Burn (15 page)

“What is this place? Who are these people?”

“You sound so melodramatic,” the flamehaired boy said. “It's what I told you. I told you I would bring you to the others.”

It was true; that's exactly what he'd said. Still, she hadn't imagined this. She'd imagined other prisoners, other scientists who had information the boy wanted. But the room he led her to – down a hallway, down some stairs, down another hallway – wasn't a holding cell. It was big, dimly lit, with rows of bulky things.

Pods.
Her brain supplied her with the word. The bulky things were called pods. In the pods were men and women, eyes shaded with black goggles. Strong-looking men and women – their muscles flexed, in response to whatever was on their screens. Immediately next to her was a pod containing a young woman with a French braid.

“Katie,” Harm explained. “Anders says Katie is the most advanced volunteer here.” She saw Anders now, a few rows down, observing her. “We're excited for the two of you to work together.”

Her, work with Katie?
On what? Why?
“What are they doing?” she asked. “What Path do you have them on?”

“Do you want to see?”

Of course she wanted to see.

She heard a grunt of disapproval. She turned – Anders had managed to sneak up behind her. He still had a Band-Aid covering the meaty part where his thumb joined his index finger. When he saw her looking at it, he glared and folded his other hand over the wound.

“Is there a problem, Anders?” the boy asked.

“I don't think you're supposed to let her do that.”

“Do that
what
?”

“I don't think you're supposed to let her do that. Sir.”

“They told me to figure this out. They put me in charge here.”

“Of almost everything. They put me in charge of watching you.”

“Are you threatening me?” the boy said lightly.

“Of course not. But I think you might want to remember where you came from. And think about whether you want to go back there.”

Something had just happened, between Anders and the flamehaired boy. She didn't know what, but when the boy turned back to her, his eyes looked scared.

“You can come over here to this one,” he said to her, a little too loudly. “Here on the end.”

He guided her toward the empty pod, handing her a pair of visioneers. “These aren't quite the right size,” he apologized as she put them on. “You won't be wearing them for long. You're just getting a taste.”

“A taste of what?” she started to ask, but then suddenly the boy was gone. And the pod was gone. And the room was gone.

Suddenly she was  …  where? Somewhere hot. Somewhere where, when she opened her mouth, sand particles flew in. Except
she
hadn't opened her mouth. She had a body, but she didn't have any control over it, not over how it was moving, or what it was seeing. The eyes that she didn't control looked down. The hands at the end of its arm were dark-skinned, thick like sausages, a gold wedding band on the fourth finger.

“You have the coordinates?” the body asked. Its voice was deep and controlled.

“I do, sir.” The other speaker was a young man, gap-toothed, in khaki fatigues. “But we don't know if they're insurgents or just kids. I think they're just kids. Here.” The young man passed over a pair of binoculars. Through them: two boys. Black hair, one in blue jeans, one in striped pants. Sitting on a low wall, playing with a kitten. One boy was fourteen, maybe, the other couldn't be older than twelve. The kitten was tiny, white with brown markings, batting at a skinny piece of fabric the younger boy swung over its head. He raised it a few inches higher and the kitten's tiny claws sunk into the boy's pants as it scampered up him like a tree. The boy giggled and pulled something out of his pocket. Kibble, or a treat.

“You have evidence?”

“Boys meeting their description were spotted near two explosive devices, but we can't be sure they were the same boys. They're awfully young.”

“You can't be too careful.”

And then something exploded. Something bright and white that filled the air with dust. She had thrown the exploding thing. It was a grenade that had come from her hands. She had thrown it, and when the dust settled, the boys were gone. The wall was gone.

In the binoculars, she could make out a leg. Stripes. The boy with striped pants must have fallen off the wall. She moved her binoculars to see the rest of the boy. The leg wasn't attached to anything. It sat in the dirt, trailing bloody octopus tentacles.

The kitten stumbled into the screen. She couldn't hear it from this distance, but she could see its tiny mouth open in a mew, its pink tongue as it wailed, looking for its owner. The kitten picked its way between fallen rocks, and then curled up in the middle of a pile of dust, next to a head that stared back at her with one unblinking eye.

She screamed. She screamed and screamed, and the dust went in her mouth, but no one could tell she was screaming. The gap-toothed boy was saying, “Nicely done, sir,” and she had to get out, but the legs refused to take her anywhere. The legs wouldn't let her leave. She was going to explode. “Get me out,” she yelled. “Get me out.”

She was trapped in this body, and the body wouldn't look away from the eye. “Please.” Her voice was hoarse from the yelling. “Get me—”

The visioneers slid up her face, the rubber scraping against her skin.

“Do you need a drink of water?” The boy stood next to her, holding the visioneers. She coughed. Her clothing was plastered to her body, cold with sweat running down her chest.

“I was screaming at you to end the Path,” she yelled.

“You weren't screaming. You didn't make any noise at all.”

“What was that? Where did you put me?” she shrieked.
What happened to the boy in the striped pants? Don't tell me. Tell me. Don't.

“Let's go sit down,” he said.

She tumbled out of the pod, not waiting for the levers to properly release, catching her sleeve on one of the claws designed to cradle her arms.

“Tell me what I saw!”

“Shhhh.”

She couldn't be quiet. She could still feel the weight of the explosive device in her hand before she threw it.

The boy led her to a little room. It had a wooden veneer table and a vending machine. He produced money from his pocket and bought her a soda.

“No,” she protested. He set it down on the table anyway. He'd bought her ginger ale. He'd known she would want something to settle her stomach. “What I just saw. What do you call that?”

“We call that the Hannibal Project.”

