The Remaking

by J. T. O'Connell

  That was the consequence of the lie; she could never really trust Desmond ever again, much less the Vines. She didn’t want to see any of them ever again either.

  Sela sighed and tried to focus on SovereignCast, but the feed cut out halfway through the third re-run. The Council was getting the upper hand in the cyber war for the moment. Sela refreshed the page over the next few minutes, hoping the stream would come back.

  It didn't.

  She stood and stretched, setting the tablet into a charging cradle on a shelf. Maybe she ought to get that laundry done. The evening was getting darker, and hopefully people would be going to dinner about this time.

  And maybe listening to other people chat while doing laundry was just what she needed to distract from her circumstance.

  As she went to pick up her hamper, a question came to mind; should she move?

  Certainly, it would be a small task to find out where her ghosted identity was renting an apartment. If they could find out her real name was Wallis and not Mason, then she might have to rent a new apartment.

  But that was crazy! After all, she couldn't afford to ghost a new, fulltime identity, and if they could find this apartment, they could find any other she might stay in. The only alternative was homelessness in a supercity.

  Homelessness was not uncommon, although the Withouts were supposed to stay at assistance shelters set up in the less-than-savory districts. They lived on the streets because they didn't like the horrid conditions in the shelters, didn't like having their lives constrained and didn't want to fall in line.

  Sela didn't want to live with the percentage who were drunks or users though. She had no idea how many of one or the other there were, but it didn't seem like the right idea for a young girl to be hiding under a bridge somewhere, or standing near a barrel fire in the transit tunnels.

  Maybe if she had a few weeks, she could set up some accommodation, anonymously. Maybe if she had been smart, she would have had a safe-house set up months ago, just in case she would ever need it. She needed it now, and nothing could be done about it. Her headache was returning.

  "Might as well get the laundry done," Sela said aloud, resigning to the task.

  She picked up the hamper and balanced it against her hip, sidling through the bedroom doorway. She grabbed her tablet from the charger and pitched it into the clothes. The front door automatically locked itself when she closed it, awaiting her personal key code.

  The laundry room was indeed busy. Still, plenty of machines were available. Several banks were completely open. Always preferring seclusion, Sela selected a pair of machines that were removed from everyone else.

  First load running, Sela sat down and tried to focus on the tablet, reading a novel she had begun a while back. She couldn't remember the characters or the situation, though. Everything had a familiar veneer, and yet, it was all confusing, a jumble of words that failed to recall a coherent plot.

  Sela sighed and flicked the screen to switch over to a puzzle game, trying to untangle a network of nodes connected together with lines. That seemed to work for a while, distracting her. She didn't have to remember plot or characters, and her mind was engaged.

  And yet, somehow she found her finger paused over the screen, her mind several districts away.

  How had they found her? It was one thing to find out her identity was ghosted. How could her real identity be ferreted out, especially since it had been a year now since she had left that name behind?

  She leaned back in the metal folding chair, closed her eyes and rubbed her face with her palms. Had she bothered putting makeup on, it would have smudged away, but who bothered putting on makeup to do their laundry?

  Although, Sela remembered wryly, letting her hands drop. Once, while doing laundry, one of the other tenants in the building had struck up a conversation, three or four months back. A few minutes in, the man had asked Sela out.

  He was handsome, if about thirty years old. She might have been flattered, otherwise. Involvement was too risky. Declining his advance was awkward, and Sela had hated the 75 minutes she spent finishing her laundry after.

  That was the last time she washed her clothes in the morning.

  Sela couldn't even remember what the man looked like. Somehow, only Desmond's face was occupied her memory, and accustomed as she had grown to him, Desmond now seemed marred in her mind's eye.

  Why hadn't she listened to her doubts about the Vines earlier? Why hadn't she paid attention to the things that had angered her about Desmond before Basil Davenport's party?

  He had gone behind her back then. He already knew that her real name was Sela Wallis, knew that Sela Mason was as much an act as Alice Williams was. He had known then, and still convinced Max Gaines to persuade her to talk to the Vines.

  Sela should have refused immediately, sought to cut all connections. A sinking pain crawled behind her ribs when she realized that going back to Max Gaines was probably a bad idea. Any connection she had with the name Sela Mason would need to be severed forever.

  Not that she was terribly close to Max. Just… He had been the nearest thing to a friend, a confidante, since she had been out on her own. And it hadn't helped that a goodly portion of her social contact was through ghosting.

  She was naturally a loner, something she had developed in school, when she had been young. But no matter how much she was inclined to spend time alone, a year of isolation was almost unbearable.

  Grasping for any distraction from the Vines, Sela thought back to when she was a child.

  Her father had been a consultant on research projects, and he would do contract work for different groups. In those days, before inexpensive high-speed internet, that meant he had to spend a year or two in one place and then move on to the next.

  They had moved regularly throughout Sela's childhood, and just when she was getting settled and making friends, the family would uproot and head off to some other place.

