Unplugged (16 page)

Then Rain. Rain Holt pulling me from the sea.

Pulling me toward him.

I took a deep breath. It had all seemed so real. Too real to be a dream.

I tried the door. There was a crack, and I could hear the wood shift, feel it break free. I pushed my whole body against it with all the force I could manage. It opened, and a pale glow fell across my face. Before I could decide otherwise, I slid my body through the narrow space.

AT FIRST I
was blinded.

The early-morning sun was a fiery round circle edging up along the horizon. My head swam like someone had spun me around, enormous bright spots dancing across my vision. I blinked and blinked, shocked by the brilliance of real sunlight. After a while, the stinging in my eyes lessened and shapes began to form, outlines of objects like silhouettes against a wall. A tree, tall and gnarled and thick, its branches heavy with green and stretching like long black fingers across the sky, and another with pointy oval leaves that fell like tears all the way to the ground.

I put my hand over my chest, trying to quiet my heart.
Felt the smooth marble underneath my feet, saw the outline of the vines growing across the esplanade and the start of the grass. Heard the
shhhhhhh
of the wind across it. The air was cool against my damp clothing, and it brought that tangy smell of salt from the sea. The ocean was close, but I couldn't see it. My heart pounded harder. The presence of so much reality made it race. The App World sky was beautiful, but knowing it was only virtual, that ultimately it was a projection, diminished the awe I'd had for it.

There came a singing, high and rhythmic. Insistent.

I closed my eyes and listened. Let it fill my ears until it was all I knew. The sound of it seemed to rise, grow bigger, as though it was aware someone had just tuned in. A sense of peace, of hope was carried atop its music as I realized its source.

Crickets.

They sang their last high notes as the night receded completely.

I remembered them from when I was small, how fascinated I was with every little thing that crawled across the earth. My sister had come upon me once, crouched in the grass one early morning like this one, staring at this strange, spindle-legged creature whose song I'd followed until I encountered its ugly brown-black body. She got down next to me, and before I could cry for her to stop, she reached for it—I thought to crush it—but all she did
was capture it in her palm so I could get a better look. We watched it, studied its wings, its waving antennae, the way it rubbed its legs together, until it lost patience with us and hopped right from her hand, disappearing back into the grass.

My throat tightened. The crickets seemed to want to remind me of my family, to celebrate the reunion Jude and I would have once I left this place and found her, to tell her and my mother that yes, I was really here. That I'd come for them. I was back, as real as ever, and I'd never forgotten them, just as I'd promised.

The singing stopped abruptly.

The sun inched higher. The Keeper would be up soon. If I was to leave, I'd have to do it now, before she discovered that I was gone and I'd taken her key. I was about to start off when I remembered what the Keeper said about the epidemic that had swept through the Real World, how some Keepers would hide their faces, worried about breathing in some new virus that might overtake the city. I hurried back through the mansion's rooms until I reached the one with the gowns and dresses. I found a pale scarf that would cover my hair and face, and a loose long-sleeved tunic of sorts that reached all the way down to my knees, covering my body. I wrapped the scarf around my head and, just as quickly, went outside again. It wasn't disease, but the strange dreams that haunted me, especially the most recent one, a warning about my face.
It made me think better of simply stepping out into the Real World unprotected.

I walked a few paces, my eyes squinting in the glare of the rising sun, then turned around to take in the house. No, it really was a mansion. It was five stories tall but each level had such high ceilings that it seemed more like ten. Every room had a balcony, with columns reaching between floors, a hundred toothpicks propping up an elaborate house of cards. The French doors and windows were covered with boards, plants and vines overtaking parts of the facade, some of them blooming with tiny white flowers. Solar panels were spaced out across the roof, but only a few were still clean enough to capture the sun and give off any power. Tall, thin windmills reached above the trees. To the left of the mansion were the remnants of a garden, wild and overgrown, great pink and red roses thick and full, their thorns choking away everything else. The marble of the esplanade shone a bright white in the sun. Along the edge of the wide lawn there was a long wrought-iron fence. Beyond it was a sight that made my heart skip.

The ocean.

