He starts. Gets up and stands a few feet away, rubbing his hands on the black cloth of his pants. He has a bit of a beard, and it suits him. When did he grow a beard? The glass key is still around his neck.
I find I really can move my body, though I’m unbelievably sore and stiff. I swing my feet over the edge of the mattress, evaluate being upright. My head spins and I let it clear. The windows are high up, like a resting room’s should be, but there’s light coming in, pink and gold. Sunrising. I am missing something. Gray watches me.
“You’ve been sick,” he says.
I decide that being sick is terrible. There’s a pitcher of water beside the bed and I try to lift it, but I need both hands. Gray helps, handing me the mug when it’s full. I can only drink a little. Sunrising. How can it be sunrising? My gaze darts up. The Forgetting.
“What day is it?” I demand.
“I don’t know.”
He seems embarrassed about that. A little angry. I reach for his hand, to say something more, but he walks away, to the other side of the small room. And then I see his back. Burns. Deep ones, like he’s been spattered with boiling rain.
“Your back … ” I start to say. Then the memories come. Janis taking us to the underground room, being tied to the post. Gray screaming.
He turns his back to the wall. “It doesn’t hurt as much now,” he says, defensive. He looks at me. Looks away again. Then he says, “What’s your name?”
The shock of that question is like a blow, and somewhere in my head I am six years old, hearing my mother say, Who are you? I remember the white powder now, spraying up from the broken glass on the floor. I did it. I made him forget. I put an arm across my stomach.
“Where is your book?” I ask.
His brows come down, confused. I swivel on the edge of the bed, look around at the floor, at the corners. But there’s no pack. No books at all. For either of us. I put my head in my hands. I’m shaking. Of course she took our books.
“Hey, you should … ” Gray comes back across the room. “I think you should lie back down.”
He doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t want to touch me. Time-out, I want to say. Free question … But Gray won’t know any of the answers now. I try to slow my breath. “My name is Nadia,” I tell him.
He sits where he had been when I woke up, on the floor, getting down slowly, to spare the skin of his back. After a few minutes he says, “So … you know me?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “Your name is Gray.”
He nods, jaw clenched. “I thought it must be. That’s what you called me. In your sleep, but you might’ve been … you were really sick.” He sounds as shaky as I feel.
“You’re the glassblower’s son,” I say. “You work with your father, Nash, and your mother is Delia. She’s a planter. You’re nineteen. You’ve finished school.”
“Nash,” he repeats. “And Delia. You’re sure?”
That sounds like what he asked me that first day at the waterfall. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“What’s happened to me?”
“You’ve forgotten,” I say. I’m holding my voice and my hands steadier, but there is one scalding tear running down my face, and it’s making him uncomfortable, embarrassed. “You’ve lost your memories.”
“When … I woke up, it was dark and I was tied down, and … ”
In terrible pain, I think.
“… and they cut me loose and brought me here, and you were on the bed. And that’s almost all I know. A girl came once and cleaned my back. Food and water come every now and then.”
Then we’re still in Janis’s house. “How many days have we been here?”
He shakes his head, such a familiar gesture. But his tone is unfamiliar when he says, “I don’t know. Food has come four times.”
My head is starting to clear, facts falling into their proper lines. Janis said that for a rare person the spores that cause the Forgetting can stay in the blood instead of the brain, and memories are retained. But too many spores, and it can be too much of a fight. I remember when I was a child, after the last Forgetting, how sore I was, how much I slept. I think I must have been sick. This time I think maybe I was nearly dead. Janis had said that bottle of live spores was enough to make half the city forget, and then, Oh, Nadia the Dyer’s daughter. It seems that you are a liar, too.
So she knows how I react to the spores now. She knows I remember. That the code isn’t forgotten. It’s probably why we’re alive. So she can drag it out of me as soon as I’m awake. I have to know what day it is. We have to get out.
I stand, like I’m going to run. But I’m not going to run. I’ve never felt so weak. I start a slow trek across the room, toward the door. I’m wearing someone’s old sleeping dress.
