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  When the food comes, I start, “How was your day, Father?” but Father just chews.

  Then I move around to the chair on his side and put on that deep, preachy voice, going, “Fine, son. How about yourself?”

  My voice: “It’s fucking bored out, Father.” That’s me doing what Father used to call “dropping the F bomb” so he’ll get up and hit me like he does back home, but his fists don’t clench. He doesn’t even scowl.

  I go back around to his side. “Language, Edward.”

  Me: “Don’t call me Edward, I hate Edward.”

  I do a pretty good Father: “It’s your grandfather’s name and I will damn well use it.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Dad. You can fucking call me Ned.”

  Like Father ever answered to the name Dad. I thought two insults consecutive plus the “Dad” would bring him out. No, he gives me the bleakest look, but never mind.

  I have a plan.

  I’ve been working on this wall, behind the dumbwaiter? Stuff goes in and out through a hatch in the back, and I’ve been chipping away at the plaster every chance I get. So, what if there are zero jackets and shit in here, just the white scrubs, like we’re patients in some ginormous hospital? I’m hoarding dirty scrubs. Tonight I put them all on, make some kind of hoodie out of the pillowcases. I’d rather freeze than fry, plus if they have guards or something, I’ll be harder to see: white on white on white. Tonight, I break out.

  I’m bailing just as soon as he sinks down in a heap at that table and starts to snore, but shit, I have to give him one last chance.

  We eat. I talk for both of us. Then I do what I have to. I go: “Why did Mother leave us anyway?”

  That stone face turns to marble, dead white. Then he breaks the Vow of Silence or whatever. It’s like an iceberg cracking. “Go to bed.”

  So I do, but only until I hear him stomp away and crash on his bed so hard that it bashes the wall between our rooms. Then I open the kitchen dumbwaiter and break out the back and into the freezing desert night.

  Back home on Kraven I used to run through the neighborhood reading other people’s windows like comic books: the fight in one, the love scene, the bad little kids getting drunk, the beating in another, another and another, and everybody and everything in the houses I looked into was a different color, all blazing and busy like frames in a comic or the best animation you ever saw! The never-ending story occupied me on those empty nights before I found Gaijin Samurai and I logged on and had a life, but there’s nothing here in this nothing place that we don’t know what it is. Everything down in the great white toilet where we landed is still and quiet and white, white, white. White shutters on every window closed tight. The blank of the white buildings around the empty plaza are white, and the grainy white sidewalks lead out to white, white houses laid out like blocks on a Monopoly board with no colors and no printing and no squares so you can tell whether you’re moving, just the bleached streets spreading out to the cement rim surrounding, as white and regular as a ring of false teeth without the gums or the grooves between. Even the barrier dune beyond is smooth and perfect, like a giant potter threw a porcelain bowl to put us in and the wheel stopped.

  Nothing, not even the shadow of a footprint, touches the sand. It comes sifting down in the night wind and stops cold at the rim, so in spite of the breeze, everything inside it lies still.

  That’s weird, and this is weird.

  There’s almost no sound. Like it’s one of those sensory deprivation tanks? Or it’s some kind of prison, i.e., we are trapped, but there are no guards that I can see, no towers where armed guards could hide, nothing set up to keep anything out or any of us in, not like they need it, I’m the only person out tonight. Skittering like an ant trapped under a dome.

  Alone. It’s so weird.

  So, what are they, locked inside against their will, like Father and me except he is, like, zombified, or are they all scared to go out?

  It’s cold as fuck out here, and darker than fuck, but! Free. I should be happy and excited, but I’m alone out in the open, and it’s cold and creepy as hell. The silence is the worst. Like all the houses are soundproofed, unless nobody else is talking to each other either, same as Father and me.

  There are no TVs in these houses, only one or two cracks of light showing around drawn shutters and nothing moving, as far as I can tell. Except for the breeze brushing the sand circle, there’s nothing to hear.

