The Left Hand of Memory (Redlisted)

by Sara Beaman

  “Of course I care,” she says. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Act like you give a single shit?”

  “Look,” she says. “I’m glad you told me. But right now I don’t think I could get any more outraged or bitter or upset than I already am.”

  “Fine,” I say, trying not to sound angry. “What do you think we should do?”

  She shrugs. “Hope for the best?”

  “Hope for the…? Hope isn’t going to save Adam from Mirabel!”

  “Well, I’m not sure anything can,” she says.

  I take a deep breath, clasping my hands tightly to keep from throwing a punch at her.

  “In the car I tried forcing myself to sleep,” I say, “thinking I might be able to find Adam in a dream and warn him or something—“

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah. I’m a Somniac, or whatever. I have Dream. But I’m too anxious to sleep.”

  “Well, then, let’s get you some sleeping pills,” she says.

  “It’s probably too late at this point.”

  She walks towards the bedroom. “It’s better than doing nothing.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to see if the medicine cabinet is still stocked up.”

  “There’s more,” I call after her as she disappears into the bathroom.

  “What?”

  “About Aya.”

  A few moments later she returns with a blister pack of pills. “What about her? Did Horace tell you where she was? Was he just fucking with Jennifer, telling her she doesn’t exist?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I think Aya is Markham.”

  Haruko laughs. “Seriously, what did he say?”

  “I am serious. Think about it. He had the amulet. The Wardens were on his trail. He needed to hide.”

  Haruko’s smile rapidly disappears.

  “With the amulet he could have been hiding the fact that Aya was just a mask of his,” I say.

  “I guess that’s possible,” Haruko says, “but if that’s what happened, why didn’t Adam ever figure it out? He’s a telepath.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Although, he did tell me that if I wanted to find Aya, I should look for Markham.”

  “Did he?” Haruko says. “Sounds like he hasn’t been telling you everything. No surprise there.”

  “I asked him not to lie to me…”

  Haruko snorts. “Oh. Okay then.”

  “I don’t mean asked asked,” I tell her. “I mean Compelled.”

  Haruko shoves the blister pack at me. “We don’t have time to argue about this shit. Take this. Go to bed. Try to find him.”

  I stand up and take the pack of pills.

  “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” Haruko asks, then hastily adds: “Not that I care.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  She shakes her head and gives me a patronizing smile.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Good luck with that,” she says.

  Invidia

  Sleep transports me away from Adam’s four-poster bed and into Mirabel’s sunny office. I walk towards the door to the stairs. I want to go to Adam’s haunt, his suite, and try to look for him. I don’t expect him to be there, but I need to check.

  As I place my hand on the knob, the phone rings. I look at it out of the corner of my eyes. I know I shouldn’t answer, but what if it’s Adam? What if it’s someone calling with information about Adam?

  I walk back to the desk and pick it up. “Hello?”

  “It’s Richard. Do you have a minute?”

  “No. I need to find Adam.”

  “No need for that,” he says.

  “What?”

  “We’d really like to speak with you,” he says. “Why don’t you come to the door?”

  His last sentence, spoken so casually, is a command. I drop the phone without hanging it up, walk straight to the door and open it. I don’t remember stepping through; the next moment, I’m in the boardroom where Mnemosyne drafted me into her House. Richard is there, and so is she, still wearing Mirabel’s body, dressed in a slim grey pantsuit. In fact, she and Richard are wearing matching outfits. Despite my gnawing dread, I almost laugh.

  “Where’s Adam?” I ask.

  “There’s been an occurrence,” Richard says, pushing his hair away from his face.

  “You mean with Mirabel? In Romania?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  Mnemosyne quirks an eyebrow. “You spoke with Horace.”

  Her gaze makes me itchy and restless. “Yes.”

  “How is he?” she asks.

  “Just fine,” I say. “So what happened to Adam?”

  Richard sighs theatrically before starting to explain. “I was taking him to our Romanian enclave so that he could convalesce in safety, away from the Wardens,” he says. “We had no idea Mirabel was there. We were unprepared.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I ask.

  “Myself, a Child of Coventina, and a Daughter of Nemesis,” he says. “In any case, when we entered the doors of the enclave, Mirabel was waiting for us. She caught me off-guard and forced me to give Adam to her. We tried to fight her, but all we had were handguns, and her flesh repelled the bullets. A Child of Coventina can do this, sometimes,” he explains, looking at me.

  “Yes. I know,” I say.

  “Ah. Well, then Mirabel turned my men against me. I had to protect myself from them without killing them, all the while trying to break her Compulsion—“

  “I get it,” I say. “So you ran.”

  “At the last possible moment our Daughter of Nemesis put the invidia on Mirabel and transported us to safety.”

  “What’s the invidia?”

  “A curse.”

  I look to Mnemosyne for confirmation.

  “He speaks the truth,” she says.

  “Well, then I’d call this a resounding victory,” I say flatly.

  Richard glares at me.

  “So what are we going to do?” I ask.

