by Nadia Afifi
“I haven’t,” she lied, trying to inject innocent curiosity into her wavering voice. Wolfe nodded with a smile.
“It’s gone dark. No one allowed in or out. NASH tried to board and someone high up got my superiors to back off. To cut a long story short, I think – I know – that it has something to do with the Pandora cloning project, and I need information.”
Amira didn’t respond. She drummed her fingers along the chipped plastic table to conceal her shaking hands. The world around her continued its predictable dance – drunken crowds laughing and clutching bottles as they migrated along the canal, oblivious to the battle of wills underway, of two parties calculating their next step.
The agent broke the silence.
“You don’t trust me. I get that. But you’re a smart girl, Amira Valdez. You must realize that you’re not surrounded by trustworthy folk at the Soma. You’ve got no reason to protect a team of labcoats running a reckless, failing experiment, and throwing you in as a political prop before the ship sinks. You’re a pawn in a game you don’t understand yet, love. A compound refugee done well, brought in to save the day – that’s a convenient trick to pull when they’re killing compound girls. You know as well as I do that laws are being broken, it’s just a question of—”
“Aldwych has its own laws,” Amira interjected, her voice shaking despite her best efforts to remain calm and clinical. “And at the end of the day, you’re a glorified space cop. You have no power within the district itself. That’s why you’re talking to me. And you have no proof that anyone’s been killed.”
The agent’s wry smile remained fixed on his face, although a distinct hardness settled in his eyes.
“Not yet,” he agreed. “But Aldwych isn’t an island, or the walled-up Vatican City it pretends to be. It’s in the middle of Westport, and if the city’s laws are being broken, the hammer will come down, along with everyone who tries to cover up what’s happening in that shiny building.”
“First you try to flatter me, then you insult me, then you threaten me,” Amira said, her voice rising. “If you’re investigating Pandora, why haven’t I seen you at the Soma or heard anything on the Stream—?”
A burst of loud cheers interrupted her speech. The small bat, wings flapping in a desperate frenzy, rose above the crowd to wild applause. It hovered off the ground for a moment, as though basking in its moment of triumph. At last, it ascended, becoming a dark smudge over the picturesque waterway. The crowd dissipated, resuming the drunken trek along the canal in search of new diversions.
“You know why,” Wolfe said as they turned back to face each other, and for the first time, his smooth demeanor cracked. He lowered his voice to a tense whisper. “Listen, love, you don’t know half of what you’re dealing with. Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish, the stories on the Stream…they don’t even scratch the surface. What’s going on right now—”
“I’ll take care of myself.” Amira rose to her feet. Indignation at this man, for interrupting her one night of respite with threats and riddles, overrode her fear. Julian and D’Arcy, back from the canal, stood hesitantly out of earshot. “I suggest you do the same.”
Before the agent could respond, she was gone, dissolving into the throng of revelers along the sidewalks of the Riverfront, into the heat and noise that ran like a tireless current through the streets.
* * *
All was quiet on the 235th floor except the sharp click of Amira’s heels pacing the length of Rozene’s ward. Amira paused in front of the expansive glass windows on the room’s northern side, gazing out at acres and acres of Westport, a dense topography of buildings, trainways and lights that stretched without pause from eastern mountains to sea. From her dizzying perch in the Soma, no building stood above her. The city lit up each night, revealing the dark, snaking trail of the river that cut into the dense lights of the Riverfront. The Canary House stood too far away to identify, but she could tell the neighborhoods by their lights and traffic – the neon glow to the east marked the infamous Satyr Road, a trail of sex shows, clubs and assorted vices cutting diagonally through the center of the city. To the west were the coastline and the harbor, where the winking lights of incoming ships and freighters marked the day’s final shift from the Pacific Parallel.
Behind her, the macabre theater of Rozene’s subconscious unfurled in the center of the room. The subject herself lay in deep sleep nearby. While the pregnant woman appeared calm in her bed, the hologram revealed a younger version of Rozene, crouched and trembling from head to bare, dirty toe.
Amira fidgeted with her coat sleeves and resumed her pacing, casting a glance at the monitor that covered the nearest wall.
Subject’s anxieties, while many, settle on a particular recurring nightmare that appears at multiple stages of sleep, she thought as strongly and clearly as she could, and the words transcribed themselves onto the screen. The dream always begins the same way – the subject sits in darkness, confined in some type of shed or other enclosure.
Rozene’s silhouette was illuminated by a narrow beam of light that peered through the wooden entrance. Head bowed, her eyes darted frequently to the door, as though she were expecting someone, or something, to come through.
The door to the enclosure then opens – Rozene recoiled under the invading light – and two figures appear and pull her out. The dream then cuts, as dreams often do, to a new place.
The scene shifted from the shed to a well-lit auditorium. Rozene sat on a flimsy chair atop an elevated stage platform, facing an excited, chattering crowd. Shoulders slumped forward, her clay-red hair hung like two curtains on either side of her face, a wispy shield against her audience. Rozene’s features in the dream were harsher, a cruel parody of her real face, but this was typical in holomentic readings of a person’s dream state. Dreamers often presented themselves as less attractive, women especially. Rozene’s self-perception was unforgiving, likely a defense mechanism in the Trinity Compound, where pride was one of woman’s many sins.
