A FEW BLOCKS FROM Mason’s street I find a taxi rank with a row of bench chairs under a shade canopy. Two women are sitting, fanning themselves with their hands. The taxi request post is glowing amber, which means a bit of a wait.
I wheel my bike to the far end of the bench and sit next to it. This is as good a place as anywhere to work out what Boc’s been doing. I already have him tagged so that I can check his movements quickly. I’ve only just brought up his dot on the grid when there’s a clunk from one of the buildings behind us. A slow beeping alarm sounds from a local produce market across the street.
Frustration burns and my hands drop. Right now, I’m meant to be with Mason. I’ll suggest that we skip through the worst of the heat then we’ll end up on the roof together, lying side by side as we gaze into a sky that never ends, talking about the never-ending lifespan of starlight …
But I push all that out of my mind. Unless I deal with Boc, I’ll never be free.
One of the women stands and does a quarter-turn, shielding her eyes from the sun.
‘Blackout, you think?’ barks the other woman. She starts swiping the request sensor over and over. As if that’s going to make any difference.
My compad beeps.
‘Where are you?’ Mum asks as soon as I answer.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. On my way home. That’s what she wants me to say, but I can’t tell her that. Blackout or no blackout, I need to deal with Boc as fast as I can. Holding my breath, I slink away from the bench seats in case Mum hears the women in the background.
‘I’m at Mason’s,’ I finish, and bite my lip. That’s what I told her last time. The alarm is still going across the street but it’s a low tone. I’m not sure if she can hear it.
‘They’re saying it’s almost the whole city,’ comes Mum’s voice.
‘Fantastic.’ Don’t think she can.
‘Might take them a while to fix this one, so I want you to stay put. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Can I speak to Mason’s mum or dad?’
I glance at the women. ‘They’re not here.’
‘Ask them to call me when they get in?’
‘Yep.’
‘And stay inside, all right? Bad things happen when there’s a blackout.’
Almost as confirmation, there’s a jolt in the smartcars on the road in front of us as they move into a single lane and an ambulance streaks past.
I take another step back from the noise of the road. ‘Mum, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’
‘All right.’ She seems distracted. Then, clearer, she says, ‘Bye, sweetheart.’ The screen switches to red as she signs off.
‘Hey, you okay?’ One of the women has been waiting for me to finish on the phone. ‘Need help getting home?’
If she knew I was illegal there’s no way she’d be saying that. I shake my head, and then nod at my bike resting against the bench. ‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’
The women head off together on foot, giving up on a taxi, so I’m left on my own. Just me, the lunatic traffic and the alarms.
The whole city tends to go stir-crazy during a blackout, partly because the water swipers go into lockdown at the same time. But for me they’re not so bad. Most of my life I’ve haven’t had access to rations, so it’s just business as usual. And I can always get water from the cave in the park.
I pull up Boc’s worm on the grid in real time. He made it home about ten minutes after leaving us. I’m pretty sure he went straight to his comscreen, at least he was just sitting in the one spot for another ten minutes, so I hack straight in and find a terminal with co-ordinates on the grid that match Boc’s location.
It’s offline right now, but when I track back to the past few days, I’m able to patch in and see exactly what Boc was doing.
My heart stills when I see. It’s exactly what I feared: he’s been all over my history map, inching his way through each of my visits to Mason’s garage and also while I was at home. Even the tag Boc used makes me wary: ‘CR’. Just my initials, like I’m a science experiment or something.
I’m not sure how close he is to figuring me out, but just the fact that he’s watching makes me feel like a hunted animal. I drop the compad in my lap and look up to the sky, trying to decide what to do. Heat shimmers in the air around the edge of the canopy of the taxi shelter. If he hasn’t worked out yet that I’m illegal, he’s not far off.
That means it’s him or me.
All around me is movement; people hurrying along the footpath, another ambulance screaming past, lights flashing. I check the map, stash the compad and hook my backpack over a shoulder.
There’s no way my set-up is going to work unless Boc knows how to jump. I can’t hang around any longer, waiting for him to learn.
I have to teach him how to skip.
Boc’s house is walking distance from Mason’s so it takes only a few minutes to get there. When I’m a few doors away, I stop riding and put one foot down on the gravel while I check the grid. Boc has moved about a metre sideways away from his comscreen. Probably sitting on his bed and using his compad is my guess. No-one else is home.
Good. I pull into his drive without pausing and stash the bike beside their front deck. Boc’s house is even more flash than Mason’s. An external elevator waits beside the driveway, ready to take people up the next two floors.
I suck in a breath, and push it out hard. The air is warm in my lungs. Wiping my hands on my shorts, I step right up to the front door and swipe the entrypad with the chip pressed between my middle finger and palm.
