Page 137 of Tapeworld Induction

Isaak

His heart raced as he waited by the door to their room, where last night they had confronted their shared guilt. There was blood on their hands.

He shook his head, wishing the thoughts away.

One hour until the mission. One hour until they would raid Cardinal Row. One hour before they put their lives on the line… again.

The dim yellow bulbs framed Dylan walking towards him down the concrete corridor. The black faux-leather jacket really suited her.

He waved a hello.

“Hi… Look, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say.” She got straight to business.

He focused on controlling his breath. “Anything.”

“When I didn’t know where you were, I had these weird cravings. I wanted meat. Meat!” Dylan’s eyes widened. She walked into the room, a pulsing energy to her movements.

He followed her inside and shut the door.

“Craving something you’ve never eaten?”

“After I saved you, it stopped happening.”

He fixed his eyes on her. “Because of the tape. You heard Elodie, how the Sleeper overloads the user’s brain with so much junk, they can’t escape. The cravings are probably a side effect from when we stole the Gunkatana. The house was snared.”

She clicked her tongue, brows furrowed. “What about you? Have you experienced anything… weird?”

He paused for a second, then decided to tell her everything. “Until you saved me, my mind kept jumping between events from my past, replaying them like they were tape-spaces. It took me back to when I injured my knee during the game, and to when Sacha came to visit me afterwards in the hospital. It even took me back to when I was a little kid and my parents were arguing. I just stuck my head into video games to block out their noise. Then my dad shut off the console, ruining my save. The Sleeper was fucking with my head.”

Dylan walked over to him and started smoothing his hair, tucking rebel locks behind his ear. “Fucking hell… Did she handpick those moments, do you think?” Her hand came to rest on his waist, the two of them standing close together.

“I don’t know. Right after I met you, I relived one of my ReSports matches. I slapped a piece of tape on my head and, instead of landing in my tape-space, I was playing ReSports. I didn’t even realise I was in the Tapeworld until Sacha glitched when talking to me.”

“Sacha?” She let go of him in surprise. “You never told me about that. Was I that hard to trust when we met?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.” Her words made his chest ache. “I just didn’t know what to make of it. Since the Sleeper, you having these cravings, and my fucked-up tape strides… It’s clear Astrid has been manipulating me all along. Who knows if the heists she sent me on were even real…? Fuck.”

“You think she was having you steal data that she planted herself? Studying you like a test subject?”

Goosebumps rose along the skin of his neck and arms. “No… No. The Gunkatana, she wants it! That had to be real. And she… she knows about you and me.”

“Of course she would… She probably reads your brain every time you go into one of her tape-spaces. Bitch.”

“Right.” He looked at her sombrely. “Maybe the Sleeper making you relive terrible memories again and again is part of the process of turning you into a mindless drone. A sleptigrade.”

She nodded slowly. “It kind of sounds like ‘tardigrade’.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know what they are?”

Now he felt like the dumbest kid in class.

She smiled, making him feel a little less stupid. “They’re these cute microscopic creatures. Insanely resilient, can survive the highest and lowest temperatures. Sleptigrade… Do you think she means like someone hardy who’s asleep? Is that why she called them that?”

He shrugged. “As long as we can save them, bring their consciousness back to normal with the lobster phone, I don’t care what she calls them.”

Dylan scratched her chin. “All this research, all these gadgets. Elodie knows more about how the Tapeworld works than she’s letting on…”