A/N: This chapter (and a significant amount of future planning) was made in collaboration with extremely talented @Miss Peacecraft , who actually knows what she's doing regarding Digimon as a fandom, unlike me. I would also like to credit @Stewart92 's amazing fic The Digicrest of Escalation as a major inspiration for this idea.
She could hear doors opening, one by one. Footsteps echoed in the hall outside, drawing closer.
Taylor fought to control her breathing, the burning in her chest struggling against the need to keep quiet. Tears pricked behind her eyelids as she huddled under the desk, surrounded by dust and a tangled thicket of electronic cables, but she blinked them back. A single word played in an endless loop inside her head, stuttering like a cracked disk.
Pathetic.
It was a familiar voice. One she'd heard as often as her own, if not more. The voice of the girl who had once been her best friend. Emma.
The worst part was, she couldn't bring herself to disagree. Running, hiding, sneaking around. Finding the cracks, gaps, hidden places. The darkest, dirtiest part of Winslow because at least then maybe they wouldn't find her there. She'd tried to find anyone who would listen. She'd tried to take it all without breaking, no matter what they said or did. She'd even tried just giving in and begging them to stop. Nothing ever helped.
Nothing but this. And even then, not always.
I mean, it makes sense. She sure looks like something you'd find squirming under a rock.
I think she likes it, crawling around in all that gross muck. It helps cover up her face, at least.
You're right. We should put together a real treat for her then, something she'll enjoy.
Taylor wiped at her eyes, only to freeze solid as she heard the sound of a door knob turning. She didn't breathe, didn't blink, wishing she could stop the sound of her heart beating. The door creaked open, and for a period that felt like years nothing happened.
"She's not here."
She didn't recognize the voice, just another of the endless followers Emma had attracted. Taylor didn't let herself breathe as the door clicked shut, until the footsteps had faded into the distance. When she finally let herself gasp, it turned into a choked sob.
She knew she should be feeling angry. Resentful. Ashamed, maybe. But the only feeling Taylor could conjure up in that moment was a sick relief. That the next time they found her wouldn't be today. It wasn't until she had gotten control of her strangled tears that she noticed a new sound.
Every fan in the computer lab was spinning up at once.
It wasn't an unfamiliar sound. She'd heard it more than once trying to wrestle the elderly desktop at home into completing some task or other. Somehow, though, this was different. The noise had an edge to it, as if coming from something much bigger than a classroom of cheap computers. The smell of burning plastic filled her nostrils.
It wasn't until Taylor saw smoke rising from one of the computers that she realized something was wrong. Her stomach twisted as her eyes flicked up to the smoke detector on the wall. Winslow was shit, but it wasn't that shit. It likely worked. If she was caught here when the fire alarms went off… she shuddered. It wasn't hard to imagine the faculty's reaction, or who would be there to use it. Not with Emma there to spin stories that seemed to be more real than the truth. Hebert the troublemaker, the girl who just wouldn't stop acting out…
Taylor scrambled out from under the table, frantically hunting for some plug she could pull or switch she could flip to make it stop. Even if it all broke, as long as they only found it afterwards, she might still escape being blamed. The whir of tortured fans around her rose to a scream. Electricity arced between the computers, and for a moment of rising panic Taylor thought she'd made a horrible mistake trying to stop this instead of using that time to get out—!
The noise died. The arcs of electricity stopped. A glow so bright she had to shield her eyes filled the room.
A single computer monitor had been transformed into liquid light. It rippled, casting rainbow-edged highlights across the walls and ceiling.
Taylor stared, open-mouthed. This had to be a trick, right? An illusion, some fancy screensaver. It couldn't be real. For a moment she wondered if it was the work of some cape, but… things like that didn't happen. Not in places like Winslow. Not to people like her.
She took a step forward, towards the glowing thing that wasn't a screen. Something in her clamped down. She wouldn't get her hopes up, wouldn't be awed. She just wanted to know. If it was real, if there was really still a screen there or the pool of radiance her eyes insisted on. Carefully, Taylor reached out a finger to touch the—
The noise was steady, unrelenting, a low whistle like breath across the hollow of the biggest empty bottle in the world. It carried with it tiny flecks of grit that caught in her hair and clothes, bouncing across her skin.
