Chapter 27

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CEE. FIND ME.

The voice takes over my body and mind. Emotionless, I move, not understanding what I’m doing until it’s already done.

I’ve carried Hero back into the house and placed him on the mattress-less bed frame. I’ve tied him—everywhere. Arms. Legs. Body. All trussed to the bedposts. He’ll be in for a nasty surprise when he wakes, but I don’t care. Can’t care. Can’t feel relief over the fact he’s still alive. Can’t feel apprehension over the ramifications of the only human I know being … not so human after all.

I don’t know what he is.

I don’t know if I’m like him.

There’s only one way to find out.

I step out of the house and onto the sand. Grains push through my toes, dry and cold, then cold and damp. As I walk, I imagine the stars above me to be a million blinking eyes. What do they see? A girl in a baggy sweater, drawing a not-quite-straight trail of footprints down the beach?

Stars or eyes, they can’t know my intentions, and when I reach the waterline, I realize neither do I. I’m just following the pull of my gut, the same one that draws me to the pool beyond the meadow. Now it leads me to sea. I bet it always has, even when I’m asleep. There’s a fishing hook caught inside me. The silver thread of moonlight spooling over the waves is the line. It disappears into the waters of the deep.

Without thinking, I step in. The surf immediately washes over the backs of my feet. Welcome, it seems to be saying, clasping my ankles like the hands of long-lost friends. The water’s cold, but I don’t mind it, don’t feel it as I take another step in, and another, each one easier than the last. It could be even easier—and faster—if I lay myself down and close my eyes, let the waves carry me out like a raft. But I can’t do that, can’t surrender the little control I have over what I believe. And what I believe is simple:

I could still turn back, if I wanted to.

The waves reach my chest. The water buoys me off my toes. I stop walking, and swim. My strokes are flawless. My strength is endless. I swim until the eyes of the universe blink their final blinks and the moon submits to the sun. Mist blankets the waves, silver. I enjoy the light of the waking day for all but a moment before I take a deep breath, and plunge.

I dive.

And dive.

The distance between me and the surface widens. I’ve gone too deep. The weight of the world above could pulverize me. But I can’t bring myself to panic, not even when the pressure in my chest builds and the primal need for air wins out over the need to survive.

I breathe in the ocean. It scorches my nasal passage and blazes down my throat, burning every centimeter of the way. Pain without panic. Without panic, my body keeps on breathing and breathing, drowning and drowning.

Then the pain stops.

Everything’s quiet as I dive, deep and deeper.

Deep, past schools of speckled fish, slim like darts. Past fat brown fish with noodle-like whiskers. Past fish with fins sharp as knives …

Deeper, to a place where there are no fish …

The puffer fish tattoo on the bodyworker’s arm flexes as she wheels in a pushcart filled with scalpels. I know I should be scrutinizing these archaic-looking instruments before they go into my brain, but I can’t look away from the fish, especially when it changes color, from blue to violet, then hot pink as she hands me a flask.

“Drink up.”

She snaps on a pair of gloves as I down the stuff. It’s thicker and sweeter than I expected. I cough on the dregs. “Nice tat,” I croak as she takes the empty flask.

“Eli can throw one in for an extra fifty while you’re under. Right, Eli?”

A grunt comes from the next-door operating room, followed by the squeal of a drill.

This is what I want, I remind myself. A place where they don’t check ID. Someone will take my place in this chair the moment I’m out.

No one will remember I came through.

“Maybe in the future,” I say to the bodyworker as she puts on a surgical mask, then goggles. They remind me of Kasey . I swallow.

“In a sec, the neuron-damper will kick in. The operation itself will last fifteen minutes. You’re free to pick up two doses of painkillers on your way out. Post-surg complications are on you. Got any burning questions, ask them now.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

The bodyworker pauses and finally seems to see me. For a second, I think she’s going to ask if I’m sure I want to do this. It’s not every day someone requests an Intraface extraction. I also don’t look like the typical clientele.

“It might leave a scar,” she says in the end.

A scar. I almost laugh and say, Have you seen my face? But of course she hasn’t. I’m hiding beneath a millimeter of concealer. My brain is high on psychdels. Without the pills, I wouldn’t even have been able to walk myself down here. A glance at my vitals would reveal everything wrong with me.

But here they don’t check. And if they do check, then they’re under no obligation to care. This body shop is the opposite of everything Ester stood for, but I don’t think it undermines the human experience. If anything, it celebrates the fact that our bodies are ours and we’re allowed to treat them to nonessential procedures. Nonessential experiences. That’s all I wanted—to live and laugh without consequence, to feel the sea like people did in the past.

And look how that turned out.

“Hey.” Fingers snap in front of my eyes. “You okay there?”

“Yeah.” My breathing has quickened. Thinking about your upcoming death is no fun. “Yeah. Just feeling the drug.”

The bodyworker frowns. She’s about to say something else, when another voice interrupts.

“Jinx. I’ll take this one.”

The memory fades as I reach the bottom of the sea.

It’s flat, without the ridges, grass, and trees of the land above. Just pebbly sand that stretches on and on, and I don’t know why I swim in the direction I do—it’s all more of the same—until something sparkles in the distance.

A house-sized dome, emerging from the sand.

It’s silver, like the lid to a fancy dish. It lifts like a lid too, when I reach it. I swim in without a second thought and it sucks me down, dumps me—seawater and all—onto some slick, cold surface.

Coughing, I push onto my hands. The ground beneath my fingers emanates blue light—dim, too dim to illuminate anything beyond the curved walls to my immediate right and left. My eyes burn when I squint to see more. Weird. They didn’t sting before, even though I had them wide open in seawater. I also wasn’t freezing before. Now I shake from head to toe.

I slosh to my feet—and almost faint. Static sands the backs of my eyes. My nerves feel singed. My spine crimps, and I double over, water geysering from my mouth and nose. My esophagus burns like my eyes by the time I’m done.

Then the dam breaks. Emotion and thought chainsaw through me, and I scream as the numbness is drained from my veins, all the pain gone for a split second before it’s back, tenfold, because I remember.

I remember.

Hero … trying to kill me … but I killed him … he was dead … but then he was—is—alive … and I—I walked right into the ocean, swam and dove down and I drowned but kept on swimming, kept on diving until I reached the bottom and here I am, here I fucking am, inside some strange dome on the seafloor, alive, but have I ever been? Alive?

Have I ever been alive?

I reach for the wall for support—and flinch away when my touch triggers a row of lights to blink on. I’m in a tunnel that winds downward, built of some smooth, matte material.

Slowly, careful not to touch any more walls, I walk down the tunnel. Lights pop on anyway. They’re the only sentient things in this cold, inanimate place, and the deeper I go, the more I lose my senses. I stop smelling the seawater. I stop hearing. The air is too odorless. Too quiet. Misgivings mushroom in my gut, but my gut nevertheless tugs me forward, brain telling me to turn around, but then what? Swim back to the surface? Confront the fact I literally dove to the bottom of the ocean? How long did it take? How much time has passed since I tied Hero to the bed? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m more scared of: the questions ahead of me, or the answers I left on the island.

My feet pad on without a care, then stop on a patch of blue-lit floor that looks no different from the other patches of floor—until a disk of it sinks. I’m taken like a pill, swallowed into the ground. The disk deposits me somewhere at least 500 meters beneath the surface of the seafloor. I step off the disk before I can stop myself, into the darkness.

Without fail, the lights come on.