The subject sits before a large crowd during an Unveiling ceremony at the compound she used to reside in. Amira recorded her thoughts. To clarify, an Unveiling ceremony is – oh, shit!
Amira stood on her toes to delete the word ‘Hadrian’ from the transcribed text. While the cognition-capturing technology in the Soma building was more advanced than the software available to the general public, the background thoughts of distracted users still snuck in from time to time.
“Turn off Thought Reader, switch to Voice Only,” Amira barked at the monitor. Her thoughts now invisible to the computer, she silently cursed the inefficacy of modern technology.
A week had passed since her meeting with ISP Agent Hadrian Wolfe, but she frequently replayed moments of their encounter on that night along the river. Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish, the stories on the Stream…they don’t even scratch the surface. What had he meant? It was well known that Parrish had been in a tumultuous relationship with Singh for years, the subject of endless gossip among Westport’s elite. They remained colleagues after their separation, but while Valerie Singh spearheaded the groundbreaking cancer gene discovery, Parrish always retained a higher-ranking position as the head of the Carthage space station. Amira began to wonder if he was the ranking official who requested her on the Pandora project, given Dr. Singh’s clear lack of enthusiasm at her presence.
Amira exhaled and resumed her monologue, circling the hologram.
“The subject sits on the podium during the Unveiling, her wrists bound with zip ties to the arms of a chair. She does not appear to be in any immediate physical danger, but brain wave readings during the dream indicate a high level of fear and apprehension. To clarify, an Unveiling ceremony is a religious ritual that takes place on most compounds, regardless of denomination. They serve many purposes, but are usually collective events that use drugs to elicit confessions from a perceived sinner, show the punishments they will face in
a hellish parallel world known as the Neverhaven and encourage public shaming.
“Another woman walks up to the stage, approaches the subject and begins a sermon. She mostly addresses the crowd, but occasionally points back to the subject, or walks behind her and grabs her roughly by the hair. Most of what she says is unclear, no doubt because the subject cannot remember the exact phrases, but it is clear that the subject is being publicly shamed before the compound for some transgression. Some phrases do stick out in the subject’s memory enough to hear them – see previous report on dream dated March 20, 2227.”
Amira could recite the words herself after days of sitting at the sleeping woman’s bedside, watching the same dream unfold every time she turned on the holomentic machine.
As Amira circled the scene, the preaching woman’s voice rose into clarity:
“Do you truly think, brothers and sisters, that it is enough to transcend through the power of blessed Chimyra, ask for forgiveness and have your sins washed away? No! For the soul is not a slate that can be wiped clean at regular intervals, when it is convenient for us. No, the soul is a sieve, through which the tribulations and temptations of life gather and pass through us. The weaker our defenses, the more fragile our spiritual foundation in this dimension, the more we are corroded through sin, and that damage is irreparable!”
“An atrocious metaphor,” Valerie Singh had scoffed while listening to Amira’s report. “Do those compound housewives need religion explained to them in terms of kitchen utensils to get the message across?” Tony Barlow, on the other hand, had listened raptly during the briefing but said nothing.
The woman in the dream continued, turning with a dramatic flourish toward Rozene. “This Child in Faith comes to you a sinner.”
Amira paused to massage the back of her neck.
“The woman’s voice fades in and out as the dream progresses,” Amira continued in a tired voice. “The subject looks around at the crowd, down at her feet, and–– wait. Wait! Stop recording!”
The hologram obediently froze in place.
She approached the center of the hologram. Rozene sat motionless in the chair, while the frozen woman was twisted in place, pointing back theatrically at her. Rozene, however, stared directly to her right, in the direction she continuously looked at throughout the dream. No matter what was happening or being said, Rozene only focused on one point in the room.
Amira knelt in front of Rozene, whose face showed unmistakable fear and also, to Amira’s surprise, revulsion. Amira followed Rozene’s wide eyes across the room, to a single row of spectators seated separately from the sea of congregants.
“Zoom in – and stop,” she said, and the hologram focused further on three figures in the front row. From their build, they appeared to be male but Amira could not be sure, as their faces were blurred beyond recognition. The other congregants all had faces, clear and defined, but something clouded the three men’s faces, like drops of water on a finished painting.
“What is that?” a soft voice spoke behind her and Amira jolted. Rozene sat awake, shifting lethargically and staring at the frozen scene in front of her.
“Rozene! When did you wake up?”
“I feel like all I do is sleep,” Rozene said. She leaned back in her bed with her arms delicately crossed, watching Amira warily.
Heart still pounding, Amira distanced herself from the blurred figures.
“This is a holographic image taken from your brain patterns while you were dreaming,” Amira said with the warmest tone she could manage. “Does it look familiar to you at all? We also had Unveiling meetings back at–– where I grew up.”
Rozene’s eyes narrowed.
