Cara sat cross-legged on the gritty floor of her domed chamber, imagining the warm cluster of candles behind her was the sun. She slid her hand under her long shadow and tugged it, feeling the rubbery texture. Not sunlight quality, but it would do. She winched the shadow, slowly folded it over her hands, and began weaving it into a shawl.

With every stitch, she imagined the World Above, where time was defined not by the chime of the bell towers, but by a celestial ball of fire in the sky. What would it be like to live in that world? To taste a ray of sunlight on her tongue? To weave shadows without having to hide from her mother?

As she finished the thirtieth stitch, a crackle came from above. A great concrete lump bulged from the ceiling, slithering along its length. Cara turned, threw the shadow sheet on the candles, and it evaporated like salt crystals in water. The wall-swelling continued its descent along the wall, down, down, down. As if some burrowing animal crawled beneath it.

The lump rested at face-height with Cara. Contours formed along its surface and pop. The rock split, revealing a woman’s face—skin like cracked cement, wispy hair, and a fine chocolate-ink line for lips.

“Hi Mum,” Cara said, lowering her head.

“Playing with fire again, Cara Ludia?”

Cara pursed her lips. “Just some candles.”

Her mother walked out the wall, rock cracking and mending itself behind her. A poncho of shadows draped over her, frilled with loose dark threads that fluttered in the light of the candles. For all her mother talked down on shadoweavers, she loved nothing more than to dress herself in the garments of their craft.

She brought a cold stiff hand to caress Cara’s cheek—nails like burned paper, flakes of gray skin drifting off. “Never mind that,” she said. “The Velwarders made their decision. Your graduation passage is to begin today.”

A shiver ran down Cara’s spine. “So soon? I haven’t had time to practice glasscrawling.”

“Don’t make me laugh. You’re a master at all forms of crawling already. The faster you’re done with the initiation, the faster you’ll be assigned to a lucrative post at the Veilgates.”

And the faster you’ll be able to gloat about having a Velwarder daughter, won’t you, mother? Yes, my little Cara Ludia is the youngest crawler throughout Rhondo to ever guard a Veilgate.

A warm lump formed inside Cara’s throat. The voice of her best friend Fenster echoed in her mind: “Just tell her you want to work in the Shadow Refinery. You don’t have to mention the sun or the World Above. She’s wearing shadows herself, isn’t she?”

Her mother rubbed her temples, eyes narrow and weak. She was tired again. She was always tired. The words twisted in Cara’s throat. What came out instead was,

“I won’t let you down, Mum.”

Cara stood at one end of Rhondo Stadium, waiting for her trial to begin. The stadium was a long expanse of glass, showered by green lights, checkered here and there with tiles of wood, metal, and obsidian. The seated crowd produced a loud din that wrenched Cara’s stomach. She noticed her mother among them—eyes tired and filled with flickering hope.

A low hum came from all around, and the crowd fell silent. The walls around the stadium bulged like velvet sheets in the breeze. Slits formed on the far wall and opened to reveal big yellow eyes that stared right at her. The Velwarders.

She knew they could be everywhere at once when they merge with their surroundings, but she’d never seen it up close. Was this what she had to become?

She shuddered, suddenly more aware of the night’s chill. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and counted to ten. She imagined bubbles encapsulating the disturbing images of the Velwarders. She imagined the bubbles drifting up to a sunlit sky and popping to nothing. Until her mind was as clear as the eternal night.

Cara stretched down, squeezed her fingers between her toes, arched her back and imagined a wave of light passing from her shoulders down the soles of her feet. She imagined that wave taking everything from inside her, gathering it all into a ball that could fit into the crook of her elbow. Until she felt light as a feather.

A bell echoed. A bass voice followed, reverberating from all around her.

“Initiate. Begin!”

Cara pressed her finger into the glass panel beneath. It dipped inside, forming ripples. Sharp cold penetrated through her muscles to the marrow of her bones. The arm was in. She exhaled and slid inside the panel. Sand pushed against her nostrils.