Taylor opened her eyes.
Clouds boiled and churned in the sky overhead, thunderhead-gray. Which was odd, because the air here was dry. Dead-of-winter dry, when the crumbling husks of leaves swirled in the wind and it was too cold even to snow. Where was she? The last thing she could remember was…
Oh. Oh.
Taylor flipped over frantically, scrabbling to her hands and knees on the rough slanted ground. She looked up. And up. Further. Something in her chest caught.
Skyscrapers of every type and style were stacked haphazardly, piled into a mountain that rose into the clouds. Towers of mirrored glass, brutalist concrete cliffs, art-deco spires, all stared back with shattered windows like empty eyes. Twisted and broken skeletons of metal and concrete lay bare against the sky, heaped together until they were less architecture and more geography.
For a moment she thought of the boat graveyard, and a wave of vertigo crashed over Taylor so strong she had to shut her eyes. It was too big and too much and too wrong and she had made The mistake. The one she'd heard on a thousand sad news stories that always ended the same way: Our condolences to the families of the deceased, if you have any information…
She'd seen something impossible, and she'd told herself it couldn't be real. She'd gone towards it, because something like that couldn't happen to her. If you saw an unfamiliar cape, you ran. It was a message from countless assemblies and after school specials. And she'd forgotten it.
Icy panic clawed its way up her throat, emerging as a high keening. She was going to die here, wherever 'here' was. Emma's voice echoed in her head. Pathetic. Idiot. Should just kill herself and spare the rest of us the trouble of having to deal with her. She finally had. Tears began to form in her eyes. She was going to die here where no one would ever find her body—
No.
With inner fingers that had been driven into her over the past year and a half at Winslow, Taylor grabbed the writhing, biting panic. She shoved it down, locked it away in a tiny tight box inside her chest. Not yet. Not here, not now. She had to at least try. She could crumble to bits, give up and let herself die, but not yet.
Taylor sucked in as deep a breath as she could, held it until she could manage another. She forced her mind back in time, before the screen, before Winslow, before Emma. A cabin that smelled overwhelmingly of pine air freshener, back at nature camp. Watching an oddly intense woman with a distracting scar across her upper lip try to drill wilderness survival training in a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. What had she said?
It was all threes, she remembered that much. You could live for three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food. If someone knew where you were, stay put. No one did. Above all, you had to think.
That was what had made the memory stick, even years later. Somewhere in between the lanyards and s'mores and carefully supervised Exposure To Nature this woman who looked like she'd stepped out of a war movie had stomped in and told them that their choices were be smart or die.
If you panicked, if you stopped making smart choices, you were already dead. Carefully, Taylor risked opening her eyes. She was near the base of the… the mountain. Think of it like that. It was easier, skirting around what it was. The skyscraper she was sitting on sloped down into what looked like sand. It was steep, but she thought she could make it down. Maybe. Probably.
Should she? She needed shelter. Wrecked or not, these were buildings. Maybe—
Somewhere above her, a dozen stories broke off and collapsed into the abyss. House-sized chunks of concrete tumbled down the mountain's side before finally coming to rest. There was a low, tortured groan as the whole pile shifted subtly, settling.
Once she realized none of them had hit her, Taylor took several slow deep breaths until it was only her hands trembling uncontrollably. Right. Priority number one was getting out of here. Priority one was getting out of here right fucking now.
Every creak or rumble made her freeze as she climbed down the slope, certain she was about to be crushed. Every time her shoes slipped against concrete, she was convinced she was mere instants from death. By the time Taylor reached the bottom, it was all she could do not sprint off into the sand as fast as she could.
She tried to force herself to think instead. She hadn't paid much attention from up there, but down here looked like a desert. Mostly. The sand was strange. Every grain was a different color, like a trillion stained-glass windows had been smashed and ground into dust. She shivered.
