Seven woefully looked up at Eight and said, “I didn’t know that he was going to put that photo on display.”
“Does that matter? What matters is that you took it in the first place. Exactly what do you think you’re doing, Seven?” Eight hissed, looming over him, forcing him to lean towards the water at a dangerous angle.
“It was just a picture from a few months ago. I took it with a camera that Twenty gave to me. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Eight rejected the explanation.
“Why do we keep having this discussion?” she glanced over his shoulder at the gallery and Seven hurriedly stood. Following her gaze, he realized that she was making sure nobody saw them speaking. Eight never wanted to be seen near him, especially without Tobias present to act as a buffer.
“If you came here to lecture me then I would appreciate it if you didn’t waste your time. Twenty displayed that photo without my permission so, regardless of what you think, there’s only one reason that I asked you here tonight.” Surprised that Seven bothered to defend himself, Eight regrouped.
“Your fixation with me needs to end, Seven. We can’t keep going on like this, especially not when it’s on display at the Imperial Galleria!” Eight had a way of becoming harried and frantic whenever she found herself berating Seven, as if deeply conflicted with her own anger.
Seven decided to pull the conversation in another direction.
“Who cares what’s on display at the Imperial Galleria?” Seven inquired coldly. “Do you think their opinions matter, Eight? They might not be the Builders themselves but the Descendants are just as bad. What does their opinion matter?”
Temporarily halted, Eight considered her reply.
“You are oblivious! I was late because HARM detected a pack of rebels trying to sneak through the sewers to get here,” Eight explained. “Tobias took me to talk to them because your phone has been off all night. Do you know what the rebels wanted? To learn about the arts. To learn about what it means to be creative…”
“Let Twenty do that for them,” Seven shrugged. “Let him help them know what it means to be alive. To be an individual. To have a soul!”
“Do you hear yourself? You’re going to get yourself into trouble because of the claims that you’re making, because of the things you’re saying! Do you think that nobody has noticed where your sympathies are? Tobias has. Ilana has.” She let her accusations hang between them. “That’s your problem. You never think anything through.”
“You have no right to comment about what goes on in my head.” Seven spoke the words in such a rage that Eight’s confidence was shaken. “Can we just cut to the chase?”
“I thought we had.”
“We haven’t. Don’t try to lecture me about my responsibilities or my sympathies or whatever you want to call them. I was in love with you, Eight. From the moment I met you, I knew it without thinking. Then the memories started, from a time before Haven. From a time when a different Seven knew a different Eight. You were threatened by that and I wish I could understand why. You hated me without trying to understand me and whatever you think I feel towards you now…” Seven let his disdain seep into his words, “It isn’t love.”
Seven turned his gaze skywards, hoping to find encouragement in the stars hovering above Haven. “I was in love with an Eight that doesn’t exist anymore.” Narrowing his eyes to a glare, Seven added, “And that means that I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“You’re as much of a slave as the rebels were except that your master has a different name,” she whispered in kind after regaining her composure. “Destiny. Purpose. Memory. You can call it whatever you want but you’re still a slave to it.”
“Are you sure about that, Mrs. Clay?”
“Our lives are filled with compromises.”
“Then do you have what I asked for or not?”
Eight pulled a note from her pocket and angrily pushed it into Seven’s hand. On each side of the paper was writing from the two men in her life. From Tobias and Seven. Seven saw the side with Tobias’s handwriting first and his expression reflected the moment’s hurtful irony. Tobias would always represent half of Eight, half of her story in this lifetime, and Seven couldn’t change that.
Eight cruelly inquired, “What will you do when the war is over, Seven? It must be threatening to think that people might stop talking about you and your fabled memories for five damned minutes.”
“I’m not sure. Whatever I do, I’ve learned to be honest with myself at all costs.”
“You make it look so easy,” Eight snarled.
