“Delia?” he asks.
I see the moment when it hits her, the realization that Gray has forgotten her. Her face twists, the hurt evident in every line. I know this feeling. Well. Nash puts a hand on her back.
“I’m sorry … ” Gray says.
“Where’s your book?” Delia turns her eyes on me before he can answer. “What did you do?”
I wish I could say I didn’t do anything. But this … I did this. And none of them will forgive me for it. And how can I blame them? “I’ll give you a minute,” I say to Gray. He narrows his eyes at me.
“Where are you going?”
“Just over there, to see about my mother and sisters,” I lie. I move away. I don’t want him to see me cry. And I don’t want him to know what I’m about to do. Liliya is instantly by my side. “Is Mother all right?” I ask her. “Genivee?”
“As right as they can be. Where’s your book?”
“Lost.” I left it on the speaking platform in my pack.
“Did you know this place was stocked? Blankets, and food. Not enough but … ”
Enough for a hundred and fifty, I think. How long had she meant to keep them in here? Until everyone else was dead? Many people are dead. Gray is where I left him, his mother trying to look at his back, but he doesn’t want to let her. He’s stiff, arms crossed. If it’s horrible to be the only one who remembers, I can also see that it’s horrible to be the only one who forgets. Oh, yes. Guilt is a sickness. Jonathan’s yells are echoing in the dome above our heads. I have to go.
“I need you to distract Rachel the Supervisor,” I whisper.
Liliya looks at me. She has a smudge on her cheek, as if someone touched her with a bloodstained hand. Then she glances toward Rachel and throws back her head.
Liliya pulls Rachel the Supervisor away to talk about organizing the people in the hidden room, and as soon as she goes I sneak up behind Jonathan, half-hidden by the bookshelf he sits against.
“I’ve come to help you forget,” I whisper behind him. “Keep yelling.”
I can feel that Jonathan hears me, because his body goes straighter. He continues his constant burble of begging to forget.
“Is it safe to open the door to the cave?” I hiss. He nods his head up and down, still talking, and I slit the string around his wrists with a sharp piece of broken glass, retrieved, unfortunately, from my foot. When his hands are free I give him the glass, let him slit the tie around his feet. Then I help him up. Not slowly, just unobtrusively, we make our way to the column. I don’t think anyone has realized there’s a door here yet. I crack it open and we slip inside, shutting it against the first hue and cry. The realization that Jonathan is gone.
He’s off down the dim stairs of the cave, familiar to him, I can see, a well-traveled path. I run after him, the rock slippery beneath my bare, cut feet, down into the cavern. The water rushes outward, the bright, waving plants covering the walls. I wonder about those plants now, pulling things we can’t see out of the air. Now I think that might include spores.
“Jonathan!” I say, trying to catch up to him. “Jonathan!”
He pauses, surrounded by the bright, bizarre plants, looking back half-afraid, like maybe my letting him go is a trick. I listen; but except for the flow of water, the silence feels deep, stretching in every direction. I don’t know if they saw us going into that column or not.
“You are going to let me forget?” Jonathan asks. “You won’t ever make me remember?”
Now it’s my turn to pause. Why does he keep asking me that? I can’t make anyone remember, even if I wanted to, I’d told him. And he had said, Why not?
Jonathan starts off down the cavern, me trotting to keep up. The soft bluish light of the glowworms is only just enough light to see by.
“Wait, Jonathan. Please. I have to ask you a question. I broke all the bottles of Remembering on the shelf. Is there another way to make someone remember?”
He looks back over his shoulder in the strange blue light, smiles at me, a little crooked and funny. I wonder if this is his real smile. And then he says, “Anna.”
I’m so surprised I nearly lose my footing. But of course if he has his memories, he might remember Anna. “What about her, Jonathan? Do you know how she died?” I’m stumbling to keep up with him.
