“Hey, do you remember where you went in the sim before you set up camp in the zoo?” Lake asked.
“My house.”
“And before that?”
He shrugged. “Maybe that’s where I started.” But he’d been someplace before that—he could remember wanting to go find his house. “I don’t know. It’s like when you have different dreams, one after another. But when you wake up, you only really remember the last one.”
She didn’t say anything, just chewed thoughtfully.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’ve got most of the sim mentally mapped,” she said. “But I think there might be pockets I’ve been to that I don’t remember.”
Taren wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. “Pockets with sleepers? How many sleepers did you say are left in the sim?”
“Fifty-two, judging by the names on the eatery wall that I haven’t marked off yet. Minus the sleepers you rescued from that house.” She stopped chewing, looked troubled.
“What?” Taren prompted.
“Nothing. Just … there’s a name I keep looking for and never finding.” Taren was about to ask which name, but she barreled on. “Maybe that means there are sleepers in the sim that no one knows about? People who came on board without any friends or siblings?”
He had a feeling she had someone specific in mind, but something else had captured his attention. He moved to examine the next chamber over, lifted a hand to trace a dent in the battered panel that sealed the chamber shut.
“Don’t let anyone tell you we haven’t tried to get at the sleepers inside,” Lake said in explanation.
“Why do the panels even lock?”
“Probably only supposed to open for medical personnel. Which we lack.”
“That’s a shit-stupid oversight.”
“Theories are: A, medical personnel were here, awake the whole time and taking care of us, but we’ve been asleep so long they died. And B, medical personnel are still here but they’re stuck in the sim.”
“Which do you subscribe to?”
“I’ve seen no dead bodies on the ship and no adults in the sim.”
“Then I stand by what I said.”
“I should mention there are areas of the sim I have yet to visit.”
“Like the Battery.”
A long pause while Lake carefully brushed crumbs from her palms. “And a couple other places.”
“Such as?”
She shook her head. “We’ve wasted enough time.” She set the empty cup inside the open door of her stasis chamber.
Taren glanced in at the chamber, suddenly itching to get going. But there was something Lake wasn’t telling him, judging by her stiff movements. “I don’t think I can afford any more surprises from you in the sim.”
She froze. Taren almost regretted what he’d said. But then she leaned against the doorway and said, “There’s one pocket in the sim we can’t ever go to. If you ever see me try to go there, or if … if Willow tries to get me to go…”
“Why would Willow—?”
“Just—don’t ever let me go through the door in the middle of the Mojave Desert, okay?”
Across the warehouse, some machinery stalled and restarted with a grumble like a wakening beast.
“What’s in—”
“Enough doom talk for now, okay?” Lake cut in. “Let’s just go.”
I don’t think I want to know, anyway. “We don’t know which battery we’re going to,” he reminded her.
“I have an idea of which one we should try.”
“So do I. Muir Beach Overlook. It’s pretty secluded. If that’s where the sleepers are camped, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have stumbled across it.”
“Never been there in real life,” Lake said. “Might be hard for me to go there first thing. Let’s start in that sim neighborhood near Sixteenth Avenue again and decide where to go from there. Just picture it while you’re going under and you should end up there.”
“Wait, what if I don’t end up there?”
“You made it there last time just fine.”
Taren nodded, but in his mind, he saw his brother’s teasing smirk.
I can do this, Gray.
If Lake and I can both keep our grip on reality.
So he was talking to his brother now, like Lake did with Willow. That didn’t seem like the best sign.
Lake turned, heading into her stasis chamber.
“Wait,” Taren said, and Lake reappeared in the doorway. “If we wake the sleepers in the Battery, will you be able to leave the sim? If it means saying goodbye to your sister?”
Lake’s eyes blazed. She turned and disappeared into her chamber, leaving Taren with the phantom of the pain he’d caused her. Haven’t you already hurt her enough? he scolded himself. Do you have to keep reminding her that her sister is dead?
And yet, he might have to, if he hoped to leave the Battery, leave the sim.
He moved to his own chamber, his legs heavy and numb. He lowered himself onto the electronic altar of the stasis bed, and tried not to think about whether Lake would be able to make herself leave Willow behind. He knew what it was like to see the people you most loved only when you dreamed …
Moments later, or maybe days—he couldn’t keep it straight—he found himself standing at the end of a lonely staircase on a bluff overlooking the ocean. He knew it was the Pacific because he knew exactly where he was: Muir Beach Overlook, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. He used to come here with his family—Mom and Dad and Gray. They’d drive over the bridge, up Highway 1, stop at places like this to take in the shape of the world, measure its edges.
He gazed down at the water, mesmerized by the seafoam blooming around the rocks. How did I get here? He had a feeling he was supposed to be somewhere else, that he was supposed to meet someone.
He turned against the wooden railing, searching. Someone was coming down the winding steps to meet him, a dark figure against the sun. Not Mom or Dad, coming to listen to the waves crash with him—
“Gray?” Taren called.
His brother grinned back at him, the sun a bright disk behind his head. “Always racing to the end of the stairs. You’re supposed to stop and take in the views along the way.”
