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I have no idea why my mind worked so hard to hide this stuff from me. I suppose it might have been easier if I’d never figured it out. I would have walked away, not given it another thought. If that had been the best option, it was gone now.
Corina was on her knees, hands over her mouth, eyes wide with horror. ‘Jax, I never meant... I am so sorry.’
I slipped Corina back into the protective tube and put the tube back in the bag. ‘Nobody dies today.’
I looked around the office as though I was waking up. It was gloomy now. The light from outside was the pearly-grey that meant the sun was close to setting. There was no point in trying to get home today. We were sheltered, relatively safe, and there was no way I was going walking through unlit streets in unfamiliar territory. I had two rations left, and only one pouch of water, but it would do. I settled in for the night.
I woke stiff and aching. There hadn’t been anything to make a softer bed from, so I had ended up on the floor, with the bag for a pillow. I rolled over towards the window to make a guess at what time it was and saw Corina perched on the edge of a desk. I was really pleased with myself that I only froze for a second, then muttered ‘Morning,’ as I sat up.
Now that I got a better look, Corina was a ghost, perched an inch above the desk and slightly transparent. Her hair was lustrously black, her makeup bold and dark, and she wore a snug jumpsuit coloured to match her deep-red lipstick.
‘This is new,’ I said, trying to keep my voice casual. It wasn’t just new, it was spooky. ‘Am I in your head or my own?’
‘Yours,’ she said. A happy smile stretched across her face because she could tell I was impressed. ‘Do you like it?’
I blinked, and she vanished. I opened my eyes and turned my head, and she stayed in the same place, rather than drifting across the background. ‘Yeah. You’ve been busy.’
‘I worked it out last night. I don’t need sleep, remember?’
Walking along the street was strange, in a nice way. We were side by side. I couldn’t always see her, but if I turned my head or stopped, she was there, even if I could see through her. Her voice came from the side she was walking on, not from the middle of my skull. It felt very real, and I appreciated the effort she had made even if it didn’t really solve the problem.
It was different, though. Corina was relaxed, happy, and I felt lighter. I wasn’t sure when I had changed my mind. At some point in the night my brain must have decided that if she truly thought herself alive, I had no right to tell her otherwise.
We – I – got back to streets I recognised by mid-afternoon. The bag dragged hard on my shoulder, stuffed full of food rations. Corina had asked me to test the new entry she had written for me in the dataweb. I could have waited until I got closer to home, but if it had gone wrong I wanted to fade into the background somewhere nobody knew me.
I went straight up to my hiding place in the lift room, concealing the fresh rations with the stuff I already had. When I did a quick count, I had enough to keep me going for ten days. A few more wouldn’t hurt, but things were safer than they had been in a while.
‘Good for you,’ said Corina, who was, in her own strange way, standing behind me. ‘Now how about something for me?’
I had a ration in my hand and I turned and offered it to her. I heard her giggle. Feeling my face burning I reached into the bag and pulled out the little white box. ‘What do I do with it?’
She gave me instructions on where to put the box so it could steal energy from the building wiring, and showed me the tiny hole in her casing where the wire attached.
‘How long do you need to... feed?’ I asked, the question feeling awkward.
‘Depends how much power I’m using. On minimum function I can go five days. Like this, two. I need to be connected for several hours.’
It was getting late, and getting dark, and I really didn’t want to spend all night breathing greasy air. ‘Will you be OK if I leave you here? I’ll make sure nobody can find you.’
Corina nodded, but she was looking anywhere but at me and had caught her bottom lip between her teeth ‘How far away will you be, Jax? I don’t know what my range is.’
‘Thirty floors down. I’ll have to take the halo off before I go into the commons anyway.’
Scared was drifting towards panic. ‘You will come back, Jax? Promise?’
Inside my head I cursed that I couldn’t take her hand and reassure her. The muscles in my arm even twitched as they began to reach out. ‘I promise. If I can, I’ll put it on again before I go to bed.’
‘Please. Even if it’s only for a minute. I hate being alone in here.’
