Authors: Nancy Kress
“Rotten at the core,” Rafe said. “Amy?”
“I don’t know the quote. But—”
“I have fallen in with uneducated idiots. Lynn?”
“
But
,” Amy insisted, “I don’t think people have chosen bondage. It’s just that times be tough, man. With a comma.”
Rafe laughed. “Shut up,” Lynn said, and at her tone they all did. Her fists were clenched for real now, and her eyes wild. Amy couldn’t imagine what was wrong with her.
Cai said, “Lynn?”
She didn’t answer, merely stomped over to the window and stared down at the traffic.
Rafe and Violet’s exuberant alliance broke. Rafe slouched in a leather chair. Violet went to stand by Amy, but her gaze was on Lynn. She whispered, “Somebody needs a nap.”
“Or something,” Amy whispered back.
Waverly came in, spoke to nobody, and sat on an empty sofa. Envy of Waverly’s outfit swamped Amy. She didn’t recognize the designer, but Waverly’s high leather boots, asymmetrical skirt, and scoop-neck top in rich chocolate perfectly set off the blonde’s dramatic coloring, made more dramatic by gold eye makeup.
Amy noticed a coffee stain on her jeans.
By five forty-five, Amy’s concern had grown. Where was Myra? If she had trouble finding a cab for Gran, they might not make the arena before long lines formed. Gran couldn’t stay on her feet too long. Damn, Amy should have rented a wheelchair or something . . . except that until she got paid today, she’d had no money for a wheelchair. As it was, she was going to have to find the bank that TLN’s check was drawn on to cash it there, plus open a checking account. . . . No, that would mean fees. TLN was supposed to have opened an account for her, but somehow that hadn’t happened. Better to carry large amounts of cash home and hide it?
Myra’s desk clock chimed six soft musical notes like a caress.
At six fifteen Violet said, “Well, it’s been very nice but I have to run along. But do let’s stay in touch and do this waiting-in-silence thing again real soon.”
“Violet, you can’t,” Amy said. “It’s your job!”
“And Myra’s rudeness. Ciao.”
Violet waved two fingers and walked to the office door. She said, “It’s locked!”
“What?” said Cai, sounding more startled than alarmed. He tried the door, rattling it hard, then turned to face the rest of them. “Locked. It’s a scenario.”
Panic swept Amy. How long were they going to be kept in here? Doing what? She pulled out her cell. “I have the number for building security!”
Rafe said, “If it’s a scenario, do you really think they’ll answer?”
They didn’t. All of them had Myra’s number; she didn’t answer either. Violet blew a raspberry into Myra’s voice mail.
“Well,” Cai said, “we better—” Before he could finish, Lynn went batshit.
There was no cell in her hand. She raced to the door, rattled the knob, and started screaming. There were no words in the scream, which made it all the more horrible, like the high-pitched shrieks of an animal with its leg broken by an iron-clawed trap. Lynn kicked the door, pounded on it, threw her small body against it, all the while screaming.
Amy ran toward her. “Lynn, don’t, it won’t help, you’ll only hurt yourself or—”
Lynn whirled around and slugged her.
Amy’s jaw, still slightly swollen and more than slightly discolored from the pickpocket’s blow on Tuesday, exploded into fresh pain. She staggered backward. Cai caught her before she fell. Despite the pain in her jaw, an electric jolt ran through Amy as Cai’s arms closed to support her. So strong was the feeling that Amy hardly noticed what was happening to the room until Violet cried, “Oh my God!”
Trees were growing from the carpet in Myra’s office.
Brown trunks, as thick around as laundry hampers, pushed up from the carpet. Halfway to the high ceiling, branches sprouted, bearing dense green leaves. Cai released Amy, who put one hand to her sore face and extended the other at full arm’s length to touch one of the trees. Her hand went through it. “A hologram!”
But like the dog in the maple and the rats in the shopping mall, these trees looked completely solid and totally real. Amy could no longer see Violet or Rafe or Waverly through the dense forest. The lights went out.
Immediately a glow from the ceiling replaced them—stars. The ceiling shone with stars so realistic that for a crazy second Amy thought they had somehow been transported to a mythical forest—she could hear leaves rustling in the breeze! She could smell the night air! But no, it was only special effects in Myra Townsend’s office.
