Soon a peninsula took shape up ahead. The narrow strip of land was striking, not only for the way the ocean walled it in, nearly cutting it off from the mainland, but because of the way it jutted into the sea like an arrow let loose from a bow. There was something familiar about it. The wind picked up, whipping across me. I had to hold the scarf in place with my hand. There were no mansions now, no houses either, just wide flat rock that bled into the grass stretching out behind it, a mile of rugged, nearly barren earth that ended with a drop into the sea.
The path dipped again. Up ahead I saw a rough staircase cut into the rock at the edge of the island. My heart rose in my chest until it lodged in my throat. To my left, cutting into the wild, churning ocean below, was a series of enormous sharp rocks that rose from the water. Stepping stones made for giants that ended at the sea. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them once more, as though they might disappear. My breaths were quick and painful as I neared the staircase and started to climb. There was no railing to hold on to, and should I trip or slip, I’d go tumbling into the sea. I barely cared.
I took the last tall step, hoisting myself onto the edge of the cliff.
There it was.
Somehow I’d already known what I was about to encounter, but to see it here made me dizzy, made my stomach churn like the raging water below. I moved forward a few paces so if I fell down it wouldn’t be to my death.
In front of me I saw several striking things.
A dais.
A podium.
A wall of glass.
All of it, abandoned. A fight had broken out here. Tufts of grass had been trampled and pulled away. A metal pillar at the end of the wall was lying on the ground, and another was bent at the middle, as though some inhumanly strong person had kicked it. Several long cracks marred the glass. I went to the dais, began wedging my toes into narrow spaces between the rocks, some other force guiding my body, giving it the capacity to climb stone as easily as to walk flat earth. When I reached the top, I lay down, flat on my back, looking up toward the sky, that big blue sky.
I closed my eyes.
Words came to me. Broken and senseless. But I could hear them like someone was speaking them right here, right now.
The New Capitalists.
Win.
Freedom.
App World tyranny.
Crisis.
Come and see.
Come and see . . . what?
Me?
I opened my eyes and turned my head until I was facing that glass wall. A crowd, dressed all in blue, flashed before me.
This was why my body had urged me here, my mind, my feet.
To see this place in person.
To convince me that the dream wasn’t a dream at all.
The crowd, the speech, the ocean, the boat. A cliff, an escape, a dive. Nearly drowning. A boy pulling me up from the sea.
Rain Holt pulling me up from the sea.
All those bruises when I’d woken up. That gash in my leg that was becoming a long fine scar along my thigh. None of it was from moving me after I’d unplugged like the Keeper tried to make me believe. It was from when I’d jumped from this dais and leapt off a cliff into the ocean below. Why had I needed to escape? Why had everyone been watching me? Had I been on trial for something I’d done? Was it possible to commit a crime while plugged in?
I sat up on the dais.
Studied it.
There was the place in the rock where I’d loosed the knife. I’d plunged that stone dagger into a guard, a person, a flesh-and-blood body with the capacity to be hurt, to shatter, to be wounded beyond repair. To be struck dead.
I stared at my hands. They were so small. Lines cut across my palms and the tender sides of my fingers, some of them so tiny they were nearly imperceptible, others deep and wide like gullies in my skin. Horror spread through me. In what I’d thought was a game, a dream, had I become a murderer? I swallowed back something acidic. Maybe I was a criminal. Maybe that was why the Keeper said I was unsafe, why she came to me in my dream to warn me about my face, because people in the Real World knew it, because I was a wanted girl. Maybe that was why Jonathan Holt appeared to me in Odyssey, because he knew I was a threat to others. Maybe my mother and my sister wouldn’t want to see me because they were ashamed of who I was and of what I was capable of doing. Maybe they’d been there that day. Maybe this was what the Keeper meant when she said I should rethink finding my family. Maybe they’d turn me in to the authorities because they’d seen what I was capable of with their own eyes.
I climbed down from the dais and started to run.
I barely remember seeing anything at all as I flew from the peninsula toward the city, barefoot, sandals gripped in my right hand, tunic rippling and rising to the tops of my thighs as my legs pumped, one in front of the other. That stark, rough arrow of land at the point of the island couldn’t recede fast enough. The trees that walled the city were ahead of me one moment, then behind me the next. I didn’t even notice passing through them, or crossing the first wide empty boulevard that circled the city’s outskirts, my body overtaken by something else, maybe instinct, capable of flight when it was required.
Something strange was happening inside of me.
My brain guided my feet, just like Lacy’s App had guided my virtual self through Loner Town. But to where? To my mother and sister? It was like that GPS was still working, like somehow it hadn’t dissipated once the download was over and had traveled with me as I crossed from one world to the other. Had Lacy tampered with our brains to make this happen? Was it happening with Adam too?
I slowed my pace, panting. Slipped my sandals back onto my feet.
Had someone been experimenting on me?
Could the plugs have . . . changed me? That night at Appless Bar, Lacy had spoken of rumors that being plugged in was altering our brains and our relationships to our bodies.
Could she have been right?
