Tabula Rasa

by Kristen Lippert-Martin

  Hodges doesn’t look at 8-Bit directly as he speaks. She licks her dry lips and flicks a piece of hair away from her face.

  “Let me guess,” 8-Bit says, “Charming Southern girl that you are, you manage to get yourself hired by Claymore Senior, and then you what? Sit for hours patiently talking to Virgil? That doesn’t sound like your cup of tea. There had to be something in it for you.”

  Hodges shrugs and smiles. “Claymore Senior was obsessed with his legacy, and his only son couldn’t stand him. I saw an opportunity to be … helpful.”

  “Yes, I imagine you did. If you could broker peace between father and son, Claymore Senior would be forever indebted to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Not really. Virgil knew how his father had made his money over the years. He thought the entire Claymore family was toxic. If he hadn’t been trapped by his condition, he would’ve walked away from all the money long ago. Stupid, really.”

  “I can’t imagine how long it must have taken for Virgil to decide you were a reliable confidante.”

  “Two years.”

  “Ouch, Ev. That had to be excruciating for you. I guess it paid off, though. Virgil finally told you all his secrets. He told you he had a daughter.”

  Hodges leans against the desk and plays with the crystal bowl, swirling the pill inside it around like a marble. “When Virgil found out his hired help had gotten herself pregnant, he sent her away. He thought his family was cursed, or something. He wanted the maid and the child far away from the Claymores, especially his father. So Virgil set up a small trust fund thinking it was only temporary. His condition was deteriorating. The doctors told him he had a year to live at most—more likely a matter of months. He made a will leaving everything he had to the maid and her brat but then …”

  “Then he didn’t die.”

  “That’s right. He didn’t die. Because Claymore Senior did everything he could to keep his son alive. He spent millions on medical research and invested in every conceivable experimental procedure, no matter how far out it was on the fringes of science …”

  “Or how ethically questionable it was,” 8-Bit says.

  “Virgil was at his father’s mercy, helpless, with no way to reach out to what’s-her-name—Blanca. Not until I came along. I was the friend he could trust to find his lost love and the daughter he’d never known.”

  She flicks her hand toward me.

  “So you pretended to be the kind emissary, interested only in reuniting them all?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Was that before or after you realized what a potentially lucrative position you were in? Trusted employee of a very rich man whose only heir is probably going to die young. Just imagine the possibilities.”

  “I did imagine them.”

  “But a lost love and newly discovered granddaughter would ruin everything for you, wouldn’t it?”

  Hodges tips her head. She picks up the crystal bowl again and looks at the ceiling light through it. After a moment she says, “I was thoughtfully saving everyone a lot of trouble. Every king wants an heir, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to be the maid’s daughter.”

  The maid.

  My mother.

  And now—now I can see my mother’s beautiful face.

  The blank white emptiness is gone. I see her laughing brown eyes. I remember the way she looked at me. So proud. So proud that I was her Angel.

  The anger boils up inside me. I can hardly hold it back, but somehow I do. I do it for my mother.

  “Why didn’t you just kill the girl?” 8-Bit asks. “That would have been the simplest solution. I mean, I don’t know for sure, of course, but I assume Blanca Ramos’s accidental death was no accident. Why give the girl a pardon instead of executing her, too?”

  Hodges walks to the door and looks toward the lobby, checking her watch.

  “Oh, don’t tell me, Ev,” 8-bit says and laughs. “It couldn’t be that.”

  She whips around. “Couldn’t be what?”

  “Were you …? Did you actually feel the tiniest bit of remorse? You kill the love of your fiancé’s life, but can’t bring yourself to kill his kid? I don’t know, Ev. Sounds to me like your conscience was giving you trouble.”

  She walks toward 8-Bit and leans over his chair, her voice low. Almost sultry. “I didn’t kill the girl because it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she didn’t know Virgil was her father.”

