by Patrick Ness
Seraphin laughed too. ‘Next thing you’re going to say is I’m shorter than I look on screen.’ This was clearly a joke. He was really tall and he had these blue eyes that just stared at her with keen interest and . . .
Wait a minute. Wait.
‘You’re Seraphin,’ said April.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re here. You’re not . . . I dunno . . . a hologram.’
‘That’s an excuse to fondle my chest, right?’
‘No. No! It’s just . . . Are you in charge of this place?’ April stared at him sick with horror and the realization that she’d basically just walked into the villain’s lair. If a villain’s lair had more ukuleles than normal. Wow. She’d been so stupid.
Seraphin threw back his head and laughed.
‘Sorry,’ April practically gushed with relief. ‘Sorry. I just assumed that you were in charge.’
‘No. But can you imagine? Me?’ He tore off his beanie hat and threw it onto the desk and shook out his hair. ‘Look, who are you?’
‘I came because of your messages. We decoded them.’
At the ‘we’ Seraphin looked reassured. ‘And I came here to find you.’
‘Oh, thank you, you’re amazing!’ Seraphin whooped. ‘I’ve been stuck here for months.’
‘Stuck here?’
‘Help, I’m a Prisoner in a War Game Factory!’
‘So who is behind this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Really? So you don’t work for them?’
‘Oh, I work for them, but that’s NOT THE SAME THING. Not at all. Listen.’ He threw himself onto a Swiss ball and started bouncing it around the room. ‘Dead truth, okay. I was offered a contract, to be the public face of the site. It was, well, it was a tonne of money. And it was for charity. So, you know, I said yes. They explained about the mock-up of my flat and everything and that was totally cool. I get that some people like artificial. But then I get here, and I think it’s an afternoon filming a few inserts and so on . . . And I Have Been Here for Months. And it has got weirder and totally weirder and do you want a juice?’
He reached under the desk and threw her a small box of fruit juice. ‘Even here I still get freebies. Insane.’
‘What flavour is it?’ April said automatically, and then smiled at herself.
‘No idea,’ said Seraphin drily. ‘I do know that it’s vegan friendly and gluten-free and that if you enjoy it the PR firm encourages you to tweet about it using the hashtag #sosopure.’ He smirked ironically.
‘Right.’
April stabbed the straw into the carton and wondered about what she was going to say next.
‘Where is here?’ she asked.
Seraphin threw his hands out, wobbled on the ball, and righted himself. ‘No idea. Like, there was an Uber. I got in it. Well, I thought it was, only . . . Anyway.’ He bounced forward on the ball, grinning wolfishly at April (a very polite, house-trained wolf ). ‘You say your people decoded my messages?’
‘Yes.’ Oh, this is where it was going. Oh dear.
‘And you’ve come to get me out.’
‘Ah.’
Seraphin took the news reasonably well. Sort of. Eventually. Once he’d stopped shouting. April might not have entirely helped. She was doing her best at looking both contrite and calm when it suddenly struck her that she was a soldier trapped in an alien dimension inside a fake flat with a celebrity shouting at her on a space hopper.
‘You’re laughing! Seraphin broke off his rant, incredulous. ‘You’re laughing?’
‘Well, yes,’ April said. ‘Sorry.’ She blew her nose and then tidied her hair back. ‘You have no idea—how scared I am, how much I want to go home. I need to get back to look after my mum. I need to tell my friends what’s going on here. Oh God, there’s so much I need to do. And I thought that you’d . . .’ She laughed again. ‘I thought that you’d have a way out.’
‘And I thought that you did.’ Seraphin laughed too.
‘The whole situation is crazy. We’re all stuck here. I’m still doing all my normal vlogs from in here about “My Insane Life” and it’s all about the sunglasses I’m being paid to wear, a healthy snack delivery company I’ve been endorsed to discover, or a song I’m writing or whatever, rather than what’s really going on, which is so mad. Like, if ever filming your daily life should be about something, it should be about this—massive space war against fricking aliens. Shouldn’t it?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘The saddest vlogs are the ones that are about something. Vlogs by sick kids.’ Seraphin wasn’t laughing. He just looked so sad. ‘Jeez. I can’t stop watching them. They’re not even popular—just grim. Kind of like Game of Thrones grim, you know? But I am an addict. ’Cos people are all like, “Hey Seraphin, you’re so brave putting yourself out there,” and I’m like “Thanks,” but I’m not a kid stuck full of needles.
