The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  Sam superimposed himself into the memory, into the warmth of the living room, back turned away from Josie, whose form warped and bled.

  ‘I can’t find Ted,’ Sam called into the real.

  ‘Focus,’ Trish said. ‘Find some positive memories and bring him – ’

  Before she could finish the sentence, the memory changed again. Ted was married now, and he was tall and bearded and an engineer in the air force. His wife had untameable red hair. So did his three daughters, who leapt on him with thankful hugs and kisses on Christmas morning. Then he was fifty, his house in disrepair. His wife yelled at him because he was a drunk now – a workless, worthless drunk – and they didn’t have sex anymore, and her hair was grey.

  The memories continued to fall and twist and bend over themselves; in the destruction of one came another, a phoenix of red hair from the ashes of a fireplace. The poison of Ted’s childhood seeped into them all.

  ‘I’m struggling to get a grip,’ Sam said in the physical.

  A pain erupted in Sam’s groin, in Ted’s, and it was faint. Nika had resurfaced. A sharp pain tore across his testicles.

  ‘Sam,’ came James’s urgent voice, ‘get out. Come back to us. Now.’

  Sam’s eyes jerked open to find a tide of blood on the carpet.

  Old Ted fell to his knees, skin slate grey. Trish and James were shrunk against the back wall. Ted, under Nika’s control, cut at the scrotum with the razor.

  ‘Fuck this,’ Sam said, then bent to his duffel bag, bringing out an EMP.

  ‘Sam,’ James warned.

  ‘Article fifty-seven: expel both the imprint and the taken if the occupied is being inflicted a pain so severe that – ’

  ‘Death is the only resolution,’ Trish concluded.

  Sam switched the EMP on and flung it. The contraption scuttled across the carpet and landed at Ted’s knees. It beeped once, twice, three times, then popped. White light flashed across the room. Ted collapsed to the floor. His physical life was over, as was his chance to become an imprint. At least the pain had ended.

  Better to have an absolute death.

  Sam stood rooted to the blood-soaked carpet. James and Trish pulled him to the bedroom window, equipment bags strung to their backs. Sam hesitated on the windowsill and looked back at photographs of Ted’s happy family, now in a heap on the floor.

  Trish pulled him through the window onto the gravel. They skirted the perimeter of the home back to their vehicles, ducking under windowsills as they went. The home’s lights popped on and off: the aftereffects of the EMP.

  Back in the Reliant, Trish and Sam followed James in his people carrier. They got purposefully lost in the tangle of backroads until they were out of sight of motorways and houses. The journey in Trish’s car was alight with argument. James pulled over into the gateway of a nondescript field. Trish brought her car up beside his, and they piled out.

  ‘We let a man die, and we fucked off,’ Sam shrieked. ‘What the actual hell?’

  ‘We had to protect the Network,’ James said.

  Sam thumped the carrier’s roof.

  ‘To hell with the Network,’ he cried.

  ‘The carer, she saw our faces,’ Trish said. ‘If there was CCTV – ’

  ‘There wasn’t,’ James assured her. ‘We’ll lay low for a while, at the collieries, until we sort this.’

  ‘How can we sort it?’ Trish said. She pulled at her hair. It was lilac now. ‘He’s dead. The fourth occupation in two weeks.’

  Sam couldn’t stop her in time. He watched on as the information registered with James.

  ‘Three occupations,’ James said slowly. He glanced between his associates.

  ‘Trish has a theory that Will was occupied too,’ Sam said.

  ‘Tonight just proves that. Doesn’t it, Sam? Doesn’t it?’ Trish beckoned.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said. It was beyond a coincidence now. ‘We need the Abadi kid. We need Rasha. I don’t give a rat’s tail about her age; she’s the only person to have survived an occupation. We need to know how.’

  James leant against his boot. His eyes washed over the stickers in the rear window.

  ‘We might find out how to confront the occupations when they come, emphasis on might, but it doesn’t help us prevent them from happening,’ he said.

  James took a deep breath, turned to them, and said, ‘We’ll head to the collieries. She’s already there. Vanessa’s going to have her take the Long Walk.’

  A dying man joins Ewella in the hold.

