The article continued for several more paragraphs, getting more rambling and disjointed as it went on. The quasi-journalistic style vanished halfway through, replaced by a first-person account of the writer’s abduction and torture at the hands of Meridian scientists. They had implanted a tracking chip in his arm and taken him to a place with locked doors and no windows, where they performed brainwashing and mind-control experiments on him. They had injected him with hallucinogenic drugs, put a helmet on his head that made him feel as though he were floating in space, and sent him to be interrogated by men in grey uniforms who claimed to be visitors from another galaxy…
I shoved back my chair so hard it nearly tipped over. The room spun around me, my stomach churning with it.
But Milo was still texting:
–Sounds pretty crazy. Maybe that’s why they haven’t shut it down.
I didn’t reply. I was too busy taking slow, shuddering breaths, willing the fury inside me to subside.
I knew he hadn’t meant to upset me, much less make me angry. He’d been trying to help, in his own misguided way. But right now, with those words glowing coldly in front of me, I wanted to snatch the phone out of my lap and hurl it through the computer screen. Not just for my sake but for Alison’s too.
But I had to say something to Milo, or he’d start to worry. I gave myself five seconds to mutter all the swear words I could think of, and then I picked up my phone again.
–And you wanted me to see this? Why?
–I thought maybe we should get in touch with this guy. See what else he knows.
–Why would we do that?
There was a long pause. Then Milo replied:
–Because it’s Meridian that’s after you. That’s the danger Sebastian was talking about, right?
That was when I knew I had passed beyond fear and anger into some kind of macabre hysteria. Because the first idea that leaped into my mind after Milo said that was to e-mail the address on the contact page and suggest an article called “How Meridian Reads All Your Text Messages, OMG!!!”
I suspected Milo wasn’t in the mood for black humor, though, and the website owner would probably appreciate it even less. I had to go back to deep breathing for a while before I felt calm enough to reply.
I’m not sure yet, I began, only to erase the words and start over. I was tired of lies and evasions: I’d spent a lifetime pretending, and sometimes I hardly knew what the truth was anymore.
I hope not, I tried again, but that wasn’t right either. So finally, I just gave up and typed:
–Yes.
INTERLUDE: Asynchronicity
(A transmission technique in which timing signals between communicating devices originate within the data stream, and not from a shared timing mechanism)
(2.1)
I’d been alone in this place for what seemed like forever. There was a crust of dried blood down the front of my clothes, my eyes were puffy and bruised, and the bridge of my nose throbbed with every heartbeat. I felt like I’d been torn to pieces and put back together wrong, and I hated it.
Not that it made any difference how I felt. I’d cried out for help, even begged for it. I’d yelled and screamed and pounded the walls. When all else failed, I’d sat in a corner and sobbed myself hoarse. No one answered.
Maybe this was one of those psychological experiments. Put a scared teenage girl in a half-lit maze of vacant rooms and dead-end corridors, all by herself, and see how long it takes for her to crack. How many hours, days, weeks of isolation before she forgets how to be human and turns into a wild animal, filthy and savage? And after that, how much longer before she stops eating, curls up in a corner, and simply waits to die?
Apparently I was going to find out. I wanted to vomit with the sheer terror of it, but I’d thrown up what was left in my stomach hours ago.
And I still didn’t know where I was or how I’d got here. There were no signs on the walls, no posters or pictures, not a single word in any language. What I’d taken for blacked-out windows had turned out to be monitor screens, and the only doors that looked as though they might lead somewhere were sealed tight. If I hadn’t found a box full of food and medical supplies in one of the rooms and a few tools scattered among the others, I’d have thought I was the only person ever to set foot in this place.
I was slumped on a sofa in the abandoned lounge, wondering what would happen if I smashed one of the screens and whether I had enough willpower left to do it, when I heard a noise. Only a soft, distant click—but to me it was shocking as a gunshot. Not just because it was the first sound I’d heard in this place that I hadn’t made myself, but because I knew instinctively what it meant. It was the sound of a door opening, and somebody coming out of it.
Coming for me.
My lungs constricted, and my heart burst into a gallop. I reached for the best weapon I had, blood-crusted fingers clenched around the grip. Then I sidled out the door and went hunting.
The corridor was curved, so I heard my visitor before I saw him. Even strides, firm footsteps—and luckily for me, he was heading in the opposite direction. I pressed back against the wall and edged sideways until he came in sight.
Crap, he was tall. Not too muscular, more on the lanky side. But his shoulders were broad beneath his grey uniform, and he moved with vigor and purpose. In a fair fight, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
But after what I’d been through, I had no intention of fighting fair.
I broke into a sprint, kicked off the corridor wall as he started to turn, and jammed the injector into his neck. It hissed, he gasped and swung around—
Then his knees buckled, and he collapsed at my feet, unconscious.
I’d done it! Now to get out of here. I raced to the door he’d come through, panting with anticipation. But he’d shut it behind him, and its surface was just as blank as before.