I stopped next to a tiny, narrow house that once must have gleamed a bright shiny green, but now the paint was nearly chipped away. My lungs burned like someone had tossed a lit match inside them, my breaths heaving as I gulped the warm air. I started along the sidewalk, my eyes on the Water Tower, which touched the blue of the sky. I gave my entire body over to whatever was happening in my mind, let my brain guide my feet and my direction. The moment I’d set eyes on that dais a hole had burned through my center, hollowing everything out.
Grass grew up through the cracks in the concrete, the bottoms of my sandals thwacking the pavement. There were potholes in the street the size of craters and I sidestepped them to avoid tripping. Eventually the wooden houses gave way to taller and taller structures. The closer I got to the city center, the more it seemed to wake from the slumber of its outskirts, the windows of the buildings clean and gleaming as opposed to grimy and boarded up, the flowers and greenery pruned and thriving as opposed to wild and overgrown. Solar panels flashed as they drank in the light and windmills rose up everywhere like dandelions in a vast city field. The stormy, briny smell of the ocean permeated the streets, the breeze thick with it. Soon I began to see people. At first it was just a couple here and there like on the cliff. A man way ahead crossing the street. Two women holding hands, heading into a small park thick with trees. But then I turned a corner and suddenly there were people everywhere. Behind me. In front of me. To my left and my right. Not a single one had a face or body altered by an App. There were no supermodels walking down the street or kids caught mid-download as they turned into dragons. People actually looked one another in the eyes as they passed. They paid attention to each other, nodding their heads, some of them saying hello.
My hand automatically reached for the scarf, pulling it up over my hair and across my face.
I searched the crowd for anyone I might recognize, for one of the seventeens who got left on this side of the border, but so far there was nothing. A number of women wore scarves around their heads and pulled up over their faces, the men with wide masks
across their noses and mouths. Most everyone I saw wore the same uniform as my Keeper, but there were also women in long, sleeveless dresses smiling up at the sun, and men in short-sleeved T-shirts and loose pants, the exposed parts of their skin a golden tan. Children ran around in shorts and shouted to one another. Everyone, regardless of their attire, wore the same thong sandals, as though these were the only shoes left in this world.
All that talk of division among the Keepers, of war, yet these people seemed happy.
The city was at peace. Idyllic even.
Not a single car rumbled down the street or honked its horn. Everyone was walking. I was taking this in when someone bumped into me so hard I nearly fell down. My heart raced, my pulse signaling danger.
An old man reached out his arm to steady me. He had wild gray hair and a long gray beard. “Excuse me,” he said.
I jerked away from him, heart still pounding. “It’s okay,” I managed, my words muffled by the fabric across my mouth. He cocked his head. Deep lines were etched into his face, around his eyes and across his forehead. I relaxed a little, wishing I hadn’t been so rude.
“You seem lost,” he said.
I shook my head. “I’m headed to the library,” I said, startling myself as these unplanned words leapt from my mouth. Once they were out, I knew they were true. That was where my feet had been taking me. I wondered what I’d find there.
“You’re not far.” The man turned and pointed. “Four blocks that way, then it will be on your left. You can’t miss it. There’s a park behind it. Sea serpents guard the front. Not real ones, though. Don’t worry.” I think he smiled underneath that thick gray beard.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Have a good day.” He bowed his head a bit and seemed about to move on, but then he placed a hand on my upper arm, his fingers curling around it, and looked at me again, really looked. Peered into my eyes. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
For a second, I froze. Then quickly I said, “No,” jerking out of his grip and hurrying away, crossing the street into the shade. I glanced back and saw him standing there, watching me make my way down the block. The heads of others turned as I rushed by. I reached the next corner, my lungs working hard. My body was sweating underneath my clothing and I didn’t like the stickiness covering my body. I raced down three more blocks and stopped.
Next to me was a park full of parents and children playing.
“You’re it!” shouted a little girl before she ran from the others and hid behind one of the tall leafy trees that lined the perimeter, its branches bending and reaching toward the sky. Keepers sat in pairs on stone benches, some of them with their arms around each other. A couple of girls, maybe not much older than me, were in bathing suits, lying out on towels in the sun. Mrs. Worthington would faint if she saw the risks they took with their skin. A few people with their heads covered scolded them as they walked by.
Beyond the park was the library. It spanned the length of a block, and was much shorter than the buildings around it, but it seemed more immense somehow, and certainly far more beautiful. It was constructed of white marble, and laced along its walls were huge arching windows. The sun gleamed bright against the glass. I made my way to it, up the long block and around the corner toward the front. I saw the two sea serpents guarding it, just like the man had said. The sea dragons roared up over the crests of marble waves, their claws curling out above the water, their backs and the tops of their heads a line of razor-sharp scales. Their teeth were bared. They were at once magical and fearsome, as though to remind everyone that what lay within these walls was the stuff of myth. Immense winding trees grew on either side of the dragons and a wide staircase led up to an entrance marked by columns.
Just like in the crowded park, people sat on the steps out front, eating and enjoying the sun. A few boys played around one of the sea dragons. I could hear the way they roared, trying to mimic the animal’s sound. People passed in and out of the library’s doors, many of them clutching thick bound volumes of paper in their hands or under their arms.
Books. The old kind.
