Paradox (20 page)

So how is a dead girl sending her a message?

All the way back up the elevator there’s no follow-up text, no response to Ana’s frantic return queries. But whether Ysa somehow survived the dunes or she came back from Paradox a zombie or this is her ghost come a-haunting, Ana cannot get up to the sixteenth floor fast enough.
Someone else is here!
She’s not alone.

The elevator pings and the doors ease open.

Ana dashes down the hall to the main doors, emblazoned with the Savitech logo. She puts both hands on the door, leans against it for a second, pushing her forehead against the cool glass in a way that her body seems to remember.

For just an instant she’s a younger version of herself; it’s only a year or so ago, but this girl might as well be someone else entirely. This Ana bends under the weight of some invisible burden; she walks by the side of a slender light-haired boy—it’s Todd—and, caught in the memory, she
doesn’t even have to turn her head to see the longing in his eyes when he looks at her. But this younger Ana is oblivious to it, lost in a maelstrom of internal chaos that no one else can see.

Ana lifts her head and pushes through the door, letting the memories—and her past—fall away behind her.

The room is still empty. On the television screen, one of the lights in the news studio has fallen over. It lies halfway across the newscaster’s desk, glass fragments strewn everywhere. Tiny blue flames lick across the papers that are scattered on the floor.

Ana tears her eyes away from the screen. “Ysa!” she calls. “Are you here?”

There’s nothing, a nothing so thick Ana wonders if maybe she imagined the whole thing. She takes a few steps forward, and then she hears a cough and a faint, “Ana?”

It’s coming from behind the door leading to the room where she woke up.

Ana passes the window showing the dark night sky, passes the worn pink couch, reaches her fingers up to the handle.

She takes a deep breath and pushes through.

The little cubicle is empty, exactly as it was when she left it.

“Ysa?” she whispers.

On the opposite side of the room, the hanging plastic strips are swaying ever so slightly.

“Ana …”

Ana pushes through the hanging strips and finds herself in
a room identical to the one she woke up in. There’s another display, another tangle of machinery, another bed …

The world slips into syrupy slow motion as Ana wobbles toward the bed. That’s not Ysa lying there. It’s …

“Todd!” she gasps.

It’s not Todd as he was on Paradox, not exactly. There’s something different about his look—he seems somehow
less
than he did on the planet’s rugged slopes and under its bright berry skies. His pale hair is limp and obscured by the wide black headband with its connecting web of wires and electrodes, and he has the same loose arm restraints and hip belt as she found on herself when she woke up.

But it
is
Todd.

His eyes are closed. In one hand he clutches a shiny pink phone—Ysa’s phone, apparently.

“Hey,” she whispers.

Todd’s eyes flicker open, bright blue, so heart-wrenchingly familiar in this unfamiliar place. “You remember me,” he says. His voice is scratchy but holds a note of wonder, as if she’s handed him a gift he can’t quite bring himself to accept.

A sob rises in her throat. “I watched you die,” she says. “The worm smashed you. Back on Paradox. What happened?”

He shakes his head, a tiny motion, but she sees it. “I’m not dead … yet.”

“How did you get back?” Ana asks. “Are you okay?”

As if in answer, Todd breaks out coughing. Ana looks at the display above his bed, which shows a series of numbers
and graphs. Moving instinctively, she reaches up and touches a button on the far right side. The display changes to an ultrasound-looking readout, and Ana gasps. It’s the image of a brain.
Todd’s brain
.

Below the image is a line of text.

Scope of infection: 81.3%

As she watches the number shifts: 81.5%.

A bubble of blood starts in the corner of Todd’s mouth, and Ana pulls the edge of the sheet up to wipe it.

“So much for our plan, huh?” Todd says.

Ana just shakes her head, trying to make sense of all the chaos inside her mind. This infection is killing everyone in the world, and now it has its grip on Todd, too.

“You don’t remember anything, I know,” Todd says. “I’m sorry. I wish I had”—he coughs—“told you more.”

Ana takes his hand and squeezes it. “I know a little bit,” she says, wishing she never had to let him go again, wishing she could will him back to health or strength or whatever he needs to fight this thing.
Can you even fight this thing?
“I know about the disease, and that everyone’s dead or dying. The papers say there’s no cure. Is that true? There’s no hope?”

Todd smiles sadly at her. “Hope,” he whispers. “That’s always the starting point, isn’t it? Before everything starts to go wrong. It all begins with hope. A new planet, a new world. Paradox. Where it all began.”

“Paradox,” she says. “We were there.”

“We were,” Todd agrees. “But not the way you think. Not the way you remember.”

“What? I do remember it all—the Dead Forest, the rocket.” She swallows. “Ysa and Chen …”

Todd sighs. “It really is out there, you know,” he says. “Paradox, the planet. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t Paradox at all.” He looks right up into her eyes. “What we were in, all of that stuff you remember—that was the simulation.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The sim was designed as a training device,” he says. “An exact replica of the planet, reconstructed based around the specifics of the first mission, APEX1. Right down to the rockets and weapons and nasty gray jumpwear.”

Ana can still feel the tearing pain in her shoulder, can hear the roar of a monster with breath as sweet as death itself, can see the twin suns, the jagged mountains, the sky and the sand and the sea.

“It wasn’t real? None of that was real?”

“It
was
real,” Todd says. “Just … inside your mind. Your body was lying in the bed in the room next to this one, while
you
were exploring Paradox. Virtually.”

