Breach

by Eliot Peper

  Block after block flew by in a blurred fugue, dog walkers and shops and bicycles and pigeons and lonely-looking park benches. Emily was tunneling into this cursed city, letting cars swerve around her as she dashed across busy streets, ignoring the protestations of fellow pedestrians.

  Her feed pinged.

  Javier.

  Emily swiped it away.

  Ping.

  Javier again.

  This time, she blocked him entirely.

  Ping.

  Diana.

  Swipe.

  Ping.

  Block.

  The goddamn feed was everywhere. It piloted the cars that refused to hit her, ferried the messages she didn’t want to read, and powered the streetlights that glowed like bioluminescent fish in the fog. It was always there in the background, a genie ready to grant any wish, a speakeasy where global conversation hummed like an antique diesel generator. The world was a junkie and Commonwealth was its dealer, supplanting bankers, heads of state, and everyone else whose product was less potent. It knew the contents of every scientific paper ever published, and it knew you better than you knew yourself. It was closing in on Emily like the walls of the elevator, and she wanted to get out.

  Block. Block. Block. Block. Block.

  Emily shut her feed off from everyone and everything. Consigned herself to digital solitary confinement. She dismissed it entirely, closing every window through which Rachel’s brainchild shone down on her, save for the music whose beats were her lifeline. She wanted out. Out. But there was no such thing as out. The only true exit was the one she had sought in the ring.

  “Ma’am?”

  An enormous man in a suit held out a meaty arm to stop her from barreling into him. Emily reeled. Her lungs burned. Her legs were numb. Wait, had she seen this giant before? Was this yet another loop? Could she be wandering her own version of the corridors that had trapped Vasilios? Her sanity was fraying.

  “Hey, Gerald,” said the giant to his besuited partner, “can you just give the boss lady a quick heads-up?”

  Sweat stung Emily’s eyes. Her train of thought jumped the rails. Give who a heads-up?

  “All right, ma’am,” said the giant in a gentle tone that was at odds with his imposing physique. “Come right this way. We’ll get you sorted.”

  She had to stop herself from spinning away and dislocating his shoulder when he put a massive hand on her upper back and guided her through a door.

  “Ms. Kim,” said a gorgeous apparition, another déjà vu–inspiring member of this fever dream’s cast. “Welcome back. This is a little unusual, but we’ll put you down as a guest of the house.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Red satin parting in front of her. Oil lamps smoldering. Golden hunting dogs lounging in front of a roaring fire. The low buzz of conversation punctuated by laughter. Monumental tapestries depicting scenes from her father’s fairytales. Glasses clinking. The languid chords of live blues guitar covering a deeper silence, the feed in abeyance.

  Analog.

  Nell guided Emily to the bar, made sure she was steady on her stool, raised a manicured finger.

  “Virginia, can we get a mineral water over here?”

  “And a whiskey,” said Emily. “Three fingers. Neat.”

  Virginia looked at Nell, who raised her eyebrows.

  Emily pulled up her sleeve, displaying the bandages beneath. “My meds are wearing off.”

  Nell shrugged. Virginia delivered both drinks.

  Emily sipped the water. She hadn’t even realized how parched her throat was.

  “I have to get back to the door,” said Nell. “But let us know if you need anything. Anything at all, okay? We can call the house doctor if you’d like.”

  “Thanks,” said Emily. “But I’m good. This is good. Really.” She tapped the side of the whiskey glass and forced a smile. “Just the prescription I need.”

  Nell looked at her for a long moment and Emily was afraid she might decide to babysit, but she turned on her heel and strode back to the anteroom.

  Emily slugged the whiskey.

  Feedlessness was an indescribable relief, like ears finally equalizing to a painful change in air pressure. She was here at this bar on this stool in this body with this aftertaste of single malt searing her throat. It jacked up her senses, cleared her head, primed her for Camiguin-conditioned combat.

