Shattered (22 page)

Until one day, I didn't.

I wasn't prepared.

Heavy dreamers weren't anything like the lightweight version I'd sampled.

They dragged you down.

Deeper than I'd ever been.

Trapped in a dream inside a dream.

Blind in a white fog.

Existence and nonexistence in one.

Being and non. Here and not. Pleasure and pain.

That was all there was. All I was.

And I was nothing.

Waking up was like breaking through the surface of a deep, black pool of water, emerging from silent depths into the too-bright, too-noisy open air. Everything was sharp edges; everything was off-key. I just wanted to slip back under.

“I thought you hated these things,” Ani said, standing over me.

“How'd you get in here?” I mumbled. It felt like the dreamer had blown my body into a million pieces, drifting on the wind, hidden in the crevices of the walls and floorboards, dissipated. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. “I locked the door.”

“Quinn had the house open it for me.”

Right. Artificially intelligent locks could be fooled. That
was the beauty of dumb, mute technology: You couldn't reprogram steel.

I reached for the next dreamer. It was set to last a week. “Have her lock it again when you go.”

Ani glanced at the dreamer in my hand. “Or I could stay. We could talk.”

I shrugged. The world was getting too sharp, the fog fading away. The longer I was awake, the easier it became to think. And I wasn't in the mood to think.

“I'm just worried,” Ani said. “After what happened—”

“Get out.” I didn't want to remember
what happened.
That was the whole point.

She flinched.

“Please,” I added. But I didn't say it nicely.

“If you stay under too long . . .”

“I'll be fine,” I said. “The dreamers are safe.”

“Right. Tell that to the empties.”

It was what we called the mechs who dreamed away their lives, twitching and shuddering for weeks on end. Empties because they were nothing without the dreamers; because they were hollow. Bodies whose minds were on permanent vacation.

These days, I only felt empty when I was awake.

I was the center of a storm.

Light swirled around me. Through me. Wind blew in waves of red and purple and black. Color had sound and sound had color. There was no body, but there was pain.

And noise, like metal on metal, like a scream.

And need, and memory, and flesh on flesh, and lips, and the weight of a body on my body.

And weightlessness. And nothingness.

The storm raged, but I was its center, and I was still.

Quiet.

It was getting harder to come back.

When the dreamer died, there was a moment in between. Like the dazed limbo between org sleep and waking when the dream dies away and reality strays just out of reach. It was like falling—but falling so far and so fast, through a darkness without a bottom, that it felt like flying.

When I came back to myself, Jude was there.

“Sweet dreams?” He leaned against the doorframe, arms laced across his chest.

“Very.” But there was nothing to remember about what these deep dreamers were doing to me; I didn't have the words to describe it to myself. It was like becoming another person; an unperson.

“Then you must have been dreaming of me.” The words rang hollow, a force of habit. Or maybe it was just that the dreamer made the world seem tired, Jude's words dull and empty.

“Worried about me?” I asked.

“Why would I be?” His eyes strayed to the single remaining dreamer. No matter—once they were gone, Sloane would supply more, as many as I needed. She understood escape.

He slung a scuffed red backpack over his shoulder and crossed the room, perching on the edge of the bed. With a cool smile, he swung his legs onto the mattress. I slapped them away. “This came for you.” He dropped the backpack on the bed. I reached for it—then jerked my hand away as the bag twitched toward me with a low mewing noise.

Jude shoved a slip of paper at me. “This too.”

He misses you,
the note said. Typed, so I had no way of knowing who it was from.

But when the bag mewed again, I had a pretty good guess. I groaned and unzipped the bag. A flabby gray cat poked his head through the opening and nuzzled into the back of my hand. “Great. Just great.”

“You know her, I presume?” Jude stroked his hand along the cat's head. It purred, arching its back. That was a sign. In a few moments, the cat would get freaked out by all the affection and lash out a claw. I kept quiet—let Jude figure it out for himself.

“It's a him,” I said. “Psycho Susskind.”

“Doesn't look very psycho to me,” Jude said, scratching his knuckle against the scruff of Susskind's neck.

“He loves machines,” I said. “Thought the toaster was his best friend. People, not so much.”

“She dropped it off in person,” Jude said. She. There was only one
she
it could be. “Middle of the night. So does she look like you used to look?” he added. “Before?”

“I thought we weren't supposed to talk about the past,” I reminded him.

“I'm just saying, she's hot.”

“You would think so.” Jude was exactly Zo's type, I realized suddenly. Not on the surface, maybe—there was nothing about him that resembled the creepy, greasy retros my sister used to bring home, their eyes red from a late-night dozer session or wide and twitchy from too many hours locked in a virtual reality circuit, fingers grasping at imaginary demons. Losers, and she knew it. Choices guaranteed to spite our father, sending him into one of his silent, pale-faced rages. But Jude could match Zo smirk for smirk, shoot down her snide crap with crap of his own. Throw in the gaunt, angular features, sharp and chiseled where the rest of us seemed waxy and soft, and he was the complete package. Either her soul mate or her double.

“You like the cat so much, you take it,” I said. “He'll love you.”

Who was less human than Jude?

“She brought it for
you
,” he said.

“So?”

He didn't say anything for a moment, pretending to concentrate all his attention on the cat. But I could see his eyes flashing, watching me from beneath heavy lids. “So nothing.” He stood up, scooped the cat into his arms. “You got that from Sloane, didn't you?” he said, nodding at the final dreamer on the nightstand. I reached for it, but I was still moving in slow motion. He swept it away with ease. Jude nestled the small black cube into his palm, rubbing his fingers along its smooth surface. Most dreamers had
a series of lines etched into their sides, indicating their duration. This one, which Sloane had been hesitant to pass along, was unmarked. “It's a new one,” she'd said. “Something about a neural feedback loop? I didn't really get it. But I guess somehow it works different on different brains.”

“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?”