“She killed Anna,” Jonathan says, matter-of-fact. “With too much Forgetting. Your family … some of you remember.” Jonathan laughs, without humor. “She used to say how good it was that Anna died. Because it helped her to understand. To make the cure. Vats and vats of it … ”
“Vats?” I pick up my pace, heart beginning to speed to the rhythm of my feet. “Jonathan, can you show me?”
He stops, looks back at me, a little frightened.
“I don’t want to use it on you. I promise.”
He nods, smiles at me. And I do think it’s his real one. But when we reach the passage that goes under the walls, I catch the faintest whiff of sweet. I grab the end of my tunic, put it over my face, but Jonathan begins to wander. I take his hand, talk to him, try to get him to tell me what he meant by “vats,” if that’s where the cure is, but when we reach the door to the laboratory I have a slight headache, and Jonathan almost doesn’t remember his name. I open the door, the smell of the Forgetting is everywhere, and Jonathan of the Council is gone.
I keep the tunic over my face, keep his hand in mine. The lamps have gone out, and there are no windows, but the door from the stairway is open, spilling down a little light. I tell Jonathan his name, tell him he’s in his house. He’s so docile. Not worried, or even upset. I send him up the stairs and tell him to stay there until someone comes for him. He thanks me. I can’t go up with him. My head is splitting open. I’m sick.
I get a flame going. And that’s when I see Reese, right where we left him, in a spray of broken glass. Cold. Dead. Gray must have hit him hard, or just right. I turn away from him and search. Quickly. Before I get too sick to walk back.
I find a cloth wrapped around several needle tubes lying on the floor, what Gray must have dropped when Reese came in the room, and all sorts of bottles and vials. I’m very careful with these, remembering what that blue liquid could do to skin. My body hurts, joints aching and sore. I wish Jonathan had said something besides the word “vat.” I don’t know what I’m looking for, except that it’s clear. And then I think maybe I do.
On top of the counter, in plain view, is a pot with a lid, connected to twisting tubes and open bottles of glass, little pans of fuel for flame, things I don’t have the first notion how to use. But when I lift the lid there’s a smell—a sharp, fresh smell that clears my head, the odor I noticed when the shelf fell on Reese and the bottles broke around him. What I smelled every time I rubbed the leaves of that plant I brought down from the mountain, the one I gave to Delia.
I draw some of the liquid into one of the needle tubes straight from the pot. I have to drop my tunic to do it, my pulse throbbing, stabbing at my temples. I hold my breath. It’s harder than I think to plunge a needle into my own skin. Something inside me insists that I shouldn’t. I do it anyway, pushing the needle hard into my leg, and probably not fast enough. It bleeds, but I can feel the sting of the clear liquid getting inside me. I breathe through my tunic and wait, not looking, but also not quite able to turn my back to the body on the floor. If that was Janis’s poison I just shot inside me then Reese and I will probably lie here a long time. But I think it isn’t. I think my headache is easing.
I fill the rest of the needles and hurry out of the underground room, back through the cave, every step I take stronger. When I reach the waving plants I stop, set down my cloth with the needles, take down my hair, unbraid what’s still braided, run my fingers through the tangles, and then slip into the rushing river. It’s warm, as I suspected, but with a strong current. I have to be careful. Hang on to the water-slicked rocks. But I also can’t risk bringing any spores back into the inner room of the Archives. I even rinse the cloth and the needles.
&n
bsp; When I creep back in through the column I’m dripping, and everyone I know is angry with me. Anson is talking to Liliya and Genivee, all three of them stopping their conversation to stare when I come back through the door. “In a minute,” I say, pushing past them. Rose has Gray to one side, his shirt up, tending his back while Delia watches. They’re all three looking at me like they wish I’d just stayed wherever I went to, though I think Rose’s anger might have something to do with the wounds she’s washing.
“Did you just turn that murderer loose?” Delia says at the same time Gray tells me, “You said you weren’t going to leave.” I ignore both of them. I’m leaving a puddle of cave water on the floor. I hold out a hand to Gray.
“Come with me,” I say. “Now.”