  You’ve always got a place here, you know. I wasn’t kidding about helping to run this joint. She shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Rizal’s offer. She was a fool. She had managed to convince herself that she had changed, that she could change. She had waltzed back into her old life and it had taken less than two weeks for her to push things too far, to find a new way to stab her friends in the back.

  Virginia poured her another drink.

  Emily had become enamored with herself. She remembered the cool greenery of Addis, her tantalizing first steps into Rosa’s apartment, Otto nestled in tousled sheets. It was supposed to be an emergency rescue mission. That was all. Once Rosa was safe, Emily would fade into the background. But no. She had to let Javier convince her to share her story. She had to let Diana convince her to double down. She remembered watching that red balloon floating up into the sky over the Berkeley hills and reaching out to take Javier’s hand. She had to let the big hearts of her too-generous friends convince her she was worthy of their love, that she was capable of redemption.

  She downed the whiskey.

  How could Emily deny the simple fact that she did nothing but sow pain? Actions spoke louder than words. As soon as she saw the sliver of a chance of forgiveness, what did she do? She pushed harder. She let her drive get in the way of her common sense. It wasn’t enough to have her friends back. She had to change the world too. So she jumped in with an argument that wasn’t hers to make and ripped the scab off a wound that had never truly healed. By revealing her friends’ secrets she had doomed their dreams and doubtless ousted them from their privileged positions. And why should it stop at turmoil within Commonwealth? If Lowell was to be believed, she might even have sparked a war. Maybe this catastrophe was really just the calm before the storm.

  Emily called for another whiskey.

  “Time to slow down, sister,” said Virginia, adjusting her bow tie.

  “Nah,” said Emily, trying her best to suppress her surging buzz and summon a roguish grin. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a heavyweight. Can’t even taste it until the third dram.”

  Virginia looked at her sidelong, but poured another.

  Despite Rizal’s offer, Emily couldn’t return to Camiguin. Diana knew that was where Emily had flown in order to catch Lowell’s ride without arousing suspicion. Freja and the rest of the cabal knew everything about her shadow life, and Lowell had bought the damn fight club. It wasn’t a big island. Emily would be easy to find. An overwhelming nostalgia for her shabby studio apartment washed over her. She had hated the place until circumstance forbade reclaiming it. She couldn’t return to Emily’s old life and she couldn’t return to Pixie’s, so she’d need to find a new rock to hide under.

  The prospect was exhausting. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to wither away and die. Emily let out an anguished giggle. Maybe she could just go curl up next to those dogs by the fire and never wake up. The world would be better off without her.

  Glancing over at the hearth, she was reminded of the legendary Southern California wildfire. The feed footage was riveting disaster porn. Flames turning all the colors of the rainbow as they gorged on chemical plants, smoke clogging the skies of the entire Southwest, steel skeletons of downtown buildings glowing as they shed apartments and offices, desperate refugees seeking sanctuary wherever they could find it. Emily identified the location of her childhood home by its GPS coordinates, but the satellite stream revealed it to be just another indistinguishable scar in the mountains of ash.

  Emily had spent her entire life fleeing wreckage. Why stop now?

  She drained the glass, immediately
regretted slamming it back on the bar.

  A hand touched her arm without warning.

  Emily spun on the stool, kicking her legs off the bar and whipping her torso around to add juice to the punch, lashing out with all her anger and shame, realizing her error too late to soften the blow.

  Nell stumbled back, clutching her broken nose. Blood poured between her fingers, bright red under the warm light of the oil lamps. Emily had a flash of absurd satisfaction at sticking it to the proprietor of this elite club that had turned disconnection into privilege, before dismissing the uncharitable thought. Who was she to judge Nell, who had shown Emily nothing but respect? Who was she to judge anyone but herself? Drunk on self-righteousness, Emily had hijacked people’s lives by cracking their feeds. She had murdered people in the ring in a failed attempt to escape her own guilt. She had lost both her honor and her friends, not once, but twice. Breaking Nell’s nose was just another stone to add to the wrong side of the scale.

  Virginia swore. The dogs barked. The room swam.

  Too much whiskey.

  Too much everything.