“It was never easy!” Seven bore down on Eight so that their faces were miserably close to one another. “Being honest about what I remember is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Seven admitted. With his plan ready to be effected, with the war’s end at hand, Seven asked Eight in a desperate plea, “Don’t you remember me? Like I remember you?”
Confusion, and the fear that accompanied understanding, clouded Eight’s eyes but disappeared behind an impenetrable curtain of self-deception. Seven knew that the battle was lost.
“I should have told you sooner,” Seven conceded to himself and, in a way, to Eight. He wanted to share the blame for the dysfunction between them. The nature of their relationship was as much his fault as it was hers.
“Why?” Eight whispered, her voice dipping low. She backed away from Seven and allowed distance to separate them.
“Because it might have changed things. We’re trapped in this endless cycle and as long as we participate in it none of us will ever be free,” he sighed. Eight didn’t argue. She didn’t agree. She simply was. Whatever she was, whatever she might be in a time after the war’s end, would be her decision to make. Seven saw fear in her eyes but, like before, it disappeared as Eight reasserted her dedication to the lies of the present. She turned away from him and started walking but paused and, over her shoulder, she asked, “If you’re right, it means that this cycle will eventually break, won’t it?”
Seven studied Haven’s mesmerizing lights and answered, “Don’t worry, Eight. I can break the cycle. If not for myself then for you and Tobias. One day…you’ll be free.”
Eight plied a handful of dirt from the ground and patted it down on the fresh grave. A lump of brown earth marked Seven’s resting place at the western edge of the roses. Wiping her hands on her already disgusting clothes, Eight considered the work done by herself and the others. It surprised her how cold the dirt was, despite it basking in sunlight. Her fingertips were numb as she tried to clean the dirt out from beneath her nails.
For unknowable reasons, the four survivors chose not to commemorate Seven’s passing with consoling remarks or recollected stories. Seven’s burial was as simple and abrupt as the life the survivors found themselves trapped in. Eight rose and her knees ached from the effort. Behind her Twenty, Ninety-Nine, and Null were congregated like wounded animals seeking shelter in one another’s company.
Surveying the basin of Rose Garden, Eight marveled at how quickly beauty became ugliness. She turned to face her friends. The last people alive at the end of the world. Not bothering to wipe away her tears, she addressed the strangers that had become her cherished friends.
“If we came this far together, we can finish it together.” Eight’s earnestly simple remark garnered their support for a little while longer. Each person grimly nodded their assent and they proceeded to trample across the bed of roses to the glass cube that was overrun with wild growth and flowers. Eight ran her hands along the glass until she rediscovered the metal plate.
Though the glass was frigid the plate felt warm to the touch. Her hand remained on the device until the sound of grinding gears drifted away from the metal doorway. It slid downwards, permitting them to enter the cube. Covered in dirt, grime, and thick overgrowth, the glass of the cube still retained a deep blue color.
When the group was inside the cube chamber, the doorway lifted itself back into position, sealing them in. Eight
’s attention was grabbed by a stalk of a vine clinging to the glass. It was colored a deep brown. The very same hue that Seven’s eyes had been that night outside the gallery.
Transmitted from the dead to the living, the memory of their last great argument festered inside Eight. It preyed on her guilt and grief. It threatened to consume the last of her sanity. As the elevator slid downwards, away from the cube, Eight shivered at what waited for them in the depths of Rose Garden.
Were the others struggling to keep going like she was? Were they about to lay down and die, as she was fantasizing of doing? Eight rubbed the bridge of her nose. Hollow and exhausted, she forced her eyes open when the elevator stopped.
She stepped out into the arena first. Arena proved to be a poor word for what seemed like an amphitheater. With stone tiers rising upwards on each side, an invisible audience might study the newcomers and the biological phenomena stored in the room.
Carved into the stone floor were circular patches of dirt. Rising out of them were roses that were several times larger than those on the surface. Green, orange, red, blue, and purple roses of animalistic size were spread across the chamber. Eight and the others filtered through the chamber, entranced by the beauty and the immensity of the flora, until they reconvened at its far side.
