“You control how long it lasts?” I’d asked.
She had hesitated, then shaken her head. “I don’t think ‘control’ is the word for it.”
“What do you care who I got it from?” I asked Jude now.
He smiled thinly. “I’d just suggest that you consider the source.”
“Aren’t you her source?” I said.
“That was for Sloane,” he said. “Maybe I got tired of listening to her whine about how much she wants to die.”
“She’s over that now,” I told him. A year ago Sloane had jumped out a window in some pathetic attempt to end whatever Great Pain she imagined was consuming her. She’d passed out in a puddle of her own blood and woken up with a mechanical body and a promise from her parents that no matter how many times she tried to break herself, they’d always Humpty Dumpty her back together. And they did, more than once. You had an accident, they’d say when she woke up, and she’d smile and nod and pretend to believe them and then try it all over again. Until eventually she gave up; she joined us.
“Whatever you say.”
“This is none of your business,” I told him.
“What? Sloane’s death wish, or yours?”
I pulled my knees to my chest. “Don’t talk to me about death.” I knew I sounded like a child. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, the attack played out in reverse. The bodies climbed to their feet, alive again. But their bloody eyes were still dead.
“I don’t know? Right.” Jude flung the dreamer at the bed. “I don’t know why I even bother trying.”
“That was trying?” I asked. “That’s just sad, Jude.”
“Don’t worry, it stops now.” He left the room. Psycho Susskind climbed on top of me, his claws bearing down on my chest, and waited for me to do something. When I didn’t, he padded out of the room after Jude. A new acolyte for the great leader.
Apparently Susskind didn’t miss me any more than Zo did.
I don’t want to think about that, I thought, like a child.
But unlike a child, I had control over my life. I had control over everything—that’s what being a mech was all about. I picked up the dreamer from where it had landed beside my pillow.
I didn’t want to think about Zo or dead people’s dead eyes or anything else.
And I didn’t have to.
Time passed—or it didn’t.
Thoughts glittered and fluttered. Words flickered bright and sputtered out, diamond sharp and meaningless.
Sweet in the brash and senseless blue and down and down and deep.
The silence of noise, waves made visible, shimmering green and gold. A universe of infinite vibration, quantum strands quivering and shivering.
Bare peculiar lands of majesty in six of purple plasma gray and I am lost.
And I am lost.
And I am.
I am.
Lost.
The world bobbing up and down, that was the first thing.
No, not the world, my head. Shaking, flopping back and forth on my neck.
Then: his hands on my shoulders, fingers gouging flesh.
His eyes, black in the dim light, wide. Scared.
I could feel the dreamer tugging me down. I was in the water again, the deep, black pool, the surface too far, the world through its murky window a soup of distorted shape and color.
“Lia!” His face in my face. My body still in his hands as he dragged me upright, as he pushed me against the wall, shouting, incomprehensible. And then the one sound that wasn’t noise.
Lia.
The name like a slap, like breaking through the water into the pain of winter air.
Kicking toward the surface, reaching up toward dry land, toward him.
I could let go, I thought. Stop fighting. Drift away.
Maybe this was what happened when you overloaded on dreamers—maybe at some point you didn’t need the dreamer anymore, and the brain made its own dreams. Maybe after the dreamer ate away everything else, the dream was all you had left.
But I didn’t let go. I held on. To the light and noise. To Riley, my face in his hands, my hands on his chest.
I woke up.
“How long?” I asked.
He let go of my face, eased me to the floor, one hand in my hand, the other at my waist. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. He didn’t let go of my hand.
“How long?” I said again.
“Since Jude was here?”
I nodded.
“Twenty-two days.” He winced like he was expecting me to freak out.
Three weeks. Plus the weeklong dreamer before that and the three days I’d dreamed away before that. One month below. In the dark. One month gone.
But if you were going to live forever, what was one month? Infinity minus one is still infinity.
“You know, I get it,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine.
“What?” But I knew what.
“Wanting it all to go away.” He brushed his hands along his thighs, then placed them flat on his knees. It was like he didn’t know what to do with them now that he was no longer holding on. “Forget.”
Normally there was nothing I hated more than someone pretending to understand what was going on in my head. But this time, it didn’t bother me.
“I keep thinking that someone should have screamed, you know?” Riley said. “It would have made it seem more like a vid. Unreal. But…”
“Yeah. No screaming,” I said, letting myself remember. For the first time not fighting back against the images. The dreamers had left an empty space behind them. And the memories rushed in to fill the vacuum.
“There was a girl,” I said. “A kid. I saw her before it all happened. She had this hot pink hair and—”
“Yeah.” He stretched his arms behind him, leaning his weight back on them. “I saw her.”
“She was probably eight or nine,” I said, picturing Zo at that age. She’d been experimenting with different hair colors, showing up with purple streaks one morning, rainbow the next. It was before she’d settled on the retro thing, and instead she was obsessed with av-wear—a phase that we all went through, when instead of modeling your avatar to look like you, you turned yourself into a live-action av, complete with neon hair, net-linked morphtattoos, and the occasional glitter wings.
But Zo had gotten a chance to grow out of it.
He leaned forward, his hands uncertain again, on his lap, then on the floor, then cradled, one in the other. “I stepped on someone. When we were running away. I wasn’t looking, and then—”
“We both did,” I said. I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted to go back to the dream. But it was like we were flying. Like we’d jumped out of the plane, and nothing was going to stop us now, except the ground. “We couldn’t help it.”
He shook his head. “I looked down,” he said. “When I felt it. Something—I don’t know. Soft and hard at the same time. You know?”