by Sara Beaman
The same Desmond we’re meeting in New York?
“Yes. The same.
“Desmond sent a letter to Mnemosyne demanding that she return the bodies of twelve of his lieutenants in exchange for Julian. But, of course, Mnemosyne wanted Julian dead, not alive. She sent back a reply telling the Wardens she’d left their lieutenants for the sun, and that Desmond should feel free to do the same with Julian.
“Desmond very nearly followed Mnemosyne’s suggestion, but Julian managed to convince him not to. He swore that he had no loyalty to her. He offered to join the Wardens’ fight, to do whatever was necessary to defeat her. So the Wardens took him on, and for years he was their student and servant.
“Somehow, during that time, the Wardens taught Julian how to shield himself from supernatural powers. This was an anomaly; it’s usually impossible for members of one House to learn the manifestations of another. I can’t learn how to put someone in a state of sensory deprivation like Aya can, for example, and she couldn’t learn to be a telepath.
“But there’s something... odd about Julian.” Adam stares at the ceiling and doesn’t continue.
What happened to him next? I ask.
“Oh. Sorry. Julian stayed with the Wardens for over ninety years. Our House, Mnemosyne included, assumed he was long dead. She was very powerful back then, but not so powerful as to see things whole continents away.
“Meanwhile the Wardens were gaining ground in the war against the Mnemonics. For the first time ever, Mnemosyne consented to a series of diplomatic meetings with the Wardens to discuss what would happen to the Americas. The Wardens decided to have Julian attend these meetings incognito to see if he could provide any insight into the proceedings.
“The envoy that Mnemosyne sent to New York was none other than Lucien—Julian’s brother, the telepath that helped him escape to the New World—and perhaps the only person who’d ever shown Julian a shred of compassion since his death at the age of twenty-five.”
What about the Wardens? Weren’t they kind to him?
He shakes his head. “What they did for him was based entirely on tactics. They expected it to pay off in time. It had nothing to do with charity or kindness.”
He pauses for a moment, looking thoughtful and sad.
“Of course I never knew Lucien. But I can tell you that it’s much more difficult to ignore the suffering of others when you can feel it for yourself—when you can feel it happening in your own head. I’m sure Lucien just couldn’t take Julian’s pain any longer, and that’s why he helped him escape.
“But since he isn’t a telepath, Julian didn’t have my perspective on the issue. And he’d spent nearly a century contemplating Lucien’s sacrifice on his behalf. In the end he could only interpret it as an act of love. Perhaps only fraternal love, but something of deep meaning nonetheless.
Adam pauses again.
“While Julian has never actually told me as much, at least not in a direct way, I’m sure he was in love with Lucien, or at least with the version of Lucien he had in his head. And when he saw him again...” Adam shakes his head.
This doesn’t end well, does it?
“No.”
Does it bother you? You seem sad...
“I feel bad for Julian. We don’t always get along, but... I know how it feels to be alone. And to want someone who doesn’t want you. And to lose someone you love.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself. In any case, Julian met with Lucien three times at these formal meetings in disguise. Three meetings on the fourth of July on three consecutive years. At the third he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He followed Lucien back to the apartment where he was spending his days and revealed his true identity.
“Lucien was shocked. At first, he didn’t believe Julian—he couldn’t read his thoughts—but once Julian provided proof of his identity, Lucien seemed amazed that he had survived. Grateful. He asked Julian to return the next night, saying that he had something he needed him to do. A favor. Something in return for what he’d done for him.
“When Julian returned to the apartment, Lucien wasn’t alone. He was with a young woman—a mortal human woman—an actress named Mirabel.”
Oh God.
“Apparently Lucien met her during his first visit to New York and had fallen head-over-heels in love with her. During his second visit, he’d told her what he was—a revenant—and asked her to join him, to spend eternity with him under the stars or whatever. And she said yes. Who knows if she knew the risks involved? Who knows if he even mentioned them?
“But when Lucien returned to Mnemosyne to ask for permission to initiate Mirabel, Mnemosyne forbade it. And when Mnemosyne declares something forbidden, she makes it utterly impossible. He was completely unable to disobey her orders once they were given.
“So he asked Julian to do it for him. To give her the blood. It didn’t matter to Lucien whether Mirabel ended up his own daughter or Julian’s, just as long as her youth wouldn’t wither away.”
So Julian’s been stuck with her for over a hundred years now? That’s fucking tragic!
“Oh, it gets worse.”
What?
“Julian did as Lucien asked. Initiated Mirabel. Then Lucien had to return to Europe and report back to Mnemosyne. When she found out what he’d done—both for Julian and for Mirabel—she killed him.”
Are you serious?
“Yes.”
That’s horrible! Why the hell did you tell me this story?
“You said you didn’t care what kind of story I told you,” he says flatly.
I stand up. Whatever. I’m going to try to get some more sleep, I guess.
Again that tiny flicker of a smile. I leave the room before I can start thinking about it.
I lie back down on the cot and stare at the ceiling.
