We all nodded. Ruby did, too, though she was chewing the inside of her cheek as she did so. Arie and Woolly leaned in to peer at the books. They pointed to the lines of numbers and turned the pages of The Great Gatsby. Ruby put her chin in one hand and drummed the fingers of her other hand on the desk.
Chase put his mouth to my ear. “You doing okay?” he whispered.
I nodded. “I just want to know what’s in there. It’s killing me.”
He nodded, kissed me on the ear.
Ruby stopped her drumming. “Here’s what’s bothering me, though,” she announced, taking up her walking stick and thumping the floor with it. “What if there’s like a hunnerd of these per— perm—”
“Permutations,” offered Woolly.
“Yeah, those,” Ruby continued. “What if there’s a hunnerd of ’em? Won’tcha hafta work on this for a whole day to find the right one?”
“No,” said Woolly.
“No?” echoed Ruby.
“No, much longer than that, I would think,” said Woolly. “Several days. A week, maybe. Or even longer.”
“Yeah,” replied Ruby. “That’s what I thought. And then ya still might come up empty, and even if ya do come up with the right per—”
“—mutation,” said Woolly—
“—you’ll have to spend time un-coding it, and that all by itself is a whole other big job.”
Woolly stuck out his lower lip and gave a nod.
“See? Now follow along what I’m tellin’ ya. Back when Al and Arie and all of us lived in Zone 1891, back when we were holed up in the terror ride at the park, we thought we needed the Agency serum to live, right?”
Nods.
“Everyone did, didn’t we?” said Ruby. “Oh, we thought the serum was legit but maybe the memory effects was bogus, and we was runnin’ around trying to find a serum without the memory effects, but we also was tryna figure out just what was true and false about everything, and course we know it was all a bunch of horse-hockey now, but back then we was obsessed with finding it all out.”
“Right.”
“Sure.”
“Now,” Ruby drawled, holding up her hands leading us further into her argument, “’parently, sometime back then, Arie found out something that he figured was important enough to put down into a code. Great. But what was it? Hell, I wanna know as bad as you all do. Sure I do. But it’s gonna take manpower to find that out, which is something I ain’t got a lot of. So, best thing for me to do is narrow down what it could be. Yah? Narrow it down before we waste that manpower, see. And when I start narrowin’ it on down, I betcha that was it—Arie found out that the serum was a fake. Or that the memory effects was fake. Or something related to that. Follow? That’s the most likely thing it could be, and we already know alla that.”
Arie objected. “Yeah, but we don’t know—”
“Bup bup bup,” Ruby held up her stick. “You’re right. We don’t know, do we? We don’t know nothin’. But follow my logic. That’s the most likely thing ya found out, kid. And so not only could this notebook un-coding burn up a whole lotta valuable manpower and not amount to nothin’, it might amount to somethin’ we already been knowin’ for a while, and in fact I think it’s most likely that that’s the big secret! No offense, kid, but what else could you of found out back in the 1891 that we haven’t already learned for ourself since we got outta there? We pretty much know everything now, and nowadays it’s not s’much about finding out more about the Agency as it is about stayin’ outta their way so they can’t make us forget all of what we done learnt.”
She was right. I had forgotten what had happened to Arie and me when we lived in the Zones, but I spent an entire year living within the Agency. What was there left to discover?
Several seconds passed without an answer from any of us.
Then Woolly held up an index finger and opened his mouth to speak.
Ruby cut him off. “An’ don’t you go tellin’ me you’ll work on this in your spare time just outta your own personal curiosity, ya’ big lummox. Y’ain’t got no spare time ’less I give it to ya, and even if I did, you’d burn up alla yer candles stayin’ up nights working on this without any sleep.”
Woolly shrugged his guilt and nodded again.
“See? I can’t afford that,” said Ruby.
