We stopped, and close by, a door opened. Her hand drew me forward and the door closed behind us. We were inside again.
I stood still as her fingers picked free the knot at the back of my head. The blindfold came away, revealing the bottom of another stairwell, the walls of this one white.
Her gaze met mine and she seemed to ascertain that I was okay. She led me up the stairs.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this airy living room with the lofty ceilings and high windows pouring sunlight over white walls. Three black sofas ringed a carpet of deep green and the glass coffee table atop it. A limited color scheme, if not for the tanks. They lined the wall: glass tanks brimming with plants and aquariums pulsing with fluorescent colors. Entire worlds behind glass. A large cage stretched behind the longest of the sofas. I caught a flash of movement inside, and a moment later I registered the sharp chirp of birdsong.
They were comfortable cages, none big enough for a girl. An unexpected prison, if it was a prison.
The woman removed her boots. She saw me watching and said, “You can take yours off, too.” She made it sound like an invitation. I unbuckled them and left them against the wall. I waited for her to take me to one of the rooms now, close the door, and interrogate me—maybe use shaper powers to pull the lost memories from the dark crevices of my mind, or hook me into some machine.
The thought of it terrified me but also quickened my blood. I wanted those memories as badly as my captors.
Natalia padded away, her back to me. “Are you hungry?”
She disappeared through an adjacent doorway, which I realized must be a kitchen. When I didn’t answer, she popped her head out and looked at me.
I shook my head.
“I am.” This was followed by the sound of a cabinet opening and pans scraping.
I followed to a bar top and watched her with wary curiosity. On the other side of it, in a tidy metallic kitchen, she pulled food from the refrigerator and pantry. She clicked the stove on. Nothing more sinister than a meal being prepared.
Oil went into the pan, corn meal stirred in a bowl. After a few minutes, I tired of standing and hitched a hip on a bar stool. She looked practiced in the kitchen and fully absorbed with cooking. I almost felt forgotten.
She pressed the thick corn batter into round cakes and placed these into the hot oil. Smells bloomed, delicious and also intensely familiar. That surprised me. I tried to grasp more from the feeling but got only a vague sense of home and a complicated mix of emotions.
Natalia continued to work. I sat still and tried to let the feeling settle over me, but no more of the memory came, only an inexplicable sense of comfort, which frightened me.
When the cakes were done, she pressed them in paper towels, cut them in half, and stuffed them with cheese. She set them onto plates with sour cream and a pinch of a green herb.
She set the two plates on the countertop just below the bar. “Pick one,” she said.
I pointed.
“Now choose who gets it,” she said.
Something about this ritual, too, was very familiar. A bit of déjà vu.
“You,” I said, watching her as I said this. Her expression remained blank. She nodded and handed me the other plate.
She stood with a hip propped against the counter and cut the first cake into bites with her fork, apparently not bothered when I didn’t eat right away, only watched her.
She polished off the first of her cakes without acknowledging my frank gaze. I got the faintest idea that there was a point to this meal, to this dish in particular, no matter how nonchalant she seemed. I doubted it had to do with poisoning me, and there were probably more efficient ways to magic me than through food.
“Where am I?” I ventured to ask as I picked up my fork.
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that yet.” Yet when she met my gaze, it was with a direct look, as if she were trying to tell me something.
A feeling stabbed my stomach again. Inexplicably, heat rose to my cheeks.
I looked down quickly at my food. I cut the cakes into pieces and arranged them carefully on the plate as I tried to capture and arrange my thoughts.
“What did you retire from?” I said.
“I’m not retired. I’m a teacher.”
The kids. That would make sense. Something about that didn’t sit right with me, though. Maybe it was the sharp look she gave me.
I remembered a second later that I shouldn’t have even been privy to that conversation—I’m retired—and made myself suddenly preoccupied with loading my fork. I took a bite. The cake was crispy but also soft, with the moistness of oil but not too much. The flavor melted over my tongue and brought me very close to a memory, something big. Much too big. I swallowed reflexively and the lump of food caught in my throat and dragged all the way down. My eyes watered.
I made myself finish the rest of the cakes while she watched. No more of the memory materialized.
“Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure now if eating had been a good idea. I felt off. Natalia’s keen attention rested on me, and I got the sense that she waited for something from me.
She seemed more dangerous at that moment than she had leading me to some unknown fate.
That’s when I noticed the thing. I’d been looking at it the entire time, but it hadn’t registered. It was a lamp, or so I guessed by the glow it put off. “What’s that?”
“This?” She unhooked it from the ceiling and set it in front of me.
The globe was fashioned out of a delicate lacework of leaves too intricate to be real, overlapped and hardened into a sphere. I traced the filigree of veins with a fingertip, while something vast fought to come up in me.
I removed my finger. “I don’t feel well.”
Somehow, then, she was standing next to me. I stood from the stool and made the first step. But that was it, and then I was looking up at her grim expression as she caught me in her arms.
