by AJ Steiger
He squints. “Why?”
I pause. If he thinks I feel sorry for him, he might not take it. “Oh, I always buy too much. It’s more than I can eat on my own.”
He chews his lower lip. I can see the longing in his eyes, the hunger. But he shakes his head. “You’re already doing this for free. I don’t feel right taking your food on top of everything else.”
“Steven …”
“I’ll be fine.” He gives me a tiny, one-sided smile. “Really. I get by.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I blurt out. “Take one thing, at least.”
He looks startled, then shrugs with one shoulder. “If you insist.”
In the kitchen, he examines the fruit bowl on my counter, selects a single bright red apple, and slips it into his pocket. At my questioning look, he says, “Been a while since I’ve had one of these. The real thing, I mean, not that genetically engineered crap they serve at school.”
An apple won’t fill him up, but it’s better than nothing, I guess.
I drive to the monorail station, a huge concrete building with advertisements shimmering across the walls. People flow in and out through the revolving door as we stand on the sidewalk outside. “Should we meet in the usual place after school?” I ask.
He nods. After a brief hesitation, he pulls a folded piece of paper from his pocket and holds it out to me. “Here.”
I take it. “What’s this?”
“You wanted to see one of my drawings. Well, here it is.”
Surprised, I unfold it. Lines of ink stand out, crisp black against the white. A sphinx rears up on its hind legs, wings spread, every feather and furred muscle rendered in exquisite detail. When I study the drawing more closely, a tingle of electricity races down my spine. “It has my face.”
He doesn’t respond.
It’s amazing how he’s managed to capture my features so perfectly with just a few strokes of the pen. But the drawing flatters me. I don’t normally have such a determined look in my eyes, do I? Determined, yet somehow haunted and vulnerable at the same time, like a child facing some unspeakable horror. Is this how he sees me?
Self-conscious, I raise my eyes. “Why a sphinx?”
“No reason.”
Lightly, I trace the wings with my fingertips. “It’s beautiful. May I keep it?”
He fidgets. “Sure. Whatever.”
“Thank you.”
We look at each other in the light of the setting sun. I want to say something to him, but I don’t know what. Don’t leave, maybe.
His gaze flicks away. “See you tomorrow, Doc.” He pulls the apple out of his pocket and takes a big, wet bite. Then he turns, walks toward the station, and disappears through the revolving door. For a few minutes, I linger, clutching the drawing. I watch the mono pull into the station, then glide away, taking Steven with it.
Abruptly, Pike’s leering face flashes through my mind. A cramp seizes my stomach, and bile surges up my throat. I choke it down, close my eyes, and walk through my compartmentalization exercises. I visualize myself tucking the memories away in a wooden chest and locking it tight. Pike’s face will find its way into my nightmares, I’m sure. But for now, it fades away.
Wanting a distraction, I return to studying the drawing. In myths, sphinxes usually ask riddles of travelers, and sometimes devour the ones who can’t answer correctly. Despite his denial, I wonder if Steven did have some reason behind the choice—perhaps a subconscious one. Or maybe I’m overanalyzing it.
Such an odd, complicated, fascinating boy. Now that I’ve seen the inside of his head, I’m more determined than ever to help him. But it goes beyond that. I think about the concern in his eyes after I surfaced from his memories. I remember his fierce desire to punish the man who hurt his friend. My fingertips wander over the ink lines, stroking them. He said he usually burns his art after he finishes. Why? Why would he hide this talent from the world? Whatever the reason, I’m honored that he chose to show it to me.
Carefully, I refold the drawing and slip it into my pocket.
There’s so much more to Steven than his trauma. I want to learn more about this broken, resilient young man. I want to find out who he is outside of the pain and darkness.
In the courtroom of my skull, my psych-ethics teacher murmurs disapproval.
“The government is breeding us!” a man shouts, jarring me from my thoughts. “They’re breeding us like cattle!”
