by Nadia Afifi
“I was following him,” she said, jerking her head toward the bound Trinity man. “Trying to find Rozene. Is she here?”
“No,” Parrish said, glowering at his compound captive. “But this gentleman here should be able to answer that question for us. Once he understands that he has no choice but to cooperate.”
“We need to be quick,” one of the masked guards interjected, addressing Parrish. “The Morgans will hold back NASH a little longer, but we don’t have forever. We need all three of these agitators to start squealing, any way we can make them.”
The Trinity man closed his eyes and muttered rapidly under his breath, a prayer.
“Alistair, think about what you’re doing,” Barlow said as Parrish grabbed a pair of sensory pads from one of the trays and placed them on the man’s temples. “This is barbaric and unnecessary.”
And at that, Amira realized what was about to happen and slumped back into her chair weakly. While she had no affection for the man who tried to kill her, she had no desire to see him suffer.
“What happened to Rozene?” Amira asked in a quavering voice, hoping to delay Parrish, if only for a few seconds. “You were with the Trinity when they took her. I heard it all. You were working for them. Why don’t you know where she is?”
Parrish faced her, his bewildered expression shifting to anger.
“We were lied to,” he replied venomously. “She was supposed to be brought to us first, so we could finish our testing for our own purposes. But Elder Young had a different idea and dropped contact after the initial seizure. He separated from me and failed to take her to the meeting point. Our people found him in the Satyr Road and tried to bring him in. Caused too much commotion and he got away. But not this one.”
“You were going to do tests on her and then hand her to them?” Amira asked furiously.
“Trust me, M. Valdez, you don’t want the details,” Parrish said impatiently.
“The Trinity didn’t want the clone to be born,” Barlow said simply. “And they didn’t trust you, with good reason. This unholy alliance was doomed to fail from the start, Alistair.”
Ignoring Barlow, Parrish continued his setup on his other, less talkative captive.
“But why would the Cosmics want to help the Trinity Compound destroy Pandora?” Amira whispered to Barlow. “Aren’t they scientists? Shouldn’t they support the project?”
“Yes and no,” Barlow said smoothly. “There is division among the Cosmics, many of whom have ties or at least sympathies with the holy communities. They entered an alliance, with the intent of both sabotaging the cloning effort on Pandora, as well as procuring something of mine. They have succeeded on the former but not the latter, which is why I have been invited here, to give up my property.”
“The property of the Sentient Cosmology movement,” the first guard said angrily at Barlow. Clearly, he was more than a hired gun. “You didn’t invent it alone.”
The Tiresia. What did that vial of clear liquid contain that inspired an assault on a facility, a kidnapping, and factional infighting among the Cosmics?
But Barlow stared intently at Alistair Parrish, his eyes fixed and unblinking, as if to shorten the space between them. He used silence like a blunt weapon, Amira realized in that moment.
“Have you really given up, Alistair?” Barlow asked. “You had the same vision as I not that long ago.”
“It was a dangerous and foolish idea,” Parrish said roughly, though with sadness in his eyes as he turned to the figure behind the glass. “The time for your fringe science has passed, Tony. I carried false hope, because of Maya, but I have faith in the Conscious Plane. Something better awaits her and us at the end, a better world.”
The Trinity man spat on the ground in disgust. In other circumstances, Amira would have been amused by his revulsion. Life beyond life, reward after death. But the compound man would deem Maya Parrish as unworthy of the Nearhaven.
“Faith,” Barlow said, so that the word twisted out of the corner of his mouth. “So you at least are wise enough to distinguish faith from fact. But tell me, Alistair, if you have such faith that a parallel universe awaits, one where Maya can walk and feel the air on her face, why do you keep her alive, hanging on to hope? Do you fear death?”
“We don’t,” the guard interjected. “And we will release her to the Conscious Plane before we leave.”
“No!” Amira cried.
