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The first time he wakes up, he thrashes. It’s instinct. He’s disoriented and groggy. It’s dark. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s on his back. And he comes to and just—hey, hey, Will, shh. Riley’s voice, but in his head, not his ears. Will stops moving. He can feel the boat rocking beneath them. Riley’s hand is resting gently over his eyes, a sign that he shouldn’t open them. There’s something pressing against his ears. After a second, he recognizes it as her headphones.
Don’t talk, she says in his head. But he had already figured that out. Whispers can see what he sees and hears what he hears, but as long as Will doesn’t respond to Riley, she can talk to him in his head. She takes her hand away from his face, but he keeps his eyes closed. It’s difficult to resist opening them. He’s awake and the impulse to look around is strong. And Riley is right there.
Here too, she says, amused.
He wants to know how long he’s been out, and where they are, and if they’ve made any progress while he’s been asleep, but he can’t speak to her to ask her any questions, and he shouldn’t know those answers anyway. It’s safer.
Will eases himself up until he’s sitting with his back against the boat. He can feel Riley, the warmth of her, next to him. She hasn’t said anything in his head in a moment, and he’s lost sight of her. Then something presses against his lips.
By the smell of it, it’s a slice of apple.
Will recoils. Oh God. How many days has it been? Riley has to have been feeding him while he’s out, which means she’s also been—
Will, she interrupts. She doesn’t care about any of that. He knows that’s what she’ll say even before she says it, so instead she just smiles and gives him half a shrug. You’d do it for me, she adds. Or any of us.
She’s still holding the slice of apple against his lips, an offering. He lifts up a hand and takes it from her. At least for right now, he can feed himself. He crunches into the apple and it’s crisp and tart.
I’ve gotten very good at stealing, Riley tells him. With a lot of help, of course. She smiles. Wolfgang and Nomi helped me break into a hospital, and then Kala helped me figure out what we needed to keep you alive and unconscious.
It is so, so hard not to talk back to her—not to think back at her—but he’s been awake for fifteen minutes now and Whispers could find him at any time. Everything depends on Will shutting the hell up.
It’s not a great plan, Riley admits. But I can’t keep you unconscious all the time. Then in the real world, where he can’t see or hear, Riley’s hands are on his shoulders, then his upper arms. The contact feels good, but he can’t think about that. She pulls at him a little. You should stretch, she says. She worries about him, he can feel it, and he wants to tell her it’s fine, they’re going to fix this, but then the boat rocks as Riley stands up. She offers him both her hands. He takes them, and then is surprised by the physical cost of standing. Riley has to guide him up, and he’s still so woozy, and the boat is swaying beneath them, and he can’t see—Will staggers, but she catches him.
I’m gonna wake you up regularly, she promises. I asked the others to look into what kind of exercise you might need, but Lito seemed to think you would know?
Will can’t help it, then. He flushes and laughs, then claps a hand over his mouth.
Outside, she covers his hand with hers and lifts it away from his face. Inside, she’s smiling at him. She must have been able to interpret something from that reaction, and he wonders briefly how much she got, but all she says is I guess that explains why Lito looked so smug.
Will wants to react to that in a dozen different ways: I’m not—I don’t—or I do but—it just happened—I wish it had been you—but then a voice in his head says Hello Will.
Will grabs Riley by the wrist. He can’t figure out how else to signal to her that Whispers is in his head, and he panics and opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Riley’s finger is against his lips, silencing him.
Is he there?
Will nods, dipping his head as little as possible. Even as he does it, he knows it’s an unnecessary precaution: Whispers has already found him. Will can feel him, hovering. He’s not there physically, but his presence in Will’s mind looms large. It makes Will want to be as still as possible. No movements, no thoughts, no feelings.
Like a rabbit, Whispers suggests. His tone is amiable. Why wouldn’t it be? He has the upper hand. Or a deer in the headlights, I suppose that’s the expression. An animal instinct. It won’t help you, of course.
Will might be panicking, but Riley is remarkably calm. I’m going to put you under, she says. He can feel her hands on his left arm. There’s an apology in her touch. She’s not the one who should be apologizing.
How long do you think you can keep your eyes closed? Whispers says, like he’s making conversation in line at the coffee shop. Not long enough, I think.
Fuck you, Will thinks, and then everything goes dark.
*
The next time he wakes up, he’s able to keep still. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, but he can’t ask. Riley doesn’t seem to want to talk, either, but she touches his cheek.
