I narrowed my eyes at Penny. “You were spying on me?”
Penny’s face scrunched. “Kinda.”
“Okay… fine, so that’s the fort,” I said. “I tried to tell you guys about this already. That’s where I’ve been meeting with Clare, and—”
“Keep watching,” Penny said, almost gently. Her tone, and the way she was looking at me, only made my heart hammer faster.
“When did you film this? Before you got me out of the water?” I said. Penny nodded, her eyes flashing to me but then back to the screen.
Now I appeared on the video, climbing out from inside the fort. I stepped out of the rocks, moved a little ways, and then turned back around and moved my hands like I was talking. Then my body flinched, almost like something had shocked it, and then…
Sitting there at the table, I stared in disbelief.
The me on the video lifted his arms and made a circle with them. Like I was—
Hugging someone. That was when I hugged Clare, I thought.
Except on the screen, there was no one in front of me. The Will standing in this video was hugging thin air. “What’s going on?” I said, my voice hoarse. My thoughts felt jumbled. Maybe if this was from the first day, when she was a transmission, that would explain why she hadn’t shown up—but no. We’d hugged today. When she was solid. Real. “You doctored this!” I shouted. “You—”
“Will,” said Dad. “Calm down.”
“She didn’t doctor it,” said Mom, her eyes rimmed with tears. “Will, there’s no one there. You thought there was, but… there isn’t. I’m sorry.”
“No! Clare’s not some imaginary friend! She’s real! She—”
“I filmed you for a half hour,” said Penny. “You sat there in that rock space for the entire time, just moving your arms now and then like you were having a conversation, but no one was there.”
“Half an hour?” I said weakly. “Okay, but that was because Clare was showing me her ship, so it makes sense she wouldn’t have been there then—”
Penny had already started shaking her head emphatically. “I know you want to believe that, but I saw you there the whole time. Alone. I’m sorry—”
“No, she was—”
“We think this most likely has something to do with your infection,” said Judy.
“It does not!”
“Will!” Dad snapped. “Listen to us. Please.”
I felt like I was burning up, sitting there. I noticed Mom’s eyes narrowing at me and realized I was scratching my neck furiously. My hand snapped away.
Mom looked at Penny again. “Show him the rest of it.”
“The rest of what?” I said, but the idea that there was more made my insides start to shake.
Penny wore a grim expression. She tapped the tablet and played a piece of security footage. It showed me walking through the main corridor of the Jupiter, toward my compartment, still wearing my suit. “This is from yesterday when you came back, right before you talked to me and Judy and first mentioned Clare. Do you remember what you were doing here?”
“Yeah, I went to my room and changed, and then brought my suit down to the ionizer. What, are we going to watch me change now?”
Penny shook her head. “No, it’s right here.”
Just then, the me on the video, still in my suit, stopped in the middle of the hallway, right outside the cockpit. I looked over my shoulder, then peered around the corner ahead of me, like I was checking to see if anyone was around.
Sitting there watching this, my heart started to race even faster, because I had no memory of this, no idea at all what the me on the video was doing. How was that possible?
I watched myself bend down, pull something from the sample pocket on my suit, and place it in the corner of the floor. Then I tapped it. From the camera’s high angle, I couldn’t see what it was that I’d put down, but the only thing I’d had in that pocket was… the shell. But I’d brought that to my room and put it on my locker!
“Do you recognize that location?” Mom asked.
“In the hallway?” I said faintly.
“It’s right above the compartment where the circuits got fried,” said Don.
“So?” My voice was little more than a whisper. I could barely breathe. “I didn’t do anything in the hall. I—”
“Your friend Clare may not exist,” said Mom, “but you brought something back from that spot you discovered, didn’t you?”
“I… I mean, yeah, I brought back a shell, but I ran it through the sterilizer. It’s on my locker with my collection—”
“You mean this.” Judy stepped to the table and opened her hand. There was the small spiral seashell.
“Yeah!” I pointed at it. “See? It’s real, and it’s from that spot, just like everything else I’ve been telling you.”
But no one seemed relieved, their eyes darting to one another.
“What do you see in my hand?” Judy asked.
“What do you mean? The seashell! It’s right there.”
All of them exchanged looks again.
“Will, that’s not a seashell,” said Mom.
“Okay, fine, you mean like technically, it’s something else? Some other kind of crustacean or—”
Mom shook her head. “It’s not a sea creature. It’s not even organic.”
“What? What do you—”
“Will,” said Judy, “what I’m holding in my hand, what everyone else in this room sees right now, is a disc made of a metallic compound, an alloy of titanium and silicates that we’ve never encountered before.”
“Never seen before until yesterday,” said Don, “when we found it in the scans of that residue from the circuit boards. Remember that greenish stuff?”
I had no idea what to say. My brain felt like a hard drive stuck spinning.
“We need to know what you did with this,” said Mom. “Is this object what caused the power surge in the ship?”
“What? It’s just a seashell.” I pointed wildly to the video. “None of this is real! I…” My breathing was out of control. Tears were springing to my eyes. I looked back at the frozen image on the security footage, me crouched down even though I had no memory of doing that.… All of it felt like too much, didn’t make sense—
“Will,” said Mom. “Settle down.”
