Last of Her Name

by Jessica Khoury

  “And what does it tell you?”

  “Well, for starters, our genetic code has a limited ‘alphabet,’ if you will, with each letter representing a type of nucleotide. The human genome has two base pairs—G and C, A and T. But Anya’s genome has eight nucleotides, in four pairs, interweaving with the existing DNA, making it possible for her genetic code to contain exponentially more information than the average human being. And these two pairs repeat over and over, forming a sort of wall around the rest. I think this is the part that acts as the rest of the code’s on and off switch.”

  Volkov taps the tabletka, activating the holo function. The four letters spin above us, split into two sets. Other information streams around them—diagrams of protein structures, complex formulas, twists of DNA.

  But I stare through all the noise at those four letters, shining in bright blue above me.

  I stare as my mind unravels.

  As my blood turns to ice.

  As everything I thought was real turns to ashes on my tongue.

  C-L

  I-O

  The code has a name.

  That name is Clio.

  I start to hyperventilate.

  Dr. Luka runs to my side, helping me sit up, telling me to breathe.

  “No,” I gasp. “I don’t understand. It has to be a coincidence.”

  “What is?”

  I let out a sob. “She’s real she’s real she’s real.”

  “Who is real?”

  “Clio!”

  Panic rakes through me.

  I roll off the chair and push past him, looking for the door. I have to get out of here. I have to escape this nightmare.

  I push aside a cart that’s in my way; instruments spill off and clatter on the floor. Dr. Luka tries to catch me, but I grab a metal tray and swing it, bashing his head. He curses and stumbles, reaching for me again, but I scramble over a table and finally spot the door. I run for it—only to have my feet pulled out from under me.

  I yelp as I flip upside down, hanging in midair, my hair swinging under me. The room tilts and sways, and I struggle in vain to free myself.

  Natalya is by the door, her hands splayed and her eyes intent on me as she tessellates. The air cracks with that awful grating sound, and a black mask spreads around her eyes. My feet are trapped in her stress field.

  Volkov appears in front of me, studying my face with disappointment. “Enough, Princess. Calm down, or we’ll sedate you.”

  Natalya lowers me. I land on the floor in a heap, and two of Dr. Luka’s assistants drag me back to the chair.

  This time, they secure my wrists and ankles with straps. I lie limp, heart racing, staring blankly at the ceiling.

  “I want Clio,” I whisper. “Tell me where she is. Please. Please.”

  Dr. Luka glances at the holo letters, then back at me. “Anya, who is Clio?”

  “My best friend.” I break into sobs, pulling weakly against my restraints. “She’s real! I saw her, I saw her on the prisoner transport. She was there the day the Red Knights came to Afka. She’s always been there, and you can’t have her.”

  The truth is there welling up in me, but I can’t face it.

  It’s too terrible.

  Too impossible.

  “I think I’m beginning to understand,” Dr. Luka murmurs. “She’s a Leonov, after all. I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before.”

  “So have I,” says Volkov, with a look of disgust. “It’s the madness. It’s taken her already. I should have seen it sooner.”

  Dr. Luka kneels in front of me, peering at me with concern. “I saw many of your family deal with this, Anya—seeing people who weren’t there, hearing false voices. But they knew not to trust their eyes. They knew how to edit their realities, culling the false from the true. This Clio is not real. She’s a side effect. You must let her go.”

  The ache from the brainjacking was nothing compared to the pain I feel now. Someone’s climbed into my skull and is drilling into it. I could rip through the walls with my bare hands to escape it, but it’s like all my strength has been drained from me. I moan and shake my head, willing them to just disappear. Maybe the brainjacking worked after all. Maybe it made me crazy.

  “What’s wrong with her?” asks Volkov.

  Dr. Luka shakes his head. “She’s been living with this delusion for a long time. With the others, we usually caught the signs early. But Anya was alone, with no one to truly understand her condition. I’m sure her foster parents tried their best, but they must have given up attempting to cure her. It won’t be so easy to do it now, given how long she’s been affected. She needs time to process what is and isn’t real.”

