by Paula Stokes
Gideon’s face is ashen. “I’m sorry. Your sister is dead.”
“What?” I shriek. “No. I saw her yesterday. She can’t be. I don’t believe you.”
Gideon removes the memory card from the tablet. “I can tell by the neural sequences on this recording,” he says softly. His eyes are wet.
I’ve never seen Gideon cry.
Never.
“She can’t be dead. I would know.” I hold out my palm. “Give me that. I need to see what you’re talking about. I would feel something if she were gone, right? I would feel something.”
Gideon blots his eyes on the sleeve of his dobok. He breathes in and out slowly, his gaze locked onto mine like we are the only two people in the world. “Are you certain you want to play this? It’s the kind of thing you might not be able to unremember.”
No, I’m not certain. I am highly uncertain. In fact, I know I don’t want to play it. I just want to rewind back to yesterday when Rose was leaving the apartment, tell her not to go or go along with her.
“I have to,” I whisper. I have to because I know my sister isn’t dead. If I play this recording, I can fix things. I can point out how it’s all a mistake. A misunderstanding. Some sort of horrible lie.
“All right.” Gideon slips the memory card back into the headset and hands it to me. He turns to Jesse. “Do not leave her side. I’m going to find Sebastian so we can review the security videos. I’ll be back.” He strides from the room.
I slip the headset on and adjust the prongs to fit, painfully aware of Jesse staring at me. “I’m going to a ViSE room,” I mutter. “I can’t concentrate here.”
“I’m coming with you,” Jesse says.
“Fine.” There’s no point in trying to object. Gideon told him to watch me and Jesse is as loyal as I am. Gideon probably saved him too, pulled him out of some miserable post-military existence and gave him a chance to feel human again.
I retrace my steps down the corridor and enter one of the small, dark rooms. I slide into what looks like a dentist’s chair and recline the head until I’m comfortable. Jesse pulls the door shut behind him, plunging us into total darkness. It’s like someone lowered the lid of a coffin—complete sensory deprivation.
I hit the PLAY button on the headset.
I’m sitting in a hard-backed desk chair in what looks like a hotel room. Textured white walls. Heavy gray curtains. A crack in the plaster runs from the floor to the ceiling. A queen-size bed takes up half the room.
A shudder moves through me, independent of the ViSE. I have known many rooms like this.
“I’m here, Winter,” Jesse says. I don’t answer. Pain plays at the edges of my consciousness. I have to focus on the recorded world, not my own.
There’s a girl tucked partially beneath the navy and gold coverlet, a girl with a shiny blond wig that sits crooked on her head. She’s wearing a red dress adorned with sequins and lace.
I will it not to be Rose. Her dress had fringe. This can’t be her.
I rise from the chair and move closer to the girl.
It’s unmistakably Rose. Either I’m remembering her dress wrong or she must have changed clothes at some point.
A masked figure stands over her motionless body. He strokes her forehead with one gloved hand, pushing tendrils of her blond wig back from her face.
As I steel myself for what I might see next, I try to decipher information about the body I’m inhabiting. I’m fairly certain the recorder is a man. My face feels hot and tight like he’s wearing a mask. The glimpses I’ve caught of his clothing are unhelpful. Black pants. Black gloves. He could be anyone. My stomach churns as I balance the dual realities.
The masked figure ties a tourniquet around Rose’s right arm and probes for a vein. Producing a small vial from his pocket, he draws clear fluid into a syringe. With his thumb and forefinger, he flicks the body of the syringe to get rid of the bubbles. He slips the vial back into his pocket as I walk toward him. He jerks his head from Rose to me. I reach my hand up toward the back of my skull and suddenly a weak electric current moves through me. Everything goes black.
My eyes flick open. I bite my lip, trying to figure out what it all means, why anyone would inject my sister with drugs against her will. But then the ViSE buzzes back to life. I quickly shut my eyes again.
