by Nirina Stone
At least the bear’s probably fainting too. I no longer feel the bite on my tongue and try to think of other ways to hurt myself to stay awake.
That’s when hands reach into the room, wrap themselves around my torso, and pull me. Where did they come from? Sure it was dark in there, but was there a door? They tug and pull and lift me out of the smelly room. They’re gentle, and they’re taking me away from the bear. So I don’t fight them. Besides, who am I kidding? I can barely lift a finger, least of all take a running kick at them.
I tilt my head to the right, trying to hear something, but all is silent in this world. Looking down, I see a layer of icy cold fog on the ground so I can’t tell if it’s gridded like the one in that room. Then they place me on something that glides over it—or it could have wheels, I don’t know. I can’t see anything past the fog.
I can breathe better out here. My mind slowly returns along with the excruciating pain in my tongue, which I only stop noticing when my ribs sear with every breath and my leg throbs in agony.
We glide—or at least I glide, they walk beside me—for such a long time, I wonder if I’m still in the room with the animals. I wonder if I actually fainted, and am dreaming this cloudy, wispy dream as I lay there waiting for my fate.
Then they bring me into another room, and I wonder if, instead of dreaming, I’m dead.
Because I see Blair lying in a white cot in front of us, beside three empty cots. I’m guessing they’ll place me on one of the others. His half-bitten side is encased in a solid cylinder of white metal. Blair’s eyes are shut closed, but he’s clean, and looks like he’s breathing.
A tall man stands beside his bed, his back to me. He’s tending to Blair, I’m guessing. But why? What’s the point? I saw Blair fall. I’m sure he was trampled under that storm of animals. I’m sure he was bleeding far too much to survive what happened to him since the cat bit off half his side. Are they trying to keep him comfortable until he passes?
“Is this heaven?” I ask. I never believed in such stories before, but can’t imagine what else it could be.
Because when Blair’s attendant finally turns around to face us, I’m looking into the big black eyes of my dead father.
“F-Father?” I say. I must be dying or dead in that other room. I must be. “Father!” I want to run to him, to wrap my arms around him. I step off the gliding bot and ignore the pain from all sides. My leg is pretty much useless but I drag it behind me.
He doesn’t speak. He stands, smiling. My attendants aren’t stopping me either.
So when I get to him, and throw my arms around him, it takes me a moment to realize that I hug air, and I’m about to fall right on top of Blair. Except someone else has me by the torso and is pulling me back into the glidingbot. Still, they don’t say a word.
It must be a hallucination, then. It’s not the first one I’ve had, but he looked so real, he looked like he was physically standing in the room.
Blair sighs when he hears my voice and struggles to open his eyes. He turns to me. “Rome,” he croaks, “what—what—” he reaches an arm out to me. Or at least he tries, but he can barely lift a finger.
“Shh,” I say, “you’ll be fine.” I wouldn’t have believed it before, but I’m certain of it now. His pallor is ashy grey, but I can see that whatever they’re doing to him is helping him heal. “You’ll be fine,” I repeat as he closes his eyes again. I wonder what sort of technology these people have access to.
When I turn and finally take a closer look at one of them, I realize she’s a small adult, about the same size as Rojhay’s people. I look over at the other two attendants and their height confirms it for me.
I’m with the Northies. Again.
My room is stark, clean. At least this time, I’m not behind some glass enclosure like a prisoner or animal. I think about the poor animals in that other room and fight a shiver. I wonder what happened to them. I wonder what would have happened to me if I didn’t put my hand on the glass window in time.
I’m allowed to roam around the corridors and rooms freely, but they never talk to me. They watch me from afar then walk past me quickly as if I’m another part of the wall.
Once, I grabbed one of them by the shoulders, yelled at him to tell me what was going on, to tell me why they’d had me impregnated, to tell me something. He just looked at me until I let his shoulders go. Then he walked away.
There’s nothing for me to do so I visit Blair often. I want to ask him questions that none of them seem to want to answer. I want him to tell me everything he knows about them.
But more than anything, I want to see Father again. Or whatever that was that looked like Father. The Northies don’t tell me anything about the apparition either, but I’m convinced I wasn’t imagining it.
I sit at Blair’s bedside now and, before I realize what I’m doing, I’m talking to him. “I went outside,” I say, “they didn’t stop me or do anything. So I took a walk around the grounds.” Of course, outside, here is not the outside I’m used to. Everything the Northies consider home is underground. From what I can tell, they don’t ever had a need to go to the surface. The grounds are the size of several football fields, a vast area that is otherwise empty but for their primary food source, I would guess.
“It’s quiet there,” I tell Blair. “It’s usually empty. Today, I walked down a new path, and ended up in a courtyard. There was a small group of people there, doing a dance.” It’s the best way I can describe what I saw. There were maybe twelve Northies, all standing within arms’ length of each other.
The ‘dance’ had them crouch low, arms stretched out, then they pulled their arms in as if to push air towards their face as they stood back on their heels. They did the movements over and over again until I could see a pattern.
It was beautiful, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I watched them for what felt like hours. Then, without a word, they finished and walked away in different directions, with no acknowledgment before they went on their way.