“It’s locked,” Gray says.
I try it anyway. The door is heavy, sparkling metal. And then I have an urgent need for a latrine. I must look like I’m searching because Gray points at a blanket in the corner, hanging over a cord strung from window to window. There’s a bucket behind it. This is mortifying, but necessary.
When I come out Gray is as far away as he can get, his wounded back turned. I sit on the bed again, exhausted, and he turns around, leaning against the wall, though not letting his skin touch. It’s painful to see him so at odds with himself. To see him so uncertain.
“You’ve had to take care of me,” I say. “All this time. I’m sorry.” I’m guessing he strung that blanket. It matches the one on the bed. He shrugs a shoulder.
“Shouldn’t have to apologize for that.”
And that sounded a little more like Gray.
Then I say, “Could I look at your back? You said someone tended it, but … ” Obviously he can’t do anything about it by himself.
He hesitates, but he comes and sits on the edge of the mattress. The swelling on his face is gone, as is all the bruising he must have had after the beating he took from Li and Reese.
“Do your ribs hurt?” I ask. He shakes his head.
Looking at his burns hurts me intensely, then makes me so angry I can feel my face getting hot. That blue liquid has eaten round holes into his skin, one or two places streaked, where it ran. He’s going to scar. Badly. There’s a cloth beside the water pitcher, a torn piece of blanket.
“Is this clean?” I ask.
“Clean as it gets.”
We’re both filthy. I pour a little water from the glass and very gently clean his back, working around where each wound has run and dried on his skin, careful not to touch the burn. He flinches, but doesn’t say anything. I can see that he is tense, though. Uncomfortable with me. Now that I’m looking closer I realize that some of these wounds have healed more than others. In fact, there seem to be several stages of healing.
“Could I see your hand?” I ask slowly. “The one with the burn?”
He lifts his hand so I can see the back of it. The first place Janis burned is well on its way to healing, like half the burns on his back. But there are others not nearly as healed, a few more seem to be just now closed and dry. And then I know, and my breath comes hard, my weakened body not quite capable of dealing with my level of rage.
She has burned him again. At least twice. And he doesn’t remember, because she’s made him forget it. But why? If you’re ruthless and cruel and you want something, wouldn’t it make more sense to let him remember and dread the next session? She has to think he’s forgotten the code, and it can’t be leverage, because I wasn’t awake. I set down the cloth and lie down before I fall, bunching the blanket beneath my head.
Gray moves immediately back to his spot on the floor. I hadn’t meant for him to go. It pains me that he wants to. I try to think, step by step, about what happened in that room. Being tied, all Janis’s eager talking, her questions. And what had she put inside me with that needle? Other than a sting and a burn when it went in, I never knew it was there. Experimenting, she’d said. Collecting data. Then she’d asked me my earliest memory, and I’d wondered if she poisoned Anna, and
…
I rub an aching temple. Janis knows that Anna was gone before the last Forgetting. She knows everything like that about our family. Why was she only interested, not surprised, when I said Anna’s name? That had been me giving in to my temper. It should have been a mistake. And then Janis had deliberately used the name Lisbeth.
I sit up again, realizations tumbling down like stones. I’d thought Janis was probing to see if I remembered, like her. But what if she was trying to determine if what she put inside of me had worked? To see what it made me remember? Janis doesn’t just have Forgetting, I realize. She has the cure. Something to make us remember, and that’s exactly what she’s been using on Gray. Making him remember, burning him for the code, making him forget again, repeat the process, and won’t he be confused and docile in the meantime? I close my eyes, my fury of a moment ago nothing compared to this new feeling in my chest. Cold, black hatred.
When I open my eyes I find Gray staring at me, watching me think. He looks away. I pull my knees up, set my chin on them. Maybe having that cure in my blood is what kept me alive. Either way, we are in trouble, just as soon as she knows I’m awake.
