I hate myself for what I did, and seek only the slightest comfort knowing I didn’t kill anyone.
After I administered the drug, a man from the government came in and took over, placing you very quietly back into homes with new parents who were all told well-crafted lies about your pasts. The school was abandoned and, for all I know, forgotten about. I’ve never returned.
You simply grew up, Landis. Unaware, and likely unexceptional.
Perhaps that can be changed. I’ve enclosed in this package what I’ve salvaged of your parents’ work. A journal of your father’s, the only one undamaged by the fire. Five copies of The Responsibility of Death (none of them your personal copy, I’m afraid). Some vials of the pills we used in our teaching. We called them vitamins, which made it easier to get you to take them. I have no idea if their efficacy remains or if they have lost all their properties over time, but it’s my hope they can undo the damage caused by the drug I gave you. An antidote.
Your parents truly discovered something powerful. Were it not for their deaths, I’m convinced you and the other children would be household names now, in whatever industry or art you chose. Maybe it’s not too late. Perhaps you can learn from your father’s writings and resurrect the program. Become what you were meant to be. In the process, I believe there’s a chance you can undo what I did to you. Recapture your memories. Remember your true parents.
I hope so, Landis. I should have allowed you to remember all along.
I’m sorry.
Forgive me if I choose to remain anonymous. Even as I die, I cannot push past my shame.
Fifty-Two
Clara
Time passes slowly as we wait for Jake to arrive.
Landis rejoined us in our room some time ago, announcing Jake is coming to the hotel. Though Landis holds the gun, Eaton carries the more menacing presence. I remember only flashes of their childhood faces. In this room, however, I have a strong read on the energy radiating from each man.
Landis isn’t as harsh as his demeanor suggests. There’s an underlying softness, perhaps even a kindness, he isn’t allowing through. It’s as if he’s playing some role that is necessary for this program. Maybe the success of this grand experiment, whatever it really is, depends on him playing this character. He doesn’t seem to want the same thing as Eaton. Landis just seems to want to remember his parents.
Eaton is different. There’s seething desperation just beneath his surface. He’s tight and coiled, and I picture a wholly separate and brutal creature bursting though his skin at any moment, fangs flashing, lunging for my neck. He’s a man of darkness. I don’t know his intentions, but it’s clear he’s in charge.
I don’t doubt Eaton would harm to get what he wants, but I also know I’m valuable to him. He might hurt me, but I doubt he’d kill me.
I’m desperately curious to piece together my childhood. My memories were of Arete Academy, clearly some kind of school. Other children. Books and vitamins. But, in all, I don’t remember enough to explain my lost time. It’s as if I watched a few short scenes from an epic movie, just enough to get a flavor of the story. I suspect there is much Landis and Eaton can tell me to fill in the blanks, but I don’t ask. I wait.
We all wait.
Landis has brought The Book of Clara from my hotel room. At the table, the two men read the pages together in silence.
After several minutes, Eaton looks over to me.
“You’ve documented much of what I was going to ask you. It’s fascinating to see how the program drove you to seclusion. That didn’t happen with the others. Your dosage was a bit higher, so perhaps that’s the reason. It’s a difficult task, you can imagine, figuring out dosages for a drug for which we have so little information. But with you, Clara, we decided to give the highest concentration of the drug. It’s all guesswork, but I think it paid off.”
Landis takes the book into his hands and continues reading on his own, his eyes widening with interest.
“When Jake gets here, we’ll have a talk,” Eaton tells me. “We need to understand all of what you remembered. You just might be the key to the program’s success.”
Landis lets out a small gasp.
I switch my gaze to him. He’s clutching my journal.
“What is it?” Eaton asks him.
“It’s…”
“What?”
“My parents,” Landis says. He hands the book to Eaton and points to an entry I remember well.
“Look,” Landis says. “It was her triggering moment. A memory of my parents.”
“Really?” Eaton starts reading, but there isn’t excitement in his face. There’s hesitation.
“I see,” he says, then snaps the journal closed.
Landis looks as frantic as someone like Landis can look.
“You were there,” he says to me. “You witnessed the murders.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I saw them happen. Maybe I did. I just saw the…the aftermath.”
“Do you know who did it?” he asks.
I look back and forth between them, and they both cling to my gaze, trying to read my mind. The truth is, I don’t know the answer to his question. There’s a seed of fear that’s been growing in me ever since I first remembered the killings. It’s a fear I was the one who killed Landis’s parents. Maybe that’s why I longed for death ever since that memory first returned to me. I was a killer and therefore deserved to die. There were only a handful of children in the room, it seemed. One of us likely committed the act. There’s no reason to think it wasn’t me.
I don’t feel like I could have done such a horrible thing, but neither would I have imagined wanting to kill myself.
Now I’m uncertain who the real Clara even is.
