Prison Princess

by Huss, JA

  “Where did you come from, Brigit?” Valor’s repeated question breaks the search I’m running inside my head and I refocus my eyes on his face.

  Tray says, “Brigit, do you remember anything? About before?”

  “Before when?” I try to laugh it off, but there’s a creeping sensation of uncomfortable sickness inside me. And both Valor and Tray are looking at me with some kind of laser focus. So I say, “I mean… I think I’ve been inside this place a thousand years, you guys. I barely remember the day we arrived here.”

  Tray tilts his head like he’s confused. “What?”

  I shrug. “There’s just a lot of stuff inside me, you know? I don’t… I can’t keep it all. I have to pack it up every once in a while. Put it away in storage.”

  “Brigit,” Valor says. “We didn’t come here together.”

  Then it’s my turn to be confused. “What?”

  “You were here first,” Tray says. “I found you inside the Pleasure Prison.”

  “Pleasure Prison?” I laugh. “Sounds like a fetish club in the city.”

  “It’s not funny,” Valor snaps. “We’re asking you a question, OK?”

  “I get it,” I say. “Sorry. I’m not trying to joke. It’s just… I don’t remember a place called the Pleasure Prison.”

  “When did we meet?” Tray asks.

  “You and I?” I say, pointing to myself. “Has there been a time when we didn’t know each other?”

  “We need to go,” Valor says. “Right now, Tray. We need to go right now. This is a trap. She’s a trap.”

  “What are you talking about?” And now I’m starting to get pissed. “What started all this? All I did was walk down to the water for a swim. I wasn’t even gone long. But you two have obviously lost your minds.”

  Tray is staring at me. Frowning. Deeply frowning.

  “Now, Tray. Pull us out now!”

  “Out where?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

  Tray walks over to me and places a hand on my arm. “Brigit,” he says. “Where are we?”

  “What?” I can’t hold down the laugh this time. It’s so ridiculous. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Where are we?” he repeats. And this time he squeezes my arm just a little too hard.

  I jerk my arm out of his grip and take a step back. “We’re at home, you dumbass. What the hell is wrong with you two?”

  “Where is home?” Tray asks. “What is this place called?”

  I open my mouth to answer and find… I don’t have one. My brows furrow as I look for that memory. What is this place called?

  I look around at the house, and the forests and the sand, and the ocean, and it’s all familiar. I live here. This is my home. The sun is starting to set so off in the distance I can see the lights of the city called… “That’s…” I point at it.

  But I don’t remember the name.

  “Something’s wrong with me,” I whisper. “I can’t remember what the city is called.”

  “Do you know where you are?” Valor asks. “Where are you, Brigit?”

  “I’m here,” I say. I almost smile again. But… the questions are so stupid. “I am here.”

  “Where’s here?” Valor asks.

  “This is a shutdown sequence,” Tray says. I know what those words mean, but they don’t have any meaning to me. “It’s a shutdown sequence,” he repeats. “She’s shutting down.”

  Both of them are close to me now and I don’t know how that happened. One moment Valor was over there, and now he’s here, in front of me. He takes my hand. Gently. Doesn’t squeeze it. Just holds it.

  “Brigit?” he asks calmly, gently. “Who built that city?”

  I look at it off in the distance. Smile, because it makes me feel happy for some reason. “People,” I say, confident that this is the right answer. “I don’t know them personally but—”

  “OK, we gotta go,” Tray says. “Valor, stare at the sun. Concentrate on it until it’s burning your eyes, and picture yourself back on the ship. Waking up in the cryopod.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? What’s a cryopod?”

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” Valor says.

  And then he disappears.

  Just… disappears.

  “What the fuck! Where did he go?” I spin around, looking at Tray. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s over,” he says, sadly. “They tricked you, Brigit. They tricked me too.”

  “What?”

  “We’re in a virtual reality, remember? We built this place, Brig. You and me. We made that city. Valor and I came in here to break you out. We pulled your body from the middle of space, brought you on to our ship, and we were about to wake you up when Valor wanted to go inside, just for a moment, to meet you, and see our world.”

  I’m shaking my head no this whole time. “No. That’s… impossible. That’s stupid. That’s—”

  “I’m leaving now,” Tray says.

  “Why? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand because we’ve triggered your shutdown protocol and your mind is being wiped.” He takes both of my hands in his. “But don’t worry. I’ll wake you up back on the ship and pull you out of cryogenic sleep, and then… it’s all going to be OK.” He places one hand on my cheek and stares into my eyes. “Trust me, OK? I will take care of you. And… you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t know. It’s going to be fine. You just need to wake up. We all just need to wake up. I’ll pull you out and we’ll be together again in the real, OK? Do you understand me?”

  He’s shaking me. And then a flash of light blazes, blinding me so I have to close my eyes. And then time is spinning backwards. My life is spinning backwards. I see it. All of it. The house, the city, the lifetime we spent on the beach, the waterfall pool, Tray’s reappearance, the years and years I wandered the land with Valor at my side. The creation. The nothing. The old world. Draden. The community garden. Aieena. The café…

  Tray. Nothing but me and Tray.