“Gray.” His name startles him. “If someone comes in I’m going to pretend to be asleep. I don’t want them to know I’m awake yet, okay?” I’m so tired it might not even be a lie.
Gray nods, brows down, eyes on the floor again. I want to stroke his head, touch that unfamiliar hair on his face. I am going to fill him so full of that cure. Just as soon as we get out of this room. “Who brings the food?” I ask. “Man? Woman?”
“Once a girl. Mostly a man. He’s big. Older, hair slicked back … ”
Reese. No help there. I look at the room, almost bare of furnishings. “Think,” I say. “What could we use in here as a weapon? If we cut down that cord with the blanket, if you were behind the door when the man comes in, do you think you could get it around his neck?”
Gray’s eyes move from the hanging blanket to me, open a little wider. And for the first time I see a hint of the glassblower’s son in the corners of his mouth. “You know, suddenly it’s a lot less boring in here.”
“Could you do it?”
“I think so. I don’t know.”
He looks tired. How has he been sleeping? Certainly not on his back. Maybe facedown on the matting. “Do you want to come up here?”
He shakes his head.
“Don’t be stupid. You’d probably rather be on your stomach, and not on the floor.” I scoot as far as I can to where the bed meets the corner of the walls, to show him how much space he can have.
He doesn’t argue anymore, just gets up, scowling. I can tell that it hurts. He gets his knees on the mattress, stretches out on his stomach. Even dirty, hurt, tired, and not remembering me, I think he is beautiful. Why can’t I ever save him? I thought I’d helped save his book during the Forgetting. I thought I’d saved him from pain in the underground room. Instead I gave him what he feared most, and more pain. Guilt is more than a bitter taste. I think it’s a sickness; it makes me ache all over. He lays his head on his arms, facing away from me, while I huddle in the corner, cold stone at my back.
Gray says, “Someone hurt me on purpose, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Will they do it again?”
I don’t want to say, because the answer is yes. She will use him to break me. Again. And again. And it will probably work. “We have to get out,” I say.
He thinks about this. “I want to ask you another question.”
“You can ask me any question.”
He takes a breath. “What are you … to me?”
What should I say? You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, the best thing that ever happened to me. You lied for me and suffered for me and wrote my name in your book. I settle on the simplest of the truths. “You loved me.”
“I don’t remember that.”
I know. I close my eyes.
“Sorry,” he adds.
“Not something you should have to apologize for,” I whisper. He turns his head on his hands.
“Where did you get that?”
His gaze is on my necklace. I pull it over my mass of tangled, half-braided hair, and let him hold the blue glass. The string is bloodstained, though I think the cut on my neck is nearly healed. “Do you remember it?” I ask.
“No. But I looked at it, while you were asleep, and knew exactly how I would make it.”
I nod. The Forgetting is so unfair. I wish he was remembering me instead.
“You said I made glass. Did I make this?”
“You did. And the key around your neck.” I think of him that night, sweaty in front of the furnace, when I was still trying to resist him, and failing miserably. He puts the necklace back in my hand, lays his head down. I see one of his hands, stretching and clenching. I wonder if he’s remembering being tied. “Nadia,” he says, trying out the name. “Forgetting is awful.”
The lock on our door clicks. I drop onto the mattress, shut my eyes as the door opens, creaking on its hinges. I hear footsteps. They sound female, though I wonder how I can tell—maybe because of the sandal heels, or because they sound so light and small. The footsteps stop beside the bed. Gray doesn’t speak.
“Nadia!” someone whispers.
My eyes fly open. It’s Genivee.
“You’re awake!” she says, clearly relieved.
I sit up. “What are you doing here?”
“Getting you out!”
“Who is this?” Gray asks.
“We have to go,” says Genivee. “Can you walk? You’ve been really sick, but Liliya says you’ll get better quick once you start.”
“What does Liliya know about it?”
“Please,” says Genivee with a roll of her eyes. I’m already half off the mattress, trying to stay decent while I get to the edge. “What happened to him?” she asks me. “Has he forgotten already?”
