by Nadia Afifi
Amira nodded.
“Dr. Mercer told me about them,” she said. “The Cosmics. Ex-compound people and those who want a lighter version of compound teachings.”
Amira observed elements of the compound in the lecture – though the spectators were sharply dressed, some even in Aldwych lab coats, they bore the blank, hungry stares of the congregants at the Passage ceremonies. Unlike at the compound, posters behind the speaker displayed quantum equations and satellite images of deep space, as well as detailed diagrams showing the fabric of matter and antimatter between the stars.
Amira gripped D’Arcy’s arm and pointed to the front row. Alistair Parrish sat near the center of the crowd, his face wet with tears.
“That’s Alistair Parrish!” D’Arcy whispered excitedly.
“It is.” Amira had never heard of Parrish’s involvement with any religion, New Age or otherwise. The geneticist, though one of the most famed scientists in all of Aldwych, and esteemed almost to the point of worship by his colleagues, was not a religious figure.
“You’d think he’d be smarter than this,” D’Arcy whispered, smirking slightly.
“Even the smartest people will look for answers anywhere they can find them,” Amira said. She felt defensive on Parrish’s behalf, but couldn’t say exactly why. “Anyway, it’s none of our business what he chooses to believe.”
The crowd burst into applause, Parrish included. The spectators rose at the speech’s conclusion and exited the park. Parrish wiped his eyes and made his way up the steps, disappearing into the crowd.
“Time to go?” D’Arcy asked, nodding in the direction of the sun, which was dipping lower toward the crystalline horizon of the ocean.
Amira cast a final glance at the crowd and gasped. Alistair Parrish had appeared again at the top of the theater steps, now joined by Tony Barlow. Though distant, their body language and gestures suggested that their exchange was not an amicable one.
“Barlow,” Amira said. “He’s on the Pandora cloning project as well. He’s the one who knew I was from the compound.”
“They don’t look friendly,” D’Arcy noted. “What does any of this mean?”
Amira shook her head. Something, perhaps. Or nothing. Every new discovery unraveled a new thread of questions.
All of this ties back to Rozene, she thought. Rozene’s mind is where the answers lie, deep in the shapeless fog of memory.
Chapter Seven
Shadows and Silhouettes
They began the same way each time – a young girl with deep-red hair in an enclosed, dark shed, her back pressed against the wall as she peered through shafts of light. Amira forced back her own memories of the shed in her past, and asked the requisite question.
“Where are we, Rozene?”
“Nowhere,” Rozene moaned loudly, and the shed on the holomentic platform vanished, replaced with static, like an old television searching for a signal. After a moment, the static became Rozene sitting in a Westport café, smiling nervously at the strangers around her. The occasional morning commuter smiled back but no one spoke to her. The ill-fitting clothes, the lack of an Eye, the learned hesitation – all revealed her to be a compound girl. A barista brought her a mug of coffee, topped with leaf-shaped foam, which Rozene tried not to disturb as she added sugar. The room was bright, the colors vivid as all of Rozene’s concentration was focused on this mundane image, a brief happy moment after her escape. The hologram changed to reveal a younger version of Rozene as a child sitting in a kitchen, jumping excitedly as a woman placed a bowl of fried cactus on the table. Despite her frustration, Amira once again felt a painful wave of sympathy for Rozene – in her desperate search for a positive memory, these were the best she could muster.
Amira sighed and stood up, placing her sensor to one side, and checked Rozene’s vitals on the nearby monitor. The dosage was correct. Rozene’s brain patterns showed the near-conscious, waking dream state that Oniria was supposed to induce. Rozene sat in a nearby chair, head slumped to one side as her arms dangled listlessly over the armrests.
“Try to relax, Rozene,” Amira said, fighting back frustration. “It’s painful, I know, but it will help you get to where your mind doesn’t want to go. Whatever happened in that shed, you need to face it. Believe me, I’ve been through similar things in the New Covenant. I know what you’re facing.”
