“No one mentioned that?” Coleman asks. “No one noticed, in casual conversation, that you didn’t have any of the same experiences growing up that they did?” He seems thoroughly puzzled by…me.
“I don’t think I ever discussed my childhood with anyone.” Not once, in the three months since I arrived. “It just…it never came up.” I shrug, trying to ignore the invasive curiosity drawn on the faces of the on-duty crew members. “Men on Gebose only speak to the women in their families, and the women I met there didn’t have much to say to me.” Except for Damaris’s constant warnings about the dangers of wanton behavior, like taking off my modesty sheath.
“What about the other concubines?” Coleman asks. “Did you spend much time with them?”
“I didn’t have much opportunity too. I was the only one brought in from another planet, and they all seemed to think I was…different.”
“Why?” Dreyer asks. “Why would Meshach buy you from off-world, when there are local girls available for free? Or at least without shipping costs.”
I shrug. “They didn’t discuss such things with me. All I know is that Meshach is a very wealthy man, and he wanted something ‘special’ for his sons.”
“Sons? Plural?” Dreyer looks horrified. “Were you supposed to serve them both? Or…all?”
My face grows even warmer at the thought. “Though it is permissible for a man to have both a wife and a concubine, if he can afford to keep them, women are not allowed to take more than one man. I would have been only for Silas. I don’t know what Meshach was planning for his younger son, but Josiah won’t come of age for another year.”
Zamora snorts. “I can’t decide which is more fucked up: the planet you just escaped from, or the one you were born on. Which doesn’t seem to exist.”
“Speaking of which…” Coleman turns back to his console, ready to proceed with his search for my homeworld. “How did you get supplies, on Theron, if there were no landing docks?”
“I told you. We were very nearly self-sufficient, and anything we couldn’t grow for ourselves was brought in from the local village.” Frustration builds inside me, a pressure pushing against my skin from the inside. “There may have been a landing dock there.”
“What was the name of the village?” Zamora asks, and I turn to see him studying me with that same concern Dreyer and Coleman seem to have about my homeworld.
“I don’t know. The sisters just called it ‘the village.’ I wasn’t allowed to go there, though. The trip wasn’t safe for a child.”
Coleman swivels away from his screen, and his focus feels like the prod of a warm finger, tilting my face up. Drawing my attention to him. “Were you the only child at this convent? Just you and the sisters?”
“Yes. I was born there. Long ago, they took in a pregnant woman who had nowhere else to go. She died giving birth to me, so the sisters raised me.”
Zamora frowns. “Alone, in a convent, with no contact with the outside world?”
“Well, when you say it like that, it certainly sounds unlikely, but it didn’t feel that way, at the time. It felt like…home.” The convent was all I’d ever known.
“So, how did you get to Gebose?” Coleman is asking nicely, but he expects an answer. One that makes sense to him and will erase the suspicion steadily growing in his eyes. The same suspicion I see echoed in Zamora’s gaze. In Dreyer’s, now that she’s watching me too.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have the answers you want. I don’t know how I got to Gebose. I just woke up there one day, in a cryopod.” Though I hadn’t known what the strange box was called, until I heard Damaris ordering for it to be hauled away.
“This is bizarre.” Dreyer swivels away from her console to face us. “You don’t remember being sold to Meshach? Or being stuffed into cryopod?” I shake my head, and she turns to Coleman. “Could that be a side effect of something they gave her? Some gas they pumped into her pod?”
“I have no idea.” Beneath the calm surface of his voice, I can feel a churning current of rage, yet his kind eyes say that he isn’t mad at me; he’s mad for me. “Grace, how long ago was that? When you arrived on Gebose?”
“Around three months ago. I don’t know the exact date.”
“Okay. What’s the last thing you remember from the convent? The last thing before waking up in the cryopod, on Gebose?”
“Um…” I close my eyes, trying for the third time in as many minutes to think back over my youth on Theron, in the convent. To push past a collection of facts—places I know to exist and events I know to have happened—and remember actually existing in a specific moment. But I can’t do it.
