All the King's Men

by Alex Powell

  And now he was going to show it to Seven.

  “The truth is, I think that most of the clue isn’t really telling me where in my mind I can find the memory. That part is obvious. I think it’s trying to warn me that I must not let what happened to me affect the bonds I build in the future. I think in many cases, it’s too late.”

  “Burning bridges.”

  “Yes. But that can change. I just…” He breathed deeply and exhaled, feeling the urge to say that he’d made a mistake and they didn’t have to look at the memory. He fought it down. “I need to let it go.”

  He took Seven’s hand in his, and the agent reassuringly squeezed it. Before he could lose his nerve entirely, Fox took them to the memory in question.

  They were at a little cottage house, with sun streaming through the open windows. A summer breeze was blowing the cheery curtains, making them billow. A small child was sitting at a cluttered kitchen table watching them, his lunch half eaten and forgotten on his plate.

  A tall, lean figure strode into the kitchen, a worn knapsack hanging off one shoulder. The child didn’t seem to notice anything odd about this, and didn’t pay the man any attention.

  “I’m going to the pub,” the man finally said to catch the boy’s eye. “You tell your mum, alright?”

  “Okay, Da,” the child said, still staring out the window. “Can I go look at the sheep?”

  “You wait for your mum to say it’s okay. Is she in the back garden? You go ask her.”

  The boy got up and headed for the door. The man intently gazed around the small kitchen with its lived-in feel, not as if he had forgotten something he was looking for, but as if he didn’t want to forget anything in it. “Bye,” he called after the child.

  “Bye!” The child waved, then went into the back garden, as instructed.

  Fox’s gut clenched at the memory, feeling a hollow pang in the middle of his chest as he watched his father’s retreating back. After all this time, he couldn’t understand why his father had left.

  “That’s the last time we ever saw him, my mum and me,” Fox said, shaking his head. “He never came back, he never called us, or let us know that wherever he’d gone, he’d arrived safely.”

  In the middle of the kitchen, a blossom of light opened, swirling around and glowing.

  “Is that…?” Seven reached out, but didn’t touch the memory.

  “It’s one of King’s memory deposits. We haven’t really determined how to give them back yet, but I’m sure we’ll work it out. I wonder, if I show it to King, maybe he’ll know what to do, in that way we have of just knowing.”

  “Show me the rest,” Seven whispered, squeezing his hand.

  Fox froze, a wobbly feeling rising in his stomach. “The rest?”

  “The rest of the memories. I know that couldn’t be the last of the memories about your father. If the pain he inflicted on you is strong enough to fuel your desert sun after all these years, there must be more.” Seven rubbed small circles into the back of Fox’s hand with his thumb. “I think King would want you to look at them.”

  Fox almost didn’t take his advice, but then plunged in, going through the memories faster, too fast to hear the words spoken, but to get a feel for what was going on.

  He saw a young boy half-asleep at the kitchen table while a young woman stood by the window, looking out. The sun had long since set. The wall clock read five to midnight, and when it struck the hour, the woman gathered the boy and took him into the bedroom. Fox remembered being tucked into bed, his mother’s hand in his hair, and just the trace of the scent of her lilac perfume.

  Then the scene shifted to his young mother and Fox again, this time at a police station. A young constable interviewed his mum, but the description of his father was too vague, and the constable had said that his father could be almost anyone.

  They’d looked everywhere, put up signs and asked neighbours and friends if they’d seen him. There hadn’t even been a peep. He’d disappeared thoroughly. Fox had decided later that his father must have planned it well in advance, to disappear without the whiff of a trail.

  One day, Fox had come home to find his mother chatting to somebody he’d never seen, a man about his mother’s age. His mum had explained that he was new to the area and they had to be nice to him. But he had always been around after that, popping in unexpectedly without messaging ahead.

