False Sight

by Dan Krokos

  One of our neighbors, Mrs. Prenslow, sees me wearing my bloody dress, but I’m too raw to care. She’s half blind anyway. I nod at her, and her eyes follow me up the stairs. I have a feeling it’ll be the last time I see her.

  The carpet in our outer hallway is stained brown with years. I smell cigarettes burning in the next unit over, two boys in their twenties who play video games until four in the morning. I put my ear to our door and listen, but hear nothing.

  It’ll be easier to see Peter before Rhys.

  Peter first, because no matter what he’ll hear me out before judging my stupid decision to take on Nina alone rather than regrouping. That’s just how he works. He’s like the human embodiment of justice or something.

  At least Rhys is likely to focus his anger on who killed Noah, not on me.

  I knock, and the door whips open two seconds later.

  Peter stands in the doorway. His face is hard. “Where was our first kiss?” he demands.

  A slap across the face. I stand there for two whole seconds. “The bathroom stall, the night before the dry run.” My answer doesn’t prove who I am. I’ve been gone for over two hours. For all they know, the creators picked me up and stole my memories and replaced me with a new clone. I guess I pass, despite that.

  Peter wraps his arms around me, holding me up. I give him my weight gladly. Rhys comes over and stands there for a moment, then he hugs both of us. We stand like that for a few seconds.

  “Who killed him?” they eventually ask.

  When I tell them, they believe me, but they don’t understand.

  We do everything at once. I throw a sandwich down my throat and they finish putting on their armor, and then I get in the shower. I have to wash the blood off. Our place might be compromised, so we need to leave pretty much immediately. Not to mention every minute adds to Nina’s lead. I turn the water on hot enough to melt skin. I peel the dress off; it pulls at my stomach, where the blood dried. Then I stand under the flow and watch the water shade from brown to red, to pink, to clear.

  I leave the door open so they can hear me. I tell them everything. I hear them running up and down the hallway while I talk, searching the places we’ve stashed weapons or resources like bottled water and packaged food. Anything for an extended trip.

  I tell them I was kept alive because Nina, or Mrs. North, or whoever the hell, wanted to use me for something. I don’t bring up that it’s possible I’m as dangerous as Nina. I wait for Peter to draw the same conclusion, but I can’t tell if he does. It makes my skin itch. I want him to realize it so I don’t have to tell him.

  “I found Noah,” is all Peter says when I get out of the shower.

  “I lost the DJ,” is all Rhys says, and he sounds so mad at himself, I’m surprised he hasn’t punched holes in the wall.

  On the way back from the bathroom, I stop in the room Rhys shared with Noah. I don’t know why. Noah’s bed is against the wall. The sheets are twisted from when he rolled out of it yesterday morning, before we all went to get breakfast at a diner. Sequel had come out of the shower wearing the same green shirt I was wearing. Neither of us had budged. “Fine, I’ll change,” she said, but I told her it didn’t matter. We were supposed to be twins anyway. That wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago. I hear the sound Noah’s blood made in the dark, paint spilling over the floor. Don’t forget me.

  Rhys is cleaning his gun at the low dresser. He’s scrubbing the barrel so hard the lubed metal slips out of his hand, and he catches it and keeps scrubbing with the same motion. Peter is rooting around for something in Noah’s closet.

  Rhys looks up from his disassembled gun. “Hey.”

  I blink.

  “We need to get to Noah,” I say. “I want his memories.” I don’t want to forget him.

  Peter steps out of the closet. “What are you thinking?”

  “Noah spent so much time with Sequel. Maybe she said something, or he saw something that will give us a clue.” But that means we have to get to his body now, before his brain cells break down too much. It might already be too late to copy his memories.

  If it works, I’ll have his personality in a box. I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I don’t want to be the keeper of his identity.

  “I can’t think of another lead,” Peter says, staring at the floor, eyes unfocused. “I don’t know where to look for her.”

  “Good plan,” Rhys says, looking a little pale at the thought.