  Maybe it’s like this in Gaijin Samurai, i.e., on Level 300 you lose your team, you lose your bearings, you end up with nobody to rely on and nothing to fight with except yourself and the great mess of stuff you know about, useless facts rattling around inside your head.

  Is this place where we landed even real life, or is this the first level of a new, harder game I might not win? Yes, I am weirded out. And freezing. In another minute parts of me will start to break off like ice chunks in an avalanche. I can’t stay out but I don’t want to go in.

  I just want this to be over, OK?

  If I was ever Hydra Destroyer, that’s done. I’m nobody but me, stupid Ned Poulnot, unarmed and unaided out here in the enormousness, shivering in my pathetic layers of scrubs, alone.

  And then I’m not.

  Alone. I mean.

  There’s a guy! He comes sliding down the inside of the barrier dune like a cross-country skier, easy on his feet and bone upright. He lands at the tippy end of the access road and gets up smiling and ’od damn, he walks toward me like the Thief that used to turn up in the old Xbox games and steal all your treasures while you were slaying the Avenger or recharging your Vector Belt, except he’s half-whistling through his teeth the way you do— what is that tune? I hear him coming and this, at least, is kind of great. I saw him first. I know the tune!

  I think it goes, “I’m just a lonesome traveler…” It stops.

  Should I be scared? Hell if I know. He doesn’t come on like one of us, from Kraven island, but I almost know who he is. He walks tall, not all cold and hunched over like me. As if he found a way to ditch the scrubs and get a real outfit, unless.

  I don’t know unless what, all I know is: tall guy walking fast, wrapped up in, is that a cape? Shuh, it’s just a tarp that he ripped off something, but it’s black. So are the jeans and thick hoodie— black boots, and that’s cool, but it’s also disturbing. How is he not shivering in the white scrubs like the rest of us?

  “Fuck,” he says, but not from close enough to scare me or near enough that I can make out his face. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Who are you?”

  He sort of laughs. “Me, scouting the perimeter like I was dead alone out here.”

  “See anything?”

  “Nothing that would help.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “Yeah, right.” I like him, I hate him, I don’t know how I feel except frustrated because he isn’t saying, and even more pissed because I can’t figure him out. “Really. Who are you?”

  “Well, hell, who the fuck are you?”

  “None of your business.” By then I have him in my sights. If I was Hydra right now, I would … but I’m not, he’s six foot something and I’m only almost fourteen. I show all my teeth like Father does when he’s pissed off. “What are you doing here?”

  He goes inside himself and comes back out with my answer, not his. “Oh. You’re the Poulnot kid.”

  “Who says?”

  “Little bird.”

  “Fuck that shit.”

  He just laughs. I’m meeting up with my first friend in this off-world new world and he sounds like all those smartass TV people up there making television in New York. “Hello, Ned Poulnot, pleased to meet you.” He sticks out his hand.

  Like I’m about to shake. “Hello, whatever the hell your name is.”

  “Steele. Rawson Steele.”

  Ohmygod. Oh. My. God. Everything I heard, all the ugly stuff people said about him back in Kraventown. Did he bring down
the attack of the Big Whatever that yanked us out of our lives? Bad shit from deep inside backs up in my throat and like to strangles me. You! That guy, stalking our personal property like a prospector, did they erase us so he could get what he wants?

  “What were you…” I want to say, doing on Kraven island? but I can’t. I go, “What are you doing here?”

  He sees the big question simmering, I’m like to explode and he puts up his hand real fast, to stop it, “It’s not what you think!”

  And then all the poison in me hits the top and blows the lid off. I lunge at him banging with both fists, and stuff comes spewing out of me but it’s not exactly words, I am fucking sobbing, God, it is embarrassing. “You did it. You did this to us, you dumped us in this big white hell so you can go back to Kraven and take our houses and all our stuff…”

  “Dude, I don’t want your damn stuff.”

  “Well, you can have it, you can have our whole fucking island. Just get me out of here!”

