by Nadia Afifi
The scars on her palms shone in the dull tavern light. She curled her hands into her sweatshirt and sank back into her seat. The warmth of the crowd did not overcome the cold, which permeated the brick walls. Over Hadrian’s shoulder, the man strummed his guitar with closed eyes, oblivious to the indifferent crowd.
“Am I boring you, love?” Hadrian’s voice cut through the din.
“If you’re an ally, you should know that I don’t respond well to threats,” she said.
“Which is why you’re here and not sitting with a silver veil and fifty kids in the desert,” Hadrian said. “You know what, love? We need what my bosses at NASH call a team-building exercise. We are mates, whether you know it or not yet. So as a gesture of goodwill, ask me some questions and I’ll answer them.”
After a minute of sullen silence, during which Hadrian finished his beer, she relented. Her first question, though not the most important, nagged her above all others.
“Where are you from? I can’t place your accent, but some of the things you say, the way you say them, remind me of compound speak.”
He laughed and gestured toward the bar for another beer.
“You’ve made sure to load that question plenty,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “The short answer is, I’m from Birmingham. Born there, anyway. I’ve done my share of travel, so I’m a Brummie by way of many places.”
“Did you live on a compound?”
“Not me, no.”
The phrasing of his answer intrigued Amira but she decided not to pursue it, shifting to the most important question.
“Did Rozene tell you why she left the Trinity Compound?”
“Everyone leaves the compounds for some variation of the same reason,” Hadrian replied with unexpected gravity. “Except for the boys who get thrown out, of course, so the older men can have all the young girls to themselves. I’ve got some of those in my ship. They take their time to adjust. Anyway, the problem for little Rozene was also one of those older menfolk. An Elder wanted to marry her and she didn’t want to marry him – and so here she is.”
They sat in silence. Amira’s breaking point in the compound was not that different from Rozene’s. Arranged marriages were standard at the Children of the New Covenant, with polygamy reserved for Elders. Children were the imperative. Part of being able to ascend into the next world was to add new souls to this one. Though Amira attempted to escape before, the night she succeeded was the day before she turned sixteen, the day of her Inspection. Though her mother never gave her details of what the Inspection entailed, she put the pieces together. She would be examined by the compound’s doctor for overall health, fertility and most importantly, purity. There was no good outcome. Passing Inspection meant that she would be declared ready for a husband, while failing on the grounds of infertility or suspected impropriety meant ‘disappearing’ from compound life, never to be spoken of again. Amira knew she had to leave that night, whatever the consequences.
Hadrian drained his beer.
“What do you know about the Trinity Compound?” he asked.
Amira paused.
“I know about it,” she said slowly. “Elder Cartwright founded it, after inventing Chimyra. I met people from the Trinity a long time ago, when the compounds tried to unify. I know it’s big, much bigger than where I lived, at least. Our parents used to threaten us – me and the other girls. They’d say if we didn’t shape up, they’d send us to the Trinity, where they knew how to deal with girls like us. ‘Learn your prayers, or you’ll get your lessons at the Trinity. You think you have it bad here, you could be at the Trinity.’ There were stories, but it’s hard to say what’s true and what isn’t.”
“They’re not just stories, love,” Hadrian said. “It’s not a good place to be a woman or a girl. Anyone, really. But that’s not what NASH cares about. They’re on the radar for something else.”
“NASH?” Amira asked, surprised. “Investigating the Trinity? Is that why you met me that night, wanting to know about Pandora?”
Hadrian nodded.
“So when you said that even you don’t tangle with the Trinity—” Amira said.
“A white lie for the kids’ sake,” Hadrian said. “As captain of their ship, I take kids from all compounds and keep my head low. But as a NASH man….”
Hadrian leaned forward, the deep etches under his eyes dark in the bar room light.
“I’m going to show you something,” he said. “If you’re going down the rabbit hole, you need to see what could bite you at the end of the tunnel.”
* * *
At nearly one o’clock in the morning, Hadrian ushered Amira inside the deserted police station. His makeshift cubicle was cluttered with paper folders and books, resembling the ransacked remnants of a widower’s attic more than a working station. It was a longstanding custom for Westport police to cooperate fully with their counterparts in space, due to the limited jurisdiction they both possessed over Aldwych. They habitually shared resources, intelligence and even office space with one another, something Hadrian had taken full advantage of.
Amira’s head throbbed under the harsh fluorescent lighting, her irritation amplified by the dying ring of the single bulb above Hadrian’s cubicle. She grabbed a cup of coffee from the nearby vending machine, which also offered gray-tinged curry bowls and some decidedly questionable sushi, the synthetic salmon turning mossy green, while Hadrian rummaged furiously through his desk.
“Here!” he called out, waving a glass disc.
As Amira settled in his chair, his face turned grim.
“What I’m about to show you – well, play for you – is classified,” he said. “This hasn’t gone out on the Stream yet, so the public knows fuck all except that Victor Zhang hasn’t been seen—”
“Victor Zhang?” she asked, bewildered. “The head of the Volta station?” Amira recalled the news report on the train back from Placement Day, how Victor Zhang hadn’t been seen in weeks.
