My eyes held steady on my sister. Jude’s other side came creeping back, reminding me we were still at odds. “The body isn’t a thing to be sold. These people who say they don’t care what happens don’t even know their own bodies anymore, or remember what it’s like to be real.” I leaned across the table. “If they did, they wouldn’t give them over so easily. You’re taking advantage of this.”
A flicker of sorrow passed across Jude’s eyes like a bird in flight, followed by a knowing look, like she held information that I didn’t. “What, Jude?”
She looked at me hard, her virtual skin like stone. “Everyone is capable of betrayal, Skylar. In the end, we all betray each other somehow, even the ones we love.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
Jude straightened, chin up, shoulders thrown back, every bit a woman capable of ruling, which meant she was also capable of cruelty. “You can’t hear an apology when someone is offering one,” she stated.
My brow furrowed. “You were apologizing just now?”
“In a way, but you’re too deaf to hear it.”
I looked at my sister, saw how her iciness caused a layer of frost to crawl down the walls of the room. “I guess you’re too proud to say sorry directly.”
Jude rose from her chair, smoothly, so steady a stack of books on her head would easily stay in place. “It doesn’t matter what I am, Skylar,” she said. “Or even if we apologized. Someday, down the road, we’d just betray each other again. And when love is involved, the betrayal is always worse.” She walked around the table and faced me. “Someone you care about deeply was willing to use you, Skylar, to get something he wanted even more,” she started, but then her eyes shifted behind me.
I heard someone else enter the room and turned to find Rain standing there. It was like Jude conjured him. Was that who she meant? Had Rain betrayed me yet again?
“Skylar, what is Jude doing here?” he asked.
Jude was shaking her head at me, as though she knew my thoughts. “Skylar, I wasn’t referring to him.”
“What is she talking about?” Rain asked.
I ignored his question, gripping the edge of the table as something unpleasant, a fear or an ache, lapped at my edges. “Who, then?”
Jude dug into the pocket of her jacket and produced a tiny slip of paper. “I made a virtual copy just in case I needed to prove it to you.” She held it out so I could see.
But I didn’t need to. I already knew exactly what it was.
“Does the name Kit ring a bell?” she went on. “Your bounty hunter friend showed up at my head of security’s door this morning with this note as proof of his access to you. We let his sister go in exchange for the very valuable information he passed to us, and here we are! You were foolish to get involved with a bounty hunter, Skylar. How else do you think we knew what you were up to today?”
My virtual self seemed to turn to stone, just as I’d seen Jude’s do, my skin taking on the gray sheen of steel. Kit betrayed me. Kit betrayed me.
Kit. Kit. Kit.
As my outsides roughened, my heart shattered inside of me.
I felt an arm slide around my waist, keeping me steady. I looked up into Rain’s eyes, grateful that I was no longer alone.
“As a gesture of goodwill, I let him go, Skylar,” Jude said. “Both he and his sister are free. Aren’t you relieved to hear such news?”
“Thank you,” I said, but my voice was black with regret.
Jude’s eyes were steady on me. “It’s punishment enough to see him again and know that he betrayed you right at the moment you loved him most. Isn’t it, Skylar?”
Pain spread through me, a pain so severe I was sure it wasn’t only my virtual self experiencing it, but my body, too, the real and the virtual at war with my vulnerable heart. Jude was right and I knew it. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to gather myself, leaning into Rain for support. “You said you were here to make a truce. Get on with it.”
She nodded. “You’ve gotten your way, Skylar, and given everyone a choice. I want you to stand by your words and allow us to sell all the bodies forfeited by their owners. With no further interference from you and your friends.”
“And in exchange?”
“I’ll let everyone who unplugs go, even you,” Jude said.
My mind spun. I turned to Rain for help. “What do we do?”
Rain seemed so calm, much calmer than I felt. “It’s not a perfect deal, but it’s better than the alternative, which risks everyone, including you.”
I took a deep breath, my stomach churning. “All right,” I croaked.
Jude smiled. “Part of being a leader means making hard choices, Skylar. Maybe now you’ll understand me a little bit better. And our father, too.” Her eyebrows went up. “Maybe you’ll even forgive our mother someday, too,” she added cryptically.
Then she turned and left the room.
I walked away from Rain and collapsed into a nearby chair, trying to process all her words and what I’d just done. My head went to my hands, my virtual self turned to water, my hair and skin wet with tears. They fell from the ceiling like a storm.
Come on. This way!
Mommy, please—
The voices were pushing through the wall again.
My head screamed in agony. For a second, everything went black. Then a hand clasped my shoulder, and my sight returned.
“Skylar.” Rain’s voice was gentle. “It’s getting late. We need to go.”
I looked at him, my eyes swimming, brain throbbing. I let him pull me from the chair to the door that led out of his father’s office.
Suddenly, we were spilling into the room connecting the two worlds, the room full of doors from every part of the App World, and I understood the voices I’d been hearing. People streamed by us, some of them at a run, some of them with fear on their faces, others with a mixture of confusion and regret, calling out as they went. As they passed through you could literally see their Apps draining away, wings disappearing to nothing, models’ legs growing shorter and plumper, magical attire evaporating to be replaced by the plain basic clothing of the virtual self, skin the color of green and blue or covered in glitter fading back to Caucasian 4.0. For a while the rush was like a stampede of strange animals, mythical creatures running from an unseen foe.
