False Memory

by Dan Krokos

  “They’re close,” I say, picking up the pace.

  “How do we know it’s not the other team?”

  “We don’t.”

  “They could be trying to lure us,” he says.

  “Then we’ll be careful.”

  I take off at close to a sprint, trying not to crunch the leaves under my feet. The scent seems to grow, so either it’s getting stronger or we’re getting closer. Branches whip my exposed face, scratch at my armor and yank my hair. I know it’s Peter and Olive, I can feel it.

  “Slow down!” Noah hisses behind me. A branch snaps under his foot like a gunshot. I see a break in the trees up ahead. A person with long black hair tied into a ponytail. I burst through and stop, raising my hands automatically.

  Olive holds the end of her staff in my face.

  Noah stomps to a halt behind me. “Olive, what are you doing?” he says. Next to Olive’s feet is Peter, still unconscious. Olive breathes heavily through clenched teeth. She doesn’t take her eyes off me except to check on Noah. The hovering wood in front of my face makes my eyes cross.

  “Prove it’s you,” Olive says. I’m so confused I take a step forward, and Olive thwacks me hard in the chest. My suit absorbs most of it, but I still lose my balance. Noah steadies me with one hand.

  “I said prove it’s you.”

  “Look at our clothes,” I say. “The others didn’t have them.”

  “You could’ve taken them,” Olive says, but I hear the doubt in her voice. A bright red scratch bisects the dried mud on her right cheek.

  “Olive, it’s us,” Noah says. “What are you talking about?” I watch Olive study him as he says it. She slowly lowers the staff away from my face and holds it at her side.

  “What happened?” I say.

  Olive looks down at Peter, who twitches in his sleep. The tiny wound on his neck is bright red. “One of them caught up to us. She was alone, I . . . I fought her. I dropped Peter and I fought her, and I won. I knocked her out. She fell against a tree and I was going to grab Peter and run again, but I had to know who it was. They wear the same suits as us. The exact same. And I was thinking about what Tycast said...”

  I swallow, tasting the river in my throat. “About the Beta team being like us.”

  Olive’s eyes lock on mine, go a little wider.

  “They areus,” she says. “The girl beneath the mask, it was me. Exactly like me, like a twin, or a clone, or whatever. It’s us.”

  “Impossible,” Noah says. He’s standing next to me now, his shoulder to my slightly lower shoulder.

  “Is it?” Olive says. Her voice cracks; she’s trying her best to stay calm, and so am I. “Because I know what I saw. I even pulled up her eyelids and she has the same eyes. Same teeth, Noah. God. There were four of them, right? Four of us. Two teams.”

  I think about the mall again. The mayhem I caused by myself. Add seven more like me and repeat in a major city.

  We cannot be caught.

  I walk over to Peter slowly in case Olive gets staff-happy again, then crouch down and feel his strong pulse on my fingers. His skin is burning. Wind cuts through the trees again, thrashing the leaves. We freeze, listening. No helicopters this time.

  Olive lets her staff fall to the ground.

  “And then you released a wave so we could find you,” I say.

  She nods at me, tries to smile. “It’s a risk I had to take. We have to stay together, like the doctor said. Like Peter said.”

  Noah turns a full circle, scanning the trees. “Then we need to move. If we could track you, what’s stopping the other team?”

  Olive shakes her head. “Distance. I carried him for a half mile, and Beta was sweeping the forest in the opposite direction. I could hear them moving away after I put down the... girl.”

  “Wanna bet your life on it?” Noah says.

  The wave didfeel subtle. Possibly short-range. Still, we shouldn’t linger.

  I stand up and put my hand on her shoulder, tentatively, as I would with a frightened animal. She relaxes under my grip. I pull her into a hug, slowly, and she wraps her arms around me. It feels strange because I don’t really know this girl. I just have to trust in my past, that we were once close. When she saw me in the hotel, Olive seemed so relieved, but that doesn’t mean we were friends growing up. Teammates, for sure, but there’s a difference.

