SHOCKS Olympia Administrative Wing, Washington, USA - June 22, 2043, 6:13 AM

  - - - - -

  It’s not as easy as simply syncing Sidney and the JAMES Unit.

  For one thing, Sidney exists in James’s processing loops—and possibly in my Mindscape. Neither of those places are ideal for connecting to the JAMES Unit in the black sector. Obviously, I don’t want to let James in there, and even though I sit down all night with all the researchers I can muster to try and find a solution, no one knows how to move a consciousness into or out of my Mindscape better than me.

  It took hours to explain what the Mindscape even is, and then thirty minutes of exhausting work trying to convince the researchers that I couldn’t put weapons in it. I’m not sure what Madame Baudelaire would do with a beyond-nuclear weapon. Probably call it clutter and throw it into the non-space outside my garden. In any case, it can’t be weaponized—at least not traditionally—and…

  And I forgot what else. I haven’t slept much the last…three days. Almost at all.

  That’s going to be a problem—enough of a problem that one of the researchers slipped me something. He said it’d knock me right out, but I took it like half an hour ago, and it’s not working. I blame my various resistances, the stress, or James’s attempts to figure out what I did in the black sector.

  I’ve told him almost everything, and I haven’t lied to him. But the details I’ve left out were…

  I try not to yawn.

  I fail.

  And then, without realizing it, I’m in a bunk somewhere in a wide-open containment cell. I don’t remember how I got there, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the cell Dad and I share, but I’m too tired to stop myself from falling asleep anyway.

  The Mindscape

  - - - - -

  It’s been…a while since you woke up here.

  And when you open your eyes, the sun’s pouring in over the wall around your garden. The oak trees are fully budded and leafed out, turning the ‘ceiling’ into a gorgeous mix of emerald and gold that reminds you of the time you visited that ancient-looking cathedral in Victoria on a field trip, but with less colors in the glass and more depth to the ones there are.

  It smells like coffee. Fresh-ground coffee.

  And Madame Baudelaire is waiting for you. {Bonjour, mademoiselle. It is good to see you again.}

  She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t need to. You’re here, you’re home, and that’s what matters. And her voice is like a gigantic, soft hug anyway.

  That, and that the Mindscape’s garden is immaculate. Not a single petal on a single tulip is out of place. The garden’s walls have just the right amount of ivy on them, and the gate seems polished brightly. You sniff the air. It’s clean and crisp, like a late fall day in the park, far from the smell of cleaning supplies and chemical despair of home—or the indescribable smells of other realities. It smells like freedom. Like calm. Like sinking into a chair with a good book or something—

  Something’s missing.

  Sidney’s not here. But he hasn’t been here in a long time—the two of you buried him deep inside James’s psyche. So it’s not that.

  It is important that you figure out what to do about him, though; you might need the Mindscape to deliver him to the black sector, and that might include a lot of risk on his part. You tell Madame Baudelaire to keep him here if he shows up. {Very well,} she says stuffily. She’s not happy about it, but you don’t care. She’s part of you, not your boss.

  The search through the garden for whatever’s missing reveals an interesting find—a single tennis ball. What it’s doing there, you can’t tell, and it’s only there for a few seconds before it vanishes. {A stray,} Madame Baudelaire says. {I apologize for the mess, mademoiselle.}

  Then, after a brief inspection of the rest of the garden, all that’s left is to visit the cottage and see what your little big sister’s been up to. You open the door. The chair’s in exactly the right spot. The books are all neatly shelved. A bin full of toys sits in the corner; as you watch, a single tennis ball materializes at the top of the pile, rolls down, and hits the bin’s side, where it stops. There are no rubber rain boots, no plastic raincoat.

  {She left. It took her a long time to pack, and I know she wanted to say goodbye to you, but you have been so busy, and she could no longer wait. I cleaned up when she went, and made the Mindscape feel like home again.}

  You try to protest. To wake up. If Alice is gone, there’s only one place she could be going, and it’s not safe for her there—no matter what James says. But Madame Baudelaire’s nonexistent hand rests on your shoulder, and she guides you to the far-too-comfortable, overstuffed armchair. {Her journey is a long one, and you have not been allowing yourself time to recover. Spend an hour here. Perhaps two. It will do you good.}

  It might do you good, you try to say, but it won’t help Alice. But instead of listening, Madame Baudelaire ignores you and pulls a book from the shelf. She starts to read it, and you find yourself relaxing into the chair.

  Just for an hour.

  Perhaps two.

  SHOCKS Olympia Administrative Wing, Washington, USA - June 22, 2043, 11:43 AM

  - - - - -

  It takes more than an hour or two for me to recover.

  In fact, it’s over five. But when I wake up, I feel almost like a human being. The wings are still there, and so are the funky, crimson-cored eyes. So are all the powers, and all the different things I’m responsible for. That list includes a few things I’ve been trying not to do.

  And I have a feeling that if I don’t do at least one of them now, I’m not going to get another chance. That the other person involved is going to do something dumb. All evidence points toward him pulling the trigger on whatever his stupid idea is. After all, that’s what he was about to do before Mrs. Nazaire intervened.

