“But as soon as we find the right icon the others will go away!” I began to step through the Apps, studying each one. They were a tornado of debris, ready to hurt and maim the eyes and mind of anyone who came into contact with them.
My foot caught on one of the holes in the floor, and I nearly tumbled into an App so vile I screamed a scream I’d only heard during the Horror Flick Apps Inara and I used to download when we wanted to scare ourselves, back when feeling terrified seemed a fun break in the monotony of so much pleasantness in the City.
Adam reached out just in time to stop me from touching it. “Skylar, careful!”
“I know. Thank you,” I said between heaving breaths, my arms gripping my stomach. The act of vomiting was supposedly another of the terrible capabilities exclusive to the real body, but now I wondered whether the virtual self might become so nauseous with fear and terror it could happen here, too. “Help me search!” I called to Adam, and we moved around the room quickly now, ducking and sidestepping as some icons hovered nearly motionless while others tried to slam into us. Then, finally, I saw a flash of white-blond by the staircase, the icon itself seeming to drip an entire world down to the floor.
“There it is,” I said, full of relief.
The Wicked Leaks App.
I rushed to it, desperate to make everything else go away.
“Skylar, wait!” Adam was shouting. “Don’t you think we should—” he tried.
Adam’s voice died midwarning.
The rest of the Black Market Apps blinked out.
For a moment, there was blissful calm. A silence that was total and complete.
The two of us breathed.
But soon the voices started. They filled the atmosphere, one on top of the other, some so loud they were shouting and others barely a whisper.
Then the mouths appeared.
Hundreds, no, thousands of mouths, detached from their faces and virtual bodies. Mouths just hanging in the air, lips moving as they spoke, some revealing rotted teeth. Depending on where you stood, you could home in on different types of chatter, different illegal conversations. By the staircase I heard a snippet about illegal Apping and how to find communities of criminals who would do it with you. I moved closer to the now-fixed table and chairs and heard a man’s deep voice explaining how to hack the code of someone’s basic self, and then another, a woman, extolling a plot to take over the government. Trader had warned me there were a lot of plots brewing, each one of them more fervent than the other.
We could be here all day trying to find the information we needed. Weeks, even.
I thought back to that night in my bedroom when I was still a Single and needed information about Lacy Mills; how I’d whittled down the millions of possible scenes I could choose to view from her life. It was as simple as searching for moments she’d spent with Rain and sorting them by price. So what was the magic combination of search terms that would lead me to the right thread of chatter now?
Mysterious virtual disappearances?
No. Too vague.
The Death App?
No. That was probably just the name Ree had given it, and if it was, it would be useless among this mess of possibilities.
An image of that dark and bottomless hole that nearly swallowed Adam and me entered my mind, and the way that Loner Town seemed to be deteriorating. Could the deaths of the bodies on the plugs and the virtual death we’d witnessed and the crumbling of this neighborhood be connected? Could the City itself be dying? The entire App World fading from existence?
Was that even possible?
And could all this have to do with a virus? That little “bug,” as Trader called it?
A particularly ugly mouth started shouting nonsense in my left ear and I swatted it away.
“Skylar.” My name was strangled in Adam’s throat.
My mind was stuck on those chilling thoughts. “What?”
“Come here,” he shouted. “Please.”
Adam was crouched in the corner. A mouth painted with neon-pink lipstick was whispering words at lightning speed in between giggling and laughing. The lips were razor thin. “Did you find what we’re looking for?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“We don’t have time to get distracted by information we don’t need.”
“This isn’t a distraction! You need to hear this!”
I went to him and dropped down so we were level. Adam listened close and I nudged in next to him. At first the words came too quickly for me to catch anything, but then I began to hear a name repeated over and over between everything else.
“Skylar.”
“Skylar Cruz.”
“Skylar, Skylar, Skylar.”
“They’re talking about me,” I breathed.
Adam nodded. “And it’s not good. You’ve got Haters.”
“I have Haters?” Lacy Mills was the kind of person who had Haters. Rain had Haters. Basically anyone and everyone with any fame whatsoever had Haters. It was one of the many things Rain told me he’d loathed about being famous and that had made him desperate to unplug, and it was one of the things Lacy was good at shrugging off, or enjoying, since she’d loved soaking up attention, any attention. But the notion that somehow I could acquire Haters was nearly incomprehensible.
“Listen carefully,” Adam said. “They’re almost worse than Haters.”
I moved closer to those neon-pink lips, so painted there were deep cracks in the thick layer of shiny makeup. The voices were not only fast, they were layered, one over the other, making it difficult to follow a single conversation. Then I heard my name again, Skylar, and I strained to hang on to the string of words that followed with everything in me.
“There’s a virus in the App World,” said that one line of chatter.
Every zero in my code jumped to attention.
To talk of a virus in the Real World with Trader was one thing. But no one in the App World would ever utter that word unless there was something to it, not even on the Black Market. The word virus was verboten, even vaguely illegal. I’d never known anyone who’d ever said it out loud, except in reference to the tragedies of the real body. But a virus that spread virtually could mean complete and total extinction of life as everyone knew it in the City.