Frustrated, I open my eyes and meet Coleman’s golden gaze. “I remember a lot of things. Picnics on the grass, on the shore of the lake. Baking a birthday cake with Sister Sarah, for Sister Tabitha. Sewing the lace trim on my own dress. But I don’t…” I frown, attempting to puzzle through what I’m trying to say. To sort out the jumble of thoughts and recollections. “I have no idea what order those things happened in. My memories are just kind of floating around in my mind, untethered by anything concrete. By dates or times.”
Coleman looks really worried now. “Do you know what day it is, today? What time it was on Gebose, when we took off?”
“Of course. Gebose follows an Earth-inspired calendar. A seven-day week and a twelve-month year, though the days are a little longer than they would be on Earth. The months a little shorter. Today, according to that calendar, is Thursday. The fifth day of the fourth month. And we took off just after fifteen hundred pm. Mid-afternoon.”
“Okay, so that’s not the problem. You understand dates and the passage of time.” He looks relieved.
Irritation flares in my chest and I glare at him. “I’m not impaired.”
“I never meant to imply that you were.” He reaches for my hand, and when I pull it out of his grasp, he looks surprised, not by my reaction, but by his own. As if he hadn’t noticed the gesture he was making until I rejected it. “I just meant…if you suffered from some kind of disorder or an injury that kept you from processing the passage of time, that might explain why your memories are jumbled up. But clearly that’s not the case. The problem isn’t you.”
I nod, somewhat mollified. “So, what is the problem?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “Either someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to completely erase any mention of both Theron and your convent from the public record, or they never existed in the first place.” He gives me an apologetic shrug. “Considering how vague your memories are, the latter explanation still seems more likely to me.”
I blink, trying to clear my thoughts, along with my vision. “How is that possible? How could I remember something that never happened? A place that never existed?”
“Implanted memories,” Dreyer says. “Or at least, a manipulation of your real memories.” “Memory manipulation is legal for recreational use, but only on a small scale. Something like this…” She waves one hand at me in a vague gesture. “Completely erasing one life and implanting another one? That isn’t legal.”
“Erase?” I’ve been…erased? “No. That can’t be true. It can’t.” I shake my head, and I can I can’t seem to stop. “Who would I be, if none of what I remember is real?”
Coleman exchanges a worried look with Dreyer. Then he turns back to me. “That’s the worst-case scenario. It’s entirely possible that some version of what you remember is real. Maybe they just manipulated the name of your homeworld. And the convent.” But it’s clear he doesn’t really believe that.
“Who’s ‘they?’”
Dreyer shrugs. “The last I heard, there was no viable, safe technique for something on this scale. Of course, my information’s more than two years out of date, so anything’s possible.
“Why is your information out of date?” I ask, and when she only glances from Zamora to Coleman with a shrug, I follow her focus around the room, noting identical closed off expressions.
“We’v
e been out of the loop for a while,” she finally says. “Thanks to an extended stay on Rhodon.” She seems to think I should recognize the name of that planet, and I’m too embarrassed to admit that I do not.
“Even if Universal Authority or one of their competitors has managed to perfect memory manipulation,” Coleman says, neatly redirecting the conversation away from a topic they clearly don’t want to revisit. “Why would they do that to Grace?”
Zamora shrugs. “Maybe Meshach ordered it. Fake memories, to lessen the trauma of being ripped from her real life and sold off?”
My real life? I’m not yet convinced that what I remember isn’t real. That doesn’t seem possible. But then, neither does the fact that Theron doesn’t seem to exist.
“What’s Universal Authority?”
“It’s a very large, very powerful company that is unhindered by ethics,” Coleman says.
“Unfamiliar with the concept, you might say.” Dreyer adds. “But they’re going to get what’s coming to them.”
“What’s coming to them?” I’m starting to feel like I stowed away on the wrong ship. Like I walked into something I can’t possibly understand. Not that I understand what’s happening to me, either.
