Since that afternoon when Corina and I kissed, I keep going back to my first time in the Jungle when I nearly fell into Corina’s strand. That time, I freaked out and ran away, but ever since I broke the drain cover I haven’t needed to sneak into the glide rooms to go to the Jungle, so I’ve been exploring. I think it may be a way for me and Corina to get some time together.
I get up and check the door, and then return to the bed. I don’t know what’s going to happen when we connect, so I’m nervous, but whatever happens, it won’t be worse than having no contact at all.
I look at the clock on the wall. It’s time. I dive.
Corina’s taking my scheduled place with Paul. I’ve watched people witness before and I know that even if they don’t hear the Jungle, they come down here when they go under. I can tell from their music.
I watch Paul’s music while he and Corina are in the chamber. Paul is easy for me to identify, because his music sounds so much like him. His rhythm is fast like Maddie’s, but unlike hers, Paul’s is consistent too—he never seems to get agitated or upset.
Paul sounds like the young country guitar players he likes so much.
There’s a flash of color as he crosses down onto his path and travels through the Jungle. When he gets to his target, his music shrinks down until it’s thin like fishing line. I can barely see it. Paul is witnessing.
I wait. Paul’s thread expands again. For a brief moment between the witnessing and when he surfaces, Paul becomes huge and bright to me.
Everybody has their own theme—a recurring refrain that comes from just them. Paul’s is twangy and warm. Someday I want to write down his melody and give him the sheet music to his own song. I think he’d really like that.
When he shrinks back down to normal human music I know he’s woken up.
I prepare myself, wait for Corina.
Her music is the most beautiful I’ve heard in the Jungle. Sometimes she’s like an orchestra, with music that scatters across clefs with shifting time signatures that reminds me of the free jazz stuff our teacher played us in music appreciation. Other times she’s nearly silent, flashes of sound like distant thunder.
But just like everybody, there’s always a part of her personal refrain playing somewhere, too. A single snatch of notes that cycles in every thread, each unique and identifiable.
Another thing I’m going to have to write down someday.
Minutes later, Corina’s thread blows up as she descends into the Jungle on the way to her target. I dive into her.
Her gravity takes me, pulls me in. She grows immense as I close in, but somehow I feel like I’ve grown, too, like we’re going to envelop each other equally.
A part of my presence bridges the gap between us, then more of me follows. Then all of me.
When we meet it’s like I’ve landed on her breath.
I can feel her all around me. It’s not like witnessing—I’m not looking through her eyes and sensing through her. It’s both more than that and less than that—there’s no facts or anything, it’s just like I suddenly have all her possibilities in my heart.
When I witness, I’m still me and I can think about other things when I’m perched. I’ve still got a sense of what I want and who I am, but when I’m wrapped in Corina’s music, it’s like I am her. I understand everything. I feel her fears and I feel her hopes. It’s not like knowledge—it’s bigger than that.
It is deeper than knowledge. It feels like total and complete . . .
Love.
And we are together.
New music. New sounds. A mix of us, a mash-up.
A new song.
I leave myself open and feel her. She is exploring me and I am exploring her. She is knowing me in the same way that I am knowing her.
Harmony.
We disentangle. She has to witness now. I feel her go, but I still feel her with me and I know that I’m still with her, too.
It’s what I hoped. More, even.
I have to float up and be me again. When I surface, I’m ready to feel like I’ve been cut in half, but it doesn’t happen.
I can still feel her. Even out in the real world. We are connected. Partnered.
It’s nearly dinnertime when I see Corina. She lowers herself slowly onto the chair next to mine on the patio. “What the hell?” she whispers. I can feel her fear and excitement. They make it hard for me to breathe.
Suddenly entangling without telling her ahead of time seems like a really stupid idea. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, but she waves me off.
“I don’t want an apology, Plugzer, I want an explanation.”
An explanation is the one thing I don’t have. “I found you in the Jungle.”
She holds her hand up to stop me. “I know you,” she whispers. “I went under and then there you were and I know you.”
Fear slips back. She’s blown away. I know because I can feel it.
I feel relief. She smiles, nods. “Not mad, just a little . . .” She doesn’t finish.
I love you. I don’t say it. I don’t think it. I just feel it because it’s true and it’s more powerful than any other feeling I have.
She feels me feel it and I feel her feel it. I reach for her. She comes to me and we hold each other for only a short moment. Perfection.
Forty-Three
Keep ur bags packed.
I’m standing on the patio by the wall, looking out at the view and thinking about the email from Cassandra when Corina calls to me. “I see you, Plugzer. In every single way, I see you.”
I freeze. “See me what?” I walk over slowly, trying to turn my thoughts away from my fear of having to run. Now that Corina and I can communicate, we’re not just in each other’s hearts, we’re in each other’s business. Corina feels me now, knows I’m hiding something. She can feel me being more watchful than I need to be. She can feel my pangs of anxiety when thoughts about the email from Cassandra or what my Voice said bubble up.
“See you standing.” She smiles up at me. “See you thinking.”
