Clockwork Memories

by Sarina Dorie

  Clockwork Memories

  THE MEMORY THIEF SERIES

  BOOK THREE

  SARINA DORIE

  Copyright © 2017 Sarina Dorie

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1535427507

  ISBN-13: 978-1535427500

  DEDICATION

  To Charlie.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  1

  Chapter Two

  9

  Chapter Three

  14

  Chapter Four

  24

  Chapter Five

  31

  Chapter Six

  36

  Chapter Seven

  40

  Chapter Eight

  45

  Chapter Nine

  51

  Chapter Ten

  61

  Chapter Eleven

  68

  Chapter Twelve

  78

  Chapter Thirteen

  83

  Chapter Fourteen

  91

  Chapter Fifteen

  98

  Chapter Sixteen

  107

  Chapter Seventeen

  112

  Chapter Eighteen

  115

  Chapter Nineteen

  125

  Chapter Twenty

  138

  Chapter Twenty-One

  143

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  154

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  A Sneak Preview

  Afterward

  About the Author

  170

  175

  180

  181

  184

  188

  291

  204

  207

  Chapter One

  When Ponce de Leon discovered an intact warehouse of ships in the Americas in 1513, the science of spaceflight was reestablished after being lost for thousands of years. Thenceforth, nations have traveled from Earth to establish new territories on unclaimed worlds. No one expected to find planets already colonized by Earth’s original spacefarers, nor were there rules yet established to protect the safety of these “native colonists.”

  —The Guidebook of Colonization and Interplanetary Relationships, Fifth Edition, 1882

  I painted my palms with the medicinal herb known as “memory moss.” It tingled and flared against my flesh like a slow consuming fire. Even the scar tissue on my left hand felt sensation once again.

  My fiancé, Meriwether Klark, sat propped up against his pillows, his eyes half-closed. His long brown hair had come untied from his ponytail and fell into his eyes. He smiled lazily, looking more like a rakish drunk than a respectable gentleman. His naked chest was already covered in green smears and I was about to add another.

  “We’re almost out of places to apply the herb,” I said. I scooted closer, doing my best not to add more stains to the pastel bedsheets or chemise I wore.

  Meriwether raised an eyebrow. “I can think of a few more places.” He tugged at the drawstring of his pants, though he didn’t untie them.

  I felt lightheaded and giddy from the memory moss. It was a pleasant sensation that I could get addicted to if I wasn’t careful. I giggled and shook my head at him.

  He had promised he would behave. More or less. There’d been plenty of “bed play” as he called it, but none of it had involved a need for taking off his trousers.

  Meriwether circled his arms around me and drew me closer so that I was almost sitting on top of him. The closeness of this gesture only made me giggle more. If someone had asked me days ago if I would have thought myself capable of sharing myself mentally or physically so unashamedly with a half-naked man, I would have blushed.

  I pressed my palms against his belly. He leaned forward and kissed me. In that moment as our eyes closed and I focused on the memory I wished to share, I sank into my past.

  I was fourteen again, before the explosion that had scarred the left side of my face and arm. I sat on a fallen log, content to sketch the jungle around me. The air was heady with the fragrance of flowers, and the colors around me were as vivid as those from a paint box. I used a stub of charcoal on my paper to block in the trees towering over the ferns and the stream rushing by. Later when we returned to the ship I would add purple to the ferns and red to the flowers. I was so caught up in capturing the moment I didn’t notice anything else until I was interrupted.

  A nose bird hovered by my ear, making little womp, womp, womp noises with its wings. It must have thought I was a flower because its long nose tickled my ear. The bird resembled a miniature elephant with its trunk-like nose, and I didn’t like the idea of it trying to taste me.

  Sweat plastered my hair to the back of my neck. It was uncomfortably humid in the jungle on the planet, Aynu-Mosir, but I wouldn’t have traded the beauty that came with it for one moment on our air-conditioned ship, the Santa Maria.

  Well, maybe for a few minutes, but that was mostly because the paper of my sketch pad kept curling up.

  A laugh came from the other side of the log where Felicity sat reading with Taishi. Her blonde curls spilled down her back as she tilted up her chin and fell into the flowers, laughing. She wore her pale white day dress which was already dirty from sitting on the ground. Taishi wore a skirt made from red leaves and little else, his lean chest naked and dark from being kissed by the sun.

  From the way Felicity and Taishi made goo-goo eyes at each other, I suspected more flirting was being done than anything else. At this rate, Taishi would never learn to read.

  He jumped to his feet and climbed up a tree. Felicity shouted to him and he shook the branches and knocked fruit onto the ground. And onto me. I sighed in exasperation and moved farther away from them. He shimmied down the tree and cracked the hard shell of a melon against a stone. Tree snails chittered nervously above and the nose birds zipped away. I watched him split open a midori melon. He pulled a segment out from the inside like one would do with an orange from Earth.