‘But yeah, dying. That’s not Living the Dream.’ He grabbed himself another juice and tossed another one across to April.
‘The whole vlogging thing’s really hard, you know. My Insane Life. Everyone looks at you like they know you. And it’s like, “You may think you know me but I do not know you,” but when they run up to you at a music festival you have to be all smiles even when they jab you in the face with the selfie stick. ’Cos you’ve already made the choice to be their best friend. That’s part of the mission. If I’m out in public, then I’m always on. I’m always smiling.
‘And you learn, like, when you really commit to it, that the sun always has to shine. ’Cos it’s my job to tell you that it’s okay. That life’s great. Is your life?’
April blinked. ‘Well, no, I mean, sometimes not, but you know . . .’
‘Nah-har.’ Seraphin made a Wrong Answer noise. ‘That’s your audience gone. Not what we came here for. And, don’t get me wrong, so many of my problems are #FirstWorldProblems.’ He stopped, shifted posture on the Swiss ball, and suddenly bounded into a devastating impersonation of himself. ‘Hey, guys! My hair! Dis-as-ter! Like whaaaaat? Insane! What am I going to do with this? Oh shoot me!’
He slid off the ball and landed on the floor. April had never seen someone do an impression of themselves, and it was odd. Ten seconds of sharp self-hatred.
‘I’ll tell you the things I don’t get to do. Simple things.
‘When you commit to doing this every day, you don’t realise that there are going to be Bad Days. Or you think that you’ll store up a few so that you can have a few days off. You know. But that never happens. It just doesn’t. And then, you know, top secret, but when you have a hangover, you don’t get to crawl back under the duvet. You have to share it with the world. Share! It! With! The! World! And your hangover has to be funny and here I am in Speedy’s Café and I am so in need of bacon and isn’t that great and . . .’ He gave a long, thoughtful sigh. ‘I’ll be wearing a baggy jumper that makes me look vulnerable yet adorable. Think about that—I have to pick what I’m wearing when I’m hungover.
‘And, hey—you ever been dumped?’
‘Ack,’ said April.
‘Sorry,’ said Seraphin. ‘I know, right, I’ve only just met you. Too much sharing. But it’s like, you’re dumped. You wake up the morning after and you just want to not be awake. Like getting out of bed is impossible. Iron Man is sat on your shoulders. But no. You gotta get out of bed. And the worst thing is that you wake up and you are dumped and then you remember that Everyone Knows. Literally everyone. Like, if it happens in public, in a restaurant, someone will have live-tweeted it, and there’ll be three reaction videos out there already. And you don’t get to have a day off. You have to be out there and be dumped and be nice about it.’
‘I think,’ said April, ‘that’s called being a gentleman.’
‘Yeah, very good, 1950s.’ Seraphin’s laugh was a nonstarter. ‘But is it fair? Sometimes, I just want to get stuff off my chest. ’Cos they were doing my head in and whatever, but I have to be sooo still. Even—you remember the one who rel
eased an album about me?’
‘Not really, no,’ April admitted. As much as she was aware of Seraphin, she sort of had a vague ‘dating that model with the quirky handbags’ memory. ‘But you’re famous. Worse, you’re internet famous. Some woman goes out with you, she’s going to be hated. She breaks up with you, she’s going to get so much more hated.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ Seraphin agreed wearily. ‘Jeez. Sometimes I think the whole online thing was invented just so we could hate on women. But look, hear me out, right. Say I’m single, and I go out and I meet a girl right, the morning after she’ll post “So, this just happened . . .” with a picture of me asleep in her bed. And the world just goes BANG. Like what? I’ve not got control over that. Like, I can’t say I’ve got a cold without three different PRs biking me over their client’s cough meds and a little note suggesting a hashtag. You know, I just want it to be back to when it was just fun insane rather than insane insane.’
