here; this was another mindscape, like the one I’d entered when Artie was caught in the cuckoo’s trap. Only this time, the mindscape was mine, and I was the one in the trap. There was no one coming to get me out of this.
I needed to get out on my own.
“This sucks,” I announced, on the off chance that one of the cuckoos who’d stolen me happened to be listening. “If you were hoping to convince me to help you do some horrible cuckoo thing, this is not a good way of going about it. This is frightening and inconvenient and . . . and mean, and I don’t work with people who are mean to me.”
There was no answer. To be fair, I hadn’t been expecting one.
I looked around the void again, searching for anything that would break the endless whiteness. Then I paused. This was my mindscape. It, and everything it contained, belonged to me. Which meant that anything I could think of should be right at my fingertips.
“I want a chair,” I said to the air in front of me. “Not too comfortable. A chair where I can sit and think.”
I turned.
There was a chair behind me.
It was simple, plain black leather with polished brass casters, the sort of thing that belonged behind a desk in a home office. It could have been placed in the window of any office supply store in the world, glistening in the light, inviting weary souls to set their burdens down for the low, low price of a few hundred dollars with an available installment plan. I took a step toward it, reaching out to run my fingertips along one faux-mahogany arm.
It felt solid and real, as real as I was. Which made sense. In here, we were both thoughts, and my thoughts were sufficient to change the world.
I sank down into the leather, tucking my legs up under myself in a cat-curl position that had been my preference when working since I was a kid. I stared at the nothingness in front of me.
“I need a chalkboard,” I said, and blinked, deliberately slow.
When I opened my eyes again, the chalkboard was there, old-fashioned and tall, green slate pristine as it awaited my genius. Two fresh erasers sat in the tray beneath it, alongside sticks of chalk in multiple colors. It was a chalkboard out of a children’s movie, pushed into place by the set designer of my thoughts, ready for me to begin.
I didn’t move.
The chalkboard was tempting—more tempting than any chalkboard I’d ever seen—and there were numbers nibbling at the edges of my mind, glorious numbers, numbers that whispered promised solutions to every problem I’d ever had and every dilemma I’d ever faced. I could use those numbers to get myself out of here, I just knew it. Something was holding me back.
I’d seen numbers like this before. Not often. They shifted and twisted when I tried to focus on them directly, flickering like candles in a soft wind, never quite going out, never quite holding still. I’d seen these same numbers when I injured myself in New York, blossoming around the edges of my consciousness before I hit the ground and everything went away. They meant something. They resolved to something.
I closed my eyes again. “I need a desk, a laptop, and an Internet connection.”
They were there when I opened my eyes. The desk was old and scarred, and I recognized it from my father’s office. He’d built it himself out of reclaimed wood, blending oak and mahogany, pine and cedar. It was a patchwork thing, like he was, and when I reached out to caress the wood with one trembling hand, it was almost like he was there with me, watching over me. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes. I blinked them away. If I didn’t find a way out of here, I was never going to see him again. I couldn’t let that happen.
The laptop was much newer, sleek and futuristic and generic. I tugged it toward me and opened a chat client.
My entire family was offline. That was a disappointment, but not a surprise. There was no way of knowing whether the Internet connection I’d imagined would correlate in any way to the world outside my mindscape. But I hoped it would.
In an earlier era, I might have imagined pigeons with notes tied to their legs, or hunting horns, or some other clumsy mechanism of communicating across great distances. Here and now, the