by James Knapp
His heart.
As I watched it slowly beat, more words appeared.
Primary systems active.
Secondary systems active.
Tertiary systems active.
More messages scrolled by, but they were too fast. After a few seconds, they stopped and vanished. A new message appeared there.
(1)Communication(s) pending.
Displaying.
Database synchronization pending.
Updating . . .
Header mismatch: Valle, Rebecca. Murder.
Header mismatch: Craig, Harold. Murder.
Header mismatch: Shanks, Doyle. Murder.
Removing . . .
Removing . . .
Removing . . .
Header mismatch: Ott, Zoe. Experimentation.
Adding . . .
Database synchronization complete.
(0)Communication(s) pending.
The words faded as I watched the sleeping man. Those thick scars covered his neck, shoulder, and chest. There was a pattern to them. I leaned over him, moving my face closer. My breath made the hairs on his chest stand on end. Up close, I could see what it was that caused the scars. They were teeth marks, many sets of human teeth marks.
Something cold and hard pressed underneath my jaw. I heard a metallic click, and knew that sound; it was a pistol’s hammer. I raised my hands, my face still near his chest.
“Back away,” he told me. His eyes had opened. I hadn’t seen the gun or noticed him move. I moved back from him slowly. He forced my chin toward the ceiling with the gun. I sat back on my heels while he held me there and sat up on the sofa.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” I said.
“I’m not afraid,” he said, but the pulsing in his chest said otherwise.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know where I am.”
I looked at his face, and thought he would shoot me. His eyelids drooped, but there was fear in his eyes, like he had lost his senses.
A memory swam up from the sea of lights; it opened like a portal to show the inside, where this man knelt over me. Blood dripped from his hand as he held something sharp. A pair of scissors was pointed at my chest. The portal went dark, and shrank to a point of light that flew back to join the rest.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” I told him.
He stared at me until his eyes seemed to clear. He eased the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb and then moved the gun away.
“What are you going to do with me?” I asked. He didn’t respond to that.
“Do you remember me, Faye?”
Points of light sparkled through the memory field. I’d known him for a long time, and very well, though he seemed like a stranger. One light displayed our fingers, laced together. I remembered the warmth of his palm in mine.
“Yes, I know you. You’re Nico.”
His heart sped up and he said, “Do you remember what happened?”
I scanned the sea of lights, but I wasn’t sure. It was difficult to make sense of them all. He watched me, waiting.
“I don’t know how I got here.”
“It’s okay,” he told me after a while. “Someone is coming to help you retrieve them.”
“What do you mean? Retrieve what?”
“Your memories. You learned something . . . just before. You were in your apartment. You thought our cases were related . . . do you remember that?”
I did remember. Spots had formed on the floor, like blood but darker. They dripped down from the thin air. The air rippled, and a dark figure appeared. It had been right there, watching us the whole time. It raised the pistol it held in its right hand . . .
“It killed him first,” I whispered.
“You weren’t the target. It was your partner. You just got in the way.”
Doyle had been about to tell me something. . . . What was he going to say?
“How can you be sure that’s true?”
“We recovered a partial list of names from an illegally trafficked revivor. The list contained four names: the victims of the last three murders, and that of your partner, Doyle Shanks. I’m sorry, Faye. I didn’t know who he was.”
“But why was he on the list?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. What do you remember about him? Who was he?”
Again, light sparkled through the field of memories. I had known Doyle Shanks for a long, long time. I worked with him every day. We tracked the killer who finally killed us both. He was with me the night before Mae Zhu’s death, and dropped me off at my place. The next morning he’d called to—
The associated memory had come forth. It hung suspended over the rest of them, opened up like a portal. The images from that night were beyond it. He dropped me off; then I saw a distortion, like a glitch left by a splice. I slept, then was awakened by the strange call.
“What’s the matter?” Nico asked.
“The memory,” I said. “It’s wrong.”
“Wrong?”
I focused on the memory distortion. The glitch tied the two memories together, concealing a missing piece. I concentrated, peering through the strange gap. I saw Shanks drop me off at my place, and then . . .
Faye, I wish it didn’t have to be like this.
Shanks sat on the edge of my bed, getting dressed. I lay on my stomach, nude and still sweaty.
Me too.
When I said it, I was upset. I felt sick. He was rough and left me feeling sore and used. He smiled, though, like I had just agreed with him.
I do care for you, he said. He brushed my hair behind my ear with one hand. Why had I agreed to this?
This was a mistake, I said.
No, it wasn’t.
It was.
His eyes narrowed, and he leaned in very close. The warm brown of both his eyes was blotted out as his pupils dilated.
No, it wasn’t, he growled.
The anxiety left me, bleeding away. In its place, I felt relaxed. Happy, even.
This never happened, he said, no longer looking at me. I left you at the door and I never came inside. I have never been inside your apartment.