‘Like this?’ suggested April.
‘Totally.’ Seraphin scrambled up, and kicked the wall of his flat. It wobbled. ‘This is the point that it’s all gone totally nuts.’
‘What the hell do we do now?’ asked April.
THIRTY-SIX
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO WIPE OUT SKANDIS FOREVER
‘COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE’
After leaving Seraphin, April had tried fighting again. And again, she’d not got any further.
What the hell was this place? Was it even a place? Was she trapped in an idea?
She’d thought that finding Seraphin would have helped. Like Dorothy finding the Wizard of Oz. Only the man hiding behind the curtain wasn’t pulling any levers. He was simply there to make a lot of noise.
He’d tried to help her but hadn’t really been able to do much. It was like neither of them had a full picture of what was going on. He was there to get brave people to fight monsters in order to save the planet. She was there, supposedly, to fight monsters to save the planet.
But something didn’t link up between the two.
So she’d gone to fight a monster, to see how it made her feel.
‘That’s definitely a reason why I don’t want to do this,’ she grunted as a Skandis threw her against a wall. Was she imagining it, or was the wall less padded than yesterday? Was the Skandis more aggressive? Was she finding it a little harder?
She lay on the floor, panting and tasting blood in her mouth. ‘I’m not a coward,’ she said, and activated the safe word.
The next ten seconds proved she wasn’t a coward. The ten seconds it took the dimensions to normalise and for the Skandis to vanish were endless. As if sensing the fight was over, the Skandis threw itself at her with desperate energy. April fired off a shot from her gun, more as a warning than anything else. It singed the creature’s hide, making the slime bubble and steam as it scorched its way through the flesh. The creature roared, pulling itself up.
I can do this, April thought. I can do this after all. She raised the gun. Aimed.
And the creature vanished.
She staggered out of the Combat Chamber. She was soaked in sweat. She held a hand out in front of her and watched it tremble. She took a deep gulp of breath and tried to hold it, but she couldn’t.
Another soldier was standing there, visor down.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Yes . . .’ she said. ‘Just . . . shaken . . .’
‘Sure,’ he said, sounding concerned. But not taking the helmet off. He just carried on staring at her. I’m being filmed, April thought. I’m looking at him and my screen says NORMAL. He’s looking at me and his screen says ABNORMAL. I’m being filmed through all of this. I’m going mad and I’m fighting aliens and I’m being filmed. If I crack now, if I go crazy with this guy, then he’ll just be filming all of it. And it’ll be shown in a loop. A loop of ‘This Weak Girl . . . ’
She stared back at the guy.
‘Hey,’ she said, and she held up her hand. ‘Look, it’s shaking less. Woop-de-doop-dee.’
‘Yes,’ said the soldier after a pause. How old was he? Mid-twenties? Ten years younger? The helmet made it impossible to tell.
‘Just, you know, still getting the hang of it.’
That creature, rushing at her out of the whiteness, roaring and spitting and leaping. And her gun coming up and her dodging to the left and then the right and the thing still coming at her.
‘Yeah,’ the soldier said. He wiped a hand across his sleeve. There was that strange green blood/fluid all over it. ‘Just killed one. They take a while. You’re Level One, now, yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait till you get to Level Three. That’s when it gets pretty juicy. They’re really fast moving there. And they take longer to kill. They’re really vicious.’
‘Vicious?’
‘Vicious.’ The helmet made the guy’s face implacable. ‘The Level Ones are much slower. Like they’re older. Or not so good at fighting.’
‘Okay.’ That sounded odd.
‘Sometimes it’s like the Level Ones are actually pleased to be killed. Imagine that, eh?’
‘Yeah.’ April was finding this whole exchange odd.
‘So . . .’ she said.
The visor tilted at an angle. Curious. April very carefully said nothing.
‘Do you want to go back in there?’ the soldier said. ‘I know how to re-jump the Combat Chambers . . .’ He gestured to an instrument panel at the end of the bay.
