by K A Riley
“It’s me. I mean, it looks like me. And feels like me. But there’s something missing.”
Sara claps her own hands a bunch of times in front of her and then stares down at her palms. “I know what you mean. I can feel my skin, the air, even. But it feels…”
“Fake?” I ask. “That’s because it is.”
Libra reaches over to tug at the tight compression sleeve of my body suit. When she does, I get a better sense of what Ignacio and Sara are talking about. I can feel the pull from Libra’s hand, but the fabric feels odd. Like it’s too distant or the wrong material, as if someone painted it on me, and now the paint is slowly drying against my skin.
Libra points out into empty the wind-swept desert. “There’s nothing here. The sim…is it running?”
I pivot around to where a few dozen of the Unsettled are sprinting right toward us at top speed, their bare feet kicking up clouds of swirling red dust as they charge. “I don’t know if the sim is running…but they sure the frack are!”
We know from Kress and the other teachers how sophisticated the VR-sims are. We can’t die or even really get seriously hurt. But, as Wisp likes to remind us, getting really hurt and getting simulated hurt aren’t that far off.
“Pain,” she always says, “whether it’s in our nerve endings or in a complex computer code, is just a matter of electrical impulses. And we have plenty of those.”
The Unsettled—simulations or not—are insane, ruthless fighters. I know that from personal experience. Whoever programmed this thing knows it, too.
“They’re programmed to be as realistic as possible,” I shout out to the others. “Right down to their bad breath and the long, sharp fingernails.”
I know my body is standing in a room, plugged into a sophisticated computer program, but there’s nothing I can do to will myself back there.
With no weapons, we have to rely on our training from Unarmed Combat. We put up a good fight. Only it’s not quite good enough.
The Unsettled are a horrifying, snaggle-toothed bunch of desperate, hazy-eyed scavengers. The mass of dusty rags bearing down on us splits up into dozens of individual fighters, who move with a blinding speed way too fast to be real.
Practically falling over each other, they launch themselves at us with a ferocity I wasn’t expecting.
The simulated battlefield is open and empty with nowhere to hide and with nothing to use as a weapon.
I don’t think the Army of the Unsettled care.
They take Lucid and Reverie out first. The twins are amazing when it comes to their ability to access other dimensions.
In hand-to-hand combat, they leave a whole new dimension to be desired.
Their virtual bodies slam to the hard-packed desert floor with a very real, very loud smash.
Before they’ve even hit the ground, the other twins—Trax and Chace—disappear under a swarm of the Unsettled fighters.
We’re definitely going to need more training.
Mattea and Ignacio jump into a defensive, back-to-back position and square off against four of our attackers.
Sara lunges at another one of our enemies—a stocky boy who must be her height and War’s weight. Bare-chested and coated in hair and sweat, he swats away her attack, latches onto her arm, and slings her, Olympic discus-style, right into Arlo.
Sara and Arlo crash together and reel backwards, falling to a stop in a tangle of twisted limbs.
As a half dozen of the Unsettled descend on Libra, two of their horde—a thick girl and a thin boy—splinter off and advance on me from opposite sides. They may not be real, but the pain sure as frack is.
I last longer than my classmates, but in the end, I wind up on one knee, waiting for the girl’s clenched fist hovering over my head to come smashing down.
Only it doesn’t. In fact, the leathery, scabby-skinned fist of my female attacker freezes exactly where it is.
I look up into her crusty eyes. The pause doesn’t last more than a half-second, and the fist jumps back to its wrecking-ball path toward my face. Only, this time, I’m able to roll to the side, dodging the strike before launching one of my own.
Feeling like I’m moving at high speed, I leg sweep the Unsettled off her feet and drop a ferocious elbow to the bridge of her nose while she’s on the ground. Before her partner can react, I’ve got my hands latched around his head and my thumbs pressed hard into his eyes.
Squealing, he staggers back, blood gushing down his face and all the way down his neck and through his tufts of mangy chest hair.
Around me, my classmates have also regrouped and are having equal success dispatching their own attackers.
I’m not connected to Haida Gwaii or anything, but it feels like I’m moving at lightning speed.
“They don’t stand a chance against us!” Ignacio boasts as he side-kicks a tall Unsettled in the midsection and hip-flips him to the ground. “It’s like they’re moving in slow motion!”
Swinging around in front of me, her voice thin behind her mischievous, knowing grin, Roxane says, “They are.”
Their chests heaving, the two sets of twins are standing over a pile of the Unsettled. Libra and Mattea are high-fiving over a small pile of their own opponents.
Rising to his feet, Ignacio claps his hands together and then slings his arms around me and Libra, pulling us in tight. “We kicked their virtual ass!”
Libra and I push his arms from around our shoulders. I’m annoyed, but I can’t help smiling. Ignacio might not be my favorite person in the world, but I do appreciate someone who appreciates a good fight.
“Did you do this?” I ask Roxane.
She stares at me through those ghostly, pale blue eyes but doesn’t answer.
In fact, she looks like she’s just seen a ghost of her own—a ghost that just stomped on a kitten.