I’m submerged inside a kaleidoscope of colors. Two black forms move slowly around the periphery, like a pair of storm clouds interrupting an otherwise brilliant autumn day. I am bliss. I am flying. My whole body tingles. I am pure matter, splitting into individual atoms. I am atoms becoming protons and electrons. I am everywhere and nowhere.
It takes a second to understand what happened. The recorder has transferred the headset to my sister and the drugs coursing through my veins are causing euphoria. I’m inside of Rose now.
“What’s happening?” I ask, my voice catching on the second word. I try to lift my head, my hands. I can’t move. And then I feel myself floating up and away from my body.
Jesse rests a warm hand on my shoulder. I resist the urge to open my eyes, to cling to him. This isn’t real.
But it feels real.
My vision sharpens, but now I’m looking down on the scene. The storm clouds become people. One large, one smaller. Both wearing masks. The smaller one holds something sharp and shiny in his hand. He bends low. A rush of warmth pulses up my arm. The kaleidoscope blurs into a rainbow and the smell of something sweet tickles my nose. A clove cigarette.
It could be part of the ViSE, or it could be … I open one eye. Yes, Gideon has slipped into the room. The end of his cigarette glows bright orange. He’s holding a glass of water in one hand. Frowning, I try to concentrate.
The figure releases the tourniquet with a sharp snap and takes my hand. I can barely make out the cross-shaped scar carved into my palm. I try to speak but can’t. A soft sigh escapes my lips.
“What do you want me to do with her?” the larger man asks.
It’s definitely a man’s voice, but it’s low and stretched out. I don’t know if it’s how the guy sounds or if it’s the drugs coursing through Rose’s veins that are distorting things. My insides twist themselves into knots as I try to untangle what’s real from what only feels real.
The smaller man doesn’t answer. He turns his head toward the back wall and his partner nods. “The river. Perfect. If anyone finds her body, they’ll just think she’s a junkie who fell in.”
The smaller man leans over me. He reaches out and touches my face with one hand as he peers into my eyes. Colors fade to gray. Suddenly the room goes black and then light. Bright white. Rushing, electric white. I gasp as I feel the cells in my body begin to hum. I am becoming part of the whiteness. The end of the tunnel reaches out for me and I plunge into its dark and icy embrace.
Jesse shakes me hard and I open my eyes, the outline of his broad shoulders slowly filtering into view. “Are you all right? You were thrashing around.”
I don’t answer. I keep feeling that tunnel, the rush of light and then darkness.
Panic crushes down on my chest. Rose can’t be dead—she can’t. I don’t even know who I would be without her. Half a person. Empty. I breathe in slowly through my nose like Dr. Abrams taught me to do when I get anxious. I count to four, hold my breath, exhale for four, repeat. Then I yank my cell phone out of my pocket and call my sister. It goes straight to voice mail, like her battery is dead.
Or like her phone is at the bottom of the river.
Jesse stands at my side, his hazel eyes glinting in the dim light. I can tell he wants to know what it is, what I saw, but he’s not going to ask me to describe my sister’s murder.
“It’s my fault,” I say finally. My voice splits apart on the last word. I rip the headset from my skull and fling it across the room. “Someone killed her, and it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Gideon says.
I rotate my body and drop my feet to the floor, but as I go to stand, my legs give out. I crumple, my knees hi
tting the soft, noise-dampening tiles of the ViSE room floor. I suck in a sharp breath, but nothing makes it to my lungs. There’s no air here. Or maybe I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
“Get her,” Gideon orders.
Jesse lifts me back to my feet just before I lose consciousness. He drapes me back onto the reclining chair. His hands feel soft, too soft; they don’t even feel real.
Nothing feels real.
“This is a dream,” I say. “This is a dream. This is a dream. Thisisadream.” Maybe if I keep saying it, I can make it come true.
“I wish it were,” Gideon says.