Who the hell is Adam, anyway? On the surface he seems so normal. Boring, almost. Too calm. Too analytical. This is, of course, if you overlook the whole being undead thing. I just can’t reconcile his past with the man in the next room. The doctor part makes sense, but... drunk driving? Manslaughter? Promiscuous sex? Haruko said he was a freak. Said he was probably trying to get in my pants. Not in those words, sure, but still. She’d probably know. She’s known him for twenty years. Apparently in the biblical sense, even.
I guess some freaks wear business suits and get to work on time.
I’m not being fair. He’s been nothing but kind to me, really. And patient. And he hasn’t hit on me or made me feel uncomfortable. And he shot a man just because I asked him to. In the heart. Without flinching.
I shiver. Now we’re back into freak territory. Although I’m just as culpable as him in this case, and I’m not sure I regret what we did.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to think of nothing.
It’s not easy to fall asleep. At first I’m not sure if I’m sleeping at all, my dreams are so scattered and strange.
I’m back at work, at the Spira Communications headquarters in Atlanta. It’s night. I’m at remedial training, being forced to watch the video of Mirabel. Her face keeps going in and out of focus; the tracking on the tape goes awry; the video screen flickers and the room goes dark.
Then it’s not her face any longer, not our face, but the face of a strange, terrible woman with white-blond hair and translucent skin. Her eyes are closed; she appears to be asleep, perhaps dreaming. The camera pans out to reveal that her head is floating in midair, disembodied. Without moving her lips, she begins to speak, but all I hear is static and screeching. I cover my ears with my hands, shut my eyes—
The head is gone. I’m in a clearing in the woods. No, it’s a pit of some kind. I’m standing between two pools of water. In front of me is a perfectly square hole in the ground, its edges clean and precise. Inside the hole is a steep stairwell that leads into the earth.
Walking up the stairs, slowly, sedately, is the same terrible woman from the video, but now her head is attached to a body. She is naked, so thin as to be painful to look
at, and her pale skin is painted light blue by the moonlight. She extends a hand, opens her fist, and a tiny golden disc on a thin chain appears, dangling from her middle finger.
She doesn’t bother to speak. She doesn’t need to. Her demands play silently in my mind’s ear. When I try to understand them, I can’t, but I know I will when the time is right.
I look down into the pool to my left. It’s shallow, and the water is clear enough for me to see straight down to the earth and stone at the bottom. The pool to my right is dark and deep, and as soon as I look into it I find myself drowning in it, gasping for air, flailing and sinking like a stone.
But it’s fine. I don’t need to breathe any more. I’m going to be fine. I close my eyes, relax, and float up to the surface of the water like a dead body.
Now I’m in the holding tank down in Basement Level Three, and it’s not water, or at least it’s not all water. A good portion of it is blood, and there’s something else in it too, something with a sickly-sweet odor that turns my stomach. I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open. I wish they’d stop making me sleep. Sleep brings such strange dreams.
This time I dream I’m visiting Adam’s office at the research hospital where he works. I need to pack up his things. All the books need to go in boxes, and the diplomas need to come down off the wall. Put foam between them so the glass doesn’t break. Take the computer, too, and whatever he has on his desk—some pictures, it looks like, that’s all. Take the contents of the desk, too. Everything in the office needs to go into boxes; the boxes go on the cart; the cart goes down into the van; the van takes the boxes to the plane. He’ll need all of this stuff. After all, he’s moving to Georgia, to Savannah, not far from Basement Level Three.
Later the two of us go to a coffee shop in Atlanta, where a red-headed teenage girl meets us. Neither she nor Adam want any coffee, though, so I drink enough for all three of us. She gives me her business card, but all it has on it is a telephone number, no name. She tells me to call if I ever need anything or if I get into any trouble at work.
But what if they’ve tapped the phones? There are cameras everywhere, after all. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that the café could be bugged, too.
When I go to get up from the table, I drop my backpack on the ground. As it hits the floor, I hear a crunch. It’s the camera, I just know it. I broke the stupid camera.
How am I supposed to get my memories back now?
A board creaks. I inhale sharply and sit up in bed.
It’s Adam. “Sorry, Kate,” he whispers. “I just wanted to go back and clean Haruko up. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
I take a deep breath and nod, still disoriented, trying to fight down feelings of panic.
“It’s all right. Go back to sleep.”
I nod again and lie down. The door shuts behind him.
I sleep, and I dream.
22
A Dream of Corridors
{Adam}
I sat in the sitting room, thinking. Haruko was asleep on the four-poster bed, curled up under the covers. I’d laid next to her for an hour or so, but sleep wouldn’t come, and I didn’t want to take any more of the pills in the cabinet—not after what had happened last time.
I pulled a three-ring binder off the bookshelf and paged through it. Inside were pages and pages of handwritten notes I’d done on a case study about a freak rash of amnesia incidents in 1989. Twenty-five people in the same neighborhood of Pittsburgh had all experienced memory loss in the same six-week period. I’d gone into the city to interview the subjects, their families, their primary care doctors. In the end I’d written the entire thing off as an outbreak of unknown etiology. The only other symptom the subjects shared was anemia. The detail had seemed irrelevant at the time, but now it looked sinister.
