Kat was supposed to be working on her video game, but concentration was in short supply. A Backwash episode – the one where Esme tries to recruit a crooked nuclear physicist through an elite dating website – was playing in the background. No matter how many times she watched the show, she never stopped swooning for Esme. She almost always wore this high-necked, flowing white dress, almost like a Victorian nightie. It would have made her look like she was floating, except she paired it with knee-high biker boots and spiked gauntlets. Her perm would have made the ‘90s blush.
In short, she was perfect. Kat wanted to be her and be with her. Whenever her boyfriend Roland came on screen she practically growled at him.
The other distraction was her stubbornly silent phone. She checked the chat log with Suzy again.
Hey, can we catch up soon? Call me. x - Seen 23.08
Nearly twenty-four hours ago and no reply.
Before any of this, she had considered inviting her sister to the women’s march on Sunday. She felt strongly about its purpose, to stand up to the myriad injustices faced by women every day. It was the kind of event Kat had always wished she could attend if the mere idea didn’t crumple up her lungs like an old paper bag. She certainly couldn’t go alone, and Suzy had always liked to shout as loud as possible when she deemed anything unfair. It might have been something they could reconnect over. It’s not like she could invite her sister to the WonderVerse comic convention that was running throughout next week. Suzy would have died laughing at the idea.
Oh well. Both could be added to the tottering pile of events she had missed because going anywhere there were other people was a terrifying ordeal. If only she could have been more like Tinker . . .
The concept of the game Kat was making was simple enough. The player took control of a barren planet devoid of atmosphere. The planet wants to prove it’s as good as popular bitch Earth. To do that, the player must work to attract people and aliens, which is a problem when the planet has nothing to offer potential settlers.
So, using the planet’s weak gravitational pull, you fish for resources – asteroids, space debris, astronaut corpses – and craft them into essential tools to improve gravitational pull, communication, terraforming, avocado growing etc. This gives the planet a better chance of attracting the lowliest living creatures, who further improve the planet, and so on. The end goal is to make the planet more populous than Earth (and not destroy it in some kind of terrible apocalypse).
It didn’t do much of that yet, of course. It was mostly a wireframe rock floating on a field of stars.
Game development had never come naturally to Kat. Growing up she had mostly sucked at video games and always lost to Suzy. It was the conjuring of coding that appealed to her – out of nothing she could create little worlds that danced exclusively to her tune (and often to the cacophony of bugs and glitches before she rooted them out).
The deadline for the Spaced Out game jam competition was two months away, plenty of time to get a prototype working.
If she focused on the game, she wouldn’t think about Safa and everything she had learned about the fade. She wouldn’t think how singing ‘Mr Pretzel’ in the school corridor had made her feel more like herself than she had for months. She wouldn’t think about how important it felt to have her hands held, skin-on-skin, irrefutably real.
She jumped when somebody knocked on her door.
‘You okay in there?’ said Dad.
The door was bolted, as always, but Kat still froze like she might be caught doing something she shouldn’t. She paused the TV, leaving Esme frozen in the moment she accidentally seals her preferred physicist inside her secret lab and has to watch her die of radioactivity poisoning.
Usually Dad would give up if he didn’t get an immediate response, but this time he kept talking. ‘It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages. I had this strange sense that I couldn’t remember . . .’ A strange hesitance laced his words as they trailed off, as if he felt he was breaching the rules of their arrangement. Kat stood, and padded gently to rest her ear against the wood.
On the other side, Dad sighed. ‘It was like this with your sister, you know. She was here, and she made sure everybody knew it. Except when it came to me . . . she wasn’t really there at all.’
They had each been there enough to argue, to wound each other with their words and make the house feel like a warzone. It had seemed so much, so overwhelming, that Kat had never thought it could be the result of something missing.
‘I didn’t want it to be the same with you,’ said Dad. ‘You clearly wanted space, and I thought if I gave it to you, did what I couldn’t for Suzy or your mum, you wouldn’t come to resent me the way they did.’
Kat pressed her fingers to the door, wishing they could push through to reach him. It was only fear of the fade that kept her from calling out to him, screaming that she didn’t resent him at all. They had ended up like this because she had thought it was the best way to preserve what they had.
She had always thought he was going through the motions, but maybe she saw it that way to justify her unwillingness, her incapability to be there for him the way he wanted. Dad had tried, and she had not. She had been looking for connection everywhere else but here, the one place where she might have found it. Where it might have been needed the most.
There was a long pause, but she knew Dad was still there, breathing against the door. Finally he said, ‘I miss you.’
Kat pulled back the bolt as quietly as she could and gripped the door handle.
‘Go,’ she whispered to herself, desperate to hug him, to feel his arms around her.
