The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  The cistern room provided good acoustics.

  Suzanne listened, eyes locked onto the one-speaker boom box. The song poured into the space with us. I’d heard it plenty of times before, but each time . . . man, when it gets to about the three-minute mark, each time is the first time.

  I watched her as she listened. Her blinking became more rapid, and she squinted a little. Her lip trembled, and a hand came up to hover near her chin, the fingertips stroking the space below her bottom lip. She asked a question, but it was swallowed in the song’s crescendo.

  I lowered the volume a couple notches. “What?”

  She cleared her throat. “Would . . . would he really have loved me?”

  I could’ve produced a near-endless supply of about anything I wanted right then from the cistern, but it was just tears I made instead. I nodded. “Yeah, we all would’ve. A lot.”

  She sniffed. “Can you turn it back up?”

  I obliged, looking down to find the volume knob. That’s when I heard it, a loud series of clanks. I glanced up as a series of railroad spikes hurtled toward me. I rolled out of the way. I came up shocked. Suzanne stood, hands out, her face red and twisted into a snarl of sorrow.

  “And because of scratchers, I can never have that,” she screamed and pitched one hand forward, left and right in succession with more pieces of sharp metal flying my way. I jumped aside again, dropping the boom box, seeking cover behind the coupe I’d crushed the one Smock with. The boom box floated, the song continued, blaring and echoing in the cavernous room. Suzanne came charging through the ankle-deep water, around the back of the car with her hands flying out again. Thunk, thunk—two more railroad spikes right where I’d been standing.

  I backpedaled away. “What are you doing? I tell you all of that, and you want to kill me anyway?”

  She threw more at me. In her grief, her aim was poor. She wiped tears away with the back of her wrist, growling as she flung more at me. It was losing its shape, what she created. It was no longer sharp, just blobs of black metal, like hunks of slag that were easy to dodge. I just ducked or stepped out of the way as the pieces flopped through the air and hit the floor with a dull thump.

  “Stop,” I said. “It’s not my fault.”

  “But you’re part of it. You’re a scratcher, and if none of you had done what you did, we wouldn’t have to try to stop you. I could’ve had a life, a real life. I could’ve had a husband. I could’ve had a wedding.” She gestured at the source of the song. “I could’ve had . . .” She looked at me. “You.”

  “Suzanne, stop. I was just trying to explain to you what could’ve been, what the Regolatore destroyed—not just for me but for you too. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault either.”

  Suzanne dropped her hands to her sides.

  The song ended. We were steeped in sudden silence.

  “If what you said . . . is true . . .”

  “It is.”

  Her bloodshot eyes searched mine. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do now. He’s already left.” She gestured at the empty space where the Smock had been dispatched to spread the word on finding all other Casseteras through all vershes.

  “It’s all right. We’re all pretty tough, I think.”

  She smiled. “I hope so. Listen, I think I want to . . . talk some more. I don’t think it’d be a good idea to do it here, but we can go somewhere.”

  “He’s already met somebody else.”

  She nodded. “He must be a real catch.”

  “He was. He really was.”

  “Do you think maybe you and I could just take a minute here and . . . talk things over?” She showed me her palms, sockets closed. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, relaxing. “Just promise you won’t freak out and do that again.”

  “I’m sorry. I promise.”

  “All right. So . . .”

  “Yeah. So.”

  “What can we do?”

  Suzanne blinked slowly. She checked the sleeve affixed to her forearm, the display upon it revealing various readouts: the time, a clock counting down, placement of points of interest like the cistern, and a wire frame map of the temple. “I don’t have long before my refresh.”

  I remembered what Clifford had told me, how once a Smock gets refreshed, they won’t remember a thing. Restored to an earlier save point; that’s how I thought of it. All the recent progress unsaved. And Suzanne’s progress was monumental.

  “Is there any way to . . . I don’t know, not have that happen?”