  I go to my room and slip into my armor and feel better immediately. The invisible seam in the back closes to the top of my spine, and the lightweight material shifts and hugs the contours of my body. The painkilling system built into the armor’s lining cools the burn of my cut forearm. I feel safe and secure with my second skin.

  Next come my sword and revolver. I used to look at my weapons with a kind of reverence, but now I know they’re just tools. My sword is straight and light and narrow, and my gun holds six bullets. The gun sticks to my left hip. The sword, Beacon, sticks to my back.

  While Rhys packs the memory machine, I find Peter in his room looking out the window.

  We’re alone for a moment. I have to share my fear. If I don’t tell him, it’s going to burn me hollow from the inside out.

  I step inside and shut the door behind me. “What if I’m like her?” I say, no preamble.

  He doesn’t reply, but his shoulders tense slightly. Please say something. Tell me I’m an idiot, that the very idea is absurd.

  “I could be like Nina,” I say again to clarify.

  He turns around. “I know.”

  A terrible second passes.

  “It doesn’t matter, though,” he says.

  “Oh really? How do you figure? I was born a few days before Sequel, and Mrs. North wasn’t rushed with me. She could’ve put anything inside my head. Why would she do something to Sequel and not me?”

  Peter swallows, and his eyes flit away for a second, but he forces them back to me. “I agree it’s possible, maybe even likely.”

  “So you need to make a decision.”

  He shakes his head, just an inch. “No, I don’t. I’m not going to worry about something we have no control over. We’re not leaving you here. We’re not splitting up. So it doesn’t really matter, does it?” He closes the distance between us and grabs the tops of my arms and squeezes gently. “If something happens—if you change—we’ll deal with it along the way.”

  “That’s stupid. Tycast didn’t make you leader to put your team at risk.” The words come out heavy, on the verge of a sob. Dr. Tycast, the man who raised us, put Peter in charge because he’s the best of us. He’s not getting upset over what-ifs like I am. I imagine the hidden Iteration inside me laughing, waiting.

  “You think I want to lead? I didn’t ask Tycast to pick me. I didn’t. Noah wanted it more. And you know what Tycast told me once? That he picked me because I didn’t want it. I just wanted to be part of the team. So don’t think I’m going to stand here and tell the girl I love that, yeah, you’re a risk, and yeah, I want you to leave. Because I don’t. We need you, and you need us.”

  His words should make me feel better—I was counting on that—but they don’t change the facts. I could run away. Let Peter and Rhys go on without me, instead of forcing them to make a choice.

  Peter must see the possibility cross my face. “Don’t even think about it,” he says. “After everything, how could you think I’d let you get away?”

  He pulls me forward and presses his lips to my forehead. The feel of his kiss relaxes the knots in my muscles. Knots that reappear the second he pulls back. He walks out of the room, discussion over.

  Sounds good on paper, but the possibility will linger in their minds. How can they possibly trust me, fully, the way they used to? They can’t.

  I don’t let it go, but I push it down. For now.

  In the main room, Rhys has the memory band in the duffel slung over his shoulder. He cracks a bottle of water and drinks the whole thing. “Thirty seconds,”
Peter calls from another room. I hear the metal scrape of a gun being assembled.

  Rhys hands me a bottle of water. “What are you thinking about?”

  I’m thinking about when Noah used the last of the peanut butter and put the empty jar back on the shelf. And I called him an asshole—over peanut butter. He apologized, and I said there was no excuse, none, because he knew the peanut butter was empty. He’d scraped it out himself. He didn’t try to fight me on it, just looked remorseful and walked away. That was last week. I got mad at him over peanut butter, and now he’s on a cold slab, bloodless, unable to know or care about anything. I’m sorry about yelling at him, and he’ll never know that.

  Then I think about the next day, when I passed by the open bathroom door and Noah and Sequel had their faces pressed together. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t slow down, but I heard their mouths break away after I passed them. It had been a kiss. I went to my room and sat on the bed and tried to understand what I was feeling. Sad, a little, but less guilty since Noah was finally happy.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  After a quick weapons check, I stand in the doorway, taking in what was once our home. We’ll probably never come back here.

