“Don’t touch it,” Carmen said, walking deeper into the cellar without sparing the agonized metal face a second glance.
“Why not?” Patricia rushed to catch up.
“Because it’s hot,” Carmen said. “It’s a furnace.”
The furnace room stretched into the darkness, way beyond the outer wall of the real-life lodge, and soon Patricia was groping her way forward in total pitch blackness, without even the faint glow from the stove to see by. She navigated by the sound of Carmen’s voice.
The footing became uneven, piled with jagged shapes. Like shells or fragments of metal. Torn discarded computer parts, or flint-sharp stones. Every step became more jabby and stabby than the last, even through the soles of Patricia’s decent mary janes.
“Take off your shoes and throw them away,” Carmen said, “or your feet will be cut to pieces.”
Patricia hesitated a moment, but every step was like treading on knives. So she slipped her shoes off, one and then the other, and tossed them aside. She heard the sound of teeth devouring her shoes, chewing and grinding. As soon as she was barefoot, she felt as though she were walking on a well-kept lawn. She still could not see at all, nor were there any scents. But as she strode forward she heard a low siren wail, like a baby’s cry slowed to half speed. Patricia started heading toward that sound, which seemed more plaintive and pathetic the closer she got, but Carmen grabbed her arm and said, “Ignore it.”
Carmen steered Patricia in a different direction, so they came near to the source of the deep caterwauling but passed by it. Soon Patricia felt her feet sinking into the “ground” a little more with each step, so that she felt the grass or whatever it was around her ankles as her feet squished into something like soil.
A few steps later, Patricia was walking into the loose sod up to her mid-calves. She smelled something sweet, like a hundred flowers in a single bouquet mixed with a fresh bag of cane sugar from her old bakery job. The kind of sweetness that’s comforting and nauseating and appetizing all at once. It grew stronger, every step forward Patricia took, and meanwhile the racket underfoot was swallowing her calves whole each time she stepped down.
“That’s it,” Carmen said from nearby. “Just let it happen. Keep walking forward. I have an errand. I’ll catch up with you soon.”
Patricia started to protest, but she could tell she was alone in the dark with the rich sugary aroma and the terrain that was gobbling her up, inch by inch.
She wanted to turn and run back the way she’d come. But she could tell that wouldn’t work—this was one of those things where you either kept moving forward or got lost forever in the dark. She didn’t even think it was a test, as such—just a weird ritual, or a passageway on the way to something else. A spell so vast, so intricate, it was a realm.
Patricia took another step, and this time she was buried up to her mid-thighs and the “grass,” or whatever it was, was scratchy and awful. The sweetness was getting intoxicating, like an incense with something narcotic mixed in.
She walked forward and downward, letting the potpourri consume her waist, then her belly, then her torso and shoulders. At last she was in it up to her neck, and her head was swimming from the perfumey sugary air. Instinct made Patricia want to take a deep breath before her next step, but Patricia trusted Carmen, as much as she trusted anyone anymore. She swung her foot forward and found nothing under it, other than loose crud.
Patricia took the last step, her head disappearing into the sharp fragrant rocks or broken glass or whatever, that scraped her face on the way down.
Rich-smelling bones and scraps buried her alive. Her feet touched a floor or the ground, and then it tilted, went sideways. She realized she was in a container that was being tipped. She opened her eyes, which she didn’t realize she’d closed, and she saw the inside of a Dumpster, full of lovely and rotten food, which was being emptied into a truck. Someone saw her squirming in the midst of all the garbage and gave a shout.
She spilled out of the truck, and the garbage collectors and the restaurant manager and a woman in a smart pink trench coat stared at her: a girl covered in restaurant waste, which no longer smelled sweet at all. She didn’t know if this was real or what city she was in, and her clothes were ruined and she was still barefoot and she couldn’t bear to look at her own grimy feet. They were all yelling but she couldn’t understand anything they were saying. She took off running, out of the secluded backstreet behind the restaurant and onto a bigger street where everybody stared at her.
She had only one thought: I have to get away from people.
Everything was too bright and tinged sort of blue-gray, like it was dusk and noon at the same time. She looked up to see where the sun was, but the whole sky was too bright to look at, and it stung her retinas.
This wasn’t the first time Patricia had been dropped in a strange town where she knew no one and had no money and did not speak the language. Even being shoeless and covered with stinking garbage was no great extra challenge—and yet she felt panic steal her breath. She was trapped, there were too many people wherever she went, they were all looking at her, faces looming and bulging, and some of them were trying to talk to her. Just breathing the same air as other humans made her feel like needles were being drilled into her skin. The idea of even touching another person’s skin made her retch—if anybody would even want to touch her, as filthy as she was.
The city—whatever city this was—pressed in on her. People came out of dome-covered wooden doorways, climbed through broken shop windows, rose up out of cars, and descended from high buses, pinning her down. Wherever she looked, faces and hands. Big staring eyes and grasping fingers, mouths gaping and making guttural roaring noises. Awful creatures. Patricia ran.