  I wish I knew you, I think. I wish it was like before, when we were a family and there were no outside problems, when we didn’t have to run from ourselves. Literally. The other Miranda. The other Peter and Noah. I wonder if they have the same names. If they’re like us, or our opposites, or somewhere in between.

  “I’m fine, really.” Olive pulls back with an awkward look on her face, like she’s surprised I hugged her. I admit I don’t seem like the hugging type. I nod and say nothing more.

  I crouch again and sling Peter’s limp arm over my shoulder. “You guys want to help me with him?” I say, grinning up at them. I have something to grin about—we’re still alive.

  Olive grins back, wiping at her nose, and after a moment Noah smiles without his eyes. We each hold a part of Peter to carry him through the woods.

  14

  We head south for a few miles before trading the forest’s cover for a road. Cars and the occasional truck pass us, but we need something that can carry us and also keep us hidden from whatever prying eyes we pass.

  It takes an hour.

  A white van rounds the bend, and I step from the tree line and wave my arms, keeping my eyes peeled for Beta, though it’s unlikely they tracked us this far. I’m wearing my black long-sleeved T-shirt again. It’s damp but less suspicious than the scaled armor. The van slows and I put on a big smile. At first, with Peter still unconscious, I worried about trusting whoever stopped for us, but with the three of us? We’ll be fine. The van pulls off the road slightly, crunching the crumbling blacktop under its tires. A decal on the side says morton’s painting. The driver rolls down the passenger window. I curl my hands over the window frame and smile at him. “Hi!”

  “Hey,” he says, smiling back. “What’s up?”

  I make a show of looking over my shoulder, then back at him. “Me and my friends were hiking, and one of them fell. He’s okay, he’s not bleeding or anything, but he passed out. We just need a ride. Could you help us?”

  Is that a helicopter I hear again, or just the wind? I step away from the door and check the narrow ribbon of sky above the road. The day is nearing dusk; the strip is purple-blue to the right, orange-red to the left. My stomach growls, and I realize I’ve never been hungrier. All the fighting and running and swimming have caught up with me.

  “You okay?” the man in the van says. The name tag on his paint-slashed shirt says michael.

  “I’m fine. Can you give us a ride? We can pay you.” I have no idea if we can pay him.

  Noah pops up on my left; I didn’t even hear him coming. “Hey!” he says brightly. “There’s only four of us. And the fourth is asleep. He had a little too much to drink.”

  At first I’m pissed, thinking he’s an idiot for changing the plan, but then I realize it’s perfect. It looks like I tried to cover up Peter’s unconsciousness and Noah isn’t afraid to say he’s passed out drunk. Just some kids screwing around. Both explanations are better than “He got stuck with a poison dart.”

  Michael furrows his brow while he studies us, but must decide he likes what he sees. He takes a swig from a bottle of raspberry tea. “Hope you don’t mind riding with paint,” he says.

  All four of us get in—we kind of heave Peter onto the floor— and Noah gives Michael an address I don’t recognize. Which doesn’t really surprise me. I don’t know if it’s somewhere I’ve been before or not. Michael asks us questions, occasionally looking in the rearview mirror at us sprawled over ladders and other paint equipment. I answer as best I can, being friendly but vague.

  The sun has almost set when the van stops in front of a house. Noah passes him some money, but Michael wa
ves it away until Noah presses it into his palm with a handshake. “You’re a lifesaver,” Noah says. I smile at Michael before we get out.

  The van chugs away from the curb. The house is two stories of gray brick with a Mercedes in the driveway. The neighborhood is upper class—plenty of space between houses, huge and sprawling front lawns, lots of dense trees to hide under if the helicopters return.

  “Where are we?” I say, as we carry Peter up the driveway. Peter’s arm is looped around my neck, and his head lolls into mine. I wince. This stuff better wear off soon.

  “Just let me do the talking,” Noah says. “Dr. Tycast had all of us make contacts in the city, places we could fall back on. Maybe he knew we’d need them someday. This house belongs to a girl whose parents are always out of town, and who won’t ask too many questions.”