Fifty-Three
Jake
On the drive up to Aspen, we pulled the car over to a quiet trailhead, and I disposed of my gun in a deep creek. We kept the one Elle took off the thug in Eaton’s apartment, and since we had that one, I wanted to get rid of the weapon directly tied to a killing. Never in my life had I imagined myself needing to ditch a murder weapon, but I suppose there are a lot of things about my current life I never could have predicted.
The Hotel Jerome is a quaint, three-story brick building that stands with quiet permanence, likely little changed since whenever in the long-ago mining days it was built.
We pull into the parking lot, and I leave my messenger bag with the papers in the car. Elle walks in first. I follow. My leg stiffened during the car ride, and every step feels like knives repeatedly stabbing into my knee.
Inside the hotel, the tight lobby is stuffed with elegant furniture—hard leathers and darkened woods—giving the feel of a luxury train car from an Agatha Christie novel.
We know what room we’re going to, but it turns out we’ll be accompanied.
Markus.
The fucker who shot me is waiting in the lobby, occupying a chair next to the fireplace. Landis must have summoned him, and Markus probably sped past us while I was in the drugstore parking lot, bandaging the wound he caused. I’m not happy to see him.
Though, even from thirty feet away, I can see the welt on his forehead where Elle smashed him with the lamp. That makes me smile.
Elle stops and turns her head back to me. “See him?”
“Yup.”
He sees us too. He stands the moment we make eye contact.
“Ideas?” she asks me.
“I’ve gone this far. I’m going to keep going. But seriously, Elle, you don’t need to do this. I can do the rest from here.”
“The rest of what, exactly?” she asks.
“I have no idea.”
She smiles. “Oh, Jake. Are you trying to be brave?”
I know she’s playing with me, but I think about her question. Being brave in a situation implies fear. Honestly, I’m not scared. This i
s likely delusion, but it fuels me enough to limp past Elle and directly up to Markus, who folds his arms across his chest.
“You look like hell,” I say.
“They’re waiting for you.”
“Aren’t you going to apologize?” I nod down to my leg. As I do, I’m suddenly aware how conspicuous a heavily bloodied pair of jeans is in the lobby of a small luxury hotel.
“No.”
Markus wears a blue blazer that he opens just enough to show me he has a gun.
“I always carry two,” he says. “And I’d like my other one back.”
I’m starting to regret getting rid of our other gun.
Elle has come over and joined the group. “No way.”
The gun is in her purse, where she seems content to leave it for now.
The two stare at each other. “Fine.” He sighs. “I’ll get it back later.”
“No,” she replies.
I step between them. “Let’s go.”
He nods, then sweeps his arm to make it clear I’m to lead the way.
“Third floor,” he says.
“I know.”
I go first, and when I look back, I see Elle and Markus awkwardly walking shoulder to shoulder, neither willing to offer their back to the other. We head into the elevator, which we share with a fur-draped woman wearing sunglasses and clutching a pocket-size dog. The dog sniffs the air, gives out a little whine, then goes back to shivering. I wonder if it’s sensed my blood.
The woman gets out on the second floor with a brief look back before the doors close. After she does, I say one thing to Markus.
“I’m sorry about your nephew.”
He says nothing at first, but it’s almost as if I can hear his entire body tense.
As the elevator heads up one more floor, he finally says, “He wasn’t going to hurt you.”
“You locked me in a room for hours. After you both threw me in a trunk. You had already hurt me.”
“It was what I was hired to do,” he says. “But no one was supposed to actually hurt you.”
“You shot me.”
“I acted on impulse. I’m not going to apologize.”
The doors open. Third floor.
“Yeah, well, neither am I.” I step out, and Elle and Markus follow. I’m hardly aware of them following me as I limp to the hotel room.
In front of the door, and for a moment, only a moment, I close my eyes. In the darkness, I see the universe, and it continues to shrink around me. It collapses in on itself, into a singularity, which is this place. Right here, now, this very point in time.
I let out a long breath, open my eyes, and knock.
Fifty-Four
Clara
I jump in my chair at the knock on the door, and Eaton reaches over and places his hand on my arm. He’s not calming me as much as telling me to stay put.
Landis gets up and heads to the door. The second he opens it, I stop breathing.
Jake.
He’s not alone. There’s a woman and another man. I have no idea who they are.
Tears well in my eyes for a man I barely know, but for whom I desperately yearn. When I left him at the airport, I felt connected to and curious about Jake, but was singularly focused on my mission of death. But now that the mission has shifted to life, all I want to do is share my experience with Jake. I want him to feel what I’ve felt. I want him to remember.
This is how he must have felt in the airport terminal that night, this intense pull. And yet I just walked away.
I hear his voice first.
“I’m here.”
Fifty-Five
Jake
“I’m here.”
I hear the anger in my voice.
“Jake, welcome.” Eaton smiles. His yellowed teeth strike me as rotten. How is it he seems to have aged even more since I last saw him?
He stands aside, and I walk into the room. I’m vaguely aware of Landis, but my immediate focus is Clara.