Dark blue and sparkling in the light. It really was close. I thought of diving in, of swimming in its current and submerging myself in its waters, but it seemed to rear up from below, too far and too dangerous to access from here. The mansion must be built on a cliff. The sky behind
everything was bright and clear and blue as a robin's egg.

My blue sky
, sang my mother's voice in my head.

The Keeper was wrong about my family, that they could be a danger to me. It was simply impossible.

I would find them and prove this was true.

A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the trees and rippled across my shirt. I pulled the scarf away from my face for a moment and breathed in, the smell green and sweet, grass and flowers mingling with the dirt.

Summer.

A strange, potent feeling welled inside me. It filled my heart, expanding my lungs and lifting my spirit. There was an ecstasy in the fresh air and real sunlight on my skin, and a peace, too. A pang of sadness drifted through me. I wished Inara were here, experiencing this with me. Longing filled me like water rising to the top of a bottle, longing to see my family again, longing to finally be in a place where I belonged, longing to have my mother and sister assuage my fears that I'd been forgotten or even abandoned. It took up every part of my insides and threatened to spill over.

I started across the lawn. The mansion's immense structure shielded me from whatever lay on its other side. There was a long winding path along the cliff that continued beyond the trees, and I followed it. For some reason, my feet pulled me away from where I sensed the city to be, as though they had a plan of their own, much like
how they'd drawn me into the room with the mirror. It was like my body had its own internal GPS. I wandered through grass as high as my knees, the ocean to my left. I passed another boarded-up mansion. It was only one story, but that single story was tall and majestic, with marble columns and great archways sprawling outward on either side, a grand path lined with overgrown bushes winding its way to the entrance. More mansions followed, all of them perched far above the ocean, tempted by the beauty of the water, drawn close by the sight of the sea. Windmills dotted their lawns, slowly turning in the breeze, and solar panels like the ones I'd seen at the Keeper's occasionally caught the glare of the sun as I passed. The path dipped lower. To my right was a wall of jagged stone and to my left, all ocean, the white foam of waves crashing into an ever-shifting outline along the island. The sun was higher in the sky now, bearing down on my bare arms and shoulders. Skin burned, this I knew from Mrs. Worthington's class, but somehow I'd imagined it bubbling over like boiling water, and all I felt right now was the slight sting of heat. There came the sudden crush of gravel behind me and I spun, searching for its source.

But there was nothing.

Only the sight of tiny rocks falling away from the edge of the cliff, loosed by the wind. My hand went to the scarf draped across my mouth and nose, pulling it tighter, my breath hot against the fabric. I looked around, behind me,
ahead of me. I didn't see a single soul or other sign of human life. I seemed to be the only person alive and out in all the Real World.

The path was so deserted I half expected an army of zombies to come at me from farther down the cliff, like in that Wandering Dead App I was obsessed with when I was a fourteen. Finally, after rounding another bend, I saw someone. A man was walking far ahead, his attention on the ocean. For a while I followed behind him, wondering if he'd turn around and see me. But he never did—he was too far away—and eventually he disappeared up a path that led away from the ocean toward the trees.

A few minutes later I saw a second person. This time it was a woman, dressed in the same white attire the Keeper usually wore. She was headed toward me, which meant that soon we would be face-to-face. She was out walking her dog.

I put my hand to my mouth and laughed. A real dog! Not one that was downloaded. It was big and tall, maybe tall enough to reach the middle of my thighs, with thick, black, curly fur. His eyes darted everywhere, like he couldn't settle on what was most interesting, and his tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth. More than anything, I wanted to place my hands on his head and touch that fur. I couldn't stop staring at him.

I couldn't even remember one from when I was small.

The woman was a few paces away, and I found I
couldn't move. She brushed by me on the path without even a glance. The most attention I received was from the big black dog, who pulled toward me on his leash, his nose trying for a sniff.

My lungs let out a big whoosh of air.

I started to laugh again, great and big and uncontrollable. What would the Keeper say if I returned to the house as though it wasn't a big deal that I'd snuck out and said, “I hope you don't mind but I've brought home a new friend,” and introduced a big curly-haired dog into our rooms? If it were a girl dog, maybe I would call her
Lacy
. I liked the idea of a loving, slobbery animal with that name.