I wanted to pound on the door and scream, but I had enough bruises already. Calm down, Tori, I told myself. There’s got to be a key on him somewhere. And sure enough, when I searched the man’s pockets, I found a key ring and a wallet. But the keys were for a Volkswagen, and I wasn’t going to get far with the credit cards or the Canadian driver’s license.
I threw the wallet down and stomped off to look for something to tie the man up with. If I threatened to smash his head in with my tool kit, maybe I’d get some answers out of him.
(2.2)
I was in the supply room snapping a fresh dose of sedative into the injector when I heard the door creak again. Somebody had noticed the man missing and come to look for him.
Well, I’d pulled off an ambush once; with luck I could do it again. But even if I succeeded, it wouldn’t be long before the sedative wore off. And since I hadn’t found any rope, there was no way I could manage two hostages at the same time.
Number Two would just have to sleep longer, then. I cranked the dial of the injector up three notches and slipped back into the corridor.
The newcomer’s steps sounded lighter, more hesitant. This one was nervous, so they’d be looking around as they walked. It wouldn’t be so easy to sneak up on my quarry this time, unless I could come up with a distraction—
“Faraday!”
The voice was a girl’s, high with distress. And was I crazy, or did she sound familiar? Ten more steps and I saw her crouching over the fallen man, her face invisible behind a veil of hair. “Faraday, wake—”
She never finished the sentence, because I launched myself at her and body-slammed her to the floor. She didn’t even have time to cry out before I sedated her.
I stayed there with my knee on her spine until she went limp. Then I got up, giddy with adrenaline and triumph. Now I knew who she’d reminded me of, with those long skinny limbs and that reddish—
Misgiving seized me. I bent and rolled her over. Then I stood back and stared, unable to believe what I was seeing.
She didn’t just remind me of Alison Jeffries. She was Alison. My schoolmate, my rival, my nemesis, was working for t
he people who’d kidnapped me.
The discovery shouldn’t have shocked me as much as it did. After all, I’d been fighting with Alison right before I was abducted, so it made sense she’d had something to do with it. And there was no doubt in my mind that she hated me, even if I’d never understood why.
And yet I still found it hard to believe that Alison would sell me out like this. It didn’t seem to fit somehow.
Well, there was no use brooding about it. I got up and checked the exit door again. It was still locked, so I jogged back to the supply room for my tool kit. Then I exchanged the injector for the heftiest blunt instrument I could find and stood over the man until he groaned and began to stir.
“No fast moves,” I warned, “or I’ll smash your head in.” Not that I needed to worry at the moment: I’d had a dose of that sedative myself, so I knew he’d be sluggish and weak for at least five minutes yet. But I wanted him to know who was in charge.
Painfully the man pushed himself up onto his elbows, shaggy head hung low. Then with another groan he crawled to one side of the corridor and flopped over against the wall, blinking up at me. With his blue eyes half-lidded and his mouth hanging open he looked comically stupid—and surprisingly young. Still, I wasn’t about to lower my guard. I hefted my tool kit, preparing for the interrogation, but the man spoke first.
“Tori Beaugrand, I presume.”
It didn’t surprise me that he knew my name—I’d already guessed that my kidnapper, or kidnappers, hadn’t chosen me at random. I was about to answer when the man caught sight of the girl lying on the floor, and his sleepy look vanished with terrifying speed. “Alison!”
“Don’t move!” I snapped, but he ignored me. He pulled Alison’s limp body toward him, feeling her neck for a pulse.
“How much sedative did you give her?” he demanded.
“It was on six—”
“Six! Do you have any idea how much that is? How it would interact with the drugs she’s already taken?” He was shouting now, eyes red-rimmed and big hands clutching Alison so tightly the veins stood out. “You little fool! You could have killed her!”
“She broke my nose!” I snapped. “Ask me if I care!”
“You should care,” he said coldly. He gathered Alison in his arms and began struggling to his feet. “She’s been through two and a half months of absolute hell because of you.”
“What?” I asked in baffled outrage. “What are you talking about?”
The young man was standing now, swaying with the effort of keeping his wobbly legs steady. Cradling Alison against his chest, he began walking very slowly back the way we’d come.
So much for being in control of the situation. Exasperated, I slung the tool bag over my shoulder and headed after him. “Look, whoever you are—”
“Call me Sebastian,” he replied shortly. “And before you ask, I am not one of the people who abducted you. Neither is Alison, for that matter. In fact, you might say we’re here to rescue you.”
My lips framed a soundless what.
“Problem is, it’s not going to be nearly as simple getting you out of this place as it was getting in,” he continued. “So when Alison wakes up—if she wakes, and you’d better hope she does—you’ll have to work together.”
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or neither one of you is ever going to see your homes and families again.”
I clutched the tool kit tighter. “Are you threatening me?”
Sebastian looked at me over Alison’s slumped head. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s just a fact.”
I wanted to demand an explanation, but the look in his eyes silenced me. Subdued, I followed him as he carried Alison down the corridor, his stride lengthening with every step.
