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Trinity remembered how she used to like to dress herself in the loading construct. The time it took was a wasteful luxury, when she could have just pre-loaded into any outfit she wanted; she'd indulged in it sometimes with Switch at the console, like that night she'd prepared so carefully to go to that leather club where her whole life had come together in a pair of brown eyes. She could remember the couple of times she'd got dressed here with Neo, a pleasure of textures and touch. Memories like black pearls in the stark white of her construct closet, its endless ceilings.
Most times, she'd not had the time or the privacy to do this. Now she'd demanded the latter because she had no choice about the former; if she didn't map out every inch of herself, if she didn't do all she could to prepare herself, she might make mistakes, and Trinity could not make mistakes. That possibility had left her the moment her memories had broken through again, as soon as she'd heard Lexy say her name, like it wasn't a joke, but a doorway, flung open to a time that she had convinced herself hadn't been real.
But it had been real. They had been real. Trinity was returned wet and screaming to her own body, alive with its horror and potential, and alone in a way she couldn't bear. She'd seen Neo reach for her, watched his hand stretch for hers in his nightmare pod as Cybebe had flown her away, and she knew then that she would come back for him. He'd run from Morpheus, but he wouldn't run from her. She had to go back to the matrix for him. And to digitise herself as she was now, she needed to start from scratch. Naked, moving with the senses that still lingered in her body.
She felt the flex of her bare shoulders as she pulled on a front-zip running bra. The firm stretch as she closed it, cross-straps on its back finding the set of her muscles. She flickered through her old clothes, painful nostalgia at a sheen that didn't fit right any more. A few pairs of Tiff's comfortable jeans hung among them. No, not that. She was Trinity, if she hadn't been Trinity in a long time.
She moved on to other options, infinite. She wasn't sure if her choice was an experiment or a compromise. A jumpsuit she found somewhere between the code and her own knowledge of this digital body. She ran her thumbtips up the smooth skin of her legs as she pulled it up. Fingers up the zipper on her back, the cut perfect, stretching her arms to feel the clothes move with her, to know what she could do in them. She found boots she could run in. She turned on her toes, learning the height of the sole, the weight of the steel inside.
Final touches. Ammo straps over her arms. She slid a black leather belt through the loops in her jumpsuit. A knife sheathed at her hip. She found Tiffany's rings on her hands as she pulled up her gloves, and thought about taking them off, as if those decades could be pulled out like a deer tick; she couldn't say what made her decide to leave them on.
She slung a long coat over her shoulder, matte-black, veiled every asset. She felt like something - as close to herself as she could be now.
She had been real. And she was back. She was Trinity. She was going to take Neo back again.
There was a mirror in the centre of everything, and she spent her last few moments of solitude looking at herself, trying to measure what she saw. Tiff was so used to no one seeing, eyes skating on a surface she never chose.
Trinity touched her earpiece. "Seq?" she called, measuring herself with her eyes as she spoke. She felt static in the air, and his face appeared beside her own, startling-close.
"Trinity."
She was back like a revenant, emerging through the glass beside Sequoia's digital ghost. "What else do you need?"
"I need guns."
My mother designed the virtual security system for the Anomaleum.
Trinity felt liquid interference open around her body. Mirror-step into a darkened walk-in closet. She could smell a trace of perfume in the air. A wall of clothes shimmered and squeaked as she palmed the door. Neon-toned light, edging out her trepidations. She was in a bedroom; a dreaming woman's room, perfect folds of ivory silk and damask. Still life with red roses. A never-lit fireplace. Night outside the window, a matte black she couldn't see beyond. It was like how her mother-in-law would live if she had New York money. Trinity didn't have a mother-in-law; she had never been married. Her boot slipped on the bearskin rug.
Trinity palmed the door. The light shifted in a moment, a spill of soft yellow as she slipped onto the wide landing.
After you were extracted, the system responded by initiating a security lockdown. Thousands of bots and Agents forming a cover net around the Anomaly's signal. So right now, it would be almost impossible to escape the matrix with Neo. There is an override key, but it's stored in a place that's not really in the machine world, and not really in the matrix either.
Why would they not keep it in the machine city?
That's not safe enough any more. We've learned too much from defectors.