“It is—look.” I reach across my body and pinch myself. The pain forces my eyes open. I’m in a ViSE room, with Jesse and Gideon. They’re just vague blurry forms, their outlines illuminated by the cherry on Gideon’s cigarette. I try again, biting down on the web of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. Wake up, Winter!
Gideon gently removes my hand from my mouth and wraps my fingers around the glass of water. He produces a pill bottle from his pocket and shakes out a small white circle.
I take the sedative from his fingers and wash it down with a couple gulps of water. I press the glass back into his hands. I’m not certain I have the strength to hold it.
“Should we call someone?” Jesse asks.
“Not yet,” Gideon says. “Give us a few minutes, will you?”
Jesse squeezes my shoulder gently. He turns and leaves, pausing to retrieve the headset from the floor on his way out of the room. He’s going to play it. He’s going to play it and watch my sister die.
My hands have curled themselves into fists, my fingernails cutting crescent moon gashes into my palms. I am still trying to wake up from this nightmare.
“It’s not your fault,” Gideon repeats.
I look accusingly at him. “It is my fault, and yours. I should have been with her, but you—how could you let this happen? You let her freelance and it wasn’t safe and now she’s dead.” The words spray out of my mouth like bullets.
“We don’t know if this is related to her freelancing.” Gideon lowers his head. “But you’re right. I should have taken better care of her. I should’ve protected her. I failed you both.” His voice cracks and he turns away from me. He walks to the far corner of the room. And then I hear the sobs, deep and racking.
I was expecting him to deflect responsibility, to tell me it wasn’t my fault or his, to pin the blame completely on a pair of nameless assailants, or perhaps to say my sister’s wild temperament is what killed her. This outpouring of pain and guilt surprises me.
Gideon sets the glass of water on the floor and sits next to me on the ViSE chair, his head buried in his hands. “Oh, Ha Neul. I keep thinking about what I could’ve done differently.”
He hasn’t called me by my real name in years, but we live artificial lives and spend our days creating artificial scenarios. I understand why he needs for something in this moment to feel real.
“Oppa,” I say softly. I rest my hand on his shoulder and feel him go tense.
He turns to me, his face still damp with tears. Even in the darkness I can see a thousand emotions breaking loose, pouring forth. “I don’t want to let her go.”
“I don’t either.” I pull him toward me, loop my arms around the small of his back, press my cheek to his chin. “Could you be wrong?” I ask. “Is there any way…”
He pulls back, shakes his head. “I’ve studied the neural sequences for death in a variety of species. The science is definitive.” He blots at his face with the sleeve of his dobok again.
The ViSE recordings show neural patterns for pain and fear and so forth. It only makes sense they would show death too. Still, I’m not ready to accept it. “But Rose isn’t one of your mice. She’s my sister. Shouldn’t I know?” I ask. “Shouldn’t I feel different?”
“Everyone wants to believe that,” Gideon says. “That our connections to the people we love are like psychic ropes that cannot be severed without both parties becoming aware.”
“But it’s not true?”
“Our bonds are real in our hearts, but not in our minds, not the way we like to think.”
“I still can’t believe it,” I say. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll get through this together,” Gideon murmurs. “We need each other now, more than ever.”
We sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me—I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had “borrowed” from her class at school. And then there was L.A.—all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different.
And now they are, but it all seems meaningless if she’s really gone.
I try to imagine going home without her. Falling asleep, waking up, eating, breathing—how am I supposed to do these things without my sister?
Another wave of pain washes over me. I rest my head on Gideon’s shoulder as the tears start to fall.
He takes my right hand in both of his. “I know,” he whispers. “I know.”
We’ve never really been close like this before. In L.A. I thought of him as a stranger, someone to respect from a distance. He was my sister’s friend, not mine. And then once we came here he told me to think of him as an older brother, which I do, but physical affection isn’t something that comes naturally to either of us.
Right now I feel as if his hands are holding me together. I wonder if that’s how it was for my sister when the two of them first met.