  So, before I head back to SHOCKS Victoria to wait for Alice to wake up, I have to deal with our dad.

  I’m not happy about it, though. Mostly, I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. But partially, I don’t know what he’s going to tell me.

  It’s nice to feel human again, though. For a couple of minutes, I walk normally instead of Slithering or Mergewalking, and make a game of not stepping on the cracks in the concrete floor—like when I was a kid.

  I track him down in the administrative wing’s cafeteria. It’s shockingly similar to the one in Victoria—the tables are a little tighter together, and they’re only rectangular so they can fit in like bricks, but the room’s design is the same. Sora would call it brutalist industrial or something. I call it boring.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He’s eating a sandwich and a bottle of cranberry apple juice.

  I don’t pick anything out to eat. I’m not hungry.

  “We need to talk,” I say as I sit down. It’s up front and blunt, and the kind of behavior that makes me Dad’s favorite when Alice does it, but right now, I don’t have time to tiptoe around him. If he explodes, he explodes. I cross my arms over my chest and stare at him. Director White’s suit and pants make me feel a little overdressed for this; he’s got a three-week stubble going, along with a three-day-plus plaid button-up that at least doesn’t reek of booze, even if it smells like everything else.

  The sandwich lowers. I catch a glimpse of Dad’s face. It’s pale, but not the same kind of clammy as it was in SHOCKS Victoria. He wipes oil off his chin, and he stares at me. “Did I ever tell you that you look like her?”

  That’s a gut-punch. My carefully calculated equation’s already wrong; it’s pretty much the same line he threw at me on the bus to Alice’s graduation. But through the pain of the emotional blow, something rises inside of me. Fury. How dare he?

  He sees it on my face—he has to; it’s not like I’m being subtle or anything—but he doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t backtrack. He keeps going. “She was always the better of us, even before…listen, I’ve been talking to that principal lady a lot, and she…she’s told me some stuff…and I’m sorry.”

  None of this is how this conversation was supposed to go. I was supposed to be furious. To let the confident, Guardian Angel Claire take over. But I’m clamming up worse than I ever did as before-time Claire. He can’t be telling the truth. He has to be lying to me. He’s a liar, and that’s what liars do. They lie.

  But he keeps going, even though he has to know that I know he’s lying. “It’s been, what? Five years? Ten? Since your mom…since it happened. I don’t know anymore. And I’ve been…your principal explained a lot of it. And I…fuck. I practiced this whole speech in front of the goddamned mirror all day, and it’s coming undone.”

  I try to say something. Anything. But I can’t. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion and on repeat, as the script full of lies falls apart and reveals the truth underneath.

  He used to be a rock.

  But he’s just a pile of dirt now, even if he’s trying to apologize for…

  “What do you want from me?” I ask. I don’t mean for the words to cut, but they do.

  He pulls back like I slapped him. And he’s quiet for a minute. Maybe two. Or maybe it’s just a couple of seconds. The sandwich sits on the plate, half-eaten and forgotten. So is the bottle of what Alice used to call ‘crappleberry juice’ to make me laugh.

  Then he looks down at his lap. “I want you to forgive me. To say it’s okay, and that I did what I could.”

  I stand up before I realize I’ve done it. My hand’s on the Revolver’s grip, but it’s still safely in my chest holster, and my finger’s not on the trigger. That doesn’t matter. He flinches again. He used to be a rock. Used to be someone I thought would keep me safe.

  Dad’s been a rock in the storm, a place to be safe when nowhere else was, and a constant source of love. He’s been someone to avoid, to tiptoe around, and to hide from as best we could. A missing piece Alice had to fill in for. Someone I tried to get SHOCKS to fix, and a potential threat—even if only a small one. He’s spent almost every moment I remember either drunk and angry or drunk and sobbing, and I can’t remember a single time he was at one of Alice’s soccer games or one of my conferences or anything where we didn’t all but drag him there.

  I can’t forgive him, no matter how much he says he’s sorry, and no matter what the risks are of having him here, angry and enraged. I just…I can’t. Not yet. Not here. Not until he earns it. I wish the truth about him was different. I wish the truth about me was different. That I could pretend to forgive him.

  But I can’t.

  I leave instead.

  When I’m done crying in the nearest bathroom—with the door locked, because I’m a Guardian Angel and Death, the destroyer of worlds and all that, and no one needs to see me cry—I finally reconnect to James.

  It’s almost amazing how quickly the vertigo disappears when the augs fully reactivate. It’s more vertigo-inducing, though, and I spend a minute staring into the crimson-and-black eyes looking at me through the mirror as I recombobulate.

  He wants to know everything. I give him the fast version—that SHOCKS and Doctor Twitchy are, in fact, building a weapon, that they refuse to let me see it with him online, and that it’s not finished yet. That we’re trying to find targeting information for Merge Prime’s origin (I skip over the second weapon and the Halcyon System being a target, too). What it is, and where I was. I don’t leave out all the details, but I leave out enough.