He slid the disc into the side of the computer screen. It was a holographic computer, albeit a very antiquated one, but the disc did not have any image to display. Hadrian’s own voice came in first, his tone perfunctory.
Recording delivered to NASH Investigative Headquarters at 17:00 hours, March 14, 2227.
The slightest of pauses was followed by another speaker, also a man, but with an unnaturally low voice that had clearly been distorted to prevent identification. He spoke in the slow, heavily enunciated speech of the compounds.
We have the criminal scientist Zhang in our custody to answer for the crimes he has committed against the cosmic order in the name of his vanity. He has nothing to say to you now, but we will allow him to repent once his trial is over.
Amira shrunk back into her seat as her heart pounded violently, not in response to the words being spoken by that disembodied voice, but to the horrible screaming that was audible in the background. Terrible shrieks that rose in volume until they devolved into a howl of unmistakable agony.
We call on the other colleagues of Zhang to end their pursuit of the abomination of human cloning, which is the most grievous affront to the laws of the universe, bound by the Conscious Plane. Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish, if you continue in your plans to mock the natural order, you will answer for it not only in the eternal embers of the Neverhaven, but in this one.
The screaming faded into silence and after a pause, a third voice, thin and tired, began to speak. From the monotonous clip of his tone and the occasional break in his speech, he seemed to be reading aloud from a written statement.
My name is Victor Zhang, the Chief Researcher of the Volta station and a member of the Aldwych Council. I am speaking to renounce my participation in the Pandora cloning project and implore Doctors Singh and Parrish to follow my example, before it is too late for them, as it now is for me. I understand that I am beyond repentance. The soul is a siev
e, and my sins have gathered and followed me to my ultimate corruption, which led me to believe that I could play God. I hope for atonement with my death and with my renunciation of my role in the terrible crimes of Aldwych.
Another pause followed. Amira felt a dizzying wave of adrenaline as her vision narrowed into a single tunnel, until her surroundings became something terrible and distant. Then it came – the unmistakable sound of a single gunshot. The recording ended.
They sat in silence, but Hadrian watched her with interest. She had audibly gasped when Victor Zhang had uttered that familiar, bizarre phrase.
“The soul is a sieve,” Amira said at last. “I heard that same thing while reading Rozene’s dreams, one about the Trinity Compound. It’s a strange phrase. I heard nothing like that in the New Covenant.”
Hadrian looked tired. He sighed and observed her carefully.
“Well then, love, that goes along with our suspicions that the Trinity was behind this,” he said. “They’re the biggest of the compounds, and the only one we reckon has real reach beyond the southwest. They managed to capture Victor Zhang here in Westport, we suspect. It was all kept quiet, of course, but now that NASH has this tape, it won’t stay quiet forever. I knew him. He was a good man.” His voice tightened at that last sentence, and he cleared his throat.
“They’re all shook up at NASH,” he said. “But the higher ups think this is a one-off thing, a group of fringe fanatics who got lucky. I don’t think so. They’ve got weapons, from what my kids tell me, and they have the will – plenty of it. You heard it – a clear threat to your doctor friends at Pandora.
“So now you know what I’m after, Amira Valdez. I don’t have any backing from NASH on this, and Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish haven’t been cooperating with me either.”
“They know about Victor Zhang?” Amira asked, horrified.
“Of course, we had to tell them that their colleague is dead and they were both threatened by his killers. They weren’t happy, mind, but it didn’t change anything fundamental. The show must go on. And neither thinks they’re at risk. Like the people above me, they don’t think a group of nutters from a compound can reach them.”
“But they reached Victor Zhang!” Amira said.
“They did. But you have to understand something about these people, love. They’re powerful folk, living legends, and they’ve been hearing that about themselves for a long time. They’ve started to believe in their invincibility, that a simple group of religious fundies can’t touch them. And here’s my second point: they underestimate the compounds and the folk that live there, see them as nothing more than backward simpletons beneath scrutiny. Everyone always has. I’m sure you’ve even experienced that, to a point.”
Hadrian smiled slightly at her and yawned deeply before grabbing a vial from his drawer. He swallowed a pill and closed his eyes.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” Amira said. The events of the last few hours were finally catching up with her, and she wanted nothing more than to retreat to the Canary House and fall into dreamless sleep. “Everyone seems to think that because of where I came from, I’m different, and that I have some kind of special insight. But I don’t. I’m just a student trying to live my life. I don’t want to get pulled into this.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Hadrian said bluntly. “The Trinity wants to stop the Pandora folk from cloning our Rozene, and you’re part of Pandora now, whether you like it or not. If someone on the inside is working with them, they know who you are and you’re not safe anymore.”
A knot formed in Amira’s stomach. D’Arcy had been assigned to the Pandora initiative. Though she wasn’t involved in its cloning project, did the Trinity care? Was she, too, compromised?
“But even if you could walk away, you won’t,” Hadrian continued. “You’re like me, love – you need to find the truth in things. It’s what separates us from the compounds, where they want every mystery in the universe answered for them, because they fear not knowing the what or the why. Whatever is happening, we need to stop it together, Amira.”
