Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Lake peeled herself away from the wall. “We should split up, take different hallways. Less suspicious that way.”

  Taren opened his mouth to say something but apparently thought better of it. He slinked around the corner, leaving Lake to listen for the distant click of opening stasis chambers and the stumbling footsteps of newly wakened sleepers.

  Instead, she heard Taren shouting from around the corner. “Hey, get off me!”

  Shit. The assholes from the eatery must have been waiting.

  Lake had no way to help Taren. No way to get out of this hallway without them spotting her as well.

  And—

  Shit again. She could hear them coming for her now.

  She turned and hurtled toward the warehouse.

  Ran to the closest stasis chamber. It was locked.

  She tried another, and another. Finally—one that was unlocked. She slid the panel shut behind her and locked herself in. Eased herself into the bed. The nodes engaged at her temples.

  Darkness.

  PARACOSM.

  Back home, she’d been good at the app’s VR game. Peaceful mode, just for building simulated houses and exploring weird landscapes other users had created. Good practice for what she was meant to do now: figure out how to live on a planet still scabbed over by war.

  “Except that’s not what you’re good for at all, is it?” She said it out loud, even though it was weird to talk to a computer program.

  It was her nerves. I almost got trapped, Taren had to save me.

  She’d just stay long enough for the mob from the eatery to get bored waiting for her.

  Then, right back out to return the favor and spring Taren.

  The penny pub’s copper walls winked like fireflies. The coin still spun on the bar. A penny from the wall? It seemed too large for that. She used an empty glass to pin it flat. The thick glass magnified an image on the coppery metal: a tree in relief. An odd tree, with a billowing crown.

  The image sparked something in her brain. Just as that girl’s story had. “Trees with blue and purple leaves that the sun shines right through.”

  The place Lake saw so often in her dreams.

  She picked up the coin and rubbed her finger over the metal tree, her thoughts racing. She’d seen plenty of evidence that the sim responded to thoughts and feelings. But was it mining even her dreams now? Hers and the girl’s from the bunker?

  And why was it here in Ransom’s pub?

  She crossed to the door. As the hinges creaked, she closed her eyes to wish for a certain sight to greet her.

  She stepped through the door onto soft sand.

  In the distance, Ransom stood under the pier, a shadow under shadows. He was skipping rocks over the surf, a fact Lake barely registered as she shed her boots and ran toward him, dodging charred bits of firewood and then clumps of seaweed. He started when she tackled him from behind and wrapped her arms around him.

  “I went to the penny pub to check on you,” she said. Her heart beat right against his back.

  “I didn’t want to hang around there.” He turned so he could pull her against his chest. “Didn’t want to find out who was banging on the door.”

  “It was only someone in the stasis warehouse, coming to check if I was all right. Not someone in the sim after all.” Lake twined her fingers in his shirt. “Have you been here just waiting for me?”

  “I figured you’d know where to find me.” He nodded at the crumbling cliffs in the distance like castle ruins jutting onto the beach. “That’s the first place I ever saw you. You were up there searching for something in those rocks.”

  The staggered platforms of mudstone gleamed in the sun, wet with sea spray. This was one of the first places Lake had wandered into after she’d come out of stasis and into the sim. She remembered climbing over the rough rock, crouching, peering past fronded anemones and flat strands of kelp. Searching …

  “I saw you up on the rocks, and I was worried for you,” Ransom said. “I knew you had lost something.”

  Lake touched the thread bracelet circling her wrist.

  “I waited for you to come down,” he said.

  “You waited and waited, and the sun never moved in the sky. That’s how I knew this place wasn’t real.” But it looks just like the coast back home, where Willow once begged to search the tide pools, and Mom made me promise not to lose her …

  The salty air stung Lake’s throat.

  “What made you come here that day?” Lake asked. “Why this beach?” Could we have met here once in real life, as kids, and we’ve never known it?

  Ransom let go of her to pick up another rock from the sand and chuck it toward the water. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “Try to get to know you?”

  “So you can give me a gift you think will save me from the sim. But it never works.”

  “You don’t think I want to know about how you grew up just so I can know? Whether you played basketball or liked to swim or ate your weight in ice cream every summer?”

  “You can know a person by being with them here and now.”

  Can you? Lake took the coin from her pocket. “Where did this come from?”

  Ransom accepted it from her and examined the strange tree stamped on its face.

  “A sleeper told me about a place in the sim with trees like the one on this coin. Like the ones in my dreams.” Lake was shaking, and not from the chill of the wind. “Except—I don’t think they were dreams. I think I must have gone there.”

  Ransom studied the coin a moment longer. Then he slipped it into his pocket. “Just the sim, manifesting my guilt.” His eyes were hard and flat as the seawater in the distance.

  “So you have heard about this place. It exists? Here in the sim?” She stepped back from him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because…” He rubbed a hand over his forehead and left a trail of sand over his skin. “I was afraid you’d go looking for it. Another endless quest to keep you out of the real world.”

  Lake watched the wet sand at her feet, where tiny holes opened as the water slid away. A miniature crab churned beneath the surface. “I come to the sim to wake the sleepers. I do it because I’m good at it, and because no one else will.”