I am lightning flashing through the frozen sand. I am the sound of thunder, quaking the windows of a massive temple.

The next tile was wood. She made contact. Clack-clack the splinters crackled around her as she slid into it, merged with it. Twigs scratched her stomach from within.

I am water flowing through the pith. I am the blood in the vessels of a great tree.

She moved to steel. She smelled bitter smoke and tasted metal. A great weight pushed against her heart. Iron dust suffused her lungs.

I am heat burning through a tempered sword. I am fire swallowing the railings of a bridge.

Glass came again, thinner this time. Then wood. Steel. Glass. Earth. Ice.

Cara slid through everything and slipped out on the other side. Bones encased her marrow, flesh encased bones, skin wrapped tightly around flesh, hair prickled like a million tiny needles. She took an airful of the cold night into her lungs.

“Cara Ludia,” a voice quaked the stadium. “You pass!”

Cheers erupted from the crowd. On the stands, Cara saw her mother clapping and smiling a bright chocolate smile. Then Cara’s gaze drifted to the stadium wall, where a toothed crescent stretched like bulging graffiti.

It was the smile of a Velwarder.

Rhys adjusted the scope of his rifle and wriggled back into place between the turret’s brick walls.

“Okay, I’ve got another one for you.”

Milo groaned.

“Dude, please, I’m begging you. I can’t afford to lose that many brain cells.”

Rhys pressed his eye to the scope. The narrow stream remained empty, its barbed wire border intact and shining in the moonlight.

“Why did the Ferrans cross the road?”

Milo sighed. “So that dumbasses like you could kill their friends with terrible jokes?”

“Because they’re all chickens.”

“Wow. Think of that one yourself, did you?”

Rhys made a quick sweep of the tall grass on either side of the stream.

“No, Eddie told it to me.”

“That’s a relief. I thought maybe all that staring at Zara finally rotted your brain.”

“I wasn’t staring.”

“Sorry, I meant ogling.”

“Shut up. I wasn’t staring or ogling. I just.” He shifted back to the stream, scanned from the horizon all the way back to the tower. “She’s really smart and pretty.”

“And stupid strong and better at hand-to-hand than you’ll ever be. She’s outta your league, dude.”

Rhys found Milo’s leg sprawled a few inches from his and kicked it.

“Shows what you know. Steen says she likes quiet, sensitive guys.”

Milo kicked him back.

“Steen only told you that because she thought it would be nicer than telling you that you had a better chance of defeating the entire Ferran national army than getting a date with Zara.”

“Hey, I’m sensitive.”

Milo snorted. “If you’re talking about that pimply stuff covering your face, then sure. The rest of you is as dense as your boots and twice as loud.”

He kicked Milo again and did another check of the barbed wire.

“At least I’ve got a sense of humor. That joke was funny even if you have a stick shoved too far up your ass to notice.”

“Better a stick up my ass than pebbles in my head. Wasn’t your family Ferran?”

Rhys’s stomach twinged.

“Only on my dad’s side. And I haven’t seen him since I was, like, two. I’ve signed all the pledges and loyalty contracts.”

“For fuck’s sake, Rhys, who do you think I am? Trenton with his little notebook? I just meant, you know, doesn’t it bother you when people say stuff like that?”

He frowned. He’d known Milo since before he could tie his shoes. They’d gone through training together, been the second at each other’s allegiance test. Had shared a bunk until they’d literally gotten too big to fit. And they’d always made fun of Trenton and his endless quests to catch someone using a non-company toenail clipper.

But Milo was Optimum, his family line going all the way back to when they were still an online wholesaler.

“No,” Rhys said.

“Not at all?”

Movement in the grass pulled his attention north.

Wobble, wobble, wobble.

He relaxed his grip on the trigger. It was just one of those little brown birds.