It was too great a risk. She couldn’t face knowing for sure if her own father couldn’t see her. If she had let their relationship decay for so long it could no longer be salvaged.
The doorbell rang downstairs, and she listened to Dad’s footsteps move away to answer. Nobody ever knocked on the door, especially not at this time of night. Kat darted out onto the landing and leaned over the banister to listen.
‘Hi, Mr Waldgrave.’ It couldn’t be – it was Wesley’s voice. ‘Is Kat home? I have her MacBook.’
There was a strange pause before Dad answered. ‘I think she’s upstairs. Go up, if you’re quick.’
Feet scraped against the doormat. Kat couldn’t believe he had got inside so easily. She had expected a hard line of questioning, aspersions cast on Wesley’s character, some kind of ancestral background check. As far as Dad knew he was just sending some random boy up to her room.
Had he forgotten who she was, even for a moment?
She caught sight of Wesley at the bottom of the stairs, leading a little girl after him. Whirling away from the banister, she slammed her door shut behind her and threw the bolt across. Outside she heard the eighth stair creak as he neared the top.
If the door was locked he would go away, and Kat’s heart wouldn’t smash its way through her ribcage. Except she wanted to know why he was here. He could have left her laptop downstairs. Maybe there would be a chance to find out more about whatever he was planning against Tinker.
So, as feet moved along the landing towards her door, she slid back the bolt and retreated into a corner to watch.
Wesley knocked, once-twice-three times, counting them out to try and steady his nerves. There was no answer, and he didn’t know if he had expected one. Beside him, Evie sneezed, failing as ever to cover her mouth.
‘Hello?’ he said.
He reached for the handle, and the door opened easily. Warm orange light spilled out from a desk lamp, and the TV was paused, a woman in a lab coat apparently choking to death behind a pane of glass. It seemed like somebody had been here just seconds before, but had evaporated as soon as his hand touched the door.
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Evie, spotting a shelf full of action figures and soft toys, pulling free of his grip to run for them.
‘Careful, they’re not yours.’
It was almost twice as big as the room he shared with Evie at home. He recognised the posters taking up every inch of wall, the tall shelving units filled with books, magazines, games and toys. The only strange thing was that he felt as if he was seeing it all from the wrong direction, and then he realised he was used to seeing it through Kat’s MacBook set up on the desk. During the campaign against her he had watched every video, seen every photo she had put online, and they almost all came from her webcam. In a way, he had been here countless times before.
Evie gently picked up some kind of overstuffed squirrel and began whispering to it. The long, white desk sat opposite the bed, its surface clean except for a scattering of Post-it notes and the small TV at one end. He placed the MacBook down carefully, as if returning a sacred relic to its rightful place.
A brush of air against his ear, and his skin prickled as he whirled around to find nothing behind him but Evie fastidiously rearranging the shelves into some order only she understood.
‘Are you here?’ he said quietly.
A flush of embarrassment rose up his neck, but he knew without doubt that he believed it, that Kat had faded from sight. Somehow the room, seemingly frozen in time, proved it.
‘If you can hear me, can you make a noise or blink a light or something?’ he said.
A car passed outside, headlights grazing the ceiling. Nothing else.
There seemed to be a chasm in the room, hanging invisible in the air, and Wesley’s body wanted to turn inside out to fill it. Before he could stop himself, he gave his confession to the empty space.
Kat stayed in the corner, making herself as small she could, and watched him peer around the room. It was an invasion, and she had to fight every urge that told her to fight or run. Invisibility made her safe.
While the little girl explored her stuff, Wesley took her laptop from his bag and placed it carefully on the desk. The sight of it made her feel oddly bold. She moved behind him and leaned close to his ear.
‘You can’t hear me, can you?’
His ears pricked. He turned to look right at her, but almost at once his gaze slid away. When he spoke he turned on the spot, as if surrounded by unseen snipers.
‘I brought your MacBook back. I’m sorry I took it.’
He leaned on the back of her desk chair and gripped the plastic until it creaked. All at once he seemed to break. ‘It was me. I made you delete your website and everything. The last few weeks . . . it was all me.’
Kat was rooted to the spot, the meaning of his words sinking in slowly. She had suspected Luke and Justin, but until earlier that day had never had reason to even think of him.
‘I read the letter on your MacBook, the one you didn’t send to us,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad. I didn’t know something like this could happen.’
He turned on the spot again, looking to the corners of the room, like Kat might be watching him through hidden cameras. She was close enough to try and push him, but before her hands could make contact they bounced away, knocking her off balance. The force field. Anger filled her up, surely hot enough to burn through the fade and let her give him a piece of her mind.
‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?’