  Hodges pushes back, hops onto the desk, and crosses her legs. “When I met with Blanca, she confessed to me that she’d never told the girl who her father was. She thought it was easier that way. Better her daughter know nothing than know the painful truth.” Hodges rolls her eyes. “She really shouldn’t have told me that.”

  “Once Blanca was gone, and with no other family, the girl disappeared into the foster care system?”

  “Yes.” Hodges blows me a kiss. “Goodbye, Sarah! Off you go, into the arms of an overburdened city bureaucracy! Have a statistically unlikely nice life!”

  8-Bit nods toward me. “But she went after Claymore back in New York. How did she figure out the connection?”

  “I don’t know.” Hodges’s upper lip curls in disgust. “Here I am looking at wedding venues and suddenly I find out someone’s sabotaging all of Mr. Claymore’s projects. A teenage girl, the rumors said. The media turned her into a sensation. And I knew! I just knew. I’d made a mis—”

  She looks over at 8-Bit, probably hating that she has to admit he was right. She had made a mistake. She killed my mother, but she let me live.

  “I tried to find this girl everyone was talking about. The girl with the wings on her back. I offered up reward money—a lot of it—for information about who was vandalizing Mr. Claymore’s building sites. And if I’d been able to get my hands on her before the police did, all this could have been avoided. But she got caught. And then she told the cops who she thought her father was. They didn’t know what to do with the information, so they called me to see if there was any merit to her claim.”

  “That’s when Virgil found out she was alive?”

  “He overheard me talking on the phone to the police about her. I had to think fast. I told him that I’d tried to spare him the pain of the truth. I told him that I’d discovered Blanca was dead and the girl was a mess—a common criminal. I told him that maybe she deserved a fresh chance, free of the Claymore money, the Claymore ‘curse.’ Just like he’d wanted all along. So Virgil agreed to send her here, to the Center. It was the perfect solution for everyone.”

  “Well, mostly for you,” 8-Bit says. “But now I understand how it all fits together. Wilson was this close to a breakthrough with the Velocius project at the same moment that the government was this close to pulling the plug.”

  Hodges runs her fingertips along 8-Bit’s swollen cheek. He jerks his head away.

  “Couldn’t have asked for a more perfect solution,” she says. “Once Wilson’s research was deemed a failure, the military would walk away, and without bothersome ethical restraints and government oversight, he could move forward. Which he did.”

  “And when Wilson finally succeeded,” 8-Bit says, “all the proprietary research that the military had largely paid for would land in the lap of Claymore Industries. They’d be free to develop the technology for the private sector.”

  “Claymore Industries already had paying customers lined up for Velocius. Who wouldn’t want to be able to think ten times faster? What CEO wouldn’t want a crack at that?”

  8-Bit looks down at me and then over at Thomas, who is now moaning like he’s struggling to speak.

  “Seriously gotta hand it to you, Ev. Letting Wilson use the girl was a brilliant move.”

  “Thank you,” Hodges says. “I know that’s got to be hard for you to admit.”

  “Although …”

  “Although what?”

  “You give the girl to Wilson to have her mind
wiped, which he does, but then he also uses her for the Velocius project. Not part of the deal, I’m sure. Worse still, she turns out to be the project’s first success. That’s got to grate on your nerves, huh?”

  Hodges gives a huff of irritation.

  “Wilson kept putting me off, saying he wanted to study her further. But I told him that either she died or his career did. Simple as that. She was supposed to have a little accident during surgery. If he’d done what I told him to do, this whole rather expensive raid wouldn’t have been necessary.”

  “Wilson reneged on your agreement then?”

  “No. He knew what I was about to call down on this place if he didn’t get rid of the girl.”

  “If he was going along with your demands, how did the girl escape?”

  “Wilson’s assistant ruined”—she pounds on the desk with each word now—“the … whole … thing!”

  Larry!

  My body wants to explode toward her like a bomb, but it’s not time. Not yet.

