Tabula Rasa

by Kristen Lippert-Martin

  “And?”

  His brown eyes burn into me. “I envied you.”

  “Envied? How could you envy something like that?”

  “Whatever it is you did—you don’t have to remember it. You can start over right now like you’re a brand-new person.”

  “But I’m not a brand-new person. Taking my memories didn’t give me anything. It hasn’t given me freedom or peace or whatever you’re imagining. Believe me, you don’t want to feel like I do. It’s a terrible thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Before I started getting my memories back, I felt like nothing.”

  “But that’s what I want to feel. Nothing.”

  “I didn’t say I felt nothing; I said I felt like nothing. Maybe that’s what they don’t understand with all this messing around in our heads. When you take memories, you take pieces of someone away. You may think you’re better off, but you’re not. You’re less than you used to be. Obviously, I am.”

  “Listen, I know all about you,” he says.

  “You just met me.”

  “Maybe, but I’m a quick study, and I know something special when I see it.”

  He tries to sit himself up higher but can’t manage it. I want to help him. I want to put my arms around him so he can save his strength. But that’s not what commanding officers do.

  “My mother used to travel all over the world buying art. She’d be gone for weeks at a time. She’s a rich woman, had always been rich, and she was restless, like she was looking for something and didn’t even know what it was. The more she looked, the worse she got. I think traveling made her feel like she was doing something useful somehow, even though she was basically just going on long shopping trips while my sister and I hung out at home with the nanny.”

  “And?”

  “Hush and listen. One time she brought this bowl back from Japan. She paid six thousand dollars for it. It was just this little rice bowl. Maybe the size of your cupped hands together. It had a few cracks in it, and I asked her why she was so excited about it, especially since it was damaged. She said it was the color that attracted her. There was something about it. It was the lightest, most fragile color green. A green-gold, my mother called it. The color of something about to grow.”

  “That’s very nice, but what does any of that have to do with me?”

  “Your eyes are green like that. Like the color of that bowl. The color of something about to grow.”

  It’s a beautiful thing to say. I’m just not sure that I deserve to hear it.

  “Thomas … I—”

  I look down at my hands and notice they’re shaking. He puts his hands on top of mine. They’re pretty shaky, too, but together like this, somehow we steady each other.

  “I wish you could see that bowl. You’d see what I mean. But you’ll never be able to.”

  “Why? Because you think we’re not going to make it out of here?”

  “No. Because my sister took the bowl and smashed it to get back at my mother for something. My mother didn’t speak to her for a month.”

  “Is this the sister you used to entertain with magic tricks?”

  “Yeah. Lainey. Her name was Lainey.”

  His face goes white and his eyes become vacant. I know it’s something to do with remembering her.

  “Thomas, how did your sister die?”

  He slumps down, his head missing the pillow. “I killed her.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “You should know who I really am. You should know what I did,” Thomas says.

  “I know who you are. You’re the guy who gave me my identity back. And I’d already be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

  “You think you know me, but you don’t. You need to hear this, Angel.”

  “All right. Tell me.”

  “My sister and I, we were close growing up. Lainey was smart and tough. I mean, here’s this rich girl with everything. You’d think she’d be all spoiled, but she wasn’t. I always thought that if she hadn’t been born into a rich family, she would’ve been okay. Money didn’t suit her. She wore grubby clothes, and her shoes had holes in them. It drove my parents crazy.”

  He looks at me. I wish I could say I understand, but I really don’t.

  “I used to think it was funny in a way. Here I’m the adopted kid, and Lainey’s their biological child. I’m supposed to be the one with the issues, right? But no. She was a mess. I think she went into rehab for the first time when she was fifteen. But she was doing better. We all thought so. She’d been sober for a year when I took off.”

  He stops and swallows like he’s choking down something bitter.

  “A couple weeks after I left with 8-Bit, she smashed her car into a Jersey barrier on the side of some highway.”

  “How is that your fault?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? She went looking for me,” he says. “Because I left with 8-Bit. Nobody knew where I’d gone or what happened. My parents filed a missing persons report. They thought something bad happened to me.”

  “That’s why you said you just met your father?”

  “8-Bit showed up out of the blue at my boarding school right after I’d just had this huge blowout with my adoptive dad for the billionth time. I’d always known I was adopted, but the story he told me … I thought I’d hit the jackpot. My real father’s some infamous computer hacker? He’s been living abroad for years, unable to return to the U.S. because of several outstanding warrants for his arrest, and the first thing he does when he gets back on American soil is come looking for me?”

  “Kind of made you feel special, I’ll bet.”

  “I thought, well, hey, that explains my talent with writing code. And rewriting other people’s code. He offered to teach me the ropes, and I jumped at the chance. I took off without saying a word to anyone. They didn’t know what happened to me. My adoptive dad can be a real idiot sometimes, but my mom … I mean, she’s a superficial, rich lady who spends too much money on stupid stuff, but she loves me. Or she did. Until I killed my sister.”

  “You didn’t kill your sister.”

  “I might as well have.”

