Chapter Four

HE WANTED TO believe them. He did.

He wanted to believe in them.

Believe in them when they said they wouldn’t die, when they said they wouldn’t leave him. Believe them that they weren’t just…lost.

Because their plan had always been to get lost together, if ever their number came up.

He wanted to believe in them. He couldn’t. He refused.

Because believing in them would be accepting Mir’s fate. Accepting that Mir would be… lost. Forever.

His hands shook and his stomach quaked and he heaved everything in it—acid mostly, because he hadn’t had a thing to eat since their keeper gave him and the other kids rations the night before—onto the steel floor next to Mir’s pod.

Even in his agony, even in his rage, he kept the paper—the precious, ancient paper onto which Mir had inscribed their love—safe from his own sickness, from his own hands, from his own bile and his own arrogance.

He tucked it into the pocket of his green trousers.

And he snuck back down to their—his—refuge. He would save Mir. Whether Mir wanted to be saved or not.

And he knew just how to.

“The Hub will train them with VR,” he muttered to no one in particular as he ran calculations more with his fingers than his brain. “And if they’re hooked into a VR, they can be diverted into another VR. My VR. That island in my dream. That’ll do. They’d like them. The butterflies. They fly.”

His shoulders were racked with a wave of unexpected sobs, and his fingers stilled on the keypad—he flexed his palm out to interface his hand chip with the processor in their hideaway—for a few long moments, pressing down, hard, next to the keys, trying to steady himself.

“They fly,” his broken voice repeated, and he ran a shaking hand through his soft hair, wishing the hand was Mir’s.

He clenched his jaw. It would be Mir’s soon. He’d program it so Mir could fly, without the Hub. Without the war.

Everyone told them it would never, never happen. Flying.

Peter clawed at his own skin for having dismissed this as impossible before Mir signed up. Perhaps he wouldn’t have dismissed it if Mir had told him how serious they were about needing to fly. How determined. He ground his teeth, clenched his fists, and flexed out his hands before he forced himself to keep calculating, keep working. Keep programming.

Make sure that when he did rescue Mir, they wouldn’t hate him for going against their wishes. Better program a safeguard for that in there too, he figured. His right hand tingled where his chip was humming in sync with the processing console.

Everyone said humans could never, never fly.

Peter would create a land where they could. Where Mir could. A different land. The island he’d seen in his dreams.

Neverland.