Given the Death App and the state of things in Loner Town, this would make total sense.
The voice kept going. “Skylar the Plague launched a virus into the App World during her emergency broadcast. The government is trying to keep this quiet, but there’s no doubt that it’s spreading and spreading fast. Too fast for anyone to contain it.”
Skylar the Plague?
This wasn’t the only name people were calling me.
Skylar the Virus Spreader. Skylar the Bringer of Virtual Death. Skylar the Destroyer. They sounded like titles one might acquire while gaming, titles that would strike fear and revulsion in the hearts of all players. There were even plots to kill me. But the real question I had was this: Did I launch a virus into the App World with the Shifting App? Had my mother been wrong about those bodies and why they’d died?
“Virus, virus, VIRUS,” went the mouth, lips curling and cracking.
“You need to leave the City,” Adam said. “It’s not safe. People want you virtually dead, really dead. Dead in every way you could possibly be dead. They’re blaming you for whatever is happening here.”
“I’m less worried about me than I am about a virus,” I whispered, nervous to say that word out loud into the atmosphere. “And the thought that maybe it’s our fault. My fault,” I corrected. Adam was about to protest again, but I gestured for him to wait. A new set of search terms had popped into my head and I wanted to try them out. “Wicked Leaks, show me Death of the City and Death of the App World.”
Adam’s mouth formed a quiet, shocked O.
The two of us waited.
One by one, and then in groups and bunches, the mouths around us began to disappear. I’d hoped that maybe all of them would, that my
search would come up empty, but soon the disappearances slowed until about thirty mouths remained. They crowded closer around us.
One of them was louder than all the others. Its voice was clear and strong and confident, a single string of words repeated over and over in warning.
Adam and I turned to it together and stared at it in horror.
“The App World is dying,” it cried. “The App World is dying.”
20
Skylar
the tug of regret
WITH A FLICK of my hand the mouths that remained disappeared.
I looked at Adam. “Come back with me to the Real World. Please. There’s so much we need to figure out.”
“No,” he said, quiet but firm.
I gritted my teeth. “Adam!”
“No,” he repeated, louder this time. Adam was shaking his head, his whole body swaying. “You can’t believe everything you hear on the Black Market.”
“This from someone who was just telling me I needed to leave because of threats from Haters. You’ll believe that, but you won’t believe the possibility that total virtual death is on this City’s doorstep? Not to mention the fact that we saw that man virtually die.”
Adam sat on the floor and rested his back against the wall. A strange-looking bug scuttled out from a crack in the wall near his left arm. It glowed red and orange and yellow and still managed to look menacing. “I don’t believe the App World is dying. It’s too crazy.”
I joined him on the ground, careful to avoid the creepy insect. “You saw what I saw. That giant hole in Loner Town? The Death App in action? The way Loner Town seems to be, I don’t know, disintegrating?”
“But what about the people whose bodies were sold on the Body Market? If the App World really is dying, then wouldn’t they just cease to exist forever?”
I’d already had the same thought. “I don’t know.” I rested my arms on the top of my knees, the pale color of my virtual skin so foreign after the deep golden brown of my real body. “If the App World is dying, then the Body Market has to close permanently, so nobody else loses a body they might want to return to. I need to shift back to the Real World immediately. Adam, shift with me. Come on.”
He just sat there, silent. Being stubborn.
“What if you stay and you die? What would happen to Parvda?”
He lowered his head. “Then she’d finally be free of me.”
I wanted to pinch him. No, I wanted to punch him. “You’re being absurd.”
“I don’t care. Stop trying. I’m not doing it. Besides, what about Ree?”
I’d nearly forgotten about her. There was a pocket inside me, tucked deep and hidden like a secret cabinet, that pulsed with guilt at abandoning her to that prison of an apartment. I knew that we owed her for that essential bit of information she’d offered about the Death App. But the rest of me just shrugged. “Ree can wait. We’ll help her later.”
Adam gaped at me. “You used to care about everyone and making sure they were okay.”
I avoided his stare, sensing the way my code was hardening, my very makeup turning solid, so solid I wondered if the blood had stopped pumping through the real veins of my body. “And I still do. But unfortunately, Ree is just one person, and right now there are hundreds of thousands of others to consider.”
A look of disapproval flashed on Adam’s face. “That’s awfully utilitarian of you. Maybe you’re more like the rest of your family than I thought.”
Adam’s words seemed to have sharp metal hooks, and they pierced my virtual skin. I looked down at my arms and expected to see them bleeding. I stood, leaving Adam alone on the ground. “Look who’s talking. You’re the one who cares about Ree more than your girlfriend.”
Adam opened his mouth to protest, but nothing came out.
“I’m leaving,” I told him.
Then I turned my back—on Adam, on Ree, on the mysterious owner of that jar of sea glass beckoning me—and I began the process of shifting back to the Real World.
“Bye, Skylar,” Adam whispered.
I stepped out the front door of Trader’s house, willing the room with the doors to appear. Shifting involved taking control of the virtual scenery, becoming the conductor of the landscape, the architect of the pathways from here to there. But the pathway back to reality was always through the room full of doors. I never knew if it was a trick of the mind or an actual place.
