“Sometimes the body appears separate from the consciousness, which is bad. It looks dead, and you see it, and that’s upsetting. But in body dislocation, the consciousness hits the body imperfectly, and the brain has to interpret seeing not out of the eyes, but out of the chin, or the chest, or the hand. The mind can’t handle it, and it instantly rearranges the body. Arms become heads, feet become knees. Proprioception completely fails. It results in extreme vertigo and is apparently extremely unsettling.” He said this like he wasn’t describing my friend who was vomiting up his entire body a half hour ago.

“The first sign that something is wrong is when the blood pressure and heart rate spike, but it all happens so quickly that by the time we read the reaction and begin shutting down the software, the psychological impact is done. It’s really terrible. I’m very happy it didn’t happen to you.”

He seemed sincere, but remembering my commitment to myself, I stayed quiet.

Peter Petrawicki stayed quiet too.

He was quiet for a long time.

I was quiet for longer.

“You were right yesterday,” he said finally. “That’s why I got angry. People in this company have seen me that angry only a handful of times. But I had no right to be upset. I thought I was going to send you home. But I was up all night thinking about what you said. I went through it word for word.”

I later found out this was true. Altus recorded pretty much everything that happened without anyone knowing. There was no law against it in Val Verde.

“I was pitiable. I was pathetic. I was chasing something so deeply boring and insular. And you’re right, I was just going where the wind was blowing. I was chasing attention. I never really cared about Carl, I cared about getting attention so I could leverage it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting capital for capital’s sake, but it isn’t interesting. It’s not like what we’re doing here.”

“No, it’s nothing like what you’re doing here,” I agreed.

“The world is a mess right now, and we’re going to fix it. People can’t live without the Dream anymore, but we can bring it back, except better.” He shook his clenched fists a little as he said it.

For one glistening moment, I had been a believer, and then I had seen Paxton. They certainly weren’t advertising body dislocation in the orientation pamphlets.

“Will it happen to him every time he goes to the Space?” I asked, suddenly worried about Paxton.

He looked at me for a long time and then said, “Can I trust you?”

I mean, obviously not. He should know that, right?

“Sure, I’m here for twelve months. Who am I going to tell?”

He looked at me really hard, like he wanted me to believe he was a mind reader.

“It will happen every time he tries, though he probably will not try again.”

“Could it happen to me?”

“Body dislocation? No. As far as we can tell, once you have occupied your body in the Space once, you will always do it successfully. Your mind knows what to expect.”

“And I work here now?”

“You work here now, though I hope that you understand that we’re going to monitor you closely. You’re a security risk.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went on national TV and outed your friend as a bisexual because it would win me points. You should hate me. Whether or not you do, I can’t tell. We want you to work here, but we don’t trust you. Don’t be too hurt, we don’t trust anyone.”

It was telling that he had taken responsibility for the thing he did, outing April. But he did not mention the things done in his name. This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just “unstable” or “mentally ill.”

Peter radiated the power that he’d gained. And he was right: Part of that power was earned trading against April. Bringing her down is what brought him up, and now he was capitalizing on that clout and April was dead. In that moment I felt the kind of rage where you really aren’t in control anymore, when your animal instincts tie together with your human emotions and words become wild and uncontrollable weapons. Looking back, the thing that made me most angry was how human he was starting to seem, and how important his work actually was. I almost got myself in trouble, but I kept hanging on to his words and keeping quiet. He had said that I was a security risk, and I was. I also needed to maintain my ability to be a security risk to Altus, and I already had an idea for how I was going to get it done.

“Maybe I do hate you,” I said with real malice in my voice, “but I’d rather work on something great with someone I hate than work on something tiny with people I love.”

That was a lie, but it was the kind of lie Peter Petrawicki might believe.

MAYA

“We have to go now.” April’s voice tumbled out as she started covering the twenty or thirty feet between us.

“April?!” I shouted.

“Now!”

I turned and got into the truck, immediately hitting the button to make sure the passenger side was unlocked. Then I looked over to see if she was coming, but she was gone. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when the passenger door was flung open. How had she gotten to the truck that fast?

“Drive,” she said blandly.

I was trying to split the difference between speed and safety, and that required me to pay 100 percent attention to the driving and not to April, the real living person who was sitting next to me in the truck, not dead.

“What’s going …” But before I could finish my question, the stereo blared on.

La la la la lala la la

It was Britney.

“Just drive,” April said. I looked over, and she was cradling her face in her hands.

La la la la lala la la

The song gushed through the cab of the truck, rhythms tumbling over themselves in that 2008 Britney way.

Love me, hate me

Say what you want about me

But all of the boys and all of the girls

Are begging to if you seek Amy

I didn’t know where I was going, so I headed toward my Airbnb. I knew how to get there and I figured, once we arrived, we’d have time to actually talk. This wasn’t safe. I was crying too much. Was it relief? Exhaustion? Love? I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t any particular emotion; it was all of them at once.

The song pulsed so loud, and I was blinking through angry tears. I wanted to stop the truck and hold her and have her sob into my arms while she explained what was going on, but she just kept her head down, her face in her hands, her hair spilling down, longer than it had been. She hadn’t noticed my hair, she’d barely even looked at me. Was I mad that she didn’t notice my hair? No, I was mad because this moment was supposed to be simple, and it was not.

I was on a back road, about a half mile from my Airbnb, when Britney was done having her weird wild way with the English language. I expected another song to come on the radio, but as the space between songs stretched out, I realized that it hadn’t been the radio that played … The song had just started when April got in the truck. The noise of the road was all that filled the cab now. And the tension and the fear.