  “No,” she said. “And . . . I wish I had time to get to the communicator. I’d tell them right now that this versh is clean.” She looked to the southernmost wall, as if beyond that shiny gray architecture a gleaming Answer to Everything was waiting, boxed up, shrink-wrapped, ready for use.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “The versh the Regolatore are from, our original source versh, has a temple where all waylaid time flows are accounted for and each move we make is premeditated. But they can’t see here; they rely on us, the acolytes, to tell them when a versh has been cleaned. If I had more time, I’d go . . . and tell them our job was done here.” She sniffed. “Even though we can’t undo what we’ve done, at least nothing worse would happen, but . . .”

  The Smocks had done so much, spread across all vershes, imbedded themselves into so many time lines. Pulling it out would be like tweezing a tick that’d already buried its head in. It’d just split apart, leave debris behind, then infect the surrounding area worse than it already was. Undoing the Smock occupation, in whole, would take an incalculable amount of time and effort. Suzanne probably didn’t know how many vershes they’d gotten themselves across. Even trying would probably do more damage than good.

  She shook her head. “We’re at the tail end of securing a total victory.” She knew the error of her ways now, and it seemed to cut her deep. “Using the waylaid time flow to see what happens ahead of some vershes, once we got a particular line—or series of events—down, it’s easy enough the second time to go and find when a scratcher appears in all other vershes and expunge them.”

  “Use the real word. You kill them.”

  “Fine. Yes, we killed them. And now there’s only one line left. Yours and Clifford Thadius Cohen’s.”

  “And to stop all this?” A pain erupted in my leg, a big precise ache. I thought maybe Suzanne had gotten me with one of those shotgun blasts of metal pieces she’d launched at me a minute ago, but when I looked down, my pants were just ripped a little, soggy with reconstructed river water but no blood. Still, drilling down into my knee was this sharp pain.

  “Something wrong?” Suzanne asked, sounding genuinely concerned. Odd, seeing as how she had tried to kill me so many times over the past few months.

  “I . . . I don’t know. This feels really weird. It hurts.”

  “Sit down.”

  I took a seat on the bumper of the battered eighteen-wheeler crashed halfway into the wall. Suzanne eased onto one knee and pulled up my pant leg. Flashes of my youth came back to me, of Mom applying Band-Aids. Being clumsy was one thing; being a clumsy kid on crutches was another. We should’ve bought stock in Band-Aid.

  Suzanne glimpsed over my knee, which looked fine to me. She sighed.

  “What?”

  “Not good.”

  “What’s happening?” Looking down at my knee, I could see right next to the bump of my kneecap there was a slight discoloration to the skin. Bruises came through easily on my fair skin, but this was different. This bruise came on fast, like someone was swirling a paintbrush around from within, using only the fiercest, most pissed-off-looking red you ever saw. It was right where Squishy had accidentally shot me.

  “Clifford fixed me, though. That shouldn’t be coming back.”

  “This happens. He used one of my iterations to do this, mixed with you. You are the foreign element that doesn’t belong in this versh, and because of that, the versh is trying to cause a separation. It’s like anti
bodies fighting off an infection.”

  Funny choice of words, seeing as how that was what appeared to be going on with my knee. And here I thought I was losing feeling in my feet because of the water we’d been standing in. No. I was turning back, slowly losing what I’d gained. I looked at my hands, and the rims of my sockets looked blotchy, ill.

  “He did this on purpose,” I suggested.

  “Probably,” Suzanne admitted, standing. “He must’ve thought by not warning you about the separation effect you might come here and fall apart even before you managed to attack us. He got into contact with us shortly after you arrived here. I imagine he was hoping you’d fall right into our laps and he’d be calling to take the credit the second you did.”

  “I have the greatest taste in men.”

  “The materials he used,” she said, meaning herself, “weren’t exact. The separation will slow if you go back, but it won’t stop.”

  “Because you and I aren’t the same person.”

  Her mouth became a flat line. Her hand touched mine. “No, we’re not. Not at all.”