“This is from my head?”
The tone in her voice hinted at another impending outburst.
Appear calm, Amira thought. Make it seem natural that her innermost secrets are on display in the middle of the room.
“From your brain patterns, yes.”
Rozene ran a small hand over her belly self-consciously, as though the sight of her younger self brought her pregnancy into painful focus.
“I–– I remember this one,” she said slowly. “I was shamed at other Unveilings for other things, but this was the last one before I left.” She closed her eyes and shuddered, as though trying to shake off the memory.
“Rozene….”
“I’m not talking about it!” she said, color rising in her cheeks. “You can see it all for yourself anyway.”
Amira’s initial compassion for the young, damaged compound girl had quickly given way to frustration. Rozene’s memories, while layered with trauma, did not differ greatly from Amira’s own experiences on the compound. But while Amira thrived in Westport, Rozene seemed to be a woman in a state of suspense, neither moving forward nor retreating in the face of adversity. And now, perpetually sedated and, for all intents and purposes, a science experiment, she continued to refuse Amira’s help.
“Please, I only want to know one thing,” Amira said. “That group of men you were looking at, during the Unveiling – do you know who they were?”
Rozene looked at Amira as though she had grown a second head. In explanation, Amira pointed back to the still-frozen scene, at the three blurred men.
“You seemed to know who they were,” Amira continued. “And you were clearly afraid.”
“Of course I know who they were, I—” Rozene said before pausing, shaking her head in confusion. She breathed in sharply, eyes darting from the blurred men back to Amira.
“No, I don’t understand…but they were, they were…” she stammered as the monitor began beeping, displaying her heart rate in an alarming crescendo. Tears of frustration welled in the corners of her eyes.
“I don’t know anymore, I’m too tired!” she spat.
“I’m sorry,” Amira said quickly.
An idea struck her. In a subtle motion, she slid her hand to the touch screen obscured behind the monitoring equipment and switched the Thought Reader back on. As she hoped, Rozene’s thoughts began transcribing on the smaller screen. Her confusion was evident in the phrases that appeared: Names won’t come. No one to remember…after me. Thunder. Trapped in the fog.
“Don’t worry about it now,” Amira continued as Rozene wiped her eyes delicately with her fingertips. “Do you want a sedative to help you sleep?”
“No more drugs,” Rozene protested, but with less defiance. Outside the window, night had taken over Westport and the landscape pulsed with the energy of millions of lights and bodies in motion.
Amira glanced at the screen transcribing Rozene’s thoughts. Ship. Hadrian Jones…best friend…will help me.
Hadrian. The hologram came back to life on the other side of Rozene – first, flashes of a docked ship strewn with lights, followed by a face, a smirking man with piercing eyes. The same face she first encountered at the Riverfront only days before.
Amira leaned against the wall to steady herself while Rozene watched her in confusion. The NASH investigator, if he was even a real investigator, knew the subject of the Pandora project. Rozene even considered him to be a friend. She called him Jones, although he introduced himself to Amira as Wolfe, but there was no mistaking the man. How did they know each other, and what was Hadrian’s motive for approaching Amira that night?
“When did it become easy for you?” Rozene asked Amira abruptly. “To live this life away from…from home?”
“I don’t know if it ever gets easy,” Amira said. She opened her mouth to continue speaking, but the words caught in her throat and for a moment, an understanding passed between them; two young women far from a home that was never home, navigating an alien world that would never know them as they knew one another.
“Listen, I know you don’t trust me,” Amira said in a gentler tone. “But I am here to help you. I know I can fix whatever’s happening to you. We’re both survivors beca
use we had to be. We survived…the places we left, and you will survive this.”
Rozene turned away, eyes shining with tears. For a moment, she seemed ready to speak further, but instead leaned back into her pillow and closed her eyes.
Amira grabbed her transcriber, hands trembling slightly, and left the ward. The last hour yielded more progress than the entire week, but before she could begin her waking therapy sessions with Rozene, Amira had a more immediate challenge to face. She knew it the moment Rozene could not identify the three mysterious men in her dream.
Someone, somehow, had tampered with the girl’s memory.
Chapter Five
The Soul is a Sieve
The docks north of Sullivan’s Wharf were a graveyard for ships that had served their purpose, either through obsolescence or the natural, corrosive decay of industry. Freighters and ferries that once carried cargo and passengers to the Pacific Parallel and beyond reclined in rows across the docks, swaying faintly in the current or parked ashore with rotting hulls and broken windows. The remains of a large cargo ship sat aground, a series of metallic beams in the shape of a battered ribcage, blanketed in moss. Somewhere in this maze, Amira hoped, a man in a ship held clues to the mystery of Rozene’s memory.
Removed from the traffic of the city, the dockyards were dark, silent and isolated. A high barbed fence lined its perimeter, the occasional security camera acting as sentry near the main gates. Amira darted past the first camera. She pulled her gray hoodie tightly over her forehead and pushed the fence in search of its inevitable weak point. Running her thin hands along the metal wire, she found a torn opening and entered the shipyard.