We nodded to each other and smiled. The breeze blew over us. The way down the mountain looked rugged but not severe.
“Shall we go, then?” I chirped.
“Yeah,” said Chase. “Hey, listen, you two. Great job today. Proud of you.”
“Yes, I agree.” It was a voice from behind us.
“You’ve done quite well,” said the voice.
In terrified unison, we spun about.
Standing on a rock a hundred feet away and slightly above us stood a man. He took a few steps and emerged from the shadow of the mountain. His arm was extended, and he trained a pistol down on us. He looked to be on the short side, maybe only a bit taller than me, but very solidly built. He wore a uniform of some sort, but it was faded and worn to the point that it would be difficult to identify its origin. Even though we could see him, he seemed to blend into the backdrop of the mountain. His skin was browned deeply by the sun, and his head and face were cleanly, eerily shaved.
“Hands on your heads, folks,” he said. “Right now, please.”
We looked at each other. Chase nodded his head with weary reluctance and then laced his finger and put his hands on his head. Arie and I did the same.
“Good,” said the man. The tone of his voice was steady, relaxed.
He was older than me and Chase. Perhaps by a decade or more.
“Spread out a bit, please?” he said. “Step away from each other.”
He waved the muzzle of the gun as if to disperse us, and we complied.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now, if you would, just turn around, face away from me, go to your knees, and then cross one ankle over the other.”
We stood there looking up at him, our hands on our heads. Chase breathed hard through his nose.
“Do as I say, please,” said the man. “I won’t hurt you. If I wanted to do that, I’d’ve done it last night, while you were asleep.”
I looked at Chase. His lips were pressed firmly together, and he had a look in his eyes I knew very well—it was the look he got when he was getting ready to do something sudden, crazy, and violent.
The man took a step in our direction, and he braced the pistol in his free hand, training it on Chase.
“Listen, you three. The weapon is fully loaded. Sixteen in the mag and one in the chamber.” His voice was calm, as though he were giving us driving directions. “I am a well-trained and very experienced marksman. I can shoot all three of you before the first of you could make it to me. That is why I am standing up here.”
Chase’s chest rose and fell conspicuously. I could hear his breath pass in and out of his nostrils.
“Sir,” said the man to Chase, as though reading his thoughts, “I have the advantage. Clearly. Please comply.”
“What do you want?” said Chase.
“Right now? For you to comply. You don’t really have a choice.”
Chase let out a loud, heavy sigh. Then turned on his heel and kneeled down. Arie and I did the same.
“Thank you, folks,” said the man. “I’m grateful. Now. Just remain still. Remember, I have no desire to hurt any of you. If I wanted that, I would have already done it.”
I heard the rasp of his boots on the rock as he came down from his vantage to join us.
“Don’t speak to each other, please,” said the man, again with an almost aggravatingly relaxed tone of voice.
He came around to stand in front of us. The sun was in our eyes, and I got the impression he’d planned that, too. We squinted and blinked up at him. He maintained a distance I judged to be several long steps. He kept the gun pointed at us in a way that made me believe he could shoot us all before we could to our feet.
“Good afternoon,” he said cordially. “My name is Colonel Steele.” He spoke as though addressing guests at a luncheon.
Arie scoffed and clucked his tongue. “Seriously?” he said. “That’s your name? Colonel Steele? Sure it’s not Major Slaughter or General Mayhem?”
I shushed Arie.
The man raised an eyebrow, and by way of answer he tapped the right breast pocket of his uniform with his index finger. We squinted through the glare and sure enough the name STEELE was stitched there.
“There’s one more thing I didn’t tell you guys,” said Chase with a heavy sigh.
“What?” said Arie.
“The guy who I said was following us? He’s good. He’s really good.”
CHAPTER 22
Later that day, I finally got to have a cup of tea.
Colonel Steel had bound our hands with zip-ties, tied us together with a length of strong cord, and marched us back down the mountain.
