by Chloe Garner
“It’s not that,” Troy said. He could tell she knew he was lying, but that didn’t matter. He had to say it, because that was how it had to be. “It’s that none of the old team are around anymore. I was just kind of looking around today and realized how many of them were missing.”
“True,” Cassie said. “People move on, and they do new things.”
He could tell from her expression that she knew exactly what he was saying, but they weren’t alone on the track and, he realized rather suddenly, it was possible there were people he couldn’t see who were listening.
He wondered if Cassie knew more than she was saying, then realized that was a stupid thing to wonder, these days.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Cassie asked.
“About what?” Troy asked. She shrugged.
“Any of it. You planning on doing anything?”
“You took away most every lever I had to take care of my people,” Troy said, “and any influence I had at the lab.”
He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to tell her about Conrad. It just felt like something that he needed to keep secret, for Conrad’s sake, and there was a pang of sadness when he realized that he’d never kept something secret from Cassie before. There had been things that he couldn’t tell her because of security rules, but this was a choice. It was knowledge that he had, that he owned all on his own, and he was keeping it from her.
And she probably knew.
Which made him even sadder.
“That wasn’t me,” Cassie said. “You know it was Donovan. He’ll have been gunning for you.”
That was true. Troy had been Cassie’s only friend, during the trial. Jesse had disappeared and Slav was supposed to testify against her. Everyone had expected Troy to be on her side, through all of that, and he’d thought that that would insulate him, but Donovan had a lot of reasons going back a long way to want to get rid of him.
“What would you do?” Troy asked. Cassie laughed.
“Lots of things,” she said. “It’s like popcorn in my brain, the ideas of what I’d do to that man.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Troy said. “And you shouldn’t talk like that.”
“They want to own me, Troy,” she said, slowing and going to lean on the railing. “I can’t let them.”
It was the same strange rule Jesse had, not that Troy thought either one of them deserved to be pawns the way a lot of the politicians would have liked, but the absolutism to it. No one got to tell them what to do, no one should be able to control them even a little. It was such a shocking change, for Cassie. She’d been a good soldier.
“Okay,” he said. “I hear you. So what happens now?”
She shrugged.
“I vote we go. I mean, that was the point, right? Blow it all up, pull it down behind us, just wander and do what we want?”
There was something stunning under her words, a suggestion that was there and wasn’t there, all at once.
“You’re talking about not coming back?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said. She turned to lean her hips against the railing, watching runners go by.
“Look, I love this place. It’s still home to me. If that makes any difference to you. But it’s too small. Look at how little they are, in their own minds. They’re a tiny spot in the universe, a speck floating around a generic star, and they make these tiny little forays into the civilized universe, with their shields and their mission plans and their defensive initiatives. Their guns.”
“You used to like guns,” Troy said. She grinned.
“Still do. I just see their limited usefulness in the bigger picture.” She looked at him and blinked. “Want to hazard a guess what percentage of the self-aware species in the universe are vulnerable to a lead projectile?”
“A lot,” Troy said and she grinned.
“If I define self-aware as the ones who have enough contacts around the universe to understand and form a role in the whole thing?”
There, she had a point. It seemed Palta weren’t going to die from a gunshot, nor were Gana. He thought of the rock monster at the servants’ camp and shook his head silently at the idea of pointing a gun at that beast and expecting it to have any more effect than a laser pointer.
He shrugged.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if I want to keep coming back here,” Cassie said. “Maybe it’s better if I just look back at it fondly, that kind of idealized version you have of a person after they die, because they can’t screw up anymore.”
“I have responsibilities, here,” Troy said. “I can’t just disappear.”
“And what are those? Posing with tourists? Body building contest coming up?”
He glared at her.
“Okay, what about Jesse?”
“What about him?” she asked. “He likes these people. Won’t admit it out loud because even he can hear how stupid it sounds, but he likes them for what they are.”
“What we are,” Troy said. “You may not count yourself any more, but I’m still one of them.”
She shrugged.
“If you insist on it. He’s Jalnian, Troy. He can do whatever he wants, and I’m not supposed to have an opinion on it. And he’s not supposed to have an opinion on what I do.”
“So you just ignore him and he ignores you, specifically because you’re the same species?” Troy asked. “That’s stupid. If that were actually true, they’d fail to meet replacement reproductive rates.”
“We live a long, long time, Troy,” Cassie warned. “If they reproduced like humans, they’d overrun the planet in a few generations. And the first one would still be alive.”
He wondered what ‘a long time’ meant, but let it go. She had a valid mathematical point, and he didn’t want to argue it.
“Still,” he said. “He’s alone. You’re alone. Is that really what you want?”
