Lush Trilogy

by S. L. Baum

  I opened my eyes wide and shook my head. “You can’t be feeling sorry for her. Not with the way she manipulates people and lies to everyone around her.”

  He stopped walking and turned to face me. “But in a way, I do. I feel sorry for the Aspen I met, before she became what she was two years into our marriage, before she became what she is today. That Aspen, that girl I met the night of her Grand Gala, was slightly apprehensive of her future, but full of hope. She wanted nothing more than to please her father, to make a good Marriage choice, and to find a way to have the perfect family. Her idea of perfect came from that monster of a man who has the ultimate influence over her. She hates him, but in the end all she wants is for him to be pleased with her. It is some twisted sort of a survival instinct. Every action she takes is with the intent to survive…”

  “And end up on top,” I interrupted him, “no matter how many people she has to crush along the way. But she isn’t going to crush me, Father. I won’t allow it to happen.”

  He took my hand in his. “I won’t allow it, either.”

  “She made her choices, Father. Aspen decided how she was going to survive, and so did you. You could have easily sacrificed my mother, embraced Aspen and her father’s ways, and never looked back. But you didn’t do that.”

  My father started walking again, still holding my hand. “I loved your real mother too much. And Hope loved me, and we loved you. That love is what helped us make the hardest decision of our lives. Aspen has never known how to love. No one ever taught her.”

  “There isn’t really a lot of love in Concord. We are taught in Training Tech that making a suitable match is more important than emotional feelings. There isn’t a lot of emotion in many of the Marriages I’ve seen.”

  “You are right. We are not taught to love,” my father agreed. “But love happens anyway. It is something that will grow on its own. Some people resist it, some people let it in.”

  “I wonder what Aspen would have been like if she’d decided to love somebody.”

  My father sighed. “I’ve wondered that myself, sometimes. Even when my memories of Hope were lost, I still wondered what life would be like if my wife had more affection for me. I do see a glimmer of it sometimes, but most of her contact with me seems forced and proprietary. You see,” he went on to explain, “many people see love as a weakness. Love makes you put the feelings of someone else above your own, at times. You can’t be completely selfish when you truly feel love for another person.”

  We walked in silence for a moment, while I thought about what he said. He was absolutely correct. Those Citizens who functioned only to better themselves didn’t seem to care deeply for another person. Affection was an easier emotion for most people to accept than love. It was clearly evident in Cimarron, who was so involved with her role as Information Specialist that she didn’t appear to be overly attached to her husband or her adopted daughter. She had affection for them, she did care about them, but I didn’t believe that she loved them.

  “Why do you think love is such a bad thing for Concord?” I asked.

  His answer came quickly. “Because Concord needs blind followers who will adhere to the rules, no matter what the consequence; even if that means giving up a spouse, a child, a parent, or a friend. Because no one person should ever mean more than Concord, to any Citizen.”

  “Well, your memories are back, now. What are we going to do? Where is my real mother? When are we going to find her? How will we expose the wrongdoings in Concord?”

  “I don’t know, but we won’t be able to act alone.”

  I hugged onto his arm as we finally neared the Business Center. “We aren’t alone. I have a whole group of people that want the same thing. Although,” I said, twisting my bottom lip, “I’ve only talked to two of them about any of this, Thorn and Gill.”

  “I was aware of Gill, but he never knew it. Hope and I decided that it would be safest if no other person was aware of my part in our plan,” he explained. “Thorn… That is boy you spend time with, correct?”

  I held my hand up and twisted the ring on my finger. “Yes. He and I played together as children. I lost this ring, that I used to wear around my neck on a blue ribbon, right before I was sent to Training Tech. He found it and saved it for me.”

  His eyes softened as he stared at the ring. “It was hers, I gave it to her. It reminded me of the Lush Brand, so I bought it and brought it home. But Hope never felt comfortable wearing it, because Aspen knew that the ring came from me, so Hope tied it around your neck and you wore it instead.”

