Soul and Blade

by Tara Brown

  I bite my lip, trying to remember anything or piece together the puzzle. “Did he take my memories away from me?”

  “I don’t know that, Jane. But I know he knew you long before you knew him. He has spoken of you for several years, like a decade or more. He is a liar, Jane. A very good one.”

  I hang up the phone, not wanting to hear any more. I’m sitting next to the only person I trust and he’s a cat.

  The helicopter lands on the pad of what I can only call a castle. It’s gray brick and completely castle-like. It must be more than ten thousand square feet, with a pool and a guesthouse. It’s ridiculous and there’s no way I know the man inside. The man who loves me and lives in my three-bedroom townhouse in downtown DC. They cannot be the same man.

  The lighting around the outside is meant to mimic torches; it’s perfect and yet frightening.

  The man who gave me the gun looks back. “We will wait here.”

  I should tell them I’m fine and that they can go. But I have a feeling I might need a getaway vehicle in about eight minutes. I might also then need an alibi.

  I grab my cat, my poor, traumatized cat, and climb from the chopper, ducking and running for the back door to the house. I don’t knock. I just walk in, closing the door and placing Binx on the counter. He growls at me through the little slats. I swallow hard and leave him there, entering the dark butler’s pantry. It leads directly into the kitchen, the main one—marble and ornate, of course. They always are in houses like this one.

  Everything looks like an older lady lives here. I almost worry I don’t have the right house as I creep through the shadows and round the massive circular staircase.

  “I didn’t expect you like this.” His voice comes from a shadow in the corner, across a great room.

  “Yes, you did,” I say. We both know it.

  “I expected I wouldn’t know you were here. I planned on a knife to my throat in my sleep.”

  I want to die and I don’t even know why yet. “I want to hear it from your lips.”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it.” My words are nearly a whisper. I drop to my knees on the hard tile floor and stare at the shadow he has become to me.

  He doesn’t move, just speaks like a villain in a movie. “We met a long time ago. I was an intern and you, the girl in a coma. You were in your late teens, we thought—me with all the knowledge of my early twenties.”

  Tears stream down my face. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing he has broken my heart completely by lying to me.

  “You had been in the coma for weeks when I met you—almost Christmastime. You were a runaway. No family, no one looking for you. No one. Just the doctors and nurses in the ward. A Jane Doe.”

  These are lies. I want to tell him that, but I sit on my heels and listen.

  “I had worked there for a summer as an intern and then stayed on doing evening shifts for the fall and winter. I spent months that winter wondering what was going on in that pretty little head of yours. Through a family connection, I’d heard of a project for coma patients. I volunteered you and me for the program. When I arrived, I was stunned to discover the art of mind running. It was in its early stages.”

  I shake my head a little. It’s my twitch in interrogations like these. I don’t understand why he’s lying to me. He certainly doesn’t recognize this as an interrogation.

  “The first few times we tried to get into your mind we realized whatever was in there was bad. Your world was dark and dank. There was no color, no stories, no life. We had been in the minds of a couple people each as test runs. You were the first person with nothing but a cell and dark hallways and doors that led nowhere. You never let anyone in but me. So we created a program to help you see nothing while I was there, just me and you. I have actually walked the halls of your silent mind. You were always a little girl in your head, crying in the corner. I couldn’t see why you cried. The pictures were blank. Needless to say, I felt an affinity with you. Always. Sitting in the dark, speaking about nothing. I read to you, from books I had memorized. I spent my entire winter trying to coax you out of the coma—mind run after mind run—until it became dangerous. Yet one day it worked, and you woke.” He pauses. He might be lying. I don’t know what to believe.

  He sighs after a couple of seconds and then continues. “Your head had been filled with things that were much worse than any of us wanted to know about. A girl on the streets living as a runaway always has the very worst memories. So we inserted a nanite, the very first of those memory bots we created. We made it wipe your memory, including your long-term memory, completely. We made you new memories. We created a past. Loving nuns and a fabulous childhood. A twin sister and loving parents stolen from you by a tragedy.”

  I look at the shadow he is and tilt my head. Can I see through the lies? Do I know him at all? Is everything a lie?

  “You joined the military a year later—fully healed and ready to be part of the world. Being a blank slate made you an easy fit. And you were a natural at shooting and combat, I suspect from years of fighting for your life on the streets.”

  I look down at the light from outside sending shadows in the bands of light across the marble floor. I don’t say anything. It’s the best tactic a person wanting the truth has against a person wishing to lie. Human beings hate silence. Especially humans who lie.

  After a few moments he speaks. “I finished my internship and I moved on to a degree in robotics engineering. The internship with the nanites had intrigued me enough. When I finished it all, Angela and I were placed in the program I had interned at. This type of neuroscience was still so young and fresh as far as the rest of the world was concerned. This lab had the technology and the secrecy and the funding to explore that little bit extra.”

  There is nothing but silence when he pauses. I can hear both our breaths gently caressing the air.

