The Memory Wall

by Lev AC Rosen

  “What is this place?” Severkin asks in a low voice.

  “It’s an abandoned dwarven colony, like I said.”

  “I didn’t think it would be so big.”

  “Dwarf colonies are cities. This was supposed to be a farming colony, providing food not just for everyone here but for half the dwarves in Wellhall.” She starts walking carefully along the balcony. It slopes downward toward the city. Severkin follows Reunne, threading an arrow into his bow.

  “What would they farm here?” Severkin asks.

  “The algae in the lake. Mushrooms. That’s all there was to eat down here until the peace. You surface dwellers don’t know how good you have it. You’ve been eating mutton and bread; we’ve had mushrooms and mole-rat meat.”

  “We?” Severkin asks, but Reunne throws up a hand, silencing him and pointing ahead into the darkness. On the narrow road of the balcony, a few dozen feet ahead of them, is a strange creature. It has brass, spiderlike legs that make hissing mechanical noises Severkin can hear in the silence, and its top half is a glowing green tentacle, flapping about wildly like a tongue searching out a stray crumb.

  “What is—” Severkin starts to say, but Reunne again gestures for him to stay silent. Another creature emerges from the darkness. This one also has a brass lower body, but instead of spider legs, it seems to have rusted wheels, squeaking along. And its top half is a dome, glowing green, and faceted like an insect’s eye.

  “Damn,” Reunne says. “Can you shoot the wheeled one from here? Kill it in one shot?”

  “I don’t know how powerful it is,” Severkin says. “I don’t know what it is.”

  Reunne draws her spear from behind her back as silently as if she were drawing it out of water.

  “Try,” she says. “And if it doesn’t go down in one shot, be prepared for more of them. It’s some sort of telepathic brain—it can call more.”

  Severkin draws his arrow back and inhales the sweet sweat of the hide bowstring. He holds his breath and aims directly for the center of the strange glowing sphere and then lets the arrow fly. He hears the soft musical twang of the arrow leaving its string, and he and Reunne watch it sail through the air and strike its target. The sphere thing lets out a noise—part screech, part the hum of a swarm of insects. It begins to deflate, oozing black liquid, but now the other creature has turned its attention to them, its spider legs hurrying toward them, its tentacle waving in front like a whip. Reunne is up, though, prepared for this, and slashes at the thing with her spear, her braid of hair whipping behind her like a pennant in the wind. Severkin nocks another arrow and checks to make sure his first target, the sphere, is dead. It isn’t moving, it has completely deflated, and its glow is fading, so he turns back to the tentacle.

  It’s still dueling with Reunne, weaving out of the way of her thrusts as it tries to whip her legs and grab her spear. Severkin takes aim at the tentacle thing and hits its base, right where the green membrane flows into the brass. Severkin’s arrow bounces off it with a clang, but the tentacle briefly turns its attention to him, and Reunne takes the opening, sweeping the blade of her spear through the middle of the tentacle.

  The top of the tentacle flies off into the air and lands like rotten fruit, but the base of it still moves, and the creature begins to flee.

  “Shoot its green part!” Reunne hisses, and Severkin quickly loads another arrow and aims it at the fleeing thing, hitting it square in the stump. It clatters forward, tripping over its own legs, and finally collapses, dead.

  “What were those things?” Severkin asks. Reunne holds up a hand, scanning the area for more enemies. When none are forthcoming, she nods and starts walking forward again, quiet and stealthy, eyes peeled.

  “This colony was supposed to be a farming colony. A huge lake to grow algae in, many machines to harvest it. A mage promised the dwarven elders he could make the algae grow faster, feed more. He came here and worked his magics, but it didn’t go as planned. And when the farmers sent machines to harvest the algae, the machines didn’t come back.”

  “The algae took the machines over?” Severkin asks. “We were just fighting enchanted algae and rogue farming equipment?”

  “Yes,” Reunne says, her voice a steel whisper in the low light. They’ve reached the end of the balcony, which slopes downward like a hill. When they step off it, they are at a crossroads with a sign at the center. Two-story buildings, long abandoned, rise above them. Severkin can hear the distant clattering noises of more machines.