“Yes.”
She looks at Gray again. I can see she wants to ask about his back, but doesn’t. “Grab what you need,” she says. “Do you have any shoes?”
Gray shrugs. I don’t have any, either. “Where are your books?” she asks. She looks grim when I shake my head, and pulls me to my feet.
“Genivee, what day is it?”
She stills, and for the first time I get a good look at her. Her eyes are large, as always, but there’s something different in them. Fear. This, and the pink light outside the window, is making my pulse speed. She says, “It’s the Forgetting.”
“How long?”
“Five hours. Maybe less. If you weren’t awake”—Genivee tilts her head at Gray—“he was going to carry you out.”
“Who are you?” Gray asks again.
“Her sister.”
“I thought you were the girl with the soup.”
“Just the once,” says Genivee. “Now move. Reese is coming back.”
I move, hand on Genivee’s shoulder, weak, but stronger than the last time I tried. I look at Gray. “Stay with me.” I’m not sure for which of our sakes I’m saying it. He looks uncertain, but he follows.
“We don’t have to go far,” Genivee whispers.
She sticks her head out the door, wary, and we creep into a hallway, where the matting is not only colorful but thick and soft underfoot, making our careful footsteps silent. The ceiling is tall white stone stretching upward, lit by a single hanging lamp. Genivee shuts the door we just walked through, locks it with a key from a string around her neck. I have no idea what’s happening here, how or why Genivee could have a key to a room in the Council House. Then Genivee motions for us to follow her, past a stairwell, to a door at the end of the hall.
We slip inside, and instantly I’m reminded of the images I saw of Earth. Too much of everything. A raised bed piled high with blankets that are soft and thick and very bright, low windows showing the fields and the sunrising, a row of plants beneath them, pinched and clipped into harsh shapes. And things, little things, assortments of od
ds and ends that can have no function, piled in heaps or arranged in patterns over all the surfaces. The air is heavy, perfumed with flowers I can’t see. I hate it.
“Janis’s room,” Genivee whispers, quietly shutting the door. “She’s been sick, too, but not as sick as you. She only got up a week ago. She’s gone now, to the Forgetting. And to see about the granary.”
“What about the granary?”
“Eshan, Veronika, Michael, that whole group took over the granary after the second bell. Barricaded themselves inside. There’s been fighting … ”
Take the granary, wake up after the Forgetting in charge of the food supply, and the Council will have to listen to them. But I don’t think Janis has gone to do anything about that at all. I think she’s gone to her tower. To observe. To see the city “weed” itself. Gray has turned toward the wall beside us, where drawings surrounded by colored squares cover almost the entire surface. I see his back, and the hatred burns cold inside my chest.
“We’re waiting for Reese to check the room and run off looking for you,” Genivee goes on. She has an ear against the door. “And then Liliya will come get us when she’s sure we can get out. And I’m really glad you’re not dead, Nadia. Here.” She tosses a bag I hadn’t even noticed she was carrying. There’s clean leggings and a tunic inside, and a shirt for Gray.
“Genivee, who’s with Mother? Is she—”
But Genivee turns, waving a frantic hand at us. Heavy, muffled footsteps are coming down the hall, followed by the sound of a key in the lock of the other room. There’s no way I can see to lock Janis’s door without a key, and we don’t have it. I turn, searching for anything we can use, and see something like an enormous, long knife hanging to one side of the drawings, just beyond Gray. I take it from its hooks. The other door opens, a pause, and then running steps come down the hall.
Genivee grabs the door latch, ready to push up with all her weight to keep it from being turned. Gray takes two silent steps and puts his hands over hers, adding his strength. I hold the long knife, not sure what I would do with it, except that Reese, Janis, none of them will be touching Gray again. I look down the length of the knife. Never mind. I know exactly what I’d do with it. I see the moment the latch moves, when Reese tries the door, but he doesn’t try it very hard. He must assume it’s locked. We hear him run down the hall, footsteps disappearing downward.
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