“Enough!” Parrish shouted. He paced back and forth with his fists pressed to his temples, as if to prevent the contents of his mind from bursting through his skull. “We must get Rozene Hull back, for her own sake as much as ours. The clone cannot be born. Once it is, more will follow, and it will be a Rubicon we cannot turn back from.”
“The Rubicon has been crossed already, Alistair,” Barlow said, and an unsettling smile spread across his face. “My ‘fringe science’ that these occultists told you was impossible? It is done.”
Silence filled the room. Even the engine seemed quieter.
“You––?” Parrish whispered. “How? To the subject, to…Rozene?”
Barlow nodded.
“What the hell is he raving about?” the guard barked, eyes glaring through the slits in the ski mask.
“Did Valerie know?” Parrish asked Barlow.
“No,” Barlow said. “I made my own unilateral decision and I will live with the consequences. We need to see what happens, Alistair, when it is born, to both mother and subject. If it works…if we succeed….”
Though baffled, Amira sifted through Barlow’s cryptic words. It is done. To Rozene. Live with the consequences.
“It was you,” she said loudly, rounding on Tony Barlow. “You were the man Rozene saw that night! I saw her memory! You snuck in and injected her with something, did something to her. It was the Ti—”
Barlow shot her a meaningful glance and she stopped speaking. Though his face was its usual mask, it was evident that he did not want her to say Tiresia. Amira did not name it, but could not contain her anger. All of these scientists, with their great minds and sweeping ideas, saw Rozene as disposable, her body and mind as a sandbox to be played in.
“You did something to her!” Amira’s voice rose in anger. “You tampered with her memory to try and kill her!”
“I did not, actually,” Barlow said softly. “Although I can see how it would appear that way. I have no desire to harm M. Hull, quite the opposite.” He nodded at Parrish.
“If not you, then who?” she asked, realizing the answer as she spoke.
“It was Victor Zhang’s mistake,” Parrish said with disgust. “He foolishly visited the Soma before he disappeared, to search for something, and passed by M. Hull’s ward. She recognized him, despite his efforts to disguise himself in the Trinity. Her face gave it away. And so we had the memory of his visit removed. M. Hull was already experiencing the same problems as the others by this time and no one expected such a detail to be noticed.” He nodded at Amira with somber respect.
“How did you get those memories removed?” Amira asked in disbelief.
“We had it arranged quickly,” Parrish said. “One of our own. Gifted as you are, you are not the only skilled holomentic reader in Westport, Amira.”
“A real reader,” the guard sneered at Amira. “Not a nobody, Academy brat like you.”
“I still don’t understand,” Amira said, scowling at the vicious guard before turning back to Barlow. “The memory tampering wasn’t the only thing wrong with Rozene – you did something before that even happened. What did you do?”
Barlow inclined his head toward Parrish and the guards, then looked intently back at Amira. The message was clear – not in front of the Cosmics.
Amira remained silent, her anger toward Barlow now compounded by a new rush of apprehension. She always found the quiet, observant man suspicious, but now she saw him in an entirely new l
ight. Though bound to a chair, he was revealing himself to be the smartest, perhaps most dangerous man in this room.
Parrish was also processing Barlow’s revelation.
“We have to get the girl back,” he said softly.
“Alistair,” Barlow warned.
Parrish ignored him, positioning himself in front of the machine from which the sensors connected to the man’s head.
“Where did Elder William Young take Rozene Hull?” Parrish asked.
The man spat on the ground.
Parrish turned the dial on the machine and the sensors lit up in crystalline blue around the man’s temples. At first, nothing happened, but after several seconds, the man began twisting and contorting in his seat, his jaw clenching, his teeth grinding. His hands tightened, gripping something invisible, as he thrashed in unmistakable pain.
“Where is Rozene Hull?”
When the man remained silent, Parrish turned the dial up further. The man, who had previously allowed only a faint whistling sound to escape from between his teeth, now opened his mouth in a full howling scream, thrashing and struggling against the chair binds.
Amira responded in kind, her breathing shallow as she doubled over in her chair, fighting and failing to block out his rising screams.