  “A girl?” I say, ignoring the way my stomach flips. Really ignoring it.

  Noah looks over his shoulder. He has his left arm wrapped around Peter’s legs. “Yeah.”

  I don’t ask any more questions. We get to the front door and Noah rings the bell. I count to ten before the door opens. A gorgeous blond girl stands in the opening. Or not a girl—she’s definitely older than us, maybe early twenties. She’s wearing a white tank top and peach-colored shorts that barely cover her long tanned thighs.

  Something twists behind my breastbone; it’s a pang of jealousy. My mouth drops open. I don’t even know what I’m jealous of. This is some girl Noah knows—big deal.

  “Noah East,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

  Noah East? It strikes me that I don’t know anyone’s last name. Not Peter’s or Olive’s. I tuck that away for a less awkward moment.

  “Hey, Elena. Nice to see you too.”

  “What are you doing here?” Elena says again.

  “I need your help,” he says. He turns toward us, letting his ragged team into the circle. “We need your help. Obviously.”

  She hasn’t fully opened the door. Her eyes cut between Noah and Peter, and then to Olive, who has this scary dead look on her face. I try to imagine being in her position, seeing and fighting another version of myself, but I can’t.

  “Is he okay?” Elena says, raising her chin at Peter.

  “He will be,” Noah says. “Just let us inside before someone sees us.”

  Elena steps aside and we carry Peter into the house. The house feels fake, like no one lives here, as if its only purpose is to appear catalog-perfect.

  Noah points up the steps. “There’s a spare bedroom up there. Lay him down. I need to talk to Elena.” He tries to make eye contact, but I turn away and help Olive drag Peter up the steps.

  “Watch the mud,” Elena says. Peter is streaked with it. I ignore her.

  The bedroom is like the rest of the house—preserved. We get Peter into bed and arrange him on the comforter. I pull his T-shirt over his head, easing it over his ears.

  “You okay?” I say to Olive, tossing the filthy T-shirt into the adjoining bathroom. Olive works on his jeans and together we strip him to his armor. I touch the back of his exposed hands, feel their dry heat.

  “No,” she says.

  I leave the blankets off. A wet piece of his longish black hair sticks to his cheek, and I push it away with the edge of my thumb. His face burns under my fingertips. I think about a future where he doesn’t get better. We can probably get the shots on our own, but we’ll need Peter to stop the dry run. He’ll have a plan. I don’t know where Olive stands, but Peter knows it’s our responsibility. Noah says he wants to find the rogue, or at least get the memory cache first, but I doubt he’s keen on fighting back directly. Because if we get caught, it’s over. Before they strip our memories, we’ll wish we had run and hid.

  Which path is right, I don’t know. But we can’t do nothing. I remember the mall again, the blind panic, a miniature dry run in its own way. People concerned only with flight, not who might get hurt in the process. People will die if we do nothing.

  Olive paces away from me, folding her arms, hugging herself, fingers clenched around her biceps. I sit on the bed with Peter and watch her. She’s agitated, mouth drawn, even though we should be safe here. The dirt has flaked off her face. The scratch on her face has begun to scab.

  “You okay?” I ask her again, before her unease infects me.

  “I don’t know who we are,” Olive says. “Ever since we were kids, none of us thought to ask. We accepted our way of life because it was what we knew, you know? We were together, all of us, with our parents—”

  “Our parents?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “I remember that, I think. Your mom was there, and Peter’s dad.”

  I stand up. “Was where, Olive? Where were we?”

  She’s blank-faced for a moment, then shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Then maybe you’re remembering our parents wrong. How can you be sure?”

  “I can’t.” She shakes her head again and presses her fingers to her forehead. “I have to lie down.”

  She’s about to say something else, but stops.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “It’s just good to see you, Mir. What Noah . . . what we did was wrong. I didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late.”

  “Why couldn’t you trust Peter?” I say.

  Olive considers it. After a while, she shrugs. “I don’t know. Noah had me convinced we couldn’t chance it. We always planned to contact Peter after we were safely away, because if he wasn’t on our side there wasn’t much he could do. Or so we thought.” She flexes the ankle her tracker was buried under.