“Ferran values are all fucked up,” he said. “I mean, they go on and on about the importance of hard work, but don’t let people have any possessions. No homes, no beds. Even their clothes belong to ‘the group.’ And they have to be connected to that weird hub all the time. Like, do you really want everyone to know when you take a shit?”

“Or jerk off while imagining Zara in her underwear?”

Rhys kicked him with the hard toe of his boot.

“But, really, is what we do any better? All those algorithms and trackers are a pain in the ass. Because yeah, sure, the size twenty-eight black skinnys I’ve gotten for the last two years fit me great and everything, but what if I want to try something different, like those wild red shreds Captain Phelps has? Or that sick motorcycle jacket with the bleach stains? Man, I would kill for something like that.”

This time Rhys’s stomach twisted with a full-blown cramp. Sure, they were alone. And, yeah, they were wearing scramblers because they were on duty. But you didn’t say shit like that. Milo had the scars all over his back to prove it – and he had gotten off easy since he’d been eight and his uncle hadn’t lost his seat on the security council yet.

“Of course it’s better,” he said. “The system takes care of us. Tells us what we need, what we should do. It understands what’s best for us better than we ever could.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just.” Milo sighed. “Maybe if I looked like that people wouldn’t treat me like a wannabe bag boy.”

It was easy to fall in love in the V. Everyone was gorgeous, their bodies crafted to be in peak physical condition. There was no body odor, no hunger, no bathroom breaks, no death. Every moment belonged to you and the people you chose to share it with.

I saw him on the first day of one of my weekly years. An hour in here was a minute out there so entire lifetimes could be lived in just a few weeks Six hours per six days was the maximum a brain could handle, however. People who stayed longer without unplugging tended to end up drooling and immobile. I had too many responsibilities back in the Real for that.

Six hours at home with your head plugged in was a nice 360 days in the V, more than long enough to develop real feelings.

He smoked a cigarette across the bar from me. I liked the way the smoke hung in the air as he watched me, creating a fog through which I could barely see his hazel eyes. He said something to the bartender, our eyes never breaking the stare. A moment later a drink appeared before me. I raised my eyebrows in a thank you and watched him watch me take a sip. Like all the drinks here, it was the best Old Fashioned I ever tasted.

When I looked at the red doors that led to the auditorium where we would be part of the 1956 Academy Awards audience, he came to stand beside me. He wore a white tuxedo and fedora, a perfect match to my tight black dress.

“You seen this movie before?” he asked.

“Which? Lots of nominees.”

“The one that’s going to win. Marty.”

I nodded and took another sip of the drink. “It’s one of my favorites. About two ugly people who find love with each other. It’s very sweet.”

He took my free hand and held it for a second. “Based on a true story?”

“Not in this world.”

I watched his full lips return to the rim of the martini and felt a quiver in my own mouth.

We skipped the show and went straight to my hotel room. The V was designed for pleasure, and I had had my share of affairs, but none felt quite like this. When his hands were not on me my body yearned for his touch like a stump crying out for a missing limb.

360 days, 360 hours, 360 minutes. Time lost all meaning with him, replaced with a million wonderful moments. We ate sushi carved from fish plucked directly from the sea and served to us on silver platters on a cruise in the Sea of Japan. We skied naked from the top of Jade Dragon. We jumped off the Burj Khalifa and soared over Dubai.

There were plenty of people who would rightfully point out that it is easy to fall in with someone when all you do is have a good time. And to them I say, so? It felt good to catch feelings for someone while narrowly avoiding getting chomped to bits by wolves in the middle of a national park or during a shootout at the Long Branch Saloon. Even simulated near-death experiences had a way of sorting the chemicals in our body so that the heart, brain, and loins all fired up in the same way as in the Real.

This was different, though, and we both knew it. There was a primal nature to our feelings. I desired him with every fiber of my being like a person stabbed and bleeding out desired the sweet release of death: overwhelming, all-powerful, inescapable. Our souls were one, tethered through time and brought together by Fate to the V. The settings were fantastic, the bodies imaginary, but the feelings authentic.