I expected him to stop at the door they’d both come through, but he walked right past it. He carried Alison into the nearest room with a bed—the same room I’d woken up in myself—and gently laid her down, smoothing the tangled hair back from her face before checking her pulse again.
“How is she?” I asked and was surprised to realize that I cared.
“Her heartbeat’s slow,” he said, “but stable. All we can do is wait.” His fingers brushed Alison’s cheek, tracing the pale oval of her face, and it came to me with a shock that this man was in love with her. When had that happened?
Sebastian looked back at me. “Sit down,” he said.
“I’ll stand, thanks,” I said. He hadn’t tried anything yet, but that didn’t prove I could trust him. Or Alison, for that matter. “What are we waiting for, anyway? Shouldn’t we be trying to get out of here?”
“We can’t,” he said. “Not yet. ”
“Why not? There’s got to be a way to open that door from the inside.” But he only looked blank, so I added impatiently, “The door you and Alison came through.”
“That’s not an exit,” he said. “It’s just a storage space. We came here the same way you did, through the relay.” He laid Alison’s arm across her chest, walked to the foot of the bed, and sat down. “This is getting us nowhere. Why don’t you start by telling your story, and then I’ll tell you ours?”
“You first.”
Sebastian sighed, but he didn’t argue. Instead, he launched into a long explanation. What the relay device was for and what it could do, and how he’d accidentally lost track of it after taking it out for a scientific test drive. How it had stayed hidden and dormant for years, defying all his efforts to find it. How he’d almost given up hope when a girl named Tori Beaugrand vanished under mysterious circumstances, and he finally had a lead to investigate…
The story was interesting in its way, but I was starting to get restless. So I’d been zapped by a top secret experimental device and beamed back to its home base, I got that. What I wanted to know was, who’d brought me here, what did they want with me, and how soon were they going to let me go?
Now Sebastian was explaining how he’d discovered I’d been seen fighting with a schoolmate named Alison Jeffries only minutes before I disappeared. Which was no news to me—she was the reason I had a new bend in my nose and blood all over my shirt, after all. I was about to interrupt and tell him to get to the point when he dropped the A-bomb: that after I vanished, Alison, shattered by the horror of seeing me disintegrate, had confessed to my murder and ended up committed to a psychiatric hospital.
And they’d kept her there for eleven weeks.
That was what Sebastian had meant when he talked about Alison’s two and a half months of hell. She’d been labeled a schizophrenic, dosed with antipsychotics and antidepressants, and kept in a locked ward against her will. All because she’d told the truth, or at least what she thought was the truth, about what happened to me.
Finding out that Alison had suffered even more than I had made me feel about half a nanometer tall. Not only had she paid for breaking my nose ten times over, she’d carried the guilt of believing that I was dead and that she’d been the one to kill me.
But selfishly, that wasn’t the worst thing about it—not for me, anyway. The worst was realizing how much time had passed for Alison and Sebastian since I’d disappeared. That I’d been missing for nearly three months back home, even though to me it felt like less than a day…
Which meant that by now everybody I knew and cared about had given me up for dead. I slid down the wall and sat down on the floor, feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach.
“I don’t know how you lost so much time,” said Sebastian, when I found the voice to ask him. “Maybe you were stored in the relay’s databanks for a while before anyone realized, or maybe they kept you there deliberately until they’d decided where to put you. But, Tori…”
I raised my head. Sebastian was regarding me with a quizzical expression, as though something about me didn’t make sense. Then he said, “Could I have a look at your arm?”
My throat went dry. “Why?”
Sebastian slid off the end of the bed and knelt on the floor beside me. Then, deliberatel
y, he rolled back the sleeve of his grey shirt and pointed to the inside of his elbow. “Because,” he said, “before I went through the relay the first time I had a chip implanted under my skin, right about here. And if you have a chip as well, then I think I know why they took you.”
(2.3)
I never told Alison half of what Sebastian and I talked about while she was sleeping or how hard it was to find out that my worst fears about myself were true. But by the time she woke up two hours later, I’d come to terms with it. I was even able to pass it off lightly when she guessed my secret, telling myself it wasn’t so different from what my parents and I had always believed anyway.
And as it turned out, Alison had a secret of her own—her synesthesia. Seeing noises as colored shapes and tasting words in thirty-nine flavors was distracting and sometimes overwhelming for her, which explained why so many times at school she’d seemed to be living in another world. And when I was nearby, it was a hundred times worse, because she could both see and hear the chip in my arm—and its constant high-pitched buzzing had made her feel like she was going insane. No wonder she’d acted so prickly around me.
But the chip was quiet now, so we could talk freely. And as we worked through our differences, I realized that I’d misjudged her. She wasn’t snobbish and unfriendly as I’d always thought, only cautious and a little shy. But the weeks she’d spent in the psych ward had changed her. She’d always seemed nervous, but now she was positively twitchy. Her pupils were dilated, her freckles stark against her too-pale skin. And though she’d grown two centimeters since I’d last seen her and put on some unexpected curves, she held herself as though she might shatter at any moment.