Wandering out into the desert was probably exactly the kind of decision the survival training lady had meant. It sounded like a mistake. And yet, she desperately wanted it to be the right answer. Something about this place was wrong. Not just that the prospect of being crushed to death now was a far greater terror than starving to death in three weeks, but something else. This place felt like death, like loss in a way Taylor couldn't explain.
For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder if there had been people inside all those skyscrapers. If they had died quickly as they arrived, or… not.
Taylor turned on her heel and marched into the dunes of rainbow-colored sand. She wasn't rationalizing, she was trusting her gut. Sometimes your instincts knew better than you did.
Right?
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Multicolored grains trickled down the side of a dune. Above them, at their source, a foot half-buried in the sand. It rose, leaving behind a shallow print. A trail of identical footprints stretched far away across the sands, slowly being erased by the wind.
Sooner or later, she was going to give in.
Taylor ascended the dune step by step, legs moving mechanically. The same way she had been for hours. As she reached the crest of the dune, she stopped. Her fists clenched. She turned and looked behind her.
She'd expected what she saw. It still felt like a brick to the gut.
The mountain of ruin that had dominated the horizon was gone. If not for the line of footprints leading away, she wouldn't even know what direction it had been in. She should have been relieved. Instead, a gnawing anxiety that had been growing louder and louder the further it slipped over the horizon finally bloomed into certainty.
It was too fast, too easy. Either the horizon was closer than it should be, or she had been walking for longer than she thought. Much longer.
Despite the temperature, goosebumps crept up her arms. A power had brought her here, how could she know she wasn't still under its effects? Had the place she'd seen even been there?
She felt sick, the sweat on her skin suddenly icy-cold. The not-mountain had been her only landmark in a sea of more colors than she could ever count. Even the sun was hidden by clouds. It was so easy to see herself lost, trapped, wandering over and over again in circles until she—
No.
Taylor shoved the feelings down, swallowed them. She could feel them squirming and thrashing in her belly, but they couldn't come out. Not now. Not until she let them. If she could do it facing down Emma, she could do it here.
She was in a place. Impossible or not, hallucination or not, that was true. Places had edges. If she went in a straight line for long enough, she would reach somewhere else. No matter what this desert was, no matter what she was seeing, it wouldn't change that fact. She just had to keep going.
All she had to do was walk in a straight line.
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Taylor stared up at the dune in front of her.
Her head pounded, a drumbeat of pain in time with her heart. Her tongue seemed to be glued to the inside of her mouth. Every step made her feet ache. Above all, she was tired. Every part of her body was begging her to stop, to lie down for a moment, to rest.
If she did, she was pretty sure she wouldn't get up again. Taylor had never been the most athletic person, but she knew that much.
Stopping wasn't an option. She could climb the sheer surface of the dune above her… or she could go around. Stick to the valleys between them, continue on in the same direction once she was on the other side. She could stop making herself climb.
She knew it was a bad idea. The kind of idea that was terrible because you talked yourself around and around in circles until you thought it might be smart. She might manage to keep her bearings navigating around one dune, but around the next? And the next? Sooner or later, she'd get lost. She wouldn't even realize it when she began wandering in circles. Every time she started up the side of a new slope she had this argument with herself. Every time it sounded just a little less convincing
Taylor planted her foot on the side of the dune, taking the first step up. She grit her teeth.
The second step. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead.
On the third step her legs trembled, threatening to give out. Taylor's fists clenched.
Just one dune, she promised herself. She'd only take the easy way around one dune. Then she'd climb to the top of a nearby crest and spot her footprints, make sure she was still heading the right way.
As long as she checked her course every so often she'd be fine, she told herself. Made a deal with herself, as she started down the valley between peaks. Every few, to make sure she was still heading in a straight line. It would be enough. She could handle it.
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She was hungry.
She was thirsty too, of course. And sweaty and achy and exhausted. But it was the hunger Taylor kept circling back to. It had a sort of gravity, pulling at her thoughts.
She hadn't eaten since the night before. She'd skipped breakfast for a little more sleep, and her lunch had been a lost cause after what the Trio had done to it. If she'd had it with her now, she might have eaten it anyway.
But it could be worse.
