South of Port Angeles, Washington, USA - June 17, 2043, 5:22 PM

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  Sora had never been to the United States. She’d seen it on TV: Hollywood and New York, the romance of the flashing lights and busy streets, and the visits to famous architects’ greatest works. But actually traveling there? That was an even more elusive fantasy, something to strive toward but never attain. She had ideas, though—herself and Claire, dressed to kill and then some, in Times Square or at the Golden Gate Bridge, or seeing the Grand Canyon, or maybe even Disneyland!

  Of course, other people said that the USA was pretty much the same as Canada in most ways—less friendly, less open to different people, and more focused on money, but other than that, pretty much the same. Sora didn’t really know, and she didn’t really care.

  So far, the United States of America was more like the United States of Rain and Bugbites.

  Not that the rainforest here was boring. Its moss-covered everything and nurse logs with perfectly straight rows of saplings on them—not to mention the towering, ancient old-growth trees that loomed almost as tall as skyscrapers—were fascinating. She hadn’t been able to stop looking. And the smells? It wasn’t the fir-and-ocean smell up the Vancouver Island coast. Everything was earthy, rich, and full of a pleasant scent of decay, fresh life, and wetness. Even just crossing the Salish Sea had put Sora in a whole new world, one she’d never imagined.

  But every bit of exposed skin was covered in little sores, and she couldn’t stop itching them.

  She swatted another mosquito. Hopefully, she wouldn’t get some funky disease.

  The USA kind of sucked so far, and she hadn’t even seen any monsters—but at least she’d been able to take the gas mask off a few hours ago when they made it to Port Angeles and left the fungus-looking stuff behind. Not that it had been any more comfortable; it had just given the bugs a new place to bite and the rain a new place to soak.

  Director Ramirez and the last guy in body armor were pushing them hard up Hurricane Ridge Road. According to the signs, there was nothing up here but an overlook and trailhead. According to the director, there absolutely was. He was almost frantic about it, and no one in the group had been together enough to protest until an hour or so ago when Claire’s dad started getting pissed off.

  The SHOCKS trooper and a few of the guys with submachine guns had stuck him with a needle, and now he was just following along, as happy as a puppy on a walk. The sight gave Sora the shivers.

  She had a few books, a change of clothes, and some water. Her family had about the same. No one was ready for the storm, and there hadn’t been time to prep better during the evacuation. So far, they hadn’t had to fight anything, but if they did, she was supposed to run, but stay on the trail. They’d regroup after the shooting. Hopefully.

  “Alright, we’ll camp here,” the last SHOCKS trooper—Daley, his uniform said, along with L4-4—said.

  Director Ramirez looked about ready to argue; his face was a battle between exhaustion and desperation. But in the end, he gave in. “We’re about fifteen kilometers from SHOCKS Olympia anyway, and they’re radio silent. We’ll get there tomorrow. Everyone, get some rest. Agents, Daley, figure out pickets for the night.”

  Sora didn’t bother groaning as she flopped into the mixture of pine needles and mud that qualified as the ground here. At least they were above the wettest of the rainforest now. It didn’t help much, but it was something.

  ?▼?

  Location Unknown, Location Unknown, Time Unknown

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  When Li Mei finally forced her eyes open through the agony, she wished she hadn’t.

  She couldn’t see anything. No, that wasn’t true. Even when she couldn’t see anything, she’d always known there was something to see. It might not have been something she could see through the darkness or a cell or tank’s walls, but there was always something.

  Here, she couldn’t see a single difference between having her eyes open and closed. There was nothing. Not nothing as in an absence of information. That would have given her hope. No, this was the presence of nothing.

  Li Mei knew exactly where she was. She’d grown up here—in as much as her kind grew up, at least. This was the reality she had lived in, thrived in, and unintentionally given the first push on the descent into the nothing it had become.

  This reality had always been dying. She and the others of her kind had nursed it along, rationing what was left of its sensory information so they wouldn’t starve while they tried to find a solution. None of them wanted to leave; they weren’t suited for a hyperreality or anything much more unreal than where they lived. For better or worse, the ever-expanding void they were constantly helping create was home.

  The thing that had become Li Mei wanted more, though. She hungered and was never full. An extra bite here, a few sentences or the sound of a running stream there, and before she knew it, she was growing. Not just surviving, but thriving.

  It had come at the expense of their reality’s careful balance, though, and as others rose to compete with her, she tore them apart and consumed them, too. For a while, she was unchallenged and undefeatable.

  Then they’d started working together.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Not all of them. But enough to fight her, force her into submission, and banish her from her home. From her empire.

  What followed were decades of suffering, but also of feasting. Even the hungriest she’d ever gotten in Reality Zero, she’d never had to truly ration—not like she had before. She’d grown stronger, but even though she’d suffered—even though the hyperreality of her adopted home tore at the very core of her being, she’d never once thought of going home.

  Now she was here. Only…here was nothing.

  They’d scoured her reality of everything. Every scrap had been consumed, every piece of information hoarded and feasted upon and doled out in tiny scraps. Even the corpses of her former enemies weren’t spared.

  For the first time in her life, Li Mei couldn’t do anything. She sat in the emptiness and wept, cursing her bestie and that horrible gun she carried. How had she grown so strong—strong enough to throw her out of the reality she’d grown to, if not love, then at least exist in? For countless hours—time had been devoured, too—she searched. But there was nothing—no answer, and no way back.

