WHO’S SYBIL? WHAT ABOUT CORINA? My feelings bubble up and spill out so that even my host can feel them. The fear, the worry, the desire . . .
. . . the love.
Corina, my host thinks back to me. His sadness is too much for me. It’s too much for him, too, but he clamps down on it hard. His whole body tenses up and he bites his cheek hard to keep the feeling inside, but Cassandra notices anyway. Her eyes stop looking worried and she starts to look annoyed.
She rolls over and faces away from us. As she moves, the blanket shifts and, briefly, I can see her nakedness, too. Her breasts are small, barely rising off her chest while she’s on her back. Her stomach is flat, dimpling in at her hips, and I see a flash of her pubes before the blanket falls back, but I’m distracted by a set of thick scars that begins just above her hip and continues down her thigh. I want to ask her what happened, but I can’t.
Be Abigail, my host tells me. You’ll know the time. And then: When you see the Bicycle Man, run up the hill!
BICYCLE MAN?
You’ll know.
I want to ask more, but before I can even form the thought, he tells me to get ready. His mind fills with memories of Jordan’s time packing for the Conference, becoming determined that immediately afterward she’s going to tell her parents everything. I don’t know if he’s made it all up or if he knows for real what happened, but either way it’s a lot of information, and I’m afraid I won’t remember it. I want to ask questions, but instead I feel my host reach out for Cassandra and then stop and pull his arm back.
I can feel him tremble with grief and sadness as I am pulled from my perch and get sucked back up to consciousness.
When I open my eyes, Paul is in the chair. “Took you long enough.”
Even in a glide suit I feel like I can’t breathe. There’s too much happening in my head, too much to process. I feel like I’m going to vomit, so I sit up and put my head between my knees with my eyes closed until I can pull myself together.
“You alright?” Paul puts his hand on my shoulder.
I cough to clear my throat and shake my head. “Bad glide.”
“Damn,” he says, and then he sits up and reaches over for me.
I fall against him and he holds me in almost the same way Pete used to hold me when I was little. For a few seconds it feels like everything that just happened doesn’t mean the end of everything.
Eventually, I pull myself back up and it all comes crashing down again.
Paul lets go, but I can tell he’s worried.
I smile as best I can. “I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?” He raises his eyebrows at me. “You look sick.”
I shrug. I’m sure I do look sick.
“Don’t puke on my suit. It’s bad enough being a cauliflower without having to smell like vomit.”
They kill witnesses.
I want to tell him. I want to scream to him that we’ve got to run, but I don’t. I’m too scared.
I try smiling, but I think I fail. I slide off the couch and he takes my place, watching me carefully. He doesn’t say anything else and I’m grateful because I don’t think I would have been able to reply.
While Paul is under, I dictate what I remember telling myself about Jordan. I try to keep my voice steady, but I’m sure that if whoever listens to these things is paying attention, they’ll know I’m freaked out. Thinking about that begins to make me more freaked out, and I have to stop dictating for a minute.
The Gentry are the enemy. They control the Locusts. Live-Tech is the problem—it helps Locusts get here. I’ve been working to bring about the end of the world. The thoughts are too big, and trying to think them is like shoving a bowling ball into my back pocket.
The single thought that upsets me the most, the thing that I’ve been trying not to think or say or see or know since the trip ended has become too strong to keep down.
Corina wasn’t there.
Wherever, whenever there was, is, will be, Corina will be missing and I was sad in a way that felt like she was . . .
I’m shaking. Time is short. Paul never stays down for more than twenty minutes, and it feels like it’s been nearly that long. I bite my cheek and force myself to breathe deep so I can calm down and finish my dictation.
I finish at nearly the same moment that Paul comes up. He looks at me. I smile, but he’s not fooled.
Forty-Five
Corina feels my fear. I can feel her pressuring me to let her explore. I try resisting, but I can’t. She reads my feelings and she knows: she knows something bad has happened.
I feel her pull back from my fear like it’s a knife’s blade. I can’t do anything except wait for her in the commons.
Corina comes out of the glide hall into the commons with Maddie, who walks directly to the dormitories. Corina slows to a stop where I’m standing by the game tables.
They’re watching. They already know.
Barely able to keep from shaking. “Chess?” I ask her. I don’t play well, but it’s her favorite game.
“Sure,” she says, feeling my need for her to play along.
We sit at the game table and set up our pieces, but as we’re about to start, movement distracts me. Corina and I look up at the same time.
Bishop is at the patio door. My chest begins to burn.
“Alex,” he says. “Can you come with me, please?”
He stands at the door waiting, thickly built and sure of himself. He feels like a priest or a cop. I nod and stand up.
They’re not good guys.
I try and clear the memory from my head because I’m suddenly sure he can read my mind. I force myself to think about lying to my parents, smoking weed, tagging up school property—other things that I got in trouble for that would leave me nervous.
I turn to Corina. “I’ll be back in a minute.” My voice is mostly breath. Our fears mix and I suddenly have to use the bathroom.
