by Tosca Lee
I feel like people are staring.
It’s because you’re pretty.
But I have never been a “pretty girl.” And I have never been mistaken for beautiful. Strange, perhaps. Different, always. From my fractured attention span to my horrible grades despite being labeled “gifted” at a young age.
I prop my elbow against the window, trying to process, not having ruled out the raving lunatic theory.
The sky has clouded over, a thin layer of gauze blurring the stars. A few minutes later it starts to rain, tiny droplets lighting up the windshield like dull glitter.
“This doesn’t make sense. How can an assassin kill any of us if we have mind control?”
“It isn’t control. It’s suggestion. Except for the powerful and passive moment of your death, they are immune to active persuasion—endowed with ‘righteous armor’ against the wiles of your bloodline,” he says wryly.
“A veritable tinfoil hat.”
“More or less.”
I may sound glib, but my hands are cold. I help myself to his coffee. Take a long slug, nearly emptying it.
“This doesn’t explain why I did it. Wiped my memory.”
We slow through the tiny town of Rumford, and he’s quiet for a minute before he says, “I know why. I don’t agree with it and I can’t begin to understand your logic, but I know.”
“Then tell me!”
“Because you’re protecting something or someone—or some ones—you know. Because at some point you realized you were being hunted and thought you might end up dead. And the only way to keep that knowledge from passing, ultimately, to the Historian was to have it deleted from your memory altogether.”
Your life depends on it. Others’ lives depend on it.
Rolan’s crazy must be contagious.
“Who are you in all of this, anyway? One of them—us? Please don’t tell me you’re my uncle Rolan.”
“There are those of us committed to protecting the lives of Bathory’s direct descendants. Since the day four centuries ago we concealed the whereabouts of her illegitimate first child, taken away in secret before she married. We are an old order who watch and intervene only when we must.”
I almost take comfort, hearing that. But something’s bothering me.
“I saw you. Talking to Luka behind the Dropfly.”
“I was. I told him everything.”
“What?”
“He followed you to Maine. He obviously knows you’re living under an assumed name. So I told him I was your stepbrother, that I’d been looking for you, had seen the two of you together at lunch. That you went through some unknown trauma back at home you refused to talk about, erased part of your memory, and faked your own death.”
“Why would you tell him that?”
“I needed him to know killing you now would get him no information. I told him I was the only family member who knew you were alive, and that I was worried about your mental state. He acted upset, made up some story about how often you seemed forgetful since you started dating, and said he wanted to talk.”
“We weren’t dating.”
“I told him to let me talk to you first. That I’d bring you by his place tomorrow so we could stage an intervention or some such thing. But he was suspicious. And then I saw him following me on the way to your place and knew you were out of time.”
“Why didn’t he kill me in Europe? Because you were there?”
“A hunter will follow, even toy with a mark for years. Insinuate himself into her life if necessary, give her time to discover who she is, to find others like her—all to gain as much information as possible on her death.”
I lean back and cover my eyes. I feel sick. Fifty questions are careening through my skull, but one takes precedence over them all.
“Who am I trying to protect?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re my priority.”
“It matters to me!”
He sighs. “Friends. Other Progeny you met in Europe, your adoptive parents . . .” I glance at him sharply, and he hesitates before saying, “It isn’t unheard of for a hunter to threaten a non-Progeny family member to gain what he wants.”
Family. The parents who took me in and raised me as their own. And now I don’t even know who or where they are.
“How long have you been following me?” I ask suddenly.
“Almost a year.”
“Then you know where they are.” I grab his phone. “Tell me where they are!”
“Audra.” He shakes his head, lays a hand on the phone. “You returned less than two months ago from Europe. I’ve never seen you go home.”
The air leaves my lungs.
What have I done?
“My last name. Ellison . . .” But even I know that by the time I search the slew of Ellisons in the United States, they could be dead. If they’re not already.
As though reading my train of thought, he glances at me. “If you were trying to protect them, maybe you have.”
And maybe I haven’t.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” I say angrily.
“It isn’t up to me to intervene except to save your life. The decision was yours. That, and you disappeared several months beforehand. We lost track of you until you showed up in an obscure headline, dead. Except the Audra I knew was too smart to die.”
“How did you find me?”
“By tracing Luka. He abruptly disappeared from Europe five weeks ago.”
My heart won’t stop pounding.
I tilt my head back, press my palms to my eyes, sifting through the remnant of my memory. There are pieces, like the shards of a cherished, broken thing: the garnet ring given me by my mother, an afternoon fishing with my father, my first, clumsily tied fly. Hugs, stories about Mickey Mouse. But their faces, like their first names, are gone. And you can’t remember what is no longer there.
“I can get you to a safe house,” Rolan says. “But unless you have something more to go on, there’s nothing we can do for them.”
I may not remember names or faces. But I am the same person I was. Dealing with the consequences of my own actions is one thing. Putting faceless, even forgotten others in danger is something else.