  I stood, my knee letting out a blast of red-hot pain. I shifted my weight onto the other leg. “Will you remember this the next time we talk?”

  Suzanne shook her head. “We get broken down at the end of each shift and rebuilt at the start of the next so we don’t need any time off or sleep.” She checked her wrist again. “The next time we see each other, I won’t remember you or any of this.”

  “Is there anything you can do here that can help me?”

  Again she shook her head, her face solemn. “You’ll have to turn yourselves in. It’s the only way to get us to leave the versh. Or somehow get me to make the call that the versh is clean. In Duluth, in your versh, there’s a communicator hub. When you see me in your Duluth again, make me make the call, or have Thadius give himself up. It’s the only way to get us to leave your versh.”

  “You could leave. We could leave. We could get out of here, run.” I stopped when I saw how crestfallen Suzanne looked. Like I was giving her a really bad diagnosis or telling her that everyone she ever loved had died. Which, I guess, I sort of had earlier, but worse: telling her everyone she could’ve loved was dead. Asking her to come along and travel around with her not-daughter and try to reconnect to a life that she had already missed was asking her to voluntarily suffer for however long she could endure such a thing.

  We looked at each other. We hugged. Nothing needed to be said.

  With her arm wrapped around me, I could see the readout on her sleeve. She had less than four minutes until her refresh. I closed my eyes on the sight of those digits counting down and just enjoyed the moment.

  Track 38

  USE ONCE AND DESTROY

  “This is nice,” Suzanne said. “This makes me think that maybe after all of it’s over, if you do what you need to do, I might try to—”

  Gone.

  My arms were around nothing. Where her feet had been in the water filled in with a splash, the water rushing in from both sides of the ankle-shaped holes. I stared, my throat clenching. “What? Where . . . what?” I charged forward, put my hands into the empty space that was still warm with her recent presence. “Mom? Mom!”

  “Kiddo,” Thadius said, charging in with his scythe rifle in his arms. Mosaic Face, sans mosaic, came up right behind him. He looked really confused and scared. He wielded a similar weapon, except of even more ramshackle manufacture.

  “Bring her back,” I screamed at them. I jumped at Thadius, grabbing him by the collar. “Bring her back!” He peeled me off as gently as he could and held me at arm’s length.

  “Jesus, Cass. I thought you’d be happy to see me.” Looking around at the semitruck, the overturned car, the water, he said, “Hell’s going on here?”

  “Bring her back!” I tried grabbing the scythe rifle out of his hands, and he released it, the thing clattering to the wet floor. I lifted the dripping harvester, unscrewed the canister.

  “I didn’t take her,” he said.

  My hands stopped their frantic attempt. Over the rifle, I looked at him, hard. More lies, even now?

  “I didn’t take her,” he repeated, his tone pleading. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The refresh. It’d taken her, harvested her, and dropped her back into the catalog to be reassembled elsewhere anew, ready for her next shift, purged of any and all she’d learned about me, herself, anything. My chest burned. A pain like that in my knee but different. Worse.

  “Can we go?” Mosaic Face whimpered. “Please?”

  “I don’t have a way to jump vershes,” I said. “I dropped it.”

  “That’s fine,” Thadius said in a rush, producing his own, this cobbled thing pretty similar to the one Clifford had made for me: three layers of green circuit boards held together with electrical tape. On its face was a knob, except this one off an oven. The only two options on Thadius’s versh jumper was high and low. We were currently at low.

  “Did you find Hamish?” I asked.

  Thadius reached a hand out to me, told Mosaic Face behind him to grab on. We would all jump together. “No time for that, girlie. Here,” he said, hand out. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He waggled his fingers open and closed. “Come on.”

  I kept my hands at my side. “You were gone for a couple months, Thadius. Did you find him?”

  Mosaic Face, hand on Thadius’s shoulder as instructed, looked at me, then at Thadius. “Was he the guy we drove to New York and you had me follow and . . .”