  “It didn’t seem familiar to you last month, when I started wearing it again,” I pointed out.

  “A token like that is no match for twelve years of consuming Memory Drugs, no matter how strong the association. Even the sight of you, our daughter together, wasn’t enough to keep her in my mind. When the mind is forced to forget, it takes a lot to make it remember once again. How long have you been trying to make me remember?”

  “Since I returned from Three,” I told him. “I’ve been sneaking a little pill to you every single day. I’m so glad they’ve finally worked.”

  “So am I.” He looked at me then, and his eyes lit up as something sparked within him. He smiled. “You really do look just like her.” He looked up and pointed to the front of Raleigh’s shop. Handfuls of Citizens were walking around the outsides of nearby businesses. “We are among too many Citizens now, Bluebell. We’ll talk more on the way back home.”

  We found Raleigh sitting in a plush, high back chair, with her tablet in hand and a beaming smile on her face, when we entered her shop. She waved excitedly and jumped up to greet us. “Have you seen the pictures? You looked amazing last night; the outfit was captured so beautifully in the photographs. I knew it would work on you!”

  “That is why Aspen… I mean, Mother… has always appreciated your talent,” I told her as I grasped her outstretched hands. “The headpiece was the best part of it.”

  “It was, wasn’t it,” she slyly sang the words, and a conspirator’s smile appeared on her face.

  “What do you really know about the headpiece?” I asked her. “You said you just found it in a box while going through your things.”

  “I did find it in a box,” she insisted, but her eyes lingered on my father and they were suddenly apprehensive.

  “You know I know!” I yanked at her hands in my excitement. “And you wanted me to know that you knew… that you know!”

  “Know what?” she feigned innocence.

  “About my mother. My real mother. You gave her that headpiece and you saved it for me, for some reason. He remembers now,” I told her, and then moved my head to rest my eyes on my father. “I think that headpiece was actually the trigger that helped him remember her.” I threw it all out there, wanting desperately to trust someone else.

  “I gave that headpiece to Hope, along with a matching feathered mask, so she could sneak into the masquerade ball and dance with Jackson out in the open. She brought it back to me afterward and I hid it. I saved it. Although I wasn’t sure what I was saving it for.” She let go of my hands and sat back down in her chair. “It just felt right to give it to you, last night.”

  Raleigh picked up her tablet, and her fingers began to scroll through a folder of pictures. She was searching for something. “I always suspected that you were Hope’s daughter and not Aspen’s. You have none of Aspen’s features, but you are the perfect mix of Jackson and Hope. I liked Hope; she was a sweet young girl. Aspen is a client that I strive to keep happy, that has always been our only relationship. But Hope, well, she was actually a friend. When she disappeared and then everyone acted as if nothing had happened, I decided to do what I could to keep myself close to Aspen. I patiently waited, knowing that someday I’d find the answer to what happened to Hope. She isn’t the only reason… I guess I’ve known for a long time there is something wrong with Concord and The Council.” Her fingers stopped moving and she stopped talking. Her eyes rested on an image
on the screen.

  “What are you looking at?” my father asked her.

  She waved me over to the right of her, and then angled the tablet so I could see. I crouched at her side, while my father came up behind me, to peer over my shoulder.

  “I always keep a photo of clients wearing a new piece. Most people aren’t aware that I have captured an image, because I often do it with my mini as I am leaving a fitting. But sometimes they are posed pictures, like this one of Aspen.” Raleigh clicked on the picture to make it take up the full screen. Aspen stood with a hand on her hip, wearing a diagonally striped, black and silver, pantsuit. The sleeves of the jacket came just below the elbow, but her signature row of bracelets, those ones black and silver, were stacked on her left arm. “Nice suit, isn’t it? The lighting was terrible in my studio that day, entirely too dark. Now, watch.”