  When the giants came for her, Emily didn’t resist, only babbled incoherent apologies.

  CHAPTER 37

  The stars danced. They jumped and twirled and zigzagged across the sky, crackling green and orange and purple and all the colors of Tokyo nightlife. They smelled like kettle corn and sang a cappella and nothing could be more beautiful.

  Emily twisted the knob, zooming in. But instead of bringing the stars into focus, she was launched into them. Gas giants flared and belched. Icy asteroids made pilgrimages across vast expanses of nothingness. Nebulas hung luminous and thick as aurorae borealis. Moons raced circles around the planets that held them hostage. Red dwarfs smoldered. Black holes sucked at the fabric of space-time. Galaxies folded in on themselves like celestial origami.

  It was all so . . . big. The sheer scale was impossible to fathom, as if some cosmic deity was pouring an ocean into the teacup of her mind. It was exquisite and fearsome, this overflowing of so much more than she could ever contain. She was sucking for air in the face of an impossibly strong wind.

  “Once upon a time . . .”

  “Come on, appa,” she said. “I’ve heard this one before.”

  “It gets better every time.”

  She peeled her eye away from the rubber eyepiece with a sucking sound.

  Sand underfoot, scratching between her toes. She was standing in the cave underneath Lowell’s mansion, alone in the middle of the room. The stream was dry, the water-polished rocks in its bed gleaming dully.

  It was quiet at first, uncannily so. Then something teased at the very edge of her hearing, but no matter how she strained her ears, she couldn’t identify it. She knelt and rubbed a handful of sand between her palms. Was that a gasp? A grunt? She went to push her lucky glasses up her nose, but they weren’t there. She looked around, but there was nobody. Just the empty stone benches and rough rock walls.

  That was definitely another gasp. And a grunt. And a scream. And laughs and moans and shrieks and whimpers and sighs and squeals and the wet slaps of flesh on flesh. She could smell sweat and maple syrup and roasted jalapeño and cum. The air was viscous, and she could feel the Earth’s molten core churning beneath her feet.

  The cave was still empty, but the sounds were getting louder and louder, more and more graphic, until they were so loud they were splitting her head in half and she was covering her ears and screaming but couldn’t hear herself over the din. It was torture until she decided it was lovely and then it was fine but she still couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

  She walked across the sand, and the grains her feet disturbed floated away as if her touch granted a temporary suspension of the laws of physics. Pain flared as her shin ran into the edge of the first tier of stone benches. She climbed, but even though there were only three tiers, they rose up before her like alpine massifs and she had to scale each bench as if it were a cliff, stretching to grasp slippery handholds.

  When she reached the top, she looked back to see the view from the mountainous peak, but she was still in the cave and had summited nothing but three knee-high benches.

  The sounds were louder, though, a cataract of ecstatic howls rattling her bones and echoing inside her skull and lighting a fire in her belly.

  She raised a hand and touched the rough wall of the cave. Dust came away on her fingers. She touched the wall again, rubbed her hand across it. It was like wiping condensation off a mirror, except it revealed not her own reflection but the long curve of a naked hip painted on the rock beneath. She rubbed back the other way and there was the calf, the delicate ankle. Then both her hands were on the wall and she was scrubbing madly, dashing around the wall to reach every surface, filling the air with choking dust, all to unveil a single massive cave painting, a painting that moved, dozens and dozens of people in the throes of desperate, indiscriminate lovemaking.

  The closer she looked, the more detailed they became until she recognized Dag and Rizal and Freja and Barend and Rachel and Dane and Frances and Ferdinand and Nisanur and Ms. Randolph and Javier and Diana and Lowell and Florence and Niko and Carolyn and Midori and Liane and Baihan and Vasilios and Jason and the courier kidnappers and her mother and father and the fire dancers and everyone she had ever known, ever met, ever glimpsed and then they weren’t a painting at all but an orgy of teeming, heaving flesh that filled the cave and she was one of them and she was all of them and she was none of them and she blinked and she was alone.

  No, not alone.