I somehow caught Ruby’s gaze and in the span of a second or two, a complicated exchange took place. In that short glance, I managed to remind Ruby that Arie needed this. This or something like it. He’d been told “no” too many times. Even if the notebook were a wild goose chase, and I was beginning to agree that this was probably the case, Arie needed something to occupy his mind, something besides hanging laundry and shucking peas. Sometimes I thought it would almost be better for Arie if he were back at Lotus or even out in the Zones somewhere, because from what I could tell, that was where he thrived—building a resistance, making plans, working under pressure. All this peace and quiet was driving him nuts.
Ruby was disappointingly right. The notebook almost certainly contained information that we’d already discovered, but here at least was a solution to the Arie Problem, I told her, pleading with my eyes.
And Ruby understood.
When the moment passed, I saw the twinkle of covert understanding in her eyes, though it was shadowed by a certain dark reluctance. She sighed loudly and stared at the notebook for a few seconds.
“All right,” she said. She thunked her walking stick on the floor and then passed a heavy-lidded gaze over each of us in turn. “Maybe there’s something here. Maybe there ain’t. Personally, I think there ain’t. But I think you’s have got a point about valuable info. We eat peas and garlic and them little funny wild strawberries, but we live on information, don’t we?”
“Indeed,” murmured Woolly.
“So, tell ya what I’m gonna do,” said Ruby, her voice low and a little apologetic. “You got three days. Woolly? Just you and the kid. Not you, Chase. Or you, Alison. Just them two.” She wagged her finger at Arie and Woolly.
They traded a look and nodded with no little eagerness.
“I’ll relieve ya both from yer camp duties, but if this ends up being another one of them diaries about what kinda soup you ate or howta fix bicycles for your neighbors, so help me I ain’t gonna be real pleased. Three days, and after that it’s back to business as per usual. Got me?”
There was a collective sigh of relief and repeated assurances from all of us that the notebook would not be a distraction. I gave Chase a squeeze.
“We won’t let you down, Boss,” said Woolly.
“There’s no way you can,” Ruby replied gruffly. “Now go on. Git.”
CHAPTER 4
All throughout the first day, I popped into the big command tent every couple hours to see if Arie and Woolly were making progress, trying each time to avoid being caught by Ruby—even when I wasn’t supposed to be busy at some camp duty or assignment.
It didn’t seem to be going well.
When I peeked through the front door flap just after breakfast, the notebook lay open between them on the table, and they sat writing lines of letters and passing The Great Gatsby back and forth. It seemed like the most tedious thing in the world two people could do together. Woolly consulted a page in the novel, ran his finger along the lines of text, wrote down one letter, then passed the book to Arie. Arie ran a finger along a line from the notebook, consulted the novel, and then passed it over to Woolly. This happened over and over. I slipped inside the tent as quietly as I could manage.
Neither of them looked up at me.
“Arie,” I hissed, looking behind me through the gap in the tent door to see if Ruby might be watching.
Arie looked up and met my gaze, but he only gave me a curt, almost dismissive head-shake and then went back to his work. I stepped out of the tent and hoped for a better result next time.
When I came just after lunch, I could see the guys had been served hash and coffee and water and camp cakes. This time Wooll
y read numbers aloud from the notebook while Arie looked up letters in the paperback and wrote them down. There were balled-up wads of paper and more dirty dishes scattered on the table top.
That time I didn’t even try to get their attention.
Lamps and a few candles were lit when I came around just before my post-dinner shift on dish patrol. This time when I saw them, I thought they were sleeping with their chins in their palms, but then I realized they were staring at long lines of letters they’d been writing down all day, presumably looking for words or maybe even just patterns. They were beginning to look a little weary. Rumor had it they’d downed a full week’s ration of coffee between them.
“I knew it!” barked Ruby from outside the tent.
I considered diving under the table.
“An’ don’t go and try hidin’ in there, Al,” she said. “I saw ya go in. I knew you’d come sniffing around.” She swept the heavy canvas door of the tent aside.