  “She remarried,” Fox said to Seven, looking at his feet. “I never did like him, and he never tried to make an effort to be friendly with me. Only interested in my mum, and she didn’t notice.”

  Fox took them back to the little inn and sat heavily at a table. “There, you’ve seen it all. Look, if you walk down this road and take a left and cross the first bridge you come to, that’s where me and my mum live, in a little row of houses.”

  Seven didn’t sit, but instead stood behind Fox and rested both hands on his shoulders, not saying anything, just offering silent support.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter, what the inside of my head looks like at any given time,” Fox said morosely. “It might as well be a desert.”

  “Your village is lovely,” Seven noted. “It’s not like the desert at all.”

  “Maybe,” Fox said, feeling as if the tiny Devon breeze might shatter him. “For what it’s worth, I wish I could take you to Paris. The real one.”

  Two solid arms wound around his shoulders from behind and Fox sighed, leaning his head on the warm shoulder next to his ear. Looking at these memories had left him raw and vulnerable, and he didn’t like the feeling. He liked the prospect for the next memory even less—the last one belonged to Karl, the traitor.

  * * * *

  Seven left Fox safely locked up in his domain. He didn’t think that the heat of the desert in Fox’s head would be any less effective for knowing where it came from. Maybe it would even be worse.

  Thankfully, he got his goggles to reappear before leaving. He needed the government to think he was still on their side, for them to believe that his training had never wavered. If they could find a spy in Karl, it was only fair that Fox and his side had one, too. At least he wasn’t a traitor for anything as temporal as money.

  He didn’t have access to everything, such as the link-ins where all their bodies were kept. But what he could do was give Fox’s friends access to information they badly needed. He had to find them first, and since Fox was a prisoner, it fell to Seven to locate them.

  Karl didn’t need to know the reason he wanted their location.

  He requested to know the last sighted location of the revolutionaries, and it wasn’t long before he was allowed into the presence of the Cat and the Reaper. He was nervous that they would notice something different about him, but he didn’t think they even knew which agent he was.

  “Go and ask the traitor yourself,” the Cat waved his arm. “We’re busy.”

  “Yes, go and ask him yourself. He was only too happy to give them up time and time again, so I’m sure he knows exactly where they are right now.”

  The one Fox called Karl was settled deep in the Government domain, doing some sort of work that Seven didn’t understand and didn’t really want to understand. Seven hadn’t met this Karl person very often, and usually it had been when there was a fight of some kind. Seven was always distracted during fights. The grey mist that made up Karl’s form moved sluggishly, and Seven sensed an air of fatigue about him.

  So Karl was new to staying day and night in the Cerebrum and his body hadn’t adjusted yet to the rigours of constantly being somewhere in between awake and asleep.

  “I’ve been told by the Cat and the Reaper that you know the last location of the rest of the rebel group, and I am requesting the coordinates,” he said, voice flat.

  Karl the traitor didn’t even look up from his work, simply scribbled something in nearly incomprehensible writing and handed the note to him.

  That was easier than he’d expected.

  The rebels were locked up in a Private domain in a p
lace that had vast amounts of information on different varieties of wool. Seven took a deep breath and went to knock, pausing before his fist could make contact with the door. This was madness.

  Freedom, he thought. I’m doing this for our freedom.

  He knocked.

  “Password?” demanded an angry, tense-sounding voice.

  “I have Fox,” he said.

  It wasn’t the password, so he expected that maybe he’d have to explain his purpose through the door before they would talk to him. He wasn’t expecting the door to slam open and for a blurred form to come hurtling out and go straight at his face.

  The militant one, he’d forgotten. He dodged the first attack and backflipped out of the way as she pivoted on her heel and came back to attack again. She was fast, and her movements were vicious.

  “I’m not going to fight you,” he informed her.

  “You’re the one who shot me,” she snarled and lunged at him.

  “You know which one I am?” he asked, tilting his head in confusion. “I thought that King was the only one who knew how to tell us apart.”