“What’s wrong?” I laugh, my hand on her shoulder. “Ignacio’s right. We just beat the hell out of this sim. If you had something to do with it somehow…”
Roxane grips my wrist with both hands. “Trapped.”
“Trapped? What do you mean?”
Libra calls our attention to the bodies of the Unsettled, which are now nearly pixilated away—along with the desert, the sand, and the sky, leaving us standing in a vacuum of white space. “Um. If we beat the sim, how come we’re still in it?”
“I’m sure it’s just a computer glitch,” Trax says, scanning what has now dissolved into…nothing.
We mill around for a while, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does.
So we wait a little longer.
Still, nothing.
We try to walk, but it doesn’t make any sense. There’s nowhere to walk to. And, since we’re basically neurochomatic representations of ourselves created by a quantum computer program and without any external point of reference, there’s nowhere to walk from.
After a while—there’s no way to tell how long—our moods drop from idle curiosity to mild worry, and then, to the brink of pure terror.
Sara gives an unamused laugh. “I’m waiting for one of you to tell us we’re trapped inside a VR-sim.”
Trax wrings his hands and bites his lower lip. “Um…I think we’re trapped in a VR-sim.”
Doubled-over, her breath coming out in hacking spasms, Chace goes into a full-blown panic attack.
Trax leans over her and tries to assure her that everything’s going to be okay.
Through her gasps, Chace stammers something about how she knew this was going to happen. “Who’ll…tell…our…stories…now?” she manages to choke out in between raspy coughs.
Roxane steps over and practically shoves Trax aside. Before he can react one way or another, Roxane is running her fingers through Chace’s dark hair and petting her like she was a feeble kitten.
“You.”
Chace manages to look up at Roxane. “Me?”
“You. Chronicle. We. Live.”
I don’t know how or why, but that seems to do the trick, and Chace stands up, ta
kes a breath, and apologizes for freaking out.
With the rest of us gathered around her, Roxane turns in a slow circle, her eyes meeting ours as she does.
“Home.”
And then my head explodes.
Not literally, fortunately. But it sure feels like it.
Before I black out, I catch a glimpse of the rest of our two Cohorts, also doubled over in agony, their hands pressed tight to the sides of their heads as we all scream in pain.
And then, just like that, it’s gone. The excruciating lightning strike melts into a comforting hum inside my head.
When I open my eyes, I’m back in the VR-sim room, standing in the circle under the octopus console with everyone else.
Mattea pats her hips and breathes a puffed-cheek sigh of relief.
Dressed in our normal Academy gear, we slip the black octopus tentacles off of our heads and let them slump to the floor.
Her face in a knot, Sara strides over to Roxane. “What the hell did you do to us?”
“Hey!” I call out. “She just saved us. Twice.”
Arlo looks confused as he pulls his hood up.
“She’s the one who slowed down the Unsettled,” I explain. “And the one who got us out of there.”
“Speaking of which,” Mattea says, looking around the room, “why were we stuck in there like that?”
And then it occurs to me: We’re alone in the room. “Wisp? Granden?”
“Maybe they went into the Control Room? Or down to the Sub-Basement to check on the Mag-Generators,” Lucid suggests.
Sounding nervous, Arlo asks, “Why would both of them go? And why would they leave us here?”
Trax shrugs. “I’m sure they’ve got things under control.”
“I’d feel a lot better hearing that from them, directly,” I tell him. “Come on.”
The others follow me out into the hallway. The weirdly quiet hallway. Where are Wisp and Granden? And if there’s a major problem, shouldn’t there be alarms going off or something?
“At least the door works,” Sara snickers.
“It’s about time something worked around—”
I’m cut off by a gasp from Libra. She’s pointing down the hall to where a lone figure is lying deadly still on the floor.
We bolt over and slide to a stop over the body of Granden.
“What the hell happened to him?” Sara cries, sliding to her knees next to him. It’s more emotion than I’m used to hearing from her, and the quiver in her voice gives me the chills.
“Is he…?” I start to ask.
“He’s alive,” Sara sighs. “But barely.”
“We need to get him downstairs to the Infirmary.”
“And we need to find Wisp.”
“Don’t bother,” Chace says, her voice shaking hard and trailing off as she points down the stairwell to the small figure lying half on the landing. “That’s her.”
31
Intruder
A noise from the far end of the hall catches our attention.
The blur of brown and black causes us to go into a simultaneous, eleven-person jump.
“Did you see that?” Libra stammers.
“Yes!” Ignacio tells her. “But who—?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’re all accounted for.”
Chace takes two huge steps back. “Someone got into the Academy.”
I shake my head. “Not possible.”
Mattea tugs on my sleeve but doesn’t make eye contact when she mutters, “I think Granden and our unconscious dean lying over there on the floor would suggest otherwise.”
With everyone from both Cohorts looking to me for guidance, I step over to Trax. “You go check out whatever that was! We’ll take Wisp and Granden to the Infirmary. Meet us there!”
Led by Trax, the members of Cohort B go bolting down the hall in one direction while my Cohort and I lug Wisp and Granden down the two flights of stairs to the Infirmary.