I realized that I had stood up, pushing the chair back without even knowing it. What is wrong with me? What was happening? I was losing control of my actions, my thoughts, my memories—
“I have to go,” I said, shaking my head. “Right now. If I don’t get back out to Clare, I can’t help her with her ship.” I started moving toward the door, not even thinking about what I was doing or saying, but words were spilling out anyway. “I’m just going to go back out there, okay? You don’t need to worry about me.”
“We can’t let you do that,” said Mom.
“I have to,” I said, scratching furiously at my arm. My balance felt off, my head absolutely burning, every inch of my body feeling like it was on fire. “I’ll go right now, and everything will be fine. You’ll see—”
Suddenly, Dad’s thick arms wrapped around me. “Will, you have to stay.”
I thrashed against him. “Let me go!” But his grip was too tight.
“Will, listen!” he shouted in my ear. “You have to listen to us. We want to make you better!”
“It’s that rash,” Judy said, raising her voice, too. “You’re infected with something. It’s affecting your mind. That’s got to be the explanation.”
“We know you wouldn’t lie to us,” said Mom. “At least not on purpose. We’re going to take you to the lab now to run some more tests and we’ll figure it out, okay?”
“No! I have to go!” I convulsed against Dad, tears running down my face, snot running from my nose. “Wait! Check the circuit board!”
“The what?” said Mom.
“I brought a circuit board back from Clare’s ship! It’s in my room, on the floor! I was working on it this afternoon!”
Mom glanced at Penny, her eyes skipping over me almost like she couldn’t look at me. Penny picked up the tablet and swiped her finger across the screen. When she put it back down, it showed the live security feed from my room. Penny had zoomed in so that you could see the square of floor by my bed. My backpack was lying there, along with the battery pack and connectors that I’d brought down… but there was no circuit board. Almost like someone had erased what I clearly saw in my mind.
“Who took it?” I asked, breathing hard against Dad’s grip. I glared at Don. “Was it you?”
Don looked away from me, gaze to the floor. “Wish it was, chief.”
“I brought it back with me! It was right there!”
“There’s no circuit board,” said Dad, moving me toward the door, “and there’s no Clare or a ship or a shell.”
“There is!” I wriggled an arm free and slammed an elbow back.
“Ow!” I caught Dad in the nose and he loosened his grip for a moment. That was all I needed to worm free, and I sprinted. If I could just get to the door—
Mom’s arm snaked around my neck. A stinging flash—white energy rocketed through my body, and it was like all my muscles went numb. I slumped against her like a wet noodle. Dad and Judy caught me. I looked up and saw Mom standing there with a tranquilizing booster in her hand, tears streaming from her eyes.
“No!” I shouted.
“I’m sorry.” Mom locked eyes with Dad and her gaze hardened. “Take him to the lab. And restrain him.”
Penny and Judy watched me, tears in their eyes, too. Don looked on with a sad expression.
“No,” I tried to say again, but it came out slurred, everything blurry, and my view of them fluttered into darkness.
LOWEST TIDE
CHAPTER
I only remembered a vague blur of what happened next. Flashes in and out of consciousness while the tranquilizer had its hold over me…
Being in the lab. Judy standing over me hanging an IV bag…
Sometime later, waking up and seeing the time on the monitor behind me. A thought like a lightning bolt through my mind—The tide! I have to get out of here!—but then trying to move only to find that I was held down by thick restraints, cinched tight against my arms and legs.…
Eyes fluttering open as I was carried down the hall, being moved to my bed. As I saw Dad removing my pack and my suit from my room.
The sound of the emergency safety locks engaging on my door, and of my parents’ murmuring voices as they walked away, leaving me locked up in the dark. A prisoner. A psyschiatric patient.
Then only dark, and the distant sound of the wind outside the Jupiter walls, wailing and whistling furiously…
“Will.”
The next thing I heard was a voice, echoey and distant. It sounded like it was coming from the far end of a pipe.
“Hey, Will, wake up.”
The distant feeling of being shaken. For a moment, I rolled around in the dreams I’d been having: blurry, heavy visions of the red dark of the Derelict, the pulsing light of that rift seemingly just behind me all the time, constantly running but never being able to escape it.
“Come on, Will! It’s almost time!”
Light started to flash in little bursts.
Blinking. Like swimming toward a surface. Everything slow and heavy.
The shaking feeling getting more distinct: a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey. Come on.”
My eyes popped open and I nearly jumped.
Clare was kneeling beside my bed, smiling. “There you are.”
I flinched and pushed back against the wall. “What are you doing here?”
Clare’s mouth scrunched. She was wearing her suit and holding her helmet under her arm. “You didn’t show up last night. I figured something went wrong, or, well, I worried that you just decided it was too dangerous or something.”
“No, it wasn’t that, I…” My mind felt like it was being pulled in two. Here was Clare, and she was as real as ever, and yet my memories from last night were also in my mind—the weird blank footage that Penny had showed, the sight of me hugging the air, of a floor without a circuit board, a shell that wasn’t a shell—
“Is everything okay?” Clare asked.