But eventually the exodus steadied to a trickle.
Where was Inara?
I hadn’t yet seen her.
I took a step, stumbled, again my mind, my sight, flickering out. I was on my knees, hands pressed against the floor. A man nearly tripped over me on his way out of the App World, but my eyes were too blurry to make him out clearly.
“Skylar,” Rain was saying. I could hear his voice somewhere above me. “You’re scaring me. This is too much for you to handle.”
“You go,” I told him, getting to my feet, everything so unsteady. “Unplug now if you need to. I’ll be okay.”
“I’m not leaving you behind,” he said.
My vision cleared and I focused on him. “I have to wait as long as I can, remember? I haven’t seen Inara. And I have to be the last one out.”
“Skylar, come on,” Rain urged.
A girl, maybe a nine, went by us, leaving behind a trail of delicate swan feathers, the ballet shoes on her feet transforming to regular slippers with each step.
“People are still coming through,” I said, hoping Inara would suddenly appear. “I can’t go yet. If I do, the people left behind will be sold by Jude.”
The floor shook underneath us. A crack appeared in the ceiling above, from one side of the room to the other, and searing pain pierced my head like lightning.
Rain’s eyes were panicked. “Your mind can’t hold this much longer.”
At first I nearly couldn’t respond, but then the pain faded to a throbbing, dull ache. “Please. I’ll join you soon. I promise.” A man who must have downloaded a James Bond App raced by us, leaving behind a sleek pistol. It clattered to the floor. The lady on his arm faded to nothing and w
hen he walked through the door he was nearly six inches shorter, his hair a dull blond again after that sleek and shiny black. Just then, the red-lacquered door to my right crumbled to nothing.
“Skylar,” Rain was yelling.
Bits of ceiling began to pour down around us.
Rain grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the blue door. It was moving and swaying, like the surface of the Water Tower, but this time it wasn’t just an effect. The portal I’d created to the Real World was breaking apart.
A woman holding a child was picking her way through the debris.
“You’re almost there,” I yelled over the din.
She looked at me, eyes wide as she came toward us. Rain was nearly on the other side of the threshold. Just a little farther and he would be gone. I held fast to the edge of the frame, even as it fell apart in my hands. The woman had nearly reached us. My head throbbed so hard I almost couldn’t open my eyes, and my heart raced so fast I was dizzy.
Then, right as the mother and child made their way through, I saw her.
Inara.
The ceiling was falling down around us, but she was almost here.
“Skylar,” Rain was pleading.
“Just,” I began, each word an effort like I’d never felt in my life. “Let. Go.”
The roar of the collapsing landscape was so loud I wasn’t sure Rain could hear me.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Inara was so close. “Skylar!” she shrieked.
But the top of the door slid downward, like a shade being pulled shut. It knocked Rain away, his hand leaving mine. It was all I could do to keep the door open high enough for Inara to slip underneath what was left of it.
The pain was so strong I was nearly blind with it.
I felt Inara move past me. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Then she was gone.
But it was too late. I was too late.
The door slid farther toward the ground and I was on the wrong side of it.
My virtual self, my body, whatever I became when I was in this shifting state, seemed to be breaking apart with the room itself, with everything around me. There came a great rumble, a roar that seemed to come from the belly of the world and rise up through the floor and press down from above.
The last thing I remembered was seeing a great beam coming toward me.
And then, then . . .
Nothing.
THREE DAYS LATER
43
Skylar
the new world
I PUT MY hand to my mouth and laughed.
I was so happy I didn’t know what else to do.
Kit circled my wrist with his fingers, then he leaned in to kiss me, slow and gentle. His eyes were bright as he pulled away from me, enough to speak.
“I love you,” he said.
The cool remnants of an ocean wave tickled across our feet.
“I love you, too,” I told him.
We clasped hands and began to walk, our bodies bumping into each other, the length of our arms touching. We floated over the sand. Occasionally we stopped to kiss. I longed to go back to the cottage, to slip under the covers of Kit’s bed and spend the rest of the afternoon there with him, but the anticipation of this was sweet enough to allow me some patience.
My whole body was impatient for Kit.
I’d never felt anything like it in my life.
To think, as a virtual girl, I would never have felt this at all.
As Kit and I walked hand in hand, our bodies electric, lit up with love bright as the sun, I thought about all that we lost when we plugged in, chose the virtual over the real. I understood why some of us did this, too. The virtual self is stunning on so many levels, all that it can do, survive, repair, the millions of possible experiences it offers us and with complete and absolute safety. We can skydive and fight lions and leap from cliffs with total confidence that all will be well. We can feel the thrill of falling from great heights or swooping up toward the clouds on feathered wings. We can change our code to make ourselves more beautiful, or ugly, try on new personalities, and all the other strange and wonderful and frightening things that the people who code the Apps can imagine. The imagination in the App World was extraordinary; it allowed us to live things that the real body can never know because it is too fragile, because it is limited, finite, mortal, because though it is capable of great imagination as well, that imagination often stretches us far beyond what can ever be real. But then, the real body is made for other things that the virtual self can never hope to know.
