I stepped to the foot of the bed. There, in front of me, lay my mother. She was ashen, color draining from her face as I watched. Her eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling. On both sides of the bed, doctors and nurses worked to save her, compressing her chest with their palms, jabbing syringes into her, getting paddles ready to—I hoped—jump-start her heart.

  “Hurry!” I screamed, but no one heard. “Mom!”

  She was already dead. I knew it from the flatline tone of the heart-rate monitor and the way her mouth hung open as though gasping for breath, but there were no gasps coming from her.

  “Mom!” I said again. “Please don’t leave me. Please!”

  The doctors and nurses blurred around me. A nurse passed through me as she rounded the bed. The entire scene seemed to slow down, then speed up, as if it were all a movie and someone was manipulating it with a remote control, speeding it up then dialing it back.

  Soon the medical team stopped their frantic movements. The lead doctor, a man with white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, snapped off his latex gloves. He looked at his watch. “Time of death: 2:37 a.m. Marsha, notify Dr. Benton, please. Tell him it looks like the blood clot shifted. Let’s schedule an autopsy to verify. We also need to notify the family.”

  Blood clot? Mom didn’t have a blood clot.

  The scene around me sped up as if someone had pressed a fast-forward button. All but one nurse filed quietly out of the room. The remaining nurse pulled the sheet over my mother’s face, turned off the medical equipment, and left.

  I was alone with her.

  There I stood at her bedside, staring down at the lifeless form beneath the sheets. I reached out my hand to pull the sheet away from her face, but my fingers slipped through it.

  “Mom?” It came as little more than a whisper. I needed her to hear me, but it was too late.

  The world felt like it had fallen out from beneath me. How was this even possible? She was supposed to be in her apartment, sleeping in her bed. I was at Austin’s, in the tank. And the moon—it was 2:37 in the morning, the doctor had said—completely baffled me. No way I could still be in the hack.

  I scanned the room for anything to indicate that this was a dream. My attention locked on the date on a wall-mounted clock: two weeks from the day I’d climbed into the deprivation chamber for the first time.

  What? How?

  This had to be a dream.

  The hospital trembled underfoot and the ground groaned long and loud. It was the twisting-steel sound of a ship before it collapses under the ocean’s crushing pressure. It came again and the air thickened and grew heavy as it pressed against me.

  I looked at my mom’s bed. Everything—the bed, the blankets, my mom—was disintegrating, breaking into millions of tiny pixels that swirled into the air, joined by particles from the medical equipment, the tiles, the floor, the walls. All of it was coming apart, being carried away by a terrible, howling wind that now overtook the groaning.

  Desperately, I reached for my mother’s hand, but she disintegrated along with the rest of the room. I tried to scream, tried to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing to grab and nowhere to go. The world was peeling away, leaving only the white void I’d seen before. I spun around, searching for the rip I’d gone through earlier, but it was gone too.

  I looked down at my hands and they too were starting to break apart and blow away in the fierce wind: my fingertips first—pixelating and flying away—then my palms, wrists, forearms . . . the destruction climbing my arm until my entire body collapsed into nothing.

  Everything was stark black and I was back in the tank.

  2.4

  DAY 3 - 8:40 am

  “FIFTEEN SECONDS,” Austin said, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. In the entire time I’d known him, he’d never been this animated. “Your stats are unbelievable.”

  I sat on his couch, clutching my unsteady hands in my lap. The water had puckered my skin like a prune, and it felt good being in dry clothes again.

  Now Austin was telling me about the data he’d gathered—“much more than I’d expected from your first hack”—and how short it’d been, but all I could think about was Mom.

  “Fifteen seconds,” I repeated, shaking my head. “It felt much longer than that, like you said it would.”

  “Hack time is pliable, elastic. It’s similar to what we experience in dreams.” He handed me a steaming cup of tea. “It took awhile for your mind to quiet enough for the Kick to initiate, which is normal. If anything, you attained a relaxed state much more quickly than I anticipated. But once you did, yes, you were under only fifteen seconds.”

  I held up my hand. “Look at me, still shaking.” I smiled at him. “I hadn’t expected any of that, any of what happened.”

  “Neither had I.” Austin placed a small digital recorder on the coffee table, then sat in the chair across from me. “Now, let’s talk about what you saw. Start at the beginning. We need to document every experience so we can cross reference everything, look for commonalities and anomalies. As much as you can remember. We have to figure out how you were able to go under so easily.”

  I began to unfold my experience, beginning with my vision of floating in the ocean. When I got to the part about the rip or tear in the white air he stopped me.

  “A tear?” he said.

  “Yeah. It hung in midair, and I stepped through it into your apartment.” I shook my head. “What was it?”

  “The ocean was probably a mental projection you used to quiet your mind, but the white void—I suspect it was another abstraction your subconscious created to limit your awareness, like a firewall.”

  I paused. “Is it real?”

