Vic did not try to stop me as I stepped out of the door. He just reminded me that I needed to remain vigilant of the Falcons. They had been hunting me for the last year, and it did not seem like they had reduced their efforts in all that time. I was not sure what was driving them to find me, but it seemed as strong as ever, according to Vic.

  We had been talking for a while, and the night that I had seen out the door earlier was just starting to fade. I could see that the sky in one direction was starting to brighten as the sun made itself known. The first few steps that I took out of the room that we apparently shared were intense. I was getting my bearings, not only from finding myself in a new place, but from just being outside and seeing the sky above my head.

  I had come out of a door that had been built into the base of a bridge going over the river that was flowing quietly past on my right. I was not sure what the room was actually intended for, but there were many scary signs posted on the door. They depicted people dying from electricity. It looked very official, and not a place anyone should ever go without explicit permission from someone in authority.

  It seemed like whatever strategy Vic was using to keep the place safe for us was working, so I was glad I had him on my side. The rest of the bridge looked old. It seemed to be built of stone and brick, with a couple of arches. The majority of the view in front of me was taken up by what I could only describe as a forest. The trees were massive, and I could barely hear the noise of the city surrounding us through the density.

  There was a barely visible path that I started walking down once I noticed it. The feeling of dirt under my feet was something that I had not felt in a long time. I guess that was not as true as I thought, as I realized how thick the skin had to be on the bottom of my feet, which must have been for me to barely notice as I walked over pointy sticks and random acorns. I had clearly not had shoes in a long time.

  The birds within the forest were singing so loudly that I could barely hear the noises of my passing. I was not actually making much noise at all as I was moving throught the forest undergrowth. I had no idea that someone could move through an environment covered in leaves and sticks with such silent steps. It felt like I was just getting lucky with every step I took, until I noticed there was a part of my thoughts working in the background, considering where every step should go. It felt a bit like I had a foreign presence in my head dedicated to keeping me as quiet as possible.

  I could not wrap my mind around the idea that I was able to stay away from the Falcons for a whole year while always knowing nothing, but if I had these silent passengers in my head, gilding me to move silently or hide better, it might make more sense.

  I kept making my way silently down the path. I knew the path was supposed to connect with a bigger path up here in a bit, but I did not want to appear out of nowhere and make people suspicious about where I had appeared from. It was farther away from our hideout than I had expected when I came to the main path. To my relief, it was completely empty. I started walking down the path like I was supposed to be here. It might have been early in the morning, but there was no reason a 13-year-old should not be out for a morning walk, as my body language conveyed.

  I looked down at the rags that I was wearing. I had not realized how similarly I was dressed to Vic until this moment. I had three layers of clothing on, and while they covered my body and kept me decent, each layer seemed necessary because the others had holes. The original color of any of the clothing on me was hard to know with the dense coating of dirt and grim covering everything. I guess I didn't fit in quite as well as I'd hoped.

  I kept walking down the path towards a location marked with a hamburger on the map. I did not have a full grasp on what I would find there, but I was hopeful. There was a soft thump thump of someone running along the path up around the next turn in the path through the park. My body reacted almost entirely on its own. One second, I was leisurely walking down the path; the next, I was dashing straight at the trunk of a tree. Before I had an instant to be alarmed about what seemed to be an impending impact, I jumped upward, placing my foot on the tree as if it were the flat ground I was on a moment before. With a second kick off the trunk, I reached out my arms, grabbing a branch at least 4 meters in the air, and swinging up and over it. After a stunningly complex sequence of movements, I was 8 meters in the air, hanging onto the side of a tree trunk, looking down as an early morning jogger ran past the place I had been seconds before.

  How silent my steps had been was a shock to get past, but this sudden ability to swing between trees and climb them like I had some monkey powers was a bit scary. The feeling of my body acting on its own was scary, even though I had just been thinking a moment ago that I might be noticed if I were seen. I did not know what I was going to do next that was outside of my control.

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  I clung to the tree, considering what I could do. Even now, I could see what movements I would need to take to get back to the ground in the shortest and most silent way possible. It felt like I had become an animal over the last year. I was just doing everything on instinct and reacting in the moment to whatever was in front of me. I did not want to be some superhuman animal capable of so much, yet always driven by instinct. I knew this was what had been keeping me alive, though. Why should I fight against something that has kept me alive and out of danger for so long?

  I felt my stomach growl while I was clinging there. I decided that I could not figure out the answer to such a complex question in a single day. I would have to work my own way back into the life that this body had been living on its own for the last year. One thing that I could figure out right now is what I was going to eat for breakfast. I swung my body down out of the tree like I was a pouncing leopard, and started running down the path.

  The sooner I got to the food, the better. It had been so long since I had a functional foot that my gate was off. I had half-expected to be a professional runner when I started the jog, but it seemed I needed to work on it myself, relearning how to run now that my body was whole once again.

  It did not take much running until I could start to see the building through the trees. It looked like the park was not endless, as it had seemed when I started my explorations. The short bit of running had improved my rhythm quite a bit. I guess my body still remembered what it was like to run everywhere like I did when I went on trips with my Mom and Grandma. We could never get anywhere fast enough.

  The pain from the other blue screens had slowly decreased until the stars of myself had returned and reconnected with me. The pain had gradually reduced to the point that I had not noticed when it went away. When it started up again with this new screen, I noticed. It felt like the pain in my head did not want to stay put. It started in my head, then started trickling down my neck to my chest. It branched out in 4 directions once it reached my chest, seeming to expand into every part of my body.

  If I were given a dose of deadly poison, this is how I would have imagined the sensation. It starts from my head and burns its way down as it enters the rest of my body. The burning is not just where it came in; it has covered my whole body. I could feel how my mind tried to partition it off into something it could send away into the void, but it was just in too many places at once, and I could not divide that much of me at once.

  I had dropped to the ground as the fire ran through every part of me. I had enough sense of self to crawl off the path and lean against a tree as I began sending myself into the void, leaving my body where it was. I just needed something to divide me from the pain; it did not matter if it was me or the pain that was in the void.

  I was lying against the tree for a while. I knew that something was wrong with me. There is no way that the Infinity System was supposed to make the people using it hurt this much. It would have been impossible for me to bear the agony if I didn’t have the emptiness. I could get some space between the pain and myself if I were not right there with it.

  I did not know how long the pain had lasted, but when I came back to myself, I had the sun on my face and could see a good many people taking walks along the path I had managed to drag myself from. The pain was still causing my whole body to ache with constant pain, but it was nothing like what it was before.

  The park felt like a completely different place now that there were people everywhere. It did not have the feel of an ancient forest hidden in the middle of the city. It was suddenly a park where kids played, and college kids rested while pretending to work on their homework.

  I got up quietly from where I had somehow stayed hidden. I felt my instinct telling me my Supermonkey antics were not going to keep me unnoticed anymore. I ended up dragging myself onto the path, exaggerating the old limp I used to have. I helped my hands out to people like I was expecting them to put something into them. This seemed to be the trick to getting most people to ignore me. I kept my eyes on a swivel as I tried to pay attention to everyone around me. I could feel it was a fairly large risk to adopt such a visible persona, even if it made most people look away.

  For that reason and because I was still hungry, I kept moving towards my goal. At the edge of the park, there was a huge highway with cars constantly flying past. It was not something that could be crossed on foot. There was a footbridge going over the highway, though. I worked my way along the bridge, hoping this choke point was not going to be my undoing. To my relief, I managed to get off the bridge and into the bustle of the city without anything happening.

  Now I just had to see how to navigate a slightly different type of jungle.