“Wow,” Violet said, inadequately.
Cai said to Amy, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she lied. Her jaw ached where Lynn had hit her. Worse, her knees trembled; that was due to Cai. It was both relief and desolation when he moved away from her and said, “Tommy?”
“Don’t come near me!” Lynn shrieked.
“Where is Tommy?” Cai said. “He gets frightened. . . . Tommy!”
A howl came from somewhere in the darkness, a cry of pure fear: Tommy. He came barreling toward Cai through—literally—the dark, rustling trees. Amy, now slumped against the door, fully recognized for the first time the extent of Tommy’s mental disability. Why had Myra and Alex put him on the show? Anything new to him was upsetting.
Tommy was also six-foot-three and 250 pounds. As he ran toward the safety of Cai’s voice, he was running in Lynn’s direction. Her shriek rose to inhuman levels. “Stay away from me!”
Cai led Tommy away. Lynn, muttering, subsided and disappeared among the trees. Amy tried to call Kaylie and then Gran, but both calls failed. So did every call from Violet’s and Rafe’s cells. “Locked in electronically as well as literally,” Rafe said. “I guess we wait for whatever comes next.”
But for a long while, nothing did. The three of them wandered between the trees. Unease gripped Amy: Would real animals run through the fake forest? But nothing happened, and eventually she, Violet, Rafe, and Waverly settled into the leather chairs around the glass table, which now sat in a forest clearing. Cai and Tommy had camped near the door, where Tommy seemed to feel more secure. Cai was engaged in calming him down.
“Cai had a brother like Tommy,” Waverly volunteered. “He died.”
“How do you know?” Amy wondered why Waverly was bothering to talk to them. Then she realized: this must all be being filmed. She sat up straighter.
“Cai told me,” Waverly said. “He was good to his brother and he’s good to Tommy. I like that.”
Violet murmured, very low, “Trying to change your image, Waverly?”
Rafe said, “Well, here we all are. Somebody think of something camera-worthy to do.”
Violet got up and began to dance, something modern. Her long body bent and swayed, passing through trees as if they weren’t there—which, of course, they weren’t. Still, it gave her dance an eerie, mythical feel.
Rafe said, “You look like a dryad, except that they were never so tall.” He began to sing, an old folk song about lovers meeting early one morning when the buds were all “a-green-o.” His voice was surprisingly tuneful and sweet. Waverly made a sound of disgust, rose, and stalked off.
Violet danced until sweat poured off her. Her long legs curved and rose, her arms swayed, her supple back arched. She finally stopped, only because Rafe had stopped singing. He said, “Not bad.”
“God, I miss that. During this show, I have to take class in the evening, and I really prefer morning.”
Amy said, ‘You’re wonderful.”
Rafe said, “How long have you been dancing?”
“Eight years, since I was ten. The last two professionally. The stories I could tell you!”
“Tell one now,” Amy said. The more Violet talked, the less Amy would have to. It was now nearly seven o’clock. No time to get Gran to Bentley Arena; Amy would just have to get a cab and see Kaylie in All-City without her. The second this stupid scenario ended, if it ever did.
Violet said, “Well, last year I was in a production of Lane Carstairs’s
Tripos
. Only as a background dancer. But after the first act, the principal dancer got greedy. She stayed out in front taking curtain call after curtain call, like it was the end of the whole show. It was Carlotta Neiman, of course.”
The names meant nothing to Amy.
“So,” Violet continued, “the stage manager signaled to have the curtain dropped in front of her, just so we could all get on with it. But just as the curtain falls, Carlotta steps forward to do one more egomaniacal curtsy, even closer to the audience. She has this signature deep balletic reverence, where she looks up through her lashes and smiles, like she’s Anna Pavlova crossed with a
Vogue
model. Anyway, the curtain falls and whacks her. Those things are
heavy
. She stumbles and collapses on the stage and breaks her leg. Shouting, yelling, threats to sue. Finally the understudy dances the second two acts, and then
she’s
so leery about the curtain that she won’t take a curtain call at all. The stage manager’s begging and pleading with her. The whole production’s a shambles anyway, so the lead male dancer, whose nose had been out of joint because
Tripos
is all bravura female dancing and the men get to do practically nothing, ties a practice skirt around his hips, goes out on stage, and does a perfect imitation of Carlotta’s famous curtsy. And the audience goes wild.”