Clara.
Very-much-alive Clara.
She’s sitting at a mahogany table in the middle of the suite, her kinked hair flowing over her shoulders and a look of sheer hope on her face.
I limp over as she rises, and a second later, we’re hugging.
This woman I’ve only known on a flight from Boston to Denver sinks into me, and I’m immediately dizzied by her presence. Her essence of time. Nostalgia. It radiates from her with such power, it nearly overwhelms me, and I feel myself immediately choking up. Whenever this life ends, I’m certain I’ll discover Clara and I were intertwined in a previous one.
“Jake,” she says. Her voice is a sob. She squeezes me harder for a second, then releases, pulls back, and directs my gaze right into her eyes.
I see a fresh cut on her right check, about an inch long. I reach up and touch just beneath it.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No, that was a tree branch. But listen, I remember. We were children together at a school.”
“I know,” I say, thinking of the Dear Landis letter.
“I don’t have the urges anymore. They just…evaporated.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say.
“I was close, but…”
Eaton steps up. “But what?”
Clara gives him a hard stare and shuts down. He’s fishing for information, but she’s not biting.
“Who are they?” Clara asks.
Elle and Markus walk into the room. Elle concedes and walks in first, giving her back to Markus. He behaves. No gun drawn yet.
“This is Elle,” I say. “She used to work for Landis. But she’s trying to help us. She’s on our side.”
That last sentence sounds like I’m trying to convince myself. But I can’t doubt Elle at this point. She’s followed me into this lion’s den.
“There are no sides,” Eaton says. “We’re here for the same thing.”
I ignore him. “And that guy is Markus. He also works for Landis, but he’s not on our side. That motherfucker shot me.”
Clara looks down at my leg, which she must have noticed when I limped in the room.
“Oh my god. You need a doctor.”
“Soon,” I say.
“She has a gun,” Markus says, pointing to Elle. “In her purse.”
“Oh?” Eaton turns to Elle. “Please hand your weapon to Markus, dear.”
Elle looks Eaton up and down with just a flash of her eyes. “Your apartment is creepy as hell,” she says. “Way too dark, hardly any personal effects. You can tell a lot about a person by how they live.”
“I know you don’t know my involvement here, Elle. You only know Landis. But Landis and I are a team, so you need to also consider me your employer. How do you think you got paid, after all?”
“I know enough. And by the way, I already quit.”
“Very well,” Eaton says. “Markus still works for me, and he is both loyal and capable. Isn’t that right, Markus?”
Markus hesitates for just a moment. “Absolutely.”
Elle remains frozen just inside the doorway. Markus finally closes the door, the lock clicking into place with finality. This luxury-hotel suite suddenly feels like a tomb.
“We’re here to see this to the end,” I say, my attention on Eaton. “You’re not going to hurt us because you need answers. Elle’s not going to shoot unless we’re threatened. She keeps the gun.”
Eaton considers this. “Fine. Landis has another one anyway.” He looks around the table and adds, “Such a violent little group we are.” Then he takes a seat at the table, sitting down with enough slouch to show fatigue. He’s a weak man, I think. Physically. Emotionally. But not mentally. I need to remember this. Eaton is smart, and whatever his endgame is, I can’t underestimate him.
“Sit,” he commands. “Let’s talk.”
Markus walks over and stands at one end of the table. Elle follows suit, standing at the other end. Opposing pieces on a chessboard.
There’s no way I’m standing; my leg is throbbing. I nearly collapse into the chair across from Eaton. Clara joins my side, and Landis sits opposite her.
Here we are.
The last of the orphans.
Reunited.
Fifty-Six
Clara
Jake sits next to me, and I feel myself listing in his direction. He’s hurt, and I can feel the pain coming off him. He’s poker-faced, but his anguish seems to flow into me.
Eaton begins.
“Clara, you’ve had a breakthrough. Please walk us through exactly what you remember, and where you were when the memories came back.”
“No,” Jake says. He reaches over and puts his hand on top of mine. “Whatever they’re doing, they need our information. Once we give it out, we’re expendable to them. There were two others like us, and they’re both dead.”
“What?” This is the first I’ve heard of two others like us. “Who were they?”
“Kate and Raymond,” Jake says. “Kate killed herself.”
“Oh,” I say, unable to find more words. It sounds so tragic, though it was exactly my own path until just hours ago.
“And Raymond was Ray Higgins,” Jake says. He looks at me as if I’m supposed to know that name.
“That’s right, you’ve been in seclusion. Ray Higgins killed twenty-three people in Chicago recently. Shooting spree.”
If hearing about Kate felt tragic, this news is soul-shattering. Tears immediately well into my eyes, and I can’t tell if fear or sadness weighs heavier on me in the moment.
“You’re making us into monsters.” My voice cracks as I speak. “Is that it?”
Eaton shakes his head. “You don’t understand. This is what we’re trying to prevent. That’s exactly why we need your information.”
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