“I’ve had good times with people I met in the V before, but never like this,” he told me toward the end of that year. We sat across from each other in a bathtub filled with pink champagne, our legs intertwined, our arms stretched around along the rim so the edges of our fingers touched. “It’s amazing, actually.”

“What is?” There was an unfamiliar sparkle in his eye. I had stared into those eyes for countless hours in the V and was stunned something about them could still surprise me.

He leaned forward as if to kiss me but paused when inches away. “Every time I look at you, you’re better looking at than the last time I looked at you.”

Another perfect line. “Optical illusion in the V,” I responded with a smirk. He laughed. I grabbed his face and kissed him as I felt the familiar burst of warmth in my chest. Life had become the Before and the After. Before Him I was little more than an animal wandering the world, surviving on whatever scraps I could scavenge. After Him I had discovered fire and was now fully a human being, fully a woman.

When our lips parted, I could not help but utter the words, “I wish-,”

He cut me off. “Come on now, you know this is this and that is that.”

It was an unspoken yet firm rule. Out there was to remain out there and in here, in here. The V was the pure, safe, sacred place. The Real was the dirty, unsafe land of obligations and responsibilities. The V was beautiful, the Real was ugly. To try to combine them would irreparably tarnish both. “When the timer’s up, we are strangers again.”

“But what if we didn’t have to be.”

He looked away from me and stood up, his chiseled nude body shiny with droplets of bubbly. He stepped out of the tub. “No.” His demeanor chilled. He walked to the bedroom of our suite in Rio. I could hear people outside celebrating Carnival. I reached over the edge of the tub and grabbed my champagne flute. I scooped a full glass from the tub and threw it back. The bubbles tickled my throat.

I got up to apologize. He was right. This is this and that is that. Nothing in the V was really real, no matter how it felt. “Hey, look, I’m sorry-,” I dropped the glass on the carpet. The cold liquid splashed my feet.

He was gone.

I clapped three times and said my password aloud.

The worst part of returning to the Real was the diaper.

As soon as I removed the V-Hat, a black motorcycle helmet with no visor, I felt the wetness and smelled the remnants of meals past. While my mind was fully plugged into the V, I was able to ignore my physical body. No matter where my brain went, my bodily functions continued while central command was distracted. Sometimes a one-hour session left me clean but a five hour one like what I just finished left a terrible mess.

I recalled the way his muscled chest felt against mine and thought, Worth it, as the rank stink of digested pizza and salad attacked my face.

“How was it?” my husband, Fred, asked. A lumpy man in with a too-thin mustache, he looked like he was just getting back from taking the kids to a park: tan shorts and red polo with dark sweat stains around the crotch and pits, respectively. Unlike me, he was the outdoorsy type in the Real and shunned the V. “I just don’t trust it,” he told me once. “It’s putting all this information and stimulus in your brain, but at what cost? What is it taking out?”

My ability to deal with your crap, I thought when I remembered that question. Allegedly they took nothing, but tech companies had lied for generations about what they did with user data and information. This could not be any different.

Take what you want. The V was worth any price.

He was worth any price.

“Mommy!” my five-year-old, Sherise, exclaimed while squeezing my legs. With a head that reached my waist, she was in the perfect position to catch a whiff. “What’s that smell?” She pinched her nose and leaned her face away from my body.

“That’s just Mommy’s peepee and poopoo from helmet vacation,” my seven-year-old, Sharonda, said.

“Ew, Mommy. You need a shower.”

“Indeed, I do,” I said. My husband gave me a knowing wink, as if he had any idea of what went on during my time away. I wondered sometimes what he would do if he knew the truth about what I was up to in the V.

Probably tell me he was happy I was having fun.

In the shower I thought of him. He had told me his name was Derrick, an alias (mine was “Bernadette”) for the V, but I heard someone call him Joseph in Egypt, at the bar at the foot of the Sphinx. His face changed and he rushed off to talk to the guy whom I never met. He came back with a wide-eyed, twitchy smile. “Who was that?” I asked him.