Rozene’s head twitched and jerked at the sound of Amira’s voice, and she made a low sound in the back of her throat.
“What’s that, Rozene?” Amira leaned closer, and Rozene turned to face her.
Rozene sat up, her eyes opening widely. “Enough. I can’t go through this again.”
“Rozene—”
“You say you know what’s it’s like, but you’ll never know! I don’t want you in my head, bitch, so get out!”
Stunned, Amira turned off the holomentic machine, the image of young Rozene frozen in mid-jump, a child not caring where she landed. Rozene sobbed bitterly while Amira removed the pads from her temples, dismantling her intricate apparatus with shaking fingers after another failed day.
The long elevator descent from the 235th floor gave Amira ample time to trade her shock for frustration, even anger. How could Rozene assume she had not overcome similar demons, that her time in the compound was different? Though her early years in Westport were difficult, Amira always knew friend from foe. She never lashed out at those who helped her.
But was she truly Rozene’s friend? Perhaps Rozene saw an opportunist, rather than a fellow survivor, in Amira. From her vantage point, it was not an unreasonable conclusion. Amira wore the same lab coat as those who administered the sedatives. At the end of each day she left, to a home and friends. The life that Rozene failed to find in Westport.
As Amira passed Aldwych’s main square and its statue of a man and a woman pointing to the heavens, she glanced back at the Soma building. The lights on the highest floor were still on. Somewhere on a lower level, D’Arcy worked a night shift, testing the Stream connection on a satellite in the Asteroid Belt. Amira entered the train station, feeling more distant from Rozene than ever before. Instead of relief, it left her hollow like the base of a dead tree, its roots rotting beneath the surface.
* * *
Rozene greeted Amira with an open grimace the next day, but her glare shifted to a look of surprise as Amira settled into the ward.
“What’s that smell?” Rozene asked.
“Something new I thought we’d try today,” Amira said, and she opened a container from her bag to unleash the scent of fried cactus into the air. She endured a late night to make it. After tracking down the unusual ingredient in the Riverfront’s all-night groceries, she created a successful batch following several disasters in the Canary House’s scarcely utilized kitchen.
“I haven’t had cactus in ages,” Rozene said with unmistakable longing. Amira began setting up the holomentic machine.
With the familiar smell in the room, Rozene drifted into the waking dream state with the first injection of Oniria. Amira asked her the usual carefully phrased questions about the compound and the shed once again came into focus on the hologram. Rozene’s pulse quickened but Amira continued in a calm voice.
“Stay with me, Rozene. This shed, is it in the Trinity Compound? Close to home?”
Rozene breathed in deeply, taking in the smells of the cooking, and nodded. The hologram remained unchanged, the young girl’s back still pressed against the wall of the shed. Amira’s heart skipped. It’s working.
“Why are you here, Rozene?”
“I don’t know.” Her wide eyes were glassy and her head lolled slightly to one side, but her voice thickened with tension.
“You seem frightened,” Amira continued, toggling the settings on the machine in search of a new angle to the scene. “You never take your eyes off the door, where the light is coming from.”
“Fo
llow the light always, for that is where you will find the higher Plane,” Rozene recited mechanically. A line of scripture from the local prayers of the Trinity, Amira assumed.
“Rozene, what’s on the other side of the door?”
Rozene suddenly shrieked, twitching violently in her chair. The younger, holographic version of Rozene in front of her was also shrieking, as water began to pour in through cracks in the shed door. Cloudy water bubbled and rose in the enclosure, reaching up to her knees in seconds. Rozene, young and translucent, and Rozene, adult and tangible, both shivered.
“It’s only water, Rozene,” Amira said gently. “Hold your breath and let it come.”
* * *
“How was that time better, M. Vald–– Amira? I nearly drowned.” Rozene eyed Amira warily but accepted the second serving of fried cactus.
