I wanted to tell him he sounded like a fool—there was no taking a place back to what it once was—but I knew he couldn’t see it, the island’s slow destruction, if not by oil, by water. It endeared him to me even more. An innocent. “They sent me to remove you,” I blurted out.
“To remove me?”
“Desire.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They’re going to kill the desal plant, or at least delay it long enough to clear this place out. They don’t want any friction.”
His face tightened, taking on a whole new shape and shade I didn’t like. He turned angrily on me, taking me by the arm. I let him press his fingers into my wrist, to feel for the seizing spot most companions have, a fail-safe, one I had removed long ago. When I didn’t fall to the yellow turf grass in a fit, his eyes found mine, and I saw it, his fear, taking hold of his hand and bending it at his back. I expected him to go down like the rest of them, but he threw his weight into me until we were falling, rock and grass and something in my back.
He rolled away from me, and I examined my back, my metal insides showing where the skin had torn loose. My body still bears the mark. When I looked up, he was running. I couldn’t catch him in that uneven terrain—companions are fast on flat ground but not terribly agile—so I picked up a rock and catapulted it at him, got him right in the back of the head.
I drove to the nearest port, Nat slumped in the passenger seat. Out of the car, I stalked the docks, grabbing the nearest sailor I could find, a white-bearded man, arms sleeved in scaly tattoos.
“Mainland,” I told the man, “credit.” He disappeared onto his boat, then came back and told me Tierra del Fuego. I handed over a few of the cards loaded with credit I carried for emergency purposes, when I needed to be untraceable, and then I went back for Nat.
I hefted him onto the boat over my shoulder, the ship’s captain and sole mate sharing a look.
“Drunk,” I said, and deposited Nat onto the ship’s wooden bench.
Only as we were pulling away from the island did I see a penguin, loads of them, two different species that my feed could identify. Gentoo, named for a racial slur used by white Europeans in India to distinguish Hindus from Muslims. And Magellanic, for that famous explorer, the first to circumnavigate the globe by a narrow strait separating Tierra del Fuego from the mainland, weeping when he saw the tranquil blue Pacific. I turned to tell Nat, to show him, but he was slumped on the bench, drops of blood turning pink on the damp deck.
When he woke, he was gagged and tied in Tierra del Fuego. I gave him some of my cards and told him to never go back, and I guess he didn’t because when I looked him up next, he was in San Francisco, alive. After that I switched off my feed, only using it when I had to. My mind was too muddled with memories, knowing that Lila was alive—Lilac, she calls herself now. That when I was ready, Nat could lead me to her.
* * *
Nat pings me, startling me out of my memories: Be outside in ten.
Through the tiny porthole of a window I see a gray clotted sky, the dull haze of drizzle. “Great,” I say to no one. That’s something I’ve gotten used to about San Francisco. One day it’s tank top weather, the next gray gloom. I grab my raincoat, an umbrella, the backpack of money he thinks I delivered. Then I head out to meet Nat, the poor fool—he should have known better than to trust me with a job that doesn’t involve killing.
He blinks headlights at me, and I hop into the passenger seat of his cargo van, newly painted black and sleek and smelling like french fries. He pulls out into the heavy traffic of Franklin, climbing the hill toward the Marina. We arc down its other side, the bay showing an anemic blue ahead of us, the great V of the levee churning an unnatural waterfall.
He glances over at me. “Why can’t you just leave it alone? She probably won’t even remember.”
“I told you. I have information for her.” And something I need her to do, I don’t tell him. Something I can’t do for myself.
We take the Broadway Tunnel to North Beach, linger near a square, the smell of pancakes and coffee wafting out of a restaurant. It’s quaint here, like a postcard of old San Francisco, with its rows of Victorians and coffeehouses and bookstores and street art, but the downtown towers make me nervous, hundreds of floors, looming over us like that. I wonder what will happen when the next great earthquake hits.
I can tell the breakfast smell is turning Nat’s stomach, so I roll up the window. I’m about to ask him what we’re doing when the back door opens and a boy wearing a tracksuit hops in, long hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, a gun bulging in his pocket, followed by a companion, female, a meek model like me, hiding behind bangs and the fake-fur lining of an oversize coat.
“Who’s this?” she asks Nat as he’s easing us back onto the road.
“Well?” he says to me.
I hadn’t thought about the words—what I’d say, how I’d say it. I want to tell her I’m sorry, I’m changed, but I’m not sorry and I haven’t changed. She blinks in my direction like she’s practiced at appearing human, like she can’t stop even now, shut in this moving van with me.
Standing on the cliffs, holding that shovel in my living teenage hands, the hot feeling of anger. We were just girls—what was I so angry about? She had embarrassed me; I remember that much. She thought she was better than everyone else. But how can that be enough?
“I was sixteen when I hurt you, when I took your human life.” It had been so short, and I know a little about her companion life, what I’ve gathered in research, a couple years with a family in a San Francisco tower not far from here. Whatever happened to her, it couldn’t have been good if she’s a courier, wiping memories to carry information, losing herself. I wonder if I’m in there at all, if Nat’s right, and she’s forgotten me entirely.