He got up and left me lying there in bed. He never looked back at me.
“I remembered it wrong,” I said to Nico. His heart went even faster.
“Zhang’s Syndrome,” he said to himself.
Through the memory’s portal, I studied the gap. What I saw there wasn’t real. It was a dream I’d had a long time ago. My brain’s decay had overlapped the memories. I couldn’t tell a dream from reality.
The portal closed and shrank to a point of light. I noticed then that it stood out from the rest. It appeared different somehow. It was dimmer than the rest. When it rejoined the rest in the field of lights, I saw more that were like it.
I drew one closer and peered inside of it. The memory itself was inconsequential, but the same strange glitch was there.
They’ve all been corrupted. . . . None of them are real. . . .
I gazed down on the sea of information. When I did, I picked out more tainted memories, more than I could imagine. They were spread through the others like a cancer.
How many of them weren’t real? I saw ten, then twenty, then one hundred. . . . There were more than I could count.
“I remembered it wrong,” I whispered again, while the man named Nico just stood there and stared.
The life that I’d known was gone.
Zoe Ott—Unknown
“Zoe, wake up,” a woman’s voice said.
I opened my eyes and found myself slouched in a folding chair behind a metal table. The walls were concrete, painted green, and at the far end, the overhead light was on but there was no one there. Before I could stop myself, I began to cry. I didn’t want to be there anymore.
“He needs you. Wake up,” the voice said. It was the dead woman, the one who got stabbed. She moved into the light where I could see her.
“Go away.”
“He called you, remember? You need to go to him.”
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Tears were blurring my vision, but I could see something shifting at the far end of the room, under the overhead light. It was like a heat ripple or something, a distortion.
“You need to wake up right now!”
When I squinted, the ripples in the air took the shape of a person, like the outline of a big man. Before I could get a better look, they disappeared again.
“Zoe!”
The images faded as I snapped out of it, gasping in air. Over the years, I had gotten used to waking up and not knowing exactly where I was, but this time something was wrong.
When I gasped, something that was touching me pulled away all of a sudden. Someone had a hand on one of my legs and was dragging me. I was lying on what might have been a chair or a sofa, but it wasn’t mine. A breeze cut through the stuffy, warm air and blew over my face; it was outside air.
I opened my eyes and saw it was dark, but I could see the city lights through a window above me and I heard one of the monorails clacking by over the howl of the wind.
Startled, I tried to sit up, and my arms and legs hit something as I flailed. I was in an enclosed space, and there was someone leaning over me. Someone big, with sour, smelly breath.
Kicking with one leg, I scooted up until my back was to the window behind me, and I realized I was in the backseat of a car. I was bundled up for going outside, but my parka was unzipped and my purse was lying open on the seat beside me.
When I jumped, the man in the backseat with me recoiled but he didn’t leave. He was holding my ID card in one hand and looking down at me uncertainly. He was bundled up in dirty clothes and a thick, dirty jacket. He had a thick black beard, and a cap pulled down over his hair.
“What are you doing?” I slurred.
With my ID still in his hand, he hooked my purse on his thumb and used his other hand to grab my ankle. He gripped it hard, and I felt myself being pulled from the car.
There wasn’t any time to think about it; I stared at him, and the city lights all bled together as the backseat got as bright as daylight. As the colors leeched out of everything, the lights above the man’s head became visible, prickling oranges and greens and reds. Anger, fear, guilt, and greed all mixed together.
Reaching out, I changed them, and the grip on my ankle relaxed.
“Stop,” I told him, and he did.
Still sitting half in and half out of the backseat of the car, I looked around for the first time and saw the car was parked under one of the monorail junctions where several tracks merged and then branched back out, forming a concrete canopy above. Everything was covered in graffiti, and the ground was littered with trash and pieces of brown ice that formed on the rails, then crumbled off whenever one of the trains passed. There was traffic in the distance, but we were parked away from the well-used streets and sidewalks.
“Let go of me,” I said, pulling my leg until he dropped it. I zipped up my coat and scooted across the seat, out the door so that I was standing in front of him.
“Put my ID and anything else you took back in my purse.”
He did as he was told.
“Now give it back.”
He held it out and I snatched it out of his hand. Once I was outside, I could see the car was actually a taxicab. I got a better look at the guy and saw that he also had a laminated badge clipped to his jacket, displaying his license information. He must have been the driver.
“How did I get here?” I asked him.
“You hailed my cab,” he said. “You told me to bring you here.”
“I told you to bring me out here?”
“Well, not here exactly. You had the directions on a phone message. You played it for me and told me to bring you there.”
“So, what were you doing?”
“You stopped moving. I thought you passed out.”
“And you decided to rob me?”
“You wouldn’t move. I thought maybe you were dead.”
He was going to dump me. He was going to take my things and dump me under a monorail platform.
“Stand there,” I said, “and don’t move.”
