EDGE OF DAY

Chapter 28

The roar of the crowd rumbled and shook the air. Day's cheek was stuck to the floor. Her throat hurt. She raised her head and gazed through the opaque walls to the people pressed up to the gates that surrounded her glass room. She was used to the mind fog and pain of waking from Chimera. The crowd though, that was something else.

She pulled the electric pads off the side of her temples and the top of her spine. Then she crawled towards a flask of water she'd left placed in the corner. The large hologram timer flashed beside the silver water container. 2 H 16 min. She'd completed the Chimera is two hours sixteen minutes.

Her entire body sagged, tension releasing in a wild flood of emotion. She'd done it. She'd broken the impossible time barrier of two hours thirty minutes to find liberation, which in Chimera time ran at about four weeks. She was the first completion this month. She hunched over, shuddering with equal measures of hope, longing, and exhaustion.

They wouldn't open up the room for another ten minutes. The enormous screens suspended from the rafters in the great hall would project highlights of the game, rebuilding the story her mind had woven into the fabric of the game, focusing on the key moments that had allowed her to wake up to the Chimera and step out of it.

She'd watched hundreds of reruns to understand how others had succeeded. The stories rarely made sense. Seeing a projection of what the person had seen and heard, didn't tell you what they were thinking and feeling. But now she knew it wasn't something the person did. It wasn't something their mind did. At least not exactly. It was the opposite. Letting go. Not controlling.

As Will has said, it was like dreaming—you could expose your mind to ideas and images before entering the Chimera, but you had no idea how your unconscious would reconstruct them to show you what you needed.

Will. She could almost still feel him, almost reach out her hand and touch his body. She could still feel the warmth of his smile like the afterglow of a fire.

She leaned back against the obsidian glass wall, now dark on her side so that instead of seeing the crowds, she saw only her sweaty, pale reflection.

Will had left over three months ago. Like hundreds of others who were supposed to come back at the end of three months, he hadn't made it.

Now, finally, her chance had come.

Static appeared at the edge of the room, pinpricks of crystal white light which were a receiving signal. The supervisor entered through the disintegrator door. Her enormous, almond eyes looked at Day with warmth and excitement. She was carrying a clipboard and life-detector wand.

"You did it!" she gushed. "It was so exciting! The most exciting Liberation I've ever had the chance to supervise!"

Gladdis had overseen the last six of Day's breakout attempts. She was in her thirties, but she was pepped up with the enthusiasm of a teenage cheerleader—probably why she'd got the coveted job of Kronos supervisor.

"You know what this means," she said, scanning the wand up and down Day's body and entering numbers on her clipboard computer. "You're going into the Multiverse!"

Of course, Day knew what it meant. Gladdis was stating what every child knew by the time they could talk. But even so, hearing the word Multiverse stirred a deep longing and fear.

"There'll be the interview with the Committee and the contract and disclaimers to sign. But—" Gladdis crouched down and held Day by the shoulders. "You're going!" She embraced Day with force and enthusiasm. Then reigned in her emotions, brushing down her blue uniform skirt.

Day felt the fluttering of excitement. Her ordeal had exhausted emotionally and mentally, but in a couple of days, she would be ready for the Multiverse. Outside the glass room, the shouting grew thunderously loud as the crowd chanted her name.

"Are you ready?" Gladdis asked. She nodded and Gladdis helped her to her feet.

Arms stretched through the walkway barriers to grab at her. Some wanted to touch her for luck, others pushed pieces of paper into her fists or her pockets. She opened up a curled piece of pink paper from a beautiful girl of around twenty-five carrying an equally angelic-looking toddler on her hip.

As she read the name on the paper, the girl called it out.

"Max Locker!" Day looked up. She was just close enough to hear the woman above the shouts of the crowd. "He doesn't know he's a father. I'm sure he'd come back if he knew. Please find him. Tell him!"

Day swallowed the ball in her throat. All these people clinging to the tiniest slither of hope. But she understood the need to believe anything was possible. You had to believe. Either you believed or you left the Arc and lived out in the wilderness like her sister Amber had done after their parents never came back from the Multiverse.

At the thought of her parents, Day's legs weakened, and she stumbled. Gladdis caught her hand.

"Rather overwhelming, isn't it?" she said into Day's ear. "Still, you're over half-way there." The grid led to the white automated completions door. The Hub would identify her as a successful completion and allow her to step through into the Vanquisher's World. A world, the whispers and rumors said, more beautiful than anything one could imagine. And most important of all, it contained the only entrance to the Multiverse.

She was almost there when someone tried to reach out and grab her. A woman with wild eyes. Day ducked. The woman spat.

"Only fools go into the Multiverse!" A security guard pushed through the crowd. "They should tear it down!" the woman screeched. "It's an abominable creation and you are doing the devil's bidding going into it!" The crowd retreated as a guard grabbed the woman around the back and carried her away.

"Don't stop!" Gladdis said. Day watched the woman kicking and biting. A shiver ran up her spine. Going into the Multiverse was a fool's mission. No one had come out in twenty-six years. But Will was in it, and her parents were in it, so she had nothing left to lose.

Just before she reached the white door and the two guards on either side of it, Day caught sight of overlong auburn hair. Goosebumps broke across her skin. She tilted to get a better look and came face to face with Amber.

"Stop dawdling!" Gladdis reprimanded.

Day looked at her sister. Apart from inside her self-created Uni-verse, she hadn't seen Amber for four years. Amber didn't look older, but she looked different. Her skirts and shirt were embroidered. She wore feather earrings and her hair around her waist. Her face was a beautiful coppery color from life outdoors.

"You look pale," she said.

"How did you get in here?" Day asked.

"It's easy to come and go when you know how."

"But how did you know I'd completed?"

"I watch you from time to time. I knew you were getting close."

Day nodded and looked down, self-conscious of the role her sister had played in the Chimera. The unconscious mind worked in strange ways, it projected things you didn't know you thought or felt. And Amber had been something of a villain, trying to destroy Day's chances of getting through the portal.

Gladdis, who'd got ahead, now walked back and pulled on Day's sleeve. "What are you doing?" she hissed. "Come on, before there's a riot." Ignoring her, Day looked up and met Amber's eye.

"You can't bring them back. You won't even be able to bring yourself back." Day nodded. Amber was right, but she had to try. And without Will, there was nothing left for her here.

With one last look back, she stepped through the Completion force-field door and entered the World of Vanquishers and the soon to be departed.

Hello! Hope you enjoyed the chapter. Thanks for reading, voting, commenting. xox