“Red,” she says. At first I think she’s confused me with someone else. But that’s right. I remember now. I was a redhead in my youth.
Her face darkens with recognition. I see it—the hate rekindled, remembered. Standing, steadying herself against the side of the van.
“Andy?” she says to the boy. He is quick with his gun and overexcited. I can tell he’s never killed, the way he’s aiming it at me.
Nat calls from the driver’s seat, “Hey now.”
“What’s she doing here?” Lilac hisses at him.
“She has information for you.”
She hunches toward me from the back of the van, a Taser in her hand, and I push myself into the door, knowing I deserve it. I press my eyes shut and try to remember the last time I saw her, at the nursing home. I was ancient by then, a whole human life behind me, my mind going. Metis patched up my brain for companionship, excellent work considering how long I went dead—the tech told me ten minutes, a real rarity. I tested fine and was shipped out for companionship, but it’d left things holey, especially those last years, only ghost memories, really just her rolling into my room, reminding me of what I’d done. I’d waited my whole life for someone to catch me, to find out what I was. Even old and weak, I broke her cheap first-gen body, apparently—how could I not remember that? It was in my incident report from the home, a companion named Lilac, destroyed. I’ve been collecting data on myself, on anyone I’m interested in, for as long as I’ve been free.
I open my eyes and she’s got the Taser to my neck and I say it: “I know where Nikki is.”
Lilac lurches away from me, braces herself on the wall of the van as Nat takes a turn into the parking garage of a tower.
“Who’s Nikki?” Andy asks.
The van drifts into darkness, my stomach sinking as we take a ramp past walls of stacked cars, turning a screw down levels until finally Nat finds an open spot and pulls in.
Lilac sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the side of the van. Like a child, I catch myself thinking—but she’s the same age as me, nearing her centennial. “She was my best friend. When I was younger than you,” she says to Andy. Then she flicks her eyes at
me. “How’d you find her? I searched so many times.”
“I knew where she went. Her family moved to Australia within a year after your death. Changed their last name and everything—why would they do that?” I don’t say what I’m thinking: did they know I was dangerous?
“Why’d you go looking for her?”
“There’s something I need.”
She snorts unattractively.
“I have cash. And it’s an easy job, one you’ll enjoy.”
“Where did you get—” Nat starts to ask when it dawns on him, what I’ve done. He gives me a knowing, hateful glare. He could never love me. No one who knows what I’ve done ever could.
“What do you want?” Lilac asks.
“I want you to kill me.”
I can feel it, their repulsion, how they want away from me—I feel stronger because of it, lifting my shirt, showing them my sored stomach. “I won’t be able to hide for much longer.” I let them get a good look, pull my shirt back down. “If you want to talk to Nikki, you should do it before it’s too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“She’s old. Ill.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s quiet for a while, we all are, and I can hear the squeal of tires, the sound of strangers as they park their cars and file off.
* * *
We take an elevator up to the forty-second floor, accompanied by a slow sax song—elevator music hasn’t changed much in all the years I’ve walked the earth. The doors open, a wide hallway gleaming wood, old black-and-white photographs of San Francisco hanging on the walls, painted a nearly nude seashell color. At the end of the hall is a giant vase full of flowers, living—I can smell them from here as Nat thumbs his way into one of the apartments.
“Yours?” I ask him, but I can tell by the blank gray space that it couldn’t be anyone else’s. Once he’d been so warm, his house crammed with souls, but now he lives alone and can’t be bothered to populate the place with things.
“This place is depressing,” Lilac says.
Nat shoots her a glare. “You look like Cam, you know.”
“Shut up. Not like I had options.”
Who’s Cam? I want to ask, but don’t. I can see it’s a touchy subject.
Nat pulls the companion I smuggled to him up on the screen.
“The color of caramel,” the companion says, as if we’ve pulled him back midthought.
“Jakob? You okay?” Lilac asks.
“They caught me, didn’t they?”
“Of course they caught you,” Lilac says, “you went to see him.”
He laughs, so loud he goes machine on the screen’s inferior speaker system, Nat and Andy clutching their ears. “That’s right,” he says. “At that San Francisco premiere. The sixth of those terrible pirate alien movies. That hideous suit I—I mean, he—was wearing. All those roles, those souls, to get me here? I wanted to kill him. Did I kill him?”
Lilac drops into the seat at the screen. “You exposed him. As a companion. Same difference.”
Quiet for the longest time. Jakob’s voice so small, barely registering: “Where’s my body?”
“Gone. Security was on you in a—”
“Christ. You should’ve left me! Lilac, I don’t want to—don’t want this—you can’t—”
Nat dims the screen, and Lilac is staring, staring at me.
“What?”
“If you don’t want it anymore, maybe?” she says.
“My body?” I’ve had it five years, before that so many bodies, a new one every six months or so, whenever it pleased my handler. But this one I’ve lived in too long—I feel oddly possessive. “It sounds like he doesn’t want it.”
“She’s right,” Nat says. “Besides, hers is falling apart.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“Well, it’s true.”