  From what the maiden gathers, he ranks low and is forgotten by his crew members. He lies opposite the wall where Ewella is chained. A gash ladders from his left armpit to his right hip. Long forgotten by the crew, his wound is untended and grows greyer and greyer with rot. The deeper the fever runs, the more he sleeps. The more he sleeps, and the closer he edges toward death, the more Ewella sees.

  On the first night she saw a burning village. The heat of the spitting fires was relentless as the sun above. The locals to this Nigerian village ran and shrieked. A wretched memory to infest the girl’s mind, and a recurrent one at that. Another showed the ill man being dragged to the ship that he tried so desperately to escape. She learnt his name, too: Ebok.

  There is no doubt in her mind that Ebok’s memories are what led her to the shore. Thoughts cycle through his mind, and so her mind too. At first the words were alien to her, a language beyond Kernewek. She has become accustomed to the language, as if her mind is a book in which Ebok pens his words and their definitions.

  My life is home. But there is no home. This boat is my life. But my life is home.

  Ewella knows all too well. She pines to be back amongst her villagers – even those who taunt her. Ebok is unlikely to return home, for leagues of relentless sea lie between them. She finds strength knowing that hers is close by.

  At the beginning of summer, Ewella failed to find paying work amongst the villagers. Her mother would often repeat to her unwilling ears that opportunity comes in the unlikeliest of forms. Ewella’s comes in the shape of a boy her age, darker than the rest of the ship’s crew. His torso is bare, and his ribs protrude. It isn’t the boy’s skeletal form that grabs her attention. He is the first crew member to tend to Ebok.

  The scrawny boy kneels before Ebok, ladles salt water from a bucket, and washes the gash on the ill man’s chest. Pain shudders through Ebok’s body. Ewella knows he is beyond saving. The boy acts with tenderness; he knows, too. He still cleanses the wound. Ebok’s twitches lessen as he drifts from the living once more. A tsunami of colour bombards Ewella’s skull, and the wood of her prison floods away –

  In its place is a stage erected in a dusty courtyard surrounded by market stalls. Merchants and keepers, as diverse as their products, haggle and barter. A crowd with square jaws, fair skin, and dark features gathers alongside the platform. Eager, excitable. Ewella catches a word, unsure if it is a title for man or place: Arab. Women, chained wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, are lined before the crowd. Tears fall silently across the maids’ unwashed faces. Hands rise amongst Arabians whilst a Nigerian yells numbers. These numbers are prices. The women are products.

  Ewella’s warm tears throw her back to the bowels of the ship. The vision gives way to the shadows of night. Her tears do not alarm her; grunts of pain do. She meets the boy’s hollow gaze. Four of the crew members hold his limbs to the floor as a fifth lies on top of him and thrusts into his buttocks. The notion of two men in the heat of passion is plausible enough to Ewella. The fact one cannot give consent, merely a boy himself, is not. A few quick, hard thrusts. The man lies astride the boy for a heartbeat. He rises, tucks his member into his leggings, and clambers up the ladder, his four accomplices in tow.

  The boy lies there for a moment. He blinks, then flexes his wrists and ankles where they had been pressed to the floor. He climbs to his knees and gathers his torn garments. A milky substance drips across his inner thigh. With his ripped clothes now just rags, he mops the fluid up. He scrubs his
thighs, and the scrubbing becomes punches. Ewella shouts. The boy recoils toward the nearest wall, and shame burns across his face: he forgot he is in company. She is with him, and Ewella knows she must continue to be – through the rape and beatings and hunger.

  Those poor protruding ribs. Ewella lunges into the corner of the cabin and searches blindly in the darkness. She returns with a dried fig; it weeps with age but is sustenance nonetheless. Most nights the men fight for food; naturally, the older and stronger are fruitful. She is guaranteed meals, dried figs mostly. She knows why now: she is a product to be haggled over at market.

  Ewella stumbles forward and offers the fig to the scrawny boy. He watches her through his fingers as if he searches for an ulterior motive. He approaches and reaches out, and his fingertips meet hers. The fig exchanges hands. He sits and eats the whole fig as Ewella looks on. When he is done, he gives her a smile, and his brilliant white teeth glow in the darkness. A hopeful smile.

  Rasha might as well have been a criminal.

  Vanessa barely spoke to her on the drive over from the holiday park to the collieries, and the first thing she said when they descended into the intoxicating black mineshaft was, ‘You’ve got us into trouble.’

