“Hi, Skylar.”
I turned. Brandy, a fellow seventeen—well, now an Over Eighteen—was passing by in the hallway. “Hey, Brandy,” I said, and tried to smile, despite the anger still churning in me from my fight with Rain.
Brandy was tall with beautiful skin, the same color as my Keeper’s. She wore dreadlocks that came all the way to the middle of her back. She’d gathered them into a ponytail today. “I thought I saw your mother headed down to the plugs earlier.”
“The plugs? Really?”
Brandy shrugged. “It seemed like that’s where she was going. See you later,” she added, before rounding the corner.
What would my mother be doing down there?
I knocked once more, just to be sure, and when there was still no answer I changed direction and headed downstairs. Soon I was entering the caverns, the sounds of the ocean tunneling into the rocks nearly constant. The plugs were powered by the water and the wind howling behind everything. The glow of glass coffins met my eyes, row after row. By now I was used to it, but still this place always sent a shiver over my skin.
“Mom,” I called out, my voice echoing. “Hello?”
When there was no answer, I began walking through the rows, searching, but I couldn’t find her, not even near Adam, who still seemed peaceful as he lay there, plugged in—something I was relieved to see. But then when I got to the far side of the caverns I saw her at the end of the row, so lost in thought she didn’t realize someone was there.
“Mom?”
She jumped at the sound of my voice. She’d been stooped over one of the shiny glass boxes. Which was supposed to be empty.
But I could see that it wasn’t.
Her eyes grew wide. “Skylar!” The surprise on her face was quickly erased, replaced by a smile. She hurried toward me, carefully placing her own body between the coffin and my line of sight. “How are you today, my darling?”
“I’m fine. Mom,” I said, pronouncing each word slowly. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”
We stood there looking at each other. She was a few inches shorter than me, her real skin glowing the same golden color as mine even in the odd lighting of this place.
“It’s good to see you.” Her voice faltered. “You look upset,” she said. Then she moved, just enough that I could see the coffin she’d been blocking, I could see into it, and even from here I could tell there was a body inside—a body I’d never seen before.
And something was wrong with it.
It was . . . off.
Off, as in, not quite settled into the cradle that was the plug.
My eyes flickered to my mother’s. I pointed behind her. “What’s wrong with that body you were looking at? Who is that?”
My mother moved a step, again placing herself between me and that one glass box. “It’s nothing for you to worry about, Skylar. Why don’t you go out for a swim? It’s still nice weather for this time of year and you may not have too many more days like this before it gets colder!” There was false cheer in her voice, a fake casual tone that clearly required effort.
“What are you hiding?” I stepped aside to move past her but she stepped to match me and planted herself in front of me.
“Skylar, don’t,” she warned.
“Don’t what? Do you really expect me not to go see what’s going on?”
“Please,” she begged, and pressed her hands into my shoulders.
“Mom,” I began, “I’ve had enough lies and secrets to last me forever. I can’t stand any more of them, especially if they’re between us. And I’m tired of people trying to protect me.” Gently, I lifted her hands off me and moved around her, but not before I visibly saw her posture slump, her glossy black ponytail falling forward along her cheek.
I went to the glass box.
Her footsteps trailed softly after me.
Inside the coffin was a teenage girl, maybe a fifteen or even younger, a fourteen or a thirteen. But she was no one I knew—no one from Briarwood, that was for certain. Freckles dotted her cheeks, her eyelashes were blond and long, and everything about her was normal for someone her age, perfect, really. Except . . .
Goose bumps covered my arms and legs.
The color of her skin . . . it was . . . I don’t even know how to adequately describe it. There was a gray-green tinge to it, like the color of the Real World sky before a terrible thunderstorm. This, and she wasn’t moving. Not at all.
Her chest was still.
“Mom, what’s wrong with her? She’s not breathing! We have to do something!”