My head snaps up. Outside the monorail station stands a thin, wild-eyed figure dressed in ragged clothes, his hair sticking up in every direction. A collar glints at his throat. He holds out a flyer to a passing woman, who ducks and hurries past. “Can’t you tell what’s happening?” Even from this distance, I can see the spittle flecking the corners of his mouth. “We’re all cattle!” His gaze locks onto me, and I tense.
He walks quickly toward me, holding out a flyer. I stare into his wide, bloodshot eyes. “Join the resistance,” he says.
“No thank you,” I reply quietly. I turn and start to walk toward my car.
He follows. “There’s a war coming,” he says. “You have to be ready. Everything will come crashing down. There’ll be blood in the streets—” He freezes, head raised, nostrils quivering, like a rabbit scenting the air for a predator. The stack of flyers falls out from under his arm, and the papers scatter on the damp pavement.
A sleek police car pulls up, and an officer steps out, holding an ND.
“It’s all right,” I say quickly. “He wasn’t trying to hurt me.”
“No need to be concerned,” the officer says, tipping his hat to me. “We’re just taking him in for treatment. We’ve received complaints that he’s been disturbing the peace here again.”
The corner of the man’s eye twitches. He pulls something from his pocket—a pen, it looks like—and aims it at the policeman. “Don’t make me use this.”
The officer rolls his eyes and says, almost kindly, “Come on, Marv.” He takes a step forward and holds out a hand. “Let’s go. You’ll feel a lot better after it’s over.”
The man—Marv—grips the pen in trembling fists. “I’m warning you! I’ll use it!”
“What are you gonna do, write on me?” He chuckles.
A tear slips down Marv’s stubbled cheek. “Butchers! You’re fucking butchers, all of you! You—” His eyes lose focus, and he sways on his feet. The pen drops from his slackening grip as he starts to slump forward.
The policeman catches him, slides him into the car like so much luggage, and buckles his seat belt. He picks up the pen, then gets behind the wheel and nods to me. The car drives off, leaving me staring after it uneasily.
The collar senses aggression and acts accordingly, even if the person’s not holding a real weapon. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually seen it in action.
I start to turn, then notice the flyers still scattered across the pavement. I bend to pick one up. It’s nonsense, a mishmash of incomprehensible sentences filled with exclamation points and capital letters. Join the resistance, he said. But of course, there is no resistance. The Blackcoats are gone—and that, I remind myself, is a good thing. A man who might once have set off a bomb or mowed down innocents with a machine gun is now reduced to waving a pen at a police officer before being carted away for his ethically questionable but ultimately humane and painless treatment.
I try to ignore the knot in my throat as I get into my car and whisper, “Take me home.”
When I get home, Greta is wiping down the coffee table in the living room. She wasn’t supposed to come in today. Did Dr. Swan send her to check up on me? “Um. Hello.”
She smiles at me. “Hi, Lain. How was school?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Careful, I just vacuumed.”
I slide off my shoes. We’ve always been friendly with each other, but it’s superficial. She asks me the right questions and I give the right answers. She’s here to spy on me, and she knows that I know it, so there’s no point in getting too
close.
“So,” she says. “Where’ve you been? Out with a friend?” Her tone is casual, but her eyes are suddenly intent.
“Alone,” I say. “I had tea at the Underwater Café.”
“Eaten yet?”
I shake my head.
“How about I cook some dinner?”
“No thank you.” I force a smile. “I think I’ll just fix something for myself tonight.”
“One of those frozen meals?” She purses her lips with disapproval. “That stuff’s loaded with chemicals. They don’t even use real meat. I saw this documentary where they grow this fake beef in a lab. Blech. I tell you, I’m never going near that stuff again.”
A small, sharp point of pain pulses behind my left eye. “I’ll have a salad.” Go. Just go. Please. “Thank you for the offer, though.”