It’s too much to take in. And yet … Ana rotates her shoulder again, touches her unmarked skin—no scabs, no wounds, not a single mark. She frowns as she looks at her scarred hands.

“But why—”

“We volunteered for this,” Todd says. “The PX37 trials, that was the official name.”

The name tickles something in her brain. Where has she heard that term?

Of course. Jackson. Bailey. PX37. The trials. Ana thinks back to Bailey’s experiences: Jackson demanding results from the testing. The screened-in area where the subjects were lying.
The trials
, which were still active after everyone else was dead or dying.

What had Ana’s letter said, way back at the start of it all when she first woke up in the rocket?
Your body is its own record
. She’d never imagined it would be so literally true. Her body, their bodies, in the lab. On Earth. Monitored, measured, recorded.

They were here all along.

“So we never even left Earth?” she says slowly. There’s something in this thought that doesn’t fit, somehow.

Todd’s body shakes in a deep cough, then he says, “There’s more to it than that.
This trip
was a simulation. But we did travel to the planet, the real one, over a year ago. APEX2. The second manned space mission. We were there—me and you and Chen and Ysa. You don’t remember any of this, do you?”

She doesn’t. But in some deep place, she knows that it’s all true, everything he’s saying.

Todd sighs. “Everyone was so excited for us, all the other ExtraSolar kids, the teachers—they were all jealous too, of course. They threw us the biggest send-off party. We were launching into space, real planetary travelers! But then it all went so wrong. We’d only been there a few months when
mission control had us go looking for what was left of APEX1. Not that there was much to find aside from their remains … But shortly after that trip was when the sickness began.

“We came back, but the disease came back with us. People outside our quarantine started dying, and finally everyone realized the bug was spread by thoughts or memories, brainwaves. But the four of us, we never got sick. There were traces of the
Vermiletum
protein in our brains, but it wasn’t virulent. At first they thought it had to do with us being young, but then plenty of other kids started dying. Their last theory was that it had to do with being on the planet when we were so young. Formative minds, I don’t know. Somehow it protected the four of us. It couldn’t help anyone else, of course.”

Ana sits suddenly upright.
The four of us?
She registers the hanging plastic strips on the far side of Todd’s room, identical to the ones through which she entered. “Hold on a second,” she tells Todd. She puts down his hand and starts around the end of the bed.

“Wait,” Todd says. “Ana!”

She pushes through the plastic strips and finds another bed, another monitor, a spaghetti-tangle of wires. And in the bed … at first she can’t tell who it is, can’t even believe there could be a person under all that
blood
. But then she notices wispy strands of yellow hair. Ysa.

She pushes through the plastic strips to the next room, eyes blurring with tears, already knowing what she will see. It’s Chen, his dark spiky hair matted with blood. Ana notices
a puckered burn scar covering the left side of his face. Just as her scarred hands didn’t show up in what she now knows was the simulation, apparently Chen’s burn mark didn’t, either. And why not? If she had something to do with designing her avatar, why not create an idealized version?

Seeing Chen’s scar now, Ana can’t help wondering if it came about from whatever experience Chen was remembering in his final moments.
Not the fire
, he’d said. She shudders.

The display above Chen’s head flashes red, the percentage readout showing 100%. Ysa’s showed the same.

But something isn’t making sense. Todd said that the four of them were supposed to be immune to the disease. So how is it that Chen and Ysa seem to have died of it? And something else. Ysa and Chen
died
in the simulation. Or at least … she thought they did.

Could it be that what
actually
killed them was the disease attacking their bodies, back here in this lab? She thinks of the way Chen slipped on what clearly was solid ground, falling into the crater. She thinks of Ysa, sucked under by sands that Todd swore were only two feet deep. Was something warped inside the simulation? Did something in there go horribly wrong?

Ana turns and pushes back through the plastic strips. She needs more answers.

“Todd,” Ana whispers, returning to his side.

Todd’s eyes fly open and he sits bolt upright, circling her wrist tightly in a shaking grasp. “Just don’t leave me alone in the dark, will you? That’s the one thing I—” He breaks off and begins to tremble violently. Heart sinking, Ana realizes that though he’s looking right at her, he’s not seeing her at all. His eyes are vacant and glassy.

She glances up at his display: 83.9%.

“Hey,” she says, scooting closer, loosening his hand from hers and trying to lower him back down on the bed. But he pulls out of her grip and scoots backward. He starts twisting his head from side to side, as if scanning the room for something vitally important. “Where have you all gone? I’ve been in my hiding spot for ages, and nobody’s found me. But now—”

Ana’s heart is racing.
What can I do?

All she can think of is the way Ysa and Chen fell into these
hallucinations
—these memories
—and never came out. She leans forward and presses her face against his. “Please, Todd,” she whispers. “Come back to me. Don’t go like this. Please.”

His body stills and then, and then—his breath catches. “Oh, Ana,” he whispers, and crumples against her. “I was back there … I was …”

“Shhh,” she says. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. It’s not real.”

His body is still shaking, but his eyes are clear. She props up his pillow and helps him lean back against it. A few drops of blood leak from one nostril, and Ana rubs them gently away. “It’s the
Vermiletum
doing this, just like with the others,” he says. “You have to keep me talking, Ana. Ask me questions. As long as I’m focusing on you and using my mind, I’m okay. It’s when I’m alone that I start to drift….”