  It had not been easy for Sela, until her father took a position as a research professor at a university near Nashville. Sela had been slow to make friends, hardly able to see the point, and intimidated by how long most of the kids at school had known each other.

  Finally, she began to make friends after joining a ballet club. Her slender physique fit the style, but she wasn't all that graceful. Talent didn't matter so much though, as the club only had a few outstanding dancers.

  Several of the other girls welcomed Sela in and helped her feel like a real part of the club. They would spend time together on the weekends at each other's houses, or walking the suburban streets, going to movies, and talking on the phone long enough to drive their parents crazy.

  And then Leon had shown up one day. Sela's aunt and uncle, that she had never met, had come to Nashville. As brothers, Sela's father and her Uncle Steffen were completely different. Sela's mother did not like Uncle Steffen, and she tolerated Uncle Steffen's wife only a little better.

  Cousin Leon was a year or so younger than Sela, and yet he had an insufferable self-assurance about him. The very first time they had met, Leon had spent half of his time displaying contempt for Sela, her parents, their home, and anything else that Leon declared to be beneath him.

  Nothing was good enough for that boy. Everything was an annoyance, or incorrect, or stupid to begin with, or there was something better to do, or… The list never ended. Even with the experience of a child, Leon had the self-confidence of a veteran politician.

  Sela disliked him from the very beginning, but she thought that he would be there for an evening and then gone. Until at dinner, Uncle Steffen announced that his family would be moving to Nashville for a few years to start up a local headquarters for some cause.

  Sela knew instantly that she would have to get used to seeing Leon. But she had already caught on that her mother did not enjoy spending time with Uncle Steffen and his family, so she hoped that maybe there would still be some separation.

  And there was… to a certain extent. Until Sela's aunt and unc
le actually bought a house and moved down from Connecticut.

  Sela's father had been aware of how difficult the constant moves had been on her. He had tried to get Sela and Leon to spend more time with each other, and Uncle Steffen had been only too eager to support it.

  So far as Sela could tell, Leon had never really had any friends, though for a different reason than she. You had to be vulnerable to be intimate with someone else, and Sela guessed that Leon had always been entitled, dismissive, and rude to everyone. Sela hated every minute she had to spend with him.

  And then, Leon started showing up when she was with her friends. She was mortified the first time they met him. They were just beginning to spend time with other boys from their class. None of them knew Leon, since he went to a private school a few neighborhoods away.

  He immediately treated all the girls as silly and foolish, and the boys too. He treated everyone as though they were insufferable idiots. He tried to pretend he was their natural better, that he was the best person to lead their group.

  But they didn't need a leader. They were kids! They hung out and talked and joked around with each other. Everyone was different in subtle ways from everyone else, but no one was a leader.

  Leon thought he was. Leon assumed he was there to tell everyone else how to behave, what to do, what to think even.

  She hated him even more than the other girls, because of the tension he caused between Sela and her very first long-term friends. Some of her friends even stopped visiting her house, because Leon was there on occasion.

  Sela still disliked him to this day, and maybe it was still hate, although she had not seen him in two or three years. She relished the time apart from the malevolent boy.

  Then she remembered the line that had set her off that morning, set her to flight from the Michelle Duncan’s office and Desmond Tine. Yes, Leon Wallis was her cousin. Wasn't all this supposed to be about her father?

  What do they want with Leon?

  Chapter 15

  The machines took forever, as always. Energy efficient meant only two things to Sela: laundry would take much longer to wash than it should, and the clothes would still be damp when they came out of the dryer. It was late into the evening before Sela finally had her clothes all folded in the hamper.

  She lugged the hamper out of the room, down the service elevator, and around the corner at the end of the hallway. Desmond was sitting in the hallway, leaning his back against the wall next to Sela's door.

  Her legs froze; she caught her breath. Desmond looked up from his card and saw her.

  He stood slowly, pocketing his card. Behind him on the carpet was her duffel bag and her purse. Desmond looked at her, his eyes softened, his face begging forgiveness.

  Sela grimaced. This answered the question of whether the Vines knew where she lived. And remorseful as Desmond might be, Sela was in no mood to talk about what had happened. She felt that initial panic riding the fringes of her renewed anger.

  How could she trust him? He had shown himself to be an excellent actor and an expert manipulator. There was no safe way to be sure of his goals, his beliefs, and his claims. For that matter, Sela realized, he might’ve just made up that whole story about his family.

  Something deep within her answered, it probably was real.

  She scowled and threw the thought out. It made no difference. The trust was broken, and weighing the honesty of one conversation or another only reminded her that Desmond was dishonest.

  With a huff of indignation, Sela started down the hallway, hefting the hamper up, as it had slipped down with her surprise.

  He began to speak as she approached him, “Sela, I…” His voice was soft and reserved. “I… I’m sorry for letting them spring that on you. It—’”

  “Spring it on me?” Sela spat back.

  “It would have been better—”

  “If you had kept things concealed from me?” she interrupted again. “Lied to me more about how much you really knew?”

  Desmond stared at her in silence, pain aching in his expression, the way he slouched his shoulders, the way his fingers pinched his cuffs. Whether it was real or not, Sela couldn’t tell.