  “I only want what’s mine.”

  “Motherfucker!” I’m shaking with it, where we are and how I was about to beat the game when this happened, and I bang my head into his chest like that will hurt him more and it finally comes out, “This is all your fault, it’s your snot-blowing shit-licking assaholic fault.”

  I’m all acking and sobbing, I can’t help it, can’t stop it, until, wham, he rams a fist into my chest and knocks all the hate out of me.

  Then he holds me off from him, waiting for me to settle, and when I quit struggling he lifts me up off the ground by about a foot and holds me in place until I finally get my breath back and sob it all out, and quit even trying to kick.

  He holds me off a minute longer and when it’s clear I’ve vomited out all the angry backed up inside of me, he sets me down and we stand there looking at each other until I start shivering because losing it warms you up, but not in a good way, and not for long. “Oh, kid.” He rips off his tarp and wraps it around me and I let him. “Be sure and hide this when you get home.”

  “That isn’t home.”

  “I know.”

  Then he looks at me straight on and says to me, like we are two grownups, “I don’t know how we got here or what did it.” His voice is all cold and so still that it scares me silent. “I don’t even know what this place is.”

  12

  Merrill

  Anywhen

  Time blurs in this place— no clocks or calendars, no phones and no other ways to check the time, just light and dark and food in the dumbwaiter three times before the sun goes down, which we have to assume marks real days and real nights. As though this is no state in no known nation, just a state of mind.

  So I can’t say exactly when Ray Powell and I finally reconnected, only that the other night I heard somebody whistling in our dead little world of epic silence and when I came outside, it was Ray.

  My shadow house here sits exactly where my real house did on Kraven island. It’s laid out in the same footprint, but unlike my place with its long front porch and jigsaw trim, this one turns a blank white face to the barren street. As I opened the door, the whistling stopped. I slipped outside the circle of light on my front walk and there was Ray.

  I whispered, “You’re outside!”

  “I am.”

  “Then it’s all right.”

  “So far.” He drew me out into the middle of the street, too far from the lampposts for their spyware to pick up anything we muttered in the dark. In our situation, you pre-suppose watchers stationed somewhere, studying a hundred monitors. Ray and I leaned close, for reasons. Let them think we’re lovers sneaking out, not the only two prisoners sharp enough to collude.

  Yes I said prisoners. What do you think we are?

  Ray’s even older than Father but he doesn’t look it. Unlike Father he comes in smiling and he’s aggressively fit. He hates argy bargy, so he ducks town meetings, but things work better because of Ray. Like his father and grandfather, he works behind the scenes. For generations, the Powells have shaped Kraventown, moving generations of hardheads like Father so smoothly that they don’t even know.

  If the intelligence monitoring our displaced lives found out who Ray really is and that we’re in this together they’d lock him up, shut us down or worse, ergo the faked assignation. Our town’s been hijacked. We have to figure out what’s going on and what comes next. That night I put my arms around Ray’s neck because I trusted him and romance seemed like the best disguise. In the real world, Ray’s safe as houses. No. Ray Powell is safe as a temple of stone. I stood quietly in his arms, waiting for him to start. He bent as though we were kissing, muttering into my ear, “We need a plan.”

  “I know.” Even standing close like that, we were shivering. The night chill penetrated to the bone.

  “As in, find a place and call a meeting.”

  “A meeting,” I said bitterly. “After what came down last time?” Resentment hung in the air between us like frosted breath.

  Ray rubbed my arms, but it didn’t help. It was so cold that his voice rattled. “We can’t do this alone.”

  “We can’t do it with them, not the way they are.” I could still taste the blood in my mouth.

  “Were.”

  “It was awful.”

  Blood in my mouth and blood in the meeting hall; it was disgusting. Filthy smears on the walls after Ray broke up the fight and the others left. That night we cleaned up in silence and walked away from certain indelible stains. We were done for the night. Done with them. Done in.