  That’s fine, there’s no time to cover everything, because James cuts me off halfway through. [Claire, there’s a situational change at SHOCKS Victoria and Vancouver Island. The tank holding your sister registered an increase in brain activity that lasted a few seconds before subsiding again. I’m monitoring the system, but haven’t seen a second increase like it. My belief is—]

  I cut him off. “Alice is trying to get back to her body. I know. There’s…not much we can do except wait for her to get there, right?”

  [Incorrect. It’s likely that, if Alice is able to return to her body, she’ll be disoriented, confused, and weak after several days without movement. It won’t be enough time to atrophy her like the tank did my body, but it will be significant. I’m not detecting any dangers in SHOCKS VVI Headquarters that could threaten her, but a containment breach is increasingly likely as time passes without the manual procedures I’m incapable of carrying out.]

  “So, we go back to Victoria, get Alice out, and come back here?”

  [That’s my idea, yes. The catch is that I’m uncertain how long it’ll take her, and it’s time you could be working toward your attack on Merge Prime—or getting stronger so you can fight back yourself. Without Director Ramirez. I don’t trust him; he’s hiding something from me.]

  “Of course he’s hiding something from us. He wouldn’t let me see the bomb up close, just in case I spilled something to you,” I say. It’s a calculated, rehearsed lie; I’ve said it dozens of times in my head. The best way to be a liar is to always, always be practicing them, and to convince yourself that they’re the truth. Alice is the best liar I know, and I’m trying to be more like her right now.

  Sometimes, the best lie is most of the truth.

  And he buys it. Or at least, I think he does. He doesn’t call me on it, at least. [I have an idea for getting you stronger while keeping you near SHOCKS VVI. It’s a little messy, but it should work. We’ll need to Mergewalk over there, though.]

  Not for the first time, I think about how ridiculously powerful Mergewalk is. If I had an army of SHOCKS RST troopers, I could move them all into SHOCKS Victoria, take it over, recontain everything there, and start working on Victoria—the city, not just the base. If I’d been this strong when Merge Prime started…could I have stopped it at West End High?

  I…I don’t know. The math on that’s way too complicated, and it’s not relevant to what’s happening right now, either. I focus in. “Details, James.”

  [Right. So, we have several dozen anomalies that left SHOCKS VVI. I’ve been tracking them through what’s left of Victoria’s surveillance infrastructure, and they’re causing the kind of chaos Xuduo-Danger anomalies do when they’re unchecked. It’d be in Reality Zero’s best interests to remove variables from the equation—especially if you’re trying some suicidal plan to hit Merge Prime wherever it is.]

  “Right. That’s fine. Unless you have a better move, this is probably the best we’re going to get. Let’s get moving, but the second you hear something from Alice, we go to SHOCKS—even if we’re in the middle of something.”

  Sidney had transferred to Claire’s augs almost instantly.

  He’d been ready. For…something. In the picoseconds between the augs coming online and James noticing them, he’d packed up his processing loops and shoved himself into the only place he could think of that James wouldn’t immediately scrape for whatever data he could find: the automated power supply controls. He’d buried himself deep—so deep James didn’t suspect a thing. And then he’d waited.

  Claire hadn’t suspected anything, either. She still didn’t know that Sidney had made the transfer from the JAMES Unit/Halcyon System amalgamation to her augs. He couldn’t communicate with her. Not here. Not while James was paying attention—and he’d seen how much the pseudo-AI anomaly obsessed over Claire when he had access to her.

  The whole time she’d been gone, James’s processing threads had focused on her family. On the tank that held her sister. On the people she knew and cared about.

  He was watching everything, and Sidney had a front-row seat to the surveillance.

  It had to be unhealthy for James. Sidney himself wouldn’t be caught dead doing it. Sure, she was his age, and he’d—in theory—saved his life. Sort of. But the level of obsession was ridiculous, and it was literally hurting Reality Zero’s chances of survival. There were dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of anomaly-bonded humans as powerful and capable of resisting as Claire was, but James’s unhealthy attachment to the girl had…left them untapped.

  Not that Sidney could do anything differently. Claire, thanks to James’s attention and that of the System, was now the only one in a position to make a difference and with the skills to do so. According to all of James’s Analysis, which Sidney had been quietly analyzing himself for the past couple of days, Reality Zero was all-in on red.

  That was why he’d taken the risk of moving. The hours he’d spent without contact with Claire had been informative in terms of figuring out what the Halcyon System wanted, what it cared about, and just how much of it was James and how much was the System. But it had also been terrifying.

  Claire was the keystone, and like it or not, cramped as the automated power supply control computer in Claire’s aural augment was, Sidney had to be there.

  The JAMES Unit was too erratic, too unpredictable, to leave it as his only contact.

  Besides, there were at least two places James couldn’t reach that Sidney could, but only if he was along for the ride.

  Patreon has one advanced chapter available for free members and seven advanced chapters ahead of Royal Road for $5.00. Come check it out!