  As Raleigh adjusted the brightness of the picture, two figures standing behind Aspen, that had been no more than outlines, came into view. There was a man and the woman who stood in the back of the room; their bodies were slightly apart as if maintaining a distance. I noticed that their hands were close together, with their pinky fingers hooked. Raleigh pinched her fingers on the screen then opened them wide, zooming in and centering the photo on the slightly unfocused, but still visible figures in the back. My father was the man… and what I could only assume was Hope was the woman.

  The sudden intake of air behind me was followed by my father’s sigh. “That is Hope. How do you have this? All image files were scrubbed clean of her.”

  “It is in a file labeled Client Photos, and Hope was never technically a client; there are no records of a purchase by her. Plus, it is dark, unless I mess with the lighting, and it’s not exactly focused. What happened to her, Jackson? Where did she go? Did she die, or was it something else?”

  My father straightened his body and straightened his face. “How do we know we can trust you? What would happen to my daughter… to me… if your only motives are to fish out some incriminating evidence against us and then you go to The Council with your suspicions? You’d be rewarded for your loyalty, but we would be punished in some terrible way.”

  “When I was finished with my CEC training, a few years before Aspen became a client, I was about to enter into a Marriage Contract with a Peace Keeper. Taft was a sweet man, and our friendship was something that I cherished. We had just started our cohabitation period, but no papers were signed yet, the contract wasn’t sealed, when he started to become paranoid that someone was watching his every move. Taft started this jerky head thing, where he would look all around his surroundings, trying to find the spy. He began to talk in low whispers, so no one could hear his words. It came to a point where didn’t want to go to work anymore, he told me that the incoming were blank people. I asked him what he meant. I wanted to know what he was afraid of, but he wouldn’t tell me. Taft said it was for my protection.”

  “What did you do?” I asked her.

  “I did the wrong thing, I confided in someone that I’d trained with. She convinced me that we needed to tell her uncle, a man who worked with The Council. A few days later, a Behavior Monitor showed up at our home and asked Taft to go with him. The Behavior Monitor said that he could make it all better, and he told Taft that after treatment, he would feel like his old self again. But Taft didn’t want to go, he pleaded with me to help him; but I was young, trusting, and loyal to Concord… so I urged him to go with the man. When Taft returned to me, he was a shadow of the man he used to be. Within a week of his return, he told me that he believed a Marriage Contract between the two of us was no longer a wise choice, and informed me of his decision to accept a transfer to Four. And then he was just gone, out of my life forever, and everyone around me started to pretend that he had never existed.

  “To get through the grief of his sudden departure from my life, I told myself everything a good and loyal Citizen would… it was for the best… something was wrong with him, but even if I lost him, he had been cured… I would find another suitable partner, and so would he, because we were obviously not meant to be together. But I missed Taft, I missed our friendship, I missed his confident smile, I simply missed him. So years later, when Hope disappeared, and no one seemed to care, I told myself that I would remember her. And, I told myself that someday I would figure out what was going on in Concord.” She took a deep breath as she finished her story and exhaled loudly, the relief flooding out of her with the air in her lungs.

  Raleigh had finally told someone her story and, for a moment, she looked lighter, with the burden of it lifted. But then gravity returned, and her shoulders slumped. “Please tell me where Hope is. Was she erased? Was she transferred?”

  My father put his arm around me and looked at Raleigh. “She escaped.”

  Raleigh shook her head. “Escaped? But how? No one chooses Banishment anymore, so the only people outside of Concord are the Banished, and they are only a small, old, weak, and desperate group.”

  “And that is what I, as a member of The Council, would have you believe. But there was once a boat that would come every thirty days, and it could transport two people away from here. We didn’t know where it would go, but we knew that Hope would be out of Concord’s grasp, and that was all that mattered. Her life was in danger.”