  8-Bit sighs dramatically, but Hodges refuses to look at him. She squeezes her eyes shut like she’s trying to push all these ugly thoughts out of her mind.

  “It was a good plan. It really was. If my hands weren’t tied to this chair right now, I might even clap for you. Getting rid of the girl, keeping all the data on a multibillion-dollar research project, and marrying into the Claymore billions? Great idea. Too bad it didn’t work.”

  “Who says it didn’t work?”

  Hodges walks past me. I can hear the rustle of her skirt, the tinkle of her bracelets. She digs through her purse and pulls out a hairbrush.

  “Got a date?” 8-Bit asks.

  “I do, actually. I need to freshen up a bit before my flight. And, David, let there be no mistake. This will be goodbye for us.”

  “I guess we’ll never get our issues settled then, will we?”

  She sits down on his lap and plays with the collar of his shirt for a moment. “Oh, we will. We will, David.” She kisses him on the cheek and then, without looking up, says, “Shoot him, please. Right about here.” She touches his chest, just below his heart, and then leaps off his lap.

  The soldier raises his rifle to comply. Just as he fires, Thomas uses his last ounce of strength to throw himself off the couch. In the process, he knocks the candy dish into the air. I watch the arc of the pill as it flies out of the dish.

  I roll and turn just in time to catch the pill in my mouth. Hodges is too distracted to notice. She glances at Thomas, who is now lying on the floor next to me, then turns her back on us both as she kneels in front of 8-Bit.

  “I’m sure you understand why I had to do this. I need to make a fresh start. I need to let go and erase the past. And that means I need to erase you, David.”

  A storm gathers on Hodges’s face at the sudden sound of helicopters approaching, a sound she’s clearly not expecting.

  8-Bit has slumped forward, gasping. He looks up. “Problem, Ev?”

  “Give me some binoculars,” she says to the soldier who’s just shot 8-Bit. She leaves briefly and then hurries back into the room. “No problem, darling. That helicopter has E.C. on it.”

  She turns away from 8-Bit as if she’s already forgotten he’s there and stands in the center of the room for a moment, spinning the bracelets on her wrist round and round. As the sound of the helicopter grows louder, a robotic voice prompts her. “What do you want us to do with the boy?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Ma’am?”

  She exhales in annoyance and closes her eyes. She waves her hand blindly toward the floor. “Give me a minute.…”

  She kneels beside Thomas, almost as if her legs have given out, and runs her fingers roughly through his hair. I know she must see the red at the roots. Her voice betrays a twinge of feeling, of softness, even as she says in exasperation, “We’ll have to take him with us. I need the password for the data files. After that, who knows? Maybe I’ll take him under my wing.”

  And there is my limit. Right there.

  I spring up and crouch over Thomas, my hands on his chest. I say calmly, almost in a whisper, “Do not touch him.”

  Hodges falls back clumsily, and one of her high heels snaps off. She looks astonished, in shock, like she’s seen the dead rise.

  8-Bit manages one last smile before his head droops and his chin comes to rest on his chest.

  Hodges screams, her voice high and shrill. “What are you waiting for? Shoot her! Kill her! That’s what we’ve been trying to do for the past two days!”

  But they don’t shoot me. One of the soldiers puts his hand to his ear, as if he’s listening to something inside his helmet.

  She runs up to each of the soldiers in turn, trying to pull the rifles out of their hands. “What are you doing? I’ve paid a lot of money for you to do exactly what I tell you to do!” The lead soldier pushes her back so hard she trips and falls. He turns his weapon on her. She is furious and bewildered. The soldier adjusts something on his translator and begins to speak.

  The robotic voice addresses Hodges. The words come slowly, haltingly. “The good thing about mercenaries is that they can be bought. Unfortunately, the bad thing about mercenaries is also that they can be bought.”