How can the convent not be real?
“Death and destruction are what’s coming to them,” Dreyer says, and I realize her focus has snagged on the underside of her own arm. On those thick scars I noticed earlier. They look almost like claw marks.
Coleman has scars too, but they’re different. One thin, clean line of dark tissue runs down the underside of each of his forearms, as if someone cut him open from wrist to elbow. I can’t imagine how anyone could come by a scar like that. By accident, anyway.
“What…what happened to you all?” I glance from Coleman’s arm to Zamora’s, and I see an identical scar, before he tugs his sleeve down and turns back to the flight instruments. “How did you get those wounds?”
“That’s a story for another day.” Coleman taps on his virtual keyboard, smoothly changing the subject again. “So, I know you don’t have a surname. But is there any chance that Sister Sarah does? Or Sister Tabitha, or any of the other sisters you remember from the convent?”
I shake my head. “I only ever heard them addressed as Sister Something-or-other. Sarah. Tabitha. Bethany. Um…” I frown, trying to think.
“What’s wrong?” Coleman asks.
“There were dozens of sisters at the convent, but I can only remember those three names.”
“What about their faces?” There’s an odd tension in his voice, as if his calm, even tone is just for show. As if something uneasy churns just beneath that. “Can you remember any of the other faces?”
I close my eyes and concentrate, but… “No.” My eyes fly open and I stare at him, my heart racing uncontrollably. “Why can’t I remember their names and faces? Why are they all a blur, in my head? I just have an impression of dark robes and covered heads. I know the Sisters exist, like I know that there are galaxies spread out all across the great expanse of space, even though I’ve never seen them. But the harder I try to remember the specifics, the more distant my memories feel.” As if they are an intellectual knowledge, rather than my own experience.
Coleman turns away from his console, and again he looks like he wants to reach for my hand. “Grace, I know this is a very difficult conclusion to come to terms with. But the more I hear, the more convinced I become that this convent doesn’t exist. And neither does Theron. As crazy as that sounds, I can’t think of any other explanation for the fact that neither of them is coming up on any search, and you can’t remember anything more than the vaguest details.”
“I don’t understand how that’s possible. I know, manipulated memories,” I add, when Dreyer opens her mouth to repeat the explanation she gave me before. “But I don’t understand why someone would do that to me. People on Gebose don’t care what my childhood was like. They never even asked me about it. And if all they care about is keeping me compliant as a concubine, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to have given me memories of growing up on Gebose? Or at least of growing up some place similar? There were no concubines on Theron. There weren’t even any men in the convent.” I shake my head, my hands clenching around handfuls of the nano-tech material I’m still clutching. “I mean, there evidently was no Theron, and no convent, but my memories of growing up don’t include any knowledge that someday I’d be sold as a concubine. What was the point of giving me fake memories that wouldn’t help me adjust to being given to Silas?”
“I don’t know,” Coleman admits. “None of this makes any sense.”
I stare at my hands, but I’m not really seeing them. “The only person who might know is Meshach, and it’s not like I can ask him.”
“Speak of the devil…” Zamora spins in his chair again, putting his back to the flight instruments. “He’s requesting an open com link.”
Panic roars at me like sound stretched from the end of a long tunnel. Suddenly I feel a cold surface against my back, though I have no memory of standing. Of backing all the way across the main deck until I’m pressed against the closed bunks where Lawrence and Jamison are sleeping. There’s nowhere left to go, and I don’t even remember fleeing this far.
“Grace?” Coleman stands, but he stops without following me. Without encroaching on my personal space. He’s approaching me as if I’m a cornered animal, ready to strike out in fear. “It’s okay. This may not even be about you.”
“It is.” My modesty sheath stretches out in front of me where I’ve dragged it, one handed, in my retreat. It’s nothing but a slightly shimmery blur on the floor.
“Even if it is, he’s just fishing. He can’t know for sure that you’re here,” Coleman insists.