  Fred’s delimbing. Trish had told the board.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Rasha said as she treaded down the sharp tunnel. ‘I couldn’t close the connection, and this boy, Fred, was being – ’

  ‘Enough,’ Vanessa hissed. She stopped ahead of Rasha but didn’t turn to face her. ‘We’re compromised.’

  Vanessa stalked forward, and Rasha ran to keep up.

  ‘Why don’t you want people to know about my training?’

  ‘Because there are people who’d want to stop it.’

  ‘So what we’re doing is bad?’

  ‘It’s beyond anything they can comprehend.’

  They stopped at an intersection where paths went west and east. A shock of frequency energy chewed Rasha’s skin. Vanessa nodded east.

  ‘The Long Walk,’ she announced.

  ‘What is it?’ Rasha asked, relieved that the darkness hid most of Vanessa’s face.

  ‘Correctional treatment for troubled witnesses,’ Vanessa spat. ‘And by witnessing protocols – outdated protocols, but mandatory nonetheless – you are troubled.’

  ‘Correctional . . .’ Rasha thought out loud. She considered Vanessa’s sentiment when she forced engagement with Joel at school that night. She’d said Rasha’s experiences in Syria, and her subsequent state of mind, was what made her a witness. It seemed her darker thoughts were no longer accepted.

  ‘You’re going to be tested,’ Vanessa said. ‘Four imprints, four extreme points of emotional experience. To continue with us, the board wants to bring you to a neutral place. To tempt you from darkness.’

  ‘To make me good.’

  ‘No, to make you subservient,’ Vanessa said, disdained.

  ‘Are they good imprints?’ Rasha asked. ‘The four?’

  ‘They’ll never go against Network protocol,’ Vanessa returned. That didn’t instil Rasha was confidence. She wanted to be back in the caravan with Haya, back in Syria before the bomb fell. To a time where she wasn’t scolded for being a refugee or a witness haunted by her past.

  A notification pinged. Vanessa withdrew her phone and read a message from the lock screen.

  ‘The four are waiting,’ she said, then gestured to the tunnel.

  Rasha reached instinctively for Vanessa’s flashlight. She jerked her hand away.

  ‘You won’t need it,’ she said. ‘Not where you’re going.’

  Rasha breathed in, out, in, out.

  Rasha traipsed east and clung to a rope handrail tacked to the stone wall. With each footstep, a storm of frequency energy swelled around her. She wouldn’t be the same after the Long Walk. Perhaps, if she found an instinct to engage with neutral imprints, she’d hone skills that kept evil at bay, to protect herself from the likes of Cridland, Fred, and the shadow imprint. To protect herself. In doing so, maybe she would win back the Network’s trust. In doing so, maybe Haya would talk to her again.

  For a moment she thought that Vanessa and company had joined her once again. Four people strode alongside her. No, they were imprints. They forced themselves against her mind, and brought themselves into her, and her into them.

  Heads of wheat grazed her hands, and roots crunched underfoot; before she knew it, Rasha had crossed into the ombrederi.

  Ahead, the meadow flattened where shrubbery was reaped, and a wooden frame stood surrounded by workmen. They all had dirty-blond hair, dark eyes, and large ears: brothers, sons, and cousins, Rasha assumed. A gangly man with a concave chest stood amidst the pillars.

  Patrick, he whispered in Rasha’s mind.

  He cackled at a dirty joke his boy had learnt from an American. He threw his head back and surveyed the work done so far. The beginning of his family home. He pictured his wife as she baked pasties and scones in the kitchen on Saturdays, the garden path his grandchildren would play upon.

  World War II was far enough in the past as to not corrode such happier times. That month, in which the groundwork had been laid for Patrick’s house, had been the most harmonious he’d ever known. The quiet after the storm. Of course, the peace wouldn’t last, but the house would, and that was Patrick’s intention. It would outlive all who built it: a humble man’s monument.

  A breeze sauntered through the structure. Rasha understood what this imprint was meant to do: have her succumb to his tranquillity. The young men chatted as they pushed wheelbarrows of cement, while their fathers reminisced about their own parents. Were the men happy? Wartime blues must have festered beneath their skin. All at peace, all at once. An impossible feat for the human condition.

