A Crack in the Sky (20 page)

The funbot began to whack Eli on his arm over and over again with its antennae
—thump! thump! thump!
Even though it didn’t say a word, its meaning was clear.

“It wants me to climb.” Eli craned his neck upward again. From where he stood, the sky looked gigantic, a massive wall of pink light that shot straight up for a dizzying distance before it started to curve over the city. Suddenly he was Alice staring into the mysterious bottle of liquid.

Drink me
.

He squinted into the glare. It seemed like a crazy idea to leave the safety of the ground. It made him sweat just to look up at that height. And besides the danger, surely it was forbidden.

Yet he wanted to know what he would find up there.

“Marilyn, what do I do?”

On his shoulder now, she eyed the wall of light.
I don’t know why you bother to ask
, she said.
You know what you’re going to do
.

“Aren’t you curious too?”

She turned her head and looked into Eli’s eyes.
You’re impossible, you know that? If we’re going to do this, let’s get it over with
.

Eli took a deep breath and one last glance at the funbot. By then it had stopped whacking him and was only watching.

“Climb, Eli Papadopoulos,” it whispered. “Climb.”

Eli grabbed the ladder with both hands and swung his legs onto it. Seconds later he was already several feet off the ground.

The higher he climbed, the warmer the air grew. Lights flickered and digital images whizzed past. A beach umbrella opened and closed overhead. A herd of floating cows grazed all around them. But this was good, Eli realized. On any other day, with the sky behaving normally, he would never have been able to get away with such a climb. At least in all this chaos there was little chance anyone would notice him.

He kept climbing, and gradually the curve of the dome sloped backward until it was necessary for him to keep one foot wrapped around a lower rung at all times to stop himself from falling. The ladder was concealed under so many pixels that Eli couldn’t make out how it was fastened to the hidden girders. At least it felt steady. He tried not to look down. He concentrated on moving to the next rung, and then the next.

I think I’m going to faint, Eli. Don’t look. I think I saw our house down there
.

Despite himself Eli glanced over his shoulder. She was
right. He picked it out too; it looked like a green and gray Victorian dollhouse in a miniature model of his neighborhood. He was so high up, he had to look away in case he lost his balance. He wondered how the sky engineers ever got used to this. What was he doing? Maybe Sebastian was right. Maybe he really did have brain fever.

“Close your eyes if you need to!” he called. “Concentrate on holding on!”

At perhaps a hundred fifty feet above street level, just when the slope of the sky seemed almost too dangerous for him to continue climbing, the ladder’s path abruptly curved into the light. He was upright again, thank god, and moving in a vertical direction. A few steps later his entire body was immersed in color. The pixels were almost too small to be distinguished from each other, and yet like reeds being bent back in an overgrown pond they moved apart as he climbed, creating a path. All around, three-dimensional digital images formed and drifted and broke apart. Two gorillas in short summer dresses waved shopping bags. A beautiful salesgirl with long earrings held up a cup of blue liquid and sighed like she’d just discovered true love.

From overhead boomed a female voice, calm and cheerful but loud as a thunderclap. “PARDON OUR APPEARANCE. WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES.”

Marilyn screeched, burying her face in Eli’s cloak. Eli almost lost his grip, but he caught himself. The voice was so thunderous that he was certain people all the way on the ground would hear it.

“WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE
AND ASSURE YOU THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM. INFINICORP IS TAKING CARE OF EVERYTHING. ENJOY! CELEBRATE! WHY NOT VISIT THE MALL?”

Eli tried to ignore all the distractions as he continued climbing higher and higher. Soon he’d climbed so deep into the layers of light that he could barely see the ground. Eventually his hand brushed against something unexpected—some kind of ledge. It was just to one side of the ladder. He stopped climbing.

“What do you suppose this is for?”

I don’t know, and I don’t care
. Marilyn’s face was still hidden under his cloak. She was shaking.

Eli reached out and pulled himself onto the iron grating. He wanted to explore, but it was hard to see much through all the flashing images and whirling colors. He felt around with his hands. On the far end of the ledge he found a smooth surface, flat and cool like glass. He wondered if he’d reached the inner wall of the dome. It was possible, but he wasn’t sure. He parted the light with his hands and peered through. Whatever the surface was, it reflected his face like a mirror. And then his fingers discovered something round and solid protruding toward him. He gripped it and found that it could turn.

This was no mirror, he realized. He remembered the sky engineer he’d seen climbing the dome, and the crack of darkness she’d climbed through.

“Marilyn, I think we’ve found a door.”

She wriggled under his cloak until her head poked out into the light again. She didn’t say a word. Eli tried to gather his
courage. In his mind he was picturing the white-eyed Outsider.
So, what’ll it be, then? In or Out?

He took a deep breath, and then he twisted the knob and pushed.

The door slowly swung open.

11
a new mission

It had been almost three weeks since Tabitha was brought to the reeducation facility, and still she hadn’t agreed to join the other Waywards on the production floors. Representative Shine had even mentioned to her that Tabitha’s was one of the longest-ever stays in the admissions ward. “But that’s fine,” she said. “You’ll let me know when you’re ready for the next step. I have faith in you.”

The truth was, Tabitha was a lot calmer now than she’d been at first.

She still thought about Ben sometimes, but less and less often. She’d pretty much gotten over her disappointment in him and in the Friends. All she felt now was regret that she’d allowed herself to be so taken in. And even though she understood that her newfound peace of mind came, at least in part, from the influence of the CloudNet sphere over her bed, it didn’t bother her much. After carrying the secret weight of her dual life for so long, it was a relief to let the burden go. It
wasn’t as if the Friends had turned out to have had anything real to offer. They had abandoned her. That much was obvious by now. So, for a change, why not allow herself to be
happy
that InfiniCorp was taking care of her?