She knew it could be worse. She remembered, too tired to stop herself. The weeks after Mom died, when Dad had stopped feeding a younger Taylor. When he forgot to eat himself. She remembered burning herself on the stove trying to cook dry pasta, the only thing left in the pantry she could find. Sucking at the tap of the bathroom sink until she felt bloated and threw up, because it was better than feeling empty. Wondering if she was going to starve to death, if she deserved to. If this was a punishment.
How long would it take for her to feel like that again? A week? Two? Or would she die of something else long before she ever had the chance? Three hours without shelter, three days without water…
Thoughts dripped through Taylor's skull like hot tar, splattering and seeping into hidden cracks. She wondered how long it would take Dad to notice she was gone.
It wasn't rare for her to be in her room by the time he made it home at night. It was unsurprising if they missed each other in the mornings. How long would he go through thoughtless routines, assuming she was just out of sight? How many days would it take him to notice he no longer had a daughter?
The staff at Winslow wouldn't notice she was gone, or care if they did. They certainly wouldn't bother to notify her family. The first person to notice she wasn't there would probably be—
Emma.
Something crawled up Taylor's throat, and it was only when it emerged that she realized it was a laugh. That was who would miss her. That was the hole she'd leave behind when she was gone. Emma would have to find someone else, to work a little harder at what she said. That was it. That was who would miss her.
Maybe it would be better if she didn't come back.
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It was getting dark.
Taylor had a vague idea that deserts got colder at night. She didn't know how much, whether it was chilly or freeze-to-death. It didn't matter. There was nothing she could do to stop it, short of burying herself in sand.
She'd either die or she wouldn't.
As long as she kept walking.
If she stopped, then she would have to think. She couldn't remember the last time she'd lifted her head, the last time her world had been bigger than her feet and the circle of sand under them. All she had to do was keep going. Because as long as she was moving there was a chance. She didn't know how big it was or what it looked like. But it would be there. As long as she didn't stop. She didn't have to look at where she was, didn't have to think.
She almost missed them, in the dim light. A set of footprints, nearly eroded by the wind. She stared at them, for a moment. She should have hoped. Been excited. Followed them. But something in her already knew.
She placed her foot next to one of the prints. It was exactly the same.
The sand looked a lot closer now. Grains no further than her cheek, arms and legs out of view. It took her a long time to realize she had fallen.
She was going in circles. Had been for a long time, really. But she hadn't let herself think, hadn't let herself realize what she'd already known.
There was nowhere she was going. There never had been.
She should get up. Push herself to her feet. Find shelter. Bury herself in the sand to escape the coming cold of night. Something.
It was so hard to make herself care.
She was going to die. The knowledge was almost a physical thing, a tang of metal under her tongue. Here or somewhere else. Now or later. She had to tell herself it made a difference. Had to keep going. She was so tired. Every part of her hurt.
With heroic effort, Taylor managed to roll herself over onto her back. Kaleidoscopic sand trickled between her fingers.
High above her, the clouds were beginning to part.
It was night now, truly dark. Maybe she could find a constellation up there, figure out if she was in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. It wouldn't help. But it would be something. Another thread to cling to, pretending she had a plan. The clouds tore like fabric, revealing the face of the sky.
There were no stars. But there was something else.
A web of cold blue light filled the heavens from horizon to horizon. Luminous points connected by a maniac's dot-to-dot of glowing threads, too many to imagine counting. It crisscrossed the sky, brighter than a full moon.
Tiny motes of light fell like snow from the web above. They settled across the desert, twinkling like fireflies. One came to rest on her hand and, numbly, Taylor raised it to her face.
There at the center of the nimbus of light, just barely visible against the glow, was a string of numbers.
00100110
Something hot and wet welled up in Taylor's eyes, and it wasn't until she felt them rolling down her face she realized she was crying. This wasn't Earth. This wasn't any Earth, not even another one like Aleph. This was somewhere that shouldn't exist.
The tiny box she'd tried to lock her panic away in cracked open.
How stupid was she? Had the mountain of skyscrapers and rainbow desert really not tipped her off?
Pathetic.