  Everything spins backwards in time and I remember who and what I am.

  And the next thing I know is… everything.

  I know everything.

  But most importantly, I know what I am.

  I am nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - TRAY

  I come out of the virtual coughing and retching. Four days. I’ve never been inside so long, and now I know why. My body is on fire from the needles that have been embedded into my skin. I can’t even lift my arms to activate the screen and open the pod. But there’s an emergency button on the side of the pod. A built-in precaution meant for just such an occasion.

  I press it and there’s a long, long hiss of air as the top lifts up and away.

  It’s dark in the ship, so I can’t see anything beyond the dim glow of lights coming from the display above me.

  But I can hear Valor moaning next to me.

  “Valor,” I croak. My throat is so dry, my body so tired. And I feel emaciated. The pod is designed to feed you nutrients but I get the feeling that those ran out hours ago. Maybe as long as a day ago. My muscles feel weak, like atrophy was starting in from lack of movement.

  What the fuck was I thinking? I know better. Why the hell did I allow us to stay inside so long?

  We could’ve died in there. Well, Valor could’ve died. I’m not sure what would’ve happened to me if this body gave out, but it would’ve been bad.

  There are no precautions attached to these pods the way we have back on Harem when people go inside the Pleasure Prison. No one looking out for us like ALCOR, or the people in the control room.

  I could’ve killed Valor.

  “I’m here,” he hisses back. “I feel like…” His voice is low, gravelly. Like he needs to cough and clear his throat. Just listening to him gives me the urge to cough. “I feel like shit,” he finally says.

  “We were inside too long. I’m fucking sorry, dude. I don’t—”

  “Help me get up, Tray.
I can’t fucking move.”

  “One second,” I say. But it’s a lot longer than a second before I can sit up. And then I have to rest and press a button on the screen for an emergency injection of adrenaline just to be able to swing my legs out and place my feet on the floor.

  I don’t attempt to stand. Just hang my head and breathe as the adrenaline surges through my bloodstream.

  How the fuck did I let this happen?

  By the time I’m able to stand Valor is sitting up. He probably found the emergency adrenaline too. I brace my hands on the pod and face him. “Are you OK?”

  He nods, trying to take deep breaths.

  It takes me almost a full minute to make my way around the other side of my pod and reach him. I hold his arm as he stands, and then we look at each other.

  What is he thinking?

  What am I thinking?

  What the fuck just happened?

  We just lived several lifetimes as lovers. That’s what just happened.

  “Don’t kiss me,” Valor says.

  I just blink at him. “What?”

  “I need to swallow a scrubbing pod for my fucking teeth, dude.”

  Even if I wanted to stop the laugh, I couldn’t. So it comes out. “Fuck, you’re so stupid, Valor. We’re in a spin node. Time isn’t passing.”

  “Yeah, well. Tell that to the film on my fucking teeth. And time wasn’t supposed to be passing in there either, but you know what I think?”

  I look at him for a moment. His neck and arms have pinpricks of purple bruises all over where the needles were. “What?”

  “I think time passes no matter what.”

  “Of course time passed,” I say. “It just went really fast in there.”

  “No, the spin node, dude. I think we fucked up.” Then he turns his head to look at Brigit’s pod. “I think she’s—”

  “I know,” I say, putting up a hand. Because I do know. She’s a trap. Just like Lyra. Just like Nyleena, and Corla, and Delphi, and whoever else is out there waiting for us. “I get it,” I say. Because Valor has gone quiet. “But we’re still pulling her out.” I glance up at him to see if he’s going to fight me on this.

  He clenches his jaw, looks over at Brigit’s pod, then back at me, and shrugs. “Yeah. We have to. Doesn’t even matter if she’s a trap. She’s our trap.”

  I let out a long breath of air when he says that. Because it answers a lot of the unasked questions inside my head.

  What are we? Back to being brothers? Will we stay lovers? Will we ever be the way it was inside the virtual?

  And ‘she’s our trap’ answers most of those questions. Who knows what’s coming next. Who cares? We’re in this together now. That’s what he’s saying.

  “OK,” I say. “Then let’s do this.”

  I feel a lot better than I did a few minutes ago, but just to be sure I walk over to the auto pharmacy and punch in a code for an energy rejuvenation drink.

  I get two, hand one to Valor once he makes his way over to the closest medical console and slumps into a chair, and we gulp them down greedily.

  “There’s a medical procedure in the database,” I tell him. “Cryogenic wake-up. Find it while I check her pod and make sure everything’s cool.”

  Valor spins in the seat to face the screen, then starts tapping away like this is all normal.

  When I walk back to Brigit’s pod I feel much better than I did a few minutes ago. But also much worse.

  Because my brain is working right again and I cannot, for the fucking life of me, understand how I thought staying inside that virtual for all that time was a good idea.

  I know better. There is no one in this fucking universe who knows the rules of virtual reality better than I do. Everything inside is based off a rule. And the rules are nothing but equations, and physics, and code.

  The sun makes heat because that’s the rule. The ocean smells like salt because that’s the rule. Trees grow, and things move, and stars appear at night because all of that is based on rules.