“I’m not alone,” she said dismissively, then grinned at him playfully. “I’ve got you.”
He looked at her for a long time, feeling just a tinge of grief as he wondered if his friend was completely gone. This new, Palta woman had all of Cassie’s memories and a lot of her behaviors, but it wasn’t Cassie.
It just wasn’t.
“I can’t abandon my people,” Troy said. “I’ve got to try to do something.”
“Troy,” she said. “All that time, all those jumps, wandering out there with Jesse, every time, I came back for you. I came back for you, now.” She turned to face him, putting her palms on his stomach. “Come with me.”
He turned away, trying to get away from her touch.
“Olivia just broke up with me,” he said. “She did it because of you. Because she thinks there’s something going on between us.” He moved further down the rail. “I love her. And I never even told her that.”
“Everyone here needs you,” Cassie said. “What do you need?”
He shook his head. He’d had a career. A great one, one that no one could get, no matter how much they wanted it. He’d loved it.
And yet.
And. Yet.
Nothing would induce him to go back to it. To go back to before Gana, before he’d seen what he’d seen and done what he’d done, back to staring at the sky and wishing he could pull it in close.
He turned to face Cassie.
“There’s nothing between us,” he said. “Nothing. You were my best friend, and, yeah, I wanted more for a long time, but you aren’t her any more. Not. Anymore,” he said, interrupting her at the end and holding up a hand. She kept his eye with a playful expression, a cat hypnotizing a mouse. He ignored it. “But I do want to go. The world out there, the universe out there is too big to just pretend I can be happy here. And you’ve burned all the bridges.”
“Donovan did,” she corrected quickly and he glowered at her. She might have glowed back.
“But we’re coming back,” he said. “Like you did with Jesse. Strictly professional, strictly scientific. I want to see what’s in th
e universe. And you’re my ticket there.” He held for a moment, deciding if he was going to say it, and then he did. “But I don’t know if we’re friends any more.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “But you’re still my best friend and the only thing in the universe I really care about. So. You’re not getting rid of me. We’ll work around your military masters as much as we have to, and if they get in my way,” she said, tipping her head to the side, then smiling slightly. “I’ll blow them all up.”
She caught his expression and wiggled her eyebrows at him.
“Figuratively, of course.”
She bounced on her toes once.
“Come on. This is going to be fun. I picked out a place to go, and I don’t even know what’s there. We’re going to see something completely new.”
“You did check if they have an atmosphere?” he asked, letting her drag him along behind her.
“Stop being such a baby,” she said back over her shoulder, leading the way back to the portal room.
*********
He looked around.
Blinked quickly.
Wasn’t sure of anything.
He found his hands, knew where his feet were. Air went in and out of his lungs, and his mind thought in words. He had language.
He had no identity.
Knew that identity was important. Could write an essay on why identity was important, and how identity was tied to history, to memory, to self.
Didn’t know if he could have self without identity, though that was patently obvious. He was himself, even if that self felt… hollow.
There was a woman next to him. Pretty. Defiant-looking, and probably more difficult than she was worth, with a strong jaw and hair that she wore up in a tight ponytail. She might have been even prettier with it down, he couldn’t say.
She was looking at her hands.
He looked back at his own hands.
They were his. If you’d put them behind a piece of cloth or into gloves, he couldn’t tell you about the scars, whether there was evidence of breaks in the bone, or even what color his skin would have been, but they were his. It was simple and complicated and stunning. Stupefying.
He looked at the woman again.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said.
“Neither do I,” she answered.
He wasn’t in pain. There was no one around them that he could see casually. He wasn’t afraid. He sensed that that might be coming, but right now, he simply was. An existence with no past.
He knew that this was possible. That this happened to people, sometimes. That it had a word, and that there would be people who understood it.
He knew how to tie his shoes and how to kiss a woman.
But he wouldn’t have recognized his own face in a mirror.
He wouldn’t have believed it was possible, before.
But before what, he had no idea.
“Do you know what happened?” he asked the woman.
“No,” she answered.
She had clever eyes. Intelligent ones.
Definitely more difficult than she was worth, but attractive at a profound level because of it. Which sounded like self-immolation, on its very surface, getting worse underneath.
Was he a stupid person?
Did anyone who was stupid know they were stupid?
He looked around once again.
Grass.
There were bushes here to one side, and the sound of water to another, calm. It wasn’t a bad place to not know who you were.
It was like a story, but he didn’t know any stories.
He looked at the woman once again, finding her looking at him with an evaluating eye.
“I have no memories,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “I don’t know how we got here.”
“I don’t like not knowing things,” she said.
That was a useful observation. Neither did he.
