The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  But there is something lying at the base of the tower. Something different, long and flat among the pieces of jagged stone. I climb down the terraced steps, careful in case they should break, but the closer I get, the faster I go. There’s carving. Words. I take the water channel in a leap, scale the fallen rubble. It’s a sign, like the ones that hang in my city. Broken, and with letters that remind me of the ancient map. But I can still piece together the meaning.

  “I Am Made of My Memories.”

  And these words, I think, are truer than any that hang in New Canaan. I am made of my memories. And I am made less by them. I wonder why the Council can’t see that. Why they wouldn’t want to stop living this way just as much as anyone else. I look up at the clear violet sky, thinking of those black specks, and the dust cloud across the plain. That hazy sky beyond the wall.

  The hazy sky. My pulse jumps, skitters in my veins.

  I climb the broken tower. Quick. The white stone was laid like an open net, with holds for my hands and feet, and soon I’m above the level of the trees, slowing as I near the top, in case the structure is weaker where it’s fallen. But I don’t need to go farther. The breeze is blowing, tangling my loose hair, the water falling behind me, my book hanging at my side, and in the distance, beyond the wall, is the swirl of thousands upon thousands of lacy wings. Dustmoths. Disturbed. Rising from the mountain pass between the hills. The same pass that brought me here.

  The Council isn’t going to stop for sunsetting, and I don’t think they’re stopping at the wall. They’re coming into the Cursed City.

  I think it must be very important to kill me.

  When I open my eyes I’m lying on my side. It’s hard to breathe, dark except for one shaft of light beaming down through a mist of dust. I can’t think what’s happened.

  And then pain hits me like a wave of granite, straight up from my left leg to push the air from my lungs. For exactly two seconds, the shock is bigger than the agony. The third second I’m yelling, whether I want to or not. The noise echoes, sudden and wrong in the silent space, and a dark spot appears in the hole letting in the shaft of light, way above my head. It’s the hole I’ve fallen through.

  “Beck!”

  The dark spot is Jill’s head.

  “Beck, are you all right?”

  I thought the tortured shouting might have clued her in to the fact that I am not, in any way, all right. I try to sit up, but only make it as far as an elbow. The slightest jiggling of my left leg makes me sick with pain, and when I look down I’m even sicker. My foot is not at an angle it should be. I let out a stream of cussing that makes me glad we’re out of communication.

  “So … not dead,” Jill observes.

  “I think … my ankle’s broken,” I reply between the foulness. “Maybe … my leg.”

  Now it’s Jill’s turn to cuss, and she’s much better at it than I am. Always has been. I lay my head back carefully where it was, panting while she abuses me from on high. We’ve had medical training, of course, and mending a broken bone is not much of a problem, but this … The bone needs to be set, and even if we did know how to do that right, the medical kit is in Jill’s pack.

  We weren’t supposed to be separated. We weren’t supposed to be in a position to need a medical kit. We’ve been in quite a few positions we were never supposed to be in on this trip. But planning for the scenario of being alone and hurt and out of communication, that would have seemed like planning for this planet’s sun to rise and set every single day. And it most definitely doesn’t. Jill’s voice comes again, down through the hole.

  “Can you get to the rappelling gear?”

  My pack is still on my back, and twisting or reaching around to get it is going to hurt. A lot. It hurts a lot when I don’t move. My fingers curl into a thick layer of soft dirt, dirt that must have been sifting in through the cracks of this room for season after season, which is probably what kept me from breaking more than I did. I bet there’s a stone floor underneath here, maybe decorated. I wonder what kind of mortar they used. And then my leg hurts and my brain recharges and starts running at full speed again. That rubble is not only too unstable to rappel from, it’s too unstable to be standing on.

  “Jill,” I shout, “get off that pile of rocks!” The dark spot that is Jill’s head doesn’t move. “Get off before you come down here the hard way, okay?” Or before she starts the rockfall that kills me. “See if you can find another way in. There has to be an entrance.”

  Jill hesitates, then her head disappears from the opening.

  A coughing fit from the dust leaves me no choice but to yell again, and when I’m done my face is running with sweat. I drag an arm across my forehead, and the sleeve comes back red. Fantastic. This is all just fantastic. And what was that I saw, right before I fell, for just a second, when the lenses were zoomed as far as they could go? It almost seemed like a tiny figure, standing on the wall, but that can’t be right. The zoom hadn’t had time to focus. The eeriness of the place is making me paranoid.

  I check the glasses. They’re still on my face and working, which is some kind of miracle. I fish around and find the earpiece, stick it back in my ear, but there’s no static, no connection to the base camp. I didn’t think there would be.

  I make myself sit up, grunting while I grit my teeth, and when I’m propped on my hands I look at the analytical menu in the lenses, choosing and adjusting the settings, then stare at my dangling foot. An image comes into focus, a picture of the bones of my lower leg. The ankle is dislocated—I think I’m lucky the tibia didn’t come right through the skin—and there’s a crack in my fibula, and when I look close, two smaller fractures in my foot.