We are made of our memories. I’ve read those words every day of my life. Today I decided that they’re true. We are who we have been. But it’s my choice today that is the memory of tomorrow. It’s my choice that determines what I will become. Not the memories of the past.
NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
IN THE BLANK PAGES OF
NADIA THE PLANTER’S DAUGHTER
BOOK 1
I take him back to the bookshelves, to the other side, where I untied Jonathan, and when I look back I see Rose put a hand on Delia’s arm, stopping her from coming after us.
“Sit,” I tell him.
He does, and I sit down cross-legged in front of him, laying my wet bundle to one side. And least we’re slightly away from the crowd here. But now I don’t know exactly what to say. I have to give him a choice, and it’s coming hard.
“You are so irritating,” Gray says. “You’re always saying one thing and doing the other, and I can’t understand you at all. And then you run off, and I’m so worried, I can’t understand me. Then you come back and I’m mad at you all over again.”
I’ve hardly allowed myself to meet his gaze since he forgot me. It’s been too painful. But I do now. I reach up and touch his face with the unfamiliar beard. And then I lean forward and kiss him, not for long, but for long enough. He pulls back, confused, embarrassed, and a little angry. But not unaffected. I can see it in his face, in the way he breathes. I felt it, when, before he had a chance to think about it, he’d kissed me back.
“Why did you do that?” he asks, voice low.
Because, Glassblower’s son, I want to know if you refuse this cure, if there is any chance you might choose me again. And I think, just maybe, that you might. That somewhere, deep down, you remember me. Just a little.
I don’t answer him with actual words, though. I just open the wet bundle beside us, show him the tubes with the needles. He goes very still.
“Where did you find it?”
“Do you want to remember?” I ask him. “Some of it’s terrible.” My insides clench at the thought of him saying no, then at the thought of him remembering some of the things I’ve done. I watch the smudge of his eyelashes as he thinks.
“Some of it may be bad, but I’m guessing a lot of it isn’t,” he replies, still very quiet. I wonder if he’s thinking about that kiss I just gave him. But he doesn’t say anything else, just pushes up his sleeve. I run my hand over the back of his arm, feeling the skin, trying to find the place I think will hurt the least.
I push the needle in, quicker this time. I watch his face, a slight wince as the liquid goes inside, and try to hold the tube steady. Then I set the empty tube with the others and we wait. We are knee to knee, alone in the small space in a very full and noisy room. Gray leans forward, head in his hands. He’s panting, starting to sweat. I could lay my cheek on his wild hair if I wanted to. I close my eyes, hear him breathe so hard that it’s almost a groan. I wonder what he’s seeing in his mind. If everything comes at once, or if time is running backward for him, like when we played with the images on the wall in the mountain.
His hand comes up, finds the back of my neck. Then he lifts his head, puts his forehead on mine. After another long minute, he says, “Did you go swimming without me, Dyer’s daughter, or is it raining outside?”
I laugh once, but I am crying, water running down my face and all over his scarred arm. I reach up a hand, touch the beard I’m getting used to.
“She told me where the cure was,” Gray says. “Showed me how to use it, how she made it, explained exactly how to remember. Because she was going to make me forget. Because I knew she was going to make me forget, and I knew that as soon as you woke up it was going to be your turn, and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it, because I wouldn’t even know it was coming … ”
I haven’t had time to feel it, but I’m glad she’s dead. “I’m sorry I made you forget,” I say into the curve of his neck. “You really do remember me?”
“I remember the first time I saw you at school,” he says in my ear. “I remember you in the workshop, before the Forgetting, when you hit Jonathan of the Council for trying to take my book and throw it in the furnace. I remember when you slapped my face. I remember watching you play with the honeybees in the south quadrant field when you were ten. I remember the waterfall, and the white room, and when you wrote me down in your book. I remember everything about you.”
“I tried to save you, and I couldn’t save you.” I can never save you.
He strokes my head. “This, Dyer’s daughter, feels very much like being saved.”
“Gray?” This is from Delia, standing behind us now with Nash and Rose.