  “She’s real,” I whisper. “Stop saying she isn’t. Please. Please stop.”

  Volkov snaps. “We don’t have time for this! No wonder it isn’t working! She’s consumed by denial.” Pushing aside the doctor, he grips my wrists, forcing me to look at him. “Who are you?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Stacia Andr—” I cut short with a gasp as he tightens his grip.

  “That’s the problem. You still don’t believe the truth of who and what you are. How can you inherit the Leonov legacy if you won’t even accept their name? Your old self is still in the way. That is where we must start. If Anya Leonova is to live, then Stacia Androva must die.”

  It’s midnight, and I’m sitting in the corner of my too-large room, tucked into the wall. I stare at the floor, chills running over my skin like I’m feverish. When I close my eyes, I can feel their needles pricking me, their fingers prodding. My body aches from the seizure the brainjacking caused. Even still, I feel tremors in my fingers.

  But none of that compares to the moment I saw Clio’s name written in my DNA.

  Rocking back and forth, I relive my entire life, trying to make sense of the chaos raging inside my skull.

  I work backward, sifting through my mind and grabbing at every memory I have of Clio. I turn them over desperately, looking for confirmation of what I know to be true—that Clio is a girl with blond hair and blue eyes, that she’s funny and kind and wise, that she’s my best friend, that she’s real.

  The memories seem real enough. I can picture her so clearly. I can hear her voice.

  “Your name is Clio,” I whisper, hugging myself and staring hard at the white carpet. “You are seventeen years old. You’re a hopeless romantic. You’re madly in love with Pol.”

  Pol.

  Pol would tell me she’s real, if he were here. He would laugh at the very idea of Clio being some sort of hallucination. He’d tell me a hundred reasons why that was ridiculous, and then he’d tease me for ever considering it might be true.

  Except …

  Except he told me Clio wasn’t on Alexandrine.

  He didn’t want me to come here. He tried to stop me.

  All along, I’ve wondered how he wasn’t as concerned about Clio as I was. He always hesitated when I mentioned going after her. I thought it was just because of his continued belief in his “mission.” But what if that wasn’t it at all?

  What if he knows?

  With a cry, I burst to my feet and begin pacing the room, my hands knotting in my hair, my breath coming fast and ragged.

  “Your name is Clio. You are seventeen years old. You love sleeping late and romance shows and you’re terrible at math. You live in …”

  I stop dead.

  My hands lower to my sides, curl into fists.

  “You live … in a house …” I shake my head, fighting through the fog that envelops my mind. “You live in a house in Afka. Right? Or … an apartment.”

  Slowly, I raise my eyes to the diamantglass window, to the reflection of the girl standing there. She is disheveled, pale, frightened. She is a ghost of myself, thin as the air and fragile as a spider’s web. Beyond her, the lights of Alexandrine flicker like strange, indifferent stars, reminding her how very far away from home she is.

  “Clio,” I whisper. �
��Where do you live? Where do you sleep? Stars, I know this! I have to know this!”

  But the more questions I ask myself, the more gaps I uncover.

  Who else was Clio friends with?

  Who did she dance with at Solstice Fest last year?

  What did my parents give her for her birthday?

  Stars, when is her birthday?

  And who raised her? Her parents died in the war, but who took care of her after that?

  I have no answers. All the questions, but no answers.

  These are basic facts I would know about any other person. Why don’t I know them about my best friend?

  I sink to the floor, sitting cross-legged, the way Riyan did when he meditated. I rest my hands on my knees and shut my eyes, and for the next few minutes, I simply breathe. Deep, steady, slow. I push out all thought and focus on the rhythm of air rushing into my lungs, sighing out again.

  Then, when I am as still inside as I can possibly be, I dive into my memory.