  “Hey, when we first got here, that girl said ‘Noah East.’ Is that his last name?”

  She nods slowly.

  “What’s yours?” I say.

  “I’m Olive South.”

  I don’t understand. These aren’t our real names. They have to know that.

  “And Peter—” Olive begins.

  “Is Peter West,” I say.

  She nods again.

  “No one thinks that’s weird?” I say.

  “I guess so. We never really thought about it. Just another normal thing to us.” She turns to leave.

  “Wait,” I say.

  She freezes in the doorway, like she’s been caught. Caught doing what, I’m not sure.

  Maybe it’s because I don’t buy Noah influencing her over Peter. Or maybe it’s something else, an old memory, or an intuition, but I ask a question that surprises me as I say it.

  “Was there something between you and Noah? Is that why you left with him?”

  She looks at the floor for several long moments. “Noah was always yours. I never got in the way of that, and neither did Peter.” When she lifts her eyes, they’re narrow with pain.

  “You left with Noah because you wanted to go with Noah.” Her eyes on the floor again. Seconds pass.

  “Do you love him?” I say.

  Finally she meets my gaze.

  “Yes.”

  It feels like someone swings a hammer into my chest. I open my mouth; no sound comes out.

  She sighs. “I don’t blame you, or hate you, Mir. I can’t. You’re my sister. But when Noah came to me and told me what he knew, I had to go with him.”

  “He stole my memories,” I say, like she didn’t already know that. I don’t mention the memory of the train, when I said I trusted him to do what he thought was right.

  The light catches a tear on her eyelid. She wipes it away. “I know. It was selfish of him. Of me, too, for still following him. But I trusted him, and I still do.” Her eyes fall to Peter on the bed. “Peter is our leader, since we were kids. It always made things different between him and us. You included.” She looks at me again. “He couldn’t act the way Noah could with us. Tycast and Sifu Phil wouldn’t let him. I know they pounded into his head that the team comes first, not the individual. Peter is one of us for sure, don’t get me wrong, but...I’ll always choose Noah first. And you.” />
  “I understand.”

  She wrings her hands together, shaking her head. “Can you forgive me?”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  Olive says, “You won’t say anything to Noah, right?”

  I shake my head even though part of me wants to. I don’t feel anger toward her. Something else. She’s upset about Noah and the situation, but she still remembers who she is. Jealous, then. I’m jealous she has her identity and I’m just scraps of a person stitched together.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says. That would be a neat trick, because even I don’t know. “You think I’m happy Noah gave you up.”

  I try to laugh; it sounds like a choked cry. “Is it true?”

  She shakes her head slowly, holding my eyes. “No. Because even after he did it, I knew his heart would always be yours. He thought it was the right thing, even if now he’ll regret it forever.”

  “I wish you had stopped him,” I say, suddenly feeling very tired.

  “Me too,” she says, and I believe her.

  She leaves before I can say anything else. I sit on the bed next to Peter. Some of his dark hair curls around the back of his neck. I reach down to feel it, hoping it wakes him, but also just wanting to touch his hair. His breath is even and slow, and his skin is cooler than before. Mud streaks his face and neck. I watch him for a long time, trying to process everything. Olive and Noah. I wonder if Noah knows, and feels the same way. I wonder if I care.

  I press my hand against the side of Peter’s face. His lips are parted slightly. I remember the feel of Noah’s lips, but also the taste of the river, the blind panic in my chest as I struggled for air during the final seconds underwater. It all feels muted looking at Peter. I rub my thumb over his smooth chin.

  His eyes snap open. He bolts upright, curling his hand into a fist. I get my arm up to block his punch. He tries again but I grab his wrists and pin him to the bed. He’s still weak, and I have a feeling I couldn’t restrain him whenever I wanted. He blinks until his eyes focus on my face.

  “Miranda,” he says. And his expression breaks apart into equal parts horror and relief. “You’re okay. I didn’t mean—”