  “How do you know all this?” Severkin asks in a whisper. “Before, you referred to the dwarves as ‘we’—what did you mean?”

  “I’m one of the gray elves that stayed below,” Reunne says. She glances at him as if waiting for a reaction.

  Severkin shakes his head.

  “Don’t you know your history?”

  “I’m not from here,” Severkin says. “I was raised far away.”

  “Ah,” Reunne says, perhaps a little sadly. There’s a sound of mechanical rattling again, this time closer. Reunne looks up at the walls, carved with dwarven symbols, then heads off down a narrow alley between two large buildings. Severkin follows. “You know the history, though, right?” Reunne asks in a whisper. The walls are close here, and claustrophobic. “That Wellhall was once a huge city both above and below, where gray elves and dwarves lived together in peace?”

  “Yes,” Severkin says.

  “Well, when the dwarves closed themselves off from above, there were a few families of gray elves—noble families, too—whose estates were in the undercity. They knew the divide was coming but chose not to move. They stayed below.”

  “And you’re from one of those families?” Severkin asks.

  “Yes.” The alley twists sharply, and Reunne peeks around the corner. She holds up one finger, then points to where she is looking. Severkin loads his bow and looks around the corner. There is another of the algae machines, another tentacle with spider legs. Severkin shoots it, and it collapses with a metal clang, never even knowing Severkin was there.

  “So you might as well call yourself a dwarf,” Severkin says. He almost spits the last word. A dwarf who looks like him.

  “No,” Reunne says as they move on through the alley. “I’m a gray elf from the undercity. I grew up with my family among the dwarves, but we are proud of our heritage. We have a huge wall on our family estate where the name of each new family member is carved, showing whose child it is, mapping our family all the way back to before the divide.”

  “But you lived with the dwarves,” Severkin persists. “You must have been part of their culture.” They turn another corner and come onto a wider street, paved with broken cobbles. Stone pedestals that look as though they once burned like torches line the road.

  “Well, yes,” Reunne admits. “Part of their society, anyway. We kept our own culture, our own gods. But we worked alongside the dwarves, true.”

  “Did you work to fight the abovelanders?”

  “No,” Reunne says, and turns to him, looking him in the eye. “You see that, don’t you? We stayed out of that conflict. The dwarves couldn’t trust us to fight our own kind even if we’d been willing. I’m an elf, Severkin. Like you.” She holds his eye, and Severkin believes her.

  “Very well,” Severkin says after a long pause. Reunne turns back around and they head farther down the street. They’re more in the open now, though they are clinging to the sides of buildings. This must have been a main road at one point. Judging by the faint glow he sees coming from the lake, which is hidden behind buildings, Severkin guesses they’re moving around it. He assumes they don’t want to get close to the edge. It must be like these things’…home? Breeding pit? Severkin doesn’t want to think about it.

  “More,” Reunne whispers, and ducks low. But this time it’s too late. Four of the tentacles have emerged from an alleyway and are heading for them, and above them, diving off a rooftop, is another creature, this one a pair of green bat wings holding a rusted sawblade. />
  “I’ll get the flyer,” Severkin says, and ducks down, tracking the thing with his bow. It dives for Reunne, aiming to plunge its blade into her back, but Severkin shoots it through the wing and it spirals to the ground. Severkin looks to the front lines, where Reunne is dealing with the four tentacles herself, spinning her spear around her like a whirlwind. He crouches and takes aim, striking, but not killing, one of the tentacles. Reunne slashes it, and it falls, leaving three to defeat. Severkin notches another arrow while Reunne parries a blow from one tentacle, but then she’s hit squarely on the chest by another, knocking her to the ground. Severkin lets fly his arrow, killing another of the creatures, and then draws his knives. The tentacles are quick. They make a sound like rustling leaves and rain as they move. One knocks him in the shoulder, and it stings, but he rolls and stabs it in the back. It lets out a high-pitched squeal and dissolves into water and dead plant life under his touch. Reunne is up again and quickly slashes the last creature, ending the battle.

  Severkin puts his knives away and takes a deep breath.