“Stop!” she yelled, tears threatening. “Stop, make it stop!”
Blood pounded in her face, her vision blurring and tunneling, while the man continued to writhe in agony at the end of the tunnel. The ringing in her ears returned.
Amira struggled fruitlessly against her binds. The screams continued and she lowered her head, sobbing, and in that unbearable moment, the world shifted out from under her.
She rose to the high ceiling. She tried to call out, but she had no mouth, no voice – they remained in the chair below with the rest of her body, now motionless. After an abrupt shift, the familiar sensations returned. The newfound calm, the taste of rust. Beneath her unnatural perch, Parrish continued his grim interrogation, the man continued to scream and thrash and Barlow remained bound, watching Amira with keen interest. She observed the scene dispassionately, calm for the first time since her ascent from the Parallel that morning.
From the ceiling, she pulled even further away. The room grew smaller and smaller, until she passed through the Carthage’s intricate walls, past wires and insulation, moving backward further and further until she was out of the station itself, floating above the spinning structure in space.
She was in space. Without a body, without air or protection, and yet the station spun before her, the stars surrounded her.
Amira drifted further away until the Carthage became a distant object in the panorama of her mind, moving in orbit alongside the blue atmospheric ring of Earth. In space, the sensation differed from her past disassociations, a detail she accepted with some concern for what it meant. She tasted rust, heard the buzzing in her ears, but did not sense the usual eyes upon her. Did the invisible observer’s reach not extend into space? She vaguely wondered if she would return, or remain a floating, conscious entity in space forever. Some distance away, a small shuttle approached the Carthage. Everything was quiet, free of engines and screams, and Amira focused on the Carthage, willing herself back inside its walls.
Then Amira returned to the room at once, gasping as she lurched forward in her seat. Her hair hung over her shoulders and a bead of sweat fell from her forehead to her knees. Panic and fear returned when she regained her body.
The captive continued wailing under Parrish’s turning dial. Amira felt Barlow’s eyes still on her.
“You disassociated, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“You left us,” Barlow said. “An ‘out-of-body experience’. But you’re a psychology student, Amira Valdez, you know exactly what I mean when I say disassociation.”
“Yes,” she said after a pause. Her face flushed with anger. “I’ve done it all my life, but it’s gotten worse.”
Barlow nodded.
“Someone’s coming,” she mouthed to Barlow. “A shuttle.” He nodded again, shooting a careful glance at Parrish. Alerting Barlow might have been a mistake, but between his ties to Hadrian and his cryptic conversation with Parrish, Amira had concluded that his agenda included keeping Rozene alive, and that she would need his help.
“What have you done?” Alistair Parrish shouted at the screaming man. “You’ve killed her, haven’t you? Does life mean nothing to you?”
“Alistair, enough,” Barlow said firmly. “This is madness. Even if you get an answer, you can’t know it’s the truth. This man will simply lie to end the torture. Perhaps we could use another resource at hand?”
“You mean M. Valdez?”
Every eye in the room turned to her.
“You have a holomentic device,” Barlow continued. “And Amira Valdez has unquestionably proven her abilities in that arena.”
* * *
The Trinity man scowled at Amira as she activated the holomentic sensor. It was outdated, but the basics of the machine were no different from the ones she used in Westport. The disc began spinning and she wordlessly attached the sensory pads to the man’s head. She loosened his bindings to improve his circulation for the reading. His swollen, bloodshot eyes caught hers.
“You’ll die screaming, apostate filth,” he said.
“Access visual cortex,” she said into the sensor. She kept her voice steady and calm, willing the rest of her to follow.
To read the prisoner while he was fully awake, free of Oniria or other medications that would ease the navigation of his subconscious layers, would be extremely difficult. She turned a dial on the reader and as she feared, the first visuals it generated were haphazard and fragmented. The man’s primal, conscious mind was an orgy of violence and rage, every flash of thought tinted in deep red as he struggled to shake the sensors off his head. On the holographic display, Barlow’s severed head turned on a spit, Parrish ran down a dark alleyway before being cut in two, and as the man glared at Amira, she materialized in the hologram, lying bloody and dismembered on train tracks. Parrish gasped and turned away in disgust, but she continued to pull deeper into the man’s mind. When he realized what she was doing, the man made a concerted effort to visualize the most gruesome, shocking scenes his undeniably active imagination could conceive.
