Veneer (23 page)

“No,” said Rosa.

“Then for argument’s sake, let’s say he was fine. Next day, we’re at Paramel.” A slight hesitation, enough to elicit a raised eyebrow from Ilya. “In the heat of the game, Deron takes a fall. He hits his head and then—”

“He hit his head?” Rosa’s eyes widened.

“Yeah, but—”

“He could have had a concussion!” She crossed her arms tightly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sebo shrugged. “I thought it was nothing. Deron’s always a little off the tram after we finish a run and gun. He had some pizza and made all the nonsensical ramblings like he always does.” The night’s conversation came back to him, scrutinized for the first time. “Things like how dark the terminus was when it really wasn’t. Then on the bus, he kept looking out the window.”

“What was out there?” asked Ilya.

“Nothing. I put a veneer on the glass, but he acted like it wasn’t there. I thought he was just being Deron.”

“Concussion,” repeated Rosa. “He hurt his head and you let him go home like nothing was wrong.”

He considered a counter-argument about how Deron was a big boy and could take care of himself, but that would have just led to more squabbling, more accusations that didn’t help anything. They needed a plan, a discrete goal and a means to attain it.

“Look,” he said, “maybe I messed up and maybe I didn’t, but what’s done is done. We need to worry about what we do now.”

“You go look for him!” shot back Rosa. Her veneer took on a stormy sheen. “You get on the trams and ride the whole fucking city if you have to.”

She didn’t have to yell, but even Sebo could appreciate the effect it would have on her emotional state if she could blow off some steam, heap some blame onto his plate. Pleasing Rosa was not his job and Deron’s appreciation of his efforts wouldn’t repay the time lost sitting in Perrault’s arguing with a distressed woman. Riding the trams seemed like a good enough compromise, a passive search that wouldn’t take much effort on his part. He could put in a few hours, pick up again after school tomorrow.

“I can ride too,” said Ilya, raising her hand. “I don’t have anything better to do. Maybe you take south and I take north?”

Sebo eyed her suspiciously. Sometimes it was difficult to see past the veneers, to believe anything beyond what the reconciler invented. Other times, it was just a nice pair of tits being suffocated by a tight shirt that kept him from knowing the person within.

“Alright,” he said, sliding out of the booth. “Then there’s no point sitting on our cocks anymore.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

Rosa didn’t look up, just kept staring at her drink. Out of the corner of her mouth, she said, “Message me if you find him. Before the cops, before his mom. You message
me
.” Her voice broke then, and Ilya put her hand on her back.

“I’m going stay with her for a bit,” announced Ilya. “Maybe we’ll cross paths later?”

“One can only hope,” replied Sebo, turning on the spot. As he walked out into the cold night, he glanced back through the glass doors, but Ilya wasn’t looking after him, wasn’t watching to see if he’d try to steal another glimpse of her artificial beauty.

“Friends have all things in common,” he repeated and then shook his head.

There was something so familiar about those words.

29 - Rosalia

Ilya insisted on walking her home, but thankfully she did it in silence. Rosalia was feeling the beginnings of remorse, for not being stronger, for yelling at Sebo. He was only trying to help, even if it was his mistake that had gotten them into this mess. At least he was doing his part. And Ilya, offering to ride the trams, was more than she had expected from someone only indirectly connected to Deron. Except that she wasn’t on the tram yet, was instead wasting her time making sure Rosalia got home safe, as if anyone between Perrault’s and her front door would dare attack her. If Ilya didn’t want to look for Deron, she shouldn’t have offered.

“Do you want me to stay a while?”

There was kindness in her face, but all Rosalia wanted was to be left alone. “I’ll be fine. I’m just gonna lie down.”

“Good,” said Ilya. “You get some rest. I’ll message you later.”

“Thanks,” said Rosalia, her word almost cut off by an abrupt hug.

Ilya said goodnight and sauntered down the walkway. At the street, she gave another little wave before setting off at a quick pace for the tram stop at the end of the block.

Rosalia waited until she was completely out of sight before opening the door and stepping inside.