“Just an old friend from out there. We went to high school together.”

“Why don’t you ask him to join us?”

“Because I don’t want him to join us.”

A new round of drinks appeared and that was that. It was early on in our time together, easier to let things slip.

Joseph in the Real, Derrick in the V, where are you? My hands slid down under my belly as I pondered the question while memories of his face and body rushed at me like the rain from the showerhead.

Last Christmas a mermaid died in the school swimming pool. It was only a small pool, built up at the sides with wooden panels, more like a tank for training children in. That meant it froze over very easily, but a mermaid couldn’t know that. It stood in a courtyard in the shadow of the school, and the sun reached it only at rare intervals.

Behind it lurked a stone and sulking outhouse, pebbledash walls lashed together with a corrugated plastic roof. In its damp darkness the children undressed, and tripped, and snapped tight, powdered rubber caps over their skulls. Under its benches something black grew wetly out towards them. It was the hut that Freya hated most of all.

Miss Wallace had caught Archie Dorrick from Upper Third belting down the corridor but she hadn’t told him off, not properly, just asked him why he needed to be rushing so quick. He said there was a mermaid dead in the pool, that it must have happened in the holidays, and Miss Wallace was so interested that she didn’t ask Archie why he had been down there on his own, which was definitely cigarettes.

Miss Wallace was young and pretty and was allowed to wear any jumper she liked, unlike Freya, who was a pupil and had to wear a plain grey one like everybody else. Miss Wallace also had colourful bracelets on her arms and hair that rose up above her head and fanned out like branches. When she moved they swayed about her; the bracelets and the hair both. In the older years they had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for comparative mythography, but Freya was only nine so Miss Wallace was her everything teacher, and she needed no other.

Freya’s last teacher had been Mr Heagerty, who had folded himself into a corner of the classroom, spiderlike, and spoke to them only in riddles. His interest in the outside world was oblique at best, and he’d never once worn a bracelet or even a colourful tie. For Miss Wallace, the outside world was the whole point, it was something to push both your hands into and wiggle about. That was why Class 7C were allowed to follow her, symmetrical grey cygnets, through the hall and out the fire escape and down the iron stairway that led to the pool with the mermaid in it.

The ice was frozen over most of it, a thin sheet, breakable. One arm punctured the surface, a long, grey-brown javelin that reached up and out and seized around the metal rung of the ladder in a tight fist. Frost followed up it and caught on the trail of fine hairs that sloped along its back. Freya couldn’t see down below the ice, Miss Wallace had them at a distance, she had first dibs on exploration. Freya jostled her way to the front of the group. She knew she had to be as close as was allowed.

Miss Wallace stared down at the mermaid, and her hair quivered, and her breath came out in clouds. Below her the arm was stiff, and quiet, and altogether too close to her throat. In the end it was Juno Clarke who asked the question that held them all close with a ferocious anxiety. Juno asked if Miss Wallace was sure it was really dead, and Miss Wallace said yes, and everyone turned to Juno and sneered at her stupidity.

Then Miss Wallace said “I can prove it,” which was something she said a lot, and she felt around inside her pockets and pulled out her fountain pen. Freya had long watched and desired that pen, it shone bronze and under Miss Wallace’s direction bled blue, looping calligraphy that far outranked Freya’s lumpen hieroglyphs. Miss Wallace took off the lid, and lifted the pen high, and then stuck it deep, deep into the mermaid’s arm.

Later, when Miss Wallace encouraged them to come close, to huddle around and stroke the arm for themselves, to learn what they could from this rare chance, Freya’s finger found the hole the pen had made. Without really meaning to, she dipped it inside, into the cold and sleepy meat. It resisted her, but she felt deeper, she wriggled her finger down to the end of the incision and scratched at the bone. Freya thought to herself that she might be the first person in history to reach inside a mermaid’s arm and scrape their nail across the bone, and in that thought there was no horror, but a realisation that for the first time, in her life of classmates and brothers and older cousins, she had experienced something truly private, something that could not be shared and that belonged to her alone. And Freya understood that there was and would be nothing else she desired as she desired the mermaid, and she knew what she had to do next.