  “No more so than the ocean you saw. It’s your subconscious contextualizing the environment around you.” Austin drifted into his thoughts for a long beat. He touched each fingertip on his right hand to his thumb, that nervous habit of his, indicating his mind was in heavy-processing mode. I waited for him to cycle through it seven times. Then he said, “Did you try walking around the rip?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Because it moved with you so that it was always in front of you.”

  A chill tickled my spine. “You have seen it!”

  “Not a rip in the air, but something like it. I picture a door before I hack; I learned early in my research that my mind needed a mental cue, like a hypnotic suggestion to give my surroundings context. That you figured that out on your own is amazing. You found yourself in front of a rip of some kind. I go through a door. I call it the threshold state because it seems to be some kind of psychological division between physical reality and the ghost state.”

  “Ghost state?”

  He shrugged. “It has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s just a name I came up with to delineate it.”

  I nodded, thinking of how I’d felt moving through Austin’s apartment and then to the bridge and hospital: like a ghost.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was eating this up. “What happened next?”

  “I was in your apartment, standing next to you at the control panel. I could see my body like I can now—solid—but when I tried to touch you my hand went through you.”

  “That’s the ghost state,” he said with a smile. “Just like when I read your cell-phone screen and heard your thoughts.”

  “It was weird, but it got weirder when I left the apartment.”

  Austin’s smile faded. “What do you mean, ‘left the apartment’?”

  I told him all about how I’d moved around the apartment simply by thinking about it, and how I’d willed myself outside and to the top of the bridge.

  “It’s not like I flew to the place or traveled to it, I said. “I just thought about it and was there.”

  “No sense of movement at all?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It was like blinking and finding myself somewhere else, almost faster than I could think it.”

  He stood and began pacing, fingertips tapping against one another, his mind clearly spinning. “This is new. This is amazing.”

  “What do you mean ‘new’?”

  “A new phenomenon, leaving the apartment. I’ve never done that.” He pointed at me. “We have to figure out why it happened now, to you. This is a serious breakthrough.”

  “You’ve never traveled outside of the apartment in a hack?”

  “No. My experience has always been localized.” He squinted at me. “Why were you able to, what was different? We have to run diagnostics and go through each data point. There must be something different about your hack that I missed. It could be any of a thousand variables—your biochemistry, an isolated reaction to the Kick, anything.” His eyes got wide. “The bridge,” he said. “Did you go anywhere else?”

  I told him about the hospital and about seeing my mom die. As I did, my throat tightened. “I didn’t recognize any of it,” I said. “I’ve never been in that hospital, not before tonight. Was it real?”

  Scenes from the experience gripped me: my mother lying there, the doctors working frantically to pull her back from death, her lifeless eyes and gaping mouth.

  “I don’t know,” Austin said.

  “One of the doctors mentioned a blood clot. Thing is, my mother doesn’t have a blood clot. She just had a checkup. She has lots of problems, but a clot isn’t one of them. It had to be a dream, right?”

  Austin was silent.

  “Right?” I said again, looking for reassurance. “Tell me you’ve had dreams during your hacks.”

  He stopped pacing at a plush leather chair and plopped down into it. “No, never. I don’t think dreaming is possible during a hack.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. The date of my mom’s death was two weeks from now. Is it possible that I saw the future?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess it depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Whether or not time and space are linear. Some physicists postulate that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and that we simply experience whatever present slice of the universe we happen to be in at the moment. Others think that hypothesis is ridiculous.”

  “What do you think?” I asked and watched his reaction.

  “As a scientist I think anything’s possible,” he said without hesitation.

  “So what does it mean, seeing my mother dying? How can that be?”

  “Are you sure your mother doesn’t have a blood clot? When was her last MRI?”

  I shrugged. “Three, four months ago.”

  “She’s been bedridden so it’s possible that she developed one since then. There’s only one way to know for sure: have Benton do an MRI on her. If it proves negative, it wasn’t a premonition. But if it’s confirmed . . .” He thought about it. “Well, that’s something completely unexpected. Either way, this is something else new.”

  “You’re right,” I said. I glanced out the window. The sky was a beautiful electric blue. “I have to get her into Dr. Benton’s.”

  I set the teacup down, stood and rounded the sofa.

  “Whoa,” he said, standing to his feet. “You can’t leave. What about the FBI? You can’t just go traipsing into your mom’s apartment. You got away from them once, but I don’t think they’ll let it happen again.”

  “I can’t just sit around and let my mom die. If what I saw wasn’t a dream then I have to tell Lettie. I have to do something.”

  “Call her then, but don’t go. You’re safe here. Out there you aren’t.” His eyes contained more compassion than I’d seen in them before. Was I growing on him, or was it simply that having grappled with his own demise, he was now more concerned about others’ feelings?

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “The FBI took my phone. Maybe I can find a pay phone or something.”

  “Wait here a minute,” he said and walked to a nearby shelf. He returned with a mobile phone in his hand. “I hate these things, but this is the best option.”

  He handed it to me.

