Wind rushed beyond the Sacred School and tore over the cliff, carrying away pebbles from the rock we sat on.

Piercey stared past the Valley below with eyes still as the dead themselves. He didn't need to tell me what he was thinking about. I could feel it as powerfully as the wind.

"We're real," I said.

"Then we'll still be real when we wake up in the real world."

I closed my eyes. "What is the real world, Piercey? She said her world is digital. Her people all uploaded. There may be nothing physical to return to."

"Don't you want to know what's out there? Where we come from? Who we are?" He turned to face me. "You want to fight to keep this prison they built for us?"

"I'm the one who has wanted to escape the school for years."

Piercey threw his head back and laughed. "Listen to yourself. The whole world is the school. It's all under their control. It's all fake."

"Our life is here."

"What about our life out there? What if we all have families waiting for us to wake up from this world? Who knows whether Dr. Henderson told us the truth when she said this is the only life we've ever known." He reached for my hand then, life in his eyes for the first time since we found out. "Let's be free. We don't even have to fight. Just jump."

I recoiled. Pebbles scattered over the cliff's edge and fell until they were too small to see. "I'm not jumping. Don't you even care that you'll lose me?"

His expression fell.

"I doubt they'll let us remember any of this if we do get to live beyond this world. We'll lose everything we have, including each other. I won't be me anymore if I can't remember my life."

He turned his face back toward the cliff. "I didn't think you'd be willing to participate in their experiment, even if rebellion cost you everything."

"Living is not giving in. Dying is. This is our life. Ours. We should take this world back from them. Not abandon it, abandon everyone in it, to the whim of false gods."

"You can't fight a god, Max."

I rose and turned my face into the wind so it would dry the tears that filled my eyes. "I won't surrender to death and I won't be her lab rat, either. I'm leaving this school. I'm going to live. Maybe I can't take our world back, but I'll take my life back. One day, I'll figure out how to do more than that."

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Piercey lowered his head. "You'd rather fight than be free."

I knelt down and wrapped my arms around Piercey's shoulders. Settled my head against his back. "You feel this?"

The wind roared against us.

"This is real. This right here. If we feel, we are."

Piercey was quiet for a long while. We sat that way with silence and wind between us.

When he spoke, his voice was stripped of emotion. "The white room must be beyond our simulation because the laws of physics seem to be different. If there's a way for the gods to let us in, there must be a way to break in." He squeezed my hands. "If we can break into the white room, we should be able to also break into the infrastructure of the simulation. Break into their control."

I knit my brows. "If we hack into the interface of our world and take control from them, they could physically destroy the hardware we're on."

"Destroying hardware is risky. Do they have a failsafe? Are we separate from the other simulated worlds they're experimenting on? Destroying us could destroy their entire project. Maybe they would just let us live freely."

I settled my forehead against the back of his neck. "You're too optimistic. Dr. Henderson doesn't look like the type of woman to let go. She'd fight for control."

"But would she destroy us?"

"That's a major gamble."

"Might be better than jumping off a cliff."

Piercey had spent years helping me plan to escape and still he refused to actually do it. "Would you really do it, Piercey? Would you actually try to take back our world from the gods?"

The quiet that followed said it all.

I sighed. "You always find the answers and do nothing with them."

He glanced behind himself, where I still held him. "I find the answers for you. I can't deny you anything, Max. I've never been able to."

We were growing up. I heard it in his words. Felt it in his strong grip on my arms. This wasn't like when I first came here at eleven and he held me when I was homesick. Or when I pulled him close after he'd failed his first healing test. The children in us couldn't survive long in a place like this. We were growing into more. And my arms around him had grown into more too, into something he wanted but I never quite did. I should have let go then as I felt that stillness settling between us, only it was hard to let go of the only person who'd never let go of me.

"Stay in this world, Piercey." I held him a moment longer. A moment too long. "Stay in my life."

I made myself release him then and I walked away, leaving him to feel the emptiness of someone letting go. Because if he jumped, he'd let go forever.

"You matter more to me than the world. I'd risk it all for you." I said it softly. So softly, I didn't know if he'd heard me.