“Skylar—”
I turned to her, my heart pounding wildly. “Do you know . . . CPR?” For that string of letters I had to reach all the way back to Mrs. Worthington’s class, and the time she’d taught us of the “pathetic” and “sad” methods Real World citizens developed for fixing real bodies, whereas our virtual ones could be restored to perfection instantly, with the help of a quick download. “I don’t know CPR, Mom—”
“—Sweetheart—”
“—I never learned it. . . .” My voice trailed off and a dreadful silence filled the space around us. My mother’s face was stricken. “Is she . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
My mother said it for me. “Dead? Yes, Skylar. She’s dead.”
My mouth gaped. “She’s too young! She’s not even—”
“—a fourteen,” my mother supplied.
“But why? Who is she? How did she even get here?” I dropped down to my knees and studied the girl’s lifeless body. I knew, we all knew, the dangers of the real body, its weaknesses, its eternal fragility, its propensity for sickness and broken bones. It was one thing for someone elderly to die on the plugs, someone whose body had aged as long as a person can and whose organs, whose heart and lungs, simply gave out. Yet it was something else for a body this young to die. “She couldn’t have been sick, because the glass seals out viruses and bacteria, purifying everything.”
My mother remained silent. Even her breaths were quiet. Then she held out her hand. “Come with me, darling,” she said as I let my fingers slide into hers. “Let’s talk.”
“About what?” I asked in a whisper. I let her pull me along until we came to a door in the farthest reaches of the cavern, a sliver of light shining out from underneath it. It was nearly obscured because of its placement behind one of the rows of boxes. I hadn’t even known that it existed until now.
Beyond the door were more bodies.
Maybe twenty of them. Too many to count with a single glance. They were laid out in the glass coffins that held the plugs. Different ages, genders, skin colors, hair colors, facial features, so much beauty in the many forms a real body could take, forms and differences that would be erased by virtual reality, a feature of the App World I hadn’t even understood until I’d unplugged, and one I’d grown to despise now that I had. The App World was a world of sameness, where people could only distinguish themselves via a download and one they must pay for. It was not a world I wanted to be a part of anymore, that much I knew.
But the bodies before me did have at least one thing in common.
They were dead. Clearly dead.
Not a single chest rose with the intake of breath.
Not a limb twitched with evidence of life.
Could this be because of the virus?
I took a step back, seeking the comfort of my mother’s presence. “What is this room? Where did all these people come from?”
My mother hesitated before speaking. “It’s a morgue.”
“A morgue? That’s a place where the dead are kept.”
“Yes.”
I turned to her, my brow furrowed tight, as a horrible thought took hold of me. “Was it the Shifting App that killed them?” I whispered. “Was it because of the trauma of it? Or trying to shift and then not making it? Is that it? You didn’t want me to know that this little girl died because of me—because of what I downloaded into her brain. Is that what’s going on here? You
’ve been hiding the bodies that died all this time?”
My mother went to one of them. She peered down at a lifeless man, who was maybe her own age. His hair was graying at the temples. “No. It wasn’t the Shifting App.”
I studied her. “How can you be so sure?”
“I was a Keeper all my life and I just know things,” she said, as if this was a real explanation. She glanced toward the far back wall and sighed. “This place is a morgue, Skylar, but it’s also a lab.”
I followed her gaze to a series of tall, long black tables, notebooks stacked high on one of them, and all sorts of instruments and metal things I didn’t recognize. “What kind of lab?”
“My lab,” she said simply.
“Your lab?” My voice went up an octave. “What are you talking about?”
She inhaled, a sharp hiss. “I was a special kind of Keeper. Before the worlds split, people would have called me a scientist—a scientist and a doctor. While you were plugged in, I studied medicine for many years.” She beckoned me toward the table stacked with notebooks, patting her hand on one of the two stools that stood next to it and taking the other one for herself.
I climbed onto it. “You’re a doctor. You have a lab. And you’re just telling me this now?”
