Jail might be deadly boring, but it sure was nice.
I went to the window for the twentieth time in the last couple of hours, touching the sill where the bird had been perched just moments before. Emory Specter and Mrs. Farley and whoever else ran this place obviously weren’t worried about me climbing through the window. It was already open wide when they locked me inside. The first thing I did was try and figure out if there was any possibility of escape.
The answer: no freakin’ way.
I was so high up that puffy clouds floated by, so close I could nearly put my hands through them. There would be no jumping, not without any Apps to break my fall or fix me immediately afterward. Good thing I was used to flying-related Apps, otherwise I might suffer from vertigo. Main Park was barely a speck below, a little green square I could squeeze between two fingers. The City stretched on and on as far as I could see, an endless grid of buildings and apartments and streets. I’d climbed to the top of the Water Tower about a million times before to take in the view, but it paled in comparison to the one I had from here. I kept racking my brain trying to think if I’d ever noticed a building this tall in the skyline of the City, but I couldn’t come up with anything so high that it spiked through the clouds. The possibility that maybe I was in a tower coded to be invisible crossed my mind, but that seemed too crazy, so I dismissed it.
And then I sighed.
The view hadn’t changed since last time I checked.
I leaned my stomach onto the sill and tipped forward.
My feet rose off the floor until they were dangling in the atmosphere. The farther I stretched, the more I could see about my location. Though even if I could pinpoint where I was, it likely wouldn’t do much good. I could scream all I wanted and no one would hear unless I somehow managed to download a Megaphone App, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Besides, Mrs. Farley probably had this place coded like my apartment, to prevent me from getting out or to prevent anyone from being able to communicate with me.
I leaned a little farther, so much I was angling toward the ground, my feet rising higher than the sill, high enough that I could easily slide forward and end up touching those clouds floating below the window. And not in a good way. More in a falling-to-my-death way. Still, what did I care what happened now? Emory Specter claimed he wasn’t going to hurt me, but why should I trust him? Once his nemesis daughter got here, if she even came for me, which I highly doubted, given the way she’d abandoned me once already, what would stop good old Emory from virtually killing me afterward? I leaned a smidge more to the right, twisting my virtual self in ways it probably shouldn’t be twisted, hoping I could see a little farther beyond the edge of the skyscraper.
My daredevil contortions were soon rewarded.
I noticed something new. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking at.
A large black circle covered part of the City below. Maybe Loner Town? It was like someone had blotted out the landscape. Or, you know how when an architecture download starts to deteriorate and sometimes the fabric of the atmosphere gets glitchy and little holes appear? What I was seeing was kind of like that, but on a massive scale.
Wait. Could that be, like, a giant glitch?
The hugest glitch ever?
It looked as if someone had detonated a bomb in a game. But that was impossible, since this was the City I was seeing. And even if this was an enormous glitch in the fabric of the App World, why hadn’t anyone come along and fixed it? Wasn’t that what the government was for? I mean, the hole might be in Loner Town, which nobody really cares about anyway, but a glitch that big is a risk to let fester. Glitches were like wounds. If neglected too long, they could infect wider swaths of code. Everyone knew this. It was basic information technology, the kind of thing people learned in App World History 1.0.
A gust of wind blew and pushed just hard enough that I tilted a little farther.
I screamed, unable to right myself, desperately digging my fingers into a crevice between the stones, my breaths heavy. When I was steady again I pushed upward until my feet reached solid virtual ground.
Whoa. That was close.
My virtual heart was throbbing like I’d just downloaded a new and improved boyfriend.
No girl wants to go virtually splat by an App-free fall from a skyscraper. Surely I could be fixed with the right downloads to my code, but I didn’t relish the thought of having to go through all that pain. Plus, what reason would Emory Specter and company have to fix me? They might just allow me to suffer.
I glanced at the door, hoping nobody heard me scream. Then I looked out the window once more, this time with new purpose. A Binocular App would be an excellent enhancement at the moment, but I’d have to make do.
And now I knew what to look for.
I searched the landscape of the City below for other black spots, and my code soon roared with a static so forceful I could hear it.
I began to count. One, two, three, four, five, and so on and so forth.
Seriously.
I counted once more, to be sure.
There must be at least twenty-seven black spots across the City, and these were the ones that were visible without any downloads to help. None of the holes were as big as the one I could see in Loner Town. In fact, most of them were fairly small in comparison. But still, I could identify them with the naked virtual eye. They reminded me of the dots that appeared across your virtual vision if you kept staring at the Sun 8.0 directly for too long.
I took one step to the left and looked again.
One, two, three, four . . .
This time I counted a total of nineteen black spots.
Different black spots.
I did the same thing again, this time taking two steps to the right. Then one step backward. Again, and again, from slightly different vantage points, I counted the black spots on the landscape. I even tried squinting my eyes and opening them wide to see what changed. What I learned was soon clear: depending on the angle, a person could identify different glitches in different places. Maybe the government was trying to repair the holes in the fabric of our world, but wasn’t able to do so completely. And the one in Loner Town was just too big to fix.
