The Fox Inheritance (Jenna Fox Chronicles 2)

"Alone," I told him.

"They're in the box. I'll be in the library." And he left.

I sat in a chair, staring at the box but not ready to look inside. The whole afternoon I stared, remembering,

opening instead of closing,

walking down the dark hallways,

feeling for walls that disappeared,

for ceilings that didn't exist.

I sat there, losing track of time, just the way I did then. Wandering for hours, centuries--maybe only seconds--there was no way of knowing. I couldn't even measure time with my breaths. There were none. No tongue. No fingers. No touch. No sound. Nothing. Only the tick of thoughts.

Tick

Tick

Tick

The darkness I had wandered in became something else, spreading, reaching, becoming more than I thought darkness could be. It was molten metal filling imagined lungs, ears, crevices, and pores. Darkness everywhere, until it had oozed in so deeply it was a part of me and I wondered if there would be room for anything else inside me ever again.

When Jenna disappeared, the only thing that gave me hope was Kara's voice. It was the only light I had. The only air. Even when she screamed. Even when she accused. At least I knew I wasn't alone. And when there were no screams, her thoughts reached into mine, and mine into hers.

Are you there?

Here. Always here. For you.

Are you there?

Locke, I'm here, here, here....

Just a thought that can do nothing. Only know. Whatever hell it was, I knew we had gone there together. I told myself that someday, some way, I would get us both out. That's what I hoped for. But the darkness creeps in there too, until hope is as black as every thought within you.

"Locke, it's getting late," Miesha had said through the door.

"Coming," I called. Her footsteps receded down the hallway, and I walked to the table where the box sat and lifted the lid.

Closure.

In the bottom were two small black cubes no bigger than six inches across. Plain, not impressive, not as endless or frightening as the world inside them. Environments, is what Dr. Gatsbro called them. They were the so-called groundbreaking technology that Matthew Fox abandoned, at least as far as Kara and I were concerned. How could this six-inch cube be called an environment? How could an entire mind be uploaded into it? How could anything survive inside for 260 years?

This is where we were. This is where our minds were uploaded and kept spinning when the rest of the world thought we were dead. I had picked up the one labeled with my name first and held it in both of my hands. I felt sick, angry, and afraid all at once when I touched it, and then, unexpectedly, protective. If I could so easily disappear from this world once, could it happen again?

Then I lifted the other cube from the box and held them side by side, just as they had always been when they were on a forgotten shelf in a warehouse. I stared at the six-inch cube that had contained Kara.

Tick

Tick

Tick

Every bit. Every dark corner. Did they get it all?

That's when Kara walked in, telling me it was time for dinner. She hadn't wanted to see them. She didn't need closure like I did, she told Dr. Gatsbro. Two steps through the door and she spotted them in my hands. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "That's it?" like it was nothing, but I saw her eyes frozen on the black cubes and her chest rising in shallow breaths.

"That's it," I said.