A solitary stone arch marked the exit. It struck Eight as peculiar and out of place deep in the ground beneath the glass and steel of the entrance. Her eyes trailed upwards where, chiseled into the facade, were a series of words:
Death will tremble to take us.
Rose Garden Cloning Facility
Eight stared at the proclamation for a long time. When her neck started to ache she understood the hypnotic effect of the sign. The gravitational pull of discovery. Revelation assaulted each of them differently. Null was quietly crying. Ninety-Nine was examining one of the giant roses. Twenty was lost in thought. In an absurd way Rose Garden constituted the perfect conclusion to their story.
Once more, Eight mustered her friends to her back and proceeded through the arch. Rose Garden would yield its secrets to her, Eight resolved, every single one of them. She would interrogate this place until it surrendered the knowledge it contained. Beneath her feet the stone texture became smoother, each step made against a perfectly flat surface.
At the end of the tunnel an illustrious light whose tendrils summoned them, extending to Eight and the others through the darkened corridor. The first to emerge into what appeared to be a gathering area, Eight stopped to examine a room drastically unlike any that she had yet to see. It was clean and new.
A glistening pane of glass stretched the far wall as hundreds of images raced across its length. Twelve alcoves sat beneath the enormous viewing screen where computers made from metal and glass were clustered together. Alluringly comfortable chairs adjoined each of the twelve workstations and of them, only six of the terminals were active. The six others were not. From the streams of information clashing and merging, rising and falling, it was easy for Eight to deduce that the true importance of Rose Garden was buried deep underground.
“Why would anyone need a cloning facility?” Null breathed, asking the question in subdued misery.
Ninety-Nine ventured forward, her short lanky frame sliding into one of the seats at an active computer. Whatever language rushed across the screen looked like gibberish to Eight but Ninety-Nine deftly handled the machine and the corresponding set of controls.
“To make clones,” Ninety-Nine answered.
Null rolled her eyes.
“Being clones explains a great deal. We woke up three days ago because we were created three days ago. The memories must be a side effect. We’re inheriting vestiges of the ones who came before us,” Ninety-Nine explained in an academic tone.
“The ones who came before us?” Null handled the nature of her existence with a remote indifference, as if a chance still existed that this was all a lie. “Is anyone else bothered by that? To think that I was...cloned...rather than born…?”
“Without any functional memories does it matter? What we do have is the time that we spent together these past few days. That has made us who we are,” Eight said, pausing for a moment to think about Seven and the memories he left her with. Null wiped the last tear away from her face and was reaffirmed in a small way by Eight’s assertion.
“Still…it begs the question of who would waste their time creating five clones only to drop them in the middle of an abandoned city for the purpose of guiding them right back to the place they were created?” Twenty asked sardonically, offering an open invitation to the others to theorize with him.
“Someone who wanted us to see Haven and to experience the city after its fall. Someone who wanted us to see what Haven has become before we arrived here. Someone who has been watching over us the entire time,” Eight decided. She found herself pacing across the room. Her mind raced with the possibilities.
Were other people living in Rose Garden? Actual survivors of the city’s fall who had cloned Eight and the others for a purpose? The question of purpose caused Eight’s stomach to churn. She and her friends existed for a reason. To serve a function. Trapped, as Seven had said a lifetime ago, in a cycle. Twenty brought her back to the present.
“But exactly who is that mysterious someone?” Twenty pressed, lazily taking an empty seat at a computer. True to form, Twenty refused to allow the circumstances to bother him excessively. He accepted being a clone so long as there was a comfortable chair involved.
“I don’t know,” Eight admitted, her response deliberately slow. The question that went unspoken between Eight and Twenty was whether or not Seven’s death was scripted by that unknown power or was it incidental? Collateral damage in the wake of their journey through Haven?