  By the time he starts talking again, I have decided it is all lies. “When you signed up for the program, at the urging of your superiors, I was not part of that decision. I had begged them not to allow you in, knowing your old memories were a carefully built ladder. It could all come crashing down if they messed with it. Even so, they knew you were very susceptible to the bots and memory manipulation. They felt it was the best place for someone like you. I would not have chosen that for you. But you proved them all right. You really were the best at it.”

  I remember the urging of my superiors. I remember signing up and thinking I was on to the next adventure. But I don’t remember him at all. “Why don’t I remember the hospital or you?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  “The chip was designed so that you believed you were at a military training facility for the first six months. It was actually a brain-injury rehab clinic. Then at the very end we tweaked your memories again, reinserting the new life we had made up for you. As far as you knew, you left the orphanage and joined the military.”

  The words ring in my head.

  It might be true.

  In my first run in Rory’s head, I saw his face when I woke from a coma. He was the doctor. I lift my gaze. “Your face was the first one I saw, wasn’t it?” It isn’t completely a question. I know it’s the truth.

  “Yes.”

  I gulp, contemplating just shooting him and leaving. Footsteps startle me, pulling me from that idea. I turn back behind me to see the wolfhound. He’s so huge for such a small puppy. He barrels toward me, sniffing and jumping. “Sirius!” Dash calls, but the pup doesn’t listen.

  I lift a hand, scratching his ears and his head. “Are all my reactions because of you and your lies about who I am?”

  “No. We restarted you to be like any amnesiac. You recall how to chew or swallow or walk or what your personal choices are as far as favorites go. Those are instinctual, not memory based. They are who you are. We could not take that away. We took only long-term memories. Th
e scars they created are still there. Sometimes I see them in your eyes.”

  I close my eyes and scratch the dog’s ears, hating that I even feel the way I do about Dash. “Did you make me love you?”

  “Of course not. When I met you again, you were a fully formed woman with skills that frightened me. You had grown into a soldier in those ten years. I had kept track of you, of course. But I wasn’t stalking you. I had been engaged and broken it off and lived half a life by the time we were reunited.”

  “When you let me into your head at the end of training, you told me I wouldn’t remember it. I wouldn’t form memories of it.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “No. But I think Rory showed it to me.”

  He gets up, walking to me. The dog sits in front of me, snuggled in. I wrap an arm around him, hugging and needing an anchor.

  Dash sits on the cold marble across from me. The shadows play with his features, scaring me with what I see and what I imagine. “Rory knew about you, about your past. Angela told him in a moment of intimacy. She called me straightaway to tell me she’d done it. I panicked and asked you to marry me before I’d even explained my family or any of the other things about me, or you. I wanted you to know I loved you more than anything and that was my way of showing it, in case Rory decided to tell you. I never wanted you to find out who and what you were. It changes nothing, and there’s nowhere in your past that will explain who you are better than when we are together.”

  It is at least an attempt at trying to explain how he had handled his family so badly and why the engagement had come out of nowhere. It doesn’t explain why he thought getting married would solve anything.

  Technically, at this point, everything is likely to be a lie, even if it feels true. I don’t care about anything else. I just want my one answer. “Did you go to the brothel with your brother?”

  “No. I told you I didn’t.”

  I heave a little, I can’t stop it. He rushes at me, but I pull the gun, my hand shaking as I extend it and point it at him.

  My hand never shakes.

  “You made me a monster. I don’t remember my life. You took it away and fed me lies and made me love you.”

  “I swear—”

  “Shut up!” I jerk the gun. “Nothing you say will ever be the truth to me! You are a liar and you made me hollow and blank! I am a lie!” I tremble everywhere, lowering the gun and getting up quickly. I hear the dog chasing me as I run for my cat, but I don’t hear Dash. I grab the cat carrier and run out the door and across the grass.

  The grass is damp and my feet push in hard.

  I almost dive into the helicopter, but I stop. I need one answer. Just one. I turn and look back at the house, clinging to my poor cat in his carrier. Dash walks through the door, holding his dog. I walk back to him a little bit so he can hear me, but not too close. “Did you make up all my triggers?”

  “The four-leaf clover is yours. The purple scarf, yours. The cat named Binx, yours. The rhymes about bullets made of blood and bone and the swans circling, they’re yours. I don’t know where they came from. The French house in the country was the one I took you to in my head. It was my grandmother’s cottage for quiet time. You loved it.”

  I take a step back. “You took everything.”

  His green-gray eyes are filled with emotion. “I tried to take away all the bad and give you good in its place. I just wanted you to be okay.”

  My lip trembles.

  “But I had no twin sister! No mother and father! No car accident! That was everything that got me through all this bullshit! Through basic and the military and being a fucking assassin! Goddammit, that is who I think I am! Who am I, if not that?”

  “I just wanted you to be a whole person. No leftovers from some horrid life.”

  “Why did you care?”

  “Because I lov—loved you. I-I loved you from the start.” He stutters and walks toward me, but I step back. I turn and run away from him, climbing into the helicopter. I slam the door and stare at him, wondering how I ended up here. This reality is so much worse than the fiction of a mind run.

