by Zen DiPietro
She found her application to the academy. It showed high marks and a stellar IQ, along with making quite a show of her memory. The irony forced a laugh out of her. Her spectacular memory, now completely hobbled by her inability to access it.
She sobered. But maybe it wasn’t ironic at all. What if… She let her mind expand, taking her new idea through the quagmire of what-ifs.
Even the most secure system could be breached. She knew that. Raptor proved it. He was the best, and he could design the highest-quality security database in the universe. But no system could be better than the best designer, which meant that anything that could be created could also be destroyed, or at least broken into, by that very same best designer.
Feeling like she was on to something, she followed the train of thought with a growing sense of excitement. What was an under-the-radar intelligence outfit to do, if it really needed to keep a secret? It couldn’t store that information in a computer, or in any storage device that could be accessed from the outside.
So what about something that could only be accessed from the inside? By one single user? Like a brain?
Like her brain.
She double-checked the logic, but it made sense. Blackout could have given her an implant. Something she would safeguard as well as she would her own brain, because it was in her brain. She might or might not have been aware of its presence there. And if Blackout decided they wanted it back…they would have taken it.
Possibly damaging her long-term memory in the process. From what Brak had told her about neural implants and brain surgery, as well as what Fallon had researched on her own, it made sense. Might fit. Could be an answer.
If it was true, she’d need to find out if her memory loss was intentional or accidental. Her initial assumption would be accidental, because why spend years training an agent to be one of the best, only to waste her for no purpose? But there could be factors she didn’t know about. There might be things that Blackout had not wanted her to remember. Maybe they’d hoped to remove what they didn’t want her to know, leave her none the wiser, and maintain her as a BlackOp. But then what would have changed to make them decide to send an assassin for her?
She wished she could talk to Brak about it all, but Brak was on a slow course back toward the heart of PAC space. She definitely couldn’t discuss these matters over the voicecom. Even a secure channel was not secure enough for a conversation like that.
She pulled the hood off her head and ran her fingers through her hair. First the short side, then she unnecessarily smoothed the side that hung down to her jaw. She pressed her fingers against her skull, cradling the brain that seemed to be the center of everything. Somewhere in her gray matter, she became increasingly convinced, the answers either still existed or had once existed. All right there in her head.
The room felt too small all of a sudden. Its tidy simplicity irritated her. She wanted something loud, something messy, something she could focus her agitation on. What the hell was she doing? Overnighting with her parents? No.
She’d conclusively proven that no amount of nostalgia was going to restore her memories. She was wasting time, and putting her team at risk for nothing. Her parents, too.
Purpose filled her. Glorious, motivating purpose. She strode to the other bedroom and tapped briefly before opening the door. Inside, Peregrine sat on the edge of the bed.
“Time to go,” Fallon said.
“Finally.” Peregrine leaped to her feet, grabbed her bag, and walked down the hall.
Hawk and Raptor sprawled in the living room’s chairs, but were already straightening to stand when they arrived.
“Moving out?” Raptor asked.
“Yes. I just need to say goodbye to my parents.” She held herself still, letting Peregrine efficiently reapply her disguise.
Her parents appeared. Her father placed his hand on her mother’s shoulder. Comforting, maybe. Or cautioning.
“I didn’t think you’d make it until morning.” Her mother’s smile was sad, but knowing. “Probably for the best. You have work to do.” She approached and put her hands on Fallon’s cheeks, forcing Peregrine to pause her work on Fallon’s forehead.
“Figure it all out, my daughter,” her mother intoned, as if saying a prayer. “Whatever your father and I can do, you let us do it. Understand?”
She clearly expected to be obeyed. Fallon nodded. She might indeed need her parents’ help before all this was done.
Yumi moved aside and Hiro took her place. He kissed each of her cheeks. “Take them down. I always knew you’d make the universe a better place.”
That made Fallon smile. “Thank you, Father.”
He hugged her tightly, then stepped back. “Anything you need.”
She nodded. “I understand. I’ll be in touch, as soon as I can.”
Her father’s eyes showed humor. “You’d better. We haven’t nearly caught up yet.”
She bowed, a deep, reverential bow. He returned it, in a way not customary for a parent to do for a child.
“Thank you both. You’ve been a big help to us.” She gave her parents a last smile before turning to the door and walking out of her childhood home.
Fallon had to give Hawk points for the inventiveness and longevity of his swearing. She lounged in the pilot’s chair of the Nefarious while he paced around its small bridge.
He was spitting a little as he talked, too. “So you’re saying that you think Blackout used your brain like a safe? Like they put something in there to keep it secure, until they wanted it back?”
“Or until they decided they wanted me to access it,” she added. “It’s entirely likely that it was wired right into my memory. Accessible, if I knew what to look for. Like a computer program. Install it and run.”
“That’s a bloody cold way of treating a person’s brain. Prelin’s ass!” He added a few more curses for good measure while Fallon waited for him to get back on track. “It’s one thing that we expect to get shot, skewered, or blown up. It’s another to have our own agency hiding things in our brains like a little kid hiding peas in the mashed potatoes.”