I grab the phone, begin to map a route. “I know where we need to go.”
7
* * *
Interstate 65 through Lebanon, Indiana, is an unremarkable, even homely, stretch of road surrounded by brown cornfields on impossibly flat earth. But I have never seen a more comforting sight than those six divided lanes.
It is 3:30 on Monday afternoon, and I am at the wheel. After two days of catching a couple hours’ sleep at a time in a Walmart or motel parking lot, eating whatever we can grab at the usual cluster of fast-food restaurants just off the exits, and otherwise driving nearly nonstop, I should be exhausted. And I am. But less than an hour away from Lafayette, Indiana, adrenaline has electrified my veins and brought me to wired life.
Rolan, not so much. He drowses against the window, having done the majority of the driving with only brief breaks from the wheel and none at all from my incessant questions.
“Can you tell a Progeny by looking at them?” I had asked him that first night, thinking I sounded insane to even my own ears.
“No, though when we do find out that an actress, model, or rock star is Progeny, it makes a lot of sense.”
“Rock stars . . . Do the ones who are Progeny know what they are?”
“Often not until it’s too late. Those that do may go into hiding to avoid dying in a plane or car crash, of a drug overdose, so-called suicide, a gunshot . . .”
“Can a hunter take a normal person’s memory?”
“No.”
“Can a Progeny persuade another Progeny?”
“No. But they can sense them, when they’re near enough.”
“How?”
“You’ll know it when it happens.”
After a while I said, “What are you called?”
He hesitated then. “You can
call us Watchers.”
I was strangely disappointed at that, thinking they really needed some better branding in the name department. As though following my line of thought, he quietly recited, “ ‘I saw in the visions of my head . . . and behold, a Watcher, a Holy One, came down from heaven.’ The Book of Daniel.”
“Like an angel.”
“Perhaps.”
“Your accent . . .”
“Romanian.”
It was a while before I finally worked up the courage to say: “Tell me about my birth mother.”
“Her name was Amerie Szabo. Though she lived under the name Barbara Bocz.”
Amerie. I said her name to myself again and again. It seemed exotic and beautiful. And though I never knew her, I thought it fit. I tried to imagine what she looked like. Did she have my eyes, was her hair the same color as mine? The pout of my lower lip—was that hers, or my nameless father’s? Did she know who had adopted me, where I had been living all these years? Had she ever come looking for me?
“She was killed three years ago,” Rolan said. “Which is probably how the Historian first knew to search for you, if not how to find you. Your mother would not have allowed herself to learn that, knowing her memory was at risk of harvest.”
Harvest. Such a clinical word for the rape of a memory. And though I understood, it hurt. How many years had I been allowed to believe I was simply unwanted?
After a stretch of silence, I finally asked: “How was she killed?”
He raised a brow at that. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, not sure at all. And then: “I want to know.”
“Her body was found in the Danube near Csepel Island, south of Budapest. It was ruled an accidental drowning.”
“It wasn’t accidental.”
His sidelong look was his only answer.
I watched mile markers glide by through a blur of unshed tears. Sometime later, I said, “My father?”
Rolan hesitated as though choosing his words carefully. “Your mother . . . was rumored to have several lovers.”
“You don’t know who he is.” I wondered if she did.
“No. But it’s possible you have siblings. And that you even found one of them.”
I had feigned sleep for most of the drive from Ohio to Indiana, just for the privacy of the dark behind my eyelids. I hoped my mother hadn’t suffered. But of course she had; she died. I wondered if I had found a sibling in Europe. If it was for him or her, along with my parents, that I laid down my memory. I was pretty sure I never had siblings growing up; I faintly remembered creating an imaginary big sister for myself when I was four or five. A strange concept, choosing to forget the one person in life you’ve always wanted there. And now, for all I knew, my actions had exposed her. Him. How long would it be before I learned that person had washed up on the shores of the Danube or died in some freak accident God knows where?
In Indianapolis we got caught in rush-hour traffic before we could skirt the city.
“Look out the window,” Rolan commanded.
I didn’t want to. The last thing I needed was to be seen by anyone packed into the lanes around us. But I did, afraid the entire time I’d find a homicidal Luka gazing back. What I saw was almost worse: the eyes of men, women, children glued in my direction as we inched past.
“I don’t get it,” I said, sinking lower in my seat and wishing for the sunglasses I had bought last week. What could they possibly be staring at?
“You probably began to notice it a few years ago. It happens around eighteen. One day you’re invisible. The next, a few people notice you. And then a few more. Some Progeny thrive on it. Others go into hiding. A few go crazy.”
The minute he said it, I had a flash recollection of two memories. Of a kid I’d crushed on all through junior high asking me to prom out of nowhere. Telling me, weirdly, when I got mono and couldn’t go, that he loved me. Of studying a year later in a college library—a soaring, vaulted cathedral to the gods of higher learning. Not at one of the many long tables in the open reading room, but in a cubicle in some obscure wing. Of crossing campus early before class or hours after dark, eating sandwiches covertly behind the stacks. I assumed, when the image had come to me in the weeks since my procedure, that I was a loner by choice, an introvert by wiring.