* * *
That night, she dreamed of the compound, and the time she fell from the roof of her family home. She had snuck out through her bedroom window, where she had been confined as punishment for listening to music on the Stream (“City filth, straight from the Devil’s mouth,” her mother had screamed before slamming the door). Earlier that day, she had asked her teachers for proof that only child-bearers entered the Nearhaven, pointing out that Elder Cartwright’s second wife never had children, which earned her an immediate lashing and subsequent suspension.
Crawling along the ledge of her home’s second floor, she grabbed the rusted stepladder that led to the roof. In her dream state, she glided more than climbed, her body floating effortlessly as her hands flew from rail to rail. The white rooftop glowed under the moonlight, the color of bone, its smooth surface cool against her feet.
In the desert, the night sky was more vivid and expansive than any painting. Though she understood very little then about the universe and its countless galaxies, staring into the night sky made her feel alive and small at the same time. Every night she made it to the roof, she cupped her hands in imitation of a telescope and peered through its fleshy lens into the cosmos. Though her parents told her that the stars showed the gates to parallel worlds, she only cared about what she could see. Potential new homes and new life in this reality. New places to discover, new riddles to solve.
She paced the length of the roof, the moon hovering close to the distant mountains, when she stumbled too close to the ledge and her foot found air. Amira fell slowly in her dream, the stars and trees spinning past her on the way to the ground. Sneaking out of the house at night was a dangerous precedent in the compound, especially for a young girl. As a result, when Amira’s mother ran out to the sound of her cries and found her curled in a ball in the grass, she marched Amira straight into the house, forcing her to limp through a broken ankle, pulled her into the kitchen, and pressed her hands directly on the still-hot stove where they had cooked tamales for dinner.
Amira jolted awake, clutching her hands where they hissed against the metal grooves years ago. The dream felt real, as real as the sweat running down her forehead. The compound, try as she may to wipe it from her mind, continued to exist hundreds of miles away, where some other young girl might be screaming in her kitchen at this very moment.
Perhaps there is no escape from the compound – only levels of separation.
But I have separated, Amira thought. I’m not Rozene, or those children running around Hadrian’s ship. I know my home, and it’s here.
With that reassuring thought, she drifted back into sleep, gently tracing the palms of her hands.
Chapter Six
Contraband and Cosmics
When Amira arrived on the 235th floor the next morning, the elevator doors parted to reveal a ward in crisis.
The doors to the ward flew open, followed by a flurry of movement. Staff in white scrubs swept a large bed down the hallway, ornamented with swinging tubes and drips, shouting instructions to each other. Stunned, Amira barely stepped aside in time as they advanced on the elevator. The bed passed by, revealing Rozene’s small, colorless face in the middle of the chaos, her eyes rolled back, her veiny neck arched like a rigid cat.
Naomi greeted Amira in a flood of tears. Through fits of sobbing, she explained that Rozene awoke with chest pains and heart palpitations in the early hours of the morning. The emergency team arrived as she fainted. Amira sat in a daze, numbly feeding Naomi a steady stream of tissues. Through Amira’s shock, the first sensations of failure set in, leaving her cold and hollow.
“It’s terrible,” Naomi sobbed. “This is what happened the last time to the other two, before, you know…. I don’t know if I can go through this again!”
“Can I see her?” Amira asked. Rozene’s pale face
, the eggshell-whites of her rolled eyes, filled Amira’s mind. Was that the last time she would see the young woman, barely out of the compound, alive?
“Not at the moment, M. Valdez,” Tony Barlow interjected, causing both women to jump at his sudden presence. Barlow possessed an uncanny ability to materialize from thin air. “Dr. Singh is in the emergency room with her now, and she is the best equipped of all of us to handle things in their current state.”
“What a day.” Naomi sighed. “And Dr. Parrish had to come in today, of all days.”
Barlow nodded grimly but said nothing. Still reeling from the revelations of the last twenty-four hours, it took Amira a moment to recall that Alistair Parrish had arrived Earthside from the Carthage station this morning, ostensibly for a routine visit to the Soma. The endless publicity meant that Pandora, and the cloning project in particular, was likely to dominate, if not monopolize, his time.
They waited in silence. Naomi anxiously fidgeted behind the protective shell of her receptionist’s desk. Tony Barlow wordlessly scrolled through data on the wall’s three-dimensional screen. Amira sat on the edge of Rozene’s now-empty bed, hands in her lap. The days since she discovered Rozene’s altered memory had passed by in a blur, but time was now at a standstill. Had she been too late? Did the person who tampered with Rozene’s memory decide to take a more extreme course of action?
The ward’s doors flew open and Valerie Singh walked briskly into the room. Her brow was knitted into a frown. She motioned them with a quick gesture to follow her into her office.
Dr. Singh closed the door behind them.
“She’s out of immediate danger,” she said, and Naomi sighed audibly in relief. “M. Hull was approaching the point of premature delivery, but we were able to reverse the early labor process and stabilize her. No harm to the fetus that we could see. We ran the usual tests, with the usual results.” She turned to Barlow with a slightly arched brow and he nodded silently in response.