The Illusionists

In her dream, Rue runs.

The dream is a game in a castle, but more than a game; and if Rue loses, she will die. The humming dread that drenches the walls of this place makes her neck clench and she can taste it, like blood on her tongue.

This place is death and the game is that they have to survive it.

The floor is made of cracked, uneven stone slabs, which makes her footfall echo so loudly, each separate noise a cacophony that she is sure will bring every horror this place has to offer right to her, pouncing on her like a ragdoll and tearing her to strips that they can gobble down.

She comes to an enormous king of a door that stretches up into the rafters. When she touches the handle, it opens easily, despite its size. The room beyond is smaller than she expected, its floor made up of uneven slabs that slope steadily down towards a hole in the centre of the room. Like a wound it gapes, coloured in blackness. The floor slabs disappear into it as if they are being sucked inside.

There is only the smallest ledge of slabs up against the walls that don't slope downwards. She has a feeling that if she steps on any one of the sloping slabs, she will slide helplessly towards the crevasse and disappear into it forever.

Rue knows what lives in the crevasse. She can feel it in her bones.

She steps into the room. Her feet slide and slip. She shuffles along. The sense of danger grows so fast she can imagine very strongly that whatever lives in the crevasse is skittering, climbing up the sides of its hole, coming closer to the source of that smell – the smell of her and of human meat. She is halfway across the room. If she doesn't hurry, she will die. Someone enters the room behind her. Rue screams a warning over her shoulder.

Don't come in! Don't come in! Find another way around!

She knows the newcomer has put a foot on the first slab.

She can see it shifting its bulk from side to side as it heaves itself up the sides of the crevasse. The smell of meat is stronger now. Double the strength.

She makes it to the other side and wrenches open the door there. The newcomer is halfway across. Something slithers out from the blackness of the hole in the middle of the ground. Broken pieces of slab tremble and shift. It moves horribly fast, scrabbling upwards in a massive rush.

Don't come in!
Rue screams.

The newcomer looks up, her mouth hanging open in terror. She has long, thin, dark hair, which shivers wildly around her shoulders as she looks rapidly between Rue and the hole, again and again.

I told you
, Rue says, her voice clipped and gasping.
I TOLD YOU NOT TO CO—

Rue woke, fighting.

It was too hard to breathe. The screaming had taken away her air.

It took a while to realise that wherever that place had been, she wasn't there any more; she was here, where things were real, and normal, and safe. The overwhelming sense of relief she felt brought tears to her eyes.

Underneath it there was the other emotion that she confessed to no one; the one that made her want to go back into the dream, nightmarish though it had been. A slick, slimy kind of fascination with the place she had visited. A desire to know more about it.

It was the second time recently that she had dreamed of that strange castle, each dream in a different room, but always with that sense of sick-hearted fear to it. The whole place was wrong, so why did she want to go back there? Was it a real place? A dream caused by her Talent? Or was it something she had made up? She wasn't skilled enough to tell.

That girl. She was new this time. Rue didn't know who she was or if she was real – a face that she had seen somewhere before, pulled from the back drawers of her mind and slotted into the dream. Just some girl.

Since she was little Rue could remember having dreams of real places she could not possibly know of but visited nightly, through no will of her own. Talent made you travel in your dreams, spy on people and places with your mind – and without them ever knowing you were there.

And if you were freakishly Talented, it also meant you could physically Jump your entire body, stripping away everything between you and somewhere else six feet or even a thousand miles away; treating distance and physics as a second's inconvenience.

Rue couldn't Jump yet, or at least not without help. She couldn't even control where she visited in her dreams; it happened randomly and without her input. She felt helpless, but there was no denying the thrill that rippled through her as she went to bed each night. Where would her mind take her? Would she learn a great, secret truth?