Her smile makes me smile. She flops down on a couch by the fire pit and I slide down onto it next to her, our legs touching, our shoulders touching. If someone walked in they would probably think we were sitting a little too close, but right now it’s worth it just to feel her heat, the resilience of her body. “What am I thinking?” I ask.
“If I knew what you were thinking all the time there wouldn’t be any need to talk to you, would there?”
“You’d still talk to me.”
She raises her eyebrows. “I would?”
I nod. “I’m too good-looking to ignore.”
She starts to laugh, then gets serious. “I’ll give you that.” Her hand sneaks onto my leg and squeezes. “But I still want to know what’s bothering you.”
“It’s . . . nothing.” She stares at me. “Something that happened in Vegas.”
She bunches up her face. “Someday, when this shit’s all through and we’re back to real life, you are going to tell me everything. You know that, right?”
Bring your girlfriend, too.
I nod. “Yeah.”
She scoots away from me, turns to look at me square in the eyes. “There!” She points at me. “Right there. It’s about me. I know it has something to do with me because you got dark right there when I said that.” She starts to wag her finger. “I heard it.”
I shake my head hard. “It’s not about you, it’s . . .” But it is about her, at least partly. I sigh, look at her. I think about maybe telling her everything, but I can’t figure how—I wouldn’t even know where to begin. “I can’t tell you, but it’s not about you. It’s about us, this place, what’s coming.”
I feel her fear. It settles in over both of us like sweat.
“We’re gonna be okay,” I say, believing it when I say it so she’ll know it’s true.
“You and me are going to make it through. Together.” I work hard to try and fill myself with hope. “Trust me.”
She looks at me for a while. Her fear melts into uncertainty, which is slowly replaced by hope. “I do trust you, Plugzer. I trust you so much it scares me.”
It does scare her. I know because I’m scared, too.
Forty-Four
Last time I spent time with Jordan, she and Will created an email designed to be sent to reporters—and even to Jeffrey Sabazios himself—if she wasn’t able to make her speech.
My glides have been getting smaller, closer together in Jordan’s time as we lock in the important details we need while getting closer to her big day. When I first got Jordan as a glide target, the headphones told me what we needed her to do, but now that it’s approaching, it feels bigger than big. Soon, because of Jordan, the world won’t be able to ignore Incursions anymore. They won’t be able to ignore Live-Tech or Sabazios, either. Jordan and me are about to save the world.
I dive under. The dark and then the Jungle. I hesitate, but I don’t stop. My board takes me down the path. An off-ramp.
It feels different, though, like something’s wrong, but it’s too short to even become a real thought.
Darkness. Light.
Something is wrong.
No.
Everything is wrong—the colors are wrong, the sounds, the smells. There’s none of Jordan’s bright whites and pale colors. The smells and sounds smell and sound wrong for Jordan.
But they’re not wrong. They’re perfectly right. It’s as normal as if I’m looking through my own eyes.
I am looking through my own eyes.
Panic.
Not a feeling in my host, but a feeling in me on my perch. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to become a Time Zombie. I don’t want to know. I try to close my eyes. I try to surface, but something is holding on to me, keeping me locked in my own mind.
“It’s time. He’s here,” I hear my host self say.
I force myself to look, to feel, to hear, to sense what’s happening around me, but my host is blocking me from his memories. I’m in a room that looks like a bedroom, but it’s not here at the compound and it’s not back in LA—it’s somewhere new. It’s light outside, but the curtains are pulled. The room is ugly. It feels dirty, like a place that’s been used for too long by someone who’s too tired to care anymore. I smell coffee and I can feel blankets on one side and the pressure of a mattress on another.
There’s the warmth of someone’s skin pressed against my back. I can feel breath on my neck.
I’m naked.
“Your timing sucks,” somebody says. “Turn around.” Her name is Cassandra. It’s Cassandra, the girl from the picture, from the email.
We’re lovers. My host starts to turn, but I don’t want to look.
She’s got blond hair that’s streaked with red, blue, and purple, with black at the tips. Her lip is pierced, and so is her nose on both sides. Her eyes are intensely gray-blue. She’s smiling.
My host, my future me, is still blocking his own mind. I can’t tell anything about where I am or when. I start to fight him so I can learn more but he won’t let me in.
Where’s Corina?!
Don’t, he warns me. The less you know, the better.
“Hey, Plugzer,” she says coyly. She’s looking my host in the eyes and I can feel him warm by her. I can feel it in his privates.
Listen to what she says, my host says to me in our head. She’s going to save our lives. “He’s listening,” I hear my host tell her.
“Things aren’t what you think they are, Plugzie.” She props herself up on one elbow. “You’ve got to run away now. If you don’t get out you’re going to be put in stasis to preserve your witness memory.”
My host interrupts my train of thought. “He doesn’t get it, Cass—he doesn’t know about the stasis chamber. He still thinks people leave.”