“Who are you?” I asked as we walked down the trail we’d just climbed.
“I believe I introduced myself before,” he answered. His reply was not sharp. It was matter-of-fact and almost friendly.
“Yeah, but who are you?” I insisted, turning back to address him.
“He’s with the Agency, obviously,” said Arie. “You’re with the Agency, right?”
Steele didn’t answer.
“You went over the ridge to the south,” said Chase. “Didn’t you? Got ahead of us and then came down to the trail where you reckoned we’d cross over.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Phew,” breathed Chase, raising his eyebrows. “Nice work.”
“Tell us why you’re holding us,” I demanded. “Who are you?”
“Let’s just say I’m the one with the gun, and so for now I’ll ask the questions,” he said, as if patiently addressing an errant teenager. “So let’s have no talking for a while, please. If you’ll comply with that request, I’ll maybe answer a few questions when we’re back down off this mountain and settled in for the night.”
Steele had sifted through our belongings and he’d patted us down very thoroughly, relieving us of anything that might be used as a weapon, even the string we used to build our tarp-tents, and including a pencil and some pens I had in my pack, but actual weapons, too—he found a small fighting knife Chase had hidden up his pant-leg, something not even I knew Chase carried. Our packs thus neutralized, he returned them to us with our supplies and water and provisions.
And so we walked in front of Steele, strung together like resentful livestock. The cord wasn’t thick, but it seemed strong enough to hinder us from running off together, and I knew that Steele could have used it to pull us off balance if we turned on him. But it also got in our way, tripped us up, and we often stalled and pulled at each other awkwardly.
“Arie,” I snapped, “slow down. You’re gonna pull me off my feet.”
“I’m sorry,” he hissed back at me. “I’m not even walking fast!”
“Cool it, guys,” said Chase wearily.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“All of you,” said Steele in a firm voice. “Stay quiet, please.”
That suited me. Oddly, I grew even more nervous than I was before, and the feeling that someone was watching or following us had not gone away. As we returned to the valley floor, I swiveled my head around, expecting to see someone following the man who’d been following us. It was a weird form of paranoia within a greater paranoia.
When we finally got off the mountain, not far from where we’d camped the night before, Steele halted our little pack train and, just before sundown, he built a fire that burned hot and with very little smoke.
And he let me brew some tea.
The tensions between Chase and Arie and me eased just a little. Arie and Chase regarded Steele with wary, hostile gazes.
“Ahhh,” I sighed. “This is all I’ve been wanting for two days.”
We ate our food in silence as it got darker. Steele would not remove our zip-ties (he said they were “getting regrettably difficult to come by these days”). But he removed the cord that strung us all together so we could move freely. He opened his large military rucksack, the fabric of which was patterned in camouflage but so frowzy and faded you almost couldn’t tell what color. From the ruck
sack he brought out some chocolate-covered oat-bars and shared them with us. They tasted good, and freshly made, and they were packaged how I remembered Agency food was—wrapped in brown waxed-paper with terse, military wording on the labels: OAT BAR, CHOCOLATE, 300 CALORIES.
Steele sat with his back to a tree. He’d put a knit beanie over his clean-shaven head and he was reading a battered volume of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In a small tin pot he’d warmed up some kind of reconstituted soup. He blew on it to cool it.
“Thank you,” I said to him, sipping my tea, “for the fire and the food.”
He nodded, and after a while he put the book back into his rucksack and said, “If you’re still hungry, please say so. I have some spare rations set aside for you.”
“You said we could ask some questions,” said Arie.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “And you behaved reasonably well, so, yes. Ask your questions.”
The three of us began all at once, asking three different questions all in unison, talking over each other. “Where are you taking us?” “Who are you?” “Why’d you take us prisoner?”
Steele laughed, and we stopped, paused for a few moments, then tried all at the same time again.
Steele held up a hand until we were quiet again and then pointed at me. “You go first.”