My phone wasn’t in my purse or in my pocket, but I saw its green signal light glowing softly from the floor of the cab’s backseat. I leaned in and picked it up.
Pulling one glove off with my teeth, I managed to get it open and punch in the voice- mail code, despite the fact that my finger was shaking like crazy. Putting it to my ear, I clamped my other hand down over the one holding the phone to keep it still.
“Zoe, this is Agent Wachalowski . . .”
I smiled and felt little pricks of pain as my chapped lips cracked. That was right: he called. As I listened, he gave me an address where to meet him.
“. . . I’m sorry to call you out here, especially at night. If you’re not comfortable, call me back and I’ll come get you. . . .”
I climbed back outside where the cabbie was still standing, breath streaming out of his nostrils. I held up the phone so he could hear.
“Is that where I asked you to take me?”
“Yeah.”
“How long was I out?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
Nico might still be there, although why he was there and why he wanted me to meet him in the middle of nowhere was beyond me. Why I had decided to even go was beyond me right at that moment too, but for whatever reason, I had gone that far.
“Get back in the cab,” I told the man, “and bring me to the address.”
“You’re here.”
“This is the middle of nowhere.”
“Down there,” he said, pointing. There was a chain-link fence hanging open down at the bottom of a concrete slope under the monorail. A rusted sign hung from it.
GUARDIAN METRO STORAGE
SEGURO. SECURE. BLOQUE.
“It’s for storage.”
“That’s the address you told me to bring you,” he said. “What do you want?”
I glanced back at the fence. It looked like it led to a ramp that went underground.
“Just get back in the cab and leave.”
“What about my fare?”
“Go!” I snapped as the lights surged for a second. He didn’t say anything else; he just lumbered back around the car.
As the engine started up and he pulled away, I made my way down to the fence. It looked like normally it was locked, but now it was hanging open. Beyond it, a concrete ramp led down under the pavement, the way dimly lit by a single remaining light. I followed it down to a heavy-looking metal door with a keypad mounted next to it, and a glass window to the right that was dark. A strip of printed tape stuck over the keypad said AFTER HOURSENTER CODE.
The message had given the address and then “8C 1101,” which I thought was an apartment unit or something, but maybe it was the pass code to get in?
I punched in the combination and sure enough, there was a beeping sound and the door thumped and then squealed open with a sound that put my teeth on edge. Behind the door was a dingy, rickety- looking elevator car. I climbed in and the door slid shut.
The numbers started at 0 and went down to 8. I pushed the button for 8, causing it to light up halfheartedly, then flicker on and off as the car made its way down. As the metal walls of the elevator rattled and groaned, I could almost feel the surface getting farther and farther away. What was he doing down in a place like this, and why did he want me there?
The doors opened and I stepped out. After they closed again, it got very quiet. I stood there and listened for a minute, but all I could hear was the occasional drip of water. The musty corridor met a junction about ten feet in front of me, lit by fluorescent bulbs behind corroding metal cages.
“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed once, but no one answered.
A sign at the junction said A-I with an arrow pointing right, and J-R with an arrow pointing left. I took the right, and found the door labeled C.
Looking back the way I came, I began to wonder what the hell I was doing there, and reached into my p
urse for the flask. It was still half full, so I finished it off and put it back. When it hit my stomach, my forehead beaded up with cold sweat and I felt as though I might have to sit down, but after a minute it passed. This had to be the place. Whatever he wanted, I was supposed to go to him. I was supposed to help him.
I put my hand on the door and leaned against the frozen metal as my mind opened and what little light there was brightened. After a few seconds, I saw it; somewhere behind the door was a presence, a single consciousness. He was there, after all, and he was alone.
Before I could knock on the door, it opened, and he was standing there in the doorway. He was wearing his suit pants and shoes, but he had taken off his shirt and was wearing just a sleeveless undershirt. He must have had some kind of heater working inside, because hot air was drifting out from behind him. He looked down at me with his eyelids drooping. He looked out of it.
“You came,” he said.
That outfit he had on, it was the one from the green concrete room when the dead woman first showed him to me. I could see the scar branching out over his right shoulder.
“Yeah.”
He stared at me a minute longer, then took a step back, giving me room to get by. He looked drunk or drugged.
“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked.
“Just the cab driver,” I said, slipping through the door. It was nothing but a big concrete box, filled with old junk. As I looked around, I saw furniture underneath plastic tarps, stacks of boxes, and other stuff filling up most of the available space.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“I had to,” he said.
“Had to?”
As messed up as I was, I could see something was really weird about him. I hadn’t been around him that much, but he was acting totally different from before, like he was a totally different person. His eyes looked dull and his expression didn’t change when he talked.
“What happened?” I asked. When his aura phased into view, there was a thin membrane of light rippling under everything else, like a torn parachute falling from the sky. There was a bright cord tethering the membrane to someplace deep inside of him. I recognized that.