Taren meant to answer, but his voice caught in his throat. The wind ruffled Gray’s hair, the sleeves of his T-shirt, the feathery scrub at his feet as if to say, Everything is alive.
“One day we’ll convince Mom and Dad we should bike out here,” Gray said. He reached the bottom of the stairs and slung an arm around Taren’s neck, messed up Taren’s already wind-mussed hair.
“Dad would never make it,” Taren said into Gray’s shirt while trying not to breathe in the smell of Gray’s sweat. He’d usually squirm away from Gray, duck out of his brother’s reach. But he didn’t want to this time. He felt like it’d been a million years since they’d last been together. A million and one.
“You’ve been out here for ages,” Gray said, releasing him.
“I have?”
Gray’s mood shifted. He shoved his hands into his pockets and grimaced against the cold. “Why have you been wasting so much time?”
Taren clutched the wooden railing. He looked out at the foamy coastline stretching toward the city so far away. “I didn’t mean to. I want to go home.” His voice sounded high and babyish to his own ears. How must it sound to Gray?
“You’ve been gone a long time,” Gray said. “You went on that ship, and you never came back.”
Taren raked his fingers over his head. He was starting to remember. He’d gotten a spot on a ship by sheer luck. And now it was time to go home—but the ship wouldn’t let him. It was locking itself up, shutting down, closing around him like a fist that would squeeze the life out of him.
“You slept for decades,” Gray went on. “That’s all you do—sleep. You don’t care about leaving the ship.”
“The ship won’t let me leave,” Taren said. “Not until every last person is awake.�
��
“Then you’d better wake them. Fast.”
“I’m trying to. They’re stuck—trapped in a simulation.” The sight of the rippling hillside suddenly made him dizzy. The fluttering fennel, the swaying cypresses. I’m in a simulation? “I’m going to fix things.”
“You think you can fix anything?” Gray gave a derisive snort. “If I were on that ship, I’d clear out the sim so fast. I’d do whatever it took.”
“I wish you could help me.”
“You don’t have time for wishing. The ship is breaking down. You’re going to die.”
Taren squeezed his eyes shut. “No, I can do this. I just have to—”
“You’ve been out here for ages. Why have you been wasting so much time?”
Taren opened his eyes. “You said that already.” He watched Gray shove his hands in his pockets again. Watched the wind ruffle his sleeves the same way it had a minute ago. “You’re saying the same things over and over.”
“You went on that ship,” Gray said. “You slept for decades—”
“Stop.”
It wasn’t his brother.
Gray was a figment.
“You think you can fix anything?” he said.
“You’re not real,” Taren said. “You’re part of the sim.” How did the sim know those things about his family?
It had read his mind. It had found his worst fears, his deepest guilt: An empty house. An angry brother. An impossible task.
Things no one had a right to know. Or to shove back in his face.
Taren’s anger rose, whipped up like seafoam by wind.
“You’re nothing,” Taren said to the ghost before him. “You think I can’t clear the sim? You don’t know what I can do.” He wanted to stick his fist out and see if it would go right through the figment of his brother. Something stopped him. The lines on Gray’s squinting face, the goose bumps on his wind-chilled arms.
The figment of Gray frowned, uncertain in the face of Taren’s anger. “If I were on that ship…”
“Go away,” Taren said through gritted teeth.
From the steps along the bluff’s ridge, someone called Taren’s name. He shaded his eyes with his hand.
Lake.
Taren turned to the figment. “Go away,” he barked.
The figment slinked toward the railing. It cowered there a moment, looking between Taren and the distant figure coming down the steps. “You don’t have much time,” the figment told Taren. Then it climbed over the railing and disappeared.
Taren drew in a steadying breath.
“Hey,” Lake said, stopping just before the end of the staircase. “I thought I lost you. Who was that?”
Taren inched toward the railing. He searched in vain for the figment on the steep incline below. “No one. A figment.”
At the top of the ridge, Willow called, “Picnic over yet?”
“We were supposed to meet in the sim neighborhood,” Lake told Taren.
“I got mixed up.” The rippling scrub that covered the incline kept catching his eye and making his heart pound. That wasn’t Gray. That wasn’t my brother.
My brother wouldn’t say those things.
But that didn’t matter, did it? Because even if that had only been a figment of his brother, the things it had said were still true. Taren would die soon if he didn’t clear the sim.
“When I didn’t see you in the neighborhood, I figured you jumped the gun and came here,” Lake said.
Taren barely heard her. He was still scanning the scrub-and-rock incline so steep it would surely send any climbers to their death.
“Hey, you okay?” Lake asked.
Taren forced himself to look away from the railing. “I don’t like it here. Let’s go.”
Lake studied his face a moment longer. Taren almost couldn’t stand the concern in her eyes. “Were you worried I’d lost you?” she asked.
“Don’t feel sorry for me, I don’t deserve it. I should have tried harder.”
“Hey.” Lake touched his arm and he tried not to shrink away. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re doing okay.”
Taren brushed past her and started climbing the stairs. “We need better than okay if we’re going to clear the sim.”