  “And because you want to be with Willow.”

  Lake’s stomach twisted. “Can you blame me?”

  Ransom stepped close again. He pressed his forehead against hers, and she felt the dusting of sand there. “Not one bit.”

  She tipped her head back so she could look up at him. Only the warmth of his arms closing around her kept away the chill her next words gave her: “I found out where the sleepers are all going. I have to follow them there, to get them free.”

  Ransom’s arms went stiff around her. Dread flooded his gaze.

  “They’ll never come out on their own,” Lake said. “There must be dozens of them hunkering down together, keeping each other trapped.”

  Ransom stared into the distance, like he hadn’t heard her. But the next moment, he hugged her tighter and said, “Let me go to the Battery for you. It’s not like I’m getting out of the sim anytime soon anyway.”

  Lake’s breath went hard in her lungs. She didn’t want to go to the Battery. She didn’t want to risk losing herself to the sim, which she knew was all too possible in such a large pocket. If she let Ransom go instead, if he could wake the sleepers himself …

  She shook her head. “You’ve never woken a sleeper before.”

  “It’s hard to, when you hardly meet them.”

  “And how would you get to the Battery? You get stuck, you can’t always get where you want to go in the sim.”

  He let go of her, frowning.

  “You take the gifts I give you,” Lake went on, because the heat in her chest wouldn’t let her stop, “and you follow me through doors and you still don’t wake up on the ship.”

  “Doesn’t that prove there’s too much about the sim you don’t understand
? That the best thing to do is leave it behind for good?”

  “I have to go to the Battery. No one else can do it.”

  “You want to go. You want a reason to spend more time with Willow.” Ransom shook his head. “I’ve tried so many times to tell you…”

  That Willow isn’t good for me. Lake wrapped her arms around herself, cold and miserable.

  “But as long as she’s part of the sim, you won’t want to leave her.” Ransom leaned to pluck something from the sand. When he straightened, he held out his palm to show her a sun-bleached sand dollar. Perfectly whole, a rare find in the real world. Though maybe not so rare in a simulation. “They say it’s good luck. Maybe it’ll help you with the Battery.”

  She didn’t take it from him. “That day the sun never set, you brought me things washed up on the sand. Because you knew I was looking for something, missing something.” Someone. “The sun never set, and you kept bringing me things, and it was the only day of my life I knew what forever would feel like. And you were there, so forever didn’t feel bad.”

  “I know why you were searching that day. You keep trying to find everyone who’s stuck in the sim, but there’s only one person you’re really looking for.”

  Lake pushed his hand with the sand dollar back toward him.

  “If you keep following Willow deeper into the sim,” he said, “you’ll never come out.”

  Freezing black seawater crept over Lake’s toes. A cold feeling crept into her chest. “And what about you? Will you ever find your way out of the sim?”

  Ransom put his arms around her again, and he was a shield from the cold wind, if not from the cold thoughts edging into her mind. “Why would I want to leave?” he said. “If this is where you are?”

  She let him go on holding her, but she knew that wasn’t an answer. Ransom never had answers. And one day, she’d have to find out why.

  10

  TAREN

  The smell inside the ship’s locked dining room reminded Taren of the ocean. Not in a good way.

  He’d been sitting on the floor, because someone had removed all the chairs and the table. Sleeping with his head tipped back against the wall, dreaming of pizza and hammocks and other things that he had only ever found on the planet turning below him. The yellow light of living room lamps. His mom’s off-key singing, his dad’s elbow nudges.

  He’d wakened to the smell of fishy water and the shock of it seeping into his pants.

  He scrambled to his feet. A half-inch of water stood on the floor. Leaking from where? That smell—like the algae drinks he’d forced down.

  “Hey!” He banged a fist against the glass door and glared at the group of boys dissecting a cleaning bot on a nearby table. One of them gave him a bored look and went back to his work.

  Taren used the side of his foot to send the water under the door. Waited a minute. The closest boy looked up in surprise when the water reached his bare feet. He came and peered into the locked room.

  “You’ve got a broken pump in your algae tank,” Taren shouted to him.

  The boy frowned. He turned back to say something to his friends.

  Taren banged on the glass again. “Hey. I can fix it.”

  “You?” The boy looked him over.

  Skinny, weak, and wet, I know.

  But his brother had taught him about fixing things.

  “You want to lose your food supply?” Taren shouted through the glass. He kicked more water under the door to underscore the situation’s urgency.

  The boys abandoned their project to drag the barricade away from Taren’s door. “You know what you’re doing?” one of them asked.

  “I know how to unclog a pump and change a filter. I have a fish tank at home, for one thing.” Had, whatever.

  They led him through a doorway to a mad-scientist lab. Endless yards of white lights and tubing. Column after column of bright green bulbs stacked to the ceiling—the algae tanks. Horrible sucking and groaning that confirmed Taren’s fears that something had broken.

  He lifted a section of tubing clogged with green clumps. “Pretty sure this is supposed to pump in the other direction,” he told the boys who still huddled close like prison guards. “See if you can find the generator. Sounds like it’s dying.”

