I should never have taken Mom’s dress.
SHOCKS probably has my cargo pants somewhere, too. And my shoes—but they can keep those, or, hopefully, burn them. They were holey, and they stank. The ones they gave me with the oversized RST armor were so much better.
But the dress.
She stopped wearing it around the same time Dad started searching the newspapers for work, so I only remember her in it once or twice. But she was so pretty. I drew pictures of her in it and everything. For a little while, I had one taped to the fridge. That was before we moved to basic living, though.
Dad threw out most of her clothes, but he kept the dress. Alice and I knew where it was—his bottom drawer. It was easy to get a hold of it, and I wanted to look okay at Alice’s graduation.
But I still shouldn’t have taken it.
----------------------------------------
SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - June 8, 2043, 1:12 AM
- - - - -
I wake up sweating—the same old nightmare again, but with a tiny change. Just one, but it’s enough that I can’t shake it. My eyes pop open—one sees the dark room, a glowing alarm clock, and the hall light leaking in through my door’s window. The other sees nothing for a second, and I bite down the panic until I feel the bandage over it.
Maybe it’s too soon for this, but I have to know. I slowly work the gauze off my face. It sticks to my cheek and ear a little, but once it’s off, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Both eyes are working.
Next, I clap. The aug picks it up perfectly. Too perfectly; it hurts a little, it’s so loud. But it does get James’s attention. He starts talking as I adjust the aug’s settings. [Claire, you’re awake. I’m going to run a quick diagnost—done. Augs are both operating at about ninety-four percent of optimal. Given your nerve burns, that’s about the best we can hope for. It’s also a significant increase to your hearing and vision.]
“Yeah, I remember the specs.” I get up, pull off the hospital gown and IV, and get dressed in my hoodie and leggings combo. As I go through that process, I keep talking. “I’ve got to do something, and I’m going to do it tonight. It’s personal. You could probably force SHOCKS to do it in a minute, but I need to do it myself. Mostly, at least. If I ask for help, will you do it?”
[Of course,] James says.
“Great.” I look at the boots in the corner for a second—I’ve had them since the outdoor store—and then shake my head. Socks will be better. “Make sure the cameras can’t see me.”
[Done.] His voice is serious, clipped, and professional. It matches the tone I wish I had in my head. But all that’s there is the truth. I stole the dress, and I need to get it back for Dad. Somehow, that’ll help. Him. Me. I don’t know who. But it’ll help someone.
And maybe it’ll make the dream go back to normal, because Mom wasn’t wearing the dress that night.
I slip out the door, closing it behind me, and set out to keep my promise to Dad.
It doesn’t take long to realize something’s wrong at SHOCKS Headquarters. In fact, I don’t even get out of our wing.
The guard who’s supposed to be at the end of our hall to make sure Alice doesn’t wander off—since she’s technically a Xuduo-Danger anomaly, or at least bonded with one—isn’t at her post. The building’s alarms aren’t going off, though, so even though my neck hairs are standing up again and my ears are ringing faintly, I simply check that the Revolver’s in my pocket and move down the hall.
Whatever’s going on, it’s only going to help me right now.
The containment wing outside my family’s hallway is eerily quiet. There’s not a single researcher on the floor, and the cells are all silent—even the ones that usually make noise. Maybe that’s what really woke me up, and not the nightmare. The silence. That’d be a relief; I’ve gotten better at sleeping through them as I’ve grown up. The truth is that they usually don’t bother me much anymore.
But I still want that damn dress back, so I creep down the hall, hand on the Revolver’s warm grip just in case something happens. I don’t regret just going with my socks. The floor’s freezing tiles contrast with my gun, but it’s so much quieter than trying to sneak in boots.
[Claire. Problem.] James’s voice cuts through my thoughts halfway down the hall. [Alice is missing.]
“What?” I hiss, narrowing my eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on her?”
[She's cut the cameras and her aug out completely.]
That doesn’t sound like an Alice thing to me. “Great. So, whatever Li Mei’s up to, she’s done it in the last few minutes. The dress will have to wait.” I pull the Revolver, switch cylinders, and double back toward Alice’s room.
----------------------------------------
So.
