“But if that kind of technology is here,” Seth wonders, thinking of the metallic strips, too, “why didn’t we have it in the online world? Why didn’t we bring it with us?”
“Maybe we wanted things simpler, easier.”
“Your life was simple and easy?”
She gives him a harsh look. “You know what I mean.”
“Well, it’s certainly simpler and easier having you here to explain it all to me. Pretty useful, wouldn’t you say?”
“Back to the me and Tommy aren’t really real thing? You want me to slap you again? Because I’d be more than happy to.”
“The rain that puts out the fire and also traps us here so we can talk,” he continues. “A chest injury that heals fast enough for me to get away. It all just sort of works, doesn’t it?”
“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”
Tomasz shifts on her lap, sleeptalking in Polish: “Nie, nie.” Regine moves her hand to wake him, but he settles back down.
“He’s having one of those dreams, isn’t he?” Seth asks.
“I expect so.”
“What do you dream about?”
“That’s private,” Regine says sharply.
“Fine, sorry, just you mentioned your father . . .”
They eat in grumpy silence for a few minutes.
“So what about this?” Seth says, thinking. “If the whole world is online, how did dying make us wake up here? Wouldn’t we just reset or something?”
“I don’t know,” Regine says again, “but people still died there, didn’t they? My Auntie Genevieve died of pancreatic cancer. And my father . . .” She clears her throat. “But if it was meant to be real, so real we’d forget we ever lived anywhere else, then even death would have to work, wouldn’t it? Maybe our brains couldn’t accept it otherwise. You die online, you die for real, because that’s life.”
“But we didn’t die for real.” Seth’s getting angry again, thinking about what happened to Owen, what happened with Gudmund, what happened to him. “And why would we do that anyway? Why would we live in a world where that shit still happens? If we were supposedly in a place so perfect we forgot we moved there –”
“Don’t look at me. My mother married my bastard of a stepfather in that perfect world, so I have no idea.” Her hand goes unconsciously to the back of her neck. “What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they’re going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.”
“But how did we end up here, then?” Seth persists. “How come this world isn’t filled with people who died and just woke up?”
“We were supposed to die in this world, too, I think. But I fell down the stairs and hit my head in a certain spot. You drowned and hit your head in the exact same spot. Tommy –” she looks down at him, still sleeping –“well, Tommy says he got struck by lightning, but I’m guessing that whatever it was is something he doesn’t want to remember, so fair enough, but still, the same spot. Some malfunction right at the point of connection that overloads the system and instead of killing us, disconnects us.” She shrugs, suddenly out of energy. “Or that’s what we think anyway.”
She runs her hand lightly over Tomasz’s wild hair. “It was his idea, actually, even though he keeps saying he doesn’t believe it. Lots of good guesses in that funny little head.” Tomasz presses himself closer against her, sleeping on.
“But if everything that happened to us isn’t real,” Seth says, “if everything we know was just some online simulation –”
“Oh, it was real, all right,” she says. “We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real.”
Seth thinks back to Gudmund, thinks back to the smell of him, the feel of him. Thinks back to everything that happened this past year, good and bad and very, very bad indeed. Thinks back to what happened to Owen, to the frantic days when he was missing, to every small bit of punishment he received from his mum and dad in the years that followed.
It sure felt real. But if it was all somehow simulated, how could it have been?
And if he was here, right now, where was Gudmund?
“We shouldn’t go back to our house until dark,” Regine says. “We could take turns sleeping, one of us keeping an eye out.”
At the thought of this, Seth feels how tired he is. After staying up nearly all night, after the run, after the adrenaline rush of the day, it suddenly becomes some sort of miracle he’s even managing to keep his eyes open.
“All right,” he says. “But when I wake up –”
“When you wake up,” Regine says, “I’ll tell you how to get into the prison.”
40
“You have to forgive me,” Monica said on his front step before even saying hello. “I didn’t mean it. I was just so angry and –”
Seth stepped out into the cold, closing the door behind him. “What are you talking about?” he said. “What’s going on?”
She looked at him fearfully. Yes, there was no other word for it. She was frightened of what she had to tell him. He felt his stomach turn to ice. “Monica?” he said.
Instead of answering, she looked up into the sky, like help might be found there. Stupidly, Seth found himself looking up, too. It was freezing, had been for the weeks leading up to Christmas, but without any snow falling. The sky was a collection of gray smears, like the snow was too angry to fall.
He looked back at Monica to find her crying.
And he knew.
Because it could only be one thing, couldn’t it? It could only mean that the one good thing in his life was about to end. All that was left was finding out exactly how it was going to happen.
“You and Gudmund,” she said quietly, her nose running in the cold air, her breath coming out over her scarf in white puffs. “You and f**king Gudmund.”
She looked almost childlike in her ultra-thick winter coat and knitted hat with the red reindeer across it that she’d worn in cold weather from when it was far too big on her growing head until now when she didn’t even wear it ironically. It was Monica’s red reindeer hat, as much a part of her as her hair or her laugh.