  He held a piece to Felicity’s lips. “When one marries in the Chiramantepjin tribe, the bride and groom feed each other melon as a symbol of our devotion to each other.”

  She slurped the juice out noisily, making both of them laugh. He drank up his own juice and didn’t offer me any. Wasn’t that just like him to think the whole world revolved around Felicity? A pang of jealousy rose in me. I remembered the way Father had looked at Mother when she’d been alive, as though she were the only thing he cherished in the entire galaxy. Now my sister had a beau who adored her, even if he was a native and my father would object once he found out they were far more than friends. At least she had someone to look at her that way. Longing it burned in my chest. When would I fall in love? When would someone look at me that way?

  Felicity lifted her skirts and came to join me. She held out two segments to me. “Faith, are you thirsty?” she asked.

  I nodded and took a green segment. She smiled. Even though it was hot, she hugged an arm around my shoulder.

  She was a good sister. She would do anything for me. I felt bad for grumbling about her to my father earlier. I wished I hadn’t been in such a black mood when she was always so considerate to me.

  The heat of the jungle faded away. I was comfortably warm and content. I opened my eyes, finding myself slumped against Meriwether’s chest. So much for trying to keep my chemise clean.

  Meriwether yawned. “That was a bittersweet memory, Faith. Pray, why did you give me that one?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t recall what I gave you anymore.�
�� That was the way memory exchange worked. I wiped the stickiness from the side of my face and laid it against his shoulder. I was just glad I hadn’t given him five memories at once like I had our first time sharing with each other like this.

  He described the memory. From the length of time it took him to explain the details, this memory must have lasted for minutes of my life, but only seconds had elapsed in our time, if the clock on the wall was any indication. It was the kisses in between memory exchanges and the talking about what we’d been given that took up the majority of time.

  As Meriwether explained the memory, my intentions became clearer to me. “I wanted you to know what kind of sister Felicity was.” At least that’s what I suspected I’d wanted to show him. “I can only hope I will be as good of a sister to her as she was to me.” I’d left her on Aynu-Mosir so that she could be happy with her husband, and I could make sure the planet stayed safe from the likes of unscrupulous businessmen. It helped to have a grandfather in politics.

  “Of course you’re a good sister! You raised her child and waited for her to return to Planet 157.”

  And I would kill for her. I would kill Lord Archibald Klark for all he had done to Felicity, to my father, and to the Jomon people who had befriended me on Aynu-Mosir. Only, it did complicate matters that Meriwether Klark was in denial that his father was such an unscrupulous scoundrel.

  “Are you certain that’s the only reason you wanted to show this to me?” he asked.

  The comfortable bliss of memory moss faded. I swallowed. I felt as though he could see straight into me. I looked out the window at the stars twinkling beyond the spaceship. I couldn’t very well admit I wanted to kill his father for his crimes on Aynu-Mosir, or Planet 157, as he called it.

  He cleared his throat. “Maybe you gave me that memory so I would know how long you’ve been waiting for me. In any case, it’s my turn to give a memory to you.” He took up the bowl of green paste and brushed it over his palms. He held up his hands. “This would be so much easier if you wore less clothes.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nice try.” I moved my braid out of the way and turned, so he could place his hands on my shoulders.

  He smirked. “No, I think not. That place has already been used. That is the rule, is it not? Once per area or else it will burn the skin?”

  “That’s what the Jomon say.” And they were the experts, as the memory moss came from their world. Reluctantly, I lifted my chemise over my head and dropped it on the floor. I kept my back turned, hiding my burns scars from him as much as my nudity.

  “My word! You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Admiration shone in his expression, as bright as the moons on a clear night.

  I rolled my eyes. “You always say that when you’re drunk on memory moss.” Still, I was flattered he had said it. I hadn’t ever thought anyone would admire me, especially with the way my skin was pink and puckered with scar tissue.

  He shook his head. “It’s true. You are the exact idea of what I imagined my soul mate would look like.”

  I was so sleepy it was hard to focus, and his sweet words didn’t help, but I made myself concentrate on what was important. “You know what memory I want,” I said. “The one of your father.” I swallowed. It was the one I no longer had in me that I needed to prove his guilt. I knew it contained something important, something vital to my own father’s death, and that of the Jomon colonists on the planet Aynu-Mosir, only I couldn’t remember what it was. Had I seen him there on the planet committing crimes? Had I seen his ship shooting at a Jomon village? Or perhaps it was simply that I needed this memory so I wouldn’t forget my hatred of Lord Klark.

  I made myself comfortable in the bed beside him, staring out the wall. His breath whispered across the back of my neck.

  “Close your eyes,” Meriwether said.

  I did so. He kissed each cheek and placed his hands on my back. I slipped into darkness.