  A hopeless wail echoed in the distance. Rasha treaded through another wheat field to a wild woman with weary eyes and sore cracked lips. Macaid, the tribeswoman whispered. She had travelled far across the rough terrain with her tribe. The night after the solstice, their map, drawn up on dried cow’s hide, went up in flames by the campfire. They navigated by the coastal lines toward a seaside sanctuary they intended to call home. It was slow. The cliffs were devoid of clean water sources. Five days since the tribe drank. Minds hallucinated. Man and horse collapsed, dead before they hit the ground.

  Macaid was considering throwing herself from the cliff tops, admitting defeat, when she heard a trickle. She stopped the convoy. Water gurgled. Ahead, a stream was visible, and upon its banks a herd of dead sheep rotted. Empowered with a surge of newfound need, Macaid and her tribe galloped upstream, past the green fly-infested dead. They found a lake. Every human dismounted and bolted into the water. They drank, washed, and rejoiced to a god many men had rejected. Macaid laughed and savoured her people’s elation. She leapt from her horse and joined her folk in the water. Her shire wouldn’t follow. Many of the horses didn’t. They sniffed the water with distrust and dug their hooves into the dirt.

  A worried yell. Commotion filled the air, and her people waded out of the lake. Macaid understood why: there was a white tint to the water.

  Days passed, and the convoy hadn’t moved from the waterside. Within hours, those who’d drunk became sick as the poison overtook their malnourished bodies. At sunrise the death toll was in the twenties; the next night Macaid nursed the last of her men before death took him.

  Macaid was alone among a hundred dead bodies, and the same again in starved horses. What was a chieftain without a tribe? She walked into the water, cupped her hands, and drank deep and true. It was bitter, as death should be. She lay back and let herself float on the water. Her weak eyes filled with the sun. It had beat down on them all thirty-seven days of their hopeless migration. It won, and it didn’t matter.

  Rasha rose from the chalky water, as she had risen from the rubble of her Syrian home, and she walked on. If she were the chieftain she would have picked herself up. She’d always search for her home. Rasha walked until she ran.

  Max ran, t
oo. He’d learnt to run fast. Less chance of being grazed by his dad’s fist. Well, not his real dad; Kenneth was the fourth boyfriend Max had known his mum to have. Mum sure loved him and told Max to call him dad. It was all kept hush-hush, though, because of Benny Fits, whoever he was. He’d learnt to hide well. The key was to be quiet. Beside the boiler in the airing cupboard had become Max’s safe space. As soon as Kenneth began to drink, Max would go the cupboard with a few select toys, a flashlight, and his overdue Tracey Beaker book. He couldn’t return it to the school library; Max wasn’t allowed to go school if he wore visible bruises. The teachers were nosy, Kenneth said, and they looked down at them. It was okay, though; he loved the book and wanted to keep it. He liked how the kids found doting new mums and dads.

  His mum’s screams grew louder and more desperate as the destruction of the kitchen sounded below Max. It quietened. Heavy footsteps creaked on the stairs. Kenneth staggered up them. A feathering of plastic told Max the blind had been ripped from the landing window again. Max buried himself as far as he could go into the corner of the closet and pulled sheets over his head from the shelf above. He wanted the darkness to gobble him up.

  Milana hid in the dark. Rasha didn’t mean to impose her own memories. This was how Max would persuade her, she was sure. Milana reached out to Rasha from beneath the crumpled bed. Rasha took her hand and squeezed it. She couldn’t endorse the fear any longer. She’d experienced much, much worse than an abusive drunk in her time, and she could hurt people in terrible ways herself.

  But perhaps not as much as Stephen.

  Stephen Cardy’s meaty knuckles gripped the steering wheel as his van hurtled through narrow village streets. This was the only thing he had control of – not his adulterous wife, nor his naughty kids, nor his closefisted boss. No. The vehicle he did. The TV sets he should have delivered were in smithereens, so glass and hardware swashed back and forth across the floor. He wanted to break things.

  The first victim was an elderly woman. Her brittle bones turned to powdered sugar as she struck the bonnet. In the passenger’s seat, Rasha gripped the door handle. She knew this was a memory. She couldn’t get hurt. So why does it feel real? she thought.