“I’ll be here,” she says. Her love comes in a wave that makes me both stronger and weak in the knees.
Bishop leads me out onto the patio. It’s raining again. Water slides off the invisible cover in sheets.
I fall in three paces behind him. He doesn’t show that he even knows that I’m there.
“Sit down, Alex,” Bishop instructs when we enter his office, gesturing at the circle of furniture.
I sit down in a chair with its back to the door. He sits across from me.
“What’s up?” I ask as casually as I can.
“I think you know, Alex.”
I shrug. I scan the room for an escape route. There’s no door besides the one we came in.
“You and Corina are in a relationship.” His voice is calm, casual like it’s no big deal.
I shrug.
“Richard really likes you, Alex. He doesn’t have his own kids yet, but he thinks of you like one.” Bishop shrugs. “He’s reluctant to call you on it, but he’s very disappointed.” He studies me for a long moment. I meet his eyes, but it’s hard to hold them. “But there’s something that concerns me more.”
I wait without reacting. I think about my breathing, the feel of my tongue against my teeth.
“Your work, Alex.” He gestures up at the wall and the displays change, shifting from window-images of famous places to something I don’t recognize—it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. The panel he’s pointing to is just a collection of colors, lines and squiggles that move around. The colors change from red to orange and yellow. “That’s what your witnessing should look like when you’re visiting Jordan Castle.”
“You can see when we glide? When we’re down under?”
He laughs. “Of course we can. We have to know everything and we can’t just trust a bunch of teenagers to behave, can we?”
“I haven’t—” They already know. I feel the fight leave me and
I slump in my chair.
He waves me off, gesturing back to the wall.
I look up at the wall—it’s sort of like the image he showed me before, but this one looks like somebody puked a thousand rainbows into a bucket full of bubblestuff, then splatted it all onto a canvas. There are millions of colors and squiggles, but they’re too many and too small for me to even be able to tell what they are.
“This is a capture from an unscheduled event that happened in a glide room after hours a while back.” He waits, and a dozen more images like the first ones cycle through. “These events happened in your dorm room, which shouldn’t even be possible.” He looks at me, squints. “And yet here we are.”
I look at the images and then back at him. I wait.
“Can you explain these, Alex?”
I shake my head.
“Have you been doing unscheduled work?”
I shake my head and wait.
“I don’t think you understand how much this concerns me.”
He looks me in the eyes and I hold his gaze. I’m not looking away before he does.
“I haven’t been witnessing.” My voice is stronger than I thought it would be.
“What have you been doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true, Alex.” He pulls something from his pocket and reaches out for my hand. Something clamps down on my finger before I can pull away. It’s Live-Tech, the size and shape of a sausage. I try to pull it off, but I can’t. It just bites down even harder. “Don’t struggle,” Bishop says quietly. “Just go with it—it’ll only hurt if you resist or you lie to me.”
I try to shake it off, but all I get in return is excruciating pain that shoots from my hand and arm all the way through my chest and down into my feet. It’s so bad that I’m afraid I’m going to mess my pants, but then the pain stops completely. “What the hell?” I shriek.
He puts his hand around mine, supporting the Live-Tech with his wrist. “I don’t want to hurt you, Alex, but you can’t keep secrets that would affect the success of the project. Tell me the truth and you won’t have to feel the pain.”
I try to shut my mind, and then the pain starts again.
It’s horrific. It feels like all the skin and meat is being peeled back from my fingers and the palm of my hand. I force myself to look. The skin is still there, but I’m screaming anyway and my body is covered in sweat.
“Don’t resist, Alex.” His voice is soft and kindly, like a doctor talking to a child scared of needles.
My vision clouds from the pain.
“Let the truth out, Alex.”
I cannot move and I cannot remove the thing from my finger. I will die from the pain.
Find your Voice, Cassandra said.
I dive, unlock the drain cover and slip down inside.
I’m in the Jungle. I can still feel the pain and I think I can even hear Bishop’s voice as he asks me to “Let it out,” but I can’t be sure that he’s said it again or if I’ve slowed down in time.
Bishop’s strand hums in front of me, vibrating, pulsing with color. I can see him, feel him.
He’s enjoying this.
I bring myself up against him, my thread against his. His music is sharp, concise, missing signs of doubt or fear. With Jordan, there are openings, places where I can push, change the texture of the thread, which makes the music change. I can erase doubts, make them bigger.
John Bishop has no openings. He has no doubts.
I try anyways:
LET ME GO.
Nothing happens. Whatever openings he has for change are too small, the notes around them too firm. And I’m too weak. The pain in my biology is too much for me to concentrate.
I try again: LET ALEX GO!
His music doesn’t change. I hear him say, “Open your eyes, talk to me.” The pain from my hand grows even more intense, and even the crashing noise and color of the Jungle begins to fade in me, overwhelmed by pain.
I’m going to lose. I’ll either talk or I’ll die.
The pain-cloud blocking out the Jungle intensifies. Things begin to grow dim. Dark.