Cassandra nods. She smiles and I think she’s beautiful. I can’t tell if it’s me on my perch or me as a host that thinks so, and then I realize that we both do. “There’s no going home, Plugzie. You’d all see right through that shit if you weren’t so desperate to believe it.” She makes a sad face like you do when you’re telling a child the truth about Santa. “When witnesses can’t glide anymore they’re told they’re done, but they don’t go home. They get frozen so there’s no chance that what they’ve seen won’t happen. They’re trapped in a permanent loop of the memories they witnessed—no sleep, no life, just memories over and over. When their last witnessed moments pass in real time . . . they’re killed.”
Calvin. The others I’ve heard about. Dead. Frozen. Letting us leave—when I think about it now—doesn’t really sit right. Even with memory wipes and memory implants, it would never work. The whole thing suddenly feels like a story for children, but at the time we all just nodded our heads and said, “Yup, he went home,” and forgot about it.
But if none of it’s real, then Richard . . .
IT’S NOT TRUE, I think. BISHOP WOULDN’T DO THAT. RICHARD WOULDN’T LET THAT HAPPEN. WE’RE TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD.
“He still believes in the project,” my host tells Cassandra. I can feel him grow sad. He’s lonely even though he’s in bed with Cassandra. “Keep going,” he says.
“Sabazios? The Gentry? They’re not the good guys,” she continues. “They’re trying to destroy us.”
WHY WOULD THEY WANT TO DESTROY US? WE’RE HELPING THEM.
“His mind’s blown. Slow down and explain.”
She nods. “The Gentry made the Locusts, Plugzie. Just like they made us.” She says it like I’m dumb and won’t understand. “They’re the Gentry’s farmers. The Locusts follow Gentry orders.” She props herself up a little further. “To you and everybody else right now, it plays like Live-Tech repels the Locusts, but that’s just pretend, man.” She wags a finger in our face. “It’s fucking kabuki theater, that’s all. Live-Tech doesn’t repel Locusts, it helps them find us—it activates like a beacon when it’s attached to a person. Think about it, were there any Locusts in your life before you touched Live-Tech? Those Incursions so far . . .” She trails off, looks like she has a question.
MY MOM AND DAD DIDN’T HAVE LIVE-TECH.
Bicycle Man, my host replies. You remember him—nearly hit us at the bottom of the hill. It was his Live-Tech that called it.
My host and I both remember the man at the same moment, a strange double-vision of the guy with the screen on his bike.
He did have Live-Tech, even commented on it.
Cassandra starts to talk again. “When is this for him? Like is it before Jordan . . . ?”
My host nods.
“Cool.” She smiles at me up in my perch. “Those Incursions in all those foreign countries that nobody believes? You go to where any of them happened, you’ll find Live-Tech nearby planted by one of Sabazios’s people.” She points at me. “Son, you’ve spent the last few months helping spread locator beacons around the world and locking in the apocalypse.”
On my perch, I flash on the woman in the cage. I try to make it make sense, but it’s just too much.
WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? THAT MAKES NO SENSE.
In response, my host self’s mind opens. A memory, vivid and awful. A body in a Locust cage. The same woman I saw before, but the cage is in a different place, a smaller room. There are Locusts there, three of them. They have their backs to me, focused on her.
The cage evaporates, leaving her exposed.
She tries to sit up. She struggles, but the Locusts reach out, each holding a part of her in place.
Their heads swivel in unison. Sickening full turns like the girl from The Exorcist. The pointed parts now point down toward the girl on the table.
The bear down on her, their razor-sharp heads penetrating the skin at her thigh, her stomach, and h
er chest.
She screams. It is loud and terrible, but it ends as quickly as it starts because while I watch, her body deflates like an air mattress, the skin pulling tight across the bones like a person dying from starvation. Then the bones themselves start to collapse and disappear, leaving only an empty bag of skin.
And then the skin itself begins to pull tight, to rip and separate, finally disappearing into the points of the Locusts.
When they’re done there is no trace of the woman.
There is no sign of her on the table. Not even a hair.
There is nothing on the table but a design: a pentagon with gray dots and a bright red triangle.
The Live-Tech logo, same as on the compound kitchen table.
“The Locusts are going to farm us. They’re going to farm us and process us, because they’re wet nurses for the Gentry,” my host tells me. “The nutrition they get from us will be passed on to Gentry babies.”
Cassandra doesn’t seem to know what I’ve just shown myself. She’s shaking her head. “The Gentry want to have their babies here. I’ll tell you the rest after we meet, but for now, what you need to know is that you’ve got to get out of the compound. Now.”
But you’re telling me this, and I’m here, so it’s not going to happen, I think, suddenly feeling better about my chances.
Only because we run, my host thinks to me. Be prepared—Bishop is going to come for you.
It’s hard to even think. All I can see is the woman, deflating.
Think! WHAT DO I DO?!
“Find your Voice. They don’t know about her.” Cassandra sits up a little more, leaning into my host. She’s serious now, looking earnestly at me through his eyes. Her energy is powerful, and both he and I feel like we’ve been chosen. “She’s your friend. She’ll lead you to Sybil.”
Strange Days Page 23