Rafe said, “Was he fired?”
“Are you kidding? He was mentioned positively in every single review!”
Violet told story after story about the dance world. Rafe countered with stories about working summers and after school as an apprentice refrigerator repairman, which Amy would not have thought a particularly humorous occupation. But Rafe’s stories were hilarious. Cai and Tommy came to sit and listen. Lynn did not reappear, but Waverly did, lurking between the false trees. Tommy was smiling now. He even volunteered, “There are no spiders on these trees. Not even fake ones.”
“Good,” Violet said. “We already have Myra.”
However, Amy couldn’t really enjoy the camaraderie; she was too aware of time passing. Seven thirty—All-City was starting. When was Orange Decision scheduled to go on? Kaylie hadn’t said. If this stupid scenario ended right now and Amy caught a cab almost instantly, maybe she could—
The “sky” brightened to a strange glow, and beams of light shot down from the ceiling. The beams were so sudden, so bright, and so red that Amy was momentarily blinded. Tommy cried out. When sight returned, Lynn came tearing through the trees.
“They’re coming for me! They’re coming for me!”
“Who?” Cai said.
“Them! Them!” Lynn’s voice rose to a shriek. Standing in a red beam, she looked demented, her face twisted with fear and her hands curved into claws. “They’re after me and you all knew about it! You’re in on it!”
“Who?” Cai asked again.
“You know who! The aliens!”
Rafe began to whistle the theme from
The Twilight Zone
. Waverly gave a snort of disgust. Tommy said, “I don’t like this! Lynn, stop making that noise!”
She didn’t. Tommy took a step toward her. He looked more confused than menacing, but Lynn screamed, “Stay away from me! You’re one of them!”
Amy managed to get out, “He’s not—” That was all the time she had before Lynn, running backward through the trees, yanked something small and dark from her pocket, aimed at Tommy, and fired.
In the dark office the shot sounded like an explosion. Waverly screamed; Cai gasped. Tommy fell to his knees and put his hands over his ears. By the eerie glow of the overhead “stars” Amy saw tears roll down his face.
Lynn fired again. Cai ran toward her but she eluded him, a small darting figure, and jumped up onto Myra’s desk. The clock thudded to the carpet. Lynn shouted, “Don’t anybody come near me or I’ll shoot you! I will!”
Violet said, her voice shockingly clear and shockingly quavery in the sudden silence, “This isn’t part of the scenario. She’s really lost it.”
No. She hasn’t
.
The phantom jumped whole into Amy’s mind, and she realized that she’d seen it before:
the empty cardboard box
. Lynn wasn’t really having a psychotic break. She was part of the scenario arranged by Myra. The gun wasn’t real.
Cai, who evidently thought differently, said shakily, “Lynn, give me the gun. You don’t want to shoot anybody here.”
“Keep away!”
“I will, I promise.” It was the same soothing voice he used with Tommy. “Just give me the gun.”
“No!” She fired again and Cai dropped to the floor. For a heart-stopping moment Amy thought she’d been wrong and Cai had been hit, but he had merely ducked. Tommy clutched at Cai, who put one arm around Tommy’s shoulders. In the glow of “starlight” Amy could see that Cai’s arm shook.
Waverly and Violet had disappeared, probably crouching behind the real chairs or even the fake trees. But Rafe crept across the carpet on his belly, staying in shadows, toward the desk. He was going to try to disarm Lynn.
Had Rafe guessed that Lynn was an actor? Rafe was smart, the smartest of all of them. But he didn’t have Amy’s phantoms, and she guessed that he was, at best, uncertain about Lynn. That made him heroic, but all at once Amy wanted the heroism for herself. This was her chance to redeem herself for freezing in front of the rats, for not knowing
Romeo and Juliet
, for doing nothing in the ersatz lobby attack. This was Amy’s chance to shine on camera and keep her job, and she was taking it.