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Out of all of the ways Pomni had imagined leaving the Circus – which was a lot – this hadn’t even crossed her mind once.
Looking back, it was kind of obvious that the Void was the way out, and it really shouldn’t have been so surprising to any of them that Kinger was involved in building the game in the first place (he’d healed Ragatha with a bug, for god’s sake) but Pomni’s mind was still reeling and reforming so fast she couldn’t hope to catch up.
In the end, all it had taken was a prolonged stay in a very dark room on one of their adventures and Caine having a mental breakdown and losing control over Kinger’s memories. Who’d’ve guessed?
Pomni forced her eyes open and found herself staring directly at the glitching screen of an old-fashioned monitor. A real monitor.
The floor she was lying on was uncomfortable and scratchy. Her limbs were aching and filled with pins and needles, her head hurt, she was so hungry it was making her nauseous and felt one loud noise away from bursting into hysterics.
When she lifted a hand to her face, it was her own. No gloves, five fingers, flesh and blood.
Pomni (not my name not right that’s wrong) eased herself upright, felt her body scream in protest. The others were sprawled all around her on the floor – that horrible standard office carpet that never looked clean – in varying states of consciousness. She picked out Ragatha first, who was starting to stir and looked more or less the same as her avatar; black shoes, blue dress, curly red hair. When she sat up and looked at Pomni (wrong), one of her eyes was streaked with white cataracts.
“Ragatha?” Her voice was hoarse and crackly, but Ragatha seemed to melt in relief.
“Pomni.”
The others seemed to wake up faster at the sound of their voices. Zooble had pink hair and tattoos and a brace around one of their legs. Gangle was wearing a ribbon-red sweater and pins with anime characters on them. Jax had faded pinkish overalls and that same automatic grin. And Kinger…
Kinger was kneeling over a woman who still lay unconscious on the floor. They both had grey hair at their temples and the beginnings of wrinkles around their eyes and matching wedding bands. His cardigan was purple. Her skirt was red and had butterflies printed on it.
They’d tried to rescue everyone who’d abstracted from the cellar when the Circus started collapsing, but Queenie had been the only one sane enough to get through to. Pomni (wrong) wasn’t sure why; maybe it was the darkness of the cellar, or the fact that she’d been there longest, or Kinger’s pleading, but she’d followed them through the exit door into the Void anyway. They’d tried to go back for the others, but the Circus had been too unstable.
“Kinger?” Ragatha started, “Is she…”
“She’s breathing.” Kinger said quietly, the words formed clumsily after years of not having a mouth. He’d pulled Queenie’s head into his lap and was now combing through her hair softly. “I don’t know what’ll happen when she wakes up, but she seems fine, for now.”
None of them said anything for a while. Just absorbing their newly recovered reality, Not-Pomni supposed.
Zooble was the first to find their voice again. “Can anyone else still not remember their name?”
Jax shrugged. “Not really.”
“I think if our memories all came back at once our brains would get fried.” Ragatha suggested. “This is probably our bodies’ ways of preserving our sanity.”
“Not that ol’ Kinger had much of that in the first place.”
“Jax! You know it was Caine’s fault that he couldn’t remember anything, and might I remind you that he was the one who got us out of the Circus in the first place-”
Not-Pomni ignored the budding argument in favour of trying to figure out why she felt like she was missing something incredibly obvious. She looked around the room for clues and found her gaze straying to the lump in the pocket of her jacket, and pulled it out to see what she recognised as her wallet.
Containing her driving licence.
“Guys.” She interrupted Jax and Ragatha, and everyone turned to look at her. She held up her wallet. “Check your IDs.”
They all did. Ragatha hummed in surprise.
“Agatha. I guess that’ll be easy to remember.”
“My name’s Christine.” It was kind of random and so different from Pomni, but it still felt like clean water on her tongue to say. Agatha smiled at her.
Jax’s real name was Jacob, but he told everyone to just keep calling him Jax because it sounded better anyway. Gangle was Gaile, and Zooble’s name was technically Daisy, but they hated that and figured they’d just go by Zee as a nickname instead. Kinger –
“Abel?” Zee repeated dumbfoundedly. “Like Caine and Abel? Your name is Abel and you still chose to call the AI you invented Caine?”
He looked a little sheepish. “Evidently so.”
“Oh my god.”
Gaile raised a hand nervously (distantly, Christine wondered why all of their real names made so much sense in her mind when she’d only ever known them how they were before). “Uh, so, finding out our names is cool and all, but don’t you guys think we should maybe try to figure out what we’re going to do? Y’know, since we’ve been trapped in the Circus for years and as such have limited hope of ever returning to our normal lives?”
“About that.” Jax was staring at his phone screen. “Abel? Do you remember the date when you and Queenie got trapped in the circus?”
Abel frowned. “Not the exact date, but I’m pretty sure it was in August of twenty-twenty-three. Why?”
Christine felt all the air rush out of her lungs. Jax turned to look at her. “Christine? How about you?”
“Thirteenth of October… twenty-twenty-three.”
Abel’s eyes blew wide. Behind her, Christine heard Zee curse. Jax held up his phone so they could all see the date on his lock screen: 20/10/23.
“None of us were in there for more than two months.”
After a long moment of stunned silence, Abel nodded slowly.
“Okay. That – that makes sense, I suppose, since computers run so fast in comparison to the human mind. It makes sense that the digital world would also run much faster than the real world. Yeah.” He looked up and gave them all a wobbly yet reassuring smile. Christine felt herself relax a little despite everything. “And this is good! It means we haven’t lost years out of our lives after all! And if I’m remembering correctly – and I’m pretty sure I am this time – mine and Queenie’s house is only a five-minute walk from here, so why don’t we go hole up there, I’ll order some food, and we can figure everything else out in the morning.”