“You said you wouldn’t hang around ’em,” said Ruby, shaking a finger at me. “Said you’d stay busy and not bother ’em.”
“I’m not bothering them,” I told her. “They barely know I’m here.”
“Not entirely true,” said Woolly dryly. “We’ve just been ignoring you.”
Arie nodded without looking up from the decoded lines. Then he paused, rubbed his eye with a fist, the way a little boy would, and went back to his work.
“G’won,” Ruby said to me in a loud whisper. She jabbed a thumb at the tent door. “Git. You think they’re not gonna tell us if they find somethin’?”
“It seems like this might be a bigger challenge than I led you to believe,” said Woolly. His mouth gaped in a great, lionesque yawn, and then he pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Yeah?” drawled Ruby. I could tell she wanted them to give up. “Well, fellas, that’s all right. Ya did your best. Maybe you can try again when things settle down.”
The pair looked at each other and nodded slowly, their eyelids puffy. Then they stood. Arie put his hands in the small of his back and arched his spine backwards. Woolly gathered up The Great Gatsby and the notebook and handed them to Arie, who nodded wearily. Then the four of us shuffled out of the tent and off in different directions. I wanted to say something. I kept quiet and went off to work the dinner shift.
That night, as I got ready for bed, I saw a glimmer of lamplight on the other side of camp, where the admin tents and structures stood. I put on my sandals and crossed the camp in the dark. My feet knew the way without any light.
Lights burned brightly in the command tent. I crept up to the nearest window, and there they were in the light of two oil lamps and three or four candles, reading numbers and letters to each other again. I smiled. Then I looked more closely at the table, and I saw sheets of paper with writing on them. Not just strings of random letters or numbers, but words, fashioned into sentences, with spaces, punctuation. I couldn’t read any of the writing, but I knew what it meant, and I gasped, surely loud enough for them to hear me.
If they did hear, they made no signal to indicate it. I turned to leave, but as I turned away, Woolly did look up, craned his head around, and saw my face in the window. There were circles under his eyes and his face was drawn.
But he smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up.
I was aching to know what they’d decoded, but I felt strongly that I’d break the spell they’d finally conjured if I interrupted for even a few moments. And so I stepped away and spirited back to my tent.
I did not sleep, and just before first light, I got up and peeked out of my tent. Light still shone from the command tent. I got dressed.
CHAPTER 5
I was never really sure about how Ruby felt about me after I’d gotten my memory scrubbed, after the time I spent with Gary Gosford in the Agency housing block. It was nothing she said to me directly. She never had a truly unkind word, and she often told me how much she loved me and how highly she thought of me. She treated me like I was her daughter or niece—she gave me advice and asked me for advice sometimes, too. I’d never heard from anyone else that she’d said anything negative about me, either. But I got a certain feeling from Ruby, like she no longer fully trusted me, no longer thought of me like she did before. Maybe, I sometimes thought, Ruby suspected that my time with Gosford and Rachel had endowed me with some kind of hidden loyalty or a Manchurian-style plan to betray everyone.
In fact, in the back of my mind I thought Ruby might have excluded me from her leadership team had it not been for the fact that Chase and I were together and had grown quite close. Ruby seemed to realize that wherever Chase went, I went, too. We were partners, and even if we hadn’t been a couple, we often thought alike.
“I think Alison’s right.”
“I like Chase’s idea.”
In planning or strategy meetings, that was sometimes all we had to say.
I’m sure we annoyed others with this closeness, but there was something that drew Chase and I together. I never wanted to be very far away from him, nor for very long. I knew I could take care of myself—I knew that Arie and I had lived for at least a year and probably longer out in the Zones on our own—but there in the mountain camp, Chase had a way of stepping in to help me out at just the right times, whether I asked him for help or not. Sometimes it was something as simple as bringing a bowl of stew to my tent after a long day, so that I didn’t have to walk across camp for dinner. Other times he’d take a shift of my duty when I wasn’t feeling well, or when I wanted to spend an afternoon with Arie.