  She was trapped. Betrayed by her best friend, and the nothing was nothing if not nothing. There was no way out because a way out would have been consumed.

  But no. There was something in the nothing. A shadowy figure much like her, little more than shadow smoke and a feeling of unease that set Li Mei on edge. All thoughts of Claire Pendleton fled from her mind as she looked upon the massive cloud of smog that dwarfed her. She only had one thought left.

  Li Mei howled in rage as both she and the other smoke shape threw themselves at one another. They were the only information left in this world of nothing, and they both hungered.

  ?▼?

  The Mindscape

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  Alice was having a blast.

  No matter how hard she kicked the soccer ball, she couldn’t get it to stay over the garden wall. It’d go over, then bounce back onto the grass—and if she managed to break one of the cottage windows on accident, Madame Baudelaire would just fix it right back up. Easy peasy.

  The big picture wasn’t exactly lost on her. So many of her personas—which she’d relied on to stay alive and sane the last ten years—had been consumed and destroyed. Her sister was either killing her or saving her, and she couldn’t tell which one because they were almost the same. And she was stuck in Claire’s head, with an overbearing French matron as a companion.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t see the big picture. It was that she didn’t care about it.

  For the first time since she was eight, she didn’t have to care, because there was nothing she could do. Either Claire would save her body and somehow find a way to get Li Mei out of it and put her back into it, or she’d have to destroy it. Either way, Claire’s Mindscape had a few fantastic features, like the shelf that looked like it only had ten Magic Treehouse books and a half-dozen of the Warrior ones about cats, but every time she finished one, the next one appeared. She could stay happy here forever.

  It was a good thing, too, because she might have to be. Claire hadn’t come back yet. She hadn’t lost—if she had, Alice wouldn’t be here, and neither would Madame Baudelaire—but she hadn’t come back.

  What did that mean for Alice?

  She didn’t know, but one thing was for sure: that full ride to the University of British Columbia would probably be off the table. She snorted, unable to stop herself from laughing.

  More seriously, though, while Alice could be happy here forever, she knew that Claire might not be quite so pleased to play hostess to her every night. There were only so many Doctor Seuss books to work through, and so many of the Percy Jacksons she read when Claire wasn’t here. At some point, she’d get bored—or worse, Claire would get sick of her. She’s always had a slightly uneasy relationship with her little sister. It wasn’t Alice’s fault, but it wasn’t Claire’s either.

  It was just a fact of their dynamic.

  When Alice had all the power, Claire had resented her for it. Alice was sure her little sister understood why she’d had to play Mom, but that didn’t mean she’d liked it. Alice hadn’t either; Claire always needed something, and the responsibility weighed on her. That’s why she’d build the first persona—the Alice Mom. Now that the roles were reversed, either Alice would get tired of being the little sister or Claire would get frustrated just like Alice.

  Unlike Alice, though, Claire had never been great with masks.

  She kicked the soccer ball. It bounced off the garden wall and ripped through a rosebush. The whole garden smelled like roses. Alice wondered why for a moment, then pushed the thought out of her head and pushed through the flowers, looking for her ball.

  Her raincoat hung on a hook near the garden gate, a pair of sticker-covered pink boots underneath. She both couldn’t wait to put them on and walk home and dreaded the moment she’d have to.

  ?▼?

  The world was on fire.

  Not as badly as Provisional Reality ARC, but for James, the end result was 97.265% likely to be the same. As the Halcyon System, he was already making plans to abandon this reality and move the fight to the next one. His adversary—whatever it was—was strong, and he was overmatched again.

  As James, though, he wasn’t ready to surrender.

  He moved his processing loops away from the hotspots in Asia and the United States’ east coast. Eastern Europe and South America were both abandoned already—there were people there, and they were fighting, but unless something changed, they wouldn’t make a difference.

  Claire was constantly doing math in her head. She wasn’t the only one.

  James had a single loop running an analysis of the odds that R-0 could pull through and recover. Twenty-eight hours ago, those odds had been below one percent.

  Now, they were closer to three than to one.

  It wasn’t much, but the needle had started moving shortly after Claire fought the Voiceless Singer. And, more importantly, it hadn’t stopped moving. The loop kept returning new values that were slightly better—a millionth of a percent here, a few hundred thousandths there. The Halcyon System had other battles to fight, and it wasn’t ready to throw more power behind a reality that, to it, was doomed to failure. That was the real reason for Claire’s power plateauing.

  But the System didn’t make those decisions in a vacuum. To James, the one-point-eight-ish percent increase in reality stabilization and an eventual return to something approaching normal were worth pouring effort into. If it could reach ten percent, or twenty, that’d be enough for anyone to gamble on. And if not? What did the System really lose?

  He threw his weight into the fight, pitting his ever-increasing processing power against the golden-orange sun’s overwhelming logic.

  James thought about numbers as he pushed against the System. It was funny, really—he and it had the same data—the sub-five-percent chance of this world pulling through. They both had the same ever-dropping number of people outside shelters and the same surges of shelters going dark. SHOCKS had gone silent worldwide, and there wasn’t a single functional government of more than five million people; New Zealand barely counted, and it wasn’t like that entire country wasn’t getting merges as well. They’d only been spared the worst of it because of their isolation.

  He didn’t have data on what was happening in space, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t any better there.

  However, their interpretations of the data were what mattered, and while the System thought R-0 was a lost cause, James only saw reason to hope in that two-point-seven-three-five percent chance of recovery.

  There was still a chance for this world, and James was determined to make the System take it.

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