Silence. Nothing moves. But he must have heard. Right now, he would be checking the screen, trying to understand why I’m here. In my mind I go over the words I’ve been practising.
Without warning, the door slips up soundlessly. It’s one of those mod ones that go up rather than sideways and the novelty of it catches me. Just for a moment. The house must be fitted with its own solar batteries for it still to be working in the blackout.
My focus narrows on Boc’s dark eyes, the broad angles of his face. His forehead creases and he crosses his arms, but I sense doubt about him, confusion. He has no idea why I’m here.
‘Hi. I just had a thought.’ I cross my arms too. Cool air wafts out in waves, still holding back the heat despite the blackout. ‘You still haven’t learnt how to time skip, right? I think I know why you’re having trouble. I’ll help you, if you want.’
I’m careful with the words I use; brushing past the idea that he’s a slow learner. I’m pressing on a sore spot without digging in. I know Boc hates that Mason learnt to skip before him.
His arms loosen, but then his jaw goes hard. He’s interested, I can tell. I’ve hit the right nerve.
‘Okay, I guess …’ His face changes. ‘Where’s Mase?’
A glance over my shoulder, buying time to think. ‘Yeah … the blackout. Don’t think he was keen to come out.’
That’s pretty much true for every citizen, almost a non-answer, but it seems to satisfy him.
‘Yeah. Sucks, eh?’ Boc’s top lip curls up and my heart accelerates. Was that about the blackout, or has he already worked me out?
I take a breath and push it back down. Unless Boc already knows my secret, this might be my last chance to push him off the scent. Acting like I have something to hide is only going to make him more wary.
‘So, what do you think?’ Somehow I find a smile, my eyebrows tight and too high. ‘Do you want to hear my idea?’
Boc steps back and motions me further into the house. ‘Sure. I’ll take all the help I can get.’
My skin gets a chill from the cool air as soon as I get inside. I wonder how much juice is left in the batteries.
A massive portrait takes up half the wall in the entrance hall, showing a man in a royal-blue air-force uniform and standing in front of a huge aeroplane propeller. His dad, I guess. I can see where Boc gets his size from.
The place isn’t as grand as I was expecting but you can tell that everything is top spec. It’s as if Boc’s family is so insanely rich they don’t even need to show it off. The living space is wide and open with walls that I’m pretty sure are movable. Judging from the number of swipe pads around, I get the feeling this place is wired to the max.
We end up in a sitting area to one side of the main living space. The comscreen is huge, taking up an entire wall. A joystick sits beside one of the chairs and a weirdly shaped mouse with a ton of buttons and spinners is resting on a table.
I look at Boc. ‘You into gaming?’
‘Yeah. You?’
‘A bit … not really.’ Those kinds of hand controllers are only used for serious gaming and stuff that needs a high level of accuracy, so he must be pretty into it. Most people wouldn’t even know how to use them.
‘Check it out.’ Boc chucks the controller at me as I fumble and just manage to catch it. ‘Bit different from your time, eh? Around the thirties, right?’
It’s the era I would have grown up in, if I were the woman from the cave. ‘Yeah, they were nothing like this.’ But I’m watching him as I answer. Does Boc still believe I was born in 2024?
‘So.’ I flip the controller over in my hand, spinning one of the side wheels. ‘Maybe we can use this for time skipping. Do you know any games where your character can disappear and return again?’
‘Sure. Most of them. When you die you usually revert to an earlier point in the game.’
Like whatever happened to me.
‘Okay …’ Thinking fast, I bring myself back. I was mostly planning to wing it when I taught him to skip, but this could work. ‘And you would use a hand signal to make it happen? Or maybe a button on the controller?’
Boc positions himself on the arm of a chair. ‘I see where this is going,’ he says. ‘Use some sort of cue, like a trigger to make it happen.’
‘Do you want to give it a go? Once you learn there’ll be no stopping you. It’s awesome, it really is.’ I spin a wheel on the controller as I chat. ‘You won’t believe the way it feels.’
I’m trying to get to him. The more he worries about being slow at learning to skip, the less he’ll worry about whatever he was noticing on the grid. At least that’s what I’m hoping.
There’s no sound from Boc and even though I try to stay focused on the controller, after a while I can’t help glancing up at him.
Boc leans forwards and considers me. Nothing about him seems even close to wanting to learn how to skip.
‘There’s one thing I don’t get,’ he says slowly. ‘Last I heard, you didn’t want to skip with other people around. Couldn’t do it, was what Mase told me.’
He crosses his arms, his chest expanding and I fight the urge to step back. How does he do that? Make me feel smaller, somehow, with one glance?