First, before the science lesson had begun, Miss Wallace came back across the courtyard and told 7C that she had an important question. Her face was suddenly very serious, and she went round in turn and asked if any of them had put the mermaid there, and Freya said no and Tim said no and Fergus said no even though if anybody had put it there, it would definitely have been him. Marybeth asked Miss Wallace how the mermaid had got into the pool, since it hadn’t been any of them, and although the class glowered at her automatically, Freya felt it was a Good Question. Miss Wallace said that if it hadn’t been anybody in another class, then maybe it had crawled out of an estuary and dragged itself inland. Mermaids could manage that, for short distances. Maybe it had seen the pool and thought in its animal mind to refresh itself. It would have heaved its long body up, over the wooden side, and only when it hit the water would it have realised its mistake.

There were a lot of questions now; the pack had grown both curious and tolerant. Jason wanted to know if it was a boy mermaid or a girl mermaid. Miss Wallace said she couldn’t tell because of the ice, but that if the tail was big and squashy that might mean it was full of babies. Joanna Fitch asked if it was saltwater or freshwater, and Miss Wallace reminded her that mermaids were freshwater, that if it had been saltwater then it would have been a dead selkie instead. Juno Clarke, hungry for redemption, asked what it was that had made it dead, and Miss Wallace looked a little sad and said it was the chlorine, that would have poisoned it long before the cold snap made the water freeze over. The chlorine would have filtered its way inside very fast, she told them, in a voice that tried to make it sound less painful than Freya was sure it was.

When the questions were over, 7C clustered around the body in the pool. The head was quite visible, from this angle: smooth, with black orb eyes, wide-set on a yowling face. Its nose was otter-like, a black pad of a snout that protruded enough to disrupt the human geometry of the skull. There were sprays of thick white whiskers on either side and the teeth below were small and sharp. The lower body was more obscured, but Freya saw a long torso, studded with dark nipples, curving into one great sinuous limb coiled beneath it. It was a dumb animal, and dead, but in that it was entirely beautiful.

It was nearly time to go back inside. 7C had had their fill of the mermaid’s dead hand, some of them were getting bored and were stamping their feet. Freya took her chance when Miss Wallace was distracted by Jason, who had found a pine cone and was proud of it: an ill trophy compared to what Freya had in mind. She ran her fingers over the back of the mermaid’s hand one last time, over its thick knuckles and into the folds of frost-crackled webbing. She found her target and she closed her fingers over it and pulled down hard.

It broke under the skin first. She was compelled to swivel it around the joint until the skin was torn all around, and even then it was difficult, it nearly sent her flying to do it. There wasn’t time to inspect her prize, just to thrust it down into the quiet black of her trouser pocket. She could feel it, small and cold and curled like a monkey nut. She squeezed her fist around it and the tiny spark of selfishness that had jumped inside her blazed, she was an inferno, she would collapse, if only something separated her from this fragment, this fossil of a perfect moment and a beautiful thing now dead.

As they trooped back up the stairway and into the honey warmth of the school, Joanna said it was funny, she had expected it to look more like a person. The others scoffed, but Miss Wallace heard her and said that it just went to show there was a world of difference between bipedal and human, and then Owen said Miss, how can it be a biped, it didn’t have any feet at all. Miss Wallace said that was a good point but in a voice that made it sound like she wished it was Owen there dead under the ice and trying to scratch his way out. She said that a mermaid physiologically speaking was an honorary biped, it was a biped in every way that mattered except the feet, and for homework she set them all the project of making up a word for things with two arms that humans and mermaids and gorillas could all be part of together, but not kangaroos or meerkats. Which seemed simple enough to Freya, as she caressed the gobbet of mermaid flesh in her pocket. Really, all it came down to was thumbs.