A muscle in my arm twitched again, and I forced a smile onto my face. It only took a moment to tuck Corina and the wire out of sight, although the white box was still a bit obvious. I moved some cardboard in front of it, checked everything was out of sight from the door, and left. My last sight of Corina was her sitting with her back against the wall, hands clasped tightly in front of drawn up knees, and a fake smile trying to hide an anxious face.
Leaving Corina made me feel sick. I hated to see her look that scared, that lonely, and I almost turned back. But I had to go down to the commons and I couldn’t wear the halo. There was already enough bad will in the air, and Trude might throw me out if I made it any worse. Then again, would being thrown out really matter? I liked Trude well enough, and she’d been good to me, but she had Jenny – who was a pain in the ass — to look after and I was just a burden. Maybe it was time to move off on my own? Plenty around my age already had.
As I locked the doors behind me, I suddenly worried that someone might come snooping and find Corina. I jumbled a few of the keys and changed a few of the tags so that the keys to ‘my’ room were hidden, then moved the key I kept outside to a new location. It didn’t feel enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else, so I called the elevator. By the time I walked into the commons, the halo was stashed in my pocket.
It was still early evening. Many were finishing their late meal and paid me no more attention than a dismissive glance. Calev and his cronies glared at me, following me with their eyes. I spotted Aunt Trude and Jenny sitting on their own, talking, and I wasn’t sure if they were alone because they chose to be or because of their association with me. I wandered towards them, and was met by coolly raised eyebrows from Trude and a frosty glare from Jenny.
‘Where were you last night?’ Jenny snapped, only for Trude to put a calming hand on her forearm.
‘I was checking out a new area, on the other side of the river. Near a place called ‘Tate’. Got talking with some people, it got late.’ I forced myself to stop. The simplest lies are the shortest ones.
‘It would have been nice to know you were out exploring,’ Aunt Trude said, not that it made any sense. How was I supposed to have told her? Jenny was not so forgiving.
‘You could have been killed and we wouldn’t know.’
I cocked my head. ‘What difference would it have made?’
‘Well, mum wouldn’t have been so worried.’
I looked at Aunt Trude – unflappable, concrete calm Trude – and decided not to make a point of it. Jenny obviously had a stone in her shoe about something and was determined to take it out on me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, without much hope the apology would draw a line under things.
‘So you’re planning to leave then?’ Jenny went on, arms wrapped across her still-flat chest and weaving her head from side to side as some of the women did when they were ‘dressing down their men’. It was hard not to laugh. Trude put her hand on Jenny’s arm again.
‘Child, if that’s Jaxon’s path, we have no call on him not to follow it.’
Jenny scowled, obviously not seeing it that way but not quite daring to challenge Trude. Not yet, at least. I felt sorry for anybody who would be taking her as a wife; he’d be in for a hard time.
‘You’ve got to admit it’s getting crowded in our room.’
‘And you smell,’ Jenny added.
‘Probably,’ I agreed, and sniffed under an arm to check she meant during the night rather than right at that moment. Trude gave me a look and told me not to be vulgar.
I went to bed early, claiming I was tired from all the traveling. Trude gave me another look and I’m sure she knew exactly how far away Tate was from Tower 42. Still, retiring early got me away from Jenny’s hostility, which Trude probably through was my real reason for going.
As soon as I was in the room I took the halo from my pocket and slipped it over my head. I was half way through undressing when Corina appeared, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of my bed and looking at my naked backside. I cursed and tried to cover myself with my hands. She burst out laughing, covering her mouth. ‘Silly, I can’t see you.’
Which left me with another revelation. For all her cleverness, without access to cameras, Corina could only see and hear the world through me. That was why being alone terrified her. I hadn’t understood all the techo-babble before, but now I felt a chill run down my spine. I finished getting ready for bed, trying to ignore the irrational thrill of standing naked in front of her.
‘What do you get when I’m asleep?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Corina replied. ‘I expect I’ll still get audio, but not much else. It’s better than nothing, and I can watch out for you; wake you if I hear anything.’
I smiled, settled down, and fell asleep with my own guardian angel sitting at the foot of my bed.