Free Fearsome Dreamer by Laure Eve

streets, huddling close to buildings in an effort not to be seen.
    People spotted him, of course. After a while, he became used to watching city crowds from a side street. He had a great many odd looks tossed his way, but nothing compared to what he got if he wasn’t in the capital city, where people were a little more used to oddness.
    In between Jumping there, he learned and learned, with the rabid feverishness of someone who cared nothing for anything else in his life. In school, where before he’d been an object of vitriol, now he was a ghost, and it suited him fine.
    When White turned eighteen, however, his game of a second life had become deadly serious, and his visits to Angle Tar were a secret no longer.
    World knew.
    The arrest was quick and brutal. Jospen was right – they had waited until White had declared adulthood and could be legally taken without reprisal by his family or anyone else. They knew exactly where he was. They knew where everyone was every minute of every day through implant tracking, and they had been watching him for a while, ever since they had found out what he could do.
    They took him in the middle of the day, as easy as anything. He had skipped school and was intending to spend the afternoon in Angle Tar, when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind and asked in a quiet voice if he could spare a moment of his time. A moment turned out to be several weeks, in the end. It had been well over a month since they had let him go and he still couldn’t sleep through the night, broken with the fear that he would wake up to find himself back in that bare, bleached room.
    His heart sank over and over, a sickening roll in his chest. He wouldn’t think about what he was doing, because it was too late for that. It was all too late. Too late when they had tortured and humiliated him, and made him feel like he was defective and disgusting. But even long before that, when his mother had first talked to him about what he could do, aged five. When his teachers had looked at him that way. When he had been born. He was like a virus, a small bacterium that World’s immune system was trying to reject. They didn’t want him here. So he would go.
    The countryside was out of the question – they were far more suspicious and isolated than city people. He couldn’t quite bring himself to choose a place with no people and too much space. He would go to Parisette, their capital city, from the first. He knew the street patterns fairly well by now.
    He looked around his room one last time. There was nothing out of it that he would miss. Outside of Life, it was grey, just like everything else. He jacked in and sent messages to his mother, brother and sister, messages they might pick up almost instantly, which is why he had done it, to force himself to go now and not put it off again. The messages were short notes telling them that he loved them and not to worry.
    His mother was upstairs, still lying in her bed. Supposedly she was meeting with a counsellor in Life right now. There was something faintly ridiculous about a Life addict having to meet in Life to be counselled about it.
    The house was quiet.
    He concentrated, steadying his breath. It had become easy to find the way to Parisette now, to a particular spot in an alley. It stank in there and was usually full of rats, but it was a safe place from which to emerge. He had used it so many times that he thought of it as his alley. He felt it in the air, pushing forwards slightly to make sure. Standing, he took up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
    â€˜Jacob.’
    Startled, he looked back.
    His bedroom door was standing open, and framed by the doorway was the thin, angular shape of his brother, Jospen.
    â€˜What are you doing here?’ said White. ‘You’re supposed to be at work.’
    â€˜Where exactly are you going?’
    White struggled between the truth and a convincing lie, then gave up.
    â€˜Where