I realized now I was hiding.
“What they’re seeing isn’t me,” I murmured.
“It is you, reflecting whatever it is that enthralls them most. Beauty. Power. Mystery. Seduction. Intelligence.”
I flipped down the sun visor and looked in the mirror. The same face that met me every morning as I brushed my teeth stared back, bags under her eyes.
“You can’t see it,” he said. “But it’s there.” I didn’t ask him what he saw. I didn’t really want to know.
At least there had been no sign of Luka. Since we’d left Maine my pulse had quickened every time I saw anything resembling a Jeep Cherokee. But wherever he was, we had left him long behind. And for that, at least, I could be grateful.
* * *
I accelerate as we leave Lebanon. For two days we’ve consciously driven the speed limit in order to avoid notice, but now I’m antsy, ready to get on with this. Scared to death, too. And I only know one thing to do when I’m close to petrified: keep moving.
When I exit I-65 into Lafayette, I feel as though I’ve both come home and returned to some alien way station. The small houses, strip malls, and red-brick buildings of the university are familiar and aberrant. The kind of place that should not have progressive science nestled within its small-town Americana, weekend pep rallies, and burger joints.
“Rolan,” I say, my heart accelerating as I slow to a pained thirty-five miles per hour. He jerks instantly awake.
Five minutes later I turn off Creasy Lane into the parking lot of a small, nondescript medical building well away from the St. Elizabeth campus.
I come to a stop, turn off the engine. And find myself staring at the glass doors of the St. Francis Center for Memory Research.
For several seconds, I can’t move.
The last time I saw this building, I was leaving it in a wheelchair under a name that is not mine—mere hours after having known exactly who I was and everything I was running from or trying to hide.
Now here I am with a stranger who’s rescued me from an enemy I don’t remember. But he cannot save the people I’ve forgotten.
Only I can do that.
My name is Audra Ellison. I am twenty-one years old. And I am prepared, once again, to protect those I love . . .
Whoever they are.
8
* * *
The reception area is modern and clinically white, lit by a giant fluorescent disk on the ceiling. A man in a navy suit sits behind the high desk. He’s broad-shouldered and his beard is meticulously trimmed, and though he smiles politely when I approach, I can’t help but feel he is more security guard than medical center staff. The entrance to the rest of the clinic is armed with a security pad behind him. I assume the waiting area is past that metal door. And somewhere beyond even that is the room where I left the details of my life.
The man does not wear a name tag, nor does he ask if he can help me. I hesitate before speaking, wondering if he recognizes me. An awkward moment ensues as we look at one another expectantly, but the only thing in his eyes is polite forbearance. Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, our trial is closed.”
“I was just here a month ago. As a patient,” I say, fingertips resting on the edge of the desk. “I’m here for a copy of my medical records. Is there some form I need to fill out?”
The man doesn’t move. “We require twenty-four hours’ notice and a written request from your power of attorney,” he says, and though I appreciate the fact that he doesn’t just hand my records over, a small surge of alarm turns my stomach.
“I—I don’t know who that is.”
“It should have been in your packet.”
But the on
ly items in the packet I received were my driver’s license, meds, and a stack of cash.
“It wasn’t. There isn’t . . . anyone.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you without it.”
“Look. I just drove a thousand miles to get here. This is an emergency.” I grab at the only thing that comes to mind, because it also happens to be true. “I’ve been experiencing blackouts. I lose time. I do things I don’t remember doing. My caretaker told me to contact the Center in case of any complications. So I’m here. Please help me.”
He glances away, and I think it’s toward the door behind him until I notice the camera in the corner. “The name of your referring physician?” he says, pulling a keyboard toward him.
“I don’t know. My procedure was . . . extensive.” I look around me, but I’m back in Maine, mental gaze scanning the coffee table, and then the pill bottle on top of it.
“Peterson. Dr. Julie Peterson.”
He types into the keyboard.
“I’m sorry. There’s no record with a referring physician of that name. Do you have ID?”
I dig in my pocket, find my driver’s license, and slide it across the desk. He glances at it and taps at the keyboard for far longer than it takes to enter my name and driver’s license number—or to type a small thesis.
When he finally looks up, he gestures to the screen in front of him. “I’m sorry, but there’s no record of you having been a patient at this clinic.”
What?
“It might not be under that name. It probably isn’t. I changed my name during my procedure.”
“And your former name?”
I glance up at the camera and lean forward on my elbow as though studying something on his desk with confusion, fingers curling over my mouth. “Audra Ellison.”
“Do you have ID under that name?”
“No. Only the new one. They should be linked.”
His fingers return to the keyboard, but a moment later he shakes his head.