  Peter and Rhys are in the hallway.

  “Come on, Miranda,” Rhys says softly.

  I close the door and lock it.

  While I’m driving us back to the school, Peter pulls out a pill bottle and shakes three tiny black pills into his palm. It’s just before midnight, and the roads are empty and dark.

  “We need to swallow these,” he says, handing one to me and one to Rhys.

  “Why?” I say.

  “Because I don’t have the injector to put them inside us. It broke. This will let us track one another.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. My first thought is that if I turn into someone else, I’ll know how to find them easily.

  Peter’s eyes are a little shiny, but he might just be tired. He wipes at them. “Well, I do know. I couldn’t find you before. Now I can find you.”

  “They won’t be useful for long.…” Rhys says.

  Peter shrugs. “There’s more in the bottle. Take them.”

  So we do. Peter gives us handheld readouts that show how far away each tracker is, and in what direction and elevation. I put mine in one of the little pouches on my waist, among the speedloaders for my revolver.

  We get to the school at 12:09, which means Nina’s been on the loose for over two hours. Either that’s a huge head start, or she’s had time to plan a strike against us.

  Police cruisers sit bumper to bumper along the front curb, glowing under the parking-lot lights. One ambulance sits at the front of the line. I know who it’s for; Noah’s death is the unconnected one. He wasn’t trampled or crushed in the gym. I can’t imagine what theories the detectives are tossing around. He was a new kid, someone will say. New this year. They’ll pull up his records and see that his emergency contact info leads nowhere. Who was this kid? they’ll ask. Who did he belong to?

  I park way in the back, hidden behind student cars left overnight. The buzz of a news helicopter overhead gives me a headache.

  The students must be coherent by now, the psychic energy having dissipated hours ago. Right away, people will see the connection to last summer, when Roses like us used their powers on the downtown area. Both attacks involved terror and panic without an obvious stimulus. I try to imagine how my ex-classmates will put the fear into words. That kind of fear is something I can’t biologically experience. I remember watching a news special after the attack on downtown. They interviewed people who said things like, “I can’t remember what I was afraid of, I was just afraid. It was beyond fear. I really can’t say what it was.” I can—it was us.

  I squeeze the steering wheel, unclench my aching jaw.

  Peter takes my hands off the wheel and puts them in my lap, then lays his hand on top. His is cool and dry and sure. Steady.

  “Relax,” he says, then points through the windshield. “Here they come.”

  I follow his gaze to the main entrance. Two cops and two paramedics wheel a gurney down the sidewalk, through pools of brightness and shadow. A white sheet covers the outline of Noah on his back. We’re far away, but I can make out the red blotch where the sheet touches his neck.

  I wonder if I’m going to cry again, but I don’t feel anything. Just hollow. It’s nice.

  “Want me to drive?” Peter says.

  “I got it.”

  “Want me to drive?” Rhys says.

  “I said I got it.” If I’m not okay enough to drive, we have a problem.

  I watch them load the bag into the back of the ambulance. The doors slam, like sealing a tomb. The ambulance pulls away, no lights, no siren.

  I put the van into gear and follow it.

  The ambulance goes straight to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office. No one spoke during the ride because there is nothing to say. I park on the side. The building is white, four stories, and lacking any sinister characteristics. It doesn’t look like it houses the bodies of those who’ve died suspiciously.

  I watch the paramedics pull Noah from the ambulance and wheel his gurney through double doors.

  I check the clock above the radio. 12:39. I lost Nina almost three hours ago now.

  “They’ll put him in the cooler and do an autopsy later,” I say. The phrase put him in the cooler makes me sick. I can’t believe I said it like that.

  “The cooler will slow his decomp,” Rhys says.

  “Thank you, Dr. Rhys,” Peter says.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’ll give the paramedics ten minutes to put him there; then we go in. Good plan?”

