Alice and I share a bedroom; she’s on the top bunk, and I got the bottom because of course I did.
Dad sleeps on a pull-out mattress sofa or in his armchair. Usually in his armchair.
Almost always in his armchair.
It took a long time to realize that Dad wasn’t a rock anymore. But we did. The more he disappeared, the more Alice stepped into his shoes. Cooking, laundry, anything a parent needed to do for a single-digit kid, Alice figured out how to do for me. She was good at it. Kept me going. And she never stopped bitching about how much it took from her life.
But even as a kid, I was the one who had to wake her up. Otherwise, neither of us got to school.
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Building Three-Five, Victoria, British Columbia - May 31, 2043, 5:42 PM
- - - - -
[Running Analyze,] James says. [I’ll let you know my projections for the fungus soon.]
The fungus I’m coughing out isn’t the only fungus in the atrium. It’s dying everywhere, piling up in stinking, rotting masses. I pull myself together and pick myself up. The glass doors are half-covered with the stuff outside, too.
And the goop isn’t the only stuff I can see through the doors.
Three massive shapes loom on the horizon—they’re taller than the single-family houses, taller than the businesses I passed on Hillside, but smaller than Aberdeen Hospital’s six stories. From this far, they look almost like circles, but as I stare, they move, and their shapes turn oblong and distorted. They’re scaled, and three tentacles lunge lazily forward to drag one down Arbutus Street toward the line of basic living buildings that loom over them.
They might not be as big as the brutalist towers, but I don’t want to know what they’ll do if they decide to break into Building Three-Five. I’ve already got an equation half-built in my head. The best thing I can do is stay away from the windows. If the monsters’—
[Fungal Lords]
—sure. If the Fungal Lords are like Earth predators, my best bet is not to be seen. I doubt the Revolver’s doing much against that. So, X is either hiding, running, or fighting. Fighting won’t work, and I can’t run—not when I’m this close to finding Dad and Alice, and definitely not when I need to use my apartment as a base to get to Sora.
[I’m sorry, Claire. There’s no URA in this building. Its reality levels are already mixing with the merge outside.]
“How close are we to the merging reality?” I tear myself away from the spore-covered window and head for the stairs. I don’t want to be in an elevator if one of those things runs into the building.
[Pretty close. I’m not expecting massive reality swings, but with no URA, it’s unknown whether the basic living buildings will fill with fungus as the realities come together.]
“Oh.” I’m quiet for a minute, trying to reevaluate the equation. I haven’t taken into account the spores and the fungus, only the Fungal Lords. And I don’t know what they can do, so even the math I’ve done is suspect at best. I set that math aside and start a new equation.
It’s just as challenging, and it lasts almost all the way up to the twelfth floor. I need to figure out how to get Alice and Dad to listen to me. Not just to not ignore the truth but to listen to me and trust that I have a plan. So, variables. Is Dad drunk? Is Alice putting up a front, or has all this broken it? Will they believe me when I say we need to get to Duncan, or maybe even farther away? And, of course, how will they react to me showing up? Four variables—just about unsolvable, but I know more about them than about the anomalies outside.
My hand’s on the door from the stairwell to the twelfth floor when I get a wave of deja vu. I’ve been here before. If I open this door, will I find a swarm of memetically-infected neighbors? I have to breathe the thought down. That’s not what this merge did. This merge is a physical threat and a toxic one, but Building Three-Five’s residents should be safe for now. For now…
I open the door.
The familiar long hall lined with apartment doors greets me. It’s empty, of course, but I can hear people moving in their apartments. That’s a relief; the rest of the building’s been so empty and quiet that I was starting to worry. But behind me, at the end of the hall, the window that usually looks out over a little park I used to play in is covered in dying, rotting fungus.
Apartment 1245 is past the elevators and the vending machines. I hurry through the eerily quiet hall and into the common area. The vending machines are mostly cleared out; the buttons for different sodas are almost all dark, except for a single lit-up one for ginger ale. The snack one’s empty, too. Not that I have money or a need.
Then, so quickly I hardly notice it’s happened, I find myself standing outside of Building Three-Five, Apartment 1245. My finger’s already punched in the first three digits of our eight-digit key code before I can stop myself, but I stop myself. I take three steps down the hall and breathe. Just breathe. I can do this. I’ve fought monsters, escaped from SHOCKS, and been to other realities. I can do this.
The code’s reset, so I start over. I’m on digit number five when the door opens, and Alice stares at me, wide-eyed.
“Hi,” I say.
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For almost five seconds, Alice stares at me. She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t even breathe. Then her eyes dart back inside, toward our bedroom door. She looks at me again, blinks, and bursts into tears.
I wasn’t expecting that reaction. I’d expected her to scream like she’d seen a ghost or to badger me about making her worry. Or anything but my perfect, stupid sister, in tears, with her arms around me. She’s blubbering. It’s almost too much. Maybe it is too much. Is this another of my sister’s lies?
I half-listen to what she’s saying, returning the hug automatically. She’s ranting on and on about the fire door, and me getting trapped on the wrong side of West End High during the fire, and how they didn’t know where I was, or how when I was in an intensive care unit at Saxe Point, they couldn’t come to see me because public transportation was down. The words don’t matter to me. She’s a liar.