Trinity remembered how not to make a sound, as if her steps repelled the black hardwood floor. Glance down the stairs. She heard a murmur below. "Frequency intrusion - cross-spectrum countermeasure ready in -"
My mother told me the frequency of the structure where the key is stored. There are counter-attack programs that safeguard it, but the Analyst has grown lazy with their maintenance. It's a long time since they were last patched, and we believe they've been accessed from the lower frequencies. If anything, that makes them more dangerous, both to the Analyst and to you.
Hand around a gun. Safety off. Any advantage of being above them wouldn't last. She dropped to the ground, limbs spread, a spider on the floorboards. She saw them. Four figures in the hallway, their suits fitting like they'd been made for someone else. Guns on their hips. She lined up her first shot.
Creak on the floor behind her.
She fired and spun in the same motion. There was a man behind her, his jaw open like he was surprised to see her, gun up high like he wasn't surprised at all. Shit. She kicked out at his legs, her knife out as he fell heavy in front of her. Hard stab down with her off-hand, deep in his chest. She exhaled, listened to the sputter of a programmed heart ending.
A shot from below hit the wall.
Shit.
She planted her foot on the wall behind her. A volley of bullets thumped over her head. Trinity launched herself, gun singing as she vaulted down the stairs. She kicked off the bannister, landed on the shoulders of the man below - felt him gasp, choking between her thighs. She felt a flash of heat bite hard on her arm. She kept firing, leaning back as he struggled and twisted. Hit someone square in the face, heard another man grunt in pain. She was out. Fuck. Her perch was falling, dropping dizzy - she slammed her gun into his temple, let him drop her to the ground.
Only one of them still on his feet. Trinity rose slowly, saw him gasping and cradling a wound in his ribs. She felt blood trickle down her wrist, gun slipping in her grip. They all looked kind of the same, she realised. Pale faces with minor variations, different patterns of moles. Same algorithm. Something she had to end. Trinity drew her second gun. She felt warm heat sliding into pain on her forearm. She felt so purposeful, so like herself again. She looked straight at him as she fired.
She shook blood off her wrist afterwards. Her coat sleeve was torn at the forearm. A matted rag, bullet-burned. Her skin stung underneath it.
"You okay?" asked Seq. He was a flickering ghost on her closed eyelid, there and elsewhere.
"Got snuck up on." Trinity could hear her own anger, like a lost treasure cradled in her voicebox. The bullet graze wasn't worth mentioning. She tore off her coat sleeve til she had something to wrap around it. She glanced around at the ornate foyer; it might have looked classy without the dead bodies. "Your signal's rough."
"I'm hitting interfe -" Screech in her earpiece. "Shit. Don't know I can follow you in there. I'll get you -" She yanked it out, held it an inch from her head. "- exit, in the back of the -"
Wail of static. Her heart pounded as the quiet seconds ran away.
She was alone. The throbbing in her ear crept down her bare neck.
Tiff had loved and hated her few moments alone. Disoriented seconds with her bike under her, horsepower grind, seesawing between her desire and fear. She could never get away for long. She didn't know how to be alone, she couldn't, her children would need her soon, couldn't turn off her phone or let it die -
Get a grip. That was over. Trinity slipped the dead earpiece back on, feeling it was about as useful as a prayer charm. She could do with one. Alone in the matrix, no signal, was bad. You might never make it out. She had to. She had to get both of them out. But fuck, she could admit it was frightening.
She stepped over a bloody corpse, hand on her gun. She passed under the arched entryway at the back of the foyer, under the pink glare of a glowing neon wall sign.
To reach the room where they keep the release key, head left through the room at the back - the programs call it the night gallery.
The back room felt far too long and open. It made her think of Tiff's children's friend's parents and their open-plan renovations that she'd nodded admiringly at while keeping her thoughts to herself. The same nouveau tastes at the wrong angles. Couches loosely ringing a fireplace, a back wall lined with black windows. There was no sun here. Old wall-lamps lit too stark in LEDs. She could sense the old mansion's core sagging at the corners, painted over at the seams. Must have looked cool sixty years ago, but so had she.
She glanced back at the neon sign - one of those decorative wall plates, the cursive letters so loopy that it took her a full three seconds to realise it said home, sweet home.