“Your objection is noted.” She found his anger somewhat amusing and even endearing, because she knew it stemmed from his protectiveness of her and his outrage at the idea of their own department not operating within ethical norms.
Blackout could burn an operative at any time. That was part of the job. You got shot, you got blown up, you disappeared never to be seen again. But getting burned shouldn’t be the result of some conspiracy. A double cross involving a person’s own brain. It turned her stomach. She kept thinking of some parasite laying eggs in her brain and waiting for them to hatch. That was what Blackout had done to her. And then, when something went wrong, they decided to assassinate her and her entire team, just like that. Their lives wiped out for nothing. She was prepared to die for a purpose. But not for nothing.
It made her angry, and there was no doubt that her teammates felt the same way.
“So what I need you to do, Raptor, is dig through the data you got for any mentions of neural implants, brain surgery, any of that. Anything remotely similar. I think that’s what this is all about.” Fallon sensed that whatever had happened to her memory was the key to the entire mess.
“What’s the priority? You looking for who in the hierarchy was involved, or the technology itself?” Raptor rubbed his chin, clearly thinking about his strategy. “The more I know about what I’m looking for, the quicker I’ll find it. I’ll do much better with that than just sifting through the huge mass like I have been, looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I want the technology. Memory augmentation. Neural implant. Anything along those lines, as well as the people responsible for creating it. If we get that info, we can take it to Brak, and we’ll finally have something real to work with. We can track the tech back to the source.”
Raptor nodded. “I’ll get to it then. I’ll let you know as soon as I find something.” She watched him stride out with p
urpose in his steps. It always felt so much better to have a defined goal.
Which left her, Hawk, and Peregrine on the bridge. They’d already left Earth behind, which had been a relief to all of them. As of yet, Fallon had no particular destination, so she pointed them in the general direction of Blackthorn Station and held their speed to a moderate, energy-conserving pace. The vastness of space practically guaranteed their anonymity, far better than any moored location could.
“What can we do?” Hawk asked.
“Sleep,” Fallon answered. “I’ll need you two to take shifts at ops control, so that I can sleep later. Or stab my brain with pointy things, or whatever.”
Her attempt at humor fell flat, gaining a sour smirk from Hawk and nothing at all from Peregrine. But they both went off to sleep, which was what mattered.
Four hours later, Peregrine arrived to relieve her, and Fallon was glad. She was worn out. The emotional toll of meeting her parents and the late hour combined to have her crawling into bed with her clothes on. At least on the Nefarious, they each got a moderately sized berth of their own. Fallon appreciated the privacy, and let her thoughts wander to her parents as she drifted to sleep.
Fallon opened her eyes to find herself standing in a tunnel. The odd thing was, she knew it was a dream. She felt the hazy bendiness of the not-universe surrounding her and had no doubt that she was traveling the recesses of her own brain.
Well, hell, she thought. This is exactly where I’ve been wanting to be. It’s about damn time.
If only she had a map to take her where she wanted to go. Raptor stepped out of a door that hadn’t been there a second ago, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Droplets of water ran down his arm but didn’t land anywhere. They just rolled and then disappeared.
“Cheese is important,” he said meaningfully. “Always the cheese.”
“What?”
But he’d gone through another door. She tried to follow him, but the seam of the exit had melded back into the tunnel.
“Ookay…” Apparently, her brain was strange.
She struck off down the passage, watching for any turns, doorways, or additional underdressed people. But nothing. Just more tunnel. She walked on for what felt like forever.
“I’m not getting anywhere.” She cast a look behind her, where the corridor yawned backward. It reminded her of time, somehow. Time, stretching out both ahead and behind, with no other ways out. The past, and the future.
But the future wasn’t a straight path. It had choices. Twists. Unexpected obstacles. So where were they?
Something tickled the top of her head and she reeled back, ready to fight. But it was only a rope. It dangled down a long shaft above her.
She sighed. Nothing could just be easy, could it? “Fine.”
She backtracked several paces, then ran, leaped, and managed to catch the end of the rope. Pulling herself up hand over hand, she got far enough to finally wind it around her leg and foot, taking the pressure off her arms.
She worked her way up the long length of rope. Sweat dripped down her face and her hands stung, but her muscles felt perfectly at ease.
A light flickered up above, then grew more distinct. She heaved her feet up through a hole in a floor, inelegantly scooting herself in enough to let go of the rope and crawl into the space. This room seemed cartoonish, with different colors of doors everywhere, some the size of an apple, others massively wide and low.
Doors. Portals? Pathways? She opened one of the small ones and peeked in. She saw nothing. She tried a tall, skinny door.
Fallon stared through it at her office on Dragonfire. Every detail was precise. Her desk, the couches, everything. Should she go in?
She debated for a moment, then closed the door and opened another. Empty. Just darkness, like an abyss of space, stretching across a galaxy.
A round, purple door drew her attention. She had to bend to peer in. She saw an image of her and her father. Her looking resolved and him looking proud. Not the actual memory, though. Just the static image she’d seen.
