CHAPTER ONE

Abby

 

 

They say that waking up from a deep sleep is like being introduced to someone you’ve never met. You don’t yet know if your minds are going to fully connect. You’ve barely shaken hands.

A new day can catch you by surprise in the same way. And in my case, that was literally true. I’d never expected to wake again.

But I did wake, jerking upright to find myself on a narrow bed, surrounded by grime that had to be years old, in a low-rent, maybe even rent-by-the-hour, hotel room. The yellow patina on the windows indicated I was somewhere in the under regions of the city, maybe as low as Sector Six. The indigent and unemployable, not to mention the drug-addled and addicted, hid from the patrols in places such as this.

I was lying on top of a knobby bedspread, dark brown to hide the dirt, with my head on a pillow so flat it barely deserved the name. All in all, I was pleased not to have spent any time underneath the covers. Bargebugs for sure.

I had no idea how I’d gotten here.

None.

At all.

My last memory was of lying on a similarly narrow bed, though a mechanical one—the best that money could buy. It had been designed for the ill, which I had been, and tucked into the corner of my living room because I could no longer manage the stairs. I’d been dying at the far-too-young age of eighty-six. In fact, twenty seconds ago in my head, I had died.

Had that been a dream? It surely didn’t feel like it. Death had felt totally and completely real.

Superstition said that if you died in your dreams, you died in real life, and my heart was still beating fast from the moment when I’d felt it stop. My life had slipped away from me between one beat and the next. There had been a breath, and then another breath, and then the inability to breathe at all.

My last conscious thought had been a surprised realization that death wasn’t painful. Or at least it was far less painful than the increasingly extreme treatments the doctors had called upon to cure the insurmountable disease that had claimed my life. In the days before my death, I’d refused any more treatment and declared with all the authority of my nearly ninety years that I was done.

I’d meant it too.

So I had a moment where my heart leapt to realize I was alive and breathing. It was amazing not to be in pain. Or nauseous. The doctors had insisted that their methods to counter that were excellent. But they’d been lying.

The sickness inside me had grown despite all the doctors’ efforts to cut it out, change its makeup, barrage it with chemicals, or wipe it out with biological nanobots. It hadn’t been a rogue parasite from New Eden or Earth. It had been my own cells working against me—cells that regenerated just as fast as the doctors could kill them.

The disease had never been contagious. The doctors had ruled that out from the start. But despite that fact, none of my children had been with me at the end. I could see them in my mind’s eye even now, hastening from one physician to another, subjecting their bodies to scan after scan, terrified that what had killed me might be inside them too.

And yet, even when they’d abandoned me, I couldn’t blame them. Death was to be feared. It was the curse of our society, for all that some poor soul died every day and everyone died eventually. We’d manipulated, massaged, packaged, and altered our bodies to such an extent that it was a wonder our cells held together at all. All the interventions modern science could marshal and direct at me had been in vain, however. The doctors had been almost glad that I’d retreated home to the Island, lest word of this unnamed and incurable disease, reminiscent of the cancers that had been ubiquitous on old Earth, spread across New Eden. It wouldn’t do for the people to lose faith in the doctors’ ability to heal, or their surety that for every human, death should be put off until at least one hundred.

Still, I couldn’t see how I’d gotten from my home on the Island to this hotel room. Were the indigenous people of New Eden, the Ddaerans (pronounced THIE-rans), whom the Founders referred to as Originals, correct about the existence of a next life after all? Their mythology told them that life continued after death, just on a different plane from the one we knew. Looking around the hotel room, I really hoped I wasn’t dead. If I was, those Ddaeran mystics had surely sold their people a bill of goods.

It was comforting to feel myself breathing, however. My chest rose and fell as I stared up at the ceiling above my head, yellowed from age and possibly generations of burning incense. The dark wooden paneling on the walls was stained with the same yellow grime. I didn’t bother touching the wall against which the bed rested to see if the grime came off. I didn’t want to know.

The rest of the room contained a beat up dresser, a single chair, and a desk. The act of turning my head to look around me, however, sent a sharp pain shooting through my skull. I winced and instinctively brought up my right hand to touch my forehead where it hurt above my right eye.

Or rather, I tried to bring up my hand.

My wrist moved only a few inches before something sharp bit into it and prevented it from rising further. I tugged again, refusing to believe I couldn’t move my arm. And then, very gingerly, I lifted my head from the pillow to see what was wrong with it.

My right wrist was handcuffed to the bed.

I stared at my wrist for a few seconds, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Not only was I chained to the bed, but the hand that was cuffed was smooth and unlined, and the nails had been painted a violent shade of purple.

With silver sparkles.

I wasn’t opposed to the purple at all, but last I’d seen, my hands had been claw-like and wasted, with hardly any flesh on the bones. Though I hadn’t known it until it happened to me, terminal illness had a tendency to do that to a person.

Obviously, the hand attached to my body was not the hand of an ill person. It was a strange disconnect between what I knew to be true—that I had been ill; that I’d died—

with what was true: I was alive and young and my fingernails had been painted purple with sparkles.

That meant … what was in my head had to have been a dream, right? Rumor had it that those same Ddaerans who postulated a life after death relied upon dreams for portents and advice about the future. Some said they could even speak to one another in them. My dreams, as evidenced by this one, were best ignored as random sparkings of an addled brain and a strange conglomeration of the flotsam and jetsam of my mind.

Nope. Still didn’t feel right.

But I’d always been a practical person, even when I was young, and I mentally shoved my thoughts and expectations to the back of my mind. With a sharply worded admonition to myself, other aspects of my surroundings came into focus too.

Which was also weird.

I could see my surroundings clearly. At the age of six, when my parents discovered I couldn’t see anything beyond ten feet in front of me, multiple surgeries had reshaped the lenses in my eyes to give me perfect vision. As my recent illness progressed, however, a side effect had been a distortion of the artificial lenses, the result of a defensive reaction on the part of my body to a foreign object. I’d been too ill for surgery, so I’d been given a pair of old-fashioned glasses to wear. Without them on my face, I hadn’t been able see well enough to find them on the bedside table.

I felt at the handcuff with my left hand and was unable to resist noticing the absence of an IV line flowing into the vein on the inside of my elbow. Amazingly, that hand was young looking too. I sat up all the way to inspect the rest of me.

That’s when I realized I was almost naked, dressed in only a skimpy top and underwear as if for sleep.

I was nearly naked and handcuffed to a bed in a dive hotel. My horror at my predicament could not be underestimated. “Claire,” I said out loud to the room at large, “you’ve finally gone and lost your mind.”

And then I laughed, though it came out as more of a hiccup. My brain was in a very strange place. Maybe even stranger than where my body was.