Just as when she first wore the Mirage in the real world, every time she entered a new space here, it took her mind a minute to catch up, as if she were stuck temporarily between channels. She pushed through the door and waited for her brain to make sense of what she found. Everything she experienced in this coded otherworld was filtered and contextualized within her mind, and this was a room that reminded her of something she’d seen long ago in a movie or picture book. A Victorian orphanage, similar to the one from Oliver Twist. Everything solidified in this context. The beds in the room reached off forever. In them children writhed in torment. They did things children were not meant to do. They cried, but over the top of their cries came snarling voices that threatened to hurt them, to maim or even kill them if they shared a word of this with anyone.
Hannah tried to wave a girl toward her, but she would not come. She tried to cover a boy with a blanket, but he kicked it off. She tried to grab them, pick them up, lead them away, but they would not budge. She looked at them again, this time from another angle, peeling through the programming constructs that comprised them. These were not children, she came to understand, but representations of them, shadows of them, shared on the Dark Net for pornographic distribution. This was not the reason she plugged in, but she could not move on without erasing them. Only light would wash away the children, and in this case the light would take the form of a disbanding equation.
How long she had been in the Dark Net, she had no idea. Thirty seconds or thirty days or thirty years. Corporeal and temporal limits were no longer relevant. It had taken practice, but in this otherworld she was learning how to break locks, open cabinets, climb stairs, tromp across a floor, up a wall, across a ceiling. There was impermanence to everything. Code could be shoved around, erased, made to signify something else or nothing altogether. Her literacy was ever-expanding. With time she thought she could probably breathe fire or blow a hurricane-force wind. She could probably grow as big as a tree or as small as a mouse, like something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She could probably fly. Cyberspace was a whirling codex, a living infinite.
Now she wanted to make light, so she taught herself to burn. A dust-clotted lamp elbowed from a brass anchor on the wall. She grabbed hold of it and yanked. The fixture tore from its casing, and the wall’s plaster crumbled to make way for the cords beneath. A foul-smelling dust came off the wall when she ripped at it, pulling out a few yards of cord, enough to twist and mangle and tear apart. Electricity spit from it like a fuse. She applied the shorn wire to the floor and to the blankets and to the tossed-aside nightgowns. Tiny flames sprung up and spread greedily and soon the room was ablaze. The children dimmed and their crying muted, and only then did Hannah turn to go.
In the hallway she heard a noise. Like many doors being slammed. Or many feet pounding toward her at once. She was no longer an anonymous guest. With the fire she had announced herself as an invader, a terrorist. And she was being pursued because of it. She began to run. Back the way she came. Spiders skittered out from beneath rugs, paintings, the seams of the hardwood floor, a black mass of them pursuing her, biting her. She stomped at them. And she swiped at the bats that swung down to scratch her face. A trapdoor opened before her, and she leaped over it. An enormous grandfather clock tipped over, and she dodged out of its way as it crashed to the floor with a metallic doom. Her feet grew faster and faster, blurring through the house, outrunning them all.
She ran through a vast ballroom lit with blood-red chandeliers in which skeletons waltzed. She ran through a nursery full of dolls—with black eyes and cracked porcelain skin—that turned their heads to watch her go. She ran through a chamber of meat hooks dangling from chains that rattled in her passing. And then she turned a corner and came to a skidding stop.
There was a worm. Black-skinned and pulsing with muscle. As big around as a man and as long as a garden hose. The wrinkled seams of its skin contracted and expanded with its movement, as it wound and surged itself across the room, and she saw within it a light. A red light. This same light slimed off the worm and stuck to the floor, marking its passage. This detritus squiggled with its own life, as though egged and hatching. A code. The code. Here was the contagion. One source of it anyway. She knew she should run. She could hear the spiders and the skeletons and the bats clattering and scuttling and hissing toward her. But this was what she had come for.
The worm paid her no attention. When it moved, it made a sound like a hand dragged across a blown balloon. An open window awaited it. It wanted to leave, to portal itself from the house, where it would feed. She yelled for it to stop, and it turned its blind black face toward her, before continuing to slough and heave forward. She knew from the fire she set that she could war with her surroundings. She looked around for a weapon and found it in an armored display. A knight stood on a short platform, a sword in its hands. When she seized it by the hilt, the knight tugged back, the armor rustily coming to life. She shoved it, and it toppled and split apart with a crash. Dozens of bald rats raced screeching from its hollows.
The worm was nearly to the window when she brought down the sword. Its blade cleaved the worm through the middle. There was a mewling sound. The two sections of it rippled and twisted and bled a stream of digitized red code that soon blackened and ashed away.
She didn’t have more than a moment before the room filled with those who pursued her. The spiders bit and filled her with poison that iced her skin. The bats tangled in her hair. The skeletons reached for her with their gray fingers. She screamed and thrashed and swung the sword and ran stumbling through the swirling mess of it all until she was free.
Far in the distance, down a hallway that seemed to reach on for a mile, she could see the front door. It was slowly closing. On the other side of it, she could see everyone—Lela and Juniper and Hemingway and Josh and Derek—begging her to wake up, to come back. Maybe—maybe—she could run fast enough to make it through the crack before it closed.
But right then another worm squirmed into view, pushing itself along the floor. She stutter-stepped, trying to decide whether to run or linger. She gave the front door one long, lingering glance before turning away from it. She hunted down the worm and pierced it through the middle. And then followed its slime trail. The fading stream of code led her to a room full of doors that opened the walls, floor, and ceiling. One of them was painted red, the edges of it glowing with a light of the same color.
She found a candlestick phone mounted to the wall and ripped the receiver off its cradle and dialed her aunt Lela’s cell. She needed help, but she couldn’t leave now. She was almost there.
?
Derek took the cell from Lela. He turned the palm-sized scarred-up phone over in his hand, saying, “I didn’t know these things still existed.” As though this was the greater marvel. Then he flipped it open, and his face lit up with the green glow of its screen. His eyes dodged back and forth between the body on the floor and the message that seemingly came from it.