I feel myself cresting toward the surface even though I don’t want to, but then:
GRAB HIM, SCARED BOY, WRAP HIM LIKE YOU DID CORINA.
The Voice. It is loud, strong. It fills me with hope and the fog shifts, pulls back.
SHARE WITH HIM, BOY, MAKE HIM FEEL YOUR PAIN!
There’s no time to argue. I shift, open myself to him instead. Immediately our gravities begin. We are crashing. We are joining.
His joy is my joy.
My pain is his pain. I feel him blanch, a stab of uncertainty. Fear interrupts his music.
He’s left an opening. I pull back, refocus on his point of indecision, connect to it, use my own fear and pain to spread it until it begins to uproot the solid notes around it.
I feel him falter.
KEEP PUSHING, SCARED BOY.
I drill down further into the hole our fear created. His music is becoming a series of jangly twangs, buzzing like too-loose strings.
I spread, feel myself smothering his sound.
He grows muffled.
Then silent.
RUN AWAY, RUNAWAY BOY. IT’S TIME TO RUN AWAY!
I surface.
Bishop is on the floor at my feet, his head resting awkwardly against my foot, his whole weight propped up by a hip pushed flush against the chair where he was seated when I went under.
The Live-Tech that was on my finger is lying on the floor by his head.
I can’t tell if Bishop’s breathing.
He’s not . . .
He might be dead.
I run.
Forty-Six
I slam the door behind me and run down the long hall to the commons. I feel for Corina—she’s in her room. She’s alone. She’s as scared as I am.
WE NEED TO RUN.
She won’t get the words, but she’ll feel the urgency.
She’s standing in the doorway when I get there.
“What’s wrong?” Worry is written on her forehead and her heart.
She is the ultimate relief for me. I pull her close. “We need to get out of here,” I whisper. “Now.”
She pushes back at me, separating. “Why?”
I reach out so she can feel what I have been feeling. I watch the expression on her face as it changes from confusion to fear, and then to anger. She doesn’t know exactly what happened, but she knows that it’s serious, that it’s urgent.
But she’s not moving. “My time here’s almost done . . .” She trails off. “I can’t leave, Alex.” She’s shaking her head. “My mom . . .”
I feel her loss deep in my gut. She wants to go home. She wants to show her mom that she’s different now. She wants things to be the way they should have been all along. Going home is real to her, a reason to stay.
“Nobody goes home, Corina. Not you, not Calvin, not Marcus. Nobody.” I reach out to her, let her feel me tell her the truth. “They’re going to kill us.”
She doesn’t say anything. I feel her searching me, looking for something. Looking for proof. “How do you know?”
“Somebody showed me, and I’ll tell you all about it after we’re gone.” I tug at her arm a little. “You’re not going to see your mom again if you stay here.” I’m trying hard to be calm, but time is running out. We’ve got to go. I put my hand on her arm, bring my face down into her line of sight. “The only way you see her is if you’re still alive and the only way you stay alive is by coming with me now.”
She hesitates, then nods. Her mind is fear.
All I want to do is hold her, but there’s no time. “Grab what you need to bring,” I tell her. “I’ve got to get something.” I run to my room.
Paul’s sitting at his desk. “Hey,” he
says when he sees me, like nothing is wrong.
“Nobody goes home, man—nobody ever leaves!” I whisper to him as I grab my backpack, still packed full of clothes. “The Gentry control the Locusts—they only pretend to be afraid of Live-Tech, but once it’s attached to a person, it becomes a beacon and it actually shows them where to go. They’re gonna kill us!” I reach out my hand to him. “You’ve got to come!”
He just stares at me. “Did your brain break?”
I can hear Corina coming down the hall. It’s time to go. “No. I’m not insane—none of this is what it seems, man—they’re going to destroy the Earth, they’re going to kill us all. You’ve got to run away with me!”
But Paul isn’t hearing me. Instead he stands up, shaking his head. I grab his arm and pull at him, but he resists, shaking me off.
“You need help, Alex,” he says quietly. “Let me get Richard . . .”
But I can’t let him do that. If he gets Richard, we’re all going to die.
“Don’t do that,” I plead. “Just come with me.”
But he’s already looking over my shoulder, trying to find some way past me.
I have no choice. “I’m coming back for you.” I say it just before I box him hard on the temple.
He falls over in a heap.
On my birthday he said I was a better brother already. Not anymore.
For a moment I can’t do anything but look at him on the floor and feel sick to my stomach. If I leave him here, he’s going to be killed. Panic floats up, making it hard to think. I can’t leave him here. I can’t leave any of them here. I’ve let too much family die already. No more.
“I’m gonna come back and get you,” I tell him again, but he can’t hear me.
I shake myself loose and feel around in the lining of my pack. The picture is still there. I sling the bag over my shoulder. Corina is standing outside my door.
She sees Paul crumpled on the floor. She looks at me.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I tell her, pulling her along. “I tried to warn him, but he thought I was crazy—he was going to call Richard.”
I take one last look at Paul as I close the door. “We’ll come back for them.”
Strange Days Page 24