But I quickly realize that she’s not lying. The Xs and Ys don’t line up. She believes what she’s saying. Under her half-assed makeup, I can see the bags under her eyes, and when she says she hasn’t been sleeping because she’s been so worried, I believe her. God, I believe her—she can’t stop crying.
Something loud interrupts us. Neither of us flinch, but only because we’ve heard the freight train sound a hundred thousand times. I wrinkle my nose as I shrug off Alice’s hug and shut the door. The whole living room smells like sweat and staleness and the nose-tickling stench of mostly emptied bottles.
The smell of Dad.
And the sound of him snoring in front of a muted TV.
“He’s been out for four or five hours,” Alice says. Her voice breaks a little, and she swallows her tears. There’s something else in her eyes, though. It’s something I’ve never seen there before. I can’t place it, though.
And there’s another smell in the apartment. I can’t place that either. Alice keeps talking. “Come on, let’s talk. Kitchen table.”
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I want to fight. I want to argue. I want to scream at her about the fire door, and the makeup on her face even though there’s no reason for her to get dolled up, and why she thinks she can boss me around like I’m still six and she’s the only person who can feed me ramen noodles, and why she thinks it’s still business as usual and that she’s the big sister and she knows how best to handle what’s obviously not something either of us can handle.
But now’s not the time.
So, instead, I let her drag me to the table. She slides into her plastic chair—the same one she always sits in. It’s closer to the kitchen; she claimed it so she could deal with whatever she was cooking and keep me from burning myself when I was little. I get the view of outside—actually, of a pulled curtain. There’s a quarter-loaf of white bread and some peanut butter on the counter. “Are you hungry?” Alice asks. “I can make you something.”
I recognize a peace offering when I see one, and that’s the best I’m going to get from Alice. Instead, I shrug off my backpack and open it. As I pull out a pair of microwavable pizza pockets, Alice’s eyes lock onto them. I set them on the table and clear my throat. “I stopped by Landsdowne Middle School on the way home. Mrs. Nazaire was there, and she made sure I got enough food.”
“Great.” Alice forces a smile, but her eyes don’t match it. They dart back to the living room where Dad’s asleep in his armchair, settle on our bedroom door for a second, and return to the pizza pockets. “Can I…?”
“Yeah.”
She scoops up the pizza pockets and carries them to the microwave—taking care of her little sister, just like old times. She glances at the bedroom door again, then looks at me for a second. Her eyebrows go up. Then the mask goes on, and she’s perfect Alice again before she even sits down.
“What happened to you after the fire door?”
I hesitate and look away. There’s a little corner of the fridge where Alice put my art from first and second grade, when she was pretending to be Mom. The faded pictures are still there, and I stare at them, trying to figure out what’s missing.
As I do, James speaks up in my augs. [Claire, the anomalies outside don’t seem to be growing, but the fungus isn’t deteriorating as quickly as it used to. I think it’ll reach an equilibrium between the Fungal Lords’ ability to generate fungus and Earth’s atmosphere killing it. Either way, we’ll want to leave here in the next day or two. Without a URA, it won’t be safe here forever.]
I nod; I’m not ready to share James with anyone, but especially not with Alice. She’s not like Mrs. Nazaire. She wouldn’t believe he was real. Instead, I clear my throat. “I hid in the bathroom for a while, found a gun, and killed one of the monsters. The boogeymen found me and locked me up for a while.”
“Really?” Alice asks. She rolls her eyes at me, and I glare at her as they flick briefly to look at our bedroom door again. “You still believe that? I know some weird stuff happened at my graduation, but there aren’t secret agents after you, Claire.”
So she hasn’t changed, then. She knows she put me in danger, but even with everything happening, she can’t see the truth. But I don’t clam up. This is the point where I fight. So I ball my fists and dig in. “Alice, I’m not lying. This is the truth.”
“Okay.” She shrugs. “Sure. Could there be a conspiracy of shadowy government agents out there? Totally. But that they’re constantly watching you? That doesn’t make any sense. Claire, think for a minute. You’re a teenage girl. There’s no conspiracy after you.”
She glances at our closed bedroom door again. I follow her gaze, but the microwave beeps, and she’s up, clearing her throat. “Let’s have some dinner, and then we can talk through this.” As she gets the pizza pockets, I stare at the closed door.
Why is it closed?
Dad hates it when the door’s closed. He thinks if he can hear and see us, we won’t be able to make trouble. He’s wrong, but it’s easier to let him believe that, so the bedroom door’s never closed unless we’re changing or something. And if we do close it, it’s so we don’t wake Dad up while he’s sleeping off his drinking. So, if Alice is out here, why is it closed?
Alice returns to the table with a single paper plate and two pizza pockets. The marinara sauce burns, and the cheese sticks to my teeth, but it’s pretty good, and Alice is back in her element again—except that she can’t stop herself from looking at the door a couple of times as she eats.