“Well—we want to know all of that. Who you are, why you’ve taken us hostage, where you’re taking us. Et cetera. Obviously.”
“Of course,” said Steele, nodding and setting his soup aside. “Uncertainty leads to fear, and fear leads to poor judgment. I’m not here to hurt you, least of all kill you, and I don’t want any of you to do anything that will lead to any harm, especially to me, so I’ll answer your questions to the best of my ability.”
Chase and I traded a glance. He was so polite. For some vague reason, this was annoying to me.
“As I said,” he began, “my name is Colonel Steele. I’ve been hired by an individual—I can’t say who, of course—to apprehend the three of you and bring you in.”
“You’re not Agency, then,” said Chase.
Steele considered this. “I’m a private contractor.”
“Rachel,” I said. “She hired you.”
Steele didn’t respond to this. His expression didn’t even change. “As I mentioned, I’m not free to tell you very many details.”
“How can you work for them?” sneered Arie. “You have to know what they do to people. It’s inhuman. They treat people like animals. Not even as good as animals.”
“I respect your opinions. I’m sure we differ on many subjects, but unfortunately, such disputes these days are most often resolved with force. There was a time when it wasn’t that way, and I miss those times. I will say I’m glad you three seem reasonable and I haven’t had to use much more than the threat of force. In any case, I’ve been hired to apprehend you, and I have to do my job, and I can’t say much more than that. Speculate all you want. I can neither confirm nor deny.”
I realized what it was about Steele’s politeness that was off-putting. It wasn’t that it came off as false or patronizing. It did not. It was very much the opposite—Steele was respectful and even genuinely kind when possible. This almost had me believing that everything would be okay. And that bothered me—I knew that everything would definitely not be okay and I did not want to be put at ease.
“Were you hired to round up anyone else?” I asked. “Anyone we know?”
Chase shot me a glance as though he thought I might give too much away. I returned Chase’s gaze but then looked back to Steele and waited for his answer.
Steele pursed his lips. Then he shrugged. “Normally, I wouldn’t respond to a question like that. Details, you know—you never know when a piece of information can be used against you. But I’ve taken a liking to the three of you, and I can’t see how this can cause any trouble, so I’ll admit I was assigned to take you three. No one else.”
“Do you know anything about anyone else who was in our camp?”
“No,” he said. I believed him.
“You’re military,” said Chase.
“Former, yes.”
Chase furrowed his brow and said, “So, you came out of the Zones?” asked Chase. “Or you were in the Agency before and left them?”
“Neither. I’ve been on my own since Year One. I’m not in anything nor do I belong to any group. I serve my own interests.”
“That’s all we were trying to do,” Arie complained, holding up his bound wrists. “We’re all just trying to be free. We deserve to be free.”
Steele looked at me as he jabbed his thumb at Arie. “Quite the revolutionary you’ve got here.”
I tried not to crack a smile, but it didn’t work.
“So, you’ve never been in the system?” Chase asked. “Never took the serum?”
Steele shook his head, took up his pot of soup, and sipped it.
“Well then you’ve gotta let us go,” Arie cut in. “You don’t know what it’s like. They wipe your memories, make you into zombies. Slaves.”
“I’ll remind you that I can’t remark on who hired me. You assume it’s the Agency, as if that organization is the only one who might take an interest in you. I won’t insult your intelligence by acting like I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know of the Agency. I sometimes take contracts from the Agency. But there are other, similar organizations and individuals. Some of which, I might add, are worse than the Agency.”
“We know you’re with the Agency,” I scoffed. “We know better than anyone who’s out to get us and who’d pay to get their hands on us, and we know what they’ll do to us when they’ve got us.”
“Well then,” he returned with a relaxed shrug. “I suppose you have no further questions.” With that, he gulped down the rest of his soup.
“You saw it all happen,” said Chase with a tinge of what I thought might be envy. “You saw everything collapse, and you remember it.”