Noises of approval floated around the group, and they all stood up, wobbling a little on their newly reclaimed limbs. Christine had never been especially tall, but she still felt much higher off the ground than she should have been. It was odd to not have to crane her neck to look everyone in the eye.
Abel picked Queenie up and carried her all the way out of the building and along the street to what was evidently their house, somehow even managing to find his keys and unlock the door without setting her down. Christine tried to take in the details of the house, but everything was still aching and fuzzy, so she just followed Abel and the others into what was presumably the living room and collapsed onto the first seat she found.
Abel set his wife down on the couch, took her shoes off and her hair down and put a pillow beneath her head and a blanket on top of her. Christine got the sense that this was something he’d done for her a hundred times over and felt her heart constrict a little for all that time he’d spent alone.
The house was dark, but nobody asked to turn on a light. Abel’s still-fractured sanity aside, the question remained of what Queenie would do if she woke up.
The others all assembled around her on the various soft surfaces that littered the room – Jax took the other armchair, Zee and Gaile folded themselves into a pile of beanbags and pillows in the corner, Abel perched on the end of Queenie’s couch, and Agatha sat stiffly down on a footstool.
Somewhere in the house, a clock was ticking. Floorboards creaked the way digital plastic render never did, and memories were starting to spark up in Christine’s mind at the once-familiar sound. Nothing tangible, yet, but still more than she’d had before.
Someone’s stomach grumbled loudly. Christine heard herself giggle despite everything, and Abel got up with a smile.
“Right – we need actual food. I’m going to go and check the kitchen for takeout menus or something, I think Queenie likes to hang onto those.”
It was so strange to see him with a proper face instead of just floating eyes, but Christine could still see the affection in his expression as he looked back at his wife before disappearing out of the room, holding his arms awkwardly like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Christine tried not to stare at her, still unconscious on the couch, but focusing on anything else would mean confronting the reality that they’d escaped and all that meant, and she really wasn’t ready to do that yet.
And besides, she kept half expecting Queenie to wake up and start glitching with too many eyes in too many colours. Or just never wake up at all. Abstraction was the closest thing to death that existed in the digital world, and while she was still alive right now, there was definitely a possibility that this was all she’d be, for ever.
Christine hoped that wouldn’t be the case, for Abel’s sake if nothing else.
The former chess piece in question came shuffling back into the room as if summoned by her thoughts, holding a glossy paper flyer and a packet of what looked like Mars bars. “These were the first things I could find that were still in date, and this pizza place was the only one that delivers at this time. I remember it being really good, though, even though they only do four flavours. I figured I’d just order a couple of each and we can have leftovers for breakfast, maybe.”
He set them down on the coffee table in the middle of the room and handed everyone a chocolate bar, and Christine shoved hers into her mouth with uncontrolled desperation that would have embarrassed her if the others hadn’t been doing the exact same thing. It was real, sticky melting chocolate and caramel and whatever that fudgy layer was made out of, sickly sweet and getting stuck around her teeth as she chewed, her stomach cramping so hard she thought she would have thrown it right back up again if she hadn’t been so agonisingly hungry.
Real food. Real, non-digital food because they were in the real non-digital world because she’d been right about the exit door all along. They got out. They got out.
Christine’s vision had gone blurry and there was something hot tracking down her cheeks, and it took her far too long to realise that she was crying.
Everyone else politely pretended not to notice – except Abel, of course. He handed her a tissue and squeezed her shoulder comfortingly.
“I’ll get on that pizza.”
“What are the four flavours?” Agatha asked through the remainder of her chocolate bar, covering her mouth for politeness’s sake.
Abel squinted at the flyer. “They’ve got plain cheese, pepperoni, all the meat, and all the vegetables. Well, I suppose that means they’ve got all their bases covered. Two of each?”
General noises of agreement. Christine personally thought she’d eat pretty much anything offered to her right now – a week without food was a week without food, no matter whether her body had existed during that time or not. Speaking of which –
“You didn’t have a Mars bar.” She pointed out quietly. “You were in there longest, aren’t you hungry?”
He shrugged awkwardly, like he was out of practice, which Christine supposed he was. “There were only five in the pack, and the pizzas will be here soon. Don’t you worry about me.”
He’d been saying that a lot recently, as the pieces of his sanity slowly returned to him and he worked to get them all out of the Circus. Don’t worry about him, getting out was more important than rest. Don’t worry about him, he just needed to tweak this last section of code. Don’t worry about him, Caine would never hurt him, really. And neither would Queenie.
They’d all worried that he’d end up abstracting before they escaped the Circus. It had been weeks since Christine had seen him not hunched over a holographic screen, surrounded by notes about his fragmented memory, frantically changing and debugging hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Abel ordered the pizza, and Christine started trying to commit her friends’ new – old – faces to memory. Agatha’s vitiligo patches in the same places as her patches as a doll; Zee’s tattoos zig-zagging up their arms and neck, silver piercings glinting at their eyebrows; Gaile’s quite frankly glorious hair, tumbling and shiny and twisting like ribbon; Abel’s own frazzled blond hair, the bags beneath his eyes, the glasses perched wonkily on his nose; Jax’s ponytail (because of course he had a ponytail) and even more piercings than Zee and easy grin that Christine was certainly not staring at, thank you very much, she had standards –
They all looked so right. She wondered if any of them felt the same way about her.
None of them tried very hard to strike up conversation while they waited for the pizza to arrive. Gaile was dozing off against Zee’s shoulder. Abel was sitting on the floor next to Queenie’s couch, watching her breathe. Jax was scrolling through his phone, Agatha was picking at the hem of her dress, and Christine couldn’t really summon up the presence of mind to do much of anything other than stare into space.
Then Queenie opened her eyes.