I lean back, wiping my face while Gray talks to his mother. And when he gets up to hug her I find someone else has come looking for me behind the bookshelves. Anson the Planter is just a meter or so away, my pack in his hand, the one I left below the clock tower. But his eyes are on the needles. Waiting his turn.
Anson is nervous as he rolls up his sleeve, and so am I. All this time I’d wanted my father to remember me, to explain why he did what he did, and now I’m not so sure I want to know. But he does. He’s determined. I plunge in the needle, not daring to look at Anson’s face as the Remembering goes in.
It’s strange to be this close to my father. He has lines on his face I hadn’t noticed before, that I don’t remember. Gray is still near me, facing the opposite direction while he talks to both Nash and Delia. But he is aware of what I’m doing. He offers his hand as soon as I put down the needle. I take it, holding it in my lap. I see the same moment in Anson that I observed in Gray, a few seconds when memories overwhelm, when the images have to be sorted. After that, they seem to run in order, a quick, backward tour through time.
“My name was Raynor,” he whispers, sounding surprised. Then he says, “Anna. Anna was the first … ” I was expecting to hear the name, though not the exact phrase my mother had used. “I took Anna to the Council because we realized she could remember. Just images, here and there. But they were clear. It was amazing.” Anson looks up and I drop my gaze. “What do you remember, Nadia?”
I hold Gray’s hand with both of mine. “Everything. I remember everything.”
He runs a hand over his face. “I didn’t know that was possible. Until today. So you’ve known? All this time?”
I nod.
“Then you listen while I explain,” Anson says.
I blink. He doesn’t sound apologetic. He sounds angry. Bitter. “I took your sister to the Council because I thought it meant something about the Forgetting. That we could learn not to forget. When Janis wanted to talk to Anna I didn’t think a thing of it. I thought it was good … ”
Now I hear the bitterness meld into grief.
“… but then Anna was gone, and they said she’d poisoned herself. I knew it wasn’t right. And your mother … ” Now he tents his hands over his face. “Renata had been struggling, just short bouts at first, nothing I thought was serious, but when Anna was gone from her bed … I went to Gretchen and begged her to let me read Anna’s books.” He looks up suddenly. “Gretchen is my sister.”
Aunt Gretchen. I hadn’t expected that. And she broke the rules for her brother. I hadn’
t expected that, either.
“Anna wrote that Janis had put a needle into her arm, asked about her great-grandfather and heirlooms, but that her mother had told her it was a secret, to never tell, and then I knew exactly what she meant. Renata’s bracelet, from her father. Anna had it on her when we found her, wound beneath the string in her hair.”
The code. My sister was wearing it when she died.
“Anna also wrote that Janis had asked her about Nadia. Not you,” he says, “but who you were named for, Renata’s sister, lost to a Forgetting when they were children. I read Nadia’s books, too. And she had memories as well. Talks with Janis. And then she was just … gone. Something was wrong. People with memories were not surviving, and memories were cropping up all through the women of Renata’s family. In my girls, and, I suspected, in Renata, too. It was why she was confused. And what could I do? The Forgetting was coming, and Janis would have all of this written down. You, your sisters … what would she do to you?”
I bring up my knees, trapping Gray’s hand against my neck. I’m beginning to understand, finally, after all these years. None of this had anything to do with Lydia the Weaver.
“I hid you,” my father says. “Made new books and wrote myself out. Changed your mother’s skill, changed your sisters’ names, though I didn’t change your mother’s. It’s a common name, and I was afraid she would remember. And I didn’t change yours, either. You were named for a girl who had almost been completely forgotten. Like Anna would be. It should have been enough. You would be Nadia the Dyer’s daughter, nothing to do with Raynor the Planter, so that when Janis looked for the family she’d written in her book, the family with memories, they wouldn’t be there.”
Except that Janis remembered everything. Like me.
“It was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Anson says, “taking away your books, knowing I was going to forget you. I had to lock up your mother and sister, but you still trusted me. I hate”—he says this word with vehemence—“that you remember it.”
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