Kelley Eskridge (19 page)

Then she took a deep breath, and began to
kick down the wall.

It felt good to use her body like this,
against something that resisted and then gave way; it was almost
erotic, and she forgot for a while what she was doing and simply gave
herself over to action and feeling. When she came back to herself, she
had broken a hole big enough to crawl through, and her cell was full of
a kind of light she had not seen in more than four years.

She looked around at the walls, the
ceiling, the floor, the stone box that had absorbed fifteen hundred
days of her without a trace. And now she was scared to leave it, scared
of what she had seen beyond it; afraid of that final step out over this
new edge. She suspected that once she took it, she would never get back
to who she had been.

But she could never do that anyway. More
than four years alone had changed her irrevocably. The people who put
her here had as much as killed Jackal Segura the day they had dragged
her screaming into her own head. She was someone new now, or at least
she was starting to be. But she wouldn't stay new for long in this one
small place in her mind. She would dry up, become stale, if she did not
keep reaching. And that was the choice. She could put all the bricks
and bits of stone back into place in the wall, and stay safe, and never
know what was on the other side of herself. Or she could reach.

Whatever is out there, she thought, is a
part of me. It's mine. She took a deep breath; and then she dropped to
her hands and knees and pushed herself through.

On the other side of the hole was her
bedroom on Ko Island.

She rose slowly. The room was full of
morning light, and she could see through the open window that the sky
was blue-gray and half-full of scudding clouds. She saw everything
discretely, as if items presented themselves to her like a row of
cadets lined up for inspection, stepping forward one at a time. There
was a scattering of sand on the windowsill. A light, gusting breeze
patted her cheek and caught in the folds of her shirt. The built-in
book-shelves on the wall opposite the window held the printed books and
the disks with all the stories she had told herself over and over in
her cell. Her summer quilt covered the bed, bleached cotton with an
intricate piecework mandala of sea blue and tidewater green. Small
woven rugs lay in a random pattern on the pine floor, which glowed oily
gold where the light striped it. When she finally remembered to
breathe, the air smelled faintly of salt and lemon verbena. And there
was her oldest friend, her Frankenbear, lying on his worn side on her
dresser, stitched at his neck and tummy and legs after the neighbor's
dog had chewed him to bits. He looked at her with the crooked button
eyes that her father had sewn on so carefully.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.”

She began to touch her things; the
lightest fingertip tracing of Frankenbear's fur, and then full hands
flat on the texture of the quilt, the grit on the windowsill, until she
was brave enough to lift from the dresser the rounded cherrywood box
that had always held her jewelry, to heft its weight in her hand and
open the carved lid. It was all there, the everyday beads and
silver-work, and the special things: her great-grandmother's opal drop
earrings; the tiny braided-gold bracelet that was the first ornament
Jackal had ever bought herself; and on a special silver chain, the
sea-rock that Snow had found and given her, that looked like a little
rounded goddess icon with plump belly and breasts and tiny legs.

She held the little rock until it was warm
in her hand, and then she slipped the chain over her neck. The goddess
nestled in her usual place just on top of Jackal's breastbone. Jackal
curled her body into the overstuffed leather chair by the window,
pulled her legs up and wedged them against one of the chair arms. The
sky outside the window was enormous. It might go on forever. It was too
wide to see it all; and it was so shocking not to be able to see the
limit of something that all she could do was look and look and look
until it filled her up.

When she was stuffed with sky, when she
had as much blue and gray and cloud inside her as she could hold, she
touched the goddess around her neck; she looked at Frankenbear with his
kind eyes; she whispered, “Home. Home.”

She did not know whether to hope that the
rest of the apartment would be there. What if it was? What if there was
something outside it? If she went there and then returned to find the
hole in the wall closed up, herself weirdly imprisoned outside of her
cell, that might do it—she might go irretrievably mad. Was she still in
VC if she wasn't in a cell? Could they get her back out if she were
somewhere else inside her head? Was she supposed to be here?