Uh, yeah. Whatever’s going on, it looks like it’s my fault.
Again.
Alice’s room is trashed. Completely destroyed, like she lost her shit about something. Spilled yogurt by the mini-fridge. Laundry everywhere—that’s normal, but this is the clean stuff, not just the dirty. Some of that could be normal wear and tear, but I was just in her room this morning, and from a quick inspection, it got a lot worse sometime tonight.
The most damning bit of evidence is the whiteboard, though. She’s smashed her marker into it; its tip’s squished all the way into the plastic, and she’s drawn an angry-looking tornado of a circle around my note to her.
Yep. My fault.
My stomach’s in my throat, but I try to let the math take over. She’s somewhere in SHOCKS Headquarters. She has to be; Li Mei wouldn’t leave—not when she wants to be freed from Alice as much as Alice does her. So that’s one variable solved. And they’re not running the alarms, so maybe—just maybe—Li Mei’s not in the driver’s seat. I can’t confirm that yet, so I leave that as Y. I can hope, though.
The answer’s pretty simple, though. Since it’s my fault, I need to track her down and get her back under control before she loses control—assuming she’s still in control when I do find her.
There’s one other variable, but it doesn’t change what I have to do. It’s just junk math—the kind of busy work Mrs. Helquist never assigned, but my middle school teachers always did. SHOCKS is definitely after Alice, too, and I need to beat them to her. Easy peasy.
So, after James pops the other rooms’ doors and I make sure Alice isn’t hiding in Sora’s shadow or anything weird like that, it’s back into the main wings.
[Sorry,] James apologizes for the hundredth time. [I’m watching the cameras. If I see her, I’ll loop the footage to keep them away from her. But it’s unlikely.]
“Thanks,” I breathe as I hurry past the Geren-Danger cells again. They’re still quiet, but the plain, slightly rusted doors stand at attention like soldiers, and the viewing ports stare accusatorially at me. I’m working through the puzzle: If I was Li Mei, where would I go? What if I was Alice?
SHOCKS is probably thinking about Li Mei and discounting Alice. The infovampire’s the worst-case scenario, after all. That means they’ll search where the information is. The computers in the office space, or Doctor Twitchy’s office, are both prime suspects. If Li Mei’s driving, she’ll start there—or at least that’s what SHOCKS probably thinks. They’ve got a good idea of her habits, so they’ll be there.
[Confirmed,] James says when I run my thoughts past him. [Most of their people are there. A few are watching the exits, but as far as I can tell, no one’s seen anything yet.]
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Got it.” I turn and jog in a different direction.
[Where are you going?]
“If it was just Li Mei, she’d probably go to the offices or the Experimental Sector, or she’d try to kill me for messing up our friendship. Since she’s not trying to kill me, and she’s not at the offices, that leaves the Experimental Sector. That would tip off SHOCKS, and the bogeymen would be after her in a heartbeat. So, it’s not Li Mei, which means it’s Alice,” I’m moving faster now, because even though Li Mei’s the worst-case scenario, Alice loose and unbalanced is almost as bad, just in a different—and more personal—way.
[So, where is she?]
“I have a guess.” I run toward the medical wing, past the turn to the Anquan-Danger wing.
My aug goes haywire a second later, and I see my sister from a camera. She’s wearing pajamas and sitting in an office chair outside a familiar-looking, plexiglass-walled room with a single bed and shower. As I turn on the speed and push my Endurance to the limit, her black eyes turn toward the computer in front of her, and the see-through door opens. She unseals the box that once held the Revolver, then scratches her head.
“Shit,” I mutter. A dozen possibilities run through my head, a dozen different tests SHOCKS tried to separate the Revolver from me. Could she really be thinking about…?
I crash into the room behind her as she shuts the plexiglass one. It locks behind her.
“Hi, Claire.” Alice’s voice is brittle, but there’s a tiny lilt of playfulness that’s not matched by the bags under jey-black eyes with the bright crimson cores. Li Mei’s here, too. She sits down on the mattress and stares at me. “Are you here to help me?”