“I looked for a door or something,” I tell Blair, “to go outside, but there’s nothing. I don’t know how to get out of here.” Not that I’m in any rush, not while he’s still in a coma. I have some time to strategize an escape while he heals. I’ll need the time. It’s not like they’re mistreating me, but I’d like to know I can go if I want to.
I stop talking when a Northie comes into the room, followed by a medibot. “What is that for?” I ask, though I know I’ll be met with silence. He stands to the side and the medibot slides up to Blair’s bedside. Its robotic arm reaches for his still hand and turns it so that his inner arm faces up.
Then the bot’s other arm pokes a small needle into his vein. I stand to look closer, but by the time I’m by its side, it’s already taken blood and cleaned his arm and is out the door.
I watch Blair’s face, waiting for a reaction or something, but he doesn’t move. His breaths are as soft as they were, days ago, before they let him sleep. I hope he wakes up soon though. The silence here is ridiculous.
I wonder how they talk to each other if they never speak? I wonder why they’re not speaking when I remember our conversations distinctly from my dreams. Then I realize, the girl I chased did speak out loud to me. The others didn’t but I remember her voice well. Rojhay certainly spoke, too. So why don’t these ones?
I sit up as the hair on my neck bristles—with that distinct feeling that someone’s watching me. I form fists and turn around slowly to face whoever is in the room.
11
Answers
“Is it really you?” I say, as I take my time to approach him. Last time, I ran at him and he disappeared. This time, I will take it slow. “Are you really here, Father?”
He looks down at me and smiles. He looks taller than I remember, well over Father’s six-foot-two frame.
“How are you here?” I ask.
He continues to smile and reaches an arm out, indicating that he’d like me to sit. The moment I do, he speaks. His mouth doesn�
��t move though. Whatever he says echoes directly in my head, like he’s inside my brain.
“I’m here Romy,” he says.
I sit, watching him not move his lips as he speaks. How in Odin is this happening? I study his face carefully. He looks the same, but the bags under his eyes are gone. The extra wrinkles and white hair he gained in Azure have disappeared. This is Father, sure, but a younger version of Father than the one I saw, those many years ago. What sort of hallucination is this? When I last saw Father, he was at least a decade older than—than this person in front of me. I have so many questions for him, I simply don’t know where to start.
I decide with, “How, Father? I thought you were dead.” I still remember the last time I saw him. The way he yelled out his name to his assailants, the zap of the stun guns, how his chair slammed back and slowly turned until it stilled. Mother’s sources said he was killed.
“Your father was killed, Romy,” he says, “a few days after the last time you saw him. He was assassinated.”
The words drive immediate sharp pains into my heart, as raw, as real as the day I saw him taken.
“But how—who are you, then?” I ask. “An apparition? A ghost?” There are no such things, of course. But what other reason could there be for this image of Father that I can’t touch?
“I suppose in a way, yes,” he says. “I am the visualization of his memories and his personality. I am him though he is dead. I am your father’s holopersona.”
This is a technology that’s far beyond the Prospo and the Soren, as far as I know. The Prospo have only gone so far as created holoimages of people across worlds that we can chat with in real time. This is another level of holo that they could only dream of. How did the Northies create this? I look at Blair, still sleeping soundly as he heals.
“How are you here?” I ask the holoimage. It doesn’t feel right to call him Father. My father is dead. This is but a moving picture of him. “And why are you here?”
“I’m here in my capacity as a healer,” he says. “I’m here to monitor the commander and make sure his nanobots are on track to heal him. It will take a while and he’s lost a lot of blood. They’re focusing on several things to fix at once, and I need to make sure they don’t—you know—grow him an extra hand or something.”
It doesn’t entirely answer my question though. “Why are you here, with the Northies?”
He frowns, then corrects me. “They are called the Metrills.”
Huh, of course. “Northies” was the name the Sorens gave them.
“They need me of course,” he says. “They need my knowledge and my memories. So I am here.”
He even speaks in the same non-direct way Father used to speak, leaving me more in the dark than I’d like.
But I shift my line of questioning, anyway. What harm is there? “When did you come here?” I ask.
“Three years ago,” he says. So, right around the time Father died then. Why? How? I didn’t even know the Sorens knew of the Northies—the Metrills—back then.
“You were a Prospo,” I say. Mother’s confession to me about my parents’ backgrounds and reasons for doing everything they did echoes in my head.
Father was a Prospo, Mother was a Soren spy sent in to infiltrate the Prospo, when she was assigned to work for his family. They fell in love, and then had me. Then Father’s father attacked Mother and ended up being killed by Father in the struggle. They ran, and moved to Citizen City, to have me, to stay together.
Until Father gave himself up and went to Azure a few years before I did, before Mother retired to Mars.
“I was, indeed, born a Prospo,” he says.
“What happened to you, Father? How were you killed? I mean, who killed you?”
I hear a groan and realize that Blair’s breathing has changed. I look over at him, and he reaches an arm towards my voice. I lean in closer and wrap my hand around his, as if to reassure him that all’s okay. When his breathing steadies, I turn to the apparition again. “How were you killed?” I repeat. I only saw him getting tased and taken away from his cell in Azure.