Or maybe they weren’t trying to repair them at all.
Maybe they were irreparable and the government was just trying to hide them instead?
I stepped away from the window and turned my attention to the room, alternating between squinting and opening my eyes wide, studying everything from different angles. The bed, the couch, the chairs, the side tables. Even the rug. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. No black spots, not big ones or even tiny ones. Everything seemed in perfect downloaded order, without any glitches that I was able to find.
I plopped down onto the puffy couch. “Harrumph.”
I sat there awhile doing nothing, because there was nothing to do. I didn’t even know if I was waiting for something, or if Emory Specter would call me down to talk again, or if he’d already forgotten my existence and would only remember again if his nemesis daughter showed up. Then, because I was bored, I decided to examine the room one more time.
This time, I tried to alter my angles of observation, but it was difficult since there wasn’t a way to mark my previous viewpoints. Nothing that a Hansel and Gretel App wouldn’t fix, but alas, there would be no bread crumbs to indicate my previous steps so I could avoid them in the future.
Seriously. How did people get by before there were Apps for, like, every single thing?
It was truly a mystery.
I was spinning one way and the other, frustrated, when something caught my eye.
By the door.
Was that a black spot?
I tried one viewpoint after another and came up with nothing—at first.
I went closer, then closer still, until I was practically crouching against it, my eyes level with the lock.
You have to be kidding me.
“A glitch, a glitch, a glitch,” I shrieked,
before it occurred that I should shut up in case somebody was listening to the happenings in my room.
The glitch was right next to the lock. A round black spot, large enough for my fist to push through it. You had to look at it just so to see it, but there was no doubt that it existed.
I reached out one single finger and poked at it.
My finger went through easily and came back totally intact.
Curious, I stood and took a step back. The hole disappeared from view, like the virtual wood spontaneously repaired itself somehow. I remembered where it was, though, just an inch and a half to the left of the lock. Once again, I placed my fingers in that spot.
They disappeared like ghosts that could pass through something solid.
I retracted my hand, then made a fist and plunged it into the glitch. I felt around on the other side of the door until my fingers touched the cold metal of a key. Carefully, I turned it until I heard a click.
A bolt sliding open.
I retracted my hand again, studying it.
“Huh.” It seemed totally unharmed.
A part of me wondered if putting my arm through a glitch would mess with my code or do some other horrible irreparable damage, like melt my virtual skin or turn my fingers into black spots. When I was satisfied that all was well, my fingers closed around the knob on this side of the door and tried it.
It turned easily.
I pushed it open wide.
Then, after looking left and right, I stepped into the hallway.
22
Skylar
selfish
THIS IS WHAT I saw when I went to find Rain:
A girl and a boy on a terrace. They were staring into each other’s eyes, eyes that were full of longing and confusion and division. They sat at just enough distance from each other that they couldn’t touch. But everything about their bodies announced that this was all they wanted to do.
The moment my gaze had landed on Lacy and Rain, I knew they were meant to be together.
The sand slipped and slid underneath my feet as I stood there, watching them. I’d taken the path around the mansion that led to Rain’s room from the outside. My body had craved the real air, the real sea, the real warmth of the real sun after so much time amid the pale virtual imitations of these things. I didn’t want to be indoors once I managed to get my limbs moving and steady enough to walk. The only stop I made was to glance inside my mother’s lab, but she wasn’t there.
Lacy and Rain were so engrossed in each other they hadn’t noticed me.
I waited for the tears to come. For jealousy to rage inside me, informing me of the truth of my feelings for Rain, and of what I had lost when I took the risk of making that deal with Lacy. Of allowing her to come between us.
But I felt none of this.
Their lips moved quickly, first Rain, then Lacy, deep in conversation, murmuring words I was too far away to understand. My toes inched forward and I took another quiet step. I should have turned around and left them alone, but I kept moving toward them instead of away. I’d nearly reached the steps of the deck before I was able to catch snatches of what they were saying.
Or, rather, confessing.
“Skylar . . . special to me . . .”
This, from Rain.
“But she . . . our history . . . and you and I, we . . .”
This, from Lacy.
There came a long pause. I didn’t dare look up, worried they would sense my presence. I kept my attention on the rough gray wood of the terrace steps as I listened.
“Rain, I still love you.” Lacy was saying. “And I think you still love me. I can tell from the way you look at me. Are you ever going to be honest with yourself and admit this? Be honest with me, too?” Her voice was strong and clear, so I didn’t miss a single word.
I can tell from the way you look at her too, Rain, I found myself agreeing.
I waited for Rain to answer.
Another long silence passed.
“Yes,” he said eventually, but nothing more.
“Yes what?” Lacy sounded frustrated.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said quietly. “I do still love you.”
My breathing stopped.
I heard rustling.
I looked up.