  Thadius nodded sadly, dragged his gaze toward me. “He’s with somebody else now.” He sighed, no way to refute it now after Mosaic Face had accidentally ratted him out. “They’ve got a daughter together. I didn’t want to interrupt, so . . . me and Matthew here just kept on going.”

  “So this is Cassetera?” Mosaic Face asked brightly. I imagined the drive here had been an interesting one. Still, I couldn’t help but notice how he sounded faintly familiar; it was the same voice, yeah, but not autotuned. Male-pattern baldness had claimed most of the real estate atop his head, even though he looked to be only about my age. “I’m confused. She doesn’t look like the girl in the holo you showed me from your show.”

  “Shut up for a minute,” Thadius said, throwing a scowl over his shoulder at him. He smiled at me. “Not the same Mosaic I knew.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” he asked.

  “Is he how you got here?” I said.

  “Still knows his shit. Had to knock him out to get him here.”

  “You knocked me out? You said I tripped.”

  “Apprentices,” Thadius said, rolling his eyes. He nodded toward his hand, the one lacking the thumb, held out for me to take. “Are we gonna go or what?”

  “I think you guys should.”

  Thadius’s forehead furrowed. “What? Stop foolin’ around. Here, grab my hand and we’ll scoot.”

  Keeping my eyes on him, I raised an arm to point my palm at the cistern. “This will be for the best.”

  I turned my back on him so when the end came, I wouldn’t have to see him. I hoped it’d be like when I jumped vershes and it’d be just one pop, except a big one, the whole world ending.

  I put both hands out. Gim—

  “You asked me about that grave in my backyard,” Thadius said, interrupting my internal command. I heard him splash through the water, coming up behind me. “Hamish, my Hamish, was gone, and there was no bringing him back. So I went to his parents’ grave and dug them up, harvested them. Took what little of them was left, dug up another body that was buried in the same place not that long before for fresher fixins, and I . . . tried making him. I had no recipe of him, but I knew his face, had some photos of him. Barely needed them; I knew his face so well. I knew I could design another Hamish if I wanted to. I . . . I did, jazzed a new Hamish, and it . . .”

  I kept my hands out, back to him. Still ready. I listened.

  “That’s when I learned once someone was
dead there was no bringing them back. Harvested dead, jazzed or not, there could never be another one. What I made looked like him, but it wasn’t him. What made my Hamish my Hamish was something else, more than just his parts. But there was no undoing it; I’d done it, and I had to put him, it, a corpse thing that just looked like him—or my idea of him—back in the ground. You do this, Cass, there’s no fixing it. There’s no going back. And even if you don’t, you have to know nothing can be done to fix anybody.”

  “That’s why I want to do it.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. “It’s not your right to decide what happens. There are plenty of good people here who don’t deserve this. Just because your story ended up shitty doesn’t mean that’s excuse enough to ruin everyone else’s. All I’ve ever been trying to do is help you learn from my mistakes.”

  I turned and lifted his hand holding the versh jumper so it was between us. “Go back.” I put my hands around the device. I placed my fingers on the knob, ready to make it jump him even if he refused to do it on his own. “Take him.” I nodded toward Mosaic Face, who stood by looking terrified. “Go back. You saying all you wanted was for me to learn from your mistakes just . . . pisses me off. Just go.” I shoved him.

  “Why?” Thadius’s voice squeaked. “It’s the truth.”

  “It’s not the truth,” I shouted, my voice tolling in the cavernous room. “You found that book two years before we met. You knew what was coming for you, and the only reason you took me under your wing was to save your own ass. You didn’t want a friend, someone to help fix herself and figure out her problems . . . You wanted to find the other piece of the puzzle and try to jam it in somewhere it didn’t belong, hoping it’d make your whole outcome better.” I picked up the scythe rifle from the floor and shoved it, too, at him.

  He refused to take it, his arms slack at his sides, his face full of hurt.