Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  “You asked me that last time,” Ransom said, taking another toothpick from a box on the bar.

  “When was that?” Willow asked.

  Ransom nudged the toothpick into place. “Hard to measure time here. Let’s say, one bridge ago.”

  Willow stood and wandered closer to the bar. “Once at school they showed us a black-and-white photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was all jagged, hanging in the air on cables.” She touched the splintered edge of the toothpick bridge, frowning as if in concern. “If you didn’t know it was half-built, you’d think a monster had snapped it in half.”

  Ransom dropped his toothpick at the word snapped. “Don’t break my bridge, Willow.”

  “I would never,” Willow said flatly, her hand still lingering.

  Ransom picked up the fallen toothpick, licked it so it’d stay in place, stuck it on a ladderlike bridge-tower. “It’s all I have to show for my time in the sim.”

  “You met me in the sim,” Lake reminded him.

  Ransom smiled. “Guess the sim’s not all bad, then.”

  Lake thought of the dappled shade the birch tree made in her simulated backyard. Thought of Willow kneeling in grass as if it were another ordinary day. No, it’s not all bad. That’s what makes it so dangerous. “The music’s not the best,” she said.

  “You don’t like my music?” Ransom said, and in the back room the piano playing stopped.

  “Well. I like hearing what kind of music you listen to when no one’s around.”

  “Sad shit, mostly.” He cracked another smile. “Gets me in the mood for when company finally comes around.”

  She slipped her hands into his and pulled him closer, wishing she were one of his magnetic toothpicks and he were a toothpick bridge. “I wish I could come more often.”

  “I wish I could leave.”

  She dropped his hands. “That would be nice.” She gestured toward the bridge. “Ever seen it in person?”

  Ransom tipped his head to one side, neither a yes nor a no.

  “I could help you if you would tell me things like that,” Lake said. “If you would tell me anything about your life before.”

  “I don’t like it when you do your trick on me,” Ransom told Lake. “The thing you do to people who are stuck in the sim.”

  “The thing I do? You mean, help people get out?”

  “You think you can figure me out and I’ll suddenly be able to leave. But that would only help if my problem was remembering what’s real and what’s not.” He looked at Willow, who stood now at the wall, trying in vain to dislodge a penny.

  I remember Willow isn’t real. How could I forget? “You won’t let me help you because you’re afraid I can’t,” Lake told him.

  “I won’t let you help me because I don’t want you wasting more time in the sim than you have to.”

  Lake smiled sadly. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You never do.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Not when I tell you how dangerous the sim is, or when I tell you it’s got a stronger grip on you than you think.”

  Lake pulled away from him, uneasy at the desperation in his voice. He wants me to stay away from Willow. But how can I?

  “I know all of that,” she said. “What I don’t understand is how you can know the sim isn’t real and still be trapped inside it. I don’t understand why you can’t move through it the same way I can, why you get stuck.”

  “I think I only go where Lake takes me in the sim,” Willow cut in. “But I’m not sure. I have a hard time remembering.”

  Lake gave her a faint smile. “It’s okay, Will.”

  “Maybe if someone else came with us in the sim,” Willow said, “they’d be able to take us to another pocket?”

  “I can’t bring other people in,” Lake said. “Too much of a chance they’ll get stuck again.”

  “Speaking of,” Ransom said. “How long have you been in today?”

  “Kicking me out?”

  “I don’t think she even sleeps anymore,” Willow said.

  “I sleep,” Lake said.

  Ransom’s face was lined with worry. “Sim-sleep doesn’t count.”

  “I don’t like the dreams I have after I’ve been in the sim. They feel wrong. Blue trees, a frozen sun. I think it’s a side effect of using the sim.”

  That only seemed to agitate Ransom further. The box of toothpicks fell to the floor and scattered.

  Ransom didn’t bother picking them up. “I’m worried about you. I’m worried you’re spending so much time in the sim that you’re forgetting what’s real.”

  “What’s the sim good for, if not for pretending to have what you can’t?” She pulled him close, ready to make that glum look vanish.

  Then—

  A thunder of boots from beyond the doorway.

  Lake shot to her feet.

  The way Taren looked at me in the eatery, like he knew.

  Like he might tell someone.

  “Someone knows I’m here.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Ransom asked.

  “The door, Ransom! Someone’s here.”

  Ransom threw out a hand so that, across the pub, the door slammed shut through the sheer force of his will.

  Then—a sound of thunder. Someone pounding on the door.

  Lake backed along the bar, toward Willow. “Come on, Will, we have to go.”

  Confusion clouded Ransom’s expression. “Lake, what’s going on?”

  “Can’t you hear it?” Lake said. “Someone’s pounding on the door!”

  The blows against the door kept coming. The doorknob rattled loud as gunfire.

  Lake had to shout. “The door to the back room?”

  “There’s no back room,” Ransom said. “That door is the only way out.” He looked between the door and Lake, still confused. But he moved to the end of the bar and grabbed a baseball bat propped there, ready to defend her.

  “Forget the bat,” Lake said. “There’s got to be another way out.” She gripped Willow’s hand and pulled her around the bar to crouch on the sticky mat.