Will tries not to lean into it. He tries not to feel relieved, or grateful, or comforted. It’s almost impossible. There’s a fine line between feeling something and communicating it to her. Anything he communicates to her, he could also be communicating to Whispers. So in addition to keeping his eyes closed and his mouth shut, Will is going to have to learn to keep a lid on his feelings.
I don’t know how long we have before he finds you, Riley says. She helps him stand up.
In response, Will begins to stretch.
*
When Will wakes up, there’s music in the headphones. It’s bluesy rock, with a deep-voiced woman singing “We may not have a cent to pay the rent, but we’re gonna make it.” The message is clear enough. He smiles, and then wonders if whatever synapses firing in his brain to make him smile will give him away.
The singer is Mavis Staples. Will doesn’t know that, but Riley does.
She’s found a blindfold for him, and the only thing he can hear is the music, so at least today he doesn’t have to concentrate on not seeing or hearing anything. He’s gotten better at standing up on his own, but Riley is always there. She only ever touches him briefly. It’s the right course of action, but Will spends every minute of his conscious existence wishing she would touch him again, and then wishing he didn’t wish that, and then wishing he could stop wishing for things.
The song winds down, and he tries to focus on the music, wondering what else she put on the playlist.
*
I don’t know shit about discipline, not really, Sun says, suddenly standing in front of him. Will stops mid-push-up and stares at her. No, keep going, Sun says. I just meant that I’ve tried to quit smoking four times already.
Will likes her. He wishes he could talk to her. It’s hard to resist the lifelong impulse to make conversation. Will’s never been a smoker, but Diego used to. He doesn’t know how many times Diego tried to quit, but he knows it’s at least four.
We don’t know if he found you because of something you thought or felt, Sun says. It might just be that the longer you spend awake, the higher the probability of him finding you. But since we don’t know which it is, we’ll be cautious. We have twenty minutes.
She pauses, and it’s a natural place for Will to interject a comment, an affirmation, an “okay, what’s the plan?”
Sorry, Sun says, watching his hesitation. I’m not accustomed to talking without pausing. But don’t respond. Anyway, I might still be a smoker, but I do know how to meditate.
It’s a good idea. He needs to keep his mind clear. Meditation might even give him the strength to fight off Whispers, at least for awhile. Maybe he’ll be able to keep Whispers from finding out everything he knows, if he gets good enough. This plan seems like the sort of thing Jonas might have suggested, and Will wonders if any of them have talked to Jonas, but he can’t give voice to that question. He finishes his set of push-ups instead.
I’m not good at it, Sun says. I fight because I’m full of feeling, not because I’m empty. But you learn to meditate and I’ll quit smoking and maybe that way, we’ll both live.
It’s a hell of a pep talk.
*
Riley’s playlists, already eclectic, become more and more diverse. Will realizes, after a time, that some of the new music is in other languages. He understands them all, which would have been a neat trick to pull back when he was getting Cs in high school Spanish.
He wonders how the others are sending Riley music, but he can’t ask. He knows she moors the boat in different places every few days. Sometimes he wakes up on solid ground, so he knows they’ve been camping. He wants to ask how Riley gets him on and off the boat, but he can only assume she has help. It must be a spectacle.
He wants to express to Riley—to all of them—how grateful he is.
He hopes they already know.
*
Once, Will wakes up to singing, but it’s not in the headphones.
Pardesi, pardesi, jaana nahin…
The song is new to him, but he also has a vague sense of recognition, and somehow he’s heard it a thousand times. Being a sensate is an exercise in superposition. He is always learning new things that he has known all his life and returning to places that he has never been. Hearing a new song that is also an old song should hardly startle him, but in this case, it is the song itself, haunting and lovely, that catches his attention.
Kala is sitting in front of him, in the boat, but also thousands of miles away. Oh, she says. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.
Will tamps down “it’s alright” and “keep singing, it was beautiful,” but he can’t keep himself from smiling at her. No matter how good he gets at controlling himself, he has to communicate in some small way. It’s simpler to accept that about himself than to crush the impulse. He tried, for awhile, to remain stone-faced and unfeeling throughout every conversation, but it made him want to die. That doesn’t help any of them.
It’s from a movie I loved as a young girl, Kala says. I watched it with Capheus last night.
She starts again. Her voice is high, clear, and full of yearning. Foreigner, foreigner, don’t go…
*
Will never had a chance to talk to Riley about normal things, like what kind of music he likes, but she seems to have found her way there regardless. It’s funny, because he never could have identified what it is that he likes about her choices. She puts genres on the playlists—rap, folk, opera—that have nothing in common. Things Will would never have listened to before. Maybe his taste is changing.
Maybe it’s the gesture he appreciates, more than the music itself.