She stretched, feeling her back press satisfyingly into the bed, and turned on her side to switch off the bed comforter, which she managed on the third attempt. Wren had shown her how to do it but she still kept getting it wrong. Although the bed comforter mimicked the warmth and weight of sheets, it wasn't real in the same sense.

Rue lay, thinking.

The small room around her was a dull, metallic grey. The walls were grey. The floor was a soft, fuzzy grey. The bed she lay on was grey. The ceiling was actually white – Wren had told her why it was a different colour, but she couldn't quite remember the reason. Something about how Life worked when you looked upwards. There was a lot from the last few days that she couldn't quite remember. Strangeness upon excitement had taken its toll.

Rue had come to realise that many of her reactions to things were considered, by general people, to be odd. It had taken a while as a child, but eventually she had understood why people pulled faces when she said or did certain things. So finding out that she had a mysterious, rare ability like the Talent had failed to surprise her one bit. Of course she did. It explained everything. It explained the fascinating, frightening dreams she had that were rich and thick as velvet and felt so real it was like living another life while she slept. It explained her constant itch, the craving she had to be away from here, wherever here was. To be doing extraordinary things.

So being recruited to train in the Talent at Angle Tar's premiere university seemed obvious to her. Why have such a skill if it was never to be used? She had gone willingly, leaving her old life of routine and learning and banality behind, the dull ticking of hours and days and weeks.

And everything would have been fine if she hadn't met White.

When she thought about White, her former tutor, she felt a burst of pain, and humiliation, and a horrible, embarrassing, overwhelming desire to be near him. To have him think well of her.

Want her.

But he didn't want her. He probably, all things considered, hated her. He thought she was a rude, stupid girl. Rue knew he was a liar. She had pushed, and she had broken something past repair, and part of her was glad, because if there was one thing guaranteed to make her lose her mind in rage, it was being lied to. It had happened too many times in the recent past. It would not happen again.

So she had left Angle Tar, her home, and come with Wren to World. She hadn't seen it as treason at first, but now she'd had time to think, she knew that Angle Tar probably would. It was illegal for Angle Tarain citizens to travel outside the country. Probably to keep them ignorant of how amazing it was everywhere else, Rue decided. But the point was that she had crossed a very thick, unyielding line.

Maybe, just maybe, that meant she could never go back.

And maybe you'll never see him again
, said a small, treacherous voice in her mind.

Rue's reasons for leaving had seemed so clear at the time. The sense of betrayal at discovering the truth about the world outside Angle Tar, and the awful inequality within it, had left her breathless and impulsive. And now she'd left everything she'd ever known behind. No one knew her here in World. No one cared for her here. But she had to make it work. She could leave no space in her head for dwelling on the past. She was already sick of waking up to that chest ache every morning as the memories of what had happened punished her again. She had to put it all away.

When she had come out of the Jump from Angle Tar with Wren that first night, head spinning, she noticed something odd about the light. Wren held her in his arms until the nausea passed and she could stand up straight. They stood on what was clearly a street, though it was starker and cleaner than any in Angle Tar. The buildings were flat and strangely angular, made of smooth, colourless surfaces. The street itself was so wide, a grand and airy stretch of space. Nothing like the tiny, penned cobble mazes of Capital City.

And all the while she looked around for a source of light, but there were no street lamps to be seen. When she glanced up into the sky, she couldn't see the moon, despite the fact that there were no discernible clouds. But she could still
see
. It was dark, like it should be at night, but then it wasn't, somehow.

Wren was smiling. ‘It's strange,' he said. ‘I know it. But you're not seeing World how everyone else sees World. This is just the platform for World.'

‘The what?'

‘The platform, the basic “real” version. When you jack into Life, you'll see it very differently. You'll see a sky filled with stars, and a moon. Over there, those long stretches of ground with nothing on them? In Life they're covered in trees. The buildings here, look. To you they're just blank, right? Well in Life, that one is covered in a ten-foot-high mural of a rabbit. And that one, there, it has an advert for
Lost in Time
– it's a Life game. It's got a train exploding on it. I mean, the train is actually exploding, right now.'

