I sagged in his grip, glancing toward J.C., dead on the floor. I muttered something softly.
“What’s that?” the guard said, shaking me by the arm. “What did you say?”
“This isn’t your prison,” I muttered louder. “It’s mine.”
I bolted upright, slamming the back of my head into the guard’s nose. As he shouted in pain I turned, grabbing him by the arm and flipping him over, then slammed him into the ground. I came up with his handgun, and held it out, sighting—flipping off the safety—just as J.C. had taught me.
Thank you.
I squeezed the trigger, firing off three quick shots, bringing down virtual mobsters who had been picking through the room. I wasn’t really worried about them, but I wanted to get the others into firing mode. Indeed, the rest of the mobsters raised their weapons and started shooting again.
The other people—one more guard, Kyle, the four techs—screamed and dodged behind overturned tables. “It’s not real!” Kyle shouted. “Remember, it’s not real!”
It didn’t matter. I’d been there so many times. What sounded real, what looked real, was real to you—even if you logically knew otherwise. Even Kyle ran for the doorway to a bathroom, where he could hide from the gunfire.
I stalked through the room. A pile of poker chips next to me exploded as a bullet hit. Shots passed right through me. I reached to my arm, where Armando had cut me, and found only smooth, unmarred skin. When had I started ignoring that wound?
A guard—one of the real people—pointed his gun toward me, so I was forced to shoot him in the shoulder. He screamed, and I casually stepped over and kicked his gun away from him. I pushed him down and took a second gun from his leg holster.
Thanks again, J.C.
I stood up and fired in two directions at once, simultaneously killing two mobsters. The techs were screaming somewhere nearby, but the only person I really cared about was hiding in the bathroom. I stepped up to the wall nearby, then pushed through. I didn’t break through; I just shoved my way past it. As I did, the virtual world became even more flimsy to my eyes.
In the bathroom, Kyle spun on me, but I easily swept his feet out from under him, stepped on his wrist—getting him to drop the gun—then kicked his weapon away. I leaned down in a smooth motion and pressed two weapons to the sides of his head.
“Two guns, Kyle,” I whispered. “One is real, one is fake. Can you tell which is which? Can you feel them, cold against your skin?”
He stared up at me, sweating.
“Death in one hand,” I whispered, “a game in the other. Which should I fire? Right or left? Would you like to choose?”
He tried to stammer out some words, but couldn’t even form a sentence. He lay there, trembling, until I stood up. Then I casually shot him in the side.
Kyle screamed, doubling over, blood leaking between his fingers.
“I lied, Kyle,” I said, tossing the gun away. “Both guns are fake. I got them in the simulation. But you couldn’t tell, could you?”
He continued to whimper at the pain.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The wound isn’t real. So no actual loss. Right?”
I dropped out of the simulation. The six people lay unconscious on the floor, trapped in the simulation. Of my aspects—J.C., Ivy, Ngozi—there was no sign. Though I did feel a buzz from my phone. A call, from Kalyani.
I didn’t answer. A moment later, a text came.
GOODBYE, MISTER STEVE.
Somehow I knew what was happening. Some of them had turned against the others, becoming nightmares. By ordering them all to congregate, I’d simply made the massacre easier. I tucked the phone away, and decided I didn’t want to know which of them had chosen that path.
I just knew that when I returned, there wouldn’t be any left. It was over.
Exhausted, I strode along the wall and looked into the windows here. Each was a cell, for testing patients.
Sandra was in the last one, seated on a short stool, eyes closed. I checked the wall monitor, tweaked a few settings, then opened the door.
I stepped into Sandra’s world.
FOURTEEN
Her final hallucination took the form of a long pier at night, extending into a placid sea. Little paper boats with candles at the centers floated along, bobbing and bumping into one another.
They didn’t do much to light the sea, but they did contrast with it. Fire upon the water. Frail lights one step from being snuffed out.