I almost laughed. “Not really. No.” A wave of pain rolled across my brain. “My parents drugged me and locked me in here and said—never mind.”
Clare cocked her head. “Said what?”
I looked past her and noticed that the door to my compartment was open, not locked like I had literally just said, and I had a dizzy feeling once again, like I was standing on something very unsteady and was about to fall. An ache passed over my brain in a wave. “They said that you weren’t real. And I couldn’t convince them. I—”
“Hey.” Clare put her hand on my arm. I felt it there. Perfectly real. “It’s okay. That’s all fixed now.”
“What are you talking about?”
Clare broke out into a beaming smile. “I met them! Your parents, your sisters, the mechanic. They seem great! And I explained everything, so they know what’s going on.”
I sat up, which caused a fresh burst of pain to rumble through my head. Also, my arm ached from where Mom had shot me with the tranquilizer, the same arm where I already had the injury from SAR. “You met my family? How?”
Clare cocked her head. “What do you mean, how? I knocked on the door and introduced myself.” She grinned. “Very politely, don’t worry.”
“You—”
“It was awkward, but then not awkward, except… still a little awkward. But listen—” Clare yanked my arm. “Lowest tide is soon. And they want to chat with us before we go.”
“Who?”
“Your family.”
She stood and I saw that she was holding my suit. She tossed it to me. “Put this on. I mean, I’ll step out, but hurry, okay?”
She stepped outside my door. “I am not looking,” she said.
I sat there, stunned. What the heck was going on? And I think the only reason I even got up was that my head was still slow like wet sand from the drugs that Mom had shot into me—Mistakenly, I thought to myself. That was all just a misunderstanding. She gets it now. Okay. No problem, right?
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there last night,” I said as I slipped on my suit. “How did it go out on the rocks?”
“I’m not gonna lie, there were a couple of moments where the waves got pretty high and I thought I was going to be swept away, but just like you said, the tide stayed below the top of the rocks. Wild wind, though, and lots more erosion. The fort is going to need a whole new decorating scheme.”
The last thing we need to worry about is the fort, I thought to myself, and for a moment, my thoughts tightened up and I heard Judy’s voice, insistent in my head—You’re infected with something—and it was like just thinking that triggered the burning on my neck and arms. I scratched furiously for a second. What you see isn’t real—
But no. Clare was here now. Things were fine. I forced myself to stop scratching and finished pulling on my suit and zipping it up. I glanced over at my locker and saw the seashell I’d found, right in line with everything else. Right where I put it. And it looks just like a seashell.
And that made me wonder: Had I dreamed that whole thing with my parents?
You didn’t dream it; something’s not right here.
“Are you ready yet?” Clare asked from the hall.
“Yeah.” I looked on the floor. My backpack was gone, but the circuit board and the battery pack were right there as if I’d just been working on them. A bolt of excitement lit through me. “Hey!” I bent and picked them up, both objects cool and heavy and real in my hands. “I think I figured out how to fix your overloading system.” I joined Clare in the hallway. “We’re going to need something like these batteries. Do you have batteries on the Derelict?”
Clare nodded. “Definitely. I mean, the wiring is probably different, but same principle, right?”
We turned the corner into the hub and there were my parents and sisters and Don, all busying about getting breakfast from the galley.
“Hey,” said Dad, turning and smiling at the sight of the two of us. “There they are. About time you rousted out of bed, Will.” He put a spoonful of cereal in his mouth and motioned with his bowl. “Clare says the low tide is pretty soon.”
“That’s right.” Mom turned from the counter, holding a rehydrated muffin. “This is it, lowest one of the cycle. Should be pretty cool out at the fort.” She smiled, too.
“Um…” I felt like my brain was being split in two. “Yeah. You guys remember locking me up last night, right? Treating me like a lab rat because you didn’t believe me, about”—I motioned to Clare—“her?”
Judy nodded around a mouthful of food. “Relax, Will. We see her now.”
“Our bad,” said Penny from her spot at the table.
“Clare,” said Mom, “did you want some breakfast? Our rations are by no means fancy, but—”
“I’m good,” said Clare. “Thank you, though, Mrs. Robinson.”
“Maureen,” Mom said with a smile.
Clare grinned. “Right. Maureen. Thanks, but Will and I should get going.”
“Of course,” said Mom. “Will, don’t miss the tide window this time, like last night.” She winked at me.
“But that wasn’t my fault,” I said, feeling more confused than ever. I almost shouted: You shot me with a tranquilizer!
“Yeah,” said Penny, “I don’t want to have to fish you out of the drink again.”
“I’ll make sure that he doesn’t,” said Clare, patting my arm.
“Good,” said Dad. He wiped at his nose, and then sniffled.
“Need a tissue?” said Mom, already grabbing one from the counter.
“I’m all right,” said Dad.
“No you’re not, you’ve got the crud just like the rest of us.” Mom turned to Clare with a knowing smile. “You might want to put that helmet on, with the germs we’ve got going around.”
Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge Page 9