Guilt entered her eyes. Her arm stretched along the black top of the table, her hand placed firmly on one of the notebooks. “With everyone leaving for the App World, New Port City had an overabundance of bodies that needed care and a shortage of trained doctors who could diagnose and treat problems and illnesses, when they occurred. You can live virtually and happily as though all is well, while your body might be suffering in this world with, I don’t know, cancer for example. It was probably about a year after you plugged in that there was a call for volunteers to attend medical school.”
I stared at my mother. “And you volunteered.”
“I did,” she said. “As it turns out, I was good at the profession, and I loved it. It’s one thing to care for the basic needs of a plugged-in body, but it was something else to care for the sick. To save someone’s life.”
My mind was stuck on one of my mother’s words. “You’re using the past tense. Why?”
My mother’s eyes clouded over and shifted to the stack of notebooks where she’d placed her hand. “Everything changed because of Jude, and so much of it is my fault. I got so wrapped up in my work. That’s how I missed seeing how obsessed she’d become with you, with the App World. When she founded the New Capitalist movement, I didn’t realize where she meant to go with it, or maybe I just refused to see. I thought it was a phase, and then . . . it wasn’t. By the time I realized what she was planning, things were beyond saving.” She picked up one of the bound journals and opened it, its paper wavy with use. Then she turned to me, eyes unblinking. “This is something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, Skylar, but I’ve been ashamed. That’s why I avoided telling you I was a doctor and about this lab. I’ve been coming here at night when you’re asleep. But I suppose I couldn’t keep it from you forever.”
I bit my lip, afraid to hear what came next. Yet another terrible truth about my family, the terrible truths stacking up like layers of cake laced with poison. “What else aren’t you telling me? Just say it. All of it.”
“As you already know, your sister was—is—very good at threats. And she threatened you. Your life. At the beginning, I didn’t know that the threats to you would never end.” My mother took a deep breath. “But a few years ago, your sister made me come work for her on the project that would help her live up to the promises she made to Emory Specter.”
I winced at the mention of his name.
“The promise,” my mother went on, the words seeming to choke her, “was to figure out how to allow for virtual eternal life. To find a way App World citizens could be liberated from their bodies.”
“That was you?” I asked. “You found the Cure?”
My mother shook her head. “Not just me, but me and a small team of scientists and doctors working together. But yes, we discovered what the App World refers to as the Cure. Please don’t hate me,” she added quickly. “You have to understand, your life was threatened, it was always under threat with your sister in charge, and I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. I never dreamed you’d find out about her or me. I always thought you were living a happy virtual life, and that you’d forgotten all about the little family you left behind when you were small.”
“I never forgot.” I stared at my mother. “I wish you’d finally trust me enough to be honest. No one ever thinks I can handle anything.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe that all this time you’ve been keeping secrets and sneaking around behind my back.” I slid off the stool. Pulled at the neck of my shirt. It felt difficult to breathe in here, like I might suffocate.
My mother gripped my arm to stop me from leaving. A tear ran down her face. “Skylar, it’s not that I’ve thought you couldn’t handle things. But this thing I have to carry myself. It’s my legacy, and much of what’s happened between our worlds is my fault, or at least partly.”
I shook my head. “No it’s not. It’s Jude’s fault. Jude’s and Emory Specter’s. You just got caught up in it.”
“But I also went along with it,” she said. “I didn’t do anything to stop it. Not in a way that made a difference.” My mother tilted her head and studied me. “You really had no idea about any of this?” she asked, sounding honestly surprised. “This place?”
“No,” I said. “How could I have known if you didn’t tell me?” I narrowed my eyes. “Unless someone else knew . . . Mom.” This one syllable fell heavily. “Who else knows?” I yanked my arm from her grasp. She didn’t even have to say his name. “Rain. Rain knew. He always knows everything and then he keeps it from me. Right?”