“First of all, you weren’t going to drown,” Amira said, eating from her own bowl next to Rozene’s bed. “It felt real, I’m sure, but you weren’t in any danger. But that was a big breakthrough, Rozene. You stayed in the shed and didn’t fight it like the other times. You were great.”
Rozene continued to eat, but her face relaxed into something nearing pleasure – at the food, perhaps, or the rare compliment. For most compound girls, praise was a jewel rarely gifted, and usually earned at a high price.
“But why the water?” Rozene asked after a lull. “I don’t remember ever being flooded before. Not enough water where we came from.”
Where we came from. Amira formed her own satisfied smile at this new, subtle camaraderie. Perhaps involving Rozene directly in interpreting the memories wasn’t a bad idea. She seemed to relax more every time her voice was heard, her opinions respected.
“I think the shed is real but the water isn’t,” Amira said. “The water is a metaphor of some kind, which we usually see in dreams instead of memories, but this is no ordinary memory. The water represents something dangerous outside, something that scares you. Something happened to you after you came out of that shed, back at the Trinity. To find out, we’ll have to get you to leave the shed and confront it, whatever it is.”
“Sounds like fun,” Rozene said drily, resting her plate on her belly. “By the way, can you make the cactus with adobo sauce next time? My grandma made the best adobo cactus salad every holy day.”
From that point on, Amira continued bringing cooked food that reminded Rozene of peaceful times at home. Though dark memories dominated most holomentic reading sessions, happy memories could possess their own quiet power. In the moments before death, Dr. Mercer had taught Amira, the brain will search for moments of joy, as those moments reflect who people truly were, what they aspired to be.
Amira learned more than she ever imagined about Rozene Hull since the start of their sessions, but there were still gaps in both women’s knowledge. To Amira’s surprise, Rozene could not recall the details surrounding her escape from the Trinity Compound nor what prompted her to leave, other than the broad explanation of being terribly unhappy. Amira suspected that at least one of the three mysterious men at the ceremony played a key role in Rozene’s departure, and whoever had tampered with her memory had been forced to remove the man from other crucial moments in her young life, leaving fragments and shards of the past that Amira would now have to sift through.
Rozene’s family was, in many ways, typical of most families in the compounds. The middle of ten children, a commendable number for an observant compound family, Rozene followed her older sisters around the compound’s orchards, playing barefoot under the shade of the hybrid-citrus trees. The family prayed, fought, endured silent meals. The husband ruled over the wife, the wife ruled over her children and the older children terrorized the young, a hierarchy of retaliation from which no one emerged unscathed. Her older brothers served as marshals for the Trinity’s leadership, responsible for keeping outsiders away and, most importantly, keeping the faithful in.
Nightmares of the Neverhaven plagued Rozene as a child, the product of classroom indoctrination. The dreams worsened once she became old enough to take Chimyra, administered each night after dinner. Under the Chimyra, dream and waking blurred in the young girl’s mind, always unsure whether she was hallucinating, sleepwalking or dreaming in those late hours, when Elders warned that the barriers between worlds weakened.
The holomentic display showed Rozene’s childhood dreams, vivid and fraught, as she escaped her room and crossed the Trinity at night, avoiding the glowing pathways that weaved around dome-like houses. The temple loomed over her with each step she took, its spiral steeple coiled like a disfigured hand waiting to grab her. The nearer she drew to the compound’s front gate, to freedom, the heavier her legs became. She stepped into the main road, shining through the dark like a streak of captured moonlight, and her feet would melt into the pavement, followed by her legs, until she dissolved, screaming and melting, into the ground. In her final moments, she glimpsed the Neverhaven, a terrible world welcoming her for the sin of imagined escape. Rozene always woke up sobbing, her sheets wet with sweat and urine. Her father reacted to the nightmares by striking her across the face with his leather shoes, her mother silently working in the kitchen through the sounds of her cries.