Zamora huffs. “If I don’t answer him soon, he might make that assumption.”
“Wake up Sotelo,” Coleman orders, as if he’s still Zamora’s Sergeant. Then he turns back to me. “I’ll take you downstairs.”
“No. I want to hear what he says.” I’m a little stunned by my own nerve; this is the same way I felt when I snuck up to the main deck, to hear what was being said about me. On Gebose, such behavior would be unthinkable. But I didn’t grow up on Gebose. And while I may have grown up isolated and sheltered in the convent, I wasn’t invisible there. I was allowed to speak. To truly exist.
Though, ironically, that may not actually be true, no matter how real my unmoored memories feel.
“Um…” I turn to the bank of bunks and see that one of the four is still unoccupied. I can hide there. But it’s a top bunk, and I’m not tall. “I don’t suppose you have a ladder? Or a step-stool?”
“No, but I can give you a boost.” Coleman’s pupils dilate with the offer.
“Thank you,” I say. Yet he hesitates, his hands hovering near my hips.
I’m not his wife, nor am I his concubine; on Gebose, he could be arrested for touching me. But the women here don’t wear modesty sheaths. They aren’t forbidden to speak to men. So I don’t think he’s worried about violating any rule. But something’s bothering him.
“Is…is that not allowed?” I look up at him. “Touching me?”
He groans, a guttural sound that triggers that lustful ache inside me. Low in my belly and curling lower. I swallow and try to breathe past the unwelcome…need. “No. We have no rules,” Coleman says. “None like that, anyway. Here.” His hands land on my hips, and they’re big enough to wrap around to the front of my lower abdomen. He lifts me with no hint of effort, and I crawl into the empty bunk.
The moment he lets me go, I… well, I miss his hands.
Puzzled, I sit up in the enclosed space and turn to face him. To see if he’s feeling…whatever this is. His golden-eyed gaze is glued to me, his pupils larger than ever. For a second, my focus seems caught on his, and I can’t manage to break the spell until I realize he’s making an odd noise. A soft whirring sound that settles low inside me, exactly where his voice resonated before.
That
aching need swells low in my belly. Then even lower.
“Fucking hell, Coleman,” Captain Sotelo curses as he climbs out of his bottom bunk, on the lower edge of my vision. “Hold it together.”
Coleman blinks, and that noise dies. “Sorry. Um…” He shoves my modesty sheath in with me, then he slides the panel part way shut, half enclosing me in the sleeping berth. “Pull this closed, then tap on the pad to the left. You can set it to one-way transparency. That way you can see and hear everything that’s going on out here.”
“What if I accidentally set it to total transparency? Meshach will see me.”
Coleman smiles. “That isn’t an option. Bunk privacy was only intended to work one-way. For obvious reasons.” Then he slides the panel closed. To my relief, a soft light emanates from overhead. And while some of the larger men might find this space confined, it’s actually much longer than I am, and it’s tall enough for me to stand in, if I don’t mind hunching.
“What’s going on?” Sotelo asks, and I tap on the panel Coleman mentioned, then I select the one-way setting. The panel shimmers for a second, then becomes mostly-clear. It’s like looking out on the main deck through a sheet of clear polymer.
“Meshach’s on the line.”
“Fuck. Okay.” Sotelo turns to glance at my bunk, and I can tell he can’t see me because his eyes focus on a point several inches in front of my face. Where the panel is opaque, from his perspective. “Put him on the screen.”
A square on the left side of the transparent viewshield fogs over, partially obscuring the panorama of space. Meshach’s face appears in that square. “Captain Pryor,” he says and it takes me a second to realize he’s talking to Sotelo. Who gave Meshach a fake name.
“What can we do for you?” Sotelo asks.
“I wonder if you’ll do me a favor?” Meshach leans forward in his chair, his full lips turned up into a half-smile the rest of Gebose seems to find charming.
Vendetta (Project Vetus Book 2) Page 6