Could she go back?

She put her head back through the hole
just to see the cell again. Just to be sure. It seemed so colorless, in
spite of the screen cycling through its fractals. It was
extraordinarily creepy to see it from outside.

She pulled her head back into the room,
rose and made her way to the door, passing the dresser and closet. The
closet; god, she thought, and opened the door; and there were all her
clothes, hanging in patient rows, all the cottons and linens and silks
and denims that had held her while she went about her life before
Mirabile, before.… Before she thought too much about it, she stripped
and tugged on her favorite scarlet cotton tunic and worn jeans, pulled
her boots on and turned without a pause and opened the door.

The rest of the apartment was indeed
there. It was empty and still. She did not stay: the need to keep
moving was an energy fizz under the skin of her ribs and thighs, that
took her through the dormitory and out the side door. She found the
rack of bicycles exactly where it should have been, and getting on one
was like…well, just like riding a bicycle, she thought, absurdly
pleased with herself. She rode out into the street and down toward the
Sea Road.

Along the south end of Ko, seagulls
bulleted across the beach in balletic ricochet-and-return patterns, and
the noise they made almost deafened Jackal, who had not heard anything
other than her own sounds for such a long time. She had to stop the
bike and stand at the place where the road curved down toward the
beach, just to lean against the handlebars and take it all in: the
enormous, choppy ocean; the rush and suck of the surf; the screech and
swoop of the gulls overhead. The Sea Road stretched ahead of her for
miles.

She took her time. She rode hard and then
lifted her feet off the pedals and coasted with her legs stretched out
and the salt air whipping thick and cool past her ears. She stopped to
drop the bike on its side and walk the beach, skipping shells across
the wash of the tide. Later, she sat on a high dune and stared out
across the restless water, letting sand run through her fingers, the
grains large and brown-sugary against her skin. She ran along the
shore-line with her arms spread out to mimic the birds above her,
wheeling and cawing in time with them as they tilted and dipped.
Sometimes she realized where she was, Ko but not Ko, Ko-in-her-head,
and her brain whipsawed around all the contradictions of real and
unreal. But the sun was warm, and the white froth whish-whished cold
against her ankles. It was as real as she was, anyway, and that was
enough.

It was the longest day she could remember,
and the sun began to sink below the horizon only when she decided that
it should. It took a long time, because she enjoyed sunsets; and when
it was dark, there was an oversized milk-white moon and a hundred
thousand stars between her and the darkness. She lay on her back in a
soft nest of sand and watched the sky. The night was warm, but not too
warm; just right, in fact. Just perfect.

She thought, I'm doing this. What else can
I do?

Thinking that, she slept. And when she
woke, she made the sun come up, and it was another beautiful day to be
alive, to be on Ko Island, to be Jackal Segura, to be for this moment
unafraid, to be strong, to be the one who made it all happen.

She left the sea eventually, long after she
had lost any sense of VC-time, and worked her way up the center of the
island, toward the mountain range of HQ buildings and the training
center campus. Riding between the corporate towers was eerie. The sound
of her wheels echoed back to her, and her shadow was huge against the
white pavement of the plaza; her reflection flashed at her from ten
thousand mirrored panes of glass. Yet she felt relaxed and comfortable
in a way she had never felt here before. It startled her to realize
that she had become used to being along. She hadn't even thought once
of Snow until now, in spite of all this time in these familiar places.
She was no longer Snow's Jackal, or the web's Jackal, or the Hope of
Ko. She was just herself.