  “You can fix it, though?” one of the boys asked.

  Fix a space-generator? Was he supposed to have had practice at that?

  He turned to glance at the boy, whose face was smudged with grease from the dissected cleaner bot. Hands were black with it. Taren couldn’t help but think of his brother, genius mechanic. “Can you fix it or can’t you?” his brother used to say when he schooled Taren in car repairs, a teasing smirk on his grease-streaked face.

  “What’s your name?” Taren asked the boy.

  “Shawn.”

  “Just find the generator, Shawn,” Taren said. “We’ll start there.”

  “Is this it?” One of the other boys was squinting at a metal grid sliding up and down.

  “That looks like some kind of press, probably for extracting water from the algae,” Taren said.

  The boy gave him an uncertain look.

  “Or could be a torture device,” Taren said. How would I know?

  “Well, there’s no algae on it.”

  “Second guess was right then,” Taren muttered. At the boy’s anxious glance, he said, “I think it’s broken. Like the pump.”

  “It smells like death.”

  “Like our death, specifically,” another boy said.

  Taren heard Gray’s voice in his head: “Can you fix it or can’t you?”

  He leaned over the tank with the metal grid. A smell like rotten eggs made him gag. “I think the algae’s getting trapped somewhere and going bad.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Taren looked out over the glass forest of algae tanks, the yards of tubing, the foreign machinery. We get the hell off this ship. “What about the protein bars?” he asked. “Where are those stored?”

  The boys exchanged dark looks with one another. “We divided them up,” Shawn said.

  “Okay? And put them where?”

  More dark looks. “We’re not telling you.”

  The pumps groaned, echoing Taren’s empty stomach. “All this algae is going to rot in the tanks. The protein bars are all we have.”

  Shawn forced it out: “There isn’t enough left for everyone.”

  “For everyone to what?” Taren’s water-soaked clothes made him shiver. “For everyone to eat for a month? A couple weeks?”

  “There aren’t enough for everyone to eat. A bunch of us have three or four stashed away for sharing with our friends. Then—that’s it.”

  “That’s … it?” Taren was sinking right through the watery floor, into someplace dark and cold. The rotting-fish smell flooded his lungs.

  “Can you fix it or can’t you?”

  Too bad it’s not you on this ship, Gray.

  “You said you could fix it,” Shawn reminded him.

  A broken pump, maybe. A complete lack of food and a whole busted lab?

  Taren gripped the edge of the stinking tank, tried to fight the urgent fear boiling through him. The pillars of slowly rotting algae were the diseased bones of the ship, the smell of it the signal of his own coming death.

  We have to get off this ship.

  I have to get them all out of the sim, and we have to get out of here as fast as possible.

  “I can fix it,” he said. Not the tanks—but I can get people out of the sim. “Just … clear out and let me try some things.”

  They exchanged looks again. Probably sensed he was lying and just wanted to get free from them.

  “I can’t do shit if I’m locked in the eatery,” he told them.

  They didn’t argue. Taren listened to the water slosh under their feet as they trudged out of the lab. He stared at the columns of rotting food and felt something inside him rot along with it.

  I can fix it. Not the ship, but I can get people out. Haven�
��t I proved that?

  He had to find Lake.

  They had to get to the Battery.

  11

  TAREN

  Taren stayed in the lab long enough to make sure the other boys wouldn’t notice him leaving. Then he went to the stasis warehouse to find Lake.

  The maze of chambers. The hum of machinery like the wheeze of a beast. Taren had walked through worse dreams, but this was the only nightmare he had come back to voluntarily.

  “Lake?” he whispered at a huddled form slumped against a chamber.

  Lake lifted her head, looked like hell in the low light. Would probably look worse in brighter. “You got away. What’s that smell?”

  “Our food supply going to shit. I checked on the algae tanks. It’s all rotting.” He almost didn’t tell her more, she already looked so completely stricken. “Only a handful of protein bars left. No sign of any other food on board, unless you know of something?”

  She shook her head, her eyes in shadow. “We have to go to the Battery.”

  He couldn’t argue. But her weary slump had him worried. “You don’t look like you’re ready to go back in.”

  She pushed herself to her feet. “I’m fine.”

  “Gotten any sleep recently?” He handed her one of the cups of water he’d brought with him.

  “A little, but…”

  “You had that dream again? Something chasing you?”

  She started to drink, paused. “I’m not going to lie. I think plugging into a broken sim might not be the greatest thing for a girl’s brain.” She took her time draining the cup while Taren used the silence to stew in anxiety.

  “Everyone has weird dreams,” he said finally, trying to reassure mostly himself. He handed her a protein bar he’d slipped out of one of the boys’ pockets in the lab. “You seem like you need this more than I do.”

  “I got my fill in the sim,” she joked, and tried to hand it back.

  “Me too,” he lied. “Fifty tacos. And what do you know, this protein bar is taco-flavored.”

  She smiled in a way that said she didn’t believe him but she’d eat it anyway. He set the second cup of water next to the stasis chamber, in case they needed it when they woke later.