The floor underneath me seemed to tilt, and I saw the now-familiar long hall, though the doors themselves changed each time I was here. The one closest to my left was covered in white fur, the pelt of a great and beautiful animal, and I shivered in disgust at the thought of something so majestic shedding its skin. Another was covered by a rushing waterfall, yet one that left the wooden floor beneath it dry. A few were simple, doors you might find at the entrance to a modest house or a small apartment, but most had at least one enticing, unusual quality—the glitter of endless diamonds, the smell of ripe and juicy peaches, the plush softness of fluffy blankets. The last two made me wonder how much my own needs could conjure what I saw, since my stomach was growling with hunger and all I wanted was to crawl beneath the covers of a bed and go to sleep.
I noticed a familiar door to my right.
The door to Ree’s apartment.
But this time the locks were broken, the bars across it splintered. I walked on until it was far behind me, willing myself to forget about it, searching for the signpost that would tell me I’d safely crossed the border between worlds and was ready wake up in the real body again. My heart stuttered and skipped with the rhythm of my steps, curious what that sign would be and if it would be different from the one I’d grown used to all those months ago.
I wanted it to be different.
Maybe it would have to do with Rain.
Maybe it would be the terrace outside his room with the beautiful nighttime view of the stars. Or that spot on the beach where he liked to sit and watch the ocean as it rumbled in to shore during a storm. Or even the table where he ate lunch in the cafeteria, the one by the tall windows that looked out onto a grove of pine trees. Or maybe the signpost would have to do with my mother or Parvda, or even Zeera and Sylvia, all of whom had come to represent my time and life in the Real World.
Ever so gradually, almost imperceptibly, the wooden floor underneath my feet became sand and the white walls between doors became the pale outline of dunes that rose up on either side of me. Seagulls called out overhead and the faint sound of the ocean waves roared and then receded, soothing my tired senses like a sweet song. My skin was warmed by the sun and my muscles loosed in relief, the tension flowing out of them at the thought of home, at the way the beach and the ocean and the tall wild grasses that framed the coastline gave me a sense of true belonging, just as the promise of the real body did as well, the sight of the brown skin that matched my mother’s and a heart that was flesh and not a long string of meaningless code. I expected to see Briarwood off in the distance, and once I did, I’d know I could wake and find myself safe and sound in the dark caverns underneath the mansion.
But as I kept going, the shore became rockier, less easy to cross. I picked my way along jagged boulders and wide, flat sheets of slate, slippery with seaweed and neon-green moss, tide pools so big I had to step through them carefully since going around them would require wading into the churning sea.
There are no rocks like this near Briarwood.
Only beach.
A road appeared that hugged the shore, cresting like an angry wave ready to pull everything in its path under. I knew by now I would not see Briarwood around the next bend, and when I saw the familiar tree and the cottage perched alongside of it, my heart and mind absorbed what this meant, even as a voice inside me whispered a truth I wished I could avoid.
Kit is still the signpost to your real self.
Trying to sit up after shifting was like wading through something thick and viscous, like the air around me was made of batter. My limbs were heavy, my body exhau
sted, and my stomach seemed to have climbed onto a merry-go-round. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, immobile. Maybe hours. But when the dizziness finally subsided and the pounding in my head dulled to only a faint hammering, I opened my eyes.
The memory of Kit’s cottage and the way my pulse jumped as I reached for the door to his house was so vivid I half expected to find out I’d awoken there, to see him across the room, the edges of his tattoos visible beneath the sleeves of his shirt, his back to me making dinner.
But, of course, that’s not what I saw.
I was still in the cavern beneath Briarwood in the very same spot as before, alive at the very least, amid the eerie now-familiar glow of the plugs.
Lacy was nowhere in sight.
21
Ree
glitches
BEING BAIT WAS so totally boring. And unlike with the sequestering in my apartment, it didn’t come with unlimited free Apps, which was so totally annoying.
If Char was still alive she would virtually die all over again with jealousy over my current predicament, though. I mean, me, ending up in a bizarre and elaborate throne room with Emory Specter, who thusly informed me first, that he has a daughter, and second, that his daughter is also his nemesis. It was just amazing on so many levels. The best gossip ever.
A bird landed on my windowsill.
It was about five different shades of the brightest greens, with a long, thin, sharp beak. It cocked its head and looked at me. I got up from the couch slowly, hoping not to scare it away.
“Here, little birdie birdie,” I called. I took one careful and quiet step forward, then another, but by the time I got close enough to reach out and touch it, it chirped loudly and flew off, leaving me alone again. “Oh, lovely,” I said to nobody and nothing aside from the rather attractively decorated walls and tastefully furnished room.
I had to admit, as far as prison cells went, this one was pretty lush.
If I could download an Interior Decorator App right now, I wouldn’t be averse to this very same design scheme. With its big all-white canopied bed and matching puffy chairs and couches slipcovered in soft white fabric covered in tiny blue flowers, any girl could be happy here for a spell. There was even a white braided rug on the floor.
The Mind Virus Page 14