Life wasn’t really so bad here.

In fact, it was pretty okay.

By then she rarely left her bed. She knew the facility’s whole CloudNet menu practically by heart. For hours at a time, she explored its passageways and lost herself in her favorite dream games. She appreciated the way the sphere kept everything else at bay. As if a switch had been flipped, her worries would disappear, and all that remained would be a light-headed, radiant feeling. She’d never experienced it like this at home. Even the room was starting to glitter.

One day Tabitha awoke from her afternoon nap overflowing with gratitude for this place, which had made her feel so cared for even after everything she’d done. She wanted to do what she knew was right. She yearned to make Representative Shine proud of her. So the next time the angel-faced girl came in to clear away the snack tray, she stopped her.

“What’s the matter, Tabitha? Something wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I—I just wanted to let you know, I’m ready now.”

Representative Shine didn’t say anything. She stepped back to the side of the bed, set the tray down, and took Tabitha’s hand.

She looked so happy.

*   *   *

Throughout that night, her last in the white room, Tabitha drifted in and out of sleep, imagining what might lie ahead for her the next day. Whatever it was, it would be very different from her old job at the Department of Intern Relations, that was for sure. She hoped she would live up to company expectations this time.

Early that morning, about an hour before wake-up, a blue-uniformed employee came to disinfect her bathroom. This wasn’t unusual. Twice a week since she’d been in the tower, they had come in to sterilize the toilet and run a mop over the tile floor. There were no robots here—at least, none that she’d seen. It was as if nothing in this facility had been modernized in many years. The Cleaners never said a word. They just came in, did their job, and left. Tabitha had learned to ignore them by then.

But that morning the Cleaner was one she’d never seen before. A muscular girl with a wide nose and a mole under one eye, she appeared to linger near the end of the bed, sorting through the sterilizers in her equipment cart longer than seemed necessary. And Tabitha got the weird feeling she was watching her. To be honest, it made her uncomfortable. Had she done something wrong? Was she in some kind of trouble?

She closed her eyes and pretended to fall back asleep. But that was when the girl whispered to her:

“Sister Tabitha …”

She opened her eyes. The girl was standing over her now, looking into her face. She spoke again: “A single thread of reality can be hard to distinguish in a complex fabric of illusion.”

Tabitha thought it was an odd thing to say. Yet at the same
time it stirred something unexpected in her, like a distant memory. She felt sure she’d heard it before, but when?

“The sour milk smell. Think about that. Concentrate on it.”

It was funny, but until that moment she’d almost forgotten about the bad smell. She’d become so used to it, in fact, that she hadn’t thought about it in what seemed like ages. But now she realized it was still there.

“It’s the stench of the ocean acidifying,” the girl continued, “the marine macrofauna collapsing. The ocean is almost dead now, but you can use the smell as a lifeline. Focus on it. Follow it out of the haze and back to reality.”

Somewhere in the deep recesses of her consciousness, Tabitha felt a vague rush. Yes, she did remember something about this from the secret meetings and whispered conversations. Something about the end of the world. With the Cleaner’s dark eyes on her, Tabitha did what she was told. She concentrated, trying her best to isolate the unpleasant odor from all the other distracting sensations. Soon she could feel it burning at her nose once more, and as it did, her other perceptions seemed to come back into sharper focus. The room stopped shimmering. All at once she experienced clarity like she hadn’t felt in days, maybe even weeks.

She sat up. “Get me out of here.”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” the fake Cleaner answered. “This place is a fortress, and we’re three hundred miles from land.”

“Are you saying it can’t be done?”

The girl paused. “There would be risks, but the Friends have the means to make it happen.”

“I don’t care about the risks! I’ll take the chance!” She slipped out of bed and started to reach for her clothes. “So,
how is it done? Are you going to sneak me onto a boat or something? Smuggle me out in a box? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“Whoa, hold on. Escape isn’t what the Friends have in mind for you.”

Tabitha stopped. It took a moment for this to sink in. “But … but I have to get out of here. I want to go home, back to the domes.”

The girl shook her head. “You can’t go back to the artificial cities, Tabitha. Not ever. You need to accept that.”

Tabitha’s stomach sank. She took a deep breath. “All right. Outside, then. I’ll live in the desert. Somehow I’ll find a way to survive out there.”

“You don’t understand, and we’re running out of time. The Elders have already decided what you’ll do. Your ability to fight the spheres is exceptionally strong. There aren’t many who could snap out of a CloudNet trance like you just did—not in
this
place, anyway. Do you realize that?” She glanced nervously at the door. “We have a new mission for you. Things happen for a reason, Sister. The Elders never intended for you to be captured, but now that you’re here, they believe this is what was meant to be. The best way for you to aid the cause is to remain here as our operative. You’ll be a lone conscious agent, an unsuspected Friend among the sleeping Waywards.”

Tabitha couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “So … you’re just going to
leave
me here? How could that help any—?”

“I have news about Brother Ben.”

That stopped Tabitha midsentence. By then Ben felt like a distant part of her life, an old, shameful mistake that was behind her now. “You don’t have to tell me. I already know. Ben
was a traitor. He gave up names, including mine. And then he killed himself.”

The girl shook her head. “Not true. If that’s what they told you, it was a lie.”

Tabitha opened her mouth to speak but then closed it. Standing by the side of her bed and blinking into the face of this girl, she felt like the whole world had frozen to a halt.