“Or more,” Trader agreed.
Rain met my eyes. “I suppose you need to go back and find out, Skylar.”
Adam stared in disbelief at Rain. “So now you’re on his side?” He gestured at Trader.
“I think she should go, too,” Zeera said. She held up the device that connected to the cradle. “The sooner the better, so we can get going on this App.”
Everything about me was so tired. All I wanted to do was to crawl into a bed and sleep, but I knew they were right. The moment I was in front of that door, my heart had fluttered with the excitement of going through it, of being in the App World again. The feeling flashed through me again now like an electric jolt into my body, readying me to go. “I can do it.”
“Skylar,” Kit said, his voice full of warning. “This is a bad idea. You didn’t see yourself while you were plugged in. But I did.”
I turned to him. “I’ll be fine.”
Zeera stuck a tiny black disc to the underside of the headrest on the cradle. “This is going to download your brain waves so we can start coding the App,” she explained. She didn’t seem worried that I was going to try and shift again so soon, and this heartened me. Then Zeera began to confer with Trader again. The two of them kept typing things into the handheld device. Meanwhile, everyone else dispersed around the room. Lacy sat on one of the chairs, a bored expression on her face. Parvda and Adam seemed like they were arguing in the corner. Rain was by the windows glancing my way, like he wanted to talk to me, but just when he’d opened his mouth to say something, Lacy got up, grabbed his arm, and dragged him over to the chair next to hers. I went to say something else to Kit, something to reassure him, but he turned his back on me and walked to the other side of the room.
I joined him there. Got in front of him so he had to look at me. “Hi.”
He stared, but didn’t say anything.
“Are you not speaking to me now?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You’re taking a huge risk.”
“Oh? This from the bounty hunter who wants to turn me in to my sister?”
Kit shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t do it, though, did I?”
“Not yet,” I reminded him. “But you will if I don’t come through.”
Before Kit could respond, Trader called out to me. “Skylar, get over here. It’s time.”
“Coming,” I called back.
My eyes hadn’t yet left Kit. I could just make out the bottom of his tattoos along the edge of his shirt sleeves. There was a lost look about him. I wanted to fix whatever it was he was feeling, and I didn’t want to leave again without doing this.
“They’re waiting for you,” Kit said.
“I’ll tell you something.” I forced myself to keep my gaze steady, forced myself not to look away. “Remember how Trader told me I’d just ‘know’ when I was in the Real World again? That I’d find a signpost that would tell me it was safe to wake up, and that I was home?”
The lost look in Kit’s eyes faded slightly, and interest nudged its way into them. “Yeah. I remember.”
“It was your house,” I said.
He seemed confused. “My house?”
I nodded. “When I was trying to find my way back, I ended up at your cottage.” I took a deep breath and said the rest of what had been swirling around in my mind since I’d woken up to find my hand held in his. “The signpost for the Real World,” I went on. “It was you.”
This time, my trip through the dreamscape was far quicker. There were a few moments of confusion, but I took control fast, and it wasn’t long before I found myself in the room with the doors. I looked around, taking it in.
Trader was right.
The number of doors had changed.
Instead of eleven, there were fourteen.
I searched the room for the golden one, but it was gone.
Could Rain have been right, too? Did Jude move back and forth between worlds? And if she did, how long had she been doing it? Longer than a year? That would mean she’d been to the App World when I lived there as a Single and had never come to see me, never even tried to.
My breaths came quickly.
Ice began to creep over everything in the room. It crawled down the metal door that shined like silver and the one lacquered in red. Soon it covered one of the new doors that had appeared, one that was encrusted in barnacles and shells and that smelled of the sea. Eventually the ice reached the floor where I stood, nearing my toes.
I wrapped my arms around my body and I began shivering uncontrollably.
What was wrong? What had I done?
My teeth chattered, a constant clicking inside my head. I could no longer think, could nearly no longer breathe. The pumping of my heart began to slow and I fought the urge to collapse into a ball.
I’d lost control of the dream.
Fear took over as the ice crawled over my feet and surrounded my ankles, rooting me there. Snow began to fall in the room and piled up fast, unnaturally so. It reached all the way to my waist before I found a way to quell the terror storming around me.
I used every last ounce of energy and conjured an iron stove, the same one I’d grown to love at Kit’s house.
Soon a fire roared inside of it.
A bottle of honey-colored liquid sat on top of it.
I grabbed it and took a swig.
It burned going all the way down.
My heart seemed to jump-start itself again and the ice covering my legs began to melt, enough so that I could walk. Once again, thoughts of Kit had saved me.
I didn’t waste any more time wondering what this meant.
The snow was still drifting around me as I pushed my way to the door I was sure led to Trader’s house in Loner Town. With a strength I didn’t know I had left I began pulling away the boards nailed over it, feeling the App World getting closer and closer with every second that passed. The moment I reached the handle I twisted it and threw my body against the door, shoving as hard as I could.
It gave way and I tumbled on through.