‘We’re not supposed to know how, but they’re really easy. I can pop you back in there in a couple of minutes.’
For a moment, his soldierly air had been replaced by boyish enthusiasm. He was almost dancing over the instruments. A boy showing off to a girl.
‘No, I’m good,’ said April. On the one hand, maybe it would do her good to confront her fears. On the other, there was something about this that just didn’t feel right.
‘You sure?’ The visor looked at her, once again unreadable.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ said April. She walked away.
She knew now what she had to do and that it wouldn’t be easy.
April walked into the Big White Room, joining everyone at the meal that was possibly breakfast.
She chewed on the soapy flakes, plucking up the courage. The moment passed. Another moment passed. And then, in a rush, she pushed her bowl away and stood up.
‘I want . . .’
She faltered. She swallowed, raised her voice, and started again. Everywhere she looked was wrong.
‘Everyone, I want to talk to you about the Skandis. I’m not going to fight them anymore.’
She’d wanted a reaction. No one said anything. Spoons lifted food from bowls.
The video of Seraphin played on.
‘I’m not a coward,’ she shouted to the roomful of people who were ignoring her. That’s not an easy thing to do. ‘I’m not saying I don’t think the Skandis are evil.’
No one cared but still she carried on talking. ‘I’m just saying that I don’t get why we are being made to fight them. It shouldn’t be us.’
The volume of the video went up slightly.
‘Cupcakes, eh? I love cupcakes. Today I’m going to make some amazing cupcakes and cut my own hair.’
‘Like that!’ April raised her voice till it scratched at her throat. ‘We should be doing stupid things. Like that. Normal things. Not . . .’ She stopped, lost for words.
‘These scissors . . . Do you think they’re blunt or Psycho badass? As in Stab! Stab! Stab! Arg!? And do you think I’ll get hair in my cupcakes? Well, Captain Pugsley will decide.’
A square appeared, blocking out a tiny, stamp-sized portion of Seraphin. It was a small picture of April. Someone in the room was looking at her. Just one person. Someone was paying attention to her.
April kept talking. ‘This. This room. Think about it. Please. This roomful of people. Isn’t it insane? Isn’t it wrong?’
‘And now we’re gonna clean the bow
l the best way. Giffers go crazy at me licking my batter.’
Another square appeared on the huge screen. Two people. How many before ABNORMAL became NORMAL?
‘Look around you. Look up. Stop looking at him. Look at yourselves, at what you’re doing.’ April hoped her voice didn’t sound desperate. She was going for strident, she was going for confident, but those last words, something pulled at her vocal cords and choked them slightly.
‘Still plenty of cream in the bowl, so a big dollop for Captain Pugsley and oh, oh, oh, I’ve spilled some on my chest. Classic.’
More squares appeared. More small pictures of April, breeding and multiplying, spreading across the wall. People were looking at her.
‘Listen to me,’ she shouted at them. ‘Stop fighting. Stop this madness!’ Then she filled her lungs. One final push. ‘JUST LOOK AT ME!’
As she said it, she realised she’d made a terrible mistake. Gone too far.
For a moment it was all good. The picture of Seraphin broke up entirely and the screen became one big April staring back at her. Waiting to hear what she’d say next.
And then, one by one, as her words echoed around the room, those squares blinked out. The wall was whole again.
‘Three-second rule, dammit, Captain Pugsley!’
Too needy. She knew she’d lost them. She turned around and walked out.
THIRTY-SEVEN
AFTER YOU READ THIS YOU’LL WANT A SHOWER
April woke up. The room was wrong somehow. For a moment she hoped she was back in her bedroom at home. That it had all been a dream. But that wasn’t how dreams worked.
The room was dark. Completely. It went this way when you were supposed to be asleep. It was disorienting. She’d woken up in the dark here before and it was peaceful. This time, though, there was something wrong in the room. Something that itched. Something that refused to be right.
She heard the breath.
She was not alone. There was someone in the room. She realised how wrong she was when they came for her. About a dozen of them. Rushing towards her. She cried out and then they were on her.
