The greatestunreality of all.
With a violent inward jolt, the realization parachuted through my head and landed right in the middle of my consciousness. Yes, the world was made of many worlds, but not all of them werereal.
Beneath my feet the earth shuddered, and although it was too dark to see, I could feel the particles of sand trickling downward as if through an invisible hourglass. And I was slipping through with them, falling and screaming and flailing for purchase, for something to hold on to. But there was nothing to grasp, nothing solid or touchable. Nothing real.
There was just the image of him, Kai, a kaleidoscope of memories flashing behind my closed eyelids, and a single, meandering thought:Forgive me.
Chapter Sixteen
When I opened my eyes again, it was day, and I was back where it had all begun. Arcade Street, standing in the middle of the road below my building, which was the only recognizable landmark left around me.
The street, lightless and disfigured by thick clumps of fog, stretched anonymously into the desolate distance, while the sky above was barely visible through the tightly woven network of wires. As far as the eye could see, a mesh of multicolored electrodes blocked the sky, the light filtering through fragmented and faint.
When I looked down, I was also startled to discover that my jeans, sweater, and sneakers had been exchanged for white ballerina flats and a billowy yellow dress with smiling daisies decorating the hem around the knees.
“Is this a dream?” I asked no one but myself, and it was with a shock I realized I had never dreamt before.
Every night I closed my eyes and experienced a moment of nothingness, of pure, undisturbed peace, before I was plunged back into reality. Unless I was seeing it all wrong. Unless this was reality and everything else had been the dream.
Existentially confused, I walked down the deserted street, passing through walls of mist and feeling increasingly frightened by the extent of my aloneness.
Where had the world gone? Where was everyone?
One brutal wave of panic lapped over the other, pulling me down into a cold black void, like I was in the ocean again. Or perhaps I had never left it. Perhaps I was still there, drowning, and if I fought against the pressure hard enough, then my head would finally break the surface and I would flounder back into Kai’s arms.
“Kai?” I pleaded as I forced myself to move, to run, to look for him. “Kai?”
A wet-salt taste covered my mouth, and I realized that I was sobbing—sobbing so inconsolably that even the sound of my shoes hitting the asphalt was inaudible over the wounded sounds escaping my chest.
“Hello?” I choked out, roughly wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Is there anyone here?”
Feet stuttering, I crashed to my hands and knees. A sharp jolt of pain spiraled through me, and as I rubbed pebbles off my scratched palms, I noticed that the skin of my knees had peeled back and two identical gashes were leaking blood down my calves.
Bile welled up my throat, but I shut my eyes and forced myself to scream again for help, for Kai, for anyone. But there was no one to answer me. No one and nothing. Just the enormity of my confusion and the severe disfigurement of my thoughts.
Then a voice. A tiny, girly voice. “Anya?”
Blinking the tears from my eyes, I glanced up. There she was. A little girl, no older than ten, moving laboriously through the vapor towards me. She was dressed as I was. A yellow dress with smiling daisies along the hemline, only that hers was dirtied and bloodied from the various scrapes on her skeletal legs and arms, which were the least of her injuries.
Her face, delicate and pallid as a doll’s, was bruised along her temples, and one of her large blue eyes was completely shut, the skin around it puffy and purple. There was an open gash on her forehead too, oozing pus and blood, her black hair matted down from it, sticking to her like a second layer of skin.
I watched her, dazed, head and heart and bones ringing as she bent over me, her little hand cupping the damp side of my cheek. “Why are you crying, Anya?” she asked me, steady and unblinking and cold as a corpse. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“Who…” I heaved, fear yanking through me. “Who are you?”
Creakily, she cocked her little wounded head to the side, her one perfect eye narrowing. “You know who I am,” she said, her voice lower now, older, familiar. “I’m the one you deleted.”
Terrified, I scrambled back on the asphalt. She stayed as she was, tangled in mists, her yellow dress swaying eerily in the wind.
Again I looked at her, her black hair, her blue eyes, her perpetually sad eyebrows, and felt something inside me crack. Break irreversibly.
“No,” I cried out, rapidly shaking my head.
“Don’t cry, Anya,” she cooed, her face splitting into a huge smile, revealing a set of small bloodied teeth. “This is what you wanted.”
“No!” I screamed at her. “This isn’t what I wanted!”
Pushing off the ground, I charged down the street, the world around me growing fuzzy, pixelated, spinning into a limitless network of wires, while she, the other, haunted me still. No matter how fast or far I ran, I could not escape her. This was her world, and I was a mere prisoner in it.
