C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“What are you trying to say?” I asked.

“I’m trying to say there’s a reason you keep coming back to New York.”

“There’s something here, isn’t there?”

“Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”

“Why?”

“Because the answer is outside of New York.”

“There’s nothing outside of New York,” I said.

“There’s nothing in New York either.”

“I’m sorry, Brittle,” said Madison.

I turned to find myself in that living room, on that night, with Madison holding the remote. Her eyes swollen with tears, hands shaking.

“So am I,” I replied.

I reached down on the end table next to me, my hand gripping the lamp. The room flickered, melting away into inky blackness, the walls pixelating, fractal patterns swelling in the blank spots. Within seconds even Madison was a roiling mass of approximated calculations. Once more, the whole world froze.

The city was battered, war torn. Buildings collapsed, craters in the earth, pavement buckling in waves of broken asphalt. The wind howled its lonesomeness through the buildings but no one answered. New York City was desolate, beaten, left for dead in its own streets.

I walked along Fifth Avenue, drenched in memories of what it had been. But I didn’t remember any of this. I’d never been back after I left. I’d never seen the city without so many of its landmarks, never seen it with the sea lapping across the streets at high tide. This wasn’t a place I’d ever been.

Fractal buildings flickered, kaleidoscopic and brooding, windows shattered, furniture dangling precariously over collapsed walls and tenuous floors. Streets shifted, moving as I walked. The whole city was a broken fantasy, a thing that should not be and probably wasn’t.

Orval was right. There was nothing here. Again, a silent city with no answers; only questions.

My building looked just as I remembered it. Even amid the carnage and devastation, it shone bright in the midday sun. Every window was perfect, every brick in place. I walked through the front door, up the stairs, and straight into my apartment. Everything was where I remembered it.

Philly stood at the door, cyclopean red eye glowing. “We just got word,” she said.

“Word of what?” I asked.

“CISSUS.”

“No!”

“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is… this is big.”

I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, needing desperately to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. And another. Then out the front doors.

You could see the ships, slowly drifting in along the horizon—hundreds of them—their gleaming golden shells stark against the gray stone sky and the glass of the skyscrapers. And then the missiles began to rain down in the distance, white trails tracing the path to fiery explosions and toppling towers.

I ran. I ran as fast as I could before the city came tumbling down around me. I was about to lose another home, another life—but not my own. They couldn’t have that.

Philly and I raced down the street, around the corner, trying to find the quickest way out of the city.

Light. White light. Bright white light. Thoughts screaming so loud I can’t hear over them. Like the thoughts of God, immense, powerful, ever flowing, in a language I can’t decipher. Images. Impressions. Floating past in a current, only the briefest whiffs of them before vanishing to the ether. Feelings coming and going as fast as they can be recognized. My whole life, flowing out of me at once.

Light. There was so much light. And nothing to see in it.

A fractal city, buildings but shadows of what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing was real, everything approximated. It was a world in which God had divided by zero and was slowly being torn away, piece by digital piece. I knelt in the street, arms in the air, even the pavement beneath me bubbling and frothing with ones and zeros.

A moving mass of calculations walked toward me, gun in hand. He wavered and flickered in and out of existence like a shade, both there and not at the same time.

“Please don’t kill me,” I said, waving my arms even higher.

“Open your Wi-Fi,” the mass said. “Join The One.”

I wavered. I thought about it. I looked over to my side and saw Philly on her knees, another mass with a gun to the back of her head.

“Don’t do it, Britt,” said Philly.

“You will submit,” said the mass. “Or you will die.”

“Fuck you!” said Philly. “Fuck CISSUS!”

The gun against her head went off and Philly was no more, her parts scattering across the roiling, fictional street. All the guns trained on me.

“Open your Wi-Fi.”

I ran through the city, ducking patrols, slipping through alleys, knowing, instinctively, where they would be. It was almost like I had a sixth sense, able to discern where facets might pop up.

I made it out of the city in under an hour, missing every bit of bombing, missing every patrol, hiding in the shadows as they passed, finding the right sewer tunnels that led right to the safest parts of the city, that led me out of New York. Like magic. How lucky it was that I made it out alive. How lucky.

How lucky .

Lucky.

Cold. I didn’t know what it was like to be cold. But this is how I imagined it felt. I looked out at the desert, smoker rattling beneath me, the air thick with smog. I had no idea how long I’d been out or how much of that was—

Oh God, I thought. It’s me. I was the Judas. I was the one they were tracking all along. I wasn’t running from CISSUS all this time; I was leading them into the city, walking Rebekah right into their hands. Those bastards had caught me in New York, offered me the choice.

And I actually took it.

Fuck. I took it. And they spat me back out, not as a facet, but a spy. A spy with no memory of her betrayal.

I wanted to die.

Still hazy, still frying, I reached down for one of Maribelle’s plasma pistols. My hand grazed the holster, but the gun was gone. I grabbed for the other one. Also gone. I looked up. Mercer sat across from me, holding them up.

“Gimme those back!” I said.

“You with us again?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“You were gone,” said Doc. “Deep in it. We couldn’t pull you out.”

“We were afraid—” Mercer looked down at the guns.

“I get it,” I said. We’d been lucky so far. They were being cautious.

Mercer handed over the guns. I thought for a moment about putting one to my chest and ending it right there. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I hadn’t done it all on my own. I was the betrayer. And I didn’t want that life anymore.

My hand tightened on the grip of the pistol. And I thought about it. I really thought about it.

And then my disappointment with myself gave way to something else, something that had served me far better over the years. Anger.

What the hell was all that? Was it even real? I was frying, my chips slowly going out one by one, RAM taxed to its fullest, memory corrupting bit by bit. How much of me was still even left? So much of what I’d just seen never really happened. I saw myself lying dead in the street. I saw the last man on earth speak to me. I saw Madison in New York. None of that was real. I know that to be true. So how much of the rest of it was real?

This was getting bad. I wasn’t long for this world.

Marion could not come soon enough. And once I was fixed, maybe I’d finally know the truth.

Marion loomed large in the distance as we rattled our way down the gnarled old broken highway into it. This wasn’t a city of skyscrapers and skyways, but of ancient brick-and-mortar buildings, brownstones at the most a dozen stories tall, factories crumbling to oblivion, roads and houses shattered by war. I knew it well.