It was quiet and dark in the foyer, but she could hear her dad talking in the living room. She slipped into the kitchen and pulled a glass from the cupboard. The fridge made a racket as it crushed the ice, which elicited a greeting from Lynn. In time, she told herself, as she drank slowly from the glass. After all, there was no way to get upstairs without going into the living room where her dad would look at her and if he were any kind of father, would see the pain in her eyes and the flutter in her veneer. He might even have the answers this time, as he often did, but something prideful in Rosalia made her want to solve this one by herself.

When the glass was empty, she refilled it and then grabbed a small bag of chips from the pantry. The lights dimmed as she exited and with a sigh, she made her entrance into the living room. Her dad was sitting on the loveseat and watching the portal above the fireplace. Next to him, Lynn sat with her hand on his leg, looking quite content in her mother’s rightful place. It wasn’t so much that she hated Lynn, but the way her father doted on her, the way he ignored her mother’s legacy by consorting with some random woman he had met at work, made her feel an anger and betrayal she couldn’t ignore. She misplaced it on purpose, directed it at the woman who had come in and tried to fill a void no one could ever hope to fill.

She was nothing like mom and she never would be.

“It’s late,” observed her father, without looking away from the television.

“I know,” said Rosalia, stopping behind the sofa.

“It’s a school night,” he continued. “Do I need to have a talk with Deron?”

She laughed to stifle a whimper. “Yes, please. You should go over and talk to him right now. And if he’s not home, you should drive around the city until you find him.” Her voice broke. “And I don’t care if you threaten him or tell him he can never see me again, just so long as you find him and let me...” Trailing off, she averted her eyes when he looked up. Even Lynn was staring at her now.

“Rose, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she replied, concentrating on her veneer. The tears welled at the corners of her eyes, but she reconciled them away as they came.

“Did you and Deron have a fight?” asked Lynn.

Contempt took over, allowed Rosalia to steady herself. “No,
Lynn
, we didn’t have a fight.” Her tone evoked a frown from her dad and she pulled back for his sake. “It’s nothing,” she explained. “Same old bullshit.”

He must have seen something in her veneer because instead of yelling at her, he just sat there, speechless, an aborted warning on his lips. Rosalia took the opportunity to cross to the stairs and as she climbed, she heard concerned whispers trailing after her.

Her bedroom door lit up at her approach, showing off the mural she had reconciled there a few weeks ago. Its design consisted of water that fell in thin lines, obscuring the detail behind it: a darkened cave, sparkling stones, and a fire in the distance where two shadows sat together, huddled next to it and each other for warmth.

It was time for a new image.

Grasping the glass and chips with one hand, she used the other to reconcile the old scene away and replaced it with a field at night, silhouettes of tall grass under a black sky. No one walked in the field, no shadows held hands on the horizon. There were no stars, no moon, nothing to light the way of anyone foolish enough to venture in. It was a lonely place, somewhere she would go if she only could.

Safe in her bedroom, Rosalia reached for the virtual keyboard on her desk and turned on some music. The first track was from her regular playlist, something too upbeat for the hour and circumstances. She swiped at her music library, winding back the clock to the Classical era, to songs that still managed to evoke emotions and soothe the heart even after so long. Something obscure began to play, a sonata perhaps, on the high end of the piano. She couldn’t place the name, but the melody felt familiar, took her mind off the world just enough to let her slip out of her clothes without realizing it.

Rosalia stood next to the wall, staring at the lush jungle veneer, trying to remember what she had been feeling when she made that. She puzzled the lapse in memory as she brought up a portal and expanded it to fill the entire wall. Its liquid contents began to shimmer, trying to anticipate her next command before defaulting to her start page. The icons shrunk to a manageable size at her insistence, revealing an empty inbox. Nothing was new; all she had were static icons that only came to life when she put her hand near them.

The network awaited her, that vast ocean of information that in a million years she could never swim across. But the idea of worldwide calamities, misguided social networking, and omnipresent pornography didn’t sound appealing. She almost gave up when she saw her bed off to the side, its covers turned back in anticipation. Then, an icon shook in place and a little exclamation point appeared above it.