‘I’m alone. And I’m angry,’ he said, oblivious. ‘I just want somebody to know.’
Kat wanted to scream. Nobody could actually be this selfish. Could do this to her – to anybody – and consider themselves the victim.
‘You can’t fix your shitty life by doing shitty things to other people,’ she told him. ‘Except I bet you think you deserve better for nothing.’
‘I can’t tell anybody about it,’ Wesley was saying. ‘I can’t look weak. I went online to find somewhere to belong, and this is all there was. Either I joined in, or I had nothing.’
For a long time, Kat was sure her online life had saved her. It hadn’t just been a place to watch Tinker videos and trade Backwash theories and read fan fiction. It had offered a place to vent about feeling sad or frustrated. To seek advice from people who felt the same. Without it, she didn’t know what she would have become. If young men couldn’t find those spaces to explore what they were feeling . . .
‘I didn’t mean for this to happen to you. It was supposed to be fun,’ said Wesley. I don’t believe all that stuff they say in videos and forums. I know there’s a lot of bad people there, but maybe it’s the only community that will have me.’
‘That’s how it starts,’ said Kat, circling around to face his blank eyes. ‘It looks innocent enough, just a bunch of nerds spewing bile into the abyss. Until somebody else decides to capitalise on how detached they all are, makes them feel like they belong to something, and exposes them to more dangerous ideas. It’s easier to talk openly about your inadequacies if you believe they’re caused by a global conspiracy against you. Young men have nowhere else to deal with their anger, so these people aim it at a target that suits them. They recruit you, and you probably don’t even notice it.’
Tinker had spoken about exactly this in one of her videos. It was no surprise they had identified her as a target.
Kat had never done anything to Wesley, and yet he had decided to destroy her life. Kat could hardly fathom the cruelty. Still, something about his confession made her feel for him; that he could only make it in a room that appeared to him to be empty.
‘If this is my fault, I won’t forget you. I want to fix it,’ Wesley said. ‘I just don’t know how.’
‘It’s not your job to fix me,’ Kat replied. ‘That’s not why you’re really here. You think if I can be forgotten so easily, it could happen to you too. And that terrifies you.’
‘They’re planning something against Tinker. I know how much you love her,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is, I have to do it. I have to make them accept me. We’re meeting tomorrow. I’ve left the address on your MacBook.’
Kat edged closer to him. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
At the shelves, the little girl had grown bored of arranging her action figures into strange poses, and came back to Wesley, taking his hand.
‘Tired now, Wezzer,’ she said. ‘Home?’
‘In a minute, Eves,’ he said. And then, to the room, ‘I’m sorry.’
Kat couldn’t help but sneer at that. ‘I hope that makes you feel better about yourself.’
She followed them onto the landing, watched them put on their shoes and leave without Dad appearing to see them off.
Her eyes settled on her laptop. She closed herself back inside her room and opened the lid. There were still tabs open in a browser, and she scrolled through until she found the chat window.
There were so few details, but one thing was clear: TrumourPixel was planning an attack – either online or in the real world – on Tinker.
‘This time it’s personal,’ she muttered to herself.
The trolls had defeated Kat, and she hated that she had let them. This was her chance to fight back – they were targeting Tinker for all the same reasons they had targeted her. This time she wouldn’t lose.
Wesley had made it sound as if she needed him, and she couldn’t allow that to be true. She retrieved her phone and found Safa’s number.
What time tomorrow? she sent. Why keep lying to herself that she might not go? Everything she had seen, had been told by Safa and the Lonely People, screamed !!!DANGER!!! (wanton exclamation marks warranted), but she couldn’t resist.
The response came a minute later.
Meat by the font tin about sex.
Kat stared at the message for a long time and wondered if she had forgotten how to read. I don’t know what that means, she replied.
FUCKING SIRI. I use voice chat to write messages.
Why?
Because it’s cool. That first message was meant to say MEET by the FOUNTAIN about SIX.
Kat paused a moment before typing a reply. Why did it feel like she was doing something illicit? I’ll see you there.
You’re the only person who will.
*
Mum was in bed when Wesley returned, so he retired quietly to the bedroom, breathing in the damp as he put Evie to bed.
The Musley family portrait had been stowed safely in his bag. Digging his fingers into the picture frame, he dismantled it and took out the photograph, turned it over and around as if to check it was real. Aaron beamed out at him, flanked by the family that had forgotten him.
Their own son. Brother.
Gone.
Carefully, he returned the portrait to the frame and reassembled it. A fleck of dust had become trapped under the glass. It pressed against Aaron’s cheek like a blemish on his skin.
Wesley pushed the photograph under his pillows, and then tugged the covers up over his head to blot out the world.