The hair stood up on the back of her neck. This was an isolated security server, and here she was thinking of the chunky wooden sign in the kitchen of the house where Tiff had grown up. Trinity pinned the memory with a fingernail. It hadn't happened. She and Tiff hadn't even had the same matrix childhoods, the same mothers.
Footsteps outside. Shit. She backed against the nearest door, gripped the handle. Twisted. She heard a heavy door swing. Shut the door behind her, hit the lightswitch.
She was in a child's playroom.
Her eyes scanned for cover. Not the rocking horse. There was a doll's house in the middle of the room, its front face folded open. Assorted figures sat at a dining table, Pippa doll cheek by jowl with a cloth rabbit. Trinity rolled behind it into its shadow. Creak at the door, footsteps stopped short.
She peered between the lacy curtains of a tiny upstairs window. Must be a smoother, newer model of those same security guys. Pressed trousers, steel-toed boots. A knee twitching. The air moving with the sweep of a gun. She tried to make herself so small she could fit in the doll's house, a backwards Alice.
"She's been here."
She should have killed the fucking lightswitch. Mistake.
More knees. She thought there were at least two men in the room; maybe three. Shit, the old her would never have fucked up like this. She scanned the room fast. A shelf of solid board books, a herd of Little Ponies in a neat line on the windowsill. A Barbie Power Wheels Cadillac neatly angled in the corner of the playmat. The rocking horse. The doll's house. Her cheek pressed against the facade. It looked handmade, painstakingly hand-painted. Bathroom tiles finished with a nail polish gloss. She heard her enemies flank out into the room. Trinity thought stupidly of the doll's house Chad had built once they knew she was expecting a girl. Chad had talked about that doll's house like it was one of his movie sets, wired it with tiny lights.
They were searching for her. Disoriented, face to the woodgrain. This wasn't right. The whole room was too neat, too empty. No mother here, no daughter.
Shadow looming above her.
She stuck her muzzle through the bedroom window and fired.
Bullet through his kneecap. He screamed and fell. She rose with the dolls' house in her hands, tossed it ahead of her toward another guy's face. She vaulted hard sideways, feet kicking off the wall as splinters and stuffing exploded in his useless hail of gunfire. Her own gun spat in her right hand, missed. Shit. There were still two of them standing, big guys, too alike, training their guns on her.
She slammed her shoulder into the nearest before he could fire, shielded by his body as she punched him with the butt of her gun. He grunted, shoved back, the playmat sliding underfoot. He knew how to use his weight against her. They tumbled into the wall. No room to shoot. He grabbed hard at her neck. The other guy angling a shot in her peripheral vision. They'd pinned her.
Not here, she wasn't going to fucking die like this while Neo was stuck in his own worst nightmare. She punched up at the guy grappling her, her gun thudding into his chin. His hold on her loosed. She felt the other guy pull back the trigger. She felt the moment open like she was the edge of a paring knife. Blind reach of her left hand. Her grip closed on a plastic pony. She threw it, heard it clatter against the other man's gun. Shot rang wild over her head. Knee up, space to give the man pinning her a clean strike to the ribs. She kicked him sideways before he could recover.
That just left a gun pointed right at her again. She was faster. Her foot arced across the windowsill, sent the ponies volleying through the air between them. He startled backwards and she put two bullets in him before he could get his act together.
A groan behind her. The kneecapped guy, his hand fumbling. She pulled the trigger almost casually.
Cordite, silence.
Trinity reloaded her gun from the ammo strap on her thigh. She looked around at the perfect playroom. The blood and the bone shards on the hood of the Barbie Cadillac. The bomb site wreckage of the doll's house. Three corpses. She wondered who would have to clean it up this time.
Tiff's thought stuck in her throat like a needle.
Out. She could feel bruises blooming on her neck and chest as she breathed. Back into the cool pink of the night gallery.
There's a room at the end, a sort of study. The key was kept there by a control program, but our monitoring data shows that the original program has become corrupted. I can only hope that your skills are a match for whatever has taken its place.
