Where by Kit Reed Page A

never mind.
    I have a plan.
    I’ve been working on this wall, behind the dumbwaiter? Stuff goes in and out through a hatch in the back, and I’ve been chipping away at the plaster every chance I get. So, what if there are zero jackets and shit in here, just the white scrubs, like we’re patients in some ginormous hospital? I’m hoarding dirty scrubs. Tonight I put them all on, make some kind of hoodie out of the pillowcases. I’d rather freeze than fry, plus if they have guards or something, I’ll be harder to see: white on white on white. Tonight, I break out.
    I’m bailing just as soon as he sinks down in a heap at that table and starts to snore, but shit, I have to give him one last chance.
    We eat. I talk for both of us. Then I do what I have to. I go: “Why did Mother leave us anyway?”
    That stone face turns to marble, dead white. Then he breaks the Vow of Silence or whatever. It’s like an iceberg cracking. “Go to bed.”
    So I do, but only until I hear him stomp away and crash on his bed so hard that it bashes the wall between our rooms. Then I open the kitchen dumbwaiter and break out the back and into the freezing desert night.
    Back home on Kraven I used to run through the neighborhood reading other people’s windows like comic books: the fight in one, the love scene, the bad little kids getting drunk, the beating in another, another and another, and everybody and everything in the houses I looked into was a different color, all blazing and busy like frames in a comic or the best animation you ever saw! The never-ending story occupied me on those empty nights before I found Gaijin Samurai and I logged on and had a life, but there’s nothing here in this nothing place that we don’t know what it is. Everything down in the great white toilet where we landed is still and quiet and white, white, white. White shutters on every window closed tight. The blank of the white buildings around the empty plaza are white, and the grainy white sidewalks lead out to white, white houses laid out like blocks on a Monopoly board with no colors and no printing and no squares so you can tell whether you’re moving, just the bleached streets spreading out to the cement rim surrounding, as white and regular as a ring of false teeth without the gums or the grooves between. Even the barrier dune beyond is smooth and perfect, like a giant potter threw a porcelain bowl to put us in and the wheel stopped.
    Nothing, not even the shadow of a footprint, touches the sand. It comes sifting down in the night wind and stops cold at the rim, so in spite of the breeze, everything inside it lies still.
    That’s weird, and this is weird.
    There’s almost no sound. Like it’s one of those sensory deprivation tanks? Or it’s some kind of prison, i.e., we are trapped, but there are no guards that I can see, no towers where armed guards could hide, nothing set up to keep anything out or any of us in, not like they need it, I’m the only person out tonight. Skittering like an ant trapped under a dome.
    Alone. It’s so weird.
    So, what are they, locked inside against their will, like Father and me except he is, like, zombified, or are they all scared to go out?
    It’s cold as fuck out here, and darker than fuck, but! Free. I should be happy and excited, but I’m alone out in the open, and it’s cold and creepy as hell. The silence is the worst. Like all the houses are soundproofed, unless nobody else is talking to each other either, same as Father and me.
    There are no TVs in these houses, only one or two cracks of light showing around drawn shutters and nothing moving, as far as I can tell. Except for the breeze brushing the sand circle, there’s nothing to hear.
    Maybe it’s like this in Gaijin Samurai, i.e., on Level 300 you lose your team, you lose your bearings, you end up with nobody to rely on and nothing to fight with except yourself and the