  “Leave him,” says Mnemosyne.

  I blink twice. “Excuse me?”

  “This was a blessing,” she says, smiling. “Mirabel took Adam unharmed. Clearly she has an interest in him.”

  “You mean you want him to carry out his mission in person?” I ask, nauseated by the idea.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you crazy? She’ll kill him!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She knows everything!” I say. “She’ll be able to tell that he’s lying to her!”

  “You underestimate how deeply she will want to believe him,” Mnemosyne says.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “I think you underestimate her. She’s not stupid.”

  “No, she isn’t,” Richard says. “But she is delusional.”

  “She believes that Adam is the reincarnation of her dead lover,” Mnemosyne says. “My son, Lucien Verlinden.”

  “But he’s not,” I say. “There’s no such thing as reincarnation.”

  Mnemosyne shrugs.

  “Mirabel will figure out that Adam doesn’t love her,” I say, almost wishing for it to happen.

  “I don’t think she will,” Richard says. “She won’t have enough time.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “That’s no concern of yours, Katherine.” Mnemosyne says. “Tell me. Julian has been sealed?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Why?”

  Mnemosyne closes her eyes and takes in a breath. “Your Warden friend ambushed him. Interesting.”

  “That thing you put in his blood is driving him insane,” I say. “Now he wants to kill himself. Can’t say that I blame him.”

  “I can’t allow that,” Mnemosyne says. “You will not allow that.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Because the Mutable will take over if he dies?”

  Mnemosyne blinks, taken aback. “Who taught you that term?”
<
br />   I don’t answer.

  “Horace?”

  I shrug.

  “Stay away from him,” she says. “Never go back there again.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I say.

  “As soon as night falls, bring Julian back to the enclave,” Mnemosyne demands. “I want the two of you to come alone. Without the Wardens.”

  “Wait, but—how do you expect me to make that happen?”

  “Just do as I say, Katherine. Your flippant attitude is losing its charm,” she says.

  I don’t respond.

  “Richard. Take her. See to her training,” Mnemosyne says.

  “Right,” Richard says.

  “There’s the door,” she says, pointing. “I have things to do.”

  She disappears.

  “Come with me,” Richard says. It’s a command.

  Fuming, I follow him through a door at the back of the boardroom and into a place I’ve never seen before: a tiny, dusty room crammed with furniture. There is a cot set into the wall, a desk attached to the wooden floor, an old-fashioned sort of vanity thing with a mirror and a porcelain basin. The floor pitches gently. Are we in a boat?

  “My original line of work,” Richard says, as if this explains everything. “Let’s go above decks. More room to move.”

  I follow him through a dark, narrow cargo hold full of crates, hunching over so I don’t hit my head on the ceiling. He leads me up a steep flight of stairs and into open air and sunlight. To our right is uninterrupted ocean, blue-green and calm. To our left is a dock leading to a port town with palm trees and cobblestone streets.

  “Where is this?” I ask. “When is this?”

  “Nowhere in particular,” he says. “An amalgam of many different times and places. The ship is the only consistent part of it, the only thing that was real at one point.”

  “This is, like, a sailing ship,” I say, looking up into the rigging. “Were you in the British navy or something?”

  “No. Not in the navy.”

  “You were a pirate?” I try not to sound impressed.

  “A privateer.” He leans against the hull. “So. Training. Ever manage to work your way out of Julian’s labyrinth?”

  “No.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “I just can’t find any problems with it,” I say.

  “Hmm.”

  “Do you have any advice to offer?” I ask grudgingly.

  “Julian’s an artist. He has a good appreciation for the grain of things, the texture. Maybe looking for something that’s too perfect isn’t the way to go.”

  “But that’s what you told me I should do!”

  “I wasn’t finished speaking,” he says. “See, you can’t copy what you can’t imagine.”

  “Okay…”

  “He was born hundreds of years ago. He’s not an engineer. I’m sure there are things he doesn’t understand.”

  “Right, but…” I scratch my head.

  “Give that some thought,” he says. “In the meantime, let’s move on. Invisibility.”

  “I’ve got that pretty much figured out already,” I say.

  “Do you? Show me.”

  “Seriously? Don’t we have more important things to do?”

  “Such as?”

  “Getting Adam out of Romania?”

  “I’m sorry,” Richard says. “I must have misheard you. It sounded like you just suggested going against Mnemosyne’s orders.”

  I roll my eyes. “What about Julian, then? He really is losing it.”

  “Do you really think you’re equipped to handle that problem?”

  “Someone has to!”

  “What makes you think no one else will?”

  “I’m the only one around,” I say.

  “What does that matter?”

  I frown, confused.

  Richard makes a wide gesture with his arms. “Physical space is nearly irrelevant to our kind, Katherine. Every day, countless revenants—not just those of us with Dream—enter this world. Each revenant has his or her own Haunt. Now, only those of us with Dream can travel freely and use our strains within the oneiroxis, but that only makes it easier for us to find those without the strain.”

  “Oh,” I say. “All right. I get it.”

