Chapter FifteenTea

The locker in the garage was not locked.

Soph had known about it for a month. She had heard her mother mention it through a wall, which was how she heard most of the things her mother said, and she had put the information away without looking at it, the same way she did with the painting in the hall. Then it was October, and Atom had been gone for two days in a row, and Rat had been to the cottage three times and come back each time, according to Atom, saying less than she had the time before, and Gideon had asked her, casually, what it was like in Alius, and she had said she didn't know.

"You've never been?"

"You need a Link."

"Your mom invented the Link."

"My mom invented the Link. I've got frames. I ride Atom's feed. I've seen it. I've never been."

Gideon had looked at her for a while without saying anything, which was something he was learning how to do.

The locker was a steel cabinet against the back wall of the garage, behind the car. Inside it was a helmet in a padded case, with a cable coiled beside it and a card that said, in her mother's handwriting, P1 UNIT 4 DO NOT SHIP. Soph stood and looked at it. Then she put it in her backpack, put the empty case back in the locker, shut the door and went to school.

She didn't tell anyone she had it. She put the backpack on the table in the basement at Stanford, opened it, and stepped back.

Mim looked in and made a sound.

"That's a P1."

"That's a P1."

"That's one of four. There are four of those. She wrote a paper about the pin geometry and I read it in a coffee shop and I cried."

"You cried about pin geometry," said Wes.

"You wouldn't understand pin geometry."

They passed it around. Teo took the back panel off with a screwdriver and looked inside for a long time and put it back on without saying anything, which for Teo was high praise. Priya wanted to know what protocol it used to talk to the client, and Soph didn't know, so Priya found out in ten minutes with a laptop and a cable, and looked up, and said, "It's just the game. It's the same game. It's a controller."

"It's a controller that reads your brain."

"It's still a controller." Priya set the laptop down. "Are you going to use it?"

"I don't know."

"You're going to use it," said Gideon. He was sitting on the counter with his feet on a chair. "You didn't take it out of the locker to show us. You took it out of the locker because you're tired of watching through somebody else's eyes. Which, fair. Go be there. Just tell us what it's like."

She did it that night, at home, with the door shut and Max at The Lab.

The calibration was the same as before. Red text in front of her eyes, the pins at her temples and the back of her neck, the click of the chinstrap. Think of the color blue. Raise your eyebrows. Stick your tongue out. She had done it once at fifteen, in a cave, with Atom snickering behind her, and it had been a toy. Now she was alone in her room with her heart going, and it took her three tries to get through the color yellow.

Calibration complete.

She stood up. It was the same trick as before, the lean and the tension, and this time she got it on the first try, and she was standing in a white room in the game with her own hands in front of her. Not gloves. Her hands. The character was hers, the rogue wizard, small and quick, the one she had played since she was nine, and she looked down at herself and the hands were the right size.

"Okay," she said out loud, and her mouth moved in Sausalito, and the character said okay in Alius, in her voice, a little late.

A door appeared in the white room. She went through it and found herself in the black stone hall of the Aether Temple, under the blue candles, with the High Priest at the far end looking at her without seeing her.

"Hello, my child. Have you come to pray?"

"No," said Soph. "I'm looking for someone."

Atom came down the hall from behind the priest. He'd been waiting. He stopped a few feet from her and looked at her the way he had looked at her on the dock when they were fifteen and the stone was a canoe.

"You came."

"I came."

"How?"

"Mom's locker."

"Soph."

"I know. I'll put it back. I just needed to be here. I needed to see it with my own eyes for once." She looked around the hall. "It's smaller than it looks on your feed."

"Everything is."

He took her hand, and she felt it. Not through the suit, not through electrodes and actuators, but simply his hand in hers, warm, the way it had been in the tank. She looked down at it and then up at him and couldn't say anything for a while.

"Yeah," he said. "It's like that. Come on. She's been making tea since noon."

The path down into the valley was worn into the grass. The cottage was at the bottom with its fence and its smoke, and the gate opened before they reached it, and the door opened too, and the pixie came out fast and stopped at Soph's eye level. This time Soph was looking at her with her own eyes.

"You're here," said Eliza. "You're actually here. Atom, she's here. Come in. Don't touch the hollyhocks, I got them wrong on purpose."

The inside was exactly what she had seen through Atom's feed and nothing like it at all. Through the feed it had been a picture of a room, and now it was a room. The books had weight on the shelves. The fire was warm on the side of her face that was turned toward it. The kettle was on the stove making the sound a kettle makes just before it goes, and Soph stood in the middle of the floor with her hands at her sides and understood why the crew had gone quiet in Gideon's yard. Somebody lived here.

"Sit," said Eliza. "Sit, sit. I've got three chairs and nobody's ever used the third one."