  Hiding won’t work. Her lungs hurt from breathing so fast.

  She turned and found a row of cabinets behind her. “Ransom! I need something to mark the cabinet door!”

  A cracking sound, and then Ransom appeared with a piece of bridge he’d wrenched free. Lake pointed to the only cabinet door big enough to let them crawl through, and Ransom fell to his knees to carve an X into it.

  He jerked it open. “Go.”

  Lake hesitated. “What about you? It won’t work for you.”

  “It’ll take me to another part of the sim, at least.”

  Lake wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss. “I’ll find you later,” she told him. Then she pushed Willow through the cabinet and crawled after her.

  Woke up drenched in sweat.

  Ransom’s words rang in her head: “You’re spending so much time in the sim you’re forgetting what’s real.”

  She wished she could believe that Willow had woken up somewhere on the ship too.

  But that hadn’t been Willow.

  Just a figment.

  “I miss you like crazy,” Lake said to the empty stasis chamber.

  She lifted the lid and tumbled out of the bed, bones weighted with loneliness. She almost couldn’t bring herself to slide open the chamber’s steel panel, because she knew it would feel terrible not to see Willow waiting on the other side.

  I’ll see her when I go back in, at least.

  After a long moment, she tugged the handle and heard the click of the panel-door unlocking. It slid aside.

  And there stood Taren.

  Lake’s heart hammered in her chest.

  So it was true: he’d guessed her secret.

  “Lake?” He’d been waiting for her. And if he told the others what he knew …

  They would make sure she’d never go back into the sim again.

  4

  LAKE

&nbs
p; “You followed me?” Lake spat, because what else was there to say. Taren knew her secret. It was all over.

  Kyle and his gang would lock her up, and she’d never see Willow’s face again.

  Taren took a step back, as if the edge in Lake’s voice might cut him. “I just wanted to know if you—”

  “Are you going to tell them?” Lake broke in. “They’ll lock me up like they did to you.”

  Taren gave her a searching look. “So you were the girl who got me out of the sim. I thought you might have been, when you looked at me that way in the eatery. But your clothes were different in the sim, your hair was darker.” He scrutinized her face.

  “My expression was less enraged?” Lake suggested.

  Taren held up his hands, palms out. “I promise I’m not going to tell anyone. I only banged on the door because you were in there so long I thought something had gone wrong.”

  “You banged on the door?” Lake slid the steel panel partway closed. “This door?”

  Taren nodded. “I didn’t know how to get you out.”

  Lake studied him, piecing it together. She must have heard him pounding on the door to her stasis chamber while she was in the sim. Her brain had interpreted it as someone pounding on the door to the penny pub.

  But she definitely didn’t remember asking him to try to rescue her.

  “I didn’t look at you any kind of way in the eatery,” she said. She was spiraling into a deep, bruising disappointment. How could she be sure he wouldn’t tell anyone her secret?

  “I saw your bracelet.” His gaze went to Lake’s hand still lingering on the door handle. “That’s how I knew for sure.”

  Lake looked down at the blue knotted thread. She never changed it when she altered the rest of her appearance in the sim. She relied on the sight of it to keep her grounded in reality.

  And anyway, she couldn’t bear to see it look any different than it had when Willow had given it to her.

  “You just pop in and out of the sim to help people get out?” Taren asked. “Like you’re Trinity from The Matrix?”

  “Lower your voice, Neo.” Lake pulled him into the cramped space and slid the panel shut behind him. The lock clicked.

  She sat on the bed while he stood crammed into the corner, gaping at the wires sprouting next to her.

  “I told you, we’re all stuck on this ship until everyone clears out of the sim,” Lake said. “And the ship isn’t exactly in great condition.”

  Taren pressed his hands into the wall behind him in a poor attempt to steady himself. “What does that mean, exactly? Give me the whole Checklist of Doom this time. Promise I can take it.”

  “Even though you’re shaking?”

  He made an attempt to stand straighter, and then had to lean all his weight against the wall again. “Side effect of stasis.”

  “Anyway, I’m not a mechanic.” Lake hesitated, but he seemed hungrier for bad news than any other sleeper she’d ever awakened. “The algae supply seems to be holding up okay, but I’m not as confident about breathable air.”

  “The CO2 scrubbers are failing?”

  “All I know is that when the light next to the word oxygen starts flashing red, that’s generally bad.”

  He took a shaky breath. “Generally, yeah.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  He shrugged off her question. “How long have we all been asleep?”

  “Decades. No one really knows how many. Probably at least thirty years. The ship was supposed to wake us up when it had evidence that we’d be okay to go home to the surface. But it hasn’t really been keeping to any other protocols so we’re not sure about that one, either.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry. No one likes waking up to bad news.”

  His face suddenly looked sunken. Lake gently pulled him to sit on the edge of the stasis bed. The nodes that engaged the sim twitched and clicked just out of reach, like hungry fish snapping at bait.

  “Where’s the captain?” he asked.

  “Dead, maybe,” Lake said. “Never seen him in the sim anyway.”