I wanted to know all of those things with Kit.
I wanted to find them out with him. I never wanted to stop.
“I love you,” I told Kit, a second time.
He smiled and leaned in for a kiss.
The sun shone down on us, warming our skin, heating us up.
Wait, whispered a voice, darkly, inside of me.
Wait.
Something is off.
Something was off. Something was off.
A heavy gray cloud passed overhead, blocking out the sun. I shivered, suddenly cold. No, suddenly freezing. I pulled myself away from Kit, a gesture that physically hurt, that pained my heart.
“What’s wrong?” I started to ask, but then I saw his face, no, his eyes, how they’d grown blank, expressionless. Indifferent. As though he couldn’t even see I was there, or worse, that we’d somehow scrolled back in time to that very first day when all I was to Kit was a thing to be bartered. As I stood there, trying to get him to look at me like I was the girl he’d just told that he loved, a gust of wintry air rushed over everything and his features seemed to dissipate, as if Kit was merely a projection and one whose source was weakening.
My teeth were chattering hard. “Kit?”
I could see through him now.
“Don’t go,” I cried. “Come back! Come back! Please!”
But my pleading didn’t matter.
He was gone.
“Skylar?” said a voice. Male. Familiar.
“Skylar?” said another. Female. Also familiar.
“Skylar, can you hear us?” said yet another.
My eyelids were so heavy, heavy like someone was pressing them down into my cheekbones, but eventually I managed to push them open. For a while my vision was blurred and all I saw were dark shapes moving in front of me.
“She’s waking up,” said one of the women’s voices.
I blinked and blinked, kept on blinking until the film cleared from my eyes and I saw who was standing around me. The first face I recognized was Rain’s, and he smiled broadly now, his eyes alive with relief.
“Welcome back to the Real World,” he said.
The Keeper reached out and took my hand, squeezing it. “You had us worried.”
I tried to sit up but my head throbbed. Everything about me ached and groaned with the slightest movement. I was back in my room at the Keeper’s apartment in the mansion, the same room where I’d woken up the first time I’d unplugged. “Is everything okay? Did people make it out of the market?” My voice was hoarse. “What happened? Where’s Inara?”
“You need to rest,” the Keeper replied.
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
Rain nodded. “Inara is okay. She’ll see you when you’re feeling better.”
I took in a long breath, feeling relieved.
“And let’s just say the Body Market is severely diminished,” Rain went on. “The plan worked enough to not only allow the people to wake up on their own, but to scare away the vast majority of the Body Tourists.”
The Keeper chuckled. “Apparently, they didn’t like the idea of buying a body that might suddenly come to life.”
I searched their faces, my mind stuck on one of Rain’s words. “It worked . . . enough?”
Rain sat down on the bed. He glanced at my hand, and I wondered if he might take it. He didn’t. “Well, while many citizens of the App World don’t want their bodies sold, they don’t want a life unplugged either
. We’re in the process of plugging them back in at facilities where their bodies will be protected, starting with Briarwood.”
“But at least they have the choice,” I said.
“At least they have the choice, yes,” the Keeper echoed.
I sensed there was more. “And . . . ?”
Rain’s eyes darkened. “There were also plenty of citizens who gave their bodies over to the New Capitalists’ cause, as Jude hoped.”
I swallowed, my throat dry, taking this in. “Well, at least they made their choice,” I repeated, though the words sounded hollow. It was difficult for me to imagine people just donating their bodies to be sold, but then, we had to respect their decision. Not everyone wanted a real life. For some, obviously for plenty, the virtual life was the only life that mattered.
Rain glanced at the door. “Skylar, there’s plenty of time to fill you in when you’re feeling better. But right now, there’s someone else here who really wants to see you.”
Kit?
His name swept through me like a storm. I couldn’t stop it.
My heart soared and then plummeted as everything that Jude had told me, the shock and the pain of it, came rushing back. I tried to sit up a little higher, my gaze caught on the jar of sea glass sitting on the bedside table where I’d left it. I didn’t know whether I wanted to pick it up and hug it to my chest or send it flying across the room to smash into a million pieces against the wall.
“Who is it?” I finally managed.
Rain nodded at the Keeper.
I nearly couldn’t take a breath as I waited to see who would walk through the door.
“I searched everywhere, Skylar,” Rain was saying. He sounded excited. “I thought maybe if I was able to find her, somehow you’d come back to us, and here you are.”
Her?
Right then she walked through the door—no, she rushed—rushed to my bedside.
“Mom?”
“My brave girl,” she said, and threw her arms around me. “We have so much to catch up on, so much to talk about.”
I let her lift me up off the pillows, reveled in the shock and comfort of having my mother, this woman I’d longed for all my life in the App World, with whom I’d still only had a precious few minutes many, many months ago, right here with me.
The Body Market Page 26
