Ascension

Chapter 13

Mick excused himself to go to the bathroom in the back of the shop. He locked the door behind him and pressed his back to it, squeezing his eyes shut. He breathed loudly through his mouth, filling up his cheeks and blowing them out repeatedly in a stress-busting method that Gabe had taught him once. It did nothing to calm him down.

Carly disintegrated and reformed again and again in his mind’s eye similar to how Mad Barty had vanished when the Watchers destroyed him. Everything about the strange girl suddenly made sense to him: the way she hardly ever spoke, her blank stares, her mechanical movements, and her general lack of expression, as if she had never had a personality. She was essentially a fabricated body with no soul inside it, an empty shell with no memories or personality to run on except for Reid’s wishes of her. He still had no idea of how she existed at all and what she had to do with Gabe’s claims of them being in a hellish unreality.

Mick relieved himself at the toilet and splashed his face with water, careful not to get the gauze on his palms too wet. He leaned over the washbasin, letting the excess water drip from his chin into the drain as he looked at himself in the mirror. As he suspected, he looked like a complete mess. His eyes were rimmed red and his cheeks were flushed with excessive rubbing from his ridiculous crying fit. He had a small scratch above his eyebrow and the white bandage stretched over his temple. His dark hair was lank on his forehead and shadows pooled both inside his eyes and under them.

He sniffed in disgust. He had seen better days.

Collecting whatever composure he could find within himself, he straightened out his t-shirt and walked back out. He ran his fingers over the wood of the bookshelves as he passed. He had never been a voracious reader and had not even read much before coming to work at Crossroads Books, but the shop had always felt so homey to him and the tall shelves, like old friends. It struck a pang in his heart to think that none of it might be real.

When he came back into the reading area, Reid was sifting through the different sheets in the file, spreading them out on the table. Mick stood where he was and watched him in puzzled silence for a moment. He knew Reid to be a lot of things: charming, charismatic, more than a little crazy, good with children, fiercely protective, a social butterfly among his customers, and strangely reclusive. He had liked to think that he knew Mortimer Reid quite well, considering how long he had known him and how long they had been friends. But at that moment, Mick felt like how he had on the day of the recent Ascension, when he had seen a darker side of Reid that he had never before imagined him capable of. He felt like he was standing in front of a stranger.

“I know you’re lurking there, Mick,” said the man in question. “Come in and sit down.”

Mick obeyed him, settling himself back onto the small couch, but sitting further to one side so that there was more distance between him and Carly. If Reid noticed, he did not comment on it.

“So,” Mick said in an attempt to be casual. “Carly isn’t real.”

“Yes,” Reid replied tightly. “She’s an automated program created to suit my needs.”

“Your needs?”

“You often asked me why I never came out of this bloody shop,” he mentioned. “It’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t. I created Carly to counter that. She’s the only connection I’ve got to the rest of this world.”

Mick glanced at the papers on the table, looking away when he saw Gabe’s sheet. “You said that she was your daughter.”

“She is,” Reid replied, “in every essence of the word. I created her. It wasn’t easy, mind you, and it took me nearly eight years to perfect her design from within the Game. At first, she took the shape of a flickering blob. With a little more work, she became a cat. I kept redeveloping the design until she became a little girl. I thought of keeping her as a cat, but I preferred this form.”