  “How did you find out what happened?”

  “I called them. I started feeling guilty about them worrying about me. Plus, you know, life with 8-Bit was a lot more complicated than I’d imagined.”

  I tug on his dyed hair.

  “Yeah. Exactly. Being on the run is a huge drag. And 8-Bit wasn’t really a dad, you know? I realized one night when we were playing video games and eating microwaveable burritos for the tenth day in a row that my adoptive dad, he yelled at me about grades and stuff like that because that’s just what dads do. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Not try to beat your high score in some first-person shooter game.”

  “What did your parents say to you when you called home?”

  “I’ll never forget my mom’s voice. I told her I couldn’t talk for long, but that I was okay. Then I asked about Lainey and there was this cold silence on the other end of the phone. She told me that Lainey got it in her head to go out looking for me. Then my dad got on the phone and screamed at me, told me not to bother coming home ever again. He said, ‘You win, Thomas. You win. How does it feel?’ Then he hung up.”

  “What does that mean, ‘You win’? Win what?”

  “I guess he meant that I’d won our power struggle. Me and him, we were always butting heads because I kept getting tossed out of all the fancy private schools he put me in, mostly for hacking into the school computers and messing with them. He told me that the reason I hacked things was because I was a cheater at heart. He said I did it because I never wanted to lose, because I wasn’t man enough to lose. He said it takes courage to learn to lose gracefully and that deep down, I had none.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “It is horrible. And he was right. And that’s why my sister is dead.”

  “I understand why you’d think that. I feel responsible for what’s happened to you, for you getting hurt like
this.”

  “It’s different. I wanted to come, remember? I rudely insisted on it, as I recall.”

  “You forgive too easily. Everyone but yourself.” I squeeze his hand. “I’m so sorry about your sister.”

  His eyes are wet. He shakes his head. “Don’t feel bad for me. I don’t deserve it. You should save your pity for yourself. Look what they do to angels in this place. I even feel bad for stupid Oscar.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t. I hate Oscar and I hope he spends the rest of his life behind bars getting rabid badgers stuffed up his butt.”

  I look at the soldiers sitting around in a circle. “I wonder if I’m going to end up like one of these guys.”

  “You won’t. Because we’re going to get you that last pill. And we’re going to find out why an entire squadron of elite soldiers is trying to take you out, you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good.”

  There’s a sudden grunt from across the room. Oscar is rolling his head back and forth like he might be waking up.

  “Oh no,” I say.

  “A more apt nickname there has never been,” Thomas responds, wincing slightly as he shifts his position.

  Elmer takes Oscar’s pulse and then raises his eyelids. Oscar grabs him by the wrist and twists. Sam, Sylvester, and Jerry are on him within seconds, but it takes all three of them to subdue him. I rush over to help.

  I try soothing him. “It’s all right. You passed out. They’re trying to help you.”

  Oscar opens his eyes but doesn’t seem to see any of us. He begins thrashing around so violently I think he’s having a seizure.

  After a few seconds Elmer shoots him up with a syringe full of something, and Oscar’s rigid body relaxes, but only slightly. Elmer looks at me, concerned. “I put enough sedative in him to knock out a rhino, but I don’t know how long it’ll be before he wakes up.”

  Oscar is twitching and rocking back and forth.

  “Several of the cuts on his head have reopened,” Elmer says. “We may need to put more stitches in.…”

  “No.” The last thing we need is a freaked-out Oscar waking up to some stranger knitting his head together.

  “Angel,” Thomas says. I walk over quickly and lean in close.

  He whispers, “You should take a couple of these guys with you. For backup.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “They’re already at war, so what difference does it make?”

  “They can’t get killed by their imaginations, whereas, you know, those guys with the guns are shooting real bullets.”

  “You and I both know they have no future. Why not give them a chance to fight their way out?”

  “It’s taking advantage of them.”

  “Yes, it is. But it may be what you have to do if you want to get that pill in time.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Thomas and I argue so loudly that Sam overhears us.

  “We’ll do it,” Sam says.

  Thomas shoots me a look. I’m about to speak, but he cuts me off.

  “If you’re gonna go on this mission, you should know something first. You were … you were transferred to a new location.”

  Sylvester is openly confused. “What? But how?”

  “You were drugged and brought here,” Thomas says. “They’ve been moving you around to different locations, to keep you disoriented and to keep people off the trail. They know you’re valuable assets they can trade to get some of their own, uh, fighters back.”

  Sylvester immediately starts nodding, but Sam is still skeptical. “How did you find us, then?”

  “To be honest, we were on the run ourselves and just happened to get lucky when we stumbled in here.”

  Sam paces. After a few more thoughtful moments, he seems to accept what we’ve told them, and Thomas begins showing them the layout of the upper floors on the tablet.

  “There are three walkways that connect this wing to the main hospital building: on the main level, the third floor, and the sixth floor. It’s possible the basements are linked together, too. But it’s also possible they never finished the tunnel linking them. Half this place is half built.” Thomas shows them the most direct route to the medicine locker, though he doesn’t say that’s our “mission objective.” He tells them we are looking for a communications center where we can charge the computer battery and that we’ve got only a few hours to do it.