Were these memories? Some she couldn’t recall, as blank spots, and some that she could? What if she chose to enter a blank one?
She opened a gray door, big enough for her to fit through. The darkness within worried her. She didn’t want to walk into the darkness. Without a weapon or a light source, she’d have no means of defending herself.
But this was her brain, wasn’t it? Her mind? Did she need to defend herself?
She stepped through the gray door and the passageway behind her disappeared. Darkness became absolute, making it hard to keep her balance. She flung her arms out, feeling for a wall or something to guide herself with, but she found nothing. She wobbled and fell, coming down hard on her hands and knees. She scooted her palms over the floor. No, the ground. The first texture she felt was grass. Cold and damp, like she might find on a dark night. Her fingers curled around the damp blades, feeling them feather against her palms. As if they were real.
Faint white light began to filter in, bringing shadows with it. The motion of a branch shaking in the breeze made her realize that a tree ahead of her stood nearly concealed in the haze. It drew her attention upward, where she saw two moons.
Those bloody moons again. They were like the ones from her nightmare. Maybe not exactly, but close enough. One larger, one smaller, with a similar glow. These didn’t press down on her though. They remained high in the sky.
Fallon heard a voice but couldn’t make out what it said. She turned toward it, only to find no one there.
Only an idiot would call out, advertising her position. Fallon was no idiot. She stalked forward, looking for the source of the voice, but there was nothing but grass, shadows, and moons.
So why was she here? And how could she leave? If this was nothing, she’d try something else. Another door. Another rope.
Something wet landed on her cheek, and she brushed it away. Looking at her fingers, she saw a smudge of blood. Hers. Somehow she knew it for a fact.
The moons had moved closer. They no longer hung so high in the sky. They seemed to want to come to see her. They kept advancing. Fallon backed up, but how can a person run away from a moon? She tripped and fell backward, with the moons continuing to come for her. She held her hands up, trying to ward them off. Then they stopped. They seemed to be asking a question.
She tried to speak, but her voice was rough. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I think I understand.”
Only then did the moons recede back into the sky where they belonged, apparently satisfied.
Fallon didn’t rush to tell her teammates about her experience. She wanted a little while to try to process it first. To figure out how she’d even explain it to her partners.
In the mess, she worked at generating enough leave-me-alone energy to keep the others at bay. So far it was working. Hawk and Raptor played cards, while Peregrine finished her shift on the bridge.
Fallon rested her arm on the table with a full glass of Zerellian ale resting against the crook of her elbow. The chill of it against her skin served her far better than the actual beverage, at the moment. She wanted to be rooted in the physical world, not drifting up into her own head again. She needed to hear the hum of people around her, even though she didn’t want to interact with them just now. Fortunately, her teammates understood her well enough to know when she wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
She pretended to study the ship’s inventory on an infoboard as she tried to characterize the experience she’d had. She couldn’t call it a dream. Though it had had a surreal, dreamlike quality, she’d been entirely lucid, and she felt certain that those tunnels had represented the neural pathways of her mind. She’d been poking among things she knew she remembered and memories that remained missing. Disconnected from her, but still nestled in her brain. So definitely not a dream. Some sort of post-hypnotic manifestation of recovered memories, then?
Brain stuff really wasn’t her area of expertise. She
’d leave it to the doctors to explain the medical things. What mattered to her was being sure of what she took away from her experience. Tactics. Planning. That was her thing.
But what should she do next? For the first time, the burden of leading her team bore down on her. Not because she lacked the desire to be everything her team needed, but because she suddenly had a doubt as to whether she was up to the task.
A bead of condensation welled up and began to roll down her glass. Fallon touched it, breaking its surface tension and causing it to burst against her fingertip. She drew an idle trail of moisture in a straight line across the faux-wood tabletop, then smeared it with her palm and watched the edges evaporate.
Tactics. Identify the objective. What she really needed was to fill in the gaps inside her head, then go storm the castle. The “castle” being Blackout, of course. Not just a base or an outpost, but headquarters itself. The big target. The place where Raptor could yank out every bit of data they could possibly need, telling them exactly who had subverted Blackout, when, and how. Where she and the rest of her team could look into the eyes of the person, or people, who had caused all this. Once they could do that, it was all downhill. A simple matter of raining all manner of hell down on the traitors. The fun stuff.
Identify the means. Both Brak and Raptor were working on finding tethers to her memories that she could yank on to pull them into place, but that left Fallon oddly disconnected from the process. She needed them to help her connect with her own memories. Her own thoughts, even, as they pertained to her past and how the past affected their present.
Oh, it was twisty. But she had to forget that. She had to stay on task. That was her job, what Avian Unit depended on her for. Identify the means.
Fine. The means. What could she do to bring back those memories? Once Raptor had finished looking for the technology behind the implant she suspected Blackout had buried in her brain, she’d ask him to search through the slush of data for mentions of Blackout missions on planets with two moons. She was certain now that the two-mooned planet from her dreams had been the point where everything had started going wrong. A real thing, not just some interpretive nightmare.