by Dan Krokos
“This doesn’t have to be your burden,” Peter says.
He’s right—it is a burden. It’ll scald me in ways I can’t anticipate, and I want it for the wrong reasons.
“This is my job,” I say, hefting the duffel bag higher on my shoulder. “Unless that’s an order?”
Several seconds pass. Then he shakes his head. “No.”
I put my hand on the cold metal handle and yank the door open. Chilled, dry air spills out in a wave across my face. The lights inside are gray and bright and completely devoid of life, just like the rest of this place.
I step inside and shut the door behind me.
My suit fights the chill. I shiver for another reason.
The walls on my left and right are a grid of small rectangular doors, stacked three high. Behind them lie the dead. Bordering the walls are gurneys with sheets over them. The sheets are white silhouettes in the shapes of bodies, rounded near the heads, pointed at the feet.
I don’t have to check each gurney; I see Noah right away. His gurney is against the far wall, the white sheet against the wall’s puke-green tile. The bright red stain below the rise of his face has spread a little.
My breath comes in clouds of sour air. I watch Noah’s sheet, expecting him to rise at any second. He’d pull the cover off and say “Surprise!” with that stupid grin. I’d punch him in the arm and he’d fake how much it hurt.
I blink.
The room is cold and dead. Noah is cold and dead. It’s time to do my job. At Noah’s gurney, I crouch and unzip the duffel and pull the memory band out.
My hand hovers over the sheet. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to pull it back and see his bloodless face. I close my eyes and breathe through my mouth, tasting the tang of antiseptic and the sweet smell of the newly dead. So strange, that cloying scent.
I stop stalling and pull the sheet off Noah. I crease it at the bottom of his ribs and force myself to look at his face. It’s the way I remember it on the floor in the lab—cold and white and lifeless, with open eyes that will never see anything again. It’s easy to see how deep the wound is now, the layers of skin and muscle Nina’s sword cut through.
I grip the railing on his gurney and close my eyes.
Everyone is on a collision course with whatever is destined to kill them. Something will kill me one day, and it’s out there now. Someone forged the blade that killed Noah. The edge met the soft flesh of Noah’s neck, met the thin tubes that carried his blood underneath, all because I let him go first.
The tears on my cheeks are chilled, like my heart. I harden myself to this and everything that comes next. Noah would want that.
I open my eyes and go to work, in the hopes that this is just one more step to making it all go away.
I have to lift his head up to secure the band. His hair is soft, and the dead weight of his head is the worst part. I close my eyes and slide it on by feel.
A small voice tells me this might not work, but I ignore it. I stomp the small voice under my armored feet. It has to work, or everything is for naught. I’ll die before I let Nina win.
The memory band hums to life. I set the machine to start with Noah’s newest memories; any clues to Nina’s plans or whereabouts will be there.
The band purrs and clicks softly. My fingers trail down his forearm, grazing his wrist, then his palm. I almost hold his hand. Like that would make it easier for him. In truth, I can’t stand the clammy feel of his skin.
Time passes too slowly, and the machine beeps now and again. Then the tiny readout on the side of his head says SCAN COMPLETE with four options underneath.
SCAN AGAIN | SAVE ALL | WIPE | NEW SUBJECT
I press SAVE ALL.
The band hums, saving whatever memories were intact in Noah’s brain. Then it clicks and shuts down, the noise dying away like it’s exhausted. I ease the band off Noah’s face and settle it into the duffel.
Then I look at his eyes.
The irises are still brown, but a little pink, on their way to red, like mine. I use my fingers to close his eyes, but they ease open again. Staring. I try again and hold the lids down, and this time they stay closed enough. Cracked, but barely.
The sum of his life experience hangs off my shoulder, the heaviest weight I’ve ever carried.
I lay the sheet over him and turn around.
The door opens, but it’s not Peter or Rhys. A woman in a white lab coat stands with a clipboard in both hands.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says. Her mouth opens and closes, brow crinkled as she takes in my armor. She’s right. I’m not supposed to be here. Noah isn’t supposed to be here, either.
She sees my eyes and visibly shrinks. I’m not wearing my contacts.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
I look at Noah one more time. The last time I’ll ever see him. But I’m about to get closer to him than I ever was in life.
“Leaving,” I say.
I tell the woman to stand in the cooler for five minutes, and the look on her face tells me she’ll comply. I shut the door on her, then turn around to find Peter and Rhys standing in front of me.
“Sorry, we thought it was better to hide,” Rhys says.
“How’d it go?” Peter says as we start walking.
“Just wait,” I say. The duffel is hot against my leg, and I start worrying about stupid things. The machine could be broken; he might have been dead too long; the memories could be corrupted. A secret part of me wants the transfer to be a failure—I won’t have to see his memories, even if they might help us. I won’t have to see what it was like when he was still alive, with thoughts of his own.
Outside, the cool early-fall air hits me, and I brace myself against the building with one hand. The fresh air is too much at once. I almost throw up, but don’t. I just swallow a few times and look at the black sky. Peter and Rhys don’t ask if I’m okay, which I’m grateful for. We just pile into the Caravan and drive away.