  Couldn’t care, either. Not right now.

  Glancing away from her, he gestured by flicking a few fingers toward the duffel and purse, “I brought your stuff for you.”

  “Good,” she replied curtly, glaring at him. She wanted to tell him to get out of her building, but she just couldn’t, and she didn’t quite know why, either. Her eyes might say it for her.

  Desmond appeared nervous. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and said, “Well, uh… There’s also something else.”

  Sela took a second glance and saw, leaning against the packed duffel was a manila envelope. Obviously, it had something to do with whatever the Vines had lined up for her.

  “I’m not interested,” she said, dismissing the envelope entirely.

  Desmond reached down to pick up the two bags, but Sela cut off his movement, “Just leave it.” That was the close enough to saying ‘Get out!’

  He froze in a half crouch and then sighed with exasperation. Standing back upright, he insisted, “Sela, you’re going to want someone there when you open that!” Desmond pointed to the envelope again.

  “I’m not interested!” she hissed, trying to keep from shouting. “Leave the bags, but take that with you.”

  Her arm sagged with the weight of the hamper and all the clothes. She didn’t want to set it down though. That would invite Desmond to help her or to stay and talk longer. Neither option was appealing to Sela.

  Desmond stared at her in silence, the pain in his eyes halfway replaced with consternation. Then he said, “Don’t ignore it, Sela.” He turned and walked down the hallway, leaving the envelope and duffel where they were.

  Fine, Sela thought. Then I’ll throw it away.

  She watched until he moved into the elevator, and then she opened her apartment. Setting the hamper in front of the door, she snatched the straps of the bags and balanced them atop the folded clothes. She jammed the envelope into the gap between stacks of clothing and the plastic side of the hamper.

  Heeling the front door closed behind her, Sela carried everything to the bedroom, careful to balance it all. She eased the stack onto her bed and then pulled out the tablet, setting it on her nightstand.

  Everything in the duffel looked untouched. The handgun was still loaded and in its pocket of the purse. Her makeup kit was there, and the emergency card. Everything was in order. The luxurious purple dress was still folded into the plastic bag.

  Sela knew she ought to hang it up, but she flung the bag across the room, and let the package rest on the floor where it had dropped after impacting the wall. The expensive shoes were stashed in the duffel bag as well, though she didn’t bother pulling them out.

  Leaving the bags aside, Sela set to putting away the laundry. In her anger, she made a few mistakes and had to double check what had gone into what drawer. She switched around the few clothes that ended up in the wrong spot.

  Nothing was left in the hamper except the envelope. She stared at it in disgust, and then, in a fit of rage, grabbed it and heaved it at the same spot on the wall she’d hit with the dress. But being paper, it caught the air and tumbled, falling after only half the distance.

  She let it stay on the floor.

  Returning the hamper to its proper location in the corner, Sela tossed the worn clothes from the duffel bag into it. Then she stowed the bag, shoes and all, on a top shelf in the closet. It fell down the first time, so she pitched it back upward with enough force that the shoes thudded against the closet wall.

  Sela decided it would be best to get out of the apartment before she broke something.

  The running paths were illuminated by fluorescent lights during the night, in the off-chance that someone on an odd schedule would be using them.

  She had never gone running this late at night. It didn’t seem likely she would encoun
ter many people, though. And besides, she was going to take a walk, so that she could bring her purse with the handgun.

  A run would have felt better. She had not run in several days. Her body had been tired from the two days at the rock gym, and whatever free time she'd had was consumed with memorizing information about the people attending the party.

  Given that it was already late though, Sela thought a walk would be enough to clear her mind. She could feel the twist of emotions on her face, scrunching her eyebrows into a glare, and squeezing her mouth into a tight frown.

  She stomped out onto the walkway, her purse slung over one shoulder, other hand swinging at her side. The outdoor air was muggy. The wind was moving the wrong direction, pushing cool air back across the lakes, keeping the breeze away from Megora.

  As she made her way out onto the first bridge, Sela could feel the rigging and bracing beneath reverberating with her pounding feet. She tried to blast her fury out in each stride, and soon a sweat was glistening on her forehead, only partly from the heat.

  Knowing all of the routes near her building, Sela calculated that she was making good time, maintaining almost a speed-walking pace. Either that, or she wasn't noticing how fast time was passing.

  Desmond stayed before her mind. She could understand Michelle Duncan lying to her. Michelle only met her twice. Michelle could be a completely different person and that wouldn't shock Sela much.

  Desmond though, she had spent time with. She had known him. At least she had believed so. They had shared dinners, and Desmond had gone to great lengths to put Sela at ease with him. He had been gentlemanly and respectful.

  And yet all along, he had known exactly who she was, and had known how he would use that.

  Sela tilted her head as she walked, hardly looking at the myriad of lights spread out across Megora.

  Was that really true, though? Sela wondered. Did Desmond know all along exactly who she was? Maybe they were digging into her background to find out who she was before offering her more access to the Vines.