Once again I saw the boy and the girl on the terrace, but now I saw that the boy was sliding closer to the girl and taking her hand into his, her face radiant with joy.
For a second, I stood there frozen, knowing I should leave but rooted to the ground like the cattails swaying in the grasses behind the dunes.
All I could think about was Kit.
How I wished for a moment like this with him.
Lacy’s eyes shone.
I pivoted, the balls of my feet digging into the rough sand, and walked in the other direction, down toward the other end of the beach.
I stopped short of the refugee camp. I wasn’t in the mood to answer more questions about plugging back in to a world that might be dying. But Andleeb had been out for a walk and she found me there, staring into the distance, watching as evening fell and tiny bonfires began to pepper the sand, people gathering around them to cook and warm their hands. The temperature was dropping fast.
“You look like you just lost a friend,” she said.
I shook my head. But had I? Maybe I’d lost Rain as a boyfriend, but maybe this didn’t mean I’d lost him as a friend, too. “I’m fine.”
Her dark eyes were unblinking. The way her head scarf framed her face made them seem even bigger. “Are you sure?”
I didn’t trust myself to answer this question without honesty, so I changed the subject. “Where’s Rasha?”
“Rasha’s napping, and you never want to wake that girl when she’s sleeping.” Andleeb laughed. “In the App World, she became a bear when she was afraid, which is pretty appropriate since she growls if you rouse her.”
I laughed in response, which sent the world into a spin. I was still dizzy from shifting. Andleeb grabbed me before I could fall. For a second I thought I might pass out. Sometimes I wondered if those incredible App World–related skills that I brought back with me when I’d first unplugged also drained away from the real body eventually, just like they would from one’s virtual self. I stood there for a full minute, waiting, until finally the world stopped spinning. “Do you feel like company on your walk?” I asked, now that I thought I was steady enough to move again.
Andleeb was studying me with concern. “Sure,” she said eventually, and dropped her hand from my arm.
“It really doesn’t bother you, having to wear that scarf over your hair all the time?” I asked as we headed closer to the water.
She adjusted it, pulling it tighter. Today it was the bright-green color of the lawn outside the library in New Port City, with tiny yellow polka dots. “No,” she said. She told me about her family’s culture and faith and how it had been affected by everyone plugging in, and what it was like to return to the Real World and have to adjust yet again. “I like the way my head scarf makes people notice me. It makes me feel visible in a way that I never was in the App World. The scarves make me into a mystery. Like, a secret waiting to be discovered.”
“That’s a nice way of seeing it,” I said. “But I don’t know about the being stared at part. I’ve always hated having people stare.”
Andleeb’s face darkened. “People stare at you for different reasons.”
My feet dug through the packed sand with every step. My legs weren’t as steady as I’d thought, and I grasped for grounding. I needed to get ahold of myself. There were things that had to get done, but I wasn’t yet in a state to do them. “Yes. And not all of them good. I am not Queen Skylar to everyone.”
Andleeb didn’t respond.
For a while the only sounds were from the waves crashing into shore. My body was exhausted, and by my third stumble Andleeb grabbed me again, holding me up. “Skylar, what’s going on?”
I bent forward a little, hands on my knees, just trying to b
reathe. “I’m tired, I guess.”
“Tired, yes. But I would say that you look like someone who just unplugged.”
I straightened and stared over the dunes at the mansion rising up behind us. The windows reflected the last rays of the sun before night fell completely.
“Skylar?” she pressed.
I turned to Andleeb. She had the eyes of someone I could trust. “Before I answer, tell me something first.”
The wind buffeted her scarf and flowing long-sleeved shirt and pants. She nodded.
“Do you think the situation with the refugees is improving or getting worse?”
Andleeb’s eyes traveled down the beach toward the camp. “It depends on who you ask. But I’d say people are losing patience. Life is difficult in the body, even more difficult than most remember. Like we’ve discussed before, if there was a way for people to plug back in safely, I think a lot of the refugees would jump at the chance.”
The bonfires were bright spots of orange in the sand. “I was afraid of that.” Shadows gathered around them, and laughter traveled down the beach toward the place where we stood. The laughter gave me hope. “What if there wasn’t a choice? And not because we couldn’t negotiate a truce with the App World, but because . . .” I trailed off.
“Skylar, what?”
“Because the App World was . . . is no longer safe. Not just because of the border patrols.” There. I’d said it. The claim The App World is dying echoed in my head.
“You did plug in,” Andleeb whispered.
I nodded. “The news isn’t good.”
Andleeb reached for my hand. “I’m listening.”
“I’m going to need all the help I can get with the refugees.” An idea was forming as I spoke. “I think we need to identify ambassadors from among the refugees to be go-betweens, both to help with the Keepers resisting your presence and to help smooth the transition to life in the Real World.” I squeezed Andleeb’s hand. “Do you think you and Rasha might be up for such a role?” My question hung in the evening air—the only sound around us was a seagull crying overhead.
The Mind Virus Page 15