My hands shake as I force them down to lie on Kara’s backup.
Please, Jenna.
My fingers surround the six-inch-square box. Small, finite, and yet as infinite as a black hole in a galaxy. The terror and solitude of that empty world flood back to me and I pull away.
Never, Father said. Nothing of their humanity was left. They will never exist beyond the six-inch cube.
I hear the moans of an animal. Grieving.
My own cries.
I lay my hands on Kara’s and Locke’s backups. ‘I’m sorry,’ I sob. ‘I am so sorry.’ I pull them from their power docks. ‘It won’t be long.’
I look at the third backup. Mine. What do you need, Jenna? What? What?
I need to own my life.
I pull it loose and cross an invisible boundary from immortal to mortal.
‘This is the beginning,’ I whisper. The real beginning.
I gather the backups in my arms. Waiting here for thirty minutes is too risky. I understand about risk management, too. Mother and Father are resourceful when it comes to me. One thin door won’t hold them for long. It’s time to complete the plan. The backups need to be somewhere safe where they can’t be reached for at least thirty minutes.
I hear a loud crack. Lily yells from above. ‘Jenna!’ She doesn’t have to tell me. Father is determined.
I run down the hallway and yell as I pass the staircase, ‘Tell them to look out my window!’
I hurry through the kitchen out to the veranda and down the slope to the pond. Dawn is fingering through the trees and rooftops. I climb onto the granite rock at the edge of the pond and look back at my house. Mother and Father are at my window, throwing up the sash.
‘Jenna, no!’
‘For God’s sake, no!’
I take Kara’s backup in my right hand. ‘You’re free,’ I say, and I throw it in the air, a soaring bird in a violet sky. It descends and splashes into the middle of the pond, ripples and spray exploding the quiet glass. Locke’s backup follows, falling not too far from Kara’s, the low ripples of the two meeting, intertwining, and gently fanning out to become nothing at all. Gone.
I take the third backup into my hand. There are no screams from the window behind me. Acceptance? The final stage of grief? It’s over. They know it. And I know it. The final fall of Jenna Fox. A mere girl, like any other.
The cube flies from my hand, high into the sky, and it seems to hang there for a moment, almost suspended, free, and then it falls, disappearing from this world and joining another.
I hold my breath, waiting.
There is no fanfare. The sun doesn’t stop its ascent. The coot hens are only mildly disturbed at the brief intrusion and circle back to the cattails to resume their breakfast. One small changed family doesn’t calculate into a world that has been spinning for a billion years. But one small change makes the world spin differently in a billion ways for one family.
And for me. The only Jenna Angeline Fox.
I sit on the rock’s edge watching the ripples lose their bulk and energy. But gone? Who can explain where energy goes? The pond returns to glass. On the surface it may look the same again, but it is forever changed by what lies within.
I hear footsteps. Soft. Slow. They stop behind me. Lily’s footsteps.
‘I let them out,’ she says.
‘I should go in.’
> ‘They’ll never forgive me.’
I stand and brush the grit from my hands. ‘The world’s changed. That’s what you told me. I think that maybe forgiveness is like change—it comes in small steps.’
She reaches out. I fold into her arms, and she holds me tight, stroking my head. Neurochip or neuron, it doesn’t matter, I am weak with her scent and touch.