Memory erasure and the conditions the Agency forced us to live in caused all kinds of conflicts and in-fighting, so I tried not to return Ruby’s supposed mistrust in-kind, but I wasn’t about to object that it might be Chase’s influence that kept me close to Ruby’s decision-making, especially now that Woolly and Arie might have wrested something important from the mysterious red notebook.
As I came out of my tent, I saw Chase approaching in the half-light.
“We’re meeting at the firepit,” he said. Then, turning about-face he headed in that direction, waving his hand and beckoning me.
When we got there, someone had started a small fire that snapped and clicked quietly, sending a plume of grayish smoke into the still air. The chickadees and mourning doves were busy singing the morning into life, but it still felt like the middle of the night to me. My head buzzed with a lack of sleep.
Arie sat in a camp chair with his elbows on his thighs and his head hanging practically between his knees. Woolly was pitched back in his chair, fingers laced across his big chest. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and he was beginning to snore.
“Guys?” I asked. “You all right?”
Woolly stopped his snoring and nodded slightly but did not open his eyes; Arie nodded without lifting his head.
“Where’s Ruby?” asked Chase.
“She’ll be along,” croaked Woolly.
“I’m here, I’m here,” said Ruby, limping up from behind us, her cane thudding in the duff. There was a weary edge in her voice.
We all came to a sort of collective alert, as we often did when Ruby appeared among us. She shuffled into our midst and stood in front of Woolly and Arie. They’d sat up in their chairs and were yawning and stretching and blinking.
“So?” she grunted.
“We’ve only decoded the first ten pages,” said Arie. His voice was thick with fatigue.
Ruby took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “And?”
“And the first part explains the purpose of the journal,” said Woolly. There was the same sleepy, baritone rattle in his voice. “It’s like we all figured—he coded the information because he thought it was important, and then he left himself little hints and puzzles to point him back to the notebook on the far side of a memory scrub. So, we were right about that.”
“Yah, yah,” said Ruby. “So, what’s the big secret?”
“Well, summarizing a little here,” said Woolly, “but it was c
lose to the end of the year, and Arie came across a man named Eudrich on the side of the road.”
“Yoo-jrick?” said Ruby.
“Close enough,” said Woolly.
“How’d the kid find ’im? He was just laying there in the road?”
“Arie was out searching some old buildings outside Zone boundaries, as was his habit at the time, and he found this guy, who’d apparently been left for dead. Basic Agency goon, young Arie thought, but this guy had been ambushed by thieves and for whatever reason, Arie decided to help him. Pretty bad shape. So, Arie helped the guy make it to a friendly house where some friends treated his injuries and fed him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I asked Arie.
“Maybe he did,” said Woolly. “Or, maybe it was to protect you.”
“Right,” continued Arie. “To keep the information compartmentalized. But then I found out he wasn’t just some goon. He was a scientist, a researcher. He told me that a lot of what the Agency had told us was true. For example, they really were working on a cure for the memory loss, at least back then. Eudrich was one of their main researchers and, according to the coded journal, he told me that at that time they could successfully and reliably restore memories almost back to the most recent previous dosing incident—they could bring back a year or so worth of lost memories. And they were working on reaching further back.”
I almost didn’t believe that I’d heard Arie correctly. I guess it was because he’d said just what I wanted to hear—that there was a way to reclaim our memories, if only some of them. Our memories before Year One—surely those were out of reach, but even one year of lost memories would mean so much. We would remember each other. Sandy could remember Arie. Arie could remember me.
I couldn’t read Ruby’s expression.
“Keep going,” I said, but my breath was so shallow it came out in a whisper.
Woolly and Arie looked at each other as if deciding who should go ahead.
“Well, that’s kind of it,” said Woolly, “at least so far. The journal documents the details of the Agency’s research on restoring the lost memories, as told to Arie by Eudrich before he died,” said Woolly.
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 3