  “Thanks for that,” Reunne says, leaning on her spear like it’s a walking cane. “We’re a good team.”

  “I think so,” Severkin says, wiping sweat from his brow.

  “But we should move. There might be more. The sooner we’re away from the lake, the better.”

  Reunne hurries down the path and Severkin follows, both of them letting their feet fall as quietly as they can. Reunne ducks into an alley, where it feels safer to talk again.

  “So what was it like?” Severkin asks.

  “What?” Reunne whispers back.

  “Growing up with dwarves?”

  Reunne chuckles softly. “If I asked you what it was like growing up with elves, could you answer me?”

  “No,” Severkin says. “I was raised by a human. But I take your point. I’ve just never met anyone like you, so I’m curious.”

  “Dwarven society is…dark. Paranoid. It’s why they cut off ties from the overland to begin with. Everyone spies on everyone, and if you put one foot out of line, you disappear in the night, taken by the Sword and Shield. And you’re lucky if you come back.”

  “The Sword and Shield?”

  “Guards who pretend they are not guards. Spies.” Reunne looks around quickly as she says this, and Severkin isn’t sure whether she’s scanning for monsters or spies. “Their goal is to know everything. They keep files on everyone.”

  “But surely not the elves?”

  “Us, too. We could get away with some, but not much. We could be taken away in the night, too. Disappeared. No one could prove the Sword and Shield had taken us.”

  “That sounds difficult,” Severkin says, but it sounds familiar.

  “It made me vigilant,” Reunne says. She says it in a way that ends the conversation.

  SINCE THE spring, Nick has been having occasional nightmares about his mother’s bad day. He doesn’t tell anyone about them, because he doesn’t think there’s anything anyone can do. He just relives the incident, twisted into something worse, then wakes up and gets on with life.

  In reality, it happened like this: There was an end-of-the-year dance for the sixth graders. It wasn’t anything fancy, just some punch and a DJ in the gym, which had dimmed lights and balloons. Nick hadn’t asked anyone to the dance, but he’d gotten to dance one song with Sadie Merrick, who he’d always thought was funny and good-looking, if not quite as cute as Jackie Dalhause. He hadn’t gone for girls, though; he’d gone because everyone was going, and he thought it ended up being kind of fun. Not like the masquerade balls that Severkin sometimes went to in the game, but Severkin was usually there to steal something from a museum and often got chased by guards by the end of the party, so Nick thought maybe it was okay that this party was a little boring.

  As the dance ended, the kids all went outside to wait for their parents to pick them up. It was late May, and the night was warm, but there was a strong breeze that made Nick cross his arms. Charlie asked Nick to go with him around the corner, out of view of the chaperones, where Charlie was going to smoke his Second Cigarette Ever because Charlie’s dad had just sent him an email saying he and the girlfriend he’d left Charlie’s mom for had set up Charlie’s room in their new place in California for when Charlie visited. He wanted Nick to take a drag, too, but then Nick’s mom’s car pulled up.

  It arrived with the sort of screech that always precedes a car chase on TV, and his mom didn’t park in one of the parking spaces but rather at a slight angle through two of them, right across the dividing line. The door flew open and Nick’s mom stepped out.

  “Oh, Nicky,” she said, “I’m so sorry I’m late. I forgot all about the time.” She wasn’t really late—only a few people’s parents had already shown up. But weirder than that, she was wearing her bathrobe, turquoise and ragged and cinched around the waist with a belt but, still, low-cut in the front. Nick felt a strange fear in his stomach, a cold nausea and dizziness. It was like when there was a glitch in a game that made you walk through a mountain and fall into a sky that wasn’t supposed to be there and you died. Except it was happening in real life.

  “Your mom has a nice rack,” Charlie snickered.

  Nick ran over to her. “It’s okay, Mom, you’re not late,” he said. He knew he needed to get her into the car, and get away. He looked behind him, and everyone was staring. The teachers, his classmates, some of his classmates’ parents. He looked back at Mom as the wind picked up and blew the bottom of her bathrobe out behind her, showing that she was naked underneath. There was laughter behind him, but it was quickly silenced. His mother looked down at him and smiled, seeming not to notice that her body was on display.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t be late next time.”