I walked along the pier, listening to quiet waves lap against the posts beneath, smelling brine and seaweed. Sandra was a silhouette sitting at the end of the pier. She didn’t turn as I settled down next to her.
She was older than I remembered, of course. The older I grew, the more shocking it was to see weathering on the faces of people I’d once known. But she was still Sandra—same long face, same eyes that seemed to be always dreaming. A beautiful sense of control and serenity.
“Do you recognize it?” she asked.
“That place along the coast where we went,” I said. “With the buskers on the dock.” I could faintly hear jazz music in the distance. “You bought a necklace.”
“A little chain. And you bought it for me.” She put her hand to her neck, but she wasn’t wearing it.
“Sandra…”
“It’s falling apart, isn’t it?” She continued to stare out across the ocean. “You’re losing control of them too?”
“Yes.”
“I was wrong. When I taught you all those years ago. I thought we could contain it, but we can’t. I suppose … suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s all just in our heads.”
“Who cares if it’s all in our heads?”
Finally she looked at me, frowning.
“Who cares?” I said. “Yes, it’s all in my head. But pain is ‘all in my head’ too. Love is ‘all in my head.’ All the things that matter in life are the things you can’t measure! The things our brains make up! Being made-up doesn’t make them unimportant.”
“And if they control your life? Dominate it? Take you away from anything that could be real or lasting?”
I waved toward her simulated world. “This is better?”
“I’m at peace here. For the first time in my life.” She hesitated, then met my eyes. “The second time.”
“You told me I had to have purpose, Sandra. Is this purpose? Sitting here? Alone?”
“I have no choice,” she said, then embraced me. “Oh, Rhone. I tried to leave again today. I visited the fairgrounds, to call you. They came back as whispers. It will happen to you too. They will steal your sanity. Unless you do … something … to contain them.”
The tiny, paper-borne lights trembled on the ocean, and in a moment I caught a glimpse of the dark shallows underneath … and dead eyes staring up out of the water.
Sandra held on tighter. I pulled her close as I picked out dozens upon dozens of corpses in the water, entombed in the depth
s. Her aspects.
“Oh, Sandra,” I whispered.
“It is peace. The only peace I’ll ever find.”
I closed my eyes against that horror. Such loss … the agony of feeling pieces inside of you being ripped away. I knew exactly what she’d gone through. Likely, I was the only living person who could fully empathize with what she felt.
“Mine are dead too,” I whispered.
“Then you can escape.”
“And if I don’t want to? If I want them back?”
“It doesn’t work that way. Once they die, they’re gone for good. Even if you make new ones, the aspects you had can never return.”
We embraced there for … I don’t know how long. It could have been hours. Finally, I pulled back from her and—looking into her eyes—knew that she didn’t have any answers for me. At least not answers I wanted.
There was an indescribable hollowness behind her eyes. I’d heard it in her voice before, on the phone. She’d lost so much, she’d seen so many nightmares. It had led her to this. A terrible numbness. Like a real-life version of becoming a nightmare.
For a brief moment, I saw through the illusion, the hallucination. I was in a small room, and Sandra—it was her, alive and real—sat on a little stool on the floor beside me. Though our surroundings were a figment, she was real. She’d always been real. I knew that as well as I knew anything.
“Stay,” Sandra said to me.
“All those years ago,” I said softly, “when you left me … I tormented myself, Sandra. Yet my aspects were never able to solve this one most important mystery. Where had you gone? Why had you gone?”
“Rhone…” she said. “That doesn’t matter now. Stay. If we have to be alone, let’s be alone together.”
“Do you know,” I said, ignoring her plea, “a piece of me always suspected that I knew why you’d gone. I’d become too needy. That was the reason, wasn’t it? You couldn’t keep dealing both with your aspects and with my problems.”
I stood up to leave, but let her hand linger in mine.
“I think I now understand your decision,” I said. “Not why you left … but why you had to leave. Does that make sense?”