I reach into my hoodie pocket with the hand that’s not eating and grip the Revolver. Then I take another bite of the scalding-hot pizza pocket. “Alright. What happened to you and Dad after West End?”
“We waited in the shelter for a while,” Alice says. That’s a truth, but also a lie. She chews thoughtfully, swallows, and continues. “The wave knocked out power and started some fires. Then, after the rescuers pulled us out, some health workers gave us pills to deal with the stress and the smoke in our lungs and sent us home. We were worried about you, but the whole school was either damaged or crawling with firefighters and inspectors, so we couldn’t do anything except wait for them to find you.”
The wave? “There wasn’t a tsunami.”
“No, there definitely was. Why else would they move everyone to the shelter? That’s what it’s there for—earthquakes and tsunamis. So, we got the pills, took them while the doctors watched, and got bussed back home. The school said my diploma would come in the mail, but it hasn’t yet.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
She nods. Takes another bite of her pizza pocket. Sets it down. “Where else would we go? Yeah, there’s some sort of disease in Sooke, but that’s a long ways away, and the TV said to stay in your houses until the Public Health Agency gets things under control.”
“They’re not going to get it under control,” I say. Somewhere outside, a Fungal Lord is moving toward us. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. I want to ask James if they’re Qishi-Danger anomalies. But I can’t, because I don’t want to share James with Alice, and she’d never believe me anyway.
"They will. The Public Health Agency is really good at what it does. I heard the TV say they’re working on vaccinations now, and we should be out of lockdown in a week.” Alice pauses. Then she takes a deep breath, sighs dramatically, and puts her head on her hands. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Thanks, dumb-butt. Me too.”
She glares at me, but there’s something missing in her eyes. It takes me a moment—maybe two—to figure it out. There’s no anger or annoyance. Instead, there’s worry. A lot of worry.
[Is there a bathroom window?] James asks suddenly. [It doesn’t have to be big, but we need to take a look outside.]
He’s right. We need to know what’s going on outside with the Fungal Lords, and I don’t trust Alice’s reaction if she opens the shade in the living room. I take another bite of the pizza pocket and clear my throat. “Bathroom.” As Alice nods, I walk down the hall and duck into the narrow, shower-only bathroom. The lock clicks shut, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
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The second I’m alone, James starts talking my ear off. [Claire, I’m trying to run a simulation on your sister to figure out what she’s trying to do here. She’s acting shifty, like she’s trying to hide something. But I don’t have the data I need to finish it.]
“Why didn’t you ask for that earlier?” I mutter. I’m already working my way through the tub toward the high, small window that’s perfect for letting steam out and worthless for everything else. Opening it requires scaling Mount Shower like a cliff, clinging to the shower rail with my feet and the high windowsill with my fingertips.
[I did ask for it earlier. You said no. Three times.] James sounds smug and exasperated. [The window was just to get you somewhere you could talk to me. I need to know this stuff. You need me to know this stuff.]
I pull myself up to the window, even though James doesn’t need it. At this point, it’s as much to put off answering the question as it is to see what’s out there. I peer out into the twelfth-floor air, a hundred fifty feet up or something, expecting to see green plants, the far-away Haro Strait and the Salish Sea, and half of another basic living building.
Instead, a milky red-white blob greets me between the growing and dying fungus. Its core is jet-black, and the rest is a red-to-pink-to-white fade of color. I stare into it, trying to figure out what it is.
It blinks.
I let go of the windowsill, let out a scream that cuts off as I hit the shower’s basin, and scramble out of the plastic shower curtain that’s collapsed around me like a tentacle. The Revolver is up, pointing at the window like I’m going to hurt the massive Fungal Lord with it. How did it get up this high? How hasn’t it torn the building apart?
A door slams in the apartment—the bedroom door. Feet move down the hall. For a moment, I expect to hear Alice momming at me, checking to see if I’m okay from my fall. But she doesn’t say anything to me. Neither does Dad. Someone’s talking, but I can’t tell what’s being said. Or who’s saying it.
I stare up at the gigantic eye, not moving, Revolver ready. It blinks again, then moves on. I can hear the tentacles dragging it up and around the Basic Living Building, and its scales work their way past the window for almost a minute—somehow, without cracking the glass.
I take a deep breath. “Okay. Sorry, I guess. Keep your eyes open and—“
“Claire, you okay in there?” Alice calls. There’s something off about her voice, and I stop muttering at James. She sounds quivery, like she’s shaking a little.
“Yeah, I just tripped. You left so much crap everywhere,” I say back. I’m not lying. Alice is rough on the bathroom in the best of circumstances, and her dirty clothes are piled against one wall instead of put in the hamper in the living room. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Okay.” There’s a long pause, but I don’t hear Alice moving. It’s quiet out there. I do my business, wash my hands, and touch the doorknob.
[Be careful,] James says. [I don’t have a simulation for your family, and something is wrong here.]
I nod, get the Revolver ready, and open the door.
Director Smith greets me. His massive revolver’s pointed at Alice, who’s shaking and sitting at her spot at the kitchen table. He gestures with his free hand at my seat. “Clarice Alora Pendleton, Subject 573-V-1/IO Alpha, let’s talk about the end of the world.”