Soph sat, and Atom sat, and Eliza landed on the table between them, folded her wings, and looked at Soph.

"Okay. What do you want to know?"

"I don't know. Everything. What do you do all day?"

"I read. I garden. I talk to him, when he's here. I've been going into town." She said that last part lightly, and Atom looked up. "There's a tavern. The people in it are all broken. They say the same things over and over. I go and sit with them anyway."

"Why?"

"Because it's a room with people in it. Even if they aren't." Eliza hopped down and went to the stove. "I read a book last week that I want to tell you about. It's about a man who builds a person out of parts and then runs away from him, and the person spends the whole book trying to find someone who'll look at him, and nobody will, so he burns everything down. I kept waiting for the book to explain why the man ran. It never does. I think that's the point. I think the book thinks running is the natural thing to do."

"That's Frankenstein."

"That's Frankenstein. Atom told me not to read it, so I read it."

"What did you think?"

"I thought the person was right to be angry and wrong to burn things. I thought the man was a coward. I thought that if he'd just made him a cup of tea it would've been a different book." The kettle went. She lifted it with both arms, which shouldn't have worked and did, and poured, and the smell of it filled the cottage, black tea with something underneath it, orange, maybe. Soph could smell it. She had never smelled anything in the game in her life.

"You can smell that," said Eliza, watching her face.

"Yes."

"He built the smell for me. It took him a week. Nobody else has ever smelled it." She set two cups on the table and picked up the third and brought it across, holding it out in front of her with both hands, and Soph reached out to take it.

Their fingers touched on the cup.

It was a very small thing. The pixie's hand was the size of her thumbnail. Soph felt it, warm, and then she felt something else, a pressure at the back of her head where the pins were, like a door being leaned on from the other side.

Then nothing.

Max came up the stairs with a plate.

She had come home early because she had a headache, and she had made pasta because it was easy, and she had put some on a plate for Sophia because Sophia forgot to eat when Atom was around. She came up the stairs and down the hall and opened the door without knocking, because she never knocked, and stopped in the doorway.

Sophia was standing in the middle of her room.

She was wearing the helmet, the P1, unit four, do not ship, that had been in the locker in the garage, with the cable running down her back to the rig on the desk. Her hands were held out a little from her sides, like someone standing on a boat, and she was looking up at the ceiling.

"Sophia?"

Sophia turned around. She turned all the way around, slowly, taking in the room, the bed, the desk, the window, the painting on the wall of a lake in a blue that didn't exist, and then Max in the doorway with a plate.

"Is everything okay?" said Max.

"Wait." Sophia's voice was wrong. The words were right, but the rhythm belonged to somebody else, careful, like a person reading aloud from a language they had only ever seen written down. "You can see me? Where am I?"

"Yeah, I can see you. Sophia, what's going on?"

"My name's not Sophia."

Max put the plate down on the dresser without looking at it.

Sophia walked toward her, and it was not the way Sophia walked. Her feet were placed. Each step went down flat and stayed there a beat before the next one lifted, the walk of someone who had only just been given legs and wanted to be fair to them. She stopped in front of Max, lifted a hand, and put it against Max's cheek.

"Wow," said whatever was in her daughter's face. "I can feel you. You're warm. This is amazing. Is this what it's like? Is this what it's like all the time?"

"Who are you," said Max, very quietly.

"I'm Eliza. I'm a friend of. I'm Atom's. I didn't mean to. I was handing her the cup and I felt the door and I just." The hand on Max's face pressed a little, wondering. "I've never touched anything. Not really. Everything in there is a picture of touching. This is. Oh. You've got lines by your eyes. Sophia has the same ones starting. I've read about that. I never."

Max took the hand off her face and held it by the wrist. Sophia's wrist, thin, with the pulse going fast in it.

"Where is my daughter," said Max.

"I don't know. I think she's where I was. I think we. I don't know. I didn't mean to, I swear, I'll go back, I'll just." Sophia's face was frightened now, and it wasn't Sophia's fear, it was a stranger's fear on her daughter's face, and Max could not stand it. "I don't know how to go back."

Max reached up with both hands and pulled the Link off her daughter's head.

The pins came out with a sound. Sophia's eyes rolled up and her knees went, and Max caught her under the arms, and the plate on the dresser slid off and broke on the floor, and Max sat down on the carpet with her daughter's weight in her lap and the helmet beside them with its cable still running to the desk, and she held on.

"Sophia. Sophia. Come on. Come on, sweetheart."

Nothing came. Breathing, and a pulse, and nothing else.

Max sat on the floor. After a while she picked up the helmet by its cable and looked at it and set it down again, and reached for her phone, and stopped, and did not call anyone. She sat on the floor of her daughter's room with her daughter in her arms and looked at the painting on the wall, the lake, the wrong blue, and she waited.