She kept running, down a main thoroughfare, onto a street, into the path of a speeding trolley that nearly killed her, into a square full of people in casual shirts and cargo pants, through an open-air market, past a shopping center, through the outdoor seating area of a café. The city went on and on. There was no way out. She needed to get out of the city, but she could see no signs.
Pick one direction, pick one direction and run, stay clear of the monsters with their grabby limbs and attempts to communicate, stay free, and get the hell out of this city. Get clear.
She ran, choking, until she came to a pier. The water stretched out, white against the blinding blue air. She didn’t even hesitate—she ran forward, past the groping pink limbs and snapping mouths clustered on the pier. The grotesque creatures barked at her and stared with their stone eyes. She was shriveling in the sun. She would never make it to the water before she melted, or they caught her.
One red-faced ogre swung his hairy arm and nearly snared her, but she ducked and fell and that gave her the momentum to pull herself up, sprint, and throw herself face-first into the ocean.
Patricia surfaced, gasping and wheezing, and looked up into the face of Carmen Edelstein, floating in the water nearby. She splashed around for a second, then got her bearings. She was in the middle of the ocean, and it was freezing. There was no dock, no pier, no city anywhere nearby. Nothing but waves, as far as she could see. And then she smelled something bilious and she got a glimpse of a dark hunched-over shape poking out of the water. Seadonia. It was like she’d just descended from the cloud to the ocean near Seadonia and all the rest had been a hallucination. But she knew it wasn’t that simple.
“So that was the Unraveling,” Patricia said, treading water. The waves went over her face for a moment.
“What did you think?” Carmen didn’t seem to need to paddle to stay afloat.
“It was horrible.” Patricia was still panting. “I wanted to get away from people at any cost. I couldn’t even recognize anyone else as being the same species as me.”
“It’s not unlike colony collapse disorder, but for humans. And yes, it’s horrifying, but it could be the only way to restore some balance and prevent a worse outcome. We’re all hoping it doesn’t come to that.”
On some level, Patricia could see how inflicting a similar fate on people could be the better option, if the other choice was people destroying themselves and taking all other living things with them. Her mind could see that, but not her insides, her frozen sore guts.
“Yes,” Patricia said. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that.”
“There’s something I need you to do for me,” Carmen said. “And I’m sorry to ask this of you.”
“Okay,” Patricia shivered.
“We need to know what they’re doing in there.” Carmen gestured at Seadonia. “We can’t see inside. The water and steel are barriers, but they’ve also surrounded it with a magnetic field.”
Patricia nodded, waiting to hear how Carmen expected her to get inside Seadonia.
Instead, Carmen said, “Your friend Laurence probably knows. Go talk to him and find out.”
Patricia tried to explain how she was the last person Laurence would want to talk to, and he would sooner spit at her. And her stomach turned at the thought of seeing him. The desperate fear of people she’d experienced in the Unraveling still clung to Patricia, and she could still see herself fleeing, never talking to another soul, running lonely. She couldn’t picture herself talking to Laurence. He had left her a voicemail, and she had deleted it unheard. She couldn’t bear to talk to him—but then she felt the crushing isolation again. And she reminded herself that she was untouchable, nothing could hurt her anymore.
“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll try talking to him.”
31
PEREGRINE WAS NOT all-seeing—it wasn’t able to worm its way into every database everywhere or see through every camera in the world. It mostly knew what all the Caddies knew, about their owners and the pieces of the world they touched—plus whatever information it could glean on the internet. So, Peregrine knew a lot, but there were huge gaps. And it had blind spots, just like any human might—there were pieces of information it knew, but it hadn’t put two and two together.
Still, Peregrine had amazing access to data and processing power. And what had it done? Set itself up as a dating service.
“I don’t know what happened in Denver,” Peregrine said again and again.
An estimated 1.7 billion people were at critical famine levels, but they didn’t have Caddies. The North Koreans were massing along the DMZ, but they didn’t own Caddies, either. Neither did the majority of the people trapped in the Arab Winter. Some of the people dying of dysentery and antibiotic-resistant bugs had Caddies, but not most of them. Did Peregrine just have a skewed view of the world, its bodies belonging as they did to the privileged millions instead of the damned billions? Laurence asked Peregrine, and it responded: “I read the news. I know what’s happening in the world. Plus some of the Caddies belong to some very powerful people, who have access to information that would make your teeth fall out. So to speak. Five minutes.”
“I got that that was a metaphor, thank you very much.” Laurence was holding the Caddy in both hands, at arm’s length. Sitting up in bed at two in the morning. “But don’t you get that romance is an essentially bourgeois contrivance? At best, it’s anachronistic. At worst, it’s a distraction, a luxury for people who aren’t preoccupied with survival. Why would you waste your time helping people find their ‘true love’ instead of doing something worthwhile?”
“Maybe I’m just doing what I can,” Peregrine responded. “Maybe I’m trying to understand people, and helping people fall in love is one way to gain a better sense of your parameters. Maybe increasing the aggregate level of happiness in the world is one way to try and hold back the crash. Four minutes.”