  I turn off the image, wishing I could turn off the pain just as easy. We have to get back into communication. I think of Dad’s field set, a piece of ultra low-tech gear he rigged up himself to use on sensitive sites, so his communications couldn’t be hacked. Mom thought it was weird, but we used to play with it all the time on the ship. I bet I could get a message out on that. If I’d brought it. Of course, if I’d brought it, the thing would probably be in a thousand pieces right now, like everything else in my pack. I breathe deep and slow, fighting for calm. Then I switch the lenses to the night function, looking through the darkness, beyond the beam of light and scatter of debris I’m sitting in.

  The room is circular, like the city, the outer wall studded with decorated half columns, an inner ring of columns I can only hope are still strong, supporting a ceiling with a beautifully curved dome that has a brand-new hole in it. There are no windows, but shelves run along the back wall, empty and broken, and straight ahead is a partially open door, whether just propped up or still on its hinges I can’t tell. It looks like there’s another room beyond it, a big one, also interior, no windows. Except for the door, and a lack of bodies, and shelves too small for dead people, the place reminds me of a tomb. I don’t like that thought.

  I lean my head back as far as I can without disturbing my leg, looking upside down and behind me, and then I see the words. Bigger than the ones outside, much bigger, still in place and taking up the entire curving back wall. The glasses show me the letters in shades of green and gray.

  “Without Memories, They Are Nothing.”

  I wait for Jill, pain like a parasite I can’t pull out, thinking about those words, and the sense of wrong they give me. Like the whole city. What happened to these people?

  I should probably be wondering what’s going to happen to me.

  I run up the terraced steps, deeper into the Cursed City. If the Council is moving as fast as I was, they’ll reach the walls in about one and one-third of a bell. I’m going to have to hide, elude them in the tangle of buildings and trees until they give up and go home. Until the dark days come. Or until we all Forget who we are.

  I don’t Know if I’m going to live through this.

  Tumbled buildings line either side of what is recognizably a street now, a broad lane, water still running in a leaf-and-stone
-choked channel down the center. I move quick and silent, careful not to disturb the dustmoths. The trees are old here, with branches thicker than my waist, smaller, budding offshoots springing up everywhere to crumble the house stones. And the feeling comes again, of people gone away, and I realize that the quiet is wrong. Not the busy kind of silence, with wind and rustling leaves. This is an absence of sound. All the small creatures holding still.

  I come fast around a corner, eyeing a dilapidated house, wondering if it or a tree would conceal me better, and then I stop so abruptly I nearly make myself fall. There is a person. About fifteen meters away, pulling down rocks from a mountainous pile of tree-clad rubble. And even though a human being is exactly what I jumped down from the wall hoping to find, the sight of this one is so shocking I just stand there, staring.

  The figure is small, slight, and with the oddest color hair, bright yellow, almost silver, so short it sticks out. I’ve only seen hair that short on a baby. And this person is scrabbling, pulling down rocks, digging frantically with their fingers, trying to tunnel their way inside a rubble pile. Which seems insane.

  A small slide of stones comes down, shaking me to my senses, and I dart behind a partial wall, peering through a hole that might have been a window. Broken pot crunches beneath my sandals, one shard snapping with a crack that shoots through the open space. I duck into the safety of the wall shadow as the person turns sharply, looking around in a quick arc.

  It’s a girl. Her clothes are plain and shapeless, and she has a pack at her feet, not that different from mine. But her skin is so pale, paler even than Nita’s, and she looks … scared, unsure as she searches for the source of the noise. She doesn’t know this place. No more than I do. Then where does she come from?

  I watch her work, pulling out chunks of stone, and then I see that she’s uncovered an opening, that she’s squeezing through it, yelling words I have difficulty understanding as she goes. But I catch enough to Know that she’s looking for something. Or someone. Someone she can’t find.

  And then the beat inside my chest picks up again. This girl doesn’t know where she is, because this girl has Forgotten. I slip out of the ruined building and follow her.

  It seems like forever, but I know it hasn’t really been that long before I see Jill through the night function of the glasses, dusty and with her face pinched, peering through the darkness beyond the half-open door. She pushes on it, just a little, and the door goes crashing to the floor with a puff of dust. I wince. We’ve been drilled most of our lives on how to observe, not disturb, historic sites. Yet somehow we’re managing to destroy this place piece by piece.

  “I’m sorry,” Jill whispers, kneeling at my side.

  I don’t know whether she means the door or me. She ought to mean the door, because my condition right now is 100 percent my own fault, not hers. I can see her not looking at the angle of my foot.

  “Where else are you hurt?” she asks.

  I shake my head. I can’t even tell. There’s no room in my mind for other kinds of pain, and it’s taking everything I’ve got not to yell. What she needs to do is get the medical kit out. Now.

  Jill drops her pack to the ground, digging through the contents like she heard my thoughts. She comes up with an infuser in her hand.

  “Tell me where to do it.”