  The helicopter is landing outside. The sound pumps through the windowless lobby. I feel the air pulsing against my eardrums. Hodges looks toward the office door, her face teetering between fury and terror.

  She stands and smoothes her hair and rumpled clothing. “Who are you? Why are you talking to me like this?”

  “Don’t you recognize my voice?”

  “Of course not! You all sound exactly alike!”

  “It’s Virgil.”

  “Virgil? That can’t be.…”

  “This man with the gun has just shifted to my employ. I’ve been watching the girl’s progress for months. The security feed went dead, but came back on again a few hours ago. I saw everything.”

  She’s shaking her head so fast her red hair flies out to the sides like flames. “We turned that feed off.”

  “He turned it back on,” I say. “Your son did. He saved me.”

  The robot voice addresses me. “Sarah, there’s so much to this story that I don’t understand. I’d like you to tell it to me.”

  “Angel. I go by Angel.”

  I stare out the door, past the wreckage of the lobby, and look at the helicopter. I watch the blades spinning. I can see it move, and wonder how it will ever lift off with its rotor going round that slowly.

  I don’t see Hodges anywhere. I try to ask a question. Where is she? Is she gone? I want to make sure she can’t get to me or to Thomas. But I can’t get the words out. My mouth and brain are out of sync.

  “My men here will escort her from the building.”

  Suddenly there are more men in the room. They must have been on the helicopter. Just like that, Hodges is in handcuffs, and they are taking her away.

  Is everything going to be okay? Is that what’s happening? Is this real?

  I unclench my fists and put one hand to my lower back. All this time I’ve managed to slow the bleeding, but I can’t hold it back anymore. I can’t hold back anything. My legs give out and I’m kneeling.

  “Do you need help?” Virgil asks.

  “No.”

  Why did I say that? It’s a habit. I do need help. I should admit that. I should shout it. Help me. Someone please help me. This time when I try to speak, nothing comes out.

  In the slow-motion rush of activity around me, I now hear what I know are words, but they are just sounds disconnected from any meaning. I want to ask what’s wrong with the soldier’s translation machine. I can’t understand what he’s asking me. Something about New York City.

  I think he said the word home.

  Time seems to rush, stop, and then hurry again. Paramedics appear. I turn my head and see them working on Thomas. He’s completely unresponsive. I use the last of my strength, the whole of my broken soul, and crawl toward him. I want to te
ll him to hold on.

  I put my hand out to touch his hair, but I collapse before I reach him. I try to say his name, but I can’t. It’s too late to speak. I’ve run out of time. Oblivion has come for me at last, but I won’t let it take me without a fight.

  CHAPTER 40

  I can’t shake the habit of looking down and counting the tiles. These sidewalks near the park are full of them. Thousands of little granite hexagons.

  A cab whizzes by, blaring its horn. I turn and watch it go. Slow and plodding as I am, I’m quickly overtaken by people hurrying home at the end of the workday.

  The city carries on as fast as ever. I just can’t keep up anymore.

  I hate walking with a cane, but still can’t manage without one. Every week I get a little stronger, and my physical therapist says that if I keep up with my therapy, I’ll be all better before I know it. But that’s not how I feel. Every tap of my cane reminds me my life is frustratingly slow. And the being “all better” part? I’m not sure if that’s ever going to be possible.

  Things are coming back to me, yes, but not as much or as fast as I’d hoped. And while I’m grateful for what I do remember, I wish I could have more than my memories. And more than my mother’s grave. I go there about once a week and shell pepitas. Some I eat; the rest I leave for the birds.

  As for Thomas … I have nothing. Nothing but memories of him, and that’s not enough. Not enough by a long shot. I knew him three days. That’s all. But I think I’ve fallen in love with him since then.

  Is it crazy to fall in love with a memory? Probably. I wish I could ask Thomas about it, because I’m sure he’d have an opinion.

  Sure, it’s a bit crazy, Angel. Not that I don’t understand. I am pretty amazing.