PART THREE
32
Skylar
home sweet home
I LIFTED MY head and looked around.
I was lying on the floor, my heel wedged in a gap between the boards. A cracked mirror hung on the wall and the door to the room swung precariously by its hinges. The atmosphere was thick with must. A moth-eaten, mouse-eaten couch missing one of its legs sat, tilted and sagging, against the wall. This was definitely Trader’s house. Even in the dark, the room seemed so bright it hurt my head. I used my hand to shield my eyes and pulled myself up until I was sitting. The furniture was broken and falling apart, but it also seemed to sparkle with magic, like someone had taken an enchanted paintbrush and run it over everything so that the entire room, the entire house, this entire world was surreal and strange.
The App World. I’d made it across the border.
I was home!
A surge of something unidentifiable went through me, beginning somewhere in my brain and rippling out toward the tips of all my limbs, literally like a wave scrolling across me, hoping to find sand at the end of its efforts. I laughed.
The wave was ticklish.
But the sound of my laughter was . . . off. Hollow and echoey, like my mouth was pressed against the opening of a great empty shell, and my voice had traveled toward the far edges and then bounced back.
I scrambled to my feet.
The palms of my hands were caked with a pale sort of dust. I rubbed them against each other, but it was no use, the white layer of grime stayed put. I lifted up my hands to inspect them and see what was clinging there, and I swallowed hard. A shudder rolled through me again, like a tremor that began at the top of my head and eventually reached my toes.
No, it rolled through my code.
Because that’s all I was now.
A virtual projection.
A basic App World self.
And that’s exactly what was wrong. The grime wasn’t grime at all, yet my ha
nds . . . they were so . . . not mine. They were pale, the color of those cottony clouds that brush across a bold blue sky as though to erase it of pigment. It had been a long time since I’d seen Caucasian 4.0, the standard skin color of all citizens in the App World, and I’d nearly forgotten what it looked like. I rubbed at my forearms, at my shins, at the backs of my hands and even my knees.
It was no use.
Here, I was pale, like an apparition. No matter how hard or how long I raked my hand over my skin, the color would not return to it. My brain seemed to squeeze inside my head. This was such a lie. My virtual self was a lie. One of the first things I’d learned when I woke up in the Real World was that my real skin was the same hue as freshly made honey, a golden brown made even richer by the sun.
I went over to the cracked mirror hanging on the wall and took in the virtual girl blinking back at me.
Skylar Cruz, a Single from the App World.
Or, at least, I imagined that I blinked back, because in the deepest parts of my code I knew this was just a trick, that virtual selves don’t blink, that they don’t need to, just like they don’t need to eat or to breathe. It was all for show, for the purpose of the ritual itself. Only the real body needs such movements and gestures, the virtual self mimicking it as closely as possible, so people felt as alive and real as possible.
Here, now, I was myself but I wasn’t; I was the person I’d been for my entire life, yet this person turned out not to be like the real me at all. Maybe this was why people shouldn’t go back and forth between the virtual and the real. It might make them crazy. In the mirror I saw a version of the eyes I’d always known, the shape of the face, the length of the hair, but everything was duller and less defined. As dull as the blank color of my virtual body. Washed out.
Why was the App World created to do this to us?
I already knew the rules, already knew the reasoning.
They’d told us over and over again in school.
The features of the standard self are designed to be enough like the real version so as to render the person recognizable, but ultimately, to provide the perfect blank canvas so the download of an App can be experienced and shown to its best advantage. They’d made us memorize this statement. It was part of the constitution of the City and it was stored in my code. Each App is like an artwork with its own palette and style. The miracle is in the transformation of the blank canvas into something far more spectacular. Apps provide the meaning and color of our existence. Everything else is secondary.
I tried to remember the benefits of this.
Knowledge could be downloaded directly into the brain and stored there. The virtual self was lighter, nearly weightless, as flexible as rubber and impervious to physical harm, capable of transforming into an infinite number of creatures and looks and personalities. And the virtual self could always be restored to its original settings, made good as new, even after losing a limb or breaking every bone until the self was limp as rags. The App World was safer. Indestructible. And so were we, its citizens.
But there was no denying this either:
I wanted my body back, my body, the real one, with form and shape and color and flesh that could wither and muscle that could tear and organs that could rupture and skin that would wrinkle as I got older. Despite the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter and the frostbite I’d felt on my fingers and toes. Now that I’d had time in the real body again and regardless of everything wrong with the Real World, I wanted it back like I’d never wanted anything in my life. The real body came with a host of risks, but with those risks came so much that was lush and lovely and varied. I nearly felt the arms of Kit reaching around me, his head buried in my neck.
What if something goes wrong? What if I can’t make it back?
I took a deep breath of the atmosphere into my lungs, or I pretended to, and reminded myself that Trader and everyone else was sitting there, waiting for me to shift, and if I somehow wasn’t able to, they’d pull me back themselves.
But then I heard voices.
So many voices.