Airless space below the dark arches of the windows. Trinity couldn't get away from the itch in her throat. This house gave her a feeling she didn't like, something she'd not felt at all on the Mnemosyne or in IO. Like her digital senses wore Tiff as an underlayer, something she'd put on before she'd even dreamed up the new clothes. For Trinity, it had never mattered where a mission took her. Slums or white tie, it was all the same code, she came in the same way with the same focus. But in this warped, hacked-shell house she could feel Tiffany's jabbering thoughts creep in through the walls at the most inane pitch.
She tried to suppress the feeling. She had some immediate facts to focus on:
She could fight. Not as well, not as fast, but she wasn't dead yet.
She wasn't thinking ahead like a fighter because her brain was full of matrix fluff.
She had no operator signal.
And if she didn't keep her shit together and find the override and get out she was never going to have Neo back.
That underlayer of her threatened to melt. It burned from the moment she had seen him look at her, see where no one else had, straight through Tiffany into the real her, the forgotten one that ached from her questions and loneliness. His eyes shook her so awake that her semblance cracked, herself enough for Lexy to notice and find her and ask her to follow her own answers all the way to the point of her anger. She needed him back. She would fight anyone anywhere to bring him back. She would give anything.
Trinity set her gloved hand on the door at the end of the room. No lock. She opened it half an inch, and heard music - 90s downtempo, turned low, the kind of stuff she used to put on to think or make love. She drew her gun and stepped through in one smooth motion.
She froze. Rage thumped like pulverised ice in her chest.
Persephone stretched on a chaise lounge, a book folded open over the thigh-slit in her crisp white dress. Trinity lunged close til the gun was almost in her open teardrop cleavage. "What the fuck are you doing here?" she growled.
Persephone's lips parted, as if she were wavering over whether to eat the muzzle. "This is my home," she said. "I made it my home. Do you like it?"
"It looks like trash," Trinity told her. "Was Merv the tasteful one all along? I wouldn't have believed it."
Persephone's eyes hardened; her lips tilted away from the gunbarrel in a pout. "A cheap shot," she murmured. "Are you always so cruel to the one who can give you what you want?"
Fuck. Trinity flicked the safety back on. "I see."
"Do you?" Persephone stood slowly, letting the gunbarrel trace down her throat and chest as she moved. "Because I think you want what I have very badly." Trinity looked aside, her teeth locked in fury. She shoved the gun back in her thigh holster. "I think you would do anything to have my key." Persephone's eyelashes fluttered, inches from hers. "Will you kiss me? Will you make me remember what love feels like?"
She felt Persephone's breath on her chin. Her eyes prickled. A sharp throb at the thought of remembering love after so long. God, she'd wanted to kiss him that day in the coffee shop. She'd imagined his lips closing soft over hers. That night, she'd gone home and had empty sex with Chad with that one burning thought in her mind. She'd wanted to cry afterwards but Tiff didn't even have tears any more.
Trinity took off her shades. "Okay," she whispered.
Persephone tipped her face up toward Trinity's. "Make me believe I am him."
She laid her gloved hands awkwardly on Persephone's shoulders, a numb layer between their skin. How could she do this? She needed Neo so much that nothing else would do. Trinity couldn't fake love.
Tiff had faked it every day for fifteen years.
She took her hands back, slowly pulled off her gloves from the fingertips. Tiffany's rings underneath. Her engagement. Her wedding. Mother's Day gift. Lies she'd told herself for fifteen fucking years because she didn't remember the time when she had loved. Not an inkling until a stranger in a coffee shop had taken her hand.
Trinity set her hands back around Persephone's shoulders. She sank into those yearning thoughts and dreams, and let her lips settle.
Like this. Open, soft lips between hers. Aching for closeness, needing this, more than this. Her hands tightened, ran hot over her back, searching. Searching every day like this, reaching with her tongue, her hands, her hunger like an empty hole in her cunt. Like her question of everything poured into the heat of a kiss.
That ice setting at her edges when she couldn't feel the answer.
She felt Persephone lean back in her hands with a sigh. "Still," she murmured. "Exquisite. So long without love, and still the same hunger."
It was an effort not to bare her teeth. Let her think that was like kissing Neo. It had felt like kissing Chad. Still her. Still wanting something real. But never finding it. And the only difference was that when Chad pulled away from her, she would wonder if the empty feeling was because he was so rarely home, so wrapped up in his work on his movie sets, she couldn't compete or wasn't good enough, maybe she couldn't satisfy him at all.