  “Don’t try and bait me, you evil little worm! I know that trick!”

  “I don’t even need to bait you. You’re doing quite all right for levels of rage all by yourself. I’m not here to fight you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Joanne, is there only one of them?” a voice called, and a glance revealed another of Fox’s companions sticking his head out of the domain.

  “I think so,” she yelled back. “He says he has Fox. I don’t see how he possibly could, but if we can catch him, he’ll tell us what we want to know.”

  “You don’t need to catch me. I’m already here to tell you what you want to know.”

  “Still don’t believe you,” Joanne said and tried to kick him.

  He didn’t move this time, and her blow caught him full in the face. Seven didn’t even flinch, let alone get thrown backwards by its force. He knew it wasn’t real and that the illusion of being injured was powerful enough that it could become real, but only if he let it.

  To Joanne, it would be akin to kicking a concrete wall.

  Her mind, however, seemed just as strong. So that left her hanging in midair with her foot impacting his forehead, and him simply standing there waiting for her to stop attacking him. She circled him warily.

  “How can we believe you’re not here to try and capture one of us?” Joanne demanded, and the other two appeared behind her to back her up.

  “I can’t, really,” he admitted. “Besides show it to you. There are things in my head you could hardly imagine. They’re both in here, Fox and King.”

  “How can they be in your head?” a robed woman asked. “They would have to be kept in a Private domain, and here you are, roaming around in Public.”

  “I can split my mind,” Seven said. “I can leave half my head in the Private domain and still enter the Public domain. I’m skilled at it. No one else I know can do it.”

  “What if we capture you?” a man with a little cape asked, hand moving to the hilt of his short sword.

  Seven shrugged. “You can do that if you like, but their bodies are still in the custody of the government. They also have tracking devices on their Cerebrum avatars. They will shortly be tracked down and recaptured if you simply let them go.”

  “Why are you here then?” Joanne asked, voice full of steel behind gritted teeth.

  “I’m here because you need the information, and Fox can’t come out of my domain. If he did, we’d soon have government agents trying to track him down. However, there’s no saying that you can’t come in.”

  “This is a rather weak plan to capture us,” the caped one said, lifting his chin.

  “The government does not make weak plans,” Seven replied, shaking his head. “How do you think they managed to find you and capture three of your number already?”

  “Three?” asked the robed one, who gasped.

  “Karl!” exclaimed Joanne.

  “We have to look for him,” the caped one cried.

  “No, no you don’t,” Seven said. “It won’t do you any good to look for Karl anymore.”

  “So you don’t have Karl, but you have the other two?” Joanne asked, brow furrowing. “That makes no sense. Did they do something to Karl?”

  “I don’t think you should worry about Karl,” Seven said patiently. He was doing this for Fox, to try and free them both. It would do no good to tell them of Karl’s treachery. He would allow Fox to do that. “You should worry about yourselves. The walls are closing in on you and you don’t even see them.”

  “How do we know this isn’t some kind of trick?” the robed woman asked. “You’re a government agent yourself. You could be lying.”

  “We don’t lie well. It wasn’t something we were taught to do, especially to our superiors. And you wouldn’t know the significance of me being able to do this.” He took off his goggles. “Fox believes me.”

  “Fox is an idiot,” Joanne said, and the others nodded.

  “Still,” the robed one said, “he does have a good instinct for these things.”

  “Fine!” Joanne said. “I’m going in to find Fox, and if it’s a trap, then I’ll kick your ass—” she pointed at Seven’s face “—and if it’s not a trap, I still might anyway. Don’t think this means we trust you.”

  Seven shrugged and closed his eyes, staying very still. Joanne’s soft fringe swept across his forehead before contact was made, then they were in his domain.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “My sitting room.”.

  “And what is that.” She pointed at Fox’s domain in the form of a glittering blue crystal, sitting right in his sitting room as if it belonged there. “Because it looks like…”

  “A domain.”