“There’s a dormitory on the fourth floor,” Ninety-Nine announced. Her voice reminded Eight of her friend’s otherwise silent existence since taking her place at the computer. She leaned backed in her chair, swiveling to face her companions. “The database here is incredible but it’s too much information to process right now.” Her haggard expression hinted at the following remark: “I need some sleep.”
“We all do,” Eight agreed. “And who knows what we’ll find on the lower levels...”
A hallway on the side of the command center led them to another elevator. Its interior was as pristine and shined as the command center. The two floors between the first and the fourth were labeled ‘Records’ and ‘Production’ but their minds were made up to find somewhere to rest before exploring the rest of the facility. Pressing the button aptly titled ‘Dormitories,’ Eight and her companions found that the fourth floor was a sprawling labyrinth of rooms, kitchens, and storage areas. A central common area linked the dormitories together, a space through which Eight and the others passed.
Much like the command center above, the dormitory common room was made of metal and light. Couches with rumpled cushions were crafted from black cloth. On a short table beside one seat in particular was an empty mug. A rumpled blanket was strewn across another chair.
Null picked a book up from the floor, turning it in her hands and feeling the paper in her fingertips. She read the title out loud: “On Sentience by Demna Clay.”
Despite the signs of recent occupation, Rose Garden felt empty except for the newest intruders. Ninety-Nine found a silver hallway that curved out of sight and beckoned for her companions to follow. Metallic doors appeared at equal intervals on each side of the hall, a largely uninteresting feature until Twenty made a discovery.
“Wait. Look here! It’s my name.”
Twenty pointed at the number, Two-Five-Two-Zero, that was etched into the door. He put his hand on the door and it automatically slid sideways, revealing the interior.
When the lights flickered on, Eight surveyed a room whose walls were lined with canvases of radically contrasting sizes. Some were shorter than Ninety-Nine while others were twice the size of Twenty. Most were finished and their surfaces were adorned by paintings of citysc
apes and gardens; some were abstract and messy; but all of them were beautiful to Eight.
Either way, Twenty’s room was a mess of paintings, drawings, and squat canisters that sat next to an unkept mattress. Drawn by an invisible force Twenty studied his room with loving approval.
“Hell yes,” he whispered, wandering through the suite aimlessly. Brushes and pencils were scattered across the floor. Tarps had been thrown around the room beneath the canisters of paint but that still hadn’t stopped clumps of it from drying against the floors and walls.
“This place is a wreck,” Eight remarked bluntly.
Her cynicism failed to dampen Twenty’s spirit. Reduced to a childish glee, he roamed from object to object.
“Couldn’t have done a better job if I’d designed it myself,” he breathed, overjoyed.
“We’ll let you have some time with it, then,” Eight said. She, Null, and Ninety-Nine continued to explore. Ninety-Nine found her room next. It was sparsely decorated but unlike Twenty’s it prominently featured a computer on a desk, papers and books flung wildly around it.
Eight and Null were alone after saying goodnight to Ninety-Nine.
“You know, if this is a cloning center, we could probably bring Seven back,” Null whispered, making the wish in a hushed voice. “Think about it. You could see him again.”
“Maybe. But cloning is a physical process. Not a spiritual one. We would get a whole new Seven. One who wouldn’t recognize us, one who never journeyed with us. We would be starting over with a whole new person.”
“Is three days worth a lifetime?” Null asked.
“This once? Yes.”
Null found her room next and it was a tastefully decorated suite featuring a bare wall upon which were the scribbled designs of buildings, vehicles, and machinery. Her notes lined each one and Eight thought she spied a design of the glass cube up at Rose Garden’s surface.
After saying goodnight to Null, Eight walked the corridor alone. From the many rooms that separated her and her friends, Eight guessed that Rose Garden housed far more than five people. There were nearly thirty doors in this wing alone before Eight reached hers, where her number, Two-Six-Five-Eight, and her hand lingered above it until she realized that if this was her room, then Seven’s must be nearby.
Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition Page 14