I’d never seen one before—not a real one. Not even as a child.
By the time I was born, books had become obsolete. With the invention of the plugs, stories and knowledge were downloaded instantly to the brain via the Apps. It hadn’t occurred to me that real books might still exist. Maybe with the technology ban in the Real World, the Keepers had no other choice but to resort to the old ways of learning.
I pulled the tunic away from my body and shook it, trying to create a breeze over my sweaty skin. Then I started up the steps one at a time. They were smooth and slippery under my feet. At one point I crouched down to slide my hand along the surface, which felt like hardened liquid under my palm. A huge bug crawled out of one of the cracks in the stairs, all legs and wavy antennae, and my hand retracted.
“It’s just a beetle,” said a woman sitting to my right, eating her lunch. She laughed. “It won’t hurt you.”
“I know.” But I couldn’t stop staring at it. This morning the song of the crickets and now this. We didn’t have bugs in the App World. They were considered an unnecessary nuisance and one of the many things we’d overcome by plugging in. I tore my eyes from it, glancing at the woman, nervous she was studying me like the old man had, but she’d gone back to eating her sandwich. I continued the rest of the way up the steps, and took a moment to lean against one of the pillars, suddenly overwhelmed. It was one thing to wander the mansion, and another to walk around all of New Port City.
A murmur rippled across everyone around me.
I looked up, searching for the source of the disturbance.
A group of women and men dressed in blue uniforms and heavy-soled black boots were walking down the street in front of the library, their footsteps loud against the concrete. Guards. I remembered them from the peninsula, the color of their clothing a blue I normally adored.
They were stopping people randomly. Talking to them.
Staring at them.
I swallowed hard. It was one of them that I might have killed. I watched now as a male guard halted a woman dressed like me, with a scarf around her head and across her face. She shook her head. She obviously didn’t want to do whatever they’d asked. The man in the guard’s uniform placed his hand on something at his waist.
A gun.
The murmurs around me grew more pronounced.
The woman reached for the end of her scarf, unraveling it from her face. It fell away, gently floating to the ground. The guard studied her. Got close to her face, then stepped away, the heel of his black boot grinding the scarf into the concrete. Another guard, also with a gun at her hip, came over to consult. They both stared at the woman as though she were an object they might like to buy, or a display item in a museum.
The woman began to cry.
Finally, the guards shook their heads and moved on.
The crowd on the steps seemed to hold their breath until the group of men and women in blue disappeared down the street. Then they let out great sighs of relief. A man went to the crying woman and picked up her scarf from the ground. He brushed it against his pants, trying to clean off the dirt. The woman, still weeping, turned in my direction. It was then that I could better take in her age, her face, her overall appearance. She was younger than I’d imagined. Long black hair, golden skin. She wiped her eyes with her hands. Even from the place I stood I could see that they were a bright, piercing blue.
The blood in my veins turned to ice.
My stomach, my heart, my insides seemed to fall through my body to the ground.
The girl, she looked like me.
19
A rare exhibition
AROUND ME, PEOPLE returned to their lunches and chatted once more with their neighbors. The stream of Keepers heading in and out of the library started up again. My heart began to slow. The resemblance I shared with the girl in the street was probably a coincidence. We had the same features, but aside from
that, we looked nothing alike.
I joined the crowd heading inside the building. Got behind a man holding the hand of a small child. He opened the door for his son. Then he looked at me. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks.” I was nervous, but he turned away quickly and I walked on through.
The library was bustling. People walked about with purpose, traveling up and down the staircase to my left. The sound of paper rustling was everywhere. Long rectangular tables stretched across the room in lines, reading lamps spaced along the surface. Keepers sat before them, books open, noses buried. One of them kept running her finger from left to right, left to right across the page.
The windows edging the top of the building invited the sun through the glass in beautiful, thick rays. The ceiling was so high I could picture birds in flight, zooming across and tucking themselves into the rafters. There were paintings, too, like in the ballroom of the mansion, frescoes with scholars wrapped in colorful robes splashed across the walls. While above me was an open, airy world of beauty and light, down below past the crowded tables was a jumbled maze of towering shelves, metal ladders attached for climbing. Someone teetered atop the highest rung of one of them, reaching for a book. She grabbed it and remained at that same height reading it, as though she did this all the time, as though she knew no fear of falling.
A woman in gray came up to me. Her skin was as dark as my Keeper’s, her hair pulled back from her face. She was smiling. “Can I help you find something?”
“I’m just looking,” I said from behind my scarf.
“Well, I’m here if you need anything,” she said, and turned to answer someone else who’d come up to her with a question.
I headed toward the maze of shelves, waiting for my internal GPS to kick in. Maybe it had stopped working. I didn’t feel pulled in any direction, really. Well, that’s not true. I felt pulled in every direction. Toward all the books. They covered every surface, overflowing, like someone had tried to store all the texts of the Real World in this one place. They were lined up neatly side by side and shoved haphazardly into wobbling stacks, wedged into every available nook. Some had toppled to the ground in places, creating hills that dotted the walkways. There were even piles on the floor. So many stories and so many words, each one individually set out in lines on pages to be digested one by one.
Unplugged Page 17