Danny paced back and forth. Reed’s pained breathing was worse than anything inside the Haystack. He’d rather they come put the thumb shackles on him.
There was nothing he could do.
He had to find the girl.
Danny pulled the lucid gear from the top. It whined as the cord unreeled to the floor. He dropped hard on the concrete and pulled it quickly over his head. The needle numbed his forehead, searching for the stent.
Before it jolted inside his brain, before he arched off the pavement, he muttered something to Reed. He doubted he would hear it.
“I’m sorry.”
And then the needle took him.
27
Danny visualized a spot.
He imagined it was a glowing dot floating in the darkness where he was drifting. He put his breath into it. One. Two. Three.
It abolished thoughts.
It brought focus. Presence.
And when he felt his body forming near the sundial, he willed it to become numb. There would be no pain when Sid pulled out his intestines. He would melt like water and blow like wind. Nothing would hurt him.
The grass was beneath him. Sunlight and wind. And the screaming of engines.
Danny opened his eyes.
An asphalt racetrack circled the Yard and rocket-shaped cars roared around it, disappearing into the trees. The engines called from the jungle and soon wound around him before reentering the Yard behind him and making another lap.
He was alone. Sid was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he got bored. Or perhaps he was setting a trap. Didn’t matter. Danny needed to get to the business of finding a Christmas present. And it would be much easier if he was invisible when he did it.
He put both hands on the sundial and felt the power vibrate through his arms. He pictured the focal dot and willed transparency to enter his body. What was his body other than data, really? Danny knew how to handle data. It helped to think of it that way, that he was computer code that needed to be manipulated. He breathed in and out, in and out.
Opened his eyes.
He was still there, but he could see the sundial through his hands.
“Translucency. Okay, close enough.”
He wasn’t invisible, but he’d faded enough that no one would notice unless they were looking right at him. He crouched down and – as the rocket cars came around – leaped into the sky.
Danny hovered just inside a cloud.
The gray haze on the horizon seemed closer than it did the last time. No one would see him, especially being half-faded. As long as no one flew into him, he could stay there all day. Since it seemed everyone was part of the race, he took his time.
The track serpentined around the entire island – through the trees and over the cliffs. The rocket cars even made a loop into the water. Occasionally, one would fire a weapon and there would be an explosion and parts flying.
The only other oddity about the island was tiny lights twinkling on top of random trees. He floated around the cloud and willed his vision to zoom on one of the trees. It appeared to be a star set on top, along with smaller lights strung from the branches.
Christmas trees. They’re all Christmas trees.
It would’ve been an easy clue to follow, but there was easily a hundred of them scattered over the island. Even one that appeared to be floating out at sea. He cloud-hopped around the sky, zooming in on several trees but couldn’t make out any substantial differences.
“I’m going to have to go down,” he muttered to no one. Then said like he was the one answering, “Yep, going to have to go down.”
The sun was already falling toward the horizon. Time in Foreverland went faster than it did in the flesh. He had wasted half of Foreverland’s day in the Haystack. Maybe he already blew it.
He dropped from the sky and hit the ground like a stone. He was able to quell the pain from the impact. He was getting the hang of it. He dusted off the dirt and stared at the twenty foot tall Christmas tree that shaded a dozen red-wrapped gifts. Nothing else was around. There was no time to waste.
Danny began ripping open presents.
He had been to nearly fifty trees. Each one had a pile of gifts that he tore open to find more sand. By the time he got to the tree in front of the Mansion, the sun had dropped below the trees and the sky had turned orange and was quickly dimming. He wasn’t going to get to all the trees, but he couldn’t sit around and think about it.
This tree was near the entrance. A golf cart had been abandoned exactly where Danny and Zin had left one a week earlier. Seemed odd, but Danny was focused on the tree and the dozen gifts beneath it. He tore through them, sifting sand from each one, finding nothing new. He crouched down to bounce back into the sky to find the next one when lights inside the Mansion caught his eye.
One of the double doors was open. An enormous tree glittered inside the dark entrance.
Danny climbed the steps. The doors had been vandalized with spray-painted graffiti and skateboard stickers. The hinges creaked as he pushed the door open. The tree stood beyond the foyer against the far back window with a view to the ocean where lights twinkled. More trees.
He sighed. He’d never get to all of them. She was killing him. And yet he couldn’t forget what Reed must be going through. He opened the dozen presents to find more sand. Danny threw the last one across the room. He grabbed the tree and launched it through the window. Shards of glass exploded.
His curses echoed down the empty halls.
But he was wasting time. Every second that was wasted was a second that Reed endured needless suffering.
He went back to the front doors. There was a narrow closet door on both sides of the foyer, both closed. But the one on the right had a sticker. Danny stopped.
It was a Spitfire sticker; the flaming head smiling at him.
One sticker. The rest of the room was in order, just the one sticker.