But now she knew the truth again, after so fucking many years of feeling starved and not good enough.
She bit back her bile as she put her shades back on. In the back of her mind she felt Tiffany crumpling up her fury like a napkin, balled tight and useless in her fist. "The override key?"
Persephone turned, and walked back to the bookcase behind the desk. Racks full of disc cases. Sati had explained: It's a message, from here to there. It's a fantasy. It was my mother's creation, more subtle than directly countermanding the security lockdown. If you activate it from inside the matrix, it will release a decoy signal that emulates the Anomaly code closely enough to divert the attention of all the Agents and enforcement programs away from the real Anomalies.
That red-tipped hand settled on a case and slid it from the collection, passing it to Trinity. A shot of adrenaline hit her where she stood - this was it, she could get the hell out of here and find Neo. She glanced at the case's cover in a sort of familiar daze. Done Quick. Blazing silhouette of a gunner. It was one of Chad's movies. She shoved the disc in her coat pocket. The bitch just wanted to see her flinch. Forget it. Go. Hand on the doorknob again, cold in her gloveless fingers.
Tiffany's hurt was still scrunched up in her palm.
"Wait," she said. Persephone, not going anywhere, raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. "The playroom." The too-perfect, too-tidy child's indulgent paradise. "You don't have kids."
Persephone's face froze, her lips dry as a scab.
"You ran out on the Merovingian, didn't you? You sheltered in this security server, did some redecorating, and set up a sweet mother fantasy that would never have to come true. No real kid's playroom ever looked that neat. So let me guess. You saw your husband moving people around in his little scenes to play his self-obsessed games and you knew just what kind of father he'd be. He'd be out there staging his fantasies and fucking other women while you were at home covered in milk and shit." Trinity's voice was as calm as a fresh pool of blood. "There's one way you're like Neo. Dodged a bullet."
She felt the tearing dark envy in Persephone's eyes and wondered if the other woman could tell how much of her admiration was genuine. Persephone's lips parted, and Trinity almost thought she might be capable of feeling pain. "You think it's so easy to leave, do you?"
Trinity's jaw twitched, Tiffany's anger caught in her teeth again. Her anger at Tiffany. Tiffany's anger at Tiffany. She closed the door as she left with a soft click.
Now all she needed was a way out.
Trinity ran silently up a back staircase. She'd reached Seq upstairs before - maybe she just needed elevation. She didn't think this structure really had a hardline - it was something else fucking with her connection to the ship. She'd climb the roof if she had to. There was a mezzanine halfway up the stairs, open entryway, a bar and a dining table set up in the room beyond. She glimpsed the window across the room. A flicker of light outside for the first time. She entered at a run.
Heavy grab at her waist as she stepped through.
Shit. She'd got too fucking careless. She struggled against her enemy's grip, saw another of them across the room, pointing a gun. She swung her body sideways, crashed them both into the dining table. Tilt, shattered glass. She swung at him, felt her fist crush his ear. He grunted. She rolled before he could finish his swing back. Crunching, silverware under her knees. Her fist closed on the stem of a broken wineglass. She stabbed for his stomach as hard as she could.
Trinity was up on her feet before he had stopped gurgling. She grabbed a fallen chair, bloody hand slipping, flung it at the man with the gun. Footsteps on the stairs behind her. She was going to be trapped between two of them. She lingered that extra quarter second and flipped back the moment the man in front of her had a clear shot at her.
She knew her gamble had worked before her feet hit the ground again. Hollow rattle of breath, friendly lungshot. Dying in the doorway. No pause, the gunner firing again as her feet touched the wall. She drew and fired back on the run, hit him with the third shot. Her momentum carried her past his corpse, into a crouch on the floor.
She panted. Shook broken shards from her clothes. Trinity straightened. She tossed her magazine. She looked out at the light behind the window, suddenly impossibly bright.
"Cut." She froze at the sound of his voice. The walls slipped in her peripheral vision. They were flat green, like the black marble dining room had never existed. Chad came out from inside the bright light, his hands waving with excitement. Chad. Her husband. Chad. "Tiff, babe, that was amazing. Like you were really in there. No one's going to believe this is your first movie." The man she'd just shot rolled up from his dead fall, grinning and giving her a thumbs-up.