  There was Rosa. Clothed, thankfully, and sitting cross-legged in the sand.

  Silence at maximum volume.

  Emily leapt, flying through the air until she considered the implausibility of the maneuver and fell to the sand at the speed of thought.

  Rosa’s eyes were closed and her hands rested on her knees.

  Emily knelt in front of her.

  “There’s so much I want to tell you,” said Rosa, and her voice was the growl of a jungle cat, but Emily could understand every word.

  Emily mirrored Rosa’s cross-legged posture, and their knees touched.

  The burble of water on rock.

  Emily looked over and saw the stream was flowing again, but when she traced the water to its source, it sprang not from the bowels of the mountain but from her own tear ducts, pouring down her cheeks over her legs and onto the sand.

  “You’re such a crybaby,” said Rosa, and her feline snarl was affectionate.

  As Emily’s tears gushed out faster and faster, the stream overflowed its banks and the water began saturating the sand.

  “I can’t stop.” Emily laughed.

  “You’re such a crybaby,” repeated Rosa.

  The water level rose over their knees, waves bouncing off the stone benches.

  “I can’t stop.” Emily wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “You’re such a crybaby,” said Rosa, and although her inflections hadn’t changed at all, they were suddenly disturbing instead of tender.

  Tears flowed and flowed and flowed and the water reached their chests. Emily wanted to move, but she was frozen in place.

  “I can’t stop,” she said with growing horror.

  “You’re such a crybaby,” growled Rosa.

  And then the water surged over their heads and filled the entire cave, leaving no pocket of air behind. It tasted of caramel and thunderbolts. It didn’t sting her eyes. She and Rosa floated, arms limp, lungs burning, bubbles streaming up from their faces.

  They were drowning.

  She looked around for the door. If they could make it to the spiral staircase, they could escape, find the space to breathe. But no matter how she searched, she could not find the exit—the cavern walls were unbroken, just a circle of rough, suffocating stone.

  She completed her circle, trying to keep herself steady underwater, mind racing, seeking an answer to an impossible problem, reaching beyond the infinity that she had glimpsed th
rough the telescope, and Rosa opened her eyes wide and instead of irises there were fractals sprouting out of her dilated pupils and the geometric shapes branched and multiplied, sending tendrils out onto Rosa’s skin and then into the water, filling the cave like a three-dimensional self-replicating spiderweb woven not from silk but from shining strands of what gold dreams itself to be.

  And then the intricate matrix grew into itself, tangling in ever-increasing density, and as all the empty spaces filled, the color deepened from gold to pink to the red of light shining through closed eyelids and Emily tasted bile and her eyes snapped open and she spat out the boozy vomit she had been choking on.

  CHAPTER 38

  Incredibly, there was a small trash bin within reach, and Emily managed to puke into it, spitting and gasping for breath as she barreled into consciousness. She was lying on a cot in a small room. There was a pitcher of water, a washcloth, and half a baguette on a side table. Thick candles caked in layer upon layer of baroque wax drippings threw flickering light over everything.

  Emily sat up slowly.

  Memories swam beneath the murky surface of her attention, but she bid them stay there a little longer. Instead, she dipped the washcloth in the pitcher and wiped her face and the back of her neck. It was a cool blessing, the air feeling fresh and clean against her wet skin. She drank directly from the pitcher, water dribbling down her chin. Her temples throbbed and her balance wavered, but she took a deep breath and steadied herself. Ripping off a piece of baguette, she chewed on the fresh sourdough, washing it down with more water. More bread, more water. The basic ingredients of life.

  Rising to her feet, Emily felt insubstantial. Her body ached. Her stomach rumbled. Dark thoughts ascended into her mind like whales preparing to breach.

  Movement. Movement was life.

  She was a little wobbly on her feet, but she’d be okay.

  She opened the door and stuck her head out. A hallway connecting to other hallways. Torches smoldering in wall brackets. Sounds of distant conversation, clattering dishes, movement. She began to explore, glancing into any open doors she passed. There was a supply closet, a suite of cubbies, and what looked like a lounge.