Steele admitted this with a small shrug and nod. His admission didn’t strike me as proud or superior. Again, his expression didn’t change much. He seemed patient, conciliatory, but he didn’t say more for a while. He only stared at the campfire. The reflected light of it flickered in his eyes.
After a few minutes, Chase said, “I think I know the answer to this next one. But I’ll ask anyhow. Can you tell us about what happened? In Year One? Before and after? We’ve all been scrubbed, obviously, probably more than once. We don’t remember anything. We don’t know much of anything beyond the past few years.”
Steele nodded some more and looked at Chase. Did I see envy in Steele’s expression, too? All at once it seemed likely. Because of course Steele must have lost family and friends and comrades in Year One, just as we all had. But Steele hadn’t forgotten a single face or moment from those times. That would be a burden of sorts.
I’d never considered that being free of memories, being free of the past, could be something enviable. I’d always considered it a vile thing to take away someone’s memory, someone’s true identity. Could it be that the Agency was correct in this one, twisted way? Did I really want to know what had happened to me in the back before? By some astronomical chance, I’d been reunited with Arie, and I’d found (or had been reunited with?) this man Chase. Wasn’t that enough? Did I really want or need to know what happened before? Did I want to know what I’d lost?
As Arie and Chase and Steele continued to converse across the campfire, I thought about this, retreated into the questions. Did I want to know who I was or what I’d done before my last memory scrub? Did I want to know who I’d been before the first memory scrub? What regret and loss and irreversible decisions lurked behind those memory wipes? Did I really want to know?
Yes. I did. And, no, the Agency was not right. Not in this one aspect, and not in any other.
Because I wanted to know myself, wanted to know who I really was. If that meant recalling bad and painful things, I would find a way to own them. Had I not suffere
d pain already? And had I not owned those parts of myself? Indeed, my life since my last memory wipe had been largely pain and hard times and even regret—I thought about Ruby. No, I would have my memories, all of them, and I’d own them.
“The Agency surely told you some version of what happened,” Steele was saying. “They had some kind of story they told you, didn’t they?
“It’s a bullcrap version of the history,” said Arie. “I pieced together a lot of the timeline from old media and snooping around, but even an accurate, detailed newspaper or magazine article is still just a single point of view, a single point of reference. And, of course, the news reports run out. As people died, as everything fell apart, there are no records of the very end. So, we have some information, but it’s like there’s this black hole in our minds, you know? Wondering how we ended up like this. Maybe not so much wondering what happened, but wondering what it was really like.”
Steele was quiet for so long I wasn’t sure he was even planning to answer. But then he drew a deep breath, exhaled, and said, “Yes. Yes, I know what you mean. I know many people who don’t remember it all, who don’t remember all the way back. I know some people who do. Not as many of us remember everything. What I can tell you is this: knowing everything that happened back then won’t make you feel any better about how things are now.”
I didn’t believe that.
“Okay,” said Chase, “but what else have we got to talk about?”
Steele stuck out his bottom lip, tilted his head, and raised his eyes to gaze into space above our campsite. Then he looked at us. “I suppose I could tell you a few things,” he replied. But then he blinked and shook his head a little.
The sky was rapidly darkening to black and a sharpening chill was in the air. Steele rolled up onto his knees and placed a large, bleached-out log on the fire. It took flame and burned brightly.
“But it’s gotten late,” said Steele. “So, I’m sorry. Not tonight. On the other hand, we’ll be on the trail for a few days, so, perhaps another time.”
He stood. We looked up at him. Then he did a singular thing. He drew his pistol. There’d been no disturbance, no apparent reason to do it. And he drew the pistol with such quickness, I didn’t even see it happen in the truest sense. There was a blur of motion, and in an instant the barrel of his gun was aimed directly at my forehead. I thew my zip-tied wrists up and turned my head away. Chase scrambled on his knees to place himself between me and the gun.
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 11