Despite her silence, Rozene’s mother provided comparative comfort and benevolence during her childhood years. Recollections of her mother, always in the kitchen slicing vegetables or bent over in the garden, were tinged with a warm blue, the color of tranquility. This changed abruptly when Rozene turned eleven and her eldest sister married.
“What are we watching now, Rozene?” Amira asked. She removed her protective goggles to witness the hologram directly, showing the Hull family gathered around the dining table. Rozene’s mother wailed with her arms stretched across the oak table, cutting through the usual silence.
“We just got the news,” Rozene said numbly. “My older sister, Evelie, died that afternoon. Her husband found her in the backyard, by the pond. Her head was under the water.”
“What happened?” Amira asked, though she guessed at the answer.
“He said she killed herself,” Rozene said. “He found out she strayed with the aid workers who brought in food and supplies from the cities. At least five men, he said. He gave her the chance to repent at the Unveiling ceremony, but she drowned herself to avoid the shame and…and atone for the dishonor she brought on him. He found her there when he came back home.”
“Did your family believe that?”
Rozene’s hooded eyes hardened, but her lip trembled slightly as she spoke. “I don’t know. It didn’t matter. The shame was terrible, the whole compound knew the story, and Mama was terrified that we’d never recover because of what happened with Evelie.”
Rozene’s memories of her mother took on a different tone from that point, their interactions wrought with fear and distrust. Her mother would watch Rozene closely, eyes narrowing each time she entered a room, as though searching for some hidden signs of debauchery. She buttoned Rozene’s shirts tightly about the collar each morning and insisted on her wearing a thick scarf whenever she left the house instead of the more revealing head veil, calling her long red hair a temptation for any man who crossed her path. She lectured the young girl about virtue and chastity, saying that a girl was like a newly blossomed flower, and every transgression, every mistake was like tearing off a petal, one by one, until only the wilted stalk remained. It escalated until she would strike at her without warning, raving incoherently that she was a future whore and temptress in the making, destined to ruin them all. Though Rozene may not have recognized it, Amira saw a semblance of love – as compound mothers interpreted love, anyway – behind the cruelty, a mother’s desire to protect Rozene from her sister’s fate. Amira wondered whether her own mother whipped her with a similar motivation, or if she just relished having power over someone, anyone, in a place where she held the lowest position possible – a barren woman, unable to carry a child a
fter Amira.
Rozene also changed. The girl who played barefoot in the sun was gone, and the young woman who replaced her learned to walk in the shelter of her own shadow.
* * *
Hadrian remained seated as Amira crossed the ship’s entrance hall. Still wearing her lab coat from her shift at Aldwych, she met his yellow eyes with grim determination.
“She says she doesn’t have that thing you want, Hadrian,” one of the children called behind her. Scrawny and no older than thirteen, the boy had insisted on frisking her at the ship’s entrance like a nightclub bouncer.
“I’m still working on it,” Amira said by way of reply. She had, of course, procured the mysterious Tiresia with unexpected ease, but Hadrian didn’t need to know that. She needed collateral.
Amira wondered if Hadrian sensed this, following her advance across the room with a knowing smile. If he did, he didn’t pursue the matter.
“The lady comes without bearing gifts,” Hadrian said loudly, his voice echoing throughout the high room. “Which means she wants something else from her new buddy Hadrian.”
“Tony Barlow,” she said smoothly. “What do you know about him?”
Hadrian’s eyes lit up with interest, even a flicker of surprise. There was a pause while he seemed to consider her question.
“I know him,” he said. “Man’s got access to the stations, so I run into him up at NASH from time to time. Why the interest, love?”
“I don’t trust him,” Amira said. “He knows about the compounds and there’s something going on with him and Alistair Parrish. He’s everywhere on Pandora but I don’t know what he does.”
“So you think he’s your man to watch.” Hadrian finished the thought for her.
“Look into Tony Barlow and tell me what you know,” Amira said firmly.
“I can do that,” he said softly, advancing across the room. “But don’t forget that anything I do depends on our deal. I’m not a charity, love.”