between the toes. His T-shirt was black, his hair was dark brown and messy. It fell over his brow in waves and down around his ears and the back of his neck. The color of his skin was much lighter than the Keeper’s but definitely not Caucasian 4.0, which made me wonder whether anyone actually had that skin tone in the Real World. His face was caught in the glare of the light, so I couldn’t quite make out its features.
Then he shifted slightly.
My heart rose into my throat. “You pulled me into a boat,” I said. “You held me in your arms in a dream.”
The boy brushed past the Keeper and planted himself in front of me. I reached out to him—I needed to see if he was real—and in doing so let go of the wall behind me.
“We need to talk,” he said, reaching back. My fingers grazed his cheek, just as his hand landed on my arm, strong and sure.
“You’re Rain Holt,” I said. “The real Rain Holt.” Before he could respond, before I could say anything else, my unsteady body went tumbling to the ground.
16
Suspicious marks
WHEN I CAME to I was in bed, my mind ablaze with surreal thoughts of being watched, being chased, and being rescued from the sea. Of Rain Holt’s arms wrapped around me, my head against his chest. A spot on my scalp throbbed. Gently, I touched it with my fingers. A hard bump had formed, the kind of thing that would never happen at home, the virtual self immediately fixable with an App.
But somehow, I felt stronger, too.
I could almost picture my muscles knitting themselves back together, my limbs becoming more nimble and sure. I was getting to know my body. Learning its possibilities and limits, just like I would in a game. My head felt clearer, too.
There was something new at my bedside this morning.
A lamp.
I reached out and turned it on, prepared for the light to blind me, surprised when it didn’t. The glow was soft. I pulled the sheet aside so I could get up, and saw the edge of something on my leg. An ugly splotch of purple and blue ran along the bottom of my thigh. I reached out to trace its outline.
It was tender.
Mrs. Worthington would always tell us how even at seventeen when we’d unplug for Service, the skin on our bodies would be like new because during our years on the plugs the bodies had never seen sunlight. Then she’d laugh, and explain how the moment we unplugged, our perfect skin would begin to ruin.
But then, Mrs. Worthington was an idiot.
I drew back the sheet farther. Large round marks on my calves were purple and blue and yellowing at their centers. I took in my arms, thrusting them into the light, only to find that there were plenty more spots.
Bruises, they were called. I remembered them from when I was small.
I had them everywhere.
I swung my legs around to the side of the bed, and the movement tugged the hem of my nightshirt higher. A long, dark seam stretched up the top of my thigh, cutting into the skin, its center a deep, fiery red. I pressed my thumb into it. The pain burned so intensely I gasped.
A memory nudged at me. I couldn’t quite make it out.
I shook off the pain and planted my feet on the floor, bracing myself—I expected dizziness, unsteadiness, too—but I was fine. For the second time since waking up, I rose and walked out of the bedroom.
The Keeper was standing in the middle of what looked to be a large living room, folding long, white linen dresses, the kind I was wearing right now. She was piling them onto the end of a sofa that seemed from another era, the 1920s if I had to guess from what I knew from the History Apps in school. The rest of the furniture was the same ornate style. To my right was the door to the outside, the one Rain had come through, and next to it I could see into a large kitchen with a table and chairs. Doors were cut into the center of the living room walls, but they were closed. Crown molding, once elegant but now crumbling, edged along the ceiling. Hanging at the center of the room was a great, decadent crystal chandelier. Its lights were dark, some of the crystals missing from their hooks.
The Keeper looked up from her work. “You’re feeling better.”
I nodded. “What is this place?”
Her eyes flickered to the chandelier, then to an enormous painting on the wall so covered in grime it was impossible to make out the image on the canvas. “It’s one of the old mansions built during the gilded age of New Port City.”
Static rushed across my skin. I was born in New Port, a city built on an island by the sea. The sense that after all these years, I was finally home, gave me chills. “Does anyone else live here?”
“No one,” she said. “It’s abandoned. We’re alone.”
I sighed. A part of me hoped that once I got my bearings, I would discover that my mother and my sister were right here, waiting for me. That they were close by, somewhere in this city, helped soothe me a little. I walked over to the coffee table in front of the Keeper to look at a tiny bowl the color of the ocean, the only decoration she seemed to have put here herself.
She watched me with narrowed eyes. “Your steps are steady today.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
The Keeper shivered. “It’s just . . . ,” she started. “You know what? Never mind.”
I held out my arms in the pool of light left by the lamp. I wanted the Keeper to see them clearly. “Where did I get these bruises?”<
br />
She waved her hand through the air casually, like she was tossing something aside. “Probably while you were being unplugged and moved here.”
I cocked my head. “Does unplugging involve being tossed down a flight of stairs?”
“You’ll heal soon enough,” she said.
I studied the Keeper, who’d gone back to her folding. “I didn’t ask if I’d heal.” I grabbed the end of the nightshirt in the Keeper’s hands so she had to stop. “Rain Holt was here. Why?”
She frowned, but didn’t say anything.
I stared at her, waiting for answers. When I got tired of her quiet, I shrugged and headed to the door I’d seen him walk through.
“What are you doing, Skylar?” the Keeper barked from close behind me.
I whirled around to face her. “If you don’t want to give me answers, then I’ll go find Rain and ask him myself.”
She shook her head. “You’re not ready to see Rain. You’re not ready to go outside either.”
I swept a hand across my body. “Why not? Look at me. I’m totally fine!”
The Keeper sighed, long and heavy. Her face seemed to sag. “Skylar. Please.”
“Am I a prisoner?” I pressed. “Are you my prison guard?”
“Of course not.” She seemed surprised by this question, maybe even a little offended. “I’m here to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection,” I said. “What I need is to see my family. What I need are answers. I want to know what my presence here has to do with the Holts.”
The Keeper walked away from me and I followed after her. “Don’t be foolish,” she said, her voice thick with disapproval. She swiped at the clothing on the edge of the sofa, taking the stack into her arms.
“Why is that foolish?”
She studied me over the pile of folded laundry in her arms. The expression in her eyes softened. “You really don’t know,” she stated, surprised.
“What don’t I know? Tell me,” I demanded.
But the Keeper shook her head. Laundry in hand, she disappeared through one of the doors in the wall, leaving me standing there alone, trying to decipher what she could possibly have meant.
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