He threw his hands wide, and Rue looked around, fascinated. There were no trees anywhere. And there was nothing on those buildings. Nothing at all. But she could almost believe there was, if she watched him.

‘I'll be honest with you. Out of Life, it's pretty dull,' said Wren. ‘They whine about the sociological problems Life causes, but then they offer us the platform as an alternative. So our choice is trees and beauty and colour and amazing,
amazing
things. Or this grey nothing of the real. Like a dull, blank canvas. It's astonishing that they think that's actually a choice.'

An uneasy frustration crept over her. She couldn't see what he saw. She couldn't understand this place yet. She needed to know how it worked.

‘Come, Rue mine,' he said, putting his arm about her shoulders. ‘We'll take you home.'

She felt immense relief, and sank into his side as they walked.

‘Where am I to stay?' she said.

‘With me, of course.'

She stopped in surprise.

‘It isn't like Angle Tar, Rue. There's no oddness involved in men and women of age living together without being married. And I live with many people; it won't just be us. You'll see.'

Wren's building looked just like every other building around it – it was a wonder he could pick it out. It was enormous, too; more like the tall houses in Capital City back home, which held twenty or thirty different families inside them.

‘It smells funny here,' said Rue, sniffing the outside air.

‘No, it doesn't smell of anything. It's a relief after the stench of Capital, right?' said Wren.

She inhaled deeply. That was what had been confusing her. There was no smell.

Wren walked up to what was presumably the main entrance, though the door looked just like any number of the others set into the wall that faced them. He pressed his face close to a flat, black decoration at head height.

‘What are you looking at?' said Rue.

There was a series of quick beeps, a little like the noise of droning bees, thought Rue, cut up into slices. Wren leaned back. The door opened smoothly, disappearing into the wall rather than swinging in or outwards.

‘It's like a key,' Wren explained. ‘Only you use your eye.'

‘You use your
eye
as a key?'

‘We'll have to get you registered to the building. Until you are, we won't be able to put your eye pattern on the door key.'

Rue was fascinated. Using your eye to open doors! She tried to swallow her nervousness at this strange culture and its magical way of living, tried instead to concentrate on the incredible things she knew it offered her.

‘Where's the box? You said you had one,' she said, as they walked through a corridor coloured a uniform grey. He had promised her another world in that box, and she had not forgotten.

‘Patience, Rue,' said Wren. ‘We'll get to it. It's in my room.'

His room had turned out to be quite ordinary. The box he had shown her before – or one like it – was there, on a thin side table. She'd stared at it, but it was a plain thing and gave up no secrets.

He had insisted she sleep for a while. Though she protested vigorously, it turned out that once she lay down, sleep overtook her almost at once. She didn't remember if he'd stayed with her or not. She hoped that he had, at least for a little while.

She shifted on the bed. She had her own room now, just down the corridor from Wren's, though she hadn't yet stopped feeling like a visitor. It was warm in here, but she was much like a cat – a room couldn't be too hot. She had watched Wren touch the wall to control the temperature but was too nervous to try it herself until she learned the skill of it. Wren called it technology, which was, she supposed, their word for magic.

Magic was so commonplace here that it had infiltrated every part of everyone's lives. They had magic devices set into walls that made food. There was no skill or understanding to it – you asked for and you got. It was so normal that it had become boring for them. Would it become boring for her, the longer she stayed here? Wren thought so, but Rue didn't see how that was possible.

There was a lot she didn't understand, and Wren didn't seem able to tell her how things worked. Where, for example, did the food come from? Was the food device like an ordering service? Were there vast kitchens underground beneath every block of houses in the district they lived in, which received your order and then sent it up by pulley? But how could that be, because the food arrived hot if you wanted it to, and how could they possibly know what you were going to order beforehand, and have it ready to go when you ordered it?