He hadn’t changed position the entire time he’d slept, and he opened his eyes to see the pavement an inch from his face. He slowly turned his head and stretched, his muscles groaning, joints popping, as he straightened out. Slowly, he got to his feet. He felt like an eighty-year-old man. He stretched out his limbs again and the memory of Kaine’s cyberattack hit him, making his stomach turn. Then came the hunger—cramps that felt like claws raking his innards.
He needed food. The man at the coffee shop around the corner was a little shocked when Michael ordered three different sandwiches and two bags of chips, but everything in the place looked good. He found a booth and wolfed down the food, staring blankly out the window at the city lights, thinking of the data he’d found on Sarah. She wasn’t close at all. She was hundreds of miles away, and for some reason, it saddened Michael to think of leaving for such a long journey, which made no sense, considering he had no actual ties to the home of Jackson Porter.
He had no ties at all. To anywhere. It didn’t matter where he went.
The second sandwich did him in. As his dad—his fake dad—used to say, his eyes had been bigger than his stomach. Still achy from the long sleep on the concrete bed, he got up and headed out of the restaurant, handing the spare sandwich and a bag of chips to a homeless woman he’d seen nearby. For some reason, he envied her. At least she had a world. His had been destroyed.
There was a lot to do before he could leave town. He’d just started making a mental list of tasks when he heard someone shout behind him.
“Jax!”
It was a girl’s voice, and Michael only turned around out of curiosity, at first making no connection to himself. But it clicked when he saw dark eyes focused on him, a pretty teenage girl running down the sidewalk. It was her. Gabriela. Even from a blurry pic sent with a short note, he could tell.
Michael grimaced and swore under his breath. He spun around and started walking, briskly, his mind suddenly empty of all solutions.
She caught up and grabbed him by the shirt, forcing him to turn and face her once again. He stopped and stared, sure that he’d gone totally pale.
“What’s wrong with you?” the girl asked, her expression somewhere between confusion and anger. “Jax. You look like a … like a zombie. Tell me what’s going on right now. I haven’t heard from you in two days!”
Michael’s mouth moved, twitching more than anything. No words came out.
Gabriela let go of his shirt and stepped back. Now she only looked hurt. “What happened to us hanging out while your parents were gone? Time of our lives! And now you can’t even reply to my messages? Can’t call me? What’s …” Her words faded out and she furrowed her brow. “Jax. Seriously. What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“Um,” Michael managed to say. “Uh, look, um, Gabriela …” With every syllable that came out, she looked more perplexed. If he’d doubted at all before, he now knew—there was no way he could fake being Jackson Porter. “Look, things have changed. I couldn’t explain it in a million years. I’m sorry. Really. Bye.”
Michael turned and started pushing past people, dodging shoppers, then broke into a run. He ran and ran and ran through the city, and he didn’t look back, not once, scared she’d be on his tail, not until he found another alley far away, sure that he’d left her behind. She’d never even called after him. She might not even have tried, too baffled to speak.
But he was alone.
Gasping for every breath, he sank to the ground and huddled in a hidden corner, aching for what he’d done to that poor girl, a girl he didn’t even know.
But Sarah … Sarah he did know.
He had to find her.
Twenty hours later, Michael was on a train, a real train—one of the sleek BulletStreams that traveled almost two hundred miles an hour. He’d never ridden on such a thing in his virtual life as a Tangent, which made him think of something he couldn’t believe he’d never realized before: he’d never gone anywhere with his family during all those years. Not any significant distance, anyway. And it had never seemed strange to him. It was just life. You worked or went to school, you longed for the next time you could slip into your Coffin and leave the world behind. That had seemed normal to Michael, and he suspected it wasn’t true at all. At least, not for everyone.
In some ways, even though he had no justification, he was offended by how manipulated his life had been. But wasn’t that the very definition of being a program? He didn’t know why; it just ticked him off. All of it. And now he was flesh and blood. He wasn’t sure when it had started or when it would end, but he knew that, slowly but surely, he was transforming, taking ownership of his … “self.” The insecurity of being artificial had started to fall away, and he didn’t know how he felt about that. It came with an arrogance he didn’t like. Or understand.