Two circles of red appeared on my mother’s cheeks. “I asked him to keep it from you”—when I opened my mouth to protest, she got there first—“I made him promise. He wanted to tell you but I pleaded with him not to. He was only following my wishes. You were so wrapped up in what was happening with the Body Market, and I didn’t want to become yet another one of your worries.”
I took this in, trying to do the math. “Wait—he’s known since before February? But that would mean . . .”
A look of horror came over my mother’s face.
“He knew where you were.” Anger flooded through me. “All that time we were preparing the Shifting App and he knew!” I thought back to the night when I caught Rain coming out of a room in that deserted part of the mansion—or I’d thought it was deserted—and how strange he’d been acting. That same night Lacy had cornered me and claimed she had something to tell me, something to show me that I’d definitely want to see, but as we were on our way out the door we’d run into Rain and she decided not to follow through. “It was you that Lacy wanted to show me that night,” I whispered, more to myself than my mother.
“I don’t know,” my mother admitted. “Rain was protecting me. I’ve known about the deaths on the plugs for a long time, nearly a year—that’s how I know that it wasn’t the Shifting App that killed them—and I was worried I might be in danger from Jude because of this knowledge. But I still think you should be understanding with Rain. I put him in a terrible position.”
“How I feel about Rain’s decisions is between me and him.”
“Skylar—”
“Mom, please!” My voice was rising again. “I don’t want to talk anymore about Rain!”
She closed her mouth.
I’d wanted to find an ally in my mother after my fight with Rain, but instead I’d found more lies and secrets and more fighting. And our conversation wasn’t even over yet. I turned away from her to take in the scene of so many dead bodies again. “This has been happening for a year and you’re just dealing with it now?”
“At first, it was just one death, and it seemed like a freak occurrence. Then it was one more, and eventually another. But it wasn’t until the last few week
s that the deaths have begun to multiply more quickly.”
I took this in. “How did these people even get in here?”
“They came in through friends I have connected to the Body Market,” she said quietly.
I gaped at her. Sometimes it struck me hard how little I knew about my mother. You have friends at the Body Market? I wanted to ask. Are you in touch with Jude, too? was the next thing that popped into my head, but I held all of this back.
“These bodies were tossed into the trash once they were no longer saleable,” she went on. “They died on the plugs, and dead bodies can’t be used for parts, at least not for long. That’s why they were dumped. A Keeper I know brought them to me so I could try and find out what happened.”
There was a time when such statements would have knocked the wind out of me—bodies thrown out, used for parts, dumped in the trash—but I’d grown used to hearing ugly ideas thrown around like nothing. I did my best to stay focused on the matter at hand. “And . . . so? What do you know?”
“Not much yet, unfortunately.” My mother slid off the stool where she’d been sitting. She led me to the glass boxes, each one set out in its own place on the floor. “You can see that whatever killed them has done so regardless of age and gender.” She stopped before a little boy. He couldn’t be more than a five.
I stared down at him, at his tender, perfect skin the color of milky coffee, his eyes closed as though he were sleeping peacefully.
My mother began to walk again among the bodies, pausing before an old woman, her hair completely gray yet her skin still smooth for someone her age, the same golden color as mine and my mother’s. “What I do know is that the deaths aren’t from natural causes. It’s not the body that’s failing, or it doesn’t seem to be. I have some theories, but they’re still very unformed. I need to do more tests before I’ll know anything even close to concrete.”
I tried to take this in. “Are you worried, I don’t know, that all the plugged-in bodies might die?”
My mother’s gaze moved on to a woman with red hair. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted toward the ceiling, chest unmoving like all the others. “Not yet,” she said. “As of now, we’re still dealing with a tiny percentage of plugged-in bodies. Not enough that I would advise we pull everyone off the plugs. That would create such chaos . . . I can’t even imagine the repercussion of such a statement to the public.” She shook her head. “What we need first is more information.”
The Mind Virus Page 6