Although I always think of Ignacio as the strongest of our group, Arlo surprises me—and probably all of us—by scooping Granden up as easily as Libra and I gather up Wisp.
We’ve done a lot of physical training, but carrying a pair of grown people down two flights of stairs is harder than I thought it would be.
Holding them by their legs and under their shoulders, we get Wisp and Granden into the Infirmary and up onto two of the white examination mag-tables hovering in the center of the brightly lit room.
“What now?” Libra asks, her eyes ping-ponging between me and the door.
“Does anyone know how to work the diagnostic equipment?”
Arlo raises his hand halfway.
“You do?”
“Oh, right,” Mattea exclaims. “Mayla’s his mentor.”
Arlo nods. “I’ve been working with her in here for the past couple of weeks. It’s part of my apprenticeship.”
“And you know how to work this stuff?” I ask.
“Kind of.”
“Well, it’s not ideal, but ‘kind of’ has to be good enough. For now, at least.”
We step back as Arlo, looking a little flustered, rummages around in a supply cabinet next to the floating mag-tables.
Returning with a shallow tray of medical equipment, he attaches thin silver leads to Wisp’s and Granden’s wrists and presses diamond-shaped contact pads to their temples, to the backs of their hands, and along the base of their necks.
Squinting into the yellow holo-display in the air at the foot of the two tables, Arlo shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?” I ask.
“They’re registering as fully conscious and alert. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.”
“Based on the fact that they’re not conscious,” Sara sneers, “I’d say there’s plenty wrong with them.”
Mattea shoulders her way in front of me to stand in front of Arlo. “Are you sure you’re reading that thing right?”
“I think so.”
“This isn’t complicated,” I snap. “Were they beaten up? Knocked out? Drugged? What the hell happened to them?”
Arlo looks almost teary-eyed under his hood when he takes a step back and insists he doesn’t know. “It’s like…it’s like…”
“Like what?” I bark, clutching the material on the shoulder of his gray hoodie in my clenched fists.
“Like they’ve been hypnotized.”
I’m just processing that—and all of its implications and impossibilities—when the Infirmary door slides open with a grainy groan.
Red faced and out of breath, Trax and his Cohort come barreling into the room. “Whoever it was got away,” he pants.
Whipping around, I ask if he actually saw anyone.
“It was definitely a person,” Reverie insists.
“Clothes, hair color…anything?”
“Tall. Skinny. Maybe? Kind of messed up clothes. We couldn’t really tell.”
“Where?” I ask.
“We heard something up on the fourth floor.”
“The Bio-Tech research labs?”
“We went in there. We tried the Techno-Genetics labs…”
“And?”
“Someone’s been in there. Looking for something. We think maybe they tried to access the quantum computers.”
“But by the time we got there, whoever it was was gone,” Reverie says, her eyes red and brimming wet. “We saw something…someone running down that long hallway toward the East Tower. We tried to follow them, but they disappeared. We were just going to try the Sub-Basement, but Trax thought we should stop here first and check on you guys and Wisp and Granden.”
I fix my eyes on Reverie’s and ask her as evenly as possible, “Who? Who did you see?”
From next to his sister, Lucid shakes his head, his eyes darting back and forth. “It was a man, I think.”
“You think?”
“He had a beard.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not going to bet my li
fe on it, but yes, I think so.”
“Great. So we have a skinny bearded intruder in the Academy and the only two properly trained people are unconscious and plugged into machines.”
“There’s something else,” Reverie adds.
“What?”
“He was carrying something. A case of some kind…under his arm.”
I’m not sure why that makes my heart jump and causes a lump to form in my throat, but right now, we have more pressing matters to attend to. Namely, our dean and vice-dean lying side by side and mysteriously unconscious on the lab tables in front of us.
Libra squints into the holo-display hovering in front of one of the primary diagnostic input panels. “At least their vital signs seem okay.”
Chace jabs her finger at the glowing diagram. “What about here? What’s this?”
“That’s brainwave activity,” Arlo tells her.
Standing next to Chase, I tap the glowing graph, myself. “How come it’s moving around like that?”
“I don’t know. But I think it means signals are having trouble getting from their brains to their bodies.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.”
Libra puts up a hand. “If there’s really someone in the Academy, then they did this. Which means they’ll know how to fix it.”
Pushing up my sleeves, I stride to the door. “You’re right. We need to know what’s going on.”
“So we’re just going to leave them here?” Libra calls out to me.
“What choice do we have? Whoever did this to them is in here with us. Which means we could wind up like them.”
“Unless we find the intruder first,” Ignacio growls.
“My thoughts exactly.”
Libra dashes over and grabs my wrist. “Branwynne. Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Like what?”
“Like if there is someone in here, it means they knew the Academy was here, they knew how to get in, they knew how to take out Wisp and Granden…and they know we’re alone.”
“I didn’t forget. And I didn’t forget that there’s eleven of us and only one of them.”
“That we know of.”
“We could always lock ourselves in here,” Chace suggests, her eyes scanning the room and the open doorway. “Try to contact Kress on the outside.”