I wanted to call Elena and tell her about it. It and everything else. She’d want to know, I thought; if she could just get over her skepticism, she’d want to know about all of this. But her number wouldn’t work; I’d tried calling her enough times to know that for sure.
Once again I considered going to Atlanta and trying to find her. Now there was a way to do it: I could take the cab Mirabel was sending for me and bail out once I was in the city. I knew her home address. I could find my way on foot if that’s what it would take. If she saw me in person she wouldn’t turn me away. She’d believe me. It might not be easy for me to be around her, but I could control myself well enough. I could manage being near two, three, maybe even four humans at once...
But what about out on the streets? What would I do in a crowd?
I placed the binder back on the shelf.
Someone knocked on the door to the suite. I scrambled to put on clothing, grabbing it off the floor and pulling it on. I hastily collected the garments Haruko had left scattered all over the furniture, threw them in the bedroom, and closed the door.
I opened the door to the suite.
It was Aya.
“Dr. Radcliffe,” she said, “you haven’t seen Haruko, by any chance?”
“She’s inside,” I said.
“Oh, good. May I speak with her?”
“She’s, uh...” I scratched the back of my head. “She’s asleep.”
Aya blinked twice, confused. As she put the pieces together, her eyelashes fluttered faster. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked!”
“It’s fine,” I said, somewhere between annoyed and embarrassed.
Aya nodded. “I suppose... you, well... you haven’t seen Mirabel as well, have you?” Oh God, she thought. She isn’t in there too, is she?
“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since the party. Why?”
“She’s not in her rooms. Normally I’d be able to use a manifestation to find her, but...”
“Maybe she’s gone invisible,” I said, joking.
“Oh dear. You’re probably right!” She wrung her hands.
“Wait—why couldn’t you find Haruko yourself, then?”
“Clairsentience doesn’t work on Wardens,” she said plainly, as if that explained everything. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to speak with Julian. Please wake Haruko up. We may need her help.”
With that she left.
The door to the bedroom opened and Haruko stepped out, zipping up her jeans and yawning.
“Mirabel’s missing,” I started to explain.
Haruko nodded. “I heard what Aya said.”
“She can make herself invisible?”
“Most illusionists can,” she said. “But there’s nothing to worry about. She’s in the seraglio.” She glanced at her watch. “She’d best hurry up, though. We need to leave in a half hour.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked without thinking. The wounded tone of my voice surprised me.
“Yeah. I have to go back to Atlanta. Work.” She slipped into the office.
“Haruko... could I go with you?”
For a few moments she didn’t say anything.
Then she asked, “To Atlanta?”
“Yeah.”
“Adam, I... about last night...” She stepped back into the sitting room again, her portfolio under her armpit. “Shit, I mean, I don’t know if I’m—if you’re ready for that.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Right,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“No, it’s all right. Here,” she said, reaching into her back pocket and pulling out a thin wallet, and from the wallet a card. The only thing printed on the card was a ten-digit number. “Call me if you ever need anything, okay?” She handed it to me.
‘If you ever need anything’? Like what? Business advice?
I put the card in my pocket. “Okay.”
“I should get going,” she said with an apologetic smile.
“I’ll show you to the garage, then,” I said.
“That’d be great.”
I’d never been to the garage before, but with the deck in my pocket I found it easily. It was enormous, brightly lit, w
ith white walls and a polished concrete floor. I counted twelve cars parked inside before I stopped counting. What the hell did Julian need that many for? I didn’t even know he could drive.
A group of servants were gathered around one town car, packing an odd mix of modern suitcases and antique-looking valises into the trunk. A few more people were scattered throughout the rest of the garage, adjusting tires, polishing windows. Eight or nine in total—too many. I stopped in the doorway, uncomfortable going any further.
“Well,” said Haruko, “I guess this is it, then.”
“I guess so.”
“Adam, I, uh...” She bit her lower lip. “Anyway, I hope I see you again.”
I nodded and forced a smile. “Have a safe trip.”
“Thanks.”
And that was all.
I stepped back into the corridors and started back towards the suite. I stared at my shoes as I walked, feeling both angry and foolish. While I knew it was unreasonable to expect Haruko to take me back to Atlanta with her, I was desperate to get away from the estate—not to mention desperate to be with someone whom I could relate to, someone who seemed to care about what I was going through. Although I’d probably just ruined that by being too forward.
I rounded a corner to find myself face-to-face with Mirabel.
“I—uh—hello,” I stammered.
She smiled. I could tell she intended to look sweet, even harmless, but instead the effect was chilling.
“I wanted to apologize for my... comments earlier,” she said without preface. “I should never have belittled you in that way.”
It took me a moment to remember what she’s talking about. An android without a personality chip.
“Oh.” I laughed nervously. “It’s fine.”
Her eyes wandered down to my shirt. As I looked down I realized I’d buttoned it wrong, yet instead of embarrassment, intense nostalgia welled up inside me, as if from nowhere.
Mirabel reached out and placed two fingertips against my arm.
“Please be careful,” she said. “Of him.”
Of Julian.
“I’m concerned about you,” she continued.