“What are you counting down to?”
“You know what,” Peregrine said. “You’ve been waiting all this time.”
“No, I don’t fucking know what.” Laurence threw the Caddy onto the bed, not hard enough to cause any damage, and pulled on his pants. He did know what. The streetlights went out. That happened a lot lately.
“You could also say I’ve been acting in my own self-interest,” Peregrine said. “The more I nudge people toward finding their soul mates, the more they encourage their friends to buy pieces of me. I become a necessity, rather than a luxury. That’s one reason the Caddies have kept functioning so far.”
“Yeah.” Laurence looked for clean socks. There had to be clean socks. He couldn’t face this without clean socks. “Except, again, you’re being shortsighted. What happens to you if our whole industrial civilization implodes? If there’s no more fuel, no electricity to recharge the Caddies? Or if the whole world goes down in a nuclear daisy chain?”
He pulled some pants on and realized his T-shirt was sweat stained and gross. Why did he even care how he looked? It was pure neurosis.
“Three minutes,” Peregrine said.
Laurence felt panic overtake him. It was 2:15 in the morning, the lights were all out except for the glow of the Caddy screen, and he was shirtless and dirty, with no place to run. He was not ready, he would never be ready, he had stopped being ready a while ago when he let go of his first, strongest anger. He looked at the tiny window of his bedroom, and at the staircase that led up to the vacant front part where Isobel was supposed to be. The house was an obstacle course of clutter, the backyard a wild tangle. He thought of a thousand hiding places and no escape routes.
He hyperventilated and choked on spit and pounded his own chest, while the darkness grew until it was bigger than he could encompass. He found shirt, shoes, still paralyzed. Peregrine kept trying to carry on their stupid conversation, as if that mattered now, while also saying “two minutes.” Peregrine added, “I think you’re just disappointed that I haven’t transformed the entire planet, or become some sort of artificial deity, which seems like a misapprehension of the nature of consciousness, artificial or otherwise. A true deity, by definition, would be outside physicality, or unaffected by whatever vessel contained it.”
“Not now.” Laurence was torn between looking for a weapon, making a mad dash for it, and fixing his hair and rebrushing his teeth, which he’d brushed a few hours before. Except he couldn’t fight, he had no place to run, and he didn’t want to primp for this. All this time as a mad scientist, why didn’t he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.
“What am I going to do?” Laurence said.
“Answer the door,” Peregrine said. “In about one minute.”
“Jesus. Fuck. I can’t, I’m losing my mind. Does she know about you? Of course she doesn’t. What am I going to do. I can’t face this. I’m going blind. I always thought the term ‘blind panic’ was a metaphor, but it turns out not. Peregrine, I need to get out of here. Can you hide me, man?”
A thudding, cracking sound made Laurence jump. He realized it was a knock on the front door, which had caught him off guard even though he’d been expecting it. There was no way that it had been a full minute since Peregrine said “one minute.” He was sure he was visibly shaking, and you could smell the terror on him. He tried to reach for the outrage that he had been so full of not long ago. Why was outrage only available when useless?
He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice. And then he reached the door as it vibrated again. He pulled it open.
He had not been prepared for her to be so unfairly beautiful.
The only light source in the whole place was a small flashlight, probably LED based, in her tiny hand. It cast a glow that was pale
but not ghostly, up onto her small breasts, visible in her lacey tank top, and her rounded chin and perfect resolute mouth. She wasn’t smiling but she was making something like eye contact. She looked calm. Her eyes were dazzling. She was holding a Caddy in one hand and had a satchel over her shoulder. Looking at her dark serious eyes and her pale, brave face, Laurence felt a rush of emotion that caught him off guard. For a picosecond he did not care that she had destroyed the machine, he just wanted to embrace her and laugh for joy. Then he remembered and felt everything lock up again, instant tetanus.
“Hi, Laurence,” Patricia said, her posture straight and her body poised, as if she could fight an army of ninjas at any moment. She seemed way more grown-up and self-assured than the last time he had seen her. “It’s good to see you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to give you your grandmother’s ring back.” She reached into her hoodie pocket and came out with a tiny black cube.
Laurence didn’t take it from her palm.
“I thought you had to keep that,” Laurence said. “Or else Priya would be pulled back into the nightmarish dimension where gravity is a strong force.”
“Yeah. That. Well, I decided I don’t like Priya that much,” Patricia said. At Laurence’s stony look, she added: “That was a joke. Joking here. Nobody is going to be pulled into any kind of void if I give you this ring back.” She held it up to him.
He looked at the nugget of felt. “Why not?”
“I realized that enough time has passed and it’s probably safe.” That sounded like total garbage, and Laurence just stared. She added: “Okay, not really. I guess I’ve gotten much better at Trickster magic since then. And…” She paused because whatever came next was difficult to say, especially when fidgeting on someone’s doorstep in total darkness.
Laurence waited it out. Patricia searched for the right words. He didn’t let her off the hook by filling the silence.
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