  15. SHE TALKS TO ANGELS

  The gun in my hand barely moves as I squeeze the trigger, hitting the man in the eye each time. I can shoot. That’s normal. That’s mine.

  I chant these things a lot, making myself see the chanting in Rory’s head was mine. I think more than a few things in Rory’s head were mine. It’s been weeks of me processing, and the longer I think about it all, the messier it becomes.

  I have spent the last two weeks telling myself that talking to Rory is not the answer, even if I think he has answers. The man is likely to be even crazier than ever from being isolated in his own dirty little world for weeks on end. There will be no answers from him, only more annoyances.

  I am done with being fucked with.

  I put the gun down and pull off my safety glasses and earmuffs.

  “You have a caller, Jane,” the owner, Mr. Christianson, shouts to me from the door in the back of the shooting range. I turn and give him a wave, but I can’t imagine who would be calling me here.

  I put my gun in the holster and stalk over to the door. Through the glass I see he means a person calling on me, not a phone call. I sigh and open the door, immediately enraged seeing his remorseful green-gray eyes. I lean against the door when it closes. “What?”

  “I need to talk to you.” Dash looks upset, but I force myself to not care, just barely. “Please, just a quick walk around the block. Maybe minus the gun.”

  “Scared?” I lift my eyes, almost grinning at him, but I’m afraid he’d take it the wrong way. He’s been calling and texting nonstop for the entire two weeks I have been avoiding all life forms beyond my cat and my loving neighbor.

  “Actually yes. I am scared of you with a gun.”

  Mr. Christianson snorts and mutters under his breath, “Wise man.”

  “Fine. But remember that I don’t need the gun,” I warn before smiling at Mr. Christianson. “Thanks.”

  “See you next week, Jane.” He eyes Dash as I empty my gun and put it in the lockbox. I carry it to my car, Dash’s car, our car. I put it in the trunk and realize I should give the car back. “I’ll give the car back as soon as I have a chance to get a different one, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I need to explain.”

  I turn and give him a look as I close the trunk. “Explain what? I think you did that.”

  “Why I left when you went back into Rory.”

  That makes me smile bitterly. “I know why you left. You knew he would show me and I would kill you.”

  “I hadn’t changed his nanobot the way they wanted me to when you went in the first time. I had it limited so that he was unable to enter your world. That was a risk if we did the changes they wanted to make. The world was entirely his the first time, apart from a few similarities that you brought to the table. But the changes we made the second time you went in allowed him to enter your mind, with the understanding you would have more control. Suck him into your world a little. But that gave a skilled operator the ability to scour your mind and use things inside of your head against you.”

  “I get it. You were worried about what he ended up showing me, so you ran.”

  “I was worried he would hurt you, and I didn’t run. I gave you space.” He sighs, his attempt at not having an accent diminished. Dash-with-an-accent reminds me of something. “I gave you some room to be angry and hate me. I had planned on coming to see you on the third or fourth day, hoping you had calmed down a bit.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to worry about giving me space, just breaking my heart. I’m dense enough that I didn’t put any of it together. I thought you broke up with me due to anger, without actually breaking up with me. Rory was elusive and Antoine slipped up, so I had some idea that you had been lying to me.”

&n
bsp; He can’t hide the surprise on his face. “You didn’t know until you came to see me? Antoine gave me a heads-up when he got off the phone with you. I was ready for you to kill me. He believed you knew everything.”

  “No. That’s why I asked you to tell me the story. I knew nothing.”

  A grin creeps across his mouth. “So deceptive.”

  “You mean for someone with no brain in their head? I guess.”

  His humor flees the second the words leave my mouth. “Jane, that is not what I think.”

  I shrug. “I never want to see you again, Dash. I just want you to pretend that we worked together once for a couple years and that’s that. I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to hear you. And I don’t want to know you. It’s been lie after lie after lie.”

  “I fucked up.” He never cusses.

  I don’t say anything else. I don’t need to. I know what I know and I believe none of it. I am a Frankenstein brain-damage victim.

  “I fucked up,” he repeats, and for the first time I see just how broken he is. He is devastated. But I am too far gone to care.

  “Do you really want the story, Jane?”

  I shrug again. “I want the truth maybe. Not a story, Dash. You took away the only good things in my life and left me standing alone on the road. Fucked up doesn’t really cover what you’ve done. Thus far I’ve learned that my best friend is a liar. Her ex-boyfriend is a pervert who has tortured and mocked me. The entire family I thought I once had is a figment of some doctor’s imagination. My childhood likely contains more things than I can handle. I was the victim of something so bad, it left me brain damaged and in a coma. You never told me what it was, so I have to guess it was horrific. And the worst part, for me, is that the man I loved more than anything, the man who got me through every nightmare and saved me from every dark corner, was the biggest lie of them all. If you don’t mind, I don’t want to spend the rest of my fucked-up life dwelling on all of that.” I am so close to tears that I can’t bear it. I toss him the keys to the Mercedes. “On second thought, just take it now. Keep the gun.” I walk away, crossing the parking lot of the gun range. “Good-bye.”