“Okay. Don’t stay up too late.” She gathers her cleaning supplies. I wait until she leaves the house, then I heat up a frozen dinner and flop down on the couch. Steam billows out as I peel back the film from my imitation sirloin with carrots and a brownie, all in their own little compartments. The meal resembles a piece of abstract art, with bright, artificial colors and food molded into shapes too precise to be the work of nature.
Why did Dr. Swan send her here tonight? Does he suspect I’ve been spending time with Steven?
I’m too worn out to worry about it now. I turn on the TV and flip automatically to the news channel.
“Up next,” an announcer says, “a woman determined to die. Representative Caroline Mackey, a member of the General Ethics Committee of Aura, has struggled for years with debilitating health problems. Now she’s suing her doctor for refusing to write her a Somnazol prescription. The doctor claims she has not explored all her treatment options, but Mackey says he’s simply imposing his moral judgment on her.”
The camera cuts to a thin middle-aged woman sitting at a table, hands folded in front of her. Her head is shaved and scarred, a stark contrast to her elegant blue suit. “This is my life and my decision.” She stares straight into the camera, hollow-cheeked and grim. “I’ve evaluated all my options, and I can’t see any realistic possibility of a life without constant pain. I’m ready for voluntary passing, and I don’t think some doctor should be able to stop me.”
What a strange combination of determination and despair—someone going to such lengths to die when death is available to anyone with a razor or a bottle of sleeping pills. But then, if someone voluntarily passes, her family receives full life insurance benefits. That’s not the case if someone commits suicide illegally.
“Mackey’s situation has been receiving attention from both sides of the debate,” the announcer continues. “The renewed controversy over Somnazol has stirred up protests.” The screen displays a demonstration, people waving signs with messages like DO NO HARM AND DEATH IS NEVER THE ANSWER.
Disgusted, I turn off the TV. Where were all these protesters when Steven was applying for his Somnazol?
Of course, despite her many physical problems, Mackey’s still a Type One—she must be if she’s a representative. No doctor wants to destroy a healthy mind. Yet they hand out the pills like candy to Fours and flood the media with propaganda telling us that Somnazol is the ethical and responsible choice for those who are irreparably damaged, that society has become much more peaceful and orderly since it was legalized. No one wants to bother trying to fix broken people, especially those without the money to pay for real treatments. Much easier to just let them die.
Sometimes I hate this country.
I poke at my food, rolling around a tiny wheel of carrot. My appetite has abandoned me. Steven’s memories keep replaying in my mind—all the months of hell, long periods of dread and loneliness broken only by visits from his captor. All the nights spent crying, muffling his sobs against the filthy mattress where he slept.
I wonder about the other children. I never saw them in his memories. Were they held captive separately? Or were they already dead by the time Pike found Steven?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. After our final session, those memories will be gone from Steven’s mind. His eyes will open, soft and puzzled, like the eyes of a sleeper awakening from a long, dark dream. He will forget me, too. He’ll leave, fresh and clean as a newborn, with all his horror and sadness scrubbed away.
But that horror will remain within me. I will never forget what happened in that small, dark room or the tears of that terrified boy.
I hug my knees to my chest.
If Father were here, he’d wrap me up in his arms and know the exact words to say. He’d help make sense of this mess in my head. I’d do anything to talk to him again, just for five minutes.
I know I won’t be able to sleep, so I go down into the bare, tiled room and turn on the Gate. I face the hard drive and wave a hand over the sensor, bringing up the holographic monitor, which displays a rotating image of a brain. Steven’s brain. I find myself staring at it, hypnotized by its slow turning.
The room is dim—I didn’t bother to switch on the overhead fluorescents—so the only illumination is the screen’s pale glow. I replay the readings from the session, watching the flow of neurological activity, like weather patterns moving over the landscape of his gray matter. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of activity in his amygdalae, the tiny almond-shaped structures connected to fear and memory.
All the horror and sorrow of the human condition—as well as all the joy, wonder, and love—can be reduced to this, chemicals in an organ resembling a lump of cauliflower. Sometimes, I find that comforting. Sometimes, it just makes me feel empty.