  There was no sleep so deep as that after hours of memory exchange. My cocoon of blankets was warm and comfortable, yet something roused me from happy dreams. The bedroom remained dark, the only sound the gentle hum of the spaceship engines. For a moment, I thought I was in my own room and mistook the person sliding into bed beside me for my roommate and best friend, Sumiko. Then an arm slid around my waist and hugged me close. His hand smoothed over the naked skin of my hip, and I was suddenly very much awake.

  Meriwether kissed my ear. “How do you feel today, Faith, my love?”

  “Mmm,” I said. My skin felt grimy from the memory moss.

  His lips brushed against my neck, sending a shiver of delight through my core, followed by a pang of guilt. I was glad for the darkness to hide the flush of embarrassment that suddenly heated my cheeks. Had my parents still been alive, they would have been horrified to learn of the way I’d been cavorting with a man before being married.

  And yet, the way I melted so perfectly into his arms made me want to do a lot more cavorting with him. He kissed his way down my neck. So much affection was more than I was used to and more than I deserved when I thought of all the times I had treated Meriwether so uncivilly in the past, thinking he was like his father. And despite this, he loved me enough to perform memory exchange with me.

  Then again, he had gotten to see a naked woman. He hadn’t complained about that.

  I clutched the blankets to my bare bosom. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but he surely could see me with his superior vision.

  “Meriwether,” I began. “We need to talk about last night.”

  “Goodness me! I’ve hardly been awake five minutes and I have already managed to make you hate me.” He said this in a lofty way that made him sound like a ninny.

  “I don’t hate you,” I said in exasperation. “It’s just that there are things we must discuss.”

  “What is it then? I know, it’s my morning breath, isn’t it? And I even ate a bit of cheese and apples. I’ve read the enzymes are supposed to neutralize bacteria in one’s mouth. It must not have worked. Oh dear, I’m prattling on, aren’t I?”

  “Morning breath?” I was too tired to have a conversation about morning breath. Then again, I didn’t have enough mental alertness at the moment to discuss political intrigues and why he had thought I was a French spy only days before.

  “I beg your pardon.” He extricated himself from the blankets. “I’ll be but a moment and then I’ll allow you to have your way with me.”

  “Meriwether, I—um—no one is having their way with anyone this morning,” I stammered. “I’m not used to such forwardness. I wasn’t myself last night. I was under the influence of the memory moss.”

  “Yes, yes. It’s always something. If it isn’t memory moss, it’s wine. If it isn’t wine, it’s memory moss. I keep waiting for you to say you are drunk with passion for me, but alas, I haven’t heard that one yet.” He sighed melodramatically.

  Clothing rustled and something shifted on his desk across the room. I didn’t have the talent he did for seeing in the dark. But then, no one did. I wondered if it was true people could have their cells modified for such purposes as he had claimed.

  I fumbled through the blankets, feeling for my chemise or petticoats. Probably they were on the floor. “Do you mind turning on the light?”

  “I do mind.” He laughed in an insipid manner that made him sound like a fool. He grew more vexing by the minute. “I prefer keeping you in the dark.”

  “I’ve gathered that much.”

  He retrieved something from the other side of the room and sat beside me. He touched something cold to my lips. “It’s a slice of apple. Tell me, will you taste all the forbidden fruits I have to offer?”

  I wanted to refuse him out of spite, but I hadn’t tasted a fresh apple since my childhood. The heady perfume sent a rumble through my belly. I bit into a slice. It was perfectly sweet and crisp, better than I remembered. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the fruit that grew on the Jomon planet where I had lived. It was just that this
was familiar and novel at the same time. I savored it as I chewed. He fed me a small cube of cheese next.

  “You’re being too nice to me. Why?” I asked around a mouthful. I realized too late what bad manners it was talking with my mouth full. He might blame my unpolished ways on my American upbringing or my lack of living in civilization as he had last time, but he at least had the wisdom not to chide me this morning.

  “Need I have a reason to show you how much I adore you?” He tweaked my nose as if I were a child. “Now as you were saying. I believe you were about to tell me all the reasons you hate me and feel I have taken advantage of you?”

  I understood his game now. He was being his usual self again and trying to distract me from more important matters. “You didn’t give me my memory. You said you were going to.”

  “No, you told me I was going to and I didn’t say yes or no. There’s a difference. And I have a perfectly good reason. Ahem.” He brought my hand to his lips.

  I wished I could have seen his expression. I smoothed a hand over his cheek, the stubble tickling my hand. He was very good at distraction.

  He said, “I need to remember what my father has done. It will help me during his trial so that I might bear witness and not put you in danger.”

  I wanted to believe him. It had been a lot easier to do so when I’d been stupid with memory moss.

  He wrapped his arms around me. “All I want is for you to let me adore you.” He kissed my cheeks. “Is there any doubt in your mind I love you?”