“She knew you were different,” I say. “She told me about you. How you wouldn’t even touch her, how all you wanted to do was talk about Korea, where had she grown up, did she miss it, what memories did she have that she refused to let fade.”
“I was very homesick at that time,” Gideon says. “But it was still wrong of me to buy her attention like that. Don’t make excuses for me. I am not different. I am not better than the other men.”
“Yes you are,” I say defiantly. “Each time she met with you, she’d come back with a light inside of her. She didn’t talk about it because she didn’t want to make the others jealous, but I could see it, the hope. And then sometimes she’d tell me stories when I couldn’t sleep. I’d drift off to the sound of her voice, thinking about how the three of us would go far away and be a family someday.”
Gideon turns to face me. “She spoke of you often, her little sister with the big, big heart. So strong, yet vulnerable. She worried you would break and that she’d never be able to put you back together.”
It’s strange to hear myself described as someone with a big heart. I’ve blocked out a lot of the memories of L.A., but perhaps in some ways the girl I used to be was better than the girl I am now. Now I feel so cold, almost incapable of loving anything.
“As much as being trapped where you were pained her, it hurt her worse to see you in the same situation,” Gideon continues. “She would have died a thousand times over to free you from that hell.”
“And you would’ve died to free her.”
“Not just her. Both of you,” Gideon insists. “You are my family, Ha Neul. I made a promise to your sister that I would do everything in my power to watch out for you, to take care of you and keep you safe. That is a promise I intend to keep for the rest of my life, if you let me.”
CHAPTER 9
I have no idea how long we sit there in the dark, in the quiet nothingness where my sister still lives through our spoken stories. But when we finally return to the back room, Baz, Adebayo, and Jesse are all huddled in a circle. They fall silent when they see us.
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Adebayo begins picking up the papers scattered across the floor, stacking them neatly on the corner of the desk. “Do you wish for me to telephone the police?” he asks Gideon. “The percentage of violent crimes solved is substantially higher when the authorities are involved in the first twenty-four hours.”
Gideon leans against the doorframe, his thumb striking the silver wheel of his lighter repeatedly. He locks eyes with me and I know what he’s thinking—involving the police could be dangerous for us. I’m illegal. Rose and I came here in a fake adoption. Gideon was a legal resident, but when we changed our names, we all got forged documents. There’s no guarantee we wouldn’t be arrested or deported if we were investigated and our papers didn’t pass scrutiny.
But this is my sister, the girl he risked his life for, the girl who would have died a thousand times over to free me. I don’t know why Rose and Gideon broke up, but I do know that he still loves her. I can hear it in his voice every time he says her name. Maybe there’s some chance we’re wrong, that the ViSE is fake, but it’s so good Gideon can’t tell the difference. If so, then we need all the help we can get.
“What do you think?” I ask.
Gideon sighs. “Look at it from a cop’s point of view. The only clue we have is a ViSE, which isn’t admissible evidence. Do you really think the police will put their best people on this case?”
No one speaks. Jesse might know cops who are willing to help out with recordings, but we’ve all had bad experiences with law enforcement. In L.A., Rose once tried to tell a cop we were being trafficked. He took her statement on the street and promised to investigate. Then he made a deal with Kyung’s men—free girls in exchange for his silence. My sister got beaten. She told me it was random, that a client became violent with her, but I knew the truth. She was punished for what she did.
Still, one bad cop doesn’t mean they’re all corrupt. And we do have other clues. “But we have the note,” I say. “And evidence of a break-in.”
“But no fingerprints,” Gideon reminds me. “And publicizing the break-in will scare the building residents.” He turns to Adebayo. “I think it best to handle this discreetly for the time being. Tell the staff we’ll be closed today but opening up tomorrow. I’ve got backups of all our recordings, but I’ll need to make copies and get new playback headsets made, so we won’t be able to offer ViSEs for at least a couple of weeks. Come up with a reason. Maybe that we’re upgrading the technology or something similar. I don’t want anyone to know we’ve been compromised.”