  Even here, in this world, everything happens based on rules. Biology is nothing but rules. Code runs the universe. And if there’s one thing I get, it’s code.

  But. That code in there? It wasn’t mine.

  It was Brigit’s.

  She wiped my code away and took all my rules with it. And she made her own code, and her own rules, and when I got there, it had all taken hold already. Almost indistinguishable from the world I made.

  A trap.

  The messages that came in just after Valor went inside.

  That was where it started. That was how this happened. I left her in there with Valor and she used that time to create a fake world so believable, even I’d fall for it.

  At least that’s what I tell myself. The other answer is… I fell in love with a spy, got so caught up in it I almost killed us inside a virtual, and now I only think I’ve figured it out because I’m trying to convince myself that my brain hasn’t been hacked.

  That’s the truth I’m facing.

  “Found it,” Valor says.

  I tap the small screen on Brigit’s cryopod, bringing it to life. Then cycle through the diagnostics, looking for anomalies.

  Normal. Nothing out of place.

  But everything seems wrong right now.

  There’s this Jax Justice vid, the one they filmed on Harem Station several years ago. Crux was pretty excited about that. He kinda loves the current guy who plays Jax these days. But that screen was about a long con. Jax wasn’t the confidence man, he was the mark. And you didn’t even know it was a con until the black moment near the end and then they did this flashback sequence that showed where everything lined up and how everything went wrong. And Jax realizes that he was a fool. That he fell for the whole stupid scheme.

  And then of course, he breaks free, kicks ass, and the hero saves the day.

  That’s how I feel.

  Except I’m no hero and I wasn’t sent to save the day.

  This entire mission was off-record. I’m fucking rogue, right now. And not only am I rogue, but I was tricked into going rogue.

  I was conned.

  I believed her. I really did. I loved her. But she’s playing a part in this. She has to be. How else do I explain what just happened?

  “It’s not her fault,” Valor says.

  I sigh, bracing my hands on the top of her cryopod. It’s fucking cold, still. Frozen like the ice of a comet. I look over my shoulder at him. He’s a fucking mess. Hair flattened to the sides of his head like a helmet. All those bruises from the needles. His eyes are sunken in. Not as bad as they were a few minutes ago before the drink, but they’re hollow and there are dark circles underneath.

  I almost killed him.

  “I’m only gonna say this once, OK?” My words come out in a low whisper.

  Valor stares back at me for a moment, confused. “OK.”

  “We.”

  He smiles. It’s crooked, and not the typical Valor smile that I’ve become used to since we met as kids. But it’s true and real. And my heart hurts a little because of that.

  “We come first,” I say, finishing my thought. “Always and forever. I fucked up, Valor. I fucked everything up.”

  “We’re fine. It’s all good,” he says.

  But it’s not. I can feel it. Everything about this is deeply wrong. I am Jax in that moment when all the events in the vid go spiraling backwards to the point of origin and he realizes where he made his first mistake.

  My first mistake was hooking ALCOR up to the galactic web.

  That’s where it all went wrong.

  That’s the point of origin for me.

  And that was twenty-one fucking years ago.

  “I’m gonna start it,” Valor says. It comes out like a warning.

  “Hold on,” I say. I wipe my hand across Brigit’s faceplate glass, trying to see inside. It comes away wet with condensation, but the ice is on the inside. So I don’t get a better view.

  I can see her. I know
she’s in there. The shadowed outline of a cheek, and a nose, and an eye.

  I grab the connector that hooked her into the medical system, twist it, and release it.

  Alarms go off. Her vital signs go flat and the screen monitoring her begins to flash red.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Valor asks.

  “Unhooking her from my virtual,” I say, walking over to Valor’s pod. I unhook that one too, then the pod I was in. I go back to the console where Valor is sitting and remove the data core that contains our world. The one we lived in for so long.

  I want to smash it. I want to break it in half.

  But I know better. I put it in my pocket.

  “I thought you wanted to run the wake-up protocol?” Valor asks.

  “I do,” I say, walking back to Brigit’s pod. “Because I need to know. I need to see her in the real and ask her all the questions. But I won’t give her access to my ship.”

  Every pod comes with a localized wake-up protocol built in. They’re not reliable, or even very safe. But they all have one.

  And that’s how I want Brigit to come out of her long sleep.

  I want to be able to contain her, should the need arise.

  Unhooked from everything and everyone.

  Alone.

  The pod screen is blinking at me now. Wake Up? it asks.

  I take one more look over at Valor, pausing to see if he’s got any better ideas or if he’s just gonna let me take care of things my way.

  He shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “Just… whatever. Do it. Wake her up. We need to know what’s going on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - BRIGIT

  “Can you hear me, Brigit?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I can hear you.”

  “Good.” There’s relief in the voice. “I want you to wake up now.”

  “I am awake.”

  “No, Brig. You’re not. You’ve been fighting me for a long time. But whatever had a hold on you is gone now and I really need you to wake up and tell me what’s going on.”

  I struggle with this. I feel like I’m awake but my eyelids are so heavy and immovable. Like I can’t keep them open and all I want to do is close them and go back to sleep.