I tap spots on the screen, zooming in again and again, until I can see the sprawling networks of neurons, rendered in a soft, transparent blue. I blink a few times.
That’s odd.
The untrained eye would see nothing out of the ordinary. But to me, the difference is as striking and bizarre as looking at The Last Supper and seeing a cartoon duck sitting among the disciples. I look again. Yes—there’s a distinct pattern aberration in his neural networks. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it. I place my fingers against the screen and glide through the forest of neurons, following the pattern aberration downward and deeper, along the curved ridge of the hippocampus, toward the center of his brain. It’s a scar, buried in his nervous tissue.
I zoom in and out. As I pull further back, my stomach turns hollow.
It’s not just one scar, but a tangle of jagged overlapping lines, like a war zone pockmarked by land mines and grenades. Did Pike do this to him? He must have. But how? This doesn’t look like the result of torture or injury. In fact—I squint, studying the screen—if I didn’t know better, I’d say this was done by a Gate. The patterns are similar, but there’s no way a Mindwalker would ever be this sloppy. This is butchery. Nausea squirms in my middle.
I close the program and bring up another recording—the memories themselves, played out like a movie. The recorded images are grainy and blocky, rendered imperfectly from neural impulses, but I can make out the basement prison and Pike’s grinning face. I don’t want to see this again, but I have to.
I lean in, watching closely.
Something changes. The image flickers and shifts. It doesn’t disappear, but for an instant, I glimpse another image through it, like something seen through foggy glass. Beyond the dirt-streaked cement walls, there are other walls, blank and white. Briefly, Pike’s face becomes another face. There’s something disturbingly familiar about it, but it’s gone too quickly for me to make out the features. The dark basement settles back into place, and I’m left staring, shaken.
What the hell is going on here?
My chemistry notes are a blur. They keep floating around on the page, refusing to stay still regardless of how hard I strain my eyes. I swear, I can hear them giggling at me like malevolent imps.
And chemistry is usually easy.
My gaze roams the classroom, which is identical to nearly every other classroom in Greenborough—huge and gray, cr
ammed with desks, watched constantly, filled with listless students who accept it because this is all they’ve ever known. I rub my dry, sleep-deprived eyes. The teacher’s talking, but the words slide through my mind without leaving a mark.
Last night, I spent hours watching and rewatching the recordings from Steven’s immersion session, but that flicker—that moment of seeing another image behind the memory—didn’t happen anywhere else in the recording. It could be a glitch. But the scars in his brain are certainly real.
What am I supposed to tell Steven? How can I explain it when I don’t even know what it means?
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I’ve fallen into the risky habit of taking it to class, in case he texts me. Like a girl with a crush. But I don’t have a crush on him, I remind myself. I’m helping him. That’s all.
I check the phone and open the text he sent me.
HEY, DOC. YOU OKAY?
YES.
I’m lying, of course.
YOU SURE?
How does he know? Is it my expression? My posture? Either way, I need to get ahold of myself. Dr. Swan probably reviews the video feeds from my classes from time to time. If I’m showing any obvious distress, he’ll notice.
I quickly type in my reply.
I’LL TELL YOU AFTER SCHOOL.
Hearing footsteps coming close, I tense and look up to see the guard approaching. He holds out a hand. “You know the policy on cell phones.”
His tone isn’t angry, but it’s firm. The guards confiscate things from students all the time. It’s routine.
“Come on. You’ll get it back later.” He smiles. “Nothing to worry about. People don’t get reclassified for texting in class, you know.”
Reluctantly, I hand over the phone.
Even after it’s gone, I can’t focus on the teacher’s lecture. My mind drifts.
Last night, after I discovered the glitch in Steven’s memories, I went to my room and summoned Chloe. She materialized and asked in her cheery, high-pitched voice, “What can I do for you, Lain?”