Her hand went slack on the gun. "Chad? I thought you -"
You left yesterday and you were going to be away on set for a month. For that movie. The videogame adaptation project with the huge budget and the NDA.
"Come on, Tiffany," he put his hand on her arm. "I don't think we even need another take." She glanced back over her shoulder, beyond the wrecked dining room; the entryway led nowhere, green nothing, the stairs beyond gone. Dark-eyed cinema cameras loomed into view, like they'd just been in her blind spot all along. Silhouettes, operators seared in sinister shapes behind the lights. It was like her vision stopped there, shrinking to the artful chaos around them; the sideways table, a glitter sheen of shattered glass. "We did beautiful work today. They said it wasn't possible to adapt Thomas Anderson's The Matrix. That bullet time and different realities stuff..."
The cameras aligned like guns. Chad tugged her toward the bright light between them. She felt the light yawn, like it was tilting the room toward it.
"Tiff, babe, that was amazing." She fell in step with Chad, knowing it would make sense soon, it always did. It was like she'd been dreaming before, one of those dreams where you're just trying to find the way out but it never seems to be there. Tiff had those weird lost moments sometimes; this one felt like it had lasted for days. "Come on, Tiffany." The light beamed over the flat green walls, shunting them closer. A slow cascade of static. She dropped her gun; it only fired blanks anyway.
Her hand caught on the object in her deep coat pocket. "Wait," she said.
"Tiff?" His eyes looked like this every time she ever tried to say no. That same pattern. She wasn’t meant to argue. Tiff’s body knew how to go along with him, how to move to avoid a fight or a decision. The cool surface of the case under her fingers. It's a message, from here to there. It's a fantasy. She’d taken this fantasy of saving Neo, with this program, and it was in a dvd case, in her pocket, because Persephone had...
Taunted her. Or tried to warn her.
The anger bloomed in her palm. Trinity opened her fingers around it. She stepped close to Chad, into his space. "No, I'm not going with you."
Chad's grip tightened. Had saying no always been like this? She twisted, off-balance, tried to shove her husband aside. His foot scythed her shins. Sent her sideways, his bulk coming down on top of her. Too familiar, scent of his body above hers, pinning her, arm across her throat. Fighting for air. Thrashing her face on broken glass.
Chad's fist slammed into her face and she almost blacked out. She choked on her scream. Felt his breath spitting at her face. How could she fight someone who'd slept beside her for fifteen years? She knew every inch of him. Every ounce of his weight crushing down on her. Her vision edged with grey.
He knew nothing about her. This wasn't her. Chad had never seen her.
Chad leaned back, his fist coming up again. An opening. She jabbed hard and fast at his throat. He slipped sideways, and she levered up furious with unreal strength. A knee free. She shoved and rolled, above him now, snaking til her thighs gripped his neck. His flailing hand caught her hair. She punched down at his face, her rings tearing his skin. Her eyes were clear again. And Chad's were a nightmare, constricted pattern of years and years. She wanted to punch him til they went out, she was so fucking angry.
His arm reached back and she saw his hand close on the dropped gun.
She groped behind her, feeling blood run out of her knuckles. His arm turned slow and massive above her. Her hand tangled in fallen silverware. She closed her fist, struck at his gun arm with whatever she was holding.
He grunted. It was a spoon. She was holding a fucking spoon in her fist. He'd fumbled the fucking gun and that was all that mattered. She hit at his face, heard teeth hit metal. Too close. He had a grip on her again, her neckline tight in his hands. She swung back and punched the spoon through his eye as hard as she could.
She felt his grip relax, cold. She sagged over her husband's dead weight. Leaving wasn't so easy. She wriggled out from under him, shook splinters of glass from her face and hands.
She heard a scratching thread of sound. She groped one bleeding hand to her ear, stroking the earpiece in shock. "- you copy? Trinity, you -"
"I'm here." Her breath felt like thunder.
"Interference just cleared." She stared at Chad, the spoon protruding jauntily from his eye. The walls had turned smooth black again, the open arch leading back to the stairs.
"I have the override," she told Seq. "All I need now is Neo."
