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You're almost seven years old when you learn that you're going to die.
When Grandpa brings her home, you don't realize she's you, at first. She's wearing pretty yellow dress like you wear when you're asleep and being your dream self, but she's so much taller, so much older, she can't be you. You don't even think to read the nameplate, you just blurt out, "Who was she, Grandpa?"
Grandpa tries to chuckle, but it comes out sad. "Well, my girl, she's going to be you!"
You can't get much out of him about what will happen; he seems too sad to say much. He pets your hair and tells you that your dream self will be very brave and do something very important. "Like I see in Skaia's clouds?" you ask, excited, and he nods and tries to chuckle again. Yes, like you see in your dreams.
He promises to tell you more later. You don't pester him -- he's so sad whenever you go up to his lab and notice him look at her, you can't bear to push him about it! So you try not to think about her too much, even though you can't help sometimes sneaking up to touch her dress, and wonder.
After Grandpa dies, you won't go up into the laboratory for months.
When you finally do, it's with reluctance. Only the knowledge that Grandpa would be so upset for his lab to get all dusty and unkempt gets you to ascend the stairs. It doesn't matter that he'll never use it again; that just makes it even more important for you to keep it nice, since he can't. You have to be strong. It's the least you can do.
(You dust your dream self off as well as you can, even though she's so much taller than you.)
Every week you go up there and dust. Every week, except for when you're desperately sick with food poisoning and Bec makes you stay in bed, even the week you have to use a stick as support to climb the stairs, because you fell asleep in the middle of running and sprained your ankle.
(Grandpa told you not to worry about how you fall asleep so much. You hear his voice in your head every time you wake up in your bed, sure you were just doing something else.)
You stop wondering about your dream self. Who cares. Who cares! She won't die anytime soon, after all. She's happy and doesn't suffer from anything, she has real live friends right there with her, she even gets to be awake more than you do, sometimes! She's silly and doesn't have a care in the world. Who could possibly care about that when they have so many other things to take care of?
Not you. You have responsibilities. You have things to take care of, so many things Grandpa needs you to do even though it's so hard to take care of them all because you fall asleep so often and end up awake at strange hours. You have to maintain his guns, you have to practice your shooting. You have to feed Bec, you have to feed yourself, you have to do your lessons, and you have to plan them first to do them. Grandpa would be unhappy if you just spent all your time playing games and staring at clouds.
(Like she does.)
Your dreambot is no help at all; sometimes you wake back up to find your greenhouse reordered so that nothing makes sense, or find out your dreamself was writing silly, stupid nonsense to the friends you try to make online.
(You eventually make some that stick around, which of course was inevitable, but you're sure she didn't help.)
All this time, all these years, you clean the lab every day. You vacuum the floor when it needs it, you dust the weird screen, you tidy the fur of Grandpa's old dog Harley and the hair of what your dreamself will be. You try not to think about her, and when you do, you try to think of her as it. She isn't you, she isn't anything but a stuffed empty shell.
(Just like the one downstairs next to the fireplace.)
When you're 11.9 years old, you realize you're almost as tall as your dead dreamself is.
You have to sit down for a while in front of the weird screen while you try to process this epiphany. It means you're finally going to leave this island. It means you're going to go on an adventure. It means you'll finally meet your four human best friends. It means the end of the world.
(It means you're going to die.)
You don't go back up into the lab until after your twelfth birthday, when guilt and curiosity drags you back up there. You do your dusting, as you have always done, you tidy up Harley, as you have always done. You take your time until you're screaming at yourself inside your head to stop stalling, already!
There she is, on her stand, just as dead as ever. Dream Jade Harley in her yellow dress, dead for five years, just a little bit older than you. You dust her, tidy her hair, straighten her dress. Then you pull the tape measure out of your sylladex.
She's two inches taller than you. You still have time.
(You measure yourself every day after that. You're so afraid. You can't wait.)