Thoughts of the Keeper silenced my laughter. I wondered if she was up yet, if she'd realized I was gone. I pressed my hand to my waist, feeling the outline of the key.

I started on my way with more confidence now. The Keeper had been so worried I'd be unsafe out here, but she was wrong. Nobody cared who I was. Nobody even bothered to turn and look at me. I let the scarf slide away from my face and hang across my shoulders. Soon the path bent right and rose until it was level with the top of the cliff again.

Then I stopped, stunned by what I saw.

Far off in the distance were the outlines of New Port City, its buildings rising up beyond a line of trees. The skyline was familiar yet foreign, in the same way that
seeing myself in the mirror for the first time had been strange, yet I still recognized myself. Great towers were clustered at the center of the island, as though the ocean had birthed them from below the earth, waves pushing up all that stone and smoothing it across glass. Huge steel and rock structures stretched like needles toward the clouds.

My eyes landed on a skyscraper that was truly familiar.

The Water Tower.

It was dead center, poking up amid the other buildings, the tallest one among them. The sunlight seemed to ripple into bright-blue waves as it hit the side. I was tempted to head straight toward it, across the grass and through the wall of trees until I spilled out into the city.

But my body, my mind, my feet were pulling me elsewhere.

Soon a peninsula took shape up ahead. The narrow strip of land was striking, not only for the way the ocean walled it in, nearly cutting it off from the mainland, but because of the way it jutted into the sea like an arrow let loose from a bow. There was something familiar about it. The wind picked up, whipping across me. I had to hold the scarf in place with my hand. There were no mansions now, no houses either, just wide flat rock that bled into the grass stretching out behind it, a mile of rugged, nearly barren earth that ended with a drop into the sea.

The path dipped again. Up ahead I saw a rough staircase cut into the rock at the edge of the island. My heart
rose in my chest until it lodged in my throat. To my left, cutting into the wild, churning ocean below, was a series of enormous sharp rocks that rose from the water. Stepping stones made for giants that ended at the sea. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them once more, as though they might disappear. My breaths were quick and painful as I neared the staircase and started to climb. There was no railing to hold on to, and should I trip or slip, I'd go tumbling into the sea. I barely cared.

I took the last tall step, hoisting myself onto the edge of the cliff.

There it was.

Somehow I'd already known what I was about to encounter, but to see it here made me dizzy, made my stomach churn like the raging water below. I moved forward a few paces so if I fell down it wouldn't be to my death.

In front of me I saw several striking things.

A dais.

A podium.

A wall of glass.

All of it, abandoned. A fight had broken out here. Tufts of grass had been trampled and pulled away. A metal pillar at the end of the wall was lying on the ground, and another was bent at the middle, as though some inhumanly strong person had kicked it. Several long cracks marred the glass. I went to the dais, began wedging my
toes into narrow spaces between the rocks, some other force guiding my body, giving it the capacity to climb stone as easily as to walk flat earth. When I reached the top, I lay down, flat on my back, looking up toward the sky, that big blue sky.

I closed my eyes.

Words came to me. Broken and senseless. But I could hear them like someone was speaking them right here, right now.

The New Capitalists.

Win.

Freedom.

App World tyranny.

Crisis.

Come and see.

Come and see . . . what?

Me?

I opened my eyes and turned my head until I was facing that glass wall. A crowd, dressed all in blue, flashed before me.

This was why my body had urged me here, my mind, my feet.

To see this place in person.

To convince me that the dream wasn't a dream at all.

The crowd, the speech, the ocean, the boat. A cliff, an escape, a dive. Nearly drowning. A boy pulling me up from the sea.

Rain Holt pulling me up from the sea.

All those bruises when I'd woken up. That gash in my leg that was becoming a long fine scar along my thigh. None of it was from moving me after I'd unplugged like the Keeper tried to make me believe. It was from when I'd jumped from this dais and leapt off a cliff into the ocean below. Why had I needed to escape? Why had everyone been watching me? Had I been on trial for something I'd done? Was it possible to commit a crime while plugged in?