He wasn’t completely stupid.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Her gaze turned introspective for a moment.
“I don’t think so,” she said, holding up her arms and turning. “Do you see anything?”
“No,” he told her, mirroring her motion once she was done.
“You look okay, too,” she said.
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Thirsty?”
He stuck out his lower lip, paying attention.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then we need to find people,” she said. He nodded. That made sense.
“Do we have enemies, do you think?” he asked. She frowned.
“I don’t know. What direction do you think we should go?”
“Water,” he said. She nodded.
“Water is smart.”
The stream was going a direction. It would be easy to follow, and useful things came from water. Fish. Energy. Transportation, when it got to be more significant.
They started walking.
“We might have enemies,” she said. “Something made us forget.”
He considered this. It was a good point.
“But we forgot, not died,” he said. “If we had enemies, would they just want us to forget? Why not kill us?”
She found the stream and turned to follow it, scratching her arm as she thought about that.
“So you think that what happened was an accident or natural.”
Those did seem to be the three options. He searched for others.
“Spontaneous?” he asked.
“I’d say that spontaneous is natural,” she answered. “Though the odds of that happening to both of us at exactly the same time…”
She tipped her head to the side.
“Do you think that that just happens? Is that normal? And we can’t remember.”
He weighed it, finding his hands in his pockets by simple habit. There was nothing in his pockets but his own hands, but it was comforting, having a habit.
“I can’t say that it isn’t,” he said, “but it seems like if it were normal to just forget, that would be something that would eventually kill you.”
“You talk about getting killed a lot,” she observed. He was still waiting for the rush of fear, but it was still just confusion. Maybe he was used to danger. He knew the systems in his body and how they chemically reacted to stimulation and stress. Maybe his adrenal system was simply tolerant.
“It could be that I’m used to being in danger,” he said. “That I think about being killed a lot? And that’s why I’m not afraid?”
“I’m not thinking about being killed, and I’m not afraid,” she told him. Maybe she was stupid.
She didn’t look stupid.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” he asked.
She looked up at the sun, then back down at the grass as they walked.
“I think because I’m going to be okay.”
“How do you know?” he asked. She shrugged.
“I just do.”
He weighed it. Did he just know?
He knew that if something bad happened, he would manage. Was that the same thing?
“Like you’re invincible?” he asked. She scratched her other arm, wincing her face to one side.
“I don’t think I’m invincible,” she told him. “I don’t know, though. Maybe I am. Can people be invincible?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s life and there’s death, and life always ends in death. There’s a law about it.”
“A lot of them,” she agreed. “But I can’t name any of them.”
“It’s really frustrating.”
She laughed.
“It is.”
“You think we’re friends?” he asked. She looked up at him.
“I think it’s more than that,” she said. He raised his eyebrows and she shrugged.
“We’re alone together, all the way out here. Neither one of us is injured. And you’re very attractive.”
/> The bluntness of it embarrassed him.
“You think we’re together?” he asked. She shrugged.
“Literally? Obviously. Figuratively? Can you think of any other good reason we’d be alone like that?”
“Maybe we were fighting?” he asked. “Or we both like to take walks? Maybe we had something secret to talk about.”
“Those aren’t implausible,” she said, then turned and faced him. She put her hand up, palm facing him, and he met hers with his, the feel of her skin warm, tingling with potential against his. She watched his face.
“Can you jump rope?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“And dance? Can you dance?”
“Yes.”
They were simple answers, but damningly distant, things he knew but that he couldn’t remember ever doing. Things that he couldn’t remember learning, like knowing that if he thought too hard about walking, he would fall down.
She kissed him.
It startled him, out of nowhere, and interrupting his thoughts with a suddenness and a closeness that made him uncomfortable, but his breath came out in a single gasp and he pulled her against him. She was familiar, the way his shoes were familiar.
The way his hands were familiar.
They stood, close enough to be a single body, his mouth against hers and hers against his, breathing as one creature, and his body knew enough even without remembering it to crave much, much more from her. She broke away, eyes still probing in that defiant, frightening way.
“You’re mine,” he said, then frowned. Something about that was the wrong words, even though they were right.
“Yes,” she said. “And you’re mine.”
That made the statement whole, complete. Whole.
“Where are we?” he asked. “Who are we?”
“Frustration isn’t going to help anything,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “All we can do is keep walking. We’ll find something, we’ll think hard about it, we’ll start to figure things out. It’s going to be okay.”
“Maybe for you,” he said. “I wish I had a weapon.”
*********
The stream led to a river, as they so often did, and the river led to a small village, mostly built of simple cut timber around a central space worn down to dirt. Birds called to each other from the piers as they chased after fishermen, and children shouted as they played.