  “You have a mission of your own,” Richard says. “Let the rest of us handle these other problems.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Just let me ask you a question.”

  “Sure.”

  “How likely do you think it is that I’ll listen to you?”

  He smiles. “Do you really want to find out what will happen if you don’t?”

  I smile back, gritting my teeth.

  “In the meantime, Mother has given us a task to perform,” he says. “So. Show me what you can do. Make yourself invisible.”

  I’m not prepared for his command when it hits. I look at my hands and concentrate with all my might, just like I did when Mirabel sent her team to the estate to find me.

  “Awfully slow,” Richard says. “What if you were in a firefight?”

  I ignore him and focus on watching myself fade away one piece at a time: arms, feet, legs, abdomen, breasts, shoulders…

  And then I get stuck. I can’t make my head disappear. I can’t see it.

  “All right,” Richard says. “What about the rest of you?”

  “I’m trying,” I say.

  “I see. Well, you’ve made yourself into an unnerving spectacle,” he says. “So there’s that.”

  “Why don’t you help me figure out how to proceed?” I ask. “You know, teach me something. Or does Mnemosyne think it’s more important for you to make snide remarks?”

  “Clearly you’re relying on your own sense of sight,” he says.

  “How the hell else am I supposed to do this?”

  “Use your mind’s eye,” he says. “Imagine yourself from my perspective.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re a telepath.”

  “I’ll admit that does make things easier for me,” he says. “You’ll just have to learn to work with what you’ve got.”

  “Or to carry a mirror,” I grumble.

  “What happens if you’re caught without one?”

  I sigh through my nose. He has a point. I try to imagine my floating head from his viewpoint, but for some reason I can’t recall what my own face looks like, at least not in any detail.

  “Focus,” Richard says. “It’ll come to you.”

  I take a deep breath and try to calm my mind, but still, I just can’t pull up the image.

  “Think of Mirabel,” Richard says.

  A jolt of anger and frustration snaps me out of his command’s hold. “I don’t want to think of goddamn Mirabel.”

  “No need to get emotional,” he says.

  My body comes back into view as I lose my concentration. “Just because you don’t give a shit about what happens to Adam doesn’t mean I don’t!”

  “If you care about what happens to Adam, maybe you should focus on developing your manifestations.”

  “Why? So that I can invisible Mirabel to death?”

  “Katherine—“

  “It doesn’t matter how much I practice this shit. I’m never going to be able to fight her. Not if you can’t.”

  “But you can help us fight her,” Richard says with a patronizing smile.

  “You mean after she kills Adam?”

  Richard folds his arms. His face is flat, the picture of apathy.

  “That’s the plan, isn’t it?”

  “I never said that.”

  “How do you expect him to survive on his own?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice level.

  “I told you,” Richard says. “Back in the boardroom.”

  “Obviously I didn’t understand.”

  “I’ve said all I’m permitted to say,” he says.

  I shake my head. “Whatever.”

  “I get it,” Richard says. “You’re in love with him or something, even though you bare
ly know him—“

  “I know him a lot better than you think.”

  “Be that as it may, can you think of a better way to kill Mirabel?”

  “Wait, so—this is the best you two can come up with?” I laugh hoarsely. “Adam Fletcher, the seduction assassin? He’s a fucking brain surgeon, not a field operative!”

  “Actually, he was a neurologist, not a—“

  “For the love of God, please shut up,” I say. “Besides, what makes you think killing Mirabel is such a great idea? What happens to the Mutable when she’s dead?”

  Richard frowns, troubled. “Nothing happens. She dies. Her blood goes silent.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s not the only person Julian initiated,” he says. “There were ten others. None of them did anything but turn into ghouls when they faced the sun.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “I’m pretty sure we would have heard something if they had turned into some kind of Mutable monsters.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Yeah. Pretty sure,” he says. “And that’s as good as it gets.”

  I laugh.

  “Why? Would you rather keep her alive forever? See what further damage she’s capable of?”

  I don’t know how to answer.

  “Kate, I’m serious. If you can think of a better way, I’m all ears.”

  I wrack my brain. Ballistic missiles? Napalm? Orbital lasers?

  “All of those things would kill Adam too,” Richard says.

  “I know that!” I snap. “God damn it. If you hadn’t let her get him, that wouldn’t matter.”

  “It was an honest mistake,” he says. “I couldn’t have known she was there.”

  “Maybe you didn’t,” I say. “But I find it pretty hard to believe Mnemosyne didn’t know.”

  Richard shrugs.

  “Besides,” I say, “wouldn’t it be nice for you if he never came back?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “You’d be the number-one lieutenant again.”

  Richard's eyes narrow. “That’s enough. If you’re not interested in improving your skills or learning anything useful, we’re done here.”

  “Then I guess we’re finished,” I say.

  He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Right. Well, you know where to find me once you learn some humility.”

  With that, the ship and the open sky are gone. I’m back in Mirabel’s office, standing by the desk.

  I curse under my breath and force myself awake.