  I reach back, back, to the beginning. I swim through a river of images, until I find my very first memory of Clio Markova.

  My parents were inside Ravi’s Diner, ordering flavored ice to carry back home, but I stayed on the sidewalk because the mayor’s new dory was parked there, and I wanted to look at it. I was lying on my back on the road, under the ship, studying its brand-new hover pads and how they were connected to the engine.

  Then there she was: a pair of red shoes standing on the other side of the dory. I scooted out and stood, and we blinked at each other. She was skinny and bright-eyed, her yellow hair in a curly topknot. I’d never seen her before, but then, I didn’t know many of the town kids

  “Are you getting ice too?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” the girl said. “I like grape, but strawberry is the best.”

  I smiled, and knew at once we would be friends, because strawberry was my favorite too.

  I release a gasp, curling over. How could something feel so real, and not exist? How could someone I’ve known so intently be nothing but empty air and my imagination? How could I love a lie with all my heart, and not know what it truly was?

  I pick up memory after memory like shards of a broken mirror, staring at each one until it becomes too sharp to hold. She is in all of them, but it seems the more I try to remember her, the fainter she becomes, until I’m not sure anymore which memories to trust. I think of a day when we found a nest of baby mouskas in the stable, and we knelt and named them one by one. Pol was there, I know. And Clio … Clio is a shadow in the corner of my eye, kneeling in the hay and cooing over the little furry creatures. She was there, wasn’t she? I’m not sure anymore.

  I’m not sure of anything.

  At the bottom of my pile of broken memories is one I can barely look at, one I’ve never fully recalled until this moment: my mom, sitting me in the chair in her office, telling me Clio was not real. How easily now I slip back into my six-year-old body, pressing my hands to my ears, screaming wordlessly until she gives up and walks away.

  “If I keep pressing her,” Mom says to Dad, who’s pacing the room, “she could break entirely. It’s happened before, with some of her ancestors.”

  “Then we don’t press her,” he says.

  The memory plays over and over, and each time it seems a little more detailed, until I can recall the plastic of the seat sticking to my thighs, the soft lavender sunlight lancing across the floor, and the smell of the antibacterial soap by the sink.

  Finally, I end up lying on the floor, spread-eagle, staring blankly. A loose thread curls up from the edge of the carpet. I pull it, and it keeps coming, unraveling along the length of the wall with a sound like tearing paper.

  Nothing in my life has been real.

  My parents were not my parents.

  My best friend never existed.

  My name is not my own.

  The only person in the galaxy who might care about me—about me, not Anya—I shot and left behind. He probably hates me now. Why shouldn’t he?

  I’m the girl who left him for a lie of her own making.

  I was born to inherit a legacy of madness, and that curse has been with me all my life without my realizing it. It’s been eating me from the inside out, like the red fungus that grows in the slinke trees. It starts at the core and weakens the tree from within. Yet years will pass and the tree will seem perfectly healthy on the outside. But then, all at once, the trunk will buckle and the tree will fall.

  My mother and my father, Pol and Spiros, everyone in the vineyard and in town.

  They knew.

  They had to have known. And either they didn’t tell me or they gave up trying. My mind feels full of gaps that I never knew were there, because I was always looking from the wrong perspective. But now I can’t help but see that my memory is a tangle of incongruent parts, the real and the unreal all entwined until I don’t even know where to begin sorting them.

  Finally, the string breaks from the carpet. I wind it slowly around my finger, around and around and around, watching it cut into my skin until the tip of my finger turns purple.

  Alexei Volkov said that for Anya to live, Stacia Androva had to die.

  But Stacia Androva is already dead.

  I still have my string the next morning, when they come to take me to Volkov. The night passed in a haze. I’m not sure if I slept or if I simply stared at the wall for hours on end. In either case, I’m lost in a fugue as I rise and dress. Breakfast is laid out—eggs, tea, fruit—but it looks as appetizing as sand. I leave it on the tray.