I’m not. Not in the way she wants, at least. “What do you need?” I ask, sitting in the chair and facing the computer. It’s got a log filled with different tests. There are more than I remember, and some that were never attempted. All sorts of stuff: electrical stimulation, exposure to various anomalies, and multiple simulated death experiments designed to reset the patient’s—my—brain to factory settings.
[None of these are good ideas for her,] James says.
“I need Li Mei out of me, and she needs out, too. We’re going to figure this out through trial and error—one experiment at a time. They’ve been recording my results there, but they wouldn’t let me see them, and they kept telling me there were some procedures they wouldn’t try because they were too dangerous. Well, Li Mei being in my brain is too dangerous,” Alice says. She’s completely stiff, and her words come out in a monotone, like she’s practiced this speech. Maybe she has.
Maybe this is like her commencement speech.
I look more closely at the experiments. In the last three days, she’s worked through most of the ones I remember, including all the ones SHOCKS thinks are safe and some of the more risky procedures.
So, as Alice stares at me, I push the chair away from the computer. “I’m sorry I missed lunch.”
“It wouldn’t have been anything, anyway,” she snaps back, emotion flaring for a second before the thin mask she’s been wearing falls back over her face and she looks exhausted and numb again.
“Can I come in?” I ask, even though she has no control over the door now that she’s inside. The Revolver’s in my pocket, just in case Li Mei’s stronger than Alice. She hasn’t been so far, though, and I’m willing to take the risk.
“No.”
That’s the answer I expected, but I pout a little anyway. “James, are you…”
[I’ve got a loop running, yes. SHOCKS can’t see any of this, and they think you’re in bed.]
“Great. Alice, I need your help. Can I at least explain why I wasn’t there?” I stand up and walk to the plexiglass door.
“Fine. Talk.” Everything about her says she doesn’t care except her eyes. For the first time, they sparkle. It’s not much, but it’s enough. The sparkle doesn’t go away as I explain the augs, the nerve burns, and the vertigo and post-surgery fog. It’s scary, and I fight a shiver the whole time.
When I finally finish explaining my thought process for finding her, she sighs and slumps onto the sheetless mattress. “Come here.” She’s got a mask on. It’s not Valedictorian Alice, though. It’s Mom Alice.
But you know what? That’s a start.
----------------------------------------
Alice steeled herself as the door clicked shut behind her little sister. Claire had always been a little careless, but this was ridiculous; she’d locked them in until the scientists realized where they were! Alice could leave any time, of course. Li Mei’s power could fade her right through that wall and straight to her bedroom. But Claire? Not so much.
Her eyebrows furrowed in a disapproving glare, and she started to stand up, but Claire held up a hand.
“It’s electronic and connected. James has it.”
Of course, Alice thought, James. The slightly friendlier voice in her head, not quite as insistent as Li Mei’s attempts to feed, but more certain of himself, more arrogant—and even though Claire had asked him to present androgynously, she couldn’t stop thinking of him as him.
That presented all sorts of problems that Claire either didn’t see or was ignoring. But Alice and James had figured out a fragile sort of peace. He did the minimum observation he could. She ignored him and pretended he wasn’t a part of her life. It had been working well. Well, well-ish; she couldn’t shake his presence completely, and she wanted him gone almost as badly as she did Li Mei.
That voice was currently losing her shit in the back of Alice’s mind. She’d had enough of Alice’s too-slow attempts to separate them, and she’d started getting a lot more threatening. Alice didn’t want to be a day sleeper, but Li Mei took so much energy to manage.
Claire sat down next to her, bumping shoulders slightly, and Alice pushed thoughts about James and Li Mei and the scientists’s attempts to get rid of them out of her head. None of that mattered right now. She was the big sister here, and Claire needed her.
“What’s wrong?” She wrapped an arm around her little sister.
Claire stiffened. “ I’m sorry I didn’t show up yesterday,” she said again.
“It’s fine,” Alice lied. Claire didn’t react like she sometimes did, and Alice let herself relax just the tiniest bit. “The doctors are working on me, right? They’ll figure something out, and Li Mei and I will go our separate ways. Or maybe she’ll die. Either way, we’ll be able to get back to normal.”
For a minute, Claire didn’t say anything. As the silence stretched past awkward and all the way to uncomfortable, Alice cleared her throat. “Come on. Let’s get out of here and go back to bed.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Claire said. “I need to get something back from the bogeymen, and I need your help.”