I sit in the backseat, on the bench Noah used to claim for his own. I look at the space next to me and remember him sitting here on our way to the dance, cracking his knuckles one by one, until Rhys told him to knock it off. His knuckle pops are like gunshots in my memory.
I pull out the memory band while Peter drives. I am hyperaware that if this doesn’t pan out, I’ve just wasted any chance we had at finding Nina.
Peter catches my eye in the mirror. “We have to sleep.”
We’ve been up for around twenty hours, which isn’t so bad, but it’ll catch up with us soon. Right now I can’t imagine sleeping. When I close my eyes, the background noise in my brain becomes louder.
“We can’t go home,” Rhys says.
“So find a place and park,” I say.
Peter drives us somewhere, but I don’t pay attention. I keep toying with the band, feeling its weight. Wondering what it’s about to show me.
Eventually, Peter parks the van in some crowded parking lot and racks his seat back. Rhys does the same and says, “Good luck, Miranda.” He probably falls asleep almost instantly.
Peter twists around on the seat. “If you insist on doing this, I’m staying up while you do.”
I shake my head. “I won’t be able to focus. Please, just trust me. Just…” I reach forward and touch his arm. After a moment, he places his hand over mine. “Just let me do this. I need you rested.”
He doesn’t say anything, no expression.
“Please,” I say again. I’d do this alone if I could, in a dark room.
“Wake me when you’re done, then,” he says.
I give him the best smile I can. “Of course.”
He watches me a second longer, always searching, then rolls over and lies still.
I could see so many things from Noah’s life. I wonder what he’d say if he knew I was doing this. He’d probably start with NO.
The buttons glow a dull red in the dim light of the van. I press the one marked APPLY LAST SCAN and slide the band ove
r my head. I hold my breath against the pain.
The memories come in a wave, too quick for me to grasp. I see images, not feelings. Noah brushes his teeth in the bathroom mirror. Rolls on the gym mat we put in the living room. Watches me and Sequel from the couch. Spars with Rhys, taking a blow to the ribs. The information rides thousands of microscopic tendrils directly into my brain tissue, where it becomes a tattoo. Mine, but not mine. Then the emotions catch up, and I fight the urge to lose myself.
Noah looks at me after we pull ourselves out of the river, soaking wet, having just evaded Beta team. Noah says good-bye to the Miranda before me, when he left her in Columbus with no memories. My own implanted memory of that moment rises up and I flicker back and forth between two sets of eyes, me looking at him without recognition, and him looking at me, eyes cracked and red with tears. Later, Noah is alone in the bathroom, crying. Noah kneels in front of the toilet, throwing up, regret burning his mind, wishing he hadn’t taken her memories away, feeling his mistake with every cell.
The emotions connected to each memory threaten to overwhelm me, but I force myself to look at each one clinically. A slide show, nothing more. These feelings don’t belong to me.
I want to look away. I want it to stop. But I can’t and it doesn’t.
As the memories pour into me, they truly become mine. I can pull them to the surface as easily as I can reference my own. I try to remember a time when Sequel was acting weird or different. Maybe a private moment between them the rest of us didn’t see. If there’s a clue, that’s where I’ll find it.
The rest of Noah’s memories sit heavily in the back of my mind, like a huge unread book I have to carry with me at all times. They wait for me patiently.
But one comes to the surface, obeying my call.
I was so adamant about it before—no one could see Noah’s memories but me.
But now I regret not sharing the burden.
It starts with an argument and ends with something else.
I am me but not me. As each second passes, I’m less myself observing Noah’s memory and more Noah remembering his own past.
Then I let go completely.
“You’re a dick,” Sequel says.
It feels like my chest cavity is filled with bees. Yes, bees. I said the wrong thing again because I’m an idiot.
I called her Miranda. That doesn’t sound too bad, but it is. She’s not Miranda. I’ve made her painfully aware of that fact.
“It was a reflex,” I say.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” she says, not smiling. She stalks into the bathroom and grabs a box of hair dye from under the sink. The label says Raven Black. She finds scissors behind the mirror.
“You don’t have to do that—”
“Don’t watch me,” she says, cutting off her auburn locks. They fall around her feet. Her movements are jerky as she tears open the box of dye.
I stop watching her, and she comes out a bit later with short black hair styled in what I later find out is called a pixie cut.
“Hey, looks good,” I say as she passes right by me. She ignores me and leaves through the front door. This girl.
Naturally I follow her.
She takes the van, so I borrow a motorcycle from the parking lot. Not smart, but I would lose her otherwise. It’s a black Yamaha R6 with a lot of miles.
I hang back and follow her for a half hour. She stops outside a squat brick building in the shitty part of town. Cheap jewelry stores and little quick marts jammed in with empty warehouses and grass-filled parking lots. No cars or people on the streets. I turn my headlight off and idle in the shadows between streetlights. After a full minute, Sequel turns down an alley next to the brick building. I hear the van shut off, so I kill the bike and sneak down the sidewalk, then pause at the mouth of the alley.
