Cloud Chasers

nineteen | between two worlds

She sat on the ground by the wall. The sun sank below the horizon and the sky grew dark. A cold breeze sent chills running down her spine and blew her hair over her face.

She folded Chase's letter. If she let any more tears fall over it, she wouldn't be able to read it again.
She brought it to her face. It was laced with Chase's familiar smell.

The tears started again. Her heart hurt, her chest felt tight. She wanted to scream but she was exhausted. Her eyes sparkled at the full moon in the night sky, watching over her.

She wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes, trying to banish her stinging thoughts.
Behind her closed eyelids appeared Niko, standing before her in the Cyberspace. "Who is Chase Journey?" he said.

She tried to step closer to him, but she couldn't move.

"You better get used to that question," he said. "Chase Journey has been deleted from existence in this reality. The people who knew him won't remember him. The things he's done in this world have been undone. Chase Journey has never existed."

She wanted to shake her head, but she stood still. She wanted to scream, but her mouth stayed shut.

"This only happened due to the peculiar case of his doppelgänger being dead," Niko continued. "Nothing to write home about."

Joyce screamed inside her head. She screamed so loud that eventually her lips unzipped and her scream became real.

Niko's image glitched out and ultimately vanished. The Cyberspace caught fire. The louder she screamed, the closer the flames got.

After the flames reached her, she found herself on the moon. She hopped in zero gravity, floated in space, reaching for the earth.

"Are you the astronaut?" She heard Niko's voice coming from behind, so she turned. The moon had become Mac Tonight's head. "Or are you the alien?"

She shook her head and kept floating to safety. When she entered the planet's atmosphere, gravity dragged her body and brought her plummeting toward the ground.

She felt a parachute breaking her fall, but when she looked up there was no parachute.

"Are you a doctor?" Niko came flying by her in his own invisible parachute. "Or are you a patient?"

She felt the ground beneath her feet. She was in the Virtual Plaza, in its vanilla form. "What's that smell?" her mouth said when she thought to call forth Helios.

"Hypnagogia," Niko said, appearing behind her.
She jumped to look, but the Virtual Plaza turned off and darkness surrounded her.

"Lights on," Niko's voice said and she was back on Edysium, except it was covered by snow.

It was still snowing, freezing cold. The snowflakes quickly adorned her hair.

"When the two is off and the three is on, the old soul resides in the young body and the world resumes the spinning," Niko said, standing by the door, except there was no door.

She tried to step closer, thinking her body wouldn't move, but it did.

She ran toward him and gripped a fistful of his tie before the ground disappeared and she fell back to reality.

Her eyes shot open. It was dawn and there was no snow on Edysium, but it was freezing cold.

She got to her feet, the back of her neck hurt from sleeping against the concrete wall.

"Did you hear about the girl stranded on top of a building?" Niko's voice startled her. "Her name was mighty Joyce."

He stepped toward her, a wry smile on his face. "How are you holding up?" he asked.