‘You went months without trying, even though we begged you to show us. And now, you do … what, fifty jumps in two weeks?’
I chuck the controller back on the coffee table. ‘After I got to know Mason better, it was easier to skip with someone else around. And it’s been good to train with someone, learn how to synch our returns.’
I’m back in the role I haven’t played for a while, a mash-up of the woman in the cave combined with the real me. ‘We’re both so much sharper these days,’ I finish. ‘You’ll be able to do it too, once you learn …’
‘You and Mase, eh? No wonder I’ve barely seen him.’ Boc stands and crosses his arms, his chest expanding. ‘Show me.’
I blink, swallow and try to recover. ‘Here?’
Boc cocks one eyebrow. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to check you out. I just want to see that you can really do it.’
Trying not to make it obvious, I scan the room. I can’t see any compads in easy reach, the comscreen is on standby. But I’m not sure anymore who’s setting up who. Is he planning to check the grid while I’m gone? See once and for all that the chip stays here, the worm unbroken?
‘But you’ve been watching the grid, right?’ I try. I’m skating close to a dangerous truth, but what other choice do I have? I need to work out how much Boc already knows. ‘You would have seen me jump already –’
His chest broadens, preparing for a stand-off. ‘Yeah, that’s the thing. There’s something weird going on. I thought maybe one of you was adding the gaps, trying to rub it in that I can’t skip. Make it seem like you were jumping together when you were just watching …’
‘Dude,’ I say, forcing a laugh that starts too high before I tone it down. ‘Paranoid much?’ He’s close to working me out, but the fake gaps seem to have thrown him off track, at least. He’s so focused on the fact that he can’t skip that he’s let it get in the way of thinking clearly.
And I have to keep it that way.
I pull myself tall, scan the room and settle on an armchair with a high back. I’ll do a series of quick jumps, keep him busy watching me disappear and return. That way, he won’t have enough time to check the grid between returns.
‘Okay.’ I slip behind the chair but stay standing on purpose to throw him. ‘I’ll do three in a row. Five seconds each.’
I position my feet, breathe in and close my eyes, but all I can think is that Boc is standing right in front of me. His presence is a spotlight on my mind. The longer I stand here, the hotter my memories burn. You’re under arrest by order of federal law. Anything you say may be used against you …
Mum’s forehead quivering as she realised I was about to jump ten years into the future.
Acting as if this is just part of the process, I shake my head free of the memories and reposition my feet. Can’t help stealing a glance towards Boc while I do.
One corner of his mouth has lifted as if he’s watching a good movie. He’s enjoying this. I force myself to smile back at his smarmy face. Patience.
I have to get it over with, so I do a half-turn and stop so that I’m facing the clean white wall. My back is turned to Boc, shutting him out. I reposition my feet.
I drop into a series of three quick skips.
The white wall in Boc’s gaming room is all I find as the lingering cool hits my skin. It adds a delicious chill to the tingles. The rush lifts me taller, my limbs somehow stronger. I don’t bother to turn, just take my time pulling on clothes and checking that the chip is still there.
I can use the calmness to challenge him too.
Finally, when I’m ready, I step away from the armchair. Boc’s at the other side of the room. It’s as if he was checking from all angles, trying to get his head around all he was seeing.
‘Holy crap. That was full on. Mase has been trying to control the timing of his return within thirty seconds, and hardly managing that. But you just landed three in a row, five seconds each, like exact to the second.’ His whole body has morphed while I was gone. He’s energised now. Excited.
‘Yup.’ I smile, genuinely this time. I’ve got him. ‘So you believe me now?’
‘Frig. Yeah.’
‘I think I’ve realised what you were seeing on the grid,’ I say evenly. The skips have helped me too. They’ve cleared the fear, sharpened my senses.
I lift my arm, presenting the fake make-up scar. ‘My chip is old tech. It’s been causing a heap of problems. Lots of glitchy stuff.’
‘For real?’ Boc’s eyebrows go up, but everything about him is different now. His face has relaxed. The mistrust has evaporated. ‘You should get it updated.’
‘I know. I just don’t want to deal with the authorities, you know? Can’t draw too much attention to myself. They might ask questions I don’t want to answer when they see how old it is.’
‘Right, of course.’ He’s swallowing this down, an explanation for all his question marks. ‘Well, my family might be able to help with that if you need.’
‘Yeah?’ He’s acting all generous, but he doesn’t fool me. There’s no way he’d be offering to help if he knew who I really was. ‘I mean … thanks. That’s great. I’ll have a think about it.’ Whatever. Super casual.
I force another smile. ‘First, let’s teach you to skip.’