She explored for weeks. She drove a
dormitory car all around the island. She walked the woods. She slept
for a week in her favorite spot, the one that she had thought never to
see again; and when she left it, she did not look back. She prowled the
corporate buildings, endlessly fascinated by the mundane: the clutter
in desk drawers, the varieties of coffee in the executive dining rooms,
the thick carpets full and rich against her bare toes. She wondered if
this was the way it really was, or if her imagination simply supplied
the details. She sat for hours in the conference room where she had
learned so much from Neill, her feet up on the table, staring out the
window at Esperance Park. She stood wide-legged in the middle of the
plaza outside Ko Prime headquarters, closed her eyes, spread her arms,
and imagined thousands of people in the real world, busy and focused,
rushing right through her. Then she dropped her arms and smiled, and
turned back into the empty lobby, the sun-bright silence. The silence
was better; being along was better.

She lost track of the months. Occasionally
she would will a change of seasons, and so she moved sporadically
through a long high summer and a chill-edged fall, a clear and precise
winter with no snow. She ate and slept, rode, read, spent fascinated
hours in the herb garden learning each type of bud and leaf and stem.
She danced. She ran naked through the enormous lobby of the Executive
One building, and made love to herself on top of the teak reception
counter, and the thought of being watched only made her want herself
more. She became utterly streamlined. She was certain and serene. There
was no need of rigid schedules or rituals to mark the passing of time;
not when she was so busy creating worlds within herself. But there
finally came a day when she thought of the world beyond Ko.

Hong Kong. She took herself off to Terry's
Cliff and sat cross-legged on the edge, looking out to sea. Hong Kong.
And then what? Al Iskandariyah? That was a nasty thought, to imagine
herself dancing down the corridors of the prison hospital into the room
where in another life she was strapped down and hooked up; leaning over
the empty table and pressing against the space where she was in that
other world, coming that close to herself.

Moved by some unnamable impulse, she
returned to her apartment, walked easily to her bedroom and crossed to
the hole in the wall in a single breath, knelt and stretched and pushed
herself back through, into her cell.

The screen was in its morphing faces
phase. The bed was nicely made; the larder cupboard was full. She
pulled an apple from the shelf, bit into it: it tasted the same as the
Ko apples, as the apples of the last…how long? Then she understood what
she had come for.

The screen display showed Day 1840.

It was hard to believe that more than a
year had passed since she had left her cell, since she had broken out.
The Jackal that was had turned to dust in the corners of a virtual
cell, under the imaginary skies of Ko. How did she feel now? Pure,
serene; as if she moved aerodynamically. She felt powerful. She felt
like herself.

It was spring when she finally went to
Mirabile, on the Ko ferry that rolled itself gently across the
glass-green sea while she stood at the rail and breathed warm wet air
that left the inside of her mouth tasting of salt. Gulls and terns kept
her company, and she fed them corn chips from the concession stand.
While the birds fought over the scraps, she watched Ko become smaller,
until she could not see it anymore.

Being empty of people made Hong Kong feel
huge, gave her for the first time a true sense of how much space was
contained in the buildings that shouldered each other aside for room to
thrust up toward the clouds. She felt small, walking in the perpetual
shadow of the city's streets, craning her neck to see the sunlight that
struck only the uppermost floors of the taller buildings. Anyone who
lived here had to reach for the sun.

She jogged down the closest transit ramp
into the subway. A train waited, open-doored and humming to itself as
if eager to get on with the journey. She let it take her through the
tunnels and up the rails that joined the elevated system, and she rode
through the ankles of the city until the train stopped, as she knew it
must, at Tsimshatsui. At Mirabile.

It felt like entering a cathedral; the
vastness of it, the resonance, was holy and terrible. Her steps became
measured, the rhythm cadenced and ritualistic. There was nothing but
space and silence and, far above her, the dark shapes of birds wheeling
around the elevator towers.

One of the elevators opened to her, and
she went up.

Mirabile fell away beneath her. She kept
her head up. She watched the birds turn slow circles until she came
level with them and left them behind. Up and up and up. Her mouth and
throat were dry. Her hands trembled. She flew up into the fist that was
the Needle, into its knuckletips that scratched the sky. The elevator
slowed and stopped, and the doors rolled apart to release her, but she
pushed the