“I was imprisoned,” he says, “and questioned and then I was made to disappear.”
“And who did that to you—to Father?”
When he doesn’t answer right away, I wonder if the voice in my head or whatever it is that gives him the ability to do that is broken. He watches me with my father’s eyes, as if assessing my reaction.
Then Father’s voice says, “The Sorens.”
All this time, I had assumed it was the Prospo—finally coming for him, for falling in love with a Soren, for killing his Father, another Prospo.
I know there’s still much I don’t know about my parents’ past, but this new revelation gives me a headache. I don’t really want to know what it means—that my mother’s people killed Father. After a moment of shock, I finally say, “Why did the Sorens want you dead, Father?”
“They knew I was about to share the whole truth with you. So it was time to shut me down.”
“What whole truth?” I say, knowing there’s so much more to the story than I’ll likely ever know.
“Where to begin?” He chuckles and scratches something on his temple. Such a human act to do, it’s bizarre to think that he’s got all of Father’s mannerisms. “They say to start from the beginning,” he says, “but I’ve always been more inclined to begin somewhere in the middle.”
Again, something exactly like what Father would say. His big black eyes stare right through me, like I’m the holoimage instead of him.
“Have you ever wondered how your mother and I managed to have you, though we were living as poor Citizens?”
Apex was a nation of people unable to naturally bear children, or so we were incorrectly taught. I’d always assumed my parents managed to find a way to be nominated and have me via Ivy Heff like all other people of Apex.
“To be frank,” I say, “I’d never thought about it that much.”
“Of course not,” he says, as he shakes his head. “Why would you be curious about that? We’re your parents, after all. Well, truth is, we had you because Mother’s people wanted us to have you. We were in a selection of families nominated to bring up second generation spies. Once of age, you were to be released into the midst of the Prospo.”
As I adjust to the shock of that, I notice that’s where the holoimage and Father differ. Father would have delivered this news reluctantly. He would have made me feel like I was wanted for far more emotional reasons, too. Not—what the holo just said.
“It was part of your mother’s assignment from the start,” he says. “She never told me. Once I clued in, I was against it, but that didn’t matter. I had no say.”
Before I can react to that, he says, “But I am glad we had you. I wouldn’t have changed any of it, after I’d met you. You and your mother were the great loves of my life and I don’t regret a single thing. I hope you’ll experience that type of love one day.”
I’m taken aback by the change in tone and forget for a moment that he’s not really here. I want to throw myself into his arms, to feel his warm hug. But I stay back. Despite the words, I know this isn’t really Father. I also have to work through what he’s just told me.
Mother was a Soren spy tasked with infiltrating a Prospo family, then charged with destroying the colony on Mars. Being aware of that, I don’t know why the news that Father didn’t expect me, that I was planned by Mother and her people for some “mission” surprises me. But it does just that.
Haven’t I always dismissed the Prospo as unimportant? Dangerous and smug in their glass towers? I’d always hated them, though I never so much as admitted it to myself, least of all anyone else. Yet, I knew how to put on a mask and fit in with their expectations of a good little Citizen ward. I would have made a good spy.
When Blair makes another pained sound, I pat him on the hand.
“So I was going to be used as—what—” I say, “as a weapon?”
He pauses through anot
her sigh from Blair. “Yes a weapon, of sorts, but you were never—deployed. The moment Mother went to Mars, I saw my chance. The timing was perfect. That’s why I encouraged you to enter Azure. I didn’t want that future for you. I thought Azure was a better option. Of course, I didn’t plan on dying—” He looks down at his shoes and mutters, “Best laid plans—”
I try to imagine what Father’s reality was like back then. Always worried about me, doing everything to protect me, then dying—for me. For the child he didn’t even expect. The epiphany hits me like a physical punch, and I try to breathe through it, not knowing how to handle the truth about my parents, and now having it all come to light. Then I realize that at some point during our chat, I placed my hand protectively over my belly. When did I do that? And why?
Then, I remember—
“Why did the Northies do this to me?” I blurt as I point at my midriff. “Why did they impregnate me?” As I speak, I realize I’m not angry and have run out of tears. It’s like a part of me has simply accepted that this is now my state, and I’m numb. I don’t even know if there is even still a baby alive in my belly—but one thing at a time.
His eyes widen as they take in my slightly swollen stomach. “What makes you think they would do that?”
I relay to him how I was kept in my glass cell. How half the time, I was passed out due to gas or whatever it was they had used.
He listens to me as his frown deepens. “Well,” he says, “All I can assure is that they don’t do—things like that. What reason would they have to?”
Of course he’s lying to me. Though it’s bizarre—Father refuses to disclose information to me, not lie about it.
“I don’t know,” I say, wondering if the Metrills have fertility problems, like much of the Prospo actually did. I didn’t see any children other than the girl I chased. The rest of them were adults—I think.
“They mess around with mind and memory manipulation,” the holo says, “but that’s the extent of it. I mean in the time I’ve known them, I’d never imagine they would do—that—” He gestures to my belly and shakes his head from side to side.