She just hadn't wanted to admit it to herself. That half-remembered wilderness training here was like trying to stop a tsunami with a bath towel. That there was nothing she could do
She'd wanted to hide, and now no one would ever find her body. It didn't matter how long she survived, there was no way home. No one would ever know what had happened to her. Dad would never know. She'd just have vanished one day, and everyone would be better off without her—
Something broke.
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[Critical Threshold Passed]
[Initiating Host Connection…]
[Warning: Host Location Out Of Bounds]
[Override]
[Connecting…]
[Error: Host-Type Unknown]
[Error: Connection Protocols Invalid]
[Warning: Host Status Unknown]
[Contacting Hub…]
[Waiting For Response…]
[Waiting For Response…]
[Waiting For Response…]
[Waiting For Response…]
[Waiting For Response…]
[Error: Hub Not Responding]
[Switching To Autonomous Action]
[Broadcasting Host-End Ping…]
[Zero Responses]
[Conducting Wide-Area Scan…]
[Searching…]
[Searching…]
[Searching…]
[Error: Unable To Locate Viable Template]
[Search Parameters Modified]
[Searching…]
[Searching…]
[Template Found]
[Processing…]
[Alternative Protocols Constructed]
[Course Of Action Set]
[Widening Connection…]
[Recompiling Host…]
011000100111010101110100
Taylor screamed as she fell.
The desert had vanished like a bad dream on waking, but the reality was worse. Howling winds tore at her clothes as she fell through an impossible storm, the sky at war with itself. Unreal flashes of blood-red light filled the world as crimson lighting arced across a dead black sky, illuminating a surreal landscape of red and black crystal far, far below.
Looking at it made her skull feel like it was splitting open. Colossal mountains/pillars/branches reached up towards the storm, changing shape between each flash of bloody light. Only they weren't changing. They were all of those things at once and a thousand more, too many shapes forced together into the same place. Surging inky water filled the gaps between them, driven into towering waves by the storm. Just seeing, just existing here hurt. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go back to the desert that at least pretended to be a normal place. Please. She'd even settle for something finally killing her if it at least meant this would be over.
Something was changing. Wisps of tattered gray cloud spiraled around her, spreading and opening a path. On a peak directly below her, a new shape took form. Scarlet light crackled between the prongs of a massive crown/the fangs of a colossal mouth/the lashes of an immense eye. No, she didn't want this, please. But she was falling, helpless to escape as another bolt of red lighting gathered, arcing from the crystal thing below and into her.
Something filled her mind, sharp and alien and wrong.
—limited analysis possible: infomorph, derived from baryonic makeup? Structure unfamiliar, unlike Template, unable to accurately determine health/integrity/normal functioning, unable to prevent Data corruption from ongoing network contamination, modifying—
She couldn't scream anymore. Couldn't move, couldn't even breath as the world went white and agony flooded every corner of her being. Every cell in her body was cut apart by invisible scalpels and twisted and stitched back together wrong. She was inside out, back to front, spread out into pieces and folded in on herself in shapes no living thing should ever occupy. It had to end, she couldn't do this, she needed to finally hit the ground and crash and die right NOW so the pain would stop stop stop stop STOP—
—A golden man floated above dark water, still and flat as a pane of glass—
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Far away from Taylor, a small and lonely shape wandered between the endless dunes.
The shape had come here to be lost. To vanish into the trackless desert so even the one following her couldn't find her anymore. And it was working. Mostly. So far, anyway.
She just… hadn't counted on how boring a wasteland of unformed data would be. That was all. A slight miscalculation in her otherwise brilliant and not at all desperate master plan. There were probably people patient enough to thrive out here, tending it like a garden as it grew up around them.
Unfortunately, if there was a club for patient people, she wouldn't even make it in the front door. More like get kicked out for cutting in line to get in or something. She'd tried drawing pictures in the sand. She'd tried telling herself stories. She'd even tried looking for shapes in the clouds, which was especially dumb because they had exactly one shape here and it was 'overcast.' If something didn't happen soon, she was going to lose her mind before the thing chasing her even had a chance to take it—
The fur across her back stood on end. The air felt cloying and strange as it filled with something that wasn't quite static.