----------------------------------------
I don’t need Alice’s help.
This would be easier without her.
I should have let her lock herself into that room and came back for her later.
All those things are true. But what’s also true is that, even though I don’t need her help, I can’t let her out of my sight until I’m ready to have a private conversation with James. And I can’t do that until I’m sure she’s asleep.
And once she’s awake, getting her back down is tough, so I need to wear her out a little.
All those parts of the equation are why she’s coming with me as I head toward what James has helpfully pointed out are the ‘Anquan Item Lockers.’ If the dress is anywhere, it’ll be there. And, equally importantly, there shouldn’t be much security. The items are all Anquan-Danger, barely a threat if they’re being actively used, and with little to no way of entering a dangerously anomalous state without certain conditions.
It’s also, helpfully, about as far from Doctor Twitchy’s office, the JAMES Experimental Sector, and the Medical Wing as you can get and still be in the SHOCKS building.
“I can’t believe you lost it here,” Alice whispers as we hurry. I keep my eyes from rolling; she shouldn’t be here, and the Mom Alice mask is back on in force. “You know how much it means to Dad.”
“I know, I know. I already told him.”
“Was he…”
“Yes. He pretty much ignored me and just asked for another beer.”
“Good.”
Something about that response hits me wrong. It’s not that it’s a lie, because it’s not. It’s that for a second, Alice’s mask slipped again. It’s too blunt. I’ll come back to that later because it’s a weak spot I’ve known about, but it’s never been this glaring.
We stop outside the door to the storage room. It’s locked. Then, a second later, it’s not. Say what you want about him, it’s nice having an all-seeing, all-knowing pseudo-AI at my disposal. Well…almost all-seeing and all-knowing; he nearly let my sister try to start experiments on herself that were so dangerous that even the bogeymen wouldn’t do them to me.
I decide we’ll talk about that later, but for now, James is helpful, and that’s all I can ask. Besides, it’s not his fault. Li Mei was clearly holding out on SHOCKS, or she’s developed some new powers. That’s got to be the truth. It was Li Mei pushing this.
I open the door and slip in. [Ordinarily, I’d let you do a little searching on your own since you seemed to think this was your penance for losing the dress in the first place,] James says, [but SHOCKS is going to start looking for Alice more actively soon, so we need to move quickly. End of the hall, third locker from the end, on the left.]
“Watch Alice. Let me know if she does anything dumb,” I say.
“What?” Her head turns toward me.
[Got it. By the way, it’s not your fault.]
“Nothing,” I tell Alice, ignoring James. I start walking down the hall, past plexiglass lockers. An umbrella that looks like it was bent back by the wind, constantly dripping water that drains down a pipe in the floor. A self-building Lego set. Replicating loaves of bread—as I stop to look at that one, a flame ticks on and starts incinerating them, leaving nothing but ash.
And then, hanging from a hangar, Mom’s dress.
It’s been dry-cleaned. That’s the first thing I notice. The rips and tears from my fight through West End High are all fixed, and the fabric’s as clean as it was the day I pulled it out of Dad’s bottom drawer. There’s a card stuck to the glass. ‘Supplementary Object - 573-V-1/IO Alpha-A: No known anomalous behavior,’ it reads.
I ignore it. “Open it up.”
A second later, James pops the door open, and I pull the hangar out. “We’ll get this back to Dad tomorrow. For now, let’s go.”
Our retreat back to our wing is easy enough. SHOCKS still isn’t moving around, and James expertly manipulates the cameras so no one can see us moving through the hall. Alice insists on taking the dress back right now, but I hold firm. I do take the longer way through the halls, though, just to pass by the door to the JAMES Experimental Sector. Call it an experiment. But nothing happens, and by the time we get back home—home, ha—Alice looks even more exhausted.
“Have you been sleeping?” I ask her.
That’s a mistake. The Mom Alice mask cracks, and regular old Alice glares at me with her dead-looking, baggy eyes. “No.”
That’s a lie. She was asleep when I visited her yesterday. But I let it go, drop her off, and slip back into my room.
James and I have a lot to discuss.