  “Get in the car, Mom,” Nick said. Mom got back into the car and Nick walked around to the passenger side, his face burning, his eyes a little watery. He heard footsteps behind him.

  “Um, Mrs. Reeves?” It was his English teacher, Ms. Ford. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive? We can call a taxi for you.”

  “She’s fine,” Nick said, turning around. He had said it in almost a roar, and his hands were clenched into fists. Ms. Ford looked at him with an expression Nick had sometimes seen on white people’s faces when his Dad walked by. That weird combination of confusion and fear, and an unspoken What is this person doing here? And now Ms. Ford was looking at him the same way. He turned away from her and got into the car, slamming the door.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  In the nightmare he’s been having, the incident plays out like it did in real life, except that when the wind comes along and lifts his mother’s robe up, the laughing doesn’t stop. His classmates and teachers laugh and point, and his mother laughs, too, and suddenly her hair is askew, and her lipstick is messy, and her eyes are heavy with mascara, and she looks like a clown or a crazy old woman from a cop show, laughing and lifting up the bottom of her bathrobe and dancing as though everything were wonderful, and Nick begs her to stop, but she doesn’t.

  In tonight’s dream, though, when Mom goes to lift up her bathrobe, she tears it off and throws it into the wind, and along with the bathrobe, her skin and hair come off, too, and underneath is Reunne, gleaming in leather armor, her spear in one hand. She smiles at Nick, then looks behind him. Nick turns, and his classmates and teachers are mechanical spiders with glowing tentacles, and he reaches into his quiver for an arrow and takes aim.

  • • •

  “Nick!” Nick wakes up to Dad calling his name and knocking on his bedroom door. “I made pancakes!” Dad sounds really excited. “And they’re only a little burned!”

  Nick sits up in bed, his eyes crusty from sleep. The smell of burned pancakes—like an oven on the self-cleaning setting—wafts through the door Dad left open. Nick rubs his eyes and hops out of bed. He looks over at the game console. He’d been hoping to play again this morning. He was so close to Wellhall, but he had played till 2 a.m., and
he wanted to be awake when he finally saw Wellhall, so he could appreciate it. So he’d saved and shut down, hoping again that Reunne wouldn’t mind. He’d had to wait for her before going into the colony, after all, so it seemed fair.

  He pulls on some clothes and heads downstairs. The smell gets stronger as he walks, but the burned part fades. Instead, it’s the full, sweet smell of pancakes.

  “Hey,” Dad says as Nick comes into the kitchen. Dad’s at the stove, and Nick swears he can see a shadow in the shape of his mother just behind him. “Go get that survey from your class that you want to give your mom. Let’s see what I can help you with.”

  “It’s too early for homework,” Nick says.

  “It’s eleven o’clock, and it’s not work for you. Just asking questions. I’m the one who has to answer them. Go get it.” Dad flips a pancake into the air. It lands on the counter and he quickly scoops it up and puts it back on the stove. “Five-second rule,” he says to himself. Nick sighs and goes back upstairs. The questionnaire is wrinkled and in his backpack, but he digs it and a pen out and brings them downstairs. Dad has put the pancakes in a large pile on one plate in the center of the table.

  “Help yourself,” Dad says, handing him a plate. Nick sits and takes one of the pancakes, inspecting both sides of it for burned bits or hair. It seems clean, though, so he starts eating. It’s a little tougher than it should be, but it tastes good.

  “Not bad, Dad,” Nick says, nodding. Dad smiles, then sits down and takes one and cuts into it before reaching over Nick’s hands and grabbing the questionnaire.

  “We should talk about yesterday,” Dad says.

  “What about it?” Nick asks.

  “You…” Dad pauses, pours some syrup on his pancake. “The way you talked to your mother. I think you were being a little emotional.”

  “I just wanted to know if she was playing the game. And I thought it was weird she didn’t remember. Do they have her on some new medication or something?” Nick has seen TV shows where hospitals keep their patients docile and stupid through their medication.