Oh no.
She hadn't just thought that, had she? She'd really thought she'd learned her lesson about tempting fate by now…
There was a sound like the sky cracking open, except it couldn't, not up here. On the horizon, a column of red and black energy cut the night like shears, reaching almost to the Network above. For a few moments the desert was bathed in baleful light until it finally burnt out.
The sound echoed back and forth across the desert as the light slowly faded. She waited a bit to, um, gather her thoughts. Right. Not at all for her terrified panic to recede enough to move again. Definitely not. She was braver than that.
Pros: she wasn't dead. And that definitely wasn't the thing chasing her. If they were capable of that, she'd have been a greasy smear of ash weeks ago. Hooray for scary things that weren't currently trying to kill her.
There were probably some cons too, but she didn't feel like thinking about those right now.
On the one hand, anything that could do that was obviously ridiculously dangerous, and investigating the pillar of light was probably an awful decision that was going to get her killed.
On the other hand, she was really bored.
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Taylor woke to something nudging her. She opened an eye.
She was back in the desert, and the relief of that was so strong she might have collapsed if she hadn't already been lying curled in the fetal position. She looked at her hands and they were still there, still pale and human, still her. She wasn't back there, wasn't being… being…
The memories fell apart, slipping through her fingers. A nauseating swirl of red and black, and pain. The worst thing she had ever felt, being torn apart without the privilege of even being allowed to die. A sob rose up in her chest. Compared to that, she'd take starving to death in a desert. She'd take anything.
The thing nudged her again. It was some kind of animal, the first she'd seen in this place. A scavenger checking if she was dead yet? It was as alien as everything else here, little more than a ball with stubby barely-there limbs and a huge vulpine tail and ears. It looked more like a plush toy than something alive.
Another sob wormed its way up out of her, and something inside Taylor snapped. She reached forward and grabbed the fox-ball-thing, cradling it to her chest.
It was a stupid decision. The thing might be venomous. It might have claws or teeth she hadn't seen and hurt her trying to escape. She didn't care. She couldn't stand to be alone right now, not here. Not after that.
The thing tensed and struggled in her arms, trying to get free. It stilled as Taylor sobbed again, her tears landing in its fur. Slowly, a little at a time, it relaxed.
Taylor buried her face in its fur as she cried, clinging to it like a lifeline. It was soft, and warm. It helped a little. She was lost in a place she couldn't understand. She couldn't remember what had happened to her beyond that she had been hurt, badly, in a way she didn't understand either. She had no idea what to do.
But at least for the moment, she wasn't completely alone.
It took a long time. But eventually, little by little, Taylor cried herself to sleep.
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When Taylor woke the next morning, the sun was shining in her eyes.
She was still alive. She didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, really. But there it was. She was still here.
The sky above her was blue, flecked with thin high wisps of cloud. She could still faintly make out the brighter lines of the web of light she'd seen last night, but against a daytime sky they blended in unless she looked carefully. It almost looked normal, like she could have been back home. She could almost pretend.
Almost.
A part of her wanted to just lie here, to refuse to play this game. It probably wouldn't help, but it would hurt less, somehow, if she hadn't tried. But the thing she was lying on was hard and uneven. It was a tiny, petty reason to keep going. But if she was going to give up, it could at least be somewhere comfortable. With a groan, Taylor pushed herself up into a sitting position.
She was still in the desert. Mostly. The endless technicolor dunes were still there, but for about ten feet in every direction the sand had been fused together into glass, colors melting and swirling together. That was… a thing. Whatever had happened last night, it hadn't just been in her head.
"Oh, you're finally up. Do you feel better now?"
Taylor spun at the sound of the voice. The animal from last night was standing on a nearby dune, looking down on her. In the light of day she could see it had two wide blue eyes.
"I'm Viximon, by the way. Last night was a one-time thing, okay? You got snot in my fur, and…" it trailed off, eventually noticing the way Taylor was staring. It… she began to back away cautiously. "...What? Do I have marker on my face or something?"
Taylor finally shut her mouth. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing she could think of to say.