12
LAKE
They found the nearest door—a public bathroom near the top of the stairs—and Taren stepped through alone to find a place to change his appearance. When he came back, sporting scruffy facial hair that Lake tried not to laugh at, he asked, “Why’s it always San Francisco? Couldn’t the sim be anything?”
“You don’t like San Francisco?” Willow asked.
“I like it fine. I just don’t get why I never end up on a nice tropical island, or at a hockey game.”
“Poor guy,” Willow said. “All you ever get is the two of us.”
He couldn’t help smiling. “A computer program and a walking alarm clock. Honestly, I’ve had weirder friends.”
“Thanks?” Lake said. “Anyway, everyone on the ship came from San Francisco, and that’s where we all want to get back to. So that’s what the sim gives us.”
“To get us ready to go home,” Taren said.
“Sure.” That’s what the sim is supposed to do, anyway. Doesn’t seem like that’s what’s happening. Lake gestured for them to step aside so she could ready herself to step through the door. “I didn’t see any sleepers at your overlook. So we’ll try my idea next, okay?”
Lake tried to envision the Battery, preparing to step through the door. Or anyway, she tried to picture the set of concrete pits she guessed was the place where everyone was gathering.
Taren was still lingering at the corner of her vision, twitching with nervous energy. “There’s a landing strip at SFO for spaceships?” he asked, his voice pitched oddly high.
He was opening too many cans for his own good.
“Actually,” Lake said, “we took a poll on the ship, and everyone figures the shuttles will probably land in the bay.”
“Shit,” Taren said. “You don’t know. Nobody knows?”
“You like standing in front of public bathrooms all day?” Lake asked.
But Willow seemed to feel bad for him. She took his hand in hers and said, “There are so many things in general you don’t know, Taren. So many.” She smiled like it should make him feel better.
At least it stopped him talking.
Lake pulled the door open, picturing concrete pits and empty gun mounts—the Battery. And its neighboring red-roof buildings, shaded by eucalyptus—the Presidio, a decent place to start a survivors’ town. That has to be the place everyone’s gone. She reached back and grabbed Taren’s free hand and pulled him through.
“This can’t be the place,” Taren said, his hand going rigid in hers.
“When I think battery, I think presidio. You?”
“This is the Presidio?”
Lake tried not to picture the place as it had once been—big blocky buildings with cheerful red tile roofs, framed with palm trees and shaded by groves of eucalyptus. The trees were gone now. The buildings, blackened shells. The whole place had been ravaged by the same firestorms she and Taren had seen on TV at the sim-house party.
“No way there’s anyone sheltering here,” Taren said.
“But this has to be it, right?” Willow asked. “How many more batteries can San Francisco have?”
“A lot,” Taren said.
Willow scowled at him, annoyed. “Okay, thanks, professor. Lake’s doing her best.”
Lake drew in a slow breath, trying to think. She had imagined sleepers flocking here to camp in abandoned buildings and hide out in the batteries along the coastal edge of the old fort. “It just made sense that this would be the right place,” she said. “The other batteries around the coastline are only concrete shells. Not worth living in, especially if you’ve got several dozen people with you.”
“What do we do now?” Taren took in the blackened landscape with the misery of a cleanup crew. “Check every
battery, one by one?”
“I bet it’ll go faster if we split up,” Willow said, still annoyed with him.
Lake couldn’t think what to do. She could only stare at the black husks of buildings, and the empty horizon where eucalyptus branches had once split sunshine into long streamers.
Is this what’s waiting for us back home?
I should have guessed a beautiful place like this would be gone.
“Do you smell that?” Taren asked.
Smoke. Lake looked up at the gray cloud sliding over the sun, turning it to a molten blot. “The firestorm. It’s coming back.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Taren said. “This place has already burned down.”
Lake held her palm up, as if to catch rain. Flakes of white ash drifted down to settle on her skin like the ghost of snow. “It’s going to burn again, somehow. We better go.”
She turned back the way they had come, eaten up by frustration. This whole trip has been a failure, and now we have to leave.
She froze. She should have thought about this—
They’d come here through a door, of course. And here was that door, waiting for them. In a building. A square white building, miraculously unmarked by smoke, though its roof was nothing but naked beams.
Taren inspected a plank nailed to the wall. Supplies on Credit, it proclaimed in carved letters. “It’s some kind of trading post, I think.”
“A postapocalyptic store?” Willow darted to touch the sign, as if considering it for a souvenir. “I bet they sell zombie-hunting stuff.”
“Sleepers are zombies enough,” Lake said. “And we don’t hunt them.”
She walked up to the rough-hewn door. No knob, just a block of wood to grip when you needed to pull the door shut. “I think there are people inside,” she said. Voices drifted up through the skeleton roof.
“Is this the Battery after all?” Taren asked, though he sounded like he didn’t believe it.
Willow peered at him. “Do you know what a battery is? Gun mounts and concrete and all that?”
“It doesn’t look big enough to hold fifty sleepers,” Lake said, “but there might be someone inside who can tell us where the Battery is.”
Strange Exit Page 8