Amira let him. He could imagine what he liked but could not control his subconscious. Once it was breached, she would unlock its contents until all his secrets lay bare. She held on to that thought as the man began laughing shrilly. The hologram displayed a naked Amira spinning in circles like a macabre top as layers of her skin and flesh unraveled onto the floor, peeled away like an apple.
An alarm sounded. The second guard ran to the radar screen.
“A shuttle’s on its way,” he said to Parrish. “NASH police craft. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”
Parrish cursed. The power of the Cosmics had its limits – Hadrian, in pursuit. Adrenaline flooded Amira’s senses, along with a strange cocktail of relief and dread. Would Hadrian’s team get the upper hand? And would she be able to find Rozene’s location before the imminent showdown between Parrish’s guards and Hadrian’s?
“Quickly, find where she is,” Parrish yelled at Amira. “And you two” – he addressed the Cosmic guards – “destroy all of the data. I want every file wiped out! Disable everything except Maya’s chamber, and get the shuttle ready! Take him!” He pointed to Barlow.
The men sprang to action. One grabbed Barlow under his arms and roughly dragged him away while the second swung a chair against the wall of monitors behind them. Amira continued to navigate the holomentic sensor amid the chaos. In the disjointed reel of the man’s active mind, Elder William Young flickered before them for only a second. The man cried out angrily, pushing the thought away.
Amira darted acro
ss the room and grabbed a lab coat from its hanger. She ignored the chaos around her. All that mattered was finding Rozene in the tempest of her new subject’s brain. And she would.
“What are you doing?” Parrish shouted.
“Cutting through the clutter,” she retorted, and tore at the coat’s sleeve. She tied the cloth around the man’s eyes before stuffing pieces of fabric into both ears. His external senses muted, the frenetic reel of imagery began to slow, the mind’s eye coming into focus.
Amid the sounds of shattering glass and equipment crashing to the ground, Amira turned the sensor toward the brain’s phonological loop.
Parrish had pressed his hostage with questions about Rozene, a mistake. The Trinity man had probably seen her only once or twice, if he had encountered her at all, so her name did not inspire strong memory triggers. As his mind calmed, Amira pulled the cloth from one ear and spoke a different set of words.
“Elder Young. Andrew Reznik. Where are they hiding?”
And there it was – Elder Young standing in the desert, a glowing ring of blue around his head and a team of young women behind him, in front of a large house overlooking a cliff. With gaping glass windows and bold geometric shapes that stretched over the cliff’s edge, supported under angular beams, it looked nothing like the simple round homes that defined the compounds.
“They’re about to dock!” one of the guards cried.
Then the image dissolved into another one, of a group of men in black standing in an enormous room with wide glass windows. An old man with long, wavy white hair was on his knees in front of them, head hanging in resignation. She recognized him immediately, as anyone in Westport would.
“Victor Zhang,” Parrish said, realization dawning on his face. “That’s his home. They’re hiding in his house in Utah. Let’s go!”
In the hologram, Victor Zhang recited from a piece of paper.
“—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—”
Suddenly, the Trinity man twisted out of his loosened bindings and lunged out of his chair at Amira, knocking her to the floor. Startled, she struggled to push him away, panicking as he gripped her arms with surprising strength. His teeth found the side of her face and sank into her ear, releasing a hot spurt of blood as the flesh tore. Pain, white-hot and staggering. She screamed and struggled to get out from underneath him. The man fell sideways off her to the sound of a hideous crack, taking a piece of her ear with him. She looked for the source of the blow and found Parrish, wielding a small monitor. He raised it again and brought it down on the Trinity man’s head.