  He puts his finger on the map and looks at each of us in turn.

  “I’m fairly sure—emphasis on ‘I could be totally wrong’—that you’ll find a working outlet in this area here, and it’s far enough from where the enemy’s camped out that you should have a better chance of not getting shot.” Thomas hands me the battery and cord. “Plug it in, stay alive, and get back down here.”

  I try to take the battery from his hand, but he doesn’t let go.

  “Those second two things are more important than the first,” he says as he stares into my eyes.

  “Got it.” I yank the battery out of his grip, and after a quick glance at Thomas’s leg, I say to Elmer, “If I don’t make it back—”

  “Shut up,” Thomas says, looking right at me.

  I ignore him and keep speaking to Elmer. “There’s a garage on the lower level, on the other side of the main building. A small tractor is parked inside. If you can put Thomas in a wheelchair to move him—”

  “Shut up,” Thomas says again.

  I spin around and glare at him. “Are you sure you want those to be the last words you speak to me?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. Shut up. Sir.”

  He smiles lazily, and I try to return it. Or I think I do. I suspect my expression looks like I’m baring my teeth, and trying not to throw up. Which is pretty much what I feel like doing when I think about Thomas dying here.

  I strap the computer on my arm so I’m wearing it just like the soldier who Oscar pushed into the pit had. Sam is taking supplies out of the backpack, distributing some to Jerry and Sylvester and stuffing the rest into his waistband and pockets.

  “Here. Take a few of these,” he says to me.

  I look at what he’s given me. They are shiny circles the color of pencil lead, maybe two inches across. Sylvester laughs like I’ve just produced his childhood teddy bear.

  “Mines,” Jerry says. He takes one from my hand and throws it carelessly against the door.

  I duck, but other than a loud snap as it hits the door, nothing happens. Sam is smiling.

  “Magnetic,” he says. “You twist them, throw them at something metal, and they stick. Ten seconds later, boom. You turn them a little, you get a smaller explosion. Dial them all the way to max and they can punch a man-size hole in the side of an armored vehicle. Very effective.”

  He puts the backpack down and kneels. “You also have a few other items in here: lots of bullets, a walkie-talkie, a knife … oh, and these.” He shows me something that looks like a dark gray piece of chewing gum. “C4 explosive strips. They won’t be of any use without blast caps, but you do have these.” It’s a packet with two circles of what looks like clay. One circle is black and one is white. “Commingle these two by kneading them together, put them on any surface, and they bore an inch-wide hole through it, no matter how thick the material is.”

  “How’s she going to crawl through an inch-wide hole?” Thomas asks.

  “She’s not. But if she puts it on, say, a lock …”

  All these gadgets and things cheer Jerry up immensely. They seem to confirm what Sylvester has been saying: that Thomas and I are some kind of unorthodox special ops team.

  “We’re ready, sir,” Sam says to me as he picks up his ax handle.

  Thomas looks at me, his face full of pride. “Looks like you’ve gotten a battlefield promotion.”

  CHAPTER 26

  For people trapped in a nightmare fantasy, these three soldiers are all I could hope for as a security detail.

  Sam, Jerry, and Syl
vester lead the way through the passage that Thomas had indicated. Sam had told the guys to commit the layout to memory, and they had, almost instantly. Unfortunately, I had not, and after the first three turns I am completely lost.

  That’s when we hit our first problem.

  The stairwell we were intending to use is blocked off by fallen debris. A strong draft of air and wisps of snow blow down from above. Sylvester puts his hand up and catches a snowflake in his palm, a look of wonder on his face.

  “We must be up in the mountains,” he says. “I heard they had snow here, even in the desert.”

  Rather than see this roadblock as an indication that we should turn back, Sam merely waves us toward another hallway. After about twenty feet, we come to a possible way up: a ragged hole in the upper floor. A huge beam has fallen, creating a steep ramp.

  Sam jumps onto the beam and tests it, bouncing up and down to make sure it’s secure. One by one we go up, crouching low and pulling against the I beam with our hands. It reminds me of crawling up a playground slide. Halfway up I remember that I’ve actually done this before, many times. But now I’m terrified, even though I’m only eight feet off the floor. Maybe when they pulled out the memory of climbing half-built skyscrapers, they pulled out my courage, too. How could I have ever gone into the sky so high?

  We reenter the stairwell above where it’s been blocked off, and climb up another level. A vertical sliver of light shines at the end of the hallway. Maybe it’s the edge of a doorway. If Thomas got it right, we should be approaching the first walkway linking the third floor of this wing and the main building, and there should be no door here at all. I look down at the screen and give Sam the thumbs-up. No soldiers up ahead. Sam runs up the hallway, keeping low. He stops just outside the door and tries the knob, but it’s locked. After quickly kneading the pieces of black and white putty together, he slaps it against the lock.

  “Don’t look directly at it,” he says, and it’s a good thing he does, because I would have watched.