  “I got a message from her when I was in Three,” I told Raleigh. “It said to make him remember,” I said, looking up at my father. “And it was signed – Mother. Raleigh, I am going to try to arrange a meeting soon, with a group of people that want to expose the many wrongdoings in Concord. As soon as the curfew is relaxed, my father and I will be actively pursuing it. Do you want in?” I asked her.

  She nodded her head. “I do.”

  We had Raleigh put a new scarf, and a few matching bangles, in a gift bag before we left the shop. Our deception wouldn’t be complete without the token gift for Aspen… my mother, my father’s beloved wife, the woman who had turned to hate instead of fighting for love.

  “Bluebell, you are looking quite well today. That shade of lavender is such a nice compliment to your glowing complexion.”

  I heard the words, knew the voice, but still looked up in disbelief – knowing that what was spoken was said in jest and filled with venom. But in truth, the words, and the voice, sounded sincere. But it wasn’t something I would have ever expected of Coral.

  “Thank you so much, Coral. You are also looking quite well today,” I forced the words out of my mouth as I stared in awe at the sweet smile on Coral’s face.

  “I feel quite well,” she smiled in return. “What a glorious Concord day. Don’t you agree?”

  “I do,” I responded, still confused by the pleasant air that surrounded her entire being. It was not the Coral I knew and loathed. “You are in an agreeable mood today,” I pointed out.

  “I am. We should all be. I must be going now. I look forward to seeing you again.” As she said the words her face flashed with confusion for a moment before the vacant, pleasant smile returned. “Concur with Concord.”

  “Concur with Concord,” my father and I chorused.

  “Goodbye, Coral,” I added. But she didn’t hear me. She had turned away and begun walking in the opposite direction, with steps that were metered and automatic. Coral was gone.

  My father saw the distress in my face and put a comforting hand around my shoulder. “What is the matter?”

  “She’s been altered, in some way. As much as I don’t like that girl, I don’t want anyone to be erased, even Coral. We need to get out of here and find my mother,” I declared.

  “We will. I know things that only nine other men in Concord are privy to. I know things that would turn the head of each and every Citizen. But even what I know is limited; each of the Councilmen can access only a specific area of the Concord Archives. Before we get out of here, we need to find out and expose the whole truth, so every Citizen knows what they are dealing with.”

  “I agree. We need to contact Thorn’s father, who is
in Media Distribution, along with Gill, and the rest of his team of we… all the people that know Concord doesn’t Reign.”

  I typed out the short version of the entire story to Thorn on my secret mini that night, and we made plans for him to come over the next day. I was alone in the house, with my father at work and Aspen at lunch with her friends, when he arrived. After we went up to my room, he opened up a bag he was carrying and took two things out. He placed them both on the bed… a locket and a knife.

  My face scrunched up in confusion. “What are we going to do today?”

  “We are going to locate your Identity Chip, remove it, and place it in this locket. That way it will still be on your person – when it needs to be – and you can leave it at home to sneak around, if need be. I also have this,” he said, and proceeded to remove some numbing spray and a tube of healing glue from the bag.

  “Seriously?! You want to cut into my skin and remove the chip?”

  “Yes. Seriously. I did it with my father last night. See,” he said and held his arm out for inspection. “I used some of the fast healing glue to repair the wound. It was small. I promise. Did you ever figure out where it was after I told you about mine?”

  I shook my head and bit at my bottom lip. “No, sorry. I never thought that this was an option. Cimarron told me about them, you said you knew where yours was, and I just left that information right over there, away from me, where I didn’t have to think about it.”

  Thorn frowned at me. “This seemed simpler when I left my house this morning. Now we have to find your chip before we can start.”

  “How are we going to do that? You said you got scanned by a doctor.”

  “I also said that if you look for a tiny scar on your extremities you’d find it, didn’t I?” he said, his tone scolding.

  “Yeah, you did. So we can just look for it, right?”

  Thorn nodded his head. “Yes. We can. Arms out, Lush Girl. Let’s find your scar. Do you have a brighter light? It will make this easier.”