Merry Christmas.
Sand.
Christmas on the beach.
Tell me your favorite Christmas.
Reed asked Danny on the beach and Danny remembered the thing he wanted most in the world: the half-pipe covered in stickers. But no one would have known that, he didn’t tell anyone about it. He wasn’t even sure it was his memory. But there it was, a Spitfire sticker in an otherwise pristine Mansion without a half-pipe in sight.
Danny put his hand on the door knob. He turned it slowly and cracked the door open. An odd grainy light spilled out. It crept out in misty tendrils. Danny tried to slam it closed but the foggy light wrapped around him. Liquefied him.
And sucked him inside.
28
The mist had texture.
Grainy particles, scratching.
Momma?
A boy. He sounded sad, crying for—
First! I’m first!
On the right. Someone excited, someone—
You go first!
Where am I?
How long until we eat? I’m hungry.
The voices bunched together, above and below. They were everywhere, but nothing came out of the gray mist. The bodiless words whizzing by like passing trains.
The mist thickened.
The grains pelted his face like sand. He looked at his hands, saw his feet and realized he was standing on something solid. The wind began pulling away, revealing a white floor.
A spot of color developed ahead of him. It was soft and faded, like a beacon appearing in a blizzard. It was pink.
Then red.
Bright red.
The mist swirled out like an ever-widening hurricane. And then it was gone. He was in a round room, walls white. And she was sitting in the center, hands on her lap. The bright red hair cut below the shoulders.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, softly. “But you couldn’t know where you were going. He would’ve known, he would’ve followed… he was watching.”
“Who?”
“Whoever runs… Foreverland.”
“The Director?”
She shrugged.
Her eyes were large, the pupils engorged and the irises brilliant green. She was almost cartoonish, the colors saturated.
The room was barren, except for the chair she was sitting on, legs crossed, hands on lap. She stood up, her bare feet touched the floor silently; toenails the same color as her hair.
Olly-olly-oxen-free! The voices soared through the wall.
“Where are we?” Danny asked.
“The boys call this the Nowhere,” she said. “It’s outside… the eyes of Foreverland. Outside the reach of he who… is Foreverland.”
“Those are memories?”
“In a way…” Her cheeks suddenly matched the color of her hair and toenails. “I know you have questions and I’ll answer them the best I can, but the truth is… I don’t know much and we don’t have much time…” She wrapped her arms around her chest like she was hugging herself. “I’m sorry. It’s just… he hurts so much… and you’re our only chance… and I never…”
She trailed off. She had difficulty finding words, like she had to search for them.
“You mean Reed?” Danny asked.
She nodded, hugging herself again.
“Who are you?” Danny shook his head. That sounded rude. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know much about Reed. Or you.”
She thought, staring blankly. “I don’t really know, Danny Boy. I just woke up here…”
Danny remembered the confusion of waking up on the paper-covered table and Mr. Jones staring at him with his white lab coat. He didn’t know anything before that moment. She had the same experience, only she woke up in Foreverland.
Is she real? Definitely rude. But is she a memory? Reed’s memory? But she’s here, alive. She had to be something other than a memory, right?
“If you’re in here, how do you know about Reed?” Danny asked.
“I see the boys’ thoughts. I see what they bring in from the island… I know the suffering they go through… before the needle.”
That’s how she knew about the half-pipe at Christmas. She saw it in my thoughts.
“Then you know Reed is—”
She began shaking her head and rocking in her self-hug.
Damn.
She was still muttering about Reed. Danny stopped her. “How can I help?”
Her oversized eyes were glassy. Her brow furrowed when she pointed at the chair.
“Sit.”
Danny went to the chair. When he sat down, a desk appeared from the floor and circled all the way around him. Several keyboards appeared.
“You don’t really need the keyboards or the monitors… but you’re familiar with that medium… so that’s what you’ll start with.”
She glared at him.
“You need to understand… I’m as much a prisoner in here as you are out there.”
“But Foreverland is a computer program.”
“I don’t know what this is, Danny Boy. You need to help us find out… what it is.”
“How?”
She lifted her arms and the walls flickered like the entire room was a monitor. The walls were blue with white puffy clouds, like the wallpaper of a computer desktop. Danny brushed his fingers over the keyboard and felt something for the first time since arriving.
A familiar thrill.
A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. Strange, this was an illusion but his body believed it.
It took several minutes to get familiar with the 360-degree monitor and multiple keyboards, but the keystrokes were the same as any computer. He accessed the mainframe and was soon sneaking around the security firewalls. The system was like one he’d never encountered. The code seemed to evolve like a living organism. Maybe it was a program that believed it was alive, just like he was sweating.
He synchronized several programs and let them run like digital wrecking balls smashing holes in databases and security code. He spun on his chair to unravel the next layer of the firewall. The security system operated like a virtual vault that continued to change the combination. Danny learned its tendencies and began to solve the complex code. His fingers blurred across the keyboards but it wasn’t fast enough.