  The pain has centralized to a single torture in my ankle. Wherever she shoots, she needs to block all my nerve endings in one go. We’ve only got four infusers with us, and I’m going to have to get out of here. “Exactly where it looks broken,” I tell her, “and a little below.”

  Jill sets the infuser back in the kit, moves down to my foot, and gingerly begins the process of unfastening my boot. She tries to take it off, and the shout I’ve been holding back echoes in the hollow places of the room.

  “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Jill says.

  I’m unreasonably angry at her. Not because she hurt me, but because now she’s crying about it. “Can you get to the broken place without taking the whole thing off?”

  She bites her lip, nods, and then the cool metal tip of the infuser is sitting just below the bulge of bone that should not be in the area of my ankle. I hear a whoosh, feel tiny stings as the air pushes the medicine deep through my skin. Numbness begins to creep down one side of my foot, spreading to my toes, then to the other side and up my leg. Bliss. I lay my head back on one arm, sighing with relief. Jill is still wiping her eyes.

  “I’m going for help,” she begins. “We need the—”

  “No.” I lift my head and see that Jill is beginning to frown through her tears. The “danger” expression. I ease my tone. “The first rule is to not split up.”

  “The first rule is to not move forward unsupervised, Beck! And you were the one not so worried about that.”

  I can’t really deny it.

  “I don’t have to get all the way back to base camp,” she says. “Give me the glasses and I’ll go back through the canyon and up the mountain until I find communication. They can come on the air bikes, since there’s no one here. Fly you … ”

  Jill’s voice trails away at my shaking head, the frown deepening between her brows. “And why not?” she asks.

  “The glasses are set to my DNA. They won’t work for you.”

  This would have been such an easy fix if we were in communication with base camp, just switch the security to Jill, whose DNA is already in the system. It was stupid not to have set the glasses to both of us before we started out, but our protocol was so careful. Locals should never experience unfamiliar technology. If someone else put the glasses on right now, they’d just be clear lenses.

  But who could have imagined having no signal? And me, the wearer of the glasses, incapacitated in a room inside a mound of rubble that any son of Sean Rodriguez could only characterize as a ritual site? And who could have imagined a city at all, sitting right here, where our scans showed an empty valley? The feeling of wrong hits me again, full force. I don’t want Jill out of my sight. We have to get out of this together. But she’s not going to like it.

  Jill has her knees pulled up to her chest, staring at the ceiling and the shaft of light. I tread gently. “Jill, I need you to set my ankle.”

  I read the injury first-aid information from the database inside the glasses while she was gone. Not nearly as detailed as what I could have gotten if we were connected to base camp and the Centauri III. But it should be enough. Maybe. Jill is staring at me like I grew another head.

  “I can’t do that,” she whispers.

  “Yes, you can. I’m going to read the instructions to you.”

  She shakes her head. “You need Dr. Lanik … ”

  “I don’t have Dr. Lanik. I’ve got you. And we should do it now, before it swells any more, and while the infusion is working.” I really want it to happen while this infusion is working. I might need the other three to get back up that mountain.

  Jill is still shaking her head. She wipes her eyes and stands, coming around to look down on my face. Her frown is a deep, straight line between her eyes. I know I’m in trouble.

  “You’re not fit to call this one, Beckett. I’m going to hike back to base camp.”

  “I don’t think we—”

  “I don’t care what you think! You’re not having your way, not this time.”

  “Listen to—”

  “You listen! I’m not going to set your ankle because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll ruin it! And there’s no reason not to wait for the air bikes and Dr. Lanik. So you’re going to lie right there like a good—”

  “No!”

  The word came out harsh, stopping Jill in her tracks. I hadn’t meant to sound like that.

  “Look, I really don’t think we should split up. There’s something … wrong about this place … ” I stare into the empty room and its shadowy columns, trying to think how to explain the feeling without sounding like I’m eight years old. Jillian’s hands go to her hips.

  “What do you mean
‘wrong’? Just because the scans weren’t calibrated? There’s no one here. You’re safer where you are than—”

  “Jill, the scans don’t need adjusting; they were dead wrong. We don’t know anything about where we are! And we … ” And then I stare harder through the darkness, let the night function pierce the shadows.

  “Jill,” I whisper. I sit up and grab her hand, pulling her down to my side.

  “What—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh, fine … ” She is so good at cussing, but I don’t have time to admire it.

  “Quiet! And don’t move.”

  She jerks her hand away. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Something moved,” I whisper. “In the other room.”

  Why can I never do what’s good for me and just not look? Why can’t I turn around and walk the other way? The yell that came ripping through the darkness a few moments ago—deep, male, and full of pain—has my memories churning. I’m afraid of what’s out there, moving toward me in the ruined streets of this city. And now I’m afraid of what might be happening inside this bizarre hidden place. I found my way through two inner chambers, all dark, windowless, and now this third room is vast, empty, full of a wood dust I can smell, something, someone, waiting at the end of it. And yet here go my feet, moving me through air that is like spilled ink, taking me straight to a fading in the blackness and an open doorway. I put an eye around the edge.