*
Riley is always there, but the others come frequently. They see Sun the most often, and Will supposes they’re both prisoners. But Kala, Capheus, Nomi, and Lito call as often as they can.
Wolfgang is more distant, but Will suspects his absence is strategic. Wolfgang has experience hunting people down. The less Will knows about where he is and what he is doing, the better.
He’s surprised, then, to find Wolfgang standing in the boat, looking out at the ocean, and humming. The melody is familiar, and it only takes Will a moment to realize that it’s the same song Kala was singing. He wonders if Wolfgang knew the song before, or if he heard it through their connection somehow. Wolfgang’s absence might be strategic, but it’s also an easy excuse to disappear. Will doesn’t have to ask to know that he and Kala are avoiding each other. She talks cheerfully about visiting all the others, but she never mentions Wolfgang.
Except, perhaps, in song.
Pardesi, pardesi, jaana nahin…
She loves you, Will wants to say, but can’t.
Wolfgang stops humming when he notices Will looking at him, and shrugs. Stuck in my head, he says. He gives Will a long look, as if daring him to say something. Will wonders if the others have been talking to him about Kala. He’s missed so much. Wolfgang drops his gaze then, looking out at the water and then back at Will. Can you hold him off for awhile, do you think? I want you awake when we find him.
How long is awhile, Will wants to ask, but instead he nods. He can’t keep living like this. They can’t keep living like this.
*
Will, Riley says. Even though her voice is only in his mind, he can hear her breath catch with delight. You feel that? A real bed.
Will no longer has to resist the impulse to open his eyes. He can use Riley’s mind to see their surroundings. They’re in a hotel room. He’s lying on the bed and Riley is sitting cross-legged beside him. She looks happy, but there are circles under her eyes. By the light beneath the half-drawn shades, it’s evening. He has no idea what season it is.
It has been a long time since Will felt a real mattress underneath him. He doesn’t want to contemplate how long. He lives in twenty-minutes increments, separated by darkness.
Nomi checked us in here, Riley says. I’ve been sticking to campsites and cheap little hotels that take cash, places where nobody looks at us. I would never have tried to stay here, but Nomi insisted. Wolfgang and I had to drag you through the lobby—Will might have winced with guilt, once—and the man at the front desk stared, but Lito charmed him so well he forgot his own name. We said you got really drunk and passed out.
They have enough practice at this that Riley no longer pauses. She keeps up a constant stream of conversation. Wouldn’t it be nice to get drunk? Lito got drunk with Hernando and Daniela last night, and I felt it a little, but it was nothing like the real thing. When this is over, we’re gonna drink champagne until our skin fizzes.
Riley has never, ever mentioned it being over before.
She lies down on the bed and curls against him, sliding one arm under the pillow and sighing with pleasure. I love sleeping, she says, and she sounds so tired. He could do with a lot less sleep, and she could do with a lot more. And beds. I never thought I would feel this way about a bed. I bet this place has a really nice shower, too. I’ll wake you up later so you can use it. Did you know they have room service here? We’re not paying, so I’m gonna order everything.
She feels so nice. Her touch is his constant star, the one thing in his strange, fragmented world that he can always trust. It’s a risk, but Will wraps his arm around her waist and fits his legs to hers. Her hair tickles his face, and he leans forward until his nose bumps the back of her neck. He kisses the bare skin there.
Riley goes still. Will hates Whispers for poisoning this thing between them, for making her afraid of his touch. He pulls back, but only a little. He has enough self-control to lie next to her and put all his feelings aside, and she clearly needs the comfort. Even if it’s only for ten minutes, he wants to take care of her for once, instead of the other way around.
Will keeps a list, in his head, of all the things he will say and do when this is over and he has his life back. Most of the list is Riley, Riley, Riley. But he’d like to work on breaking Sun out of prison and helping Capheus care for his mother, too. He wants to meet Amanita and Hernando and Daniela in real life. Will makes a note to buy some champagne, too.
Next to him, he feels Riley relax into sleep. Her breath comes slow and steady. He listens to it for a long time—not in his mind, but the real sound of her breath in his ears. There is something about the immediacy of the senses that the mind can never replicate. She talks to him sometimes, or sings, if she thinks it’s safe. He misses answering.
He lets her sleep and stays awake listening for far longer than he should. He’s courting danger, doing this. But even with all his hard-earned discipline, it is impossible to deny himself this tiny pleasure. Will gives himself five more minutes of consciousness. Instead of waking her, he gets up and puts himself under. He stumbles back to bed, wraps himself around her, and murmurs her name against the shell of her ear.