I’m inside my head. I don’t need the keyboards.
He began to call out commands instead of typing and they were executed just as if he’d pecked them on the keyboard. He swiveled around to watch geometric shapes of computer code connect, shift and reconnect like organic chemistry. He stopped seeing the numbers and letters and began to see the computer language in three-dimensional objects that began to float off the walls. He shouted at them, made them change direction, change form, merge or divide. He was looking for the arrangement that would open the door to the system that was driving Foreverland.
Still, he was behind the evolving firewall that was always half a step ahead.
In the mind.
He focused inwardly, forming his next command into a sharpened thought instead of a spoken word. Then he created another one. And another. The shapes began to move again. Silently, Danny looked around the room and sent the thought-commands out. The room was in continuous movement, washed in morphing shapes and colors. Danny stopped looking at what they were doing so that he wasn’t limited by his eyes. He connected with his mind; he began to construct the code, predicting outcomes, glancing only to verify what they were becoming. He was in the center of another universe that operated on numbers and formulas and colors, looking for the right combination—
The room went black. Something clicked.
A spot of light hung over his head.
“What is it?” the girl said.
He’d forgotten she was there. “The firewall cracked.”
“What’s that mean?”
More clicking, like blocks were stacking and pieces latching and uncoupling. The spot of light shrunk to a pinpoint and began to dim. The clicking ended. Something fell into place like a key sliding into a lock. And turning.
The point exploded in blinding light.
And then they were flying above planet Earth.
“We’re through,” Danny said.
“Where?”
Danny stood up. “It’s the outside world.”
It exists.
There was an outside world. The desks and keyboard had disappeared. Danny walked on clouds, looking at the blue ocean thousands of feet below.
“We’re seeing the world through satellites,” he said.
“Where’s the island?”
Danny put together a few thought-commands, requesting the location of the portal he’d just hacked. The view spun like the planet rotated below. They were in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, halfway between South America and Africa.
Nothing but water.
[Enhance,] he thought.
The view zoomed toward the water and two tiny islands came into view. The southern one was very small and narrow. There appeared to be an airstrip the length of it. The larger island to the north was shaped like South Carolina.
“That’s it,” Danny muttered. “That’s where we are.”
“It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“Exactly.”
He began pacing around, observing the two islands. The details were sharper than what he’d seen in his flying sessions in Foreverland. There was the Yard in the center of the larger island and the horseshoe-shaped dormitory and the top of the Haystack nestled in the trees.
That’s where I am. Right now.
He scrolled the view to the south end, over the Mansion. He enhanced the view until he was walking right over the roof. The area behind the Mansion was a resort with swimming pools and lounging areas. There was a large pier attached to the shore with a yacht.
He looked at the smaller island, now off in the distance about five miles.
“They must fly into that island.” Danny took a few steps and the view scrolled beneath him until the airstrip was just below their feet. There was a hangar at one end and an empty pier on shore. “And then bring people o
ver on the yacht.”
The girl stood next to him. “What do you think they’re doing?”
The view returned to the Mansion. Someone was swimming. One of the Investors was taking long, smooth strokes to the end of the pool before turning to backstroke in the other direction.
“Looks like they’re on vacation,” he said.
After scrolling over the rest of the Mansion yard and finding nothing unusual, he began to look at the rest of the island. The view – directly overhead – looked like a privately owned tropical island. If someone flew over it, there would be nothing out of the ordinary.
“There’s not much time.” The girl had been walking along Danny’s side, looking where he was looking but watching for his reaction. “Is there anything here that helps?”
He grunted. “Not really.”
Danny continued walking, looking for anything that would be of interest. The Yard had a few people in it. The Chimney was highest in the sky, the stovepipe quiet. The waves were crashing violently on the north shore. The beach was empty, of course, because Reed was still in the Haystack with those vicious looking things on his hands.
Danny turned.
The girl was standing in the middle of the room, her hands clutched in front of her. She saw his thought and her eyes were big but not glassy this time.
“How do you know Reed?” he asked.
“It’s hard to know… my memories…”
“They’re mixed up?”
She shrugged.
“But you’re stuck in here?” Danny asked. “You can’t get out of Foreverland?”
“I don’t know… I just remember suddenly being here… something was after me when I woke up…”
Danny waited, but she seemed more confused than before. “So you escaped into the Nowhere?”
Quick nod, again. “No one can come out here. Not even him.”
The Director.
“You know that Reed dreams about you. He thinks you’re telling him not to come, that he has to—”
“I know… I just… want him to be okay.”
She turned away so Danny couldn’t see her face. Her shoulders tensed. He thought she might be weeping, but when she turned back around, Danny thought it was anger fading from her expression.
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