  “They’re our people, Mer.”

  “They’re awful.”

  “Were. This place,” Ray said, without explaining. “They’ve changed.”

  The rest rolled in and hit so hard that I fell back a step, couldn’t breathe. Then it came in a rush. “We’ve changed.”

  Ray said, “You OK?”

  “Not really.” I swallowed pain. Ray had promised. “Is Ned?”

  He nodded. “So far. Merrill, we need the others.” He put his big hands on my shoulders and leaned hard, grounding me. “Don’t ask me how I know this, I just know it. Either we all go or nobody goes.”

  The next day we went from house to house in the blistering sunlight, trying to rally them. We kept knocking on doors until it got too hot to be outside. We thought our neighbors would be jonesing for another meeting with questions answered, questions raised, but what can I say?

  They blew us off.

  They blew us off, one after another.

  The few who opened their doors were passive and glassy-eyed. Stunned, as if they’d just been hit by a truck. They don’t go out and they won’t let us in, not kind, responsible Ray Powell, that the community admires and respects and owes in a lot of ways, and, even though we all have history— we grew up together!— not me.

  It didn’t matter who I tried or what I said, I got back flat refusals shouted from behind closed doors, with one or two whispered apologies leaking out between the cracks. Every day was harder, probably because every day the sun burned hotter than it had the day before. The few who opened their doors to me were friends like Kara Maxwell and Betsy Till, people I thought I knew but don’t, not really, not the way they are.

  Seeing Kara was the hardest. “Oh,” she said and her voice sank, “I thought you were here about Bill.”

  “Bill’s missing.”

  “So am I.” Her face crumpled and she wailed, “How is he going to find me here?”

  “Oh, sweetie!” I put out my arms but I couldn’t reach her.

  “Don’t,” she said. I knew that look: Some day they’ll come marching down our street. It meant, don’t say anything more. My best friend Kara shoved a bottle of water at me. Her eyes were spinning like marbles and she fell against the door, shutting me out.

  A guard in high school basketball, Betsy Till stood in her doorway waving her arms, waiting for me to feint, and Selina Crane? She snarled like a tigress shielding her cubs. Old Mrs. Tanner and the Weisbuchs were nicer because they remem
ber me when, but they’re too shaky to come out in this heat and terrified of letting anything in. I was touched that Tappy Deloach even got out of his chair and made it to the door. I guess they felt sorry for me, soldiering on, all dehydrated and anxious and trying to smile, parched and panting in the heat.

  Ray did no better.

  I have this fear that mysteriously whisked off-island and set down in a rigidly structured landscape so far from the Inland Waterway that we can’t see the ocean or hear it or even smell the salt, the displaced population of Kraven actually likes being contained.

  Ray thinks they’re all in shock. He says removal and alienation took apart people we used to know and put them back together differently, although that doesn’t explain him or me. Even the town loudmouths like Errol Root and Wade Tanner won’t come out. This place made them get a lot smaller, apologizing from behind half-closed doors. Rebel shot his big arms across the opening like bolts. Trauma keeps them inside. These houses are designed for comfort. Contained, our people are safe from unknown hazards— their neighbors and their enemies, scary outside entities that they don’t know about.

  I think they’re victims of the design. Whoever did this to us built the compound with security and comfort in mind. Then they set it like a trap and sucked us into it. Uproot a group and while you’ve got them flailing and terrified, enclose them. Keep them clean and fed and they’ve settled in: snug houses secured against the elements, everything we need supplied so we’ll forget our wants. Hermetically sealed calm. New food appears in our kitchen compartments at mealtimes, fresh linens show up in the cubby next to the basin once a week— more often if needed. There are fresh scrubs in our closets every morning, neatly folded on shelves above the chutes where we dumped our ruined clothes from home at the end of that terrible first day.

  Maybe there really is some strong drug in the food or air or in the water, but if that’s it, how come Ray’s still Ray and I’m still anxious, fucked-up me?