  “It’s a burner,” he said. “Got it at Walmart. The minutes are prepaid and the number is untraceable. Use this to call Lettie, have her take your mom in. But you can’t leave here. Okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  I took the phone up to the roof and dialed the number for Mom’s room at Cedar Ridge. Lettie answered.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Where are you?” Her voice was strained. “A federal agent came here in the middle of the night looking for you. What’s going on?”

  “It’s complicated.” A beat. “I’m helping them with a case, but that’s all I can say.”

  “They seemed really worried about you. Where’ve you been?”

  “Somewhere safe. I promise.”

  “You need to come home now. We’ll figure this out, but you have to come home.”

  “I can’t, not yet. I will soon.”

  “Honey, let me come get you.”

  “No.” I was silent for a moment. “But you have to do something for me. It’s important. I need you to get Mom to Dr. Benton. Today. Tell him she needs an MRI.”

  “An MRI? She just had one a few months—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “Just . . . do this for me. Please. I can’t explain why, but you just have to trust me. And don’t take no for an answer. It has to be today.”

  “They’re so expensive, and insurance won’t cover it if—”

  “Lettie, listen to me. I had a vision, okay?” I let my words hang there. My grandmother was a spiritual woman who often talked about how God spoke to people in unusual ways—dreams, visions, even in tiny coincidences. I knew this would get her attention.

  “What kind of vision?” she asked.

  “The kind that feels real. It was early this morning. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, but I think that’s what it was. I saw Mom die of a blood clot. I think it was a warning of some kind. I know it sounds ludicrous.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lettie said. “If I do this, you have to promise you’ll come home.” Her words were firm, strengthened by determination and belief.

  “First I have to—”

  “Promise me.”

  I was silent for a moment. “Okay, but the MRI has to be today.”

  “I’ll call Dr. Benton then.”

  “Today,” I said. “Please.”

  “I’ll make sure of it.” She sighed heavily on the other end of the line. “What have you gotten yourself into, child?”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “Soon.”

  “Please be safe.”

  “I will. The moment you get the results, call me back at this number, but don’t give it to anyone else. Especially not the FBI. I’ll be home soon,” I said and I hoped it was true.

  2.5

  DAY 3 - 8:30 pm

  AUSTIN STARED through bleary eyes at the digital brain scan that filled his computer monitor. He would compare the black-and-white image against the sequential database he’d developed to meticulously track his scans, but he already knew what he’d discover.

  It had been twelve hours since Nyah’s hack. After calling her grandmother she’d crashed in the guest room, exhausted. He hadn’t heard a peep from her since then, which gave him the time he needed to parse not only her data, but to update his own.

  He leaned closer to the screen and traced his index finger across the stark image. The tumor that was rotting his mind from the inside out was a white mass set against the grey ridges of brain tissue. On-screen, the brain could have belonged to any of the hundreds of terminal patients whose cases he’d researched over the years in the hope of finding clues to help his own condition, but it wasn’t somebody else’s brain; it was his.

  And despite his best efforts, the tumor was still destroying him with stunning speed. There was no escaping the data. Unlike people, data was incapable of lying or spinning the truth. It wasn’t right or wrong, it just was. It’s the reason he’d always put more faith in science than he had in people.

  The universe was built on immutable principles and laws, facts that led to reliable conclusions. Facts were never flawed, only the people who interpreted those facts were.

  We see the world not as it is, but as we are, someone had once told him that. But bending fact to serve one’s perception could only lead to delusion. Insanity. And he wasn’t insane. Not yet, anyway.

  In fact, Dr. Benton believed Austin’s tumor had significantly elevated his already formidable cognitive abilities. Somehow the fibrous mass had created unusual neural connections that didn’t exist before, which allowed him to think more creatively. It was precisely because of his tumor that he was exceptional.

  It was a hypothesis that seemed to bear itself out experientially. With each new day, the growth expanded and his mental processes grew more acute, more lucid. He required less sleep, but whether that was explained by a deeply rooted instinct to survive or, rather, by higher brain function, he didn’t know.

  Either way, he’d been driven to the point of obsession with finding a cure where experts claimed there was none to be found. He was convinced that, given enough time, he would find one. He simply needed enough data to lead him to it.

  At the moment, however, the data led to only one conclusion: he would die, sooner rather than later. That’s what the three neurologists back in Boston had told him, as well. There was nothing they could do for him except make the symptoms more bearable.

  Only Dr. Benton had offered a solution beyond symptom management: an aggressive and experimental chemotherapy paired with radiation that he said might shrink the tumor.

  Might. But even if it worked, he’d said, the possibility of destroying brain tissue was high—collateral damage, he’d called it. That was the price of surviving to see his twentieth birthday.

  Austin would rather die. What would he be without his mind? Nothing. He was his mind. The only thing he’d ever had that set him apart—that made him exceptional—was his powerful intellect. Taking that away, even if it meant he could continue to exist, was not an option. He would exist, but he would not be living.

 

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