HELLO?”
My voice didn’t echo. An echo implied a wall, however distant, for it to bounce off of. Instead, it dropped away like a stone falling into a well, dense and dull and disregarded.
There was no ground under my feet, but I was standing anyway, toes pointed outward instead of dangling down. I raised one foot and stomped experimentally. There was no feeling of resistance; my foot simply stopped when it hit what my brain insisted on thinking of as the floor.
Maybe the thought was the problem. I closed my eyes. There is no floor, I told myself sternly. There is nothing for me to stand on.
The sensation of falling was immediate and stomach-churning, as the not-a-floor beneath me took my thoughts to heart and dissolved, leaving me to plummet through the nothingness. I screamed before I could think better of it, and my terror sounded as wrung-out and empty as everything else.
“There’s a floor!” I shouted. “There’s a floor there’s a floor there’s a floor—”
The impact when my feet hit the reconstituted floor was enough to send me sprawling, my entire body aching from the sudden stop. I lay where I was, suspended on a flat, seemingly solid surface that looked exactly like everything else surrounding me. No walls, no ceiling, but there was a floor now, called into existence by my demands.
I rolled onto my back and stared up into the nothingness. My throat hurt from the screaming and my ankles hurt from the landing and everything was awful. Everything was absolutely, utterly, no questions about it, awful.
Laboriously, I sat up and looked around again. Any hopes that the void would have changed during my fall were for naught: the world around me was as blank and white and empty as it had been before. The only thing to indicate that I had moved at all was the ache in my butt and ankles, and even as I thought about it, the ache faded away, like my body couldn’t hold onto even the idea of pain.
That was actually a good thing. It meant I wasn’t really here; this was another mindscape, like the one I’d entered when Artie was caught in the cuckoo’s trap. Only this time, the mindscape was mine, and I was the one in the trap. There was no one coming to get me out of this.
I needed to get out on my own.
“This sucks,” I announced, on the off chance that one of the cuckoos who’d stolen me happened to be listening. “If you were hoping to convince me to help you do some horrible cuckoo thing, this is not a good way of going about it. This is frightening and inconvenient and . . . and mean, and I don’t work with people who are mean to me.”
There was no answer. To be fair, I hadn’t been expecting one.
I looked around the void again, searching for anything that would break the endless whiteness. Then I paused. This was my mindscape. It, and everything it contained, belonged to me. Which meant that anything I could think of should be right at my fingertips.
“I want a chair,” I said to the air in front of me. “Not too comfortable. A chair where I can sit and think.”
I turned.
There was a chair behind me.
It was simple, plain black leather with polished brass casters, the sort of thing that belonged behind a desk in a home office. It could have been placed in the window of any office supply store in the world, glistening in the light, inviting weary souls to set their burdens down for the low, low price of a few hundred dollars with an available installment plan. I took a step toward it, reaching out to run my fingertips along one faux-mahogany arm.
It felt solid and real, as real as I was. Which made sense. In here, we were both thoughts, and my thoughts were sufficient to change the world.
I sank down into the leather, tucking my legs up under myself in a cat-curl position that had been my preference when working since I was a kid. I stared at the nothingness in front of me.
“I need a chalkboard,” I said, and blinked, deliberately slow.
When I opened my eyes again, the chalkboard was there, old-fashioned and tall, green slate pristine as it awaited my genius. Two fresh erasers sat in the tray beneath it, alongside sticks of chalk in multiple colors. It was a chalkboard out of a children’s movie, pushed into place by the set designer of my thoughts, ready for me to begin.
I didn’t move.
The chalkboard was tempting—more tempting than any chalkboard I’d ever seen—and there were numbers nibbling at the edges of my mind, glorious numbers, numbers that whispered promised solutions to every problem I’d ever had and every dilemma I’d ever faced. I could use those numbers to get myself out of here, I just knew it. Something was holding me back.
I’d seen numbers like this before. Not often. They shifted and twisted when I tried to focus on them directly, flickering like candles in a soft wind, never quite going out, never quite holding still. I’d seen these same numbers when I injured myself in New York, blossoming around the edges of my consciousness before I hit the ground and everything went away. They meant something. They resolved to something.
I closed my eyes again. “I need a desk, a laptop, and an Internet connection.”
They were there when I opened my eyes. The desk was old and scarred, and I recognized it from my father’s office. He’d built it himself out of reclaimed wood, blending oak and mahogany, pine and cedar. It was a patchwork thing, like he was, and when I reached out to caress the wood with one trembling hand, it was almost like he was there with me, watching over me. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes. I blinked them away. If I didn’t find a way out of here, I was never going to see him again. I couldn’t let that happen.
The laptop was much newer, sleek and futuristic and generic. I tugged it toward me and opened a chat client.
My entire family was offline. That was a disappointment, but not a surprise. There was no way of knowing whether the Internet connection I’d imagined would correlate in any way to the world outside my mindscape. But I hoped it would.
In an earlier era, I might have imagined pigeons with notes tied to their legs, or hunting horns, or some other clumsy mechanism of communicating across great distances. Here and now, the Internet was the answer. I kept scrolling through the listed names, each with the little grayed-out dot that meant they weren’t available to talk to me. I scrolled faster and faster, past every person I’d ever touched, every person I’d ever made a connection with, every person who might have been able to hear me. There were so many of them. There weren’t nearly enough.
The last name on the list, Ingrid, was the only one with a green dot.
I hesitated, staring at that name, staring at that dot, before finally clicking on it and pulling up a chat window.
What did you do to me? I typed.
The cursor blinked for several seconds before the reply popped up: Sarah?
Yes. This is Sarah. What did you do to me?
How are you talking to me right now? You’re in the middle of your metamorphosis. You can’t be talking to me.