Neo wasn't there when they hacked into the high-rise apartment. They split up as soon as Seq checked in, going room by room, and it reminded her too much of the recon she'd done when he had been just another potential. Reading clutter like it would tell you who the target really was. She found the pills discarded in the bathroom trash with the empty bubble-bath bottles and blunt razorblades. Made her so fucking angry.
She stalked through the open-plan kitchen. Tiff poked between her torn layers of clothes, framing thoughts and observations she could have had if any of this had been real. The wine-rings on granite, the cute coffee cups. A view so expensive it felt safe and dangerous for her all at once. It's not real, Trinity told her. This isn't anyone's home.
Berg and Lexy had loaded the override into a game console hooked to the living room TV. Trinity searched through the room as it loaded, picking over the primitive VR equipment, the cabinet full of old game discs. The Matrix, she and Neo slick and digital, side by side. She remembered seeing the picture years ago. The fluttering, impossible way that Tiff had loved her.
"It's running," Berg called. Trinity watched as the code began to execute. She saw a portal open behind the 50-inch screen, the signal hacked smoothly into the matrix around them. She watched a figure walk across the screen. It wasn't Neo, but you could have mistaken them from a distance. She admired the focus, commitment, and sheer will in how the program moved as it slipped out through the TV set, striding out into the city below.
"Was that it?" Seq's face flickered on the surface of the screen. "It's attracting all kinds of trouble - there's agents and bots all over -" His face curled in shock. "Uh, okay, I think the override program can handle them."
"What about Neo? Did you find him?" Trinity asked.
She watched Seq's eyes move across his monitors. "Got him. He's upstairs. On the roof." Trinity's heart jumped.
She paused for a second in the doorway before she left. She felt Tiffany lingering in the apartment behind her, silhouetted against the city in the window as Trinity took the stairs two at a time. Trinity had to silently thank her for getting her this far. For protecting her, a wall of thorns around her casket as she had slept and healed from her death wounds.
And she had to cut Tiffany aside and say goodbye.
Trinity stepped out onto the rooftop.
Neo was right at the edge, a shadow turning to her as soon as she breathed his name. She took in everything in a second - the drag of the wind on his face, the frozen set of his back, the fragile emptiness in that corner of his eye. "Neo!" She only noticed how she hurt as she ran to him, her face aching and tender and blood crusting on her skin.
He stared. She knew he was shaken at the sight of her under the cold maintenance light - the torn coat and bruises, jagged cuts on her face, her lips smeared, dragged through a thicket of decades. "Wh..." Question cut off. Like he didn't need to fucking ask any of it.
"Neo," she breathed again.
"Am I dreaming?" he asked. His arms twitched, a convulsive flicker like he was on the edge of sleep, on the edge of her.
"Yes," she said. She stepped close, stopped with only a breath of air between them. "I was, too. I didn't know it until you touched my hand. You knew me when I didn't know me. You woke me. You made me realise that I was sleepwalking through someone else's dream of me. And I couldn't go back to sleep." She held out her bloody hands; two of the fingers wouldn't uncurl right. "I couldn't stay another moment in a home that wasn't real and wasn't ours."
Neo cradled her hands in his, attentive to her pain. He'd been so hesitant to take her hand, when she hadn't remembered. When she'd still believed Chad was her life. "I missed you," he whispered.
She felt the cuts on her face stinging in the freezing air. She looked into his eyes, so close. She'd not felt exposed like this in so long. "I missed you. I needed you. When she offered me the red pill again, I took it because I wanted it for both of us."
Neo hesitated. His eyes froze with a fear beyond anything she could name. "Trinity - I felt the last time you breathed - I heard your heart stop." He bent his head close against hers, and she felt his tears brush her cheek. His rough exhale. A shiver that ran through his whole body.
She turned her face and touched her lips to his.
The warmth of his kiss was everything she had ever searched for. She knew again, like she had the very first time.
She opened her mouth and held him as his sigh deepened to a sob against her lips. She knew she had the answer to his hurt. He could let go of Thomas, the lie that had shielded him from a grief too vast to see beyond. There had been no way through it for him, until she had made one. "I promise," she whispered. "When you wake, I will be there beside you. You'll know that it's real. You'll feel me breathe." She pressed her hand gently to his chest. "We'll be home."