“It’s a dream come true.”

Smiling, she nods. “Then follow me.”

Chapter Two

June 20X5, Keystone

Allard leads me down a lightly worn trail, our feet crunching over brittle leaves. It’s eerily still this deep in the woods, and we walk in silence for several minutes until she asks, “How did you escape the explosion?”

My heart stalls. She’s going to think I’m nuts. “I heard a voice…not with my ears, but from…within me,” I say, sucking in my breath. “This is going to sound weird, but it said ‘jump,’ and it was almost like this hurricane wind pushed me over. I mean, I threw myself overboard, but it all happened so fast…”

The night comes flooding back, and I bury my face in my hands, holding back stinging tears, trying to forget what happened next. Did I hear them scream or did I imagine it?

Allard touches my elbow. “That’s instinct. Your superior intuition is unique. It’s why we want you. It will serve you well here.”

Raising my head, I push the memories away and focus on her. On the future. “I don’t know if I trust my intuition. It’s been wrong before.”

“I’m here to help with that.” She guides me forward alongside a gurgling stream.

“How?”

“Practice. Forgiveness. We study and understand your past so it no longer limits your future.”

“Fun,” I say, keeping my plans to only move forward and never look back to myself.

We arrive at a small stone cottage so overtaken by ivy it disappears into the landscape. I may have missed it entirely if Allard hadn’t pushed aside vines to reveal a weathered wood door.

“I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy. But it will be worth it,” she says. She inserts a skeleton key into the faded brass lock before opening the door and motioning me inside.

Ducking under the ivy, I enter a living room with stone floors and wood-paneled walls. Cast in watery light filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the cottage, a shallow tweed couch faces a large stone fireplace. The space is void of cameras and screens—the techiest thing is an antique record player that sits in an orange box on the hearth. It’s like the whole place is frozen in time, like I’ve stepped into a VR game set a hundred years ago.

I rub my arms against the chill in the room as a dizzying wave of homesickness washes over me. If only I could curl up with my cat on the cushy lounge in my old home theater to get lost in a movie. While I was growing up, my parents kept me under lock and key. Most kids were on the Networks since birth, so when they went public at sixteen, they already had fans, but not me. I was homeschooled by robots and nannies with the occasional VR field trip. Publicly, my parents said they kept me a virtual secret because they wanted me to have a childhood, but I think they didn’t want to risk revealing my true identity. Movies were my only link to the outside world—practically my only friends—and my only common ground with my dad. As an actor, he studied the classics, and I’d watched the entirety of his rare collection religiously. They were my life.