* * *
I woke in bed. A different one this time, in a dark room. I vaguely recalled kind hands and laughter around a table. I let the memory go and didn’t try to pursue it. A small lamp cast enough light for me to find the door.
I found her in the living room. She sat on the couch with her arms around a pillow, gazing at a fish tank.
“I remember you,” I said.
Her gaze snapped to mine. There was something in it, a startled look, and something else.
“You do?” Careful, neutral in inflection. Too careful.
“You killed the police who were after me. Didn’t you?”
Run, Mom had said on the phone. Don’t come home. They’ve come for Daniel. Run.
I’d run.
They’d cornered me at the end of the street. She had fallen out of the sky—from one of the balconies, likely—and they’d dropped to the ground, dead. Her face had been a terrible blank as her gaze met mine.
“I thought you were going to kill me, too,” I said.
“I wasn’t. I was there to help you.”
“I realize that now.” If she’d wanted to kill me, she could have snuffed me like the men. But I’d been irrational with terror. And I’d run from her and—
The memory stopped there, but I could sense the immensity of what came next, the jagged terrible shape just beneath the surface. My heart raced, skipping beats, my body reacting to a threat I couldn’t remember.
“Come here,” she said.
It was strange and also natural, her invitation. I sat down next to her and let her put her arms around me. Comfort from a familiar stranger. Her hands laced loosely at my abdomen. A shaper’s hands.
Mine too, I realized as I gazed down at them. That came very close to the terrifying memory, and I closed them.
She offered simple comfort. A warm body, a hand stroking my hair. The easy affection of someone who worked with kids. Of course, I wasn’t a kid anymore. Whatever I’d had left of my childhood—the naivety of a woman in her early twenties—was gone, althoug
h I couldn’t remember where to.
Why did I allow her to put her arms around me? She had to be an assassin, a shaper who could kill another with a thought. I was a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf. Even other shapers feared those who could kill with such ease, making it seem like nothing more had happened than a stroke or a fatal skip of the heart.
“I knew you before that,” I said.
Her hand paused. The words just came. I didn’t know what revelation was supposed to follow that, but she held very still.
It came to me. “You watched my brother sometimes. When my parents and I were out. Oh gods.”
I rocked forward. It was there, all there, with only a thin surface tension holding it back. All I needed to do was touch it and the flood would explode.
She gripped my shoulder. “Ssshhh.” She rubbed my back in circles. I recovered my breath and let myself relax back into her.
Her hands quieted me. There was something I needed to tell her.
“Natalia,” I said. The feel of her name on my tongue was familiar and came to me like a long forgotten pleasure.
“Lark,” she whispered.
I looked back at her, startled. She didn’t smile. Her eyes shone in the glow from the aquarium, and I realized I knew those eyes, maybe better than I could remember. Something was still missing. Something frightening.
“What did they do to you?” she asked.
I hugged her arms tight to my chest.
“In the building,” I said. “When you found me. I was under the wall when it fell. I held it up. I didn’t have time to think about it. Why am I not dead? I should be dead.”
I could hear bubbles from a tank across the room, the rustle of a leaf as a lizard slid across its perch. Tiny sounds. The food Nat had made me sat flat in my stomach, like my body didn’t quite know what to do with it.
My heart must have been loud enough to hear. “Sshh,” she said again, and she kissed my temple. Her lips were soft and cool. “Relax for me.”
She must have helped a bit. My pulse slowed. My muscles relaxed. I felt the same light-headedness I’d felt huddled in the building. The rush of blood came slower in my ears this time. Gentler. But the effect was the same: the dark came, and I slipped from the mooring.
CHAPTER TWO
My name was Lark. My father worked for the local government office, and my mother checked facts for an information firm. They didn’t make a lot of money—it was incredibly expensive to live on Mi’hani—but we lived comfortably in our third-floor flat. I had one brother, ten years younger than I. Daniel.
Until my mother’s pregnancy, I was the coddled only child. I’d resented my brother before he was even born.
Then I held him for the first time, and he opened his eyes for me.
I liked to read to him. I read to him about the history of Mi’hani, of shapers and the flux and the reality engines. Colonization on Mi’hani had been an experiment. No one had ever inhabited a planet like it before. This close to the center of the universe, reality was not stable. Buildings mutated overnight. The terrain moved like something alive. That was why the engineers had developed the reality engines: to stabilize the flux. That was how we could live here without our bodies rearranging themselves, why we always had one head instead of two and two eyes instead of a half dozen like some of the poor original colonists. Actually, I didn’t know for sure if the flux had changed the bodies of the original colonists, but the story made my brother’s eyes grow so wide it looked like his body would transform, eyes into dinner plates.
The flux made the world a little bit like wet clay. Pliable. The reality engines kept it from moving about on its own, but there were some people who discovered they could shape the world on their own, using just their minds, their breath, their hands. Shapers. A lot of them died in witch trials, much like the witch trials of ancient Earth.
That was, until the government realized they could employ shapers instead of kill them.