Updates.

Shrugging, Rosalia tapped the icon and let Canvas expand into the portal. Her home room appeared, with four of the walls still holding their original designs. She looked at the waterfall and thought of the room beyond it, the one with the moon nightmare. With its pale light obscured, it wasn’t as menacing, not as important when compared to losing Deron. She thought of him, but not without acknowledging the need to put him out of her head. Reconciliation would distract her. Changing the last blank wall of her gallery to something magnificent would make Deron’s face go away, if only for a little while.

Rosalia put her hand on the wall and took a deep breath. In the darkness behind her eyes, she waited for something to emerge from her clouded mind. Images flew, but none substantial enough to waste time on. Retracing her steps, she thought about everything she had seen, tested the ideas to see if they were worthy of reconciliation. After a few minutes, she gave up, but when she opened her eyes, the wall had already changed.

It was blown-up reproduction of her Guardian chip, down to the last detail, just as she had seen it on Nurse Hendricks’ wall. The tissue around it was pinker than she remembered and now there were little veins crisscrossing within it, little pulses of blood that appeared blurry from their motion. A smirk crept onto her face as she realized she
had
been thinking about the chip. In the game, her avatar backed away from the wall and watched as the sparkling curtain fell over the image, assimilating it into the public collective and comparing it with the thousands or millions of other players. She let a minute pass before walking her avatar to the wall and through it.

The other gallery was dark, lit from the center by a red orb embedded in the ceiling. Only one other wall was reconciled and its contents didn’t make any sense. A series of three images stared back at her, all containing a chip similar to her Guardian except that these had tendrils extending both up and down. They were small, almost invisible; the artist had used contrasting blue on black to highlight them. The upper lines extended in an oblong pattern, which she recognized as the shape of a brain. The lower tendrils descended in a solid stalk before breaking away to form a small clump.

A heart and a spine.

The labels beneath the images suddenly made sense.
2
,
13
,
21
; they were ages. What she was looking at was the growth of a human and its internal wiring growing right along with it. The Guardian chip reached further into the body than she had thought. It seemed to require an entire network of wire to probe every last piece of it.

“A whole new system,” she said aloud, comparing what she was seeing to the established circulatory, respiratory, and central nervous systems. A shiver went up her spine and she wondered whether the wires shivered too. For a moment, all she could think about were the metal vines in her body, intimately entwined with her spinal cord, poking and prodding their way into the depths of her brain. It was too much.

She imagined herself biological, all natural, but she was actually a mix, a half-breed of woman and circuitry.

What that meant for her soul, she wasn’t sure.

A familiar concerto started, rescuing her from the spiraling breakdown. Logic crept back into her reality and reminded her that she was seeing an image inside a game. Whoever had reconciled it had seen a Guardian chip, but there was no proof that what they painted on the second wall even existed. Rosalia had seen no wires in the nurse’s office and never in her life had she even heard the possibility advanced.

If anything, she had overreacted, panicked not because of the veneer’s content but because of her emotional state, the fatigue that threatened her ability to stand.

She almost smiled at her own foolishness. But even that moment was short-lived as she realized she could verify the story by touching the wall. If she moved through it, then someone else in Canvas had seen the same thing. Or, her rational side pointed out, had imagined the same thing. Cautiously, she approached the wall.

Her heart sank as her avatar passed cleanly through it.

Another room, another wiring diagram, and a slightly different angle of the Guardian chip. On the fourth wall, set apart by the drawing of a nude woman swimming, was a cityscape that resembled downtown Easton. In the center was a dull building that seemed out of place with all the finely veneered skyscrapers around it. It was the kind of structure people wouldn’t give a second glance to, yet there it was, focal point of a crude but ambitious cityscape. As her avatar approached the wall, a small bubble popped into being next to her, informing her that annotations were available. She pressed the
show
button and watched as a single word in rounded red letters appeared above the building.