  He knocked on the domain’s door, and a voice yelled back, “Password?”

  “You never gave me a password,” Seven replied.

  “Oh, well, come in anyway,” Fox replied, and the door swung open.

  “Fox?” Joanne said, voice incredulous. “What are you doing in here? How can this be happening at all? Everyone knows a Private domain can’t be set up within another domain.”

  “Joanne? What are you doing here?”

  They entered and found themselves in Devon again. Fox scrambled off one of the benches to enthusiastically embrace Joanne. Seven turned away and spotted King, standing near the stream overlooking the swan nest and watching them paddle about.

  “Oh, Seven. You keep bringing back friends! Who’s this one, then?” King asked cheerfully.

  Joanne gasped as she saw King. “You really do have him.” She turned to Fox. “I have the first bunch of memories. I could give them to him right now.”

  “The government is still in possession of his body,” Seven reminded them before they could get too excited. “Ours, too. Of course, the government might not realize you’ve given back the memories. They wouldn’t know unless they invaded his head again, but if they found out…”

  “Joanne.” Fox excitedly grabbed her hands and danced on the spot. “Our bodies. I know where they are. We’re all in Winnipeg.”

  Joanne stared blankly at him. “Where is that?”

  Fox leapt into an explanation about cold and snow, so Seven turned back to King. “She has some of your memories stored in her head. You put them there. Would you be able to get them out again?”

  King looked at Joanne more closely, then smiled. “Yes, it’s easy. All you have to do is touch it, and it will transfer quite easily. Should I?”

  “Not quite yet,” Seven said. “Soon, though, hopefully.”

  “I’d like my memories back,” King said wistfully. “If mine are like the ones I see in everyone else’s heads, then they must be wonderful.”

  “Some of them aren’t as wonderful, but I suppose it could be,” Seven said, looking around the little village that Fox called home.

  “How can you trust him?” Jo
anne broke in, pointing at Seven. “He’s an agent of the enemy.”

  “Joanne, did you know that all of them are prisoners, just like me and King? Their bodies are kept away from them, and they live in the Cerebrum without a way to log out. If that was how you lived your life, wouldn’t you also want to escape?”

  “I have no memories like this one.” Seven waved an arm to indicate Fox’s home. “I’d like to, though. I think it would be nice.”

  “I still don’t trust him,” Joanne said. “How do you know he won’t turn you in?”

  “Because he came and found you, and I didn’t even ask him to. He knew I needed to tell you this information, and that without his help, I wouldn’t be able to.”

  “An eye for an eye,” Seven agreed.

  “What do you mean by that?” Joanne asked.

  “Joanne…” Fox briefly bowed his head before he looked at her face again. “Karl is the traitor. I know, because he came and saw us, to try and bribe me into giving up my memories. I refused him, but he could come to any of you and try to ferret out more information.”

  “He’s seen our real faces!” Joanne gasped, grabbing Fox’s forearms. “He could find us!”

  “He didn’t see mine, but then, he’s already got me. I got the clue from my head, and now Karl is the last one. Joanne, I think King knew that Karl was going to turn him in.”

  “How do you know? What’s the last clue?” Joanne’s fists clenched in frustration.

  “Just one line,” Fox said. “My kingdom for a patent.”

  “If he knew, why did he let Karl get away with it?” Joanne asked. “It doesn’t make sense!”

  “It set off a chain of events,” Seven said, and they all looked at him. “You’ve just uncovered the story of a lifetime, haven’t you?”

  “That’s…true…” Fox looked at him in surprise. “But what if it hadn’t worked?”

  “But what if it had?” Seven asked with a smile.

  “It still might not,” Joanne said, shaking her head. “But now that we know, we’ll do everything we can think of to get you and King out.”

  “We have to go back,” Seven said. “I’ll be missed soon.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be out hunting us down?” Joanne asked, narrowing her eyes.