  “Decent enough,” Rhys says.

  Peter nods. He closes his eyes and settles into the seat, meditating.

  Enough time passes and we get out of the Caravan, looking less than surreptitious in our scaly armor. None of us thought to bring over-clothes, but I guess we had our minds on other things. Rhys passes me the duffel bag that contains the machine. I try to take it, but he holds on to the strap.

  “You sure you want Noah’s memories swimming around in your head?” he says.

  Not when he says it like that. But we need a clue, and there are none. The way he says it, I know he must be thinking the same thing. Noah knew Sequel, not Nina, and there may be no clues present in his memories. But I don’t know where else to look.

  And Noah’s words, Don’t forget me, still ring in my ears. I don’t want to forget him. If someone has to sift through his memories, it’s going to be me. Not that I could say that without feeling stupid. I can already hear Rhys’s retort—I don’t think he meant remember him literally, Mir. And he’d be right.

  We go through the doors like we own the place, which, in a way, we do. No one here can stop us. The hallways are white and bright and sterile. Cold. We march down them in a loose triangle, Peter leading the way.

  Someone shouts behind us, “Hey. Hey!”

  I spin around, hands reaching for my weapons. A stout man in a blue uniform with a shiny silver badge stands in a doorway, hand on the doorknob, other hand on his holstered pistol. Just a few strides away.

  His revolver is halfway off his leg when I do what Alpha team swore never to do, if we could help it. I release some of the tension that’s always present in my brain, letting some of my energy escape in the smallest wave, just enough to get his hand off the gun. It hurts and feels good at the same time. His eyes widen and his nostrils flare; his mouth drops open.

  “Miranda!” Peter says behind me.

  I ignore him and close the distance to the guard, then grab a fistful of his shirt and twist, pulling him to me. I make my voice hard as rock. “Take us to the cooler.”

  The guard nods rapidly, eyes crinkling and swelling with tears. “Yes…please…” I feel him tremble through my closed fist. He’s on the verge of screaming, or fainting, or both.

  I let go of his shirt and grab his arm, which is alr
eady a little damp with sweat. “Lead us.”

  He starts off, breathing heavily and dragging me along. Peter and Rhys have nothing to say. The scent of roses—a weird side effect of our psychic power—is already fading. Maybe it wasn’t the right call, but there’s no use second-guessing it now.

  Peter and Rhys lag behind.

  “Come on,” I say. The guard pulls me around a corner.

  “How about a heads-up next time?” Peter says when they catch up.

  “Heads-up on a snap decision? You got it.”

  Rhys snickers quietly.

  Straight ahead is a big steel door with a pull handle. I know what it is before the guard says, “Here. Here.”

  I release the guard’s arm. Rhys grabs his shoulders, spins him around, and hunches to look into his face. “Where’s the nearest closet?”

  “There’s one in the next office.…”

  Rhys plucks the radio and gun off the guard’s belt and turns him in the right direction. “I want you to go there and shut yourself in, and don’t come out for an hour. Got it? Or…bad things will happen.”

  The guard nods and shuffles away, keys jangling on his belt.

  Rhys turns back to me and Peter. “Who knew the fearful were so impressionable?”

  We don’t laugh, because it isn’t really a joke. A few moments pass outside the big steel door. No one speaks. They have to be wondering if I’m strong enough. I know I am, but that doesn’t mean I want to go inside.

  Peter touches my elbow lightly. “I want you to let me do it. I don’t know what absorbing all those memories will do to you.”

  If some latent personality wakes up inside me, would they have access to whatever I download from Noah? This is an unnecessary risk, and yet…I don’t want anyone else to see. I don’t want Peter or Rhys to see the memories Noah has of me. Who knows what happened between us over the years? I barely remember any of it. So I’m reckless, basically. Because I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to risk it, and yet I’m doing it anyway.

  Instead of all that, I say, “I’ve downloaded memories from Rhys and Mrs. North. I’ll be able to tell the difference between theirs and mine.”