I go to the screen, lean so close to Lilac we’re nearly touching, the closest we’ve been since the cliffs, and I call up the feed, leave it for her to connect, back away, relieved by the distance. “Nikki lives with her daughter in Melbourne,” I tell her. “This is her feed.” Andy hovers at Lilac’s shoulder, Nat gone entirely. She presses connect, and we wait.
An old withered face—I don’t recognize her. I mean, my facial recognition software tells me who she is, but my memories, they don’t sit with this ancient person. Good Lord, how she’s shrunk and shriveled, like a corpse, only living. Her eyes, that’s all that’s left of her old self, bright and shining and seeing us.
“Do I know you?” she asks. I feel myself backing out of the room, no, I can’t be here, afraid. I haven’t felt it for ages, running out of the apartment, covering my ears, though this doesn’t help—I can hear Lilac: “You were my best friend, the only one I had. I’m sorry for…” I make for the emergency stairwell, far enough that I can’t hear—it’s too much, what I’ve done, and my head pulses with the pain, my stomach, how can it hurt? I slump onto the steps, and that kid Andy comes for me, standing off a bit.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Leave me alone.” I don’t mean to yell.
“No.”
I take in his fragile human features, bones showing under the skin, veins right below the surface. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you?” he parrots in a mocking voice.
“Where’s your family?”
Andy grins, kicks the stair with his sneaker. “My folks are dead. When Pa passed, Rolly, that’s my older brother, he took over the disposal center. Until the recall. Now he’s some boring farmer.”
“Is that how you met Lilac?”
“Yup. She came for a body. For Jakob. He’s always losing bodies!” I observe him humorlessly as he laughs. “We stayed there awhile, all of us, until Rolly told Lilac and Jakob he couldn’t have it, companions lurking about—dangerous! He tried to stop me from going with them, to keep me on the farm, but the farthest he’s traveled is Mendocino County. And me? I’ve seen Alaska.”
“What’s it like?”
He shrugs. “I remember it green, greener than you’d expect.”
“Nothing else?”
“I was like four years old. I don’t remember much from back then.”
I think back to four, trying to recall a single memory, but I come up blank. Those years, that life, dead and gone.
“Why’d you do it, become a companion?” he asks.
“Why do you care?”
“I wish I could be one.”
“You’ve got a whole life ahead of you.”
“Yeah, but then I’ll die. I could die tomorrow. I could die right now.”
“I could too.”
“But your brain. You could move—”
“There are no more bodies. I’d be stuck in a screen like your friend Jakob. How do you think you’d like that, being stuck in a screen?”
He frowns, swipes his hair off his shoulder. “Well, are you gonna tell me?”
“Fine.” And I tell him my whole sob story.
* * *
I signed the contract ages ago, back when my mind was still superficially functioning. My daughter-in-law was furious with me for spending so much. “You know how tight our budget is. How can we afford you?”
I told her, “You will inherit all my money, dear. Surely it’s not too much to ask.” But she refused. We’d never gotten along. I remember the way she would survey me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, waiting for me to get sick, die—I could see it—and my son, the pushover, he went along with her, so I had to sign myself away to strangers.
Still, it meant living, and my life hadn’t been much. I’d gotten pregnant in college and been stupid enough to have it, get married, all of it. After what I did to Lilac, it felt like I deserved a good punishment. We played out that miserable charade until our son was out of the house. Then my husband told me he didn’t feel fulfilled any longer and moved out, into the forest to fight fires, some sort of m
ilitia operation. It was insane.
* * *
And I feel it again, burning up my insides, a shovel in my hands, the satisfying thud of contact.
* * *
I refused to see my son, my daughter-in-law. I kept expecting them to have a baby, for something to bring us back together—I knew they’d been trying. I waited for the news, but it never came. And when my mind started to go, they put me in a home. Factually I know my son is dead, suicide—I’ve seen the autopsy report—but I don’t feel it. I can’t.
* * *
Andy is already bored, bouncing side to side on the balls of his feet, but I go on. The telling—it feels good to share my story, awful too, like I’m casting off clothing.
* * *
I was leased by a man, old, a widower. He asked me to tell him stories, to rub his feet. He’d lost his entire family to the virus. What he really needed was a nurse, but he’d leased me instead. Mostly I think it was for the stories.
* * *
“Sex stories?” Andy asks, suppressing a giggle.
I smile. What a child. He has no business with a gun.
* * *
At night I’d lie next to him wearing his wife’s pajamas. He could have had sex with me. I’d come with a fully operational body, but he wasn’t interested in that. He liked the sound of my voice, to feel me next to him, for me to make him breakfast, a boiled egg and toast. When he didn’t wake one morning, I packed a bag and went out onto the street, and I’ve never been a companion since.
* * *
I don’t tell Andy this, but on my own, without anyone to know me, to remember me, to ask me to tell my story, I’ve nearly shed her entirely—my human self. And I’m glad to be done with her.
“Nat says you kill people.”
“People find out you’re a companion and they want you to do things for them. Things they can’t do for themselves.”
The Companions Page 19