She stands in front of an old wooden door set into the building. Without warning, she kicks it in and steps down into a basement. Makes total sense. Go to a strange building and kick the door in. It had a knob: I saw it. She didn’t even check to see if it was unlocked. If she was meeting someone, she probably would’ve knocked.
She doesn’t come out right away, so I sneak to the door, avoiding the garbage in the alley. She stands alone in a little brick room. Gray-green streetlight filters through the filthy windows. It smells like rat shit and mildew.
“I can’t believe you followed me,” she says.
I jump.
She turns around slowly. There’s a different look in her eye. If she was mad at me before, she doesn’t seem mad now. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
“Not really,” I say, trying to recover. I made absolutely no sound on my approach.
“Come here.”
She has her hands out, grabbing for me.
My heart is pounding.
I go to her and take her hands, and she holds them both, and it’s hard to swallow. I realize I want her very badly. I want her and I know that’s weird, but I don’t care.
She goes up on tiptoe and kisses me. It’s a simple kiss. Our lips touch, nothing more. Hers are soft, mine are chapped.
“Was that okay?” she says.
I nod. Then I say, “Why did you come here?”
She shakes her head. She rises up again, but I turn my face from her kiss. I’m still stunned. I’ve felt these lips before, yet I haven’t.
“I want to know,” I say.
“It’s stupid.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m just drawn to this place. How crazy does that sound?”
“Drawn here? You’ve come here before?” It strikes me how weird that is. She got mad, left, and drove to an empty room in a decrepit building.
She nods.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, that’s weird.”
“Have you been with her?”
Boom, out of nowhere. My stomach twists. “What do you mean? Don’t change the subject.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“No.”
“You promise?”
I nod slowly. “We never could. It was forbidden.”
“I know that. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
Sifu Phil isn’t around to drill it into our heads anymore, so she’s right. Maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe the rules about sex were just something to keep us in line. Not some mystical rule of kung fu. I remember Sifu Phil’s words, though: There’s a reason the monks are celibate. And it’s not for fun.
I don’t say anything.
“Do you still want her?” she asks.
Yes.
Yes I do.
But Miranda doesn’t want me. She wants Peter. The way she looks at him is how she used to look at me, before I stole her life away in some selfish quest to keep her safe. A decision I will regret forever. Not because it killed her feelings for me, but because of what it did to her.
Miranda still wrestles with the damage. I hear the words she sometimes mumbles in her sleep.
But she isn’t standing in front of me right now. Someone else is. My heart feels black for even thinking this, but Sequel’s the next best thing. And who knows? Maybe she’s better.
“No,” I say. “I don’t want her.”
Whatever it is about this place, Sequel is different. It’s like she’s alive for the first time. Her eyes are bright, not guarded. This isn’t normal. It’s just a building. It’s just walls. There is nothing here. What does she want to keep secret?
“I want to trust you,” she says.
“You can.” I put my hands on her hips. “Hey, you can.”
If the lie is on my face, I hide it the best I can. She can trust me. That part wasn’t a lie. But a sliver of my heart will always be with Miranda.
She steps away from me, and I guess we’re leaving now. Good. My lips are still burning. But then she grips her T-shirt with both hands and pulls it over her head. I hear the fabric hit the floor. The light is dim, but I can make
out her shape. My heart pounds so hard I think I might die right here. Suddenly my mouth is dry and tacky and I worry about kissing her like this.
“I can trust you,” she says, halfway to a question.
I swallow, desire hammering me from all sides. I lick my lips. “Yes.”
She kisses me again, softly like before, but then our lips press harder and our mouths open. She yanks my shirt over my head in one quick motion, but I don’t lift my arms quick enough, so the sleeves rip. Guess how much I care. Her hands are cold on my blazing skin. The basement isn’t so musty and dark and empty now. It’s alive, like us. Her hands fumble with the button on my jeans, and—
I push the band off hard enough to tear out some hair. It bounces off the roof, then the seat next to me, then up at the side window. Peter and Rhys spring upright in their seats. I look at the clock on the dashboard—2:02. Less than thirty minutes have passed, and Nina is now four hours ahead of us.
“I know where to go,” I say.
They stare at me like I’m some kind of zoo animal.
“What happened?” Peter says.
“What did you see?” Rhys says.
“Just drive!” I close my eyes. “Just drive,” I say again, quieter.
“I want a little more than that,” Peter says. “Don’t shut us out.”
Rhys watches us, eyebrows raised. I’m so tired. Putting what I saw into words is the last thing I want to do.
But I tell them what I saw. All of it. My face is neutral; I can’t let Peter know how it affected me. He’d be jealous, or wonder if there’s something I’m leaving out. Or maybe he wouldn’t. I’ve never seen him not confident before. But I don’t want to chance it. I don’t want to give him something else to think about, not when focus is so crucial.
“You said the room was empty, right?” Rhys says. “It already sounds like there’s nothing there to find.”
“It’s called a clue,” I say. “Maybe she went there. It felt like she was waiting for something, I don’t know.”
“She has a huge lead on us,” Rhys says. “Guarantee if she went there she’s moved on by now—well, I don’t guarantee, but it’s likely. We don’t even know why she liked the place.”