“And if you’re a shaper and they find out,” I told my brother, “they will take you away and make you work for them as one of their agents. They make you eat other people. All of the people who resist becoming their agents.” I made a terrible expression at him.
I felt bad when, later, I heard him yell out in his room and my parents ran to him. He didn’t tell them what had given him the nightmares. I sat up in my bed with my arms curled around my knees. The next night he asked for more stories.
I had nightmares, too. I often woke in the middle of the night sweating, but I did not call out, so my parents and my brother never knew.
In my dreams, the government’s shapers hunted me with red eyes and ate me.
* * *
I was seventeen when people began to disappear. No one had eaten them, of course. They simply didn’t show up to work or make it home from school. Sometimes their houses were found empty in the morning. That scared me. At school, the teachers pretended like nothing was happening, and any student found muttering or passing notes was sent to the office.
My parents talked behind closed doors late at night, and the only time I heard the wallscreen on was early in the morning when my brother and I were supposed to be asleep. But I knew what was going on because I had a small handscreen I’d found in the trash. It had been broken, but I had told it to work again and to receive signals from the small receiver I’d shaped out of scraps collected over the course of a couple weeks. I could have tapped into the signals coming from the house receiver, but I didn’t want to risk altering any registered mechanism, especially those registered in my parents’ names. The chances of the government discovering the alteration were slim, but then, I had no idea how they identified shapers. I didn’t want to put my family in danger. But I needed to know what was going on, because I had a tense, sick feeling that it pertained to me.
My specialty was machines, an ability I hadn’t discovered till my early teens. I’d thought shapers able to manipulate all of reality. I could only work with electronics.
I could make them do almost anything.
* * *
I made it safely through foundational school. While my friends pursued careers in areas they excelled in, I took up accounting. No one wanted to talk about accounting. No one looked twice at me.
At school, I walked past the recruitment fairs. Their posters made it seem like a patriotic thing to do, becoming a shaper agent. I kept my head low. I felt like a coward.
On my handscreen at night, I listened to pirated frequencies and late-night news segments about people who refused to be drafted. There were rumors about individuals organizing a resistance to the government and its use and abuse of people who shaped.
I felt a stirring of excitement hearing about the insurgents. I felt a kinship. They might have been a story, or they might have been individuals working independently. But I liked to think of them as a real united force that was growing, an organization to resist a corrupt government that, no matter what people pretended, was doing some awful things.
* * *
In the summer of my nineteenth year, the rebels exploded a government compound. My parents’ reaction was surprisingly flat. They never wanted to talk politics, not even when my mom came home early one morning because the small family information firm she worked for had closed without warning.
I had dined with my mother’s employers once. Good people. They treated their employees well and managed their business in the clear. We never heard from them again.
The building was converted to empty office space the next week.
Dad’s income alone would not sustain us, so I added a job to my schedule, and after a search of two months, my mom took on a position with different hours. Some afternoons, no one was at home to watch my younger brother when he returned from school.
It was not a time when anyone felt comfortable leaving their children alone.
It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, to come home and discover a woman I’d never met sitting at our table. Dad introduced her as a friend.
Natalia. She’d be watching Daniel on evenings when we were all out. She was tall and had a mature face. Not old, but knowing. Much of that had to do with her eyes, a dark blue that pierced. Serious eyes, almost severe, yet when she smiled they lit up and she seemed to be smiling just for me.
I avoided her for weeks.
In the evenings, I retired straight to my room and worked on homework until Dad or Mom came home and Natalia left. But if Dad invited his work friend home with him, Natalia would stay to entertain Daniel. Sometimes, she cooked dinner.
On those nights it was often a choice between embarrassment and starvation. My initial intimidation and attraction had deepened and I couldn’t meet her eyes without blushing, so I wouldn’t come out, which only made my fear of her worse.
This continued until, one evening, I heard my parents talking and thought Natalia had left already. I poked into the kitchen for something to drink and there she stood at the stove, Daniel at her side. She’d pulled her brown hair into a pony tail while she chopped vegetables. Her blue eyes met mine.
“Oh!” I said.
She smiled. The kitchen smelled like hot oil and tomatoes. “We’re making corn cakes. Would you like to join us?”
I felt as red as the tomato she held. Her gaze held something, mischief or laughter, like she knew I’d been avoiding her and it amused her. I couldn’t say no in the face of that. So I let her show Dan and me how to form the cakes and fry them, how to pat them dry and to serve them with the fresh salsa.
About halfway through the evening, my body had forgotten to blush every time her gaze met mine. She knew a lot of interesting things. Our conversation started with cooking but moved to traditional Earth customs, simulation, the biology of corn, the carbon structure of living things, ancestry, and the life of stars. In short, everything that had nothing to do with anything of consequence. In our little bubble of warmth in the kitchen, there was no rebellion or curfew bells. No school or work. No plans for the future. Just me and Nat, and Daniel of course, laughing and shouting and dancing around each other as we orchestrated the meal. I loved to watch her work. I said things to make her laugh because she had a way of throwing back her head, especially when I caught her off guard.
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