They were coming from outside the house.
It didn’t make any sense. Loner Town was always dark and empty and dreary and frightening. The only people who came here were the ones who didn’t want to talk to anyone else, who kept to themselves, and who lost themselves in Apping without ceasing, as though life was merely a constant download.
But no, there was definitely shouting. Or maybe it was more like chanting.
I went to the window. A moth-eaten curtain lay limp and thick across it, and I peered through one of the bigger holes.
I took a step back, sure I was imagining things.
Maybe I was still dreaming.
I returned to the window and looked outside once more.
People were streaming down the streets of Loner Town, avoiding potholes as they went, virtual selves awake and alert and marching in unison. It was as populated as the toniest street of the City. I put my ear to the hole in the curtain so I could hear what they were saying.
“Set us free!”
“Open our borders!”
“Our bodies, our selves!”
“My body is my body!”
“Plugs need bodies!”
It was a protest! From the sound of it, against not only the border closing, but against the removal of bodies. Police lined the sidewalks as the protestors walked down the center of Loner Town’s broken streets. Things in the App World had changed since I unplugged. I watched the people go by for a while longer and realized something else.
Not a single one of them had downloaded any Apps.
They were a sea of pale ghosts moving together, all of them their basic, virtual selves, unaffected by any downloads.
Was this part of their protest?
A boycott of Apps?
The code that threaded the veins of my virtual self grew static with energy. Wait till I tell the others. Liberating the Body Market was more important than ever. There were people in the App World who were trapped here, fighting against the changes Emory Specter had forced on everyone.
That my father had forced on all of us.
I turned away from the window. As much as I wanted to continue watching the protest, there was something important I needed to do before I could go back to the Real World again. Something I had to find out.
My eyes scanned the walls of the room until I found what I was looking for, a hole as big as my fist and as deep as my arm. I went to it and shoved my hand inside and began routing around.
“When you get to my house,” Trader had whispered to me as Zeera was sticking more round black discs onto the headrest of the cradle, “there’s a stash of capital hidden there for emergencies.” He looked at me meaningfully. “You can use it for whatever you need.”
I could nearly see a reflection of Inara hovering in his eyes, but I looked at him like he was crazy. “What does that even mean? Capital is accessed through the mind.”
“You’ll see when you find it,” he said. Then he smiled. “Remember, I’m a virtual genius. I can code anything.”
My arm was nearly shoulder deep in the hole in the wall, but still I found nothing. Then suddenly I reached a pocket of static, something electric, like a lightning bolt.
I retracted my hand and stumbled backward, just in time before a long chain of Apps shot out of the hole and gathered like a swarm of bees around my head. As I took in the sight, I had to give Trader credit. He was clever. It was his own personal App Store, but everything was prepaid. All I had to do was touch whatever I wanted and it would download immediately.
I glanced longingly at the door that had spit me out into this world.
Soon, I thought. Soon I’d go back. I would.
Just not yet.
A tiny App in the shape of a truffle zoomed past my lips. It left a trail of sweet chocolate dust in its wake and it took all the will in me not to bite down into it for a taste.
So my brother had emergency sweets in his st
ash.
That was a fun new fact.
I tried to see through the swarm to pick out the App I wanted. I knew it was here somewhere.
Then, far, far up at the very edge of the moving, swirling mass, I saw it.
The icon for Odyssey.
I waded through the rest of them, swatting away the most aggressive Apps with my hands until there was nothing left between me and the one I needed. I reached out a single finger and touched it. As I did, my entire virtual self sighed with the relief of the download pouring into me like a cold rain after an eternity in the desert. The Real World is a desert of pain and loss, went my brain, my code, the part of me that was made to be here and to love this place, to long for it. I was home, this was home, there was no place like home and no feeling like a download, it went on. This was only the second-to-last thought that went through my code before I blinked out of the atmosphere and into the game.
The very last one was Inara.
I shielded my eyes from the glare of the sun.
It was bright. Brighter than normal, the kind of sunshine that burned skin and turned it red and angry and blistery.
Something wasn’t right.
But the place definitely was. I stood at the end of a long curving stretch of beach, one I’d been to before, on my last full day in this world. I inhaled deeply, expecting the tangy, briny scent of the sea to fill my senses, waiting for it to draw me forward, but instead my entire virtual body recoiled and I took a step backward. There was only the brackish smell of kelp and the foul one of rotted fish. Now that I looked at my surroundings a bit more closely, the sand was more brown than white, and sharp bits of shell and narrow pins of mica were tossed through it, ready to cut the bottoms of careless feet.
This couldn’t be Inara’s landscape I’d tapped into.
Could it?
I started toward the other end, watching where I stepped, wanting to run but obliging myself to tread cautiously over this treacherous ground. Eventually I crested the tall dunes, expecting to see a single sailboat waiting for me, one small sign that this wasn’t a fool’s journey, that Inara was somewhere close. That she’d known exactly where to wait for me all this time.
The Body Market Page 20