  As I follow Natalya through the Rezidencia’s white hallways, I twist and untwist the string, feeling like it’s the only thing tethering me to sanity. If it breaks, I am lost.

  These are my first steps into a universe without Clio. It’s like walking into an alternate reality, a world that doesn’t feel real. I’m just a hologram floating along, empty light flickering over the walls. My body is here, but my heart is a thousand light-years distant.

  Instead of the lab, I’m brought to a large, round room encased by arching diamantglass windows. I know what this place is, not just because I’ve been here before in Zhar’s holo but because I’ve seen it in history documentaries so many times. It’s perhaps the most famous room in the galaxy—the imperial throne room.

  Or as it was known in the Empire’s days, the Solariat.

  The throne is still in place, which surprises me. I would have thought it would be the first to go when the new regime moved in. Maybe they keep it as a trophy. Maybe Volkov likes to sit in it and play emperor. Shaped like a crescent moon, the throne is fifteen feet tall and made of mirrored black stone, polished to a shine. The upper arc curves over the seat below, and from its tip hangs a round glass sphere. Inside it flashes a melon-sized Prism, one of the largest I’ve ever seen. It must power the whole of the Rezidencia.

  The rest of the room is open floor, smooth glass tiles patterned with spheres and lines. It seems every material in this room was selected to mirror the throne and its occupant. Though these days, the great seat is empty.

  Volkov waits for me along with the whole of the Committee. Their backs are turned to the door, but when I enter with my guards, heads swivel. They’re not wearing their formal robes today but fancy gowns and suits, as if they’re all having a party later. The rings on the Head of Commerce’s fingers alone could probably rebuild Afka. They flash as she raises a glass of white wine to her lips, her blue eyes scanning me head to toe. Beside her, the Head of Defense leans in to whisper in her ear, eliciting a smirk from her lips. The others watch me with a blend of curiosity and skepticism, as if I am a pet brought in to perform. Only the Head of Press and Public Affairs gives me a smile—but that’s probably just reflexive, given how much time she spends putting on a friendly face for her newscasts. I still can’t remember her name.

  I’m dressed up today—a filmy black gown with a train, long sleeves, bare shoulders and collarbone. Crystals have been embroidered onto it, trickling like diam
ond rain from the bodice to the hem. The only thing about me that feels even remotely right is my multicuff, which I now twist back and forth until my wrist begins to chafe.

  The moment I saw the dress laid across my bed this morning, I knew something was up.

  I just couldn’t find it in myself to care.

  As I walk across that shining floor in that shining gown, I feel hollow as the night, a mechanical, emotionless void. It’s like my heart is beating but no blood pumps through it.

  “Anya,” Volkov murmurs, his eyes sweeping over me. “You look like an empress.”

  He takes my hand and escorts me to the front of the room, the others parting for us.

  A week ago, I would have felt sickened to be at the center of the entire Committee’s attention. Now I just want to lie down and sleep. I’ve never felt so weary. The people in front of me seem no more than ghosts. Maybe, like Clio, they too aren’t real. Maybe all of this is one endless dream manufactured by my broken mind. I can trust nothing anymore, least of all myself.

  “Today,” says Volkov, his voice is raised for the benefit of everyone in the Solariat, “we will see the Firebird step into her birthright.”

  He’s unusually confident for someone with no more answers about the Firebird than I have. But his eyes are bright, his face flushed.

  I feel a tingle of unease down my arms.

  “This had better not be a waste of our time,” calls out the Head of Commerce, and a few other Committee members nod in agreement. “Really, Volkov, is all this ceremony necessary?”

  “Why do we need to be here, anyway?” asks Defense. “I’ve got a full-blown rebellion to handle on Amethyne. Couldn’t this have been relayed by holo?”

  “Kostya, my friend.” Volkov’s eyes flick to the man, betraying a flash of irritation. “After today, the rebellion won’t matter. All our jobs will be a great deal easier.”