  “I remember his lottery at school. They told us some billionaire had been building a private ship before the war even started, and he was going to pick one hundred and fifty students from five schools to come aboard. They wouldn’t let you prove you deserved a spot—it was all going to be random.” Taren skimmed his fingers over the head brace built into the bed. The metal arms contracted slightly, and he jerked his hand away. “The captain—he’s that tech guy, right? The one who made the VR app? I remember him from the video they showed at school. Smug genius type, really pleased with how generous he was being.”

  “Seems like his ship wasn’t exactly seaworthy when he loaded us onto it. But I guess that’s the tech industry for you—push it out now and patch it later.” She meant it as a joke, but the thought of the ship needing a patch it would never get was almost more than she could take at the moment.

  “And there aren’t any adults on board?” Taren asked.

  “I guess he figured he’d leave the engineers and politicians to the government ships and bunkers.”

  “So we’re on our own.”

  “Looks like it.”

  Taren shuddered, like he might be sick after all. The room filled with the sound of the head brace clicking, searching for something to latch on to.

  Lake tried to think of something to say, to soften the blow of all the bad news. “I’m sorry—”

  “I want to go back into the sim with you,” Taren cut in. “Help you wake people up.”

  The new ones always try to go right back in. “It’s not that easy.”

  “You do it.”

  Lake stood, touched the door handle.

  “Wait.” Taren put his hand on her arm. “We’re going to die on this ship if we don’t leave it soon. I don’t much feel like waiting around for that. I did enough waiting in the sim.”

  Lake stared at the stars tattooed on his arm, avoiding his heated gaze. “You think that if you go back in, you’ll remember you’re in a simulation. You think you won’t get stuck again. But you’ll forget. The sim will make you forget that it’s not real.”

  “You remember, when you go back in. You remember you’re in a simulation.”

  Most of the time. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Taren dropped his arm. His gaze roved the tiny chamber, lit on bundled wires snaking down the side of the bed. “What about your sister?”

  Lake tensed.

  “You told me in the sim that you were searching for her,” Taren said. “Did you ever find her? I could help you look.”

  “My sister never got on board the ship.”

  “I thought younger siblings of lottery winners were supposed to be allowed to board.”

  “Until all the spots filled up. I had to leave her behind, and now she’s gone.” Her words dropped heavy as stones between them. “No bunker for her, or for my parents. No way any of them survived.”

  She expected him to reel at her words, but he only tilted his head in a sympathetic way. “None for mine, either,” he said.

  The overhead light flickered. Machinery hummed. Lake wished for Willow, alive and well and digging holes to hide treasures in.

  “I don’t go into the sim to search for my sister,” she said. “I go because everyone on this ship got a spot my sister didn’t. I’m not going to let them waste it.”

  Taren winced, then tried quickly to cover his reaction.

  “Don’t feel guilty,” Lake said. “It’s not like you’re the specific person who took my sister’s spot.”

  Taren studied the constellation of tattooed stars on his arm. “My brother got a spot on a government ship. He went up before I did. Mechanical engineer, conscripted from Lockheed.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You want to know the worst thing I’ve ever seen? The video feed cutting out when his ship broke apart in space.”

  Now, Lake was the one left reeling.

&n
bsp; Taren balled his fists on his knees. “Gray was a mechanic. He was supposed to make it. I’m not anything. If they had asked us to earn our spots on this ship, I don’t think I could have.”

  “No one earned their salvation. Only the rich and lucky survived.”

  Taren pinned her with his gaze. “And luck runs out.”

  The overhead light flickered again, as if to prove his point.

  “You can’t tell me you don’t need help in the sim,” Taren said.

  Lake couldn’t deny it. It was like Willow had said—if Lake took Taren into the sim, he might find a pocket she couldn’t.

  Or he might get himself stuck again, after all my hard work getting him out.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking to get yourself into.” Lake turned the door handle and listened to the click of the lock releasing.

  “Lake—”

  “We can’t go into the sim right now,” she said over her shoulder. “We need to eat something, fuel up. There’s a lot you have to learn before you can wake sleepers.”

  5

  TAREN

  The day Taren won a ticket off the smoldering Earth was the same day his brother left to claim a spot on a government ship. Taren’s parents had been rigid with fear for days after reports of fallout and firestorms, but now they slumped like broken dolls, as if they knew they could give up on surviving because their sons would survive enough for all of them.

  Then the reports had come: the government ship had broken apart in space during a fuel transfer to its correctional thrusters. Taren couldn’t stop picturing it in his mind: the ship coming apart like a great hot egg bursting. Debris shooting out in all directions. Some of which had to have been people—the remains of people. Of his own brother. Sometimes when the images played in his head, Taren would hold his breath, as if that could stop the ship from breaking apart. As if it were a wish flower and he could keep the seeds from scattering.

  Taren erased the thought now as he stepped into the stasis chamber, ignoring his stomach’s complaints about the food he’d just given it. That’s all I have, there’s not exactly a buffet on board.

  He tried not to feel cheated. He’d gone from a barren sim to a busted ship. From eating wild plants to drinking algae. Plus, no dog and no sunshine.