“That man who I was wasn't Hannibal.”

“No. Of course not. As we've already discussed, nobody has access to Hannibal Barca's memories. That was Corey Ducett, the most decorated soldier in the Red War.” He waved his hand before she could ask. “Small Central Asian conflict. Not historically important, except that Corey Ducett revolutionized urban warfare.” He glanced at the prisoner. “He was safe, in case you were wondering. He survived the Red War. He didn't die for a long time after that.”

“Where did he die?”

“In a prison. His methods weren't appreciated in their time.”

“Are they all – are all of the people in there watching Corey Ducett?”

“No. Almost none of them. He's just one of the standards. He's part of the curriculum.”

Why had he brought her down here? Was it a threat? If she couldn't give him the information he wanted, would he make her sit through that simulation again?

“That affected you,” the boy said. “That made you upset. Why? You've been in lots of pods before.”

“For
good
,” she almost yelled. “For programs experimenting on perfect lives. For research about improving the human experience.”

“Perfect means something different in different human experiences.”

“Why did you
show
me this?” She didn't understand.
What could he hope to accomplish by bringing her here?
Unless. Her stomach filled with dread. “I helped design this, didn't I? That's one of the memories I can't remember. I helped design the Hannibal Project.”

“No. You didn't. Don't worry about that.”

“I didn't? Then why am I here? Why do you think I can help you?”

“After the design for the Julian Path was finished, you dedicated yourself completely to one project. It was much more advanced than anything we have here. You worked on it alone.”

“What was it?”

He hesitated. She could see him debating whether or not to tell her in his head. He wanted her to remember the program on her own – that had always seemed to be important to him. But he was rattled by the conversation with Anders earlier. He was afraid she wasn't moving fast enough. He didn't want to go back to where he'd come from, wherever that was.

“Doesn't any of this sound familiar to you?”

“It was an advanced project that I was working on alone?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And I kept all of my research private, so no one else could replicate it?”

“Yes.”

“Can we go back up to my room now?”

“I thought you wanted to get out. I thought you'd been saying that for days, that you wanted to get out.”

She had been saying that for days. But she'd just had the tiniest flicker of a memory. Less than a flicker. Like a candle that had been extinguished minutes ago, but still glowed orange at the wick. It was barely anything, but it was more than she'd had before. And if the memory was accurate, then she wanted to go back up to the room, because she wasn't sure she should ever be allowed to leave.

Breath came flooding back into Lona's lungs almost as if she'd been under water; she put her hand to her heart and sucked oxygen in big gulps. She was still sitting on the bed.

How much time had passed? How long was she stranded in that non-sleeping nightmare? A red light blinked at her from inside the television cabinet; she stumbled across the room to open the door wider. Almost midnight.
Without even sleeping
. Her throat swelled with panic.
The dream had sucked her in without even putting her to sleep first.

It must be this house – this house where Zinedine had lived, which still smelled like her laundry. It had reeled Lona in too close. She had to get out of here before Zinedine's dream Path came after her again.

She found her shoes by the side of the bed. They were slip-on ankle boots; she pulled them on as quietly as possible, glad that she'd worn shoes with no laces. Shoes with no laces. It made her think of Warren. The one in her dream, the one in reality, the one from today, the one from the past before she was born. Her head ached, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't stop herself from replaying what happened beyond the door of the lab:
my mother stabbed me through her belly with a needle.

That part of the vision was perfectly clear. The vicious satisfaction Zinedine had felt when she slid the needle into her flesh. No wonder Lona had been immediately placed in the Julian Path after she was born. Her mother couldn't have found a better way to demonstrate that Lona was unwanted.

The house felt quiet and still, with no sounds coming from either of the other bedrooms. Downstairs, the kitchen sink was piled with dishes and there was a half-eaten cake on the counter. She felt a momentary stab of guilt, leaving without saying goodbye. She would find an excuse to come back later. She would ask Maggie a million questions then. But for now she just needed to get away from this house.

Her coat was neatly folded over a stool by the front door. She picked it up and was just about to ease the lock open when –

“I think your car keys are on the floor there. I heard something clunk out of your pocket earlier.” Jeremy. She hadn't seen him sitting there on the couch, a dozen chocolate wrappers dotting the coffee table. He unwrapped another and looked at it suspiciously. “I don't like the weird jelly ones.” He bit into the candy and smiled. “Peanut butter is my favorite.”

He pushed the dish toward her and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head in refusal. “Don't worry about leaving, if you need to,” he said. “I'll tell Maggie that you got off all right and that you didn't appear to be on the verge of fainting or anything. She knocked on the door earlier but you didn't answer, so she assumed you'd fallen asleep.”

“I'm sorry to leave without saying goodbye, or thank you, or anything.”

He waved her away. “It's no bother. We're the ones who should apologize. You come here looking for information about Ned's old research partner, and suddenly I'm storming off into the snow in my socks.”

“I wasn't  …  very clear when I knocked on the door. I know Maggie got the impression that I had information about your daughter.” She swallowed, hard. She'd almost said
about my mother.
“It must have been shocking.”

Jeremy grunted. “Do you like olives?”

“Excuse me?”

“Maggie's going to know I was up snacking if I eat all of the chocolates. I need to diversify.” He nodded at the sofa cushion next to him and then disappeared into the kitchen. Lona left her coat on, but sat where he'd gestured. When Jeremy returned, he was carrying a tray of pickles and olives covered in plastic wrap and a plate full of grapes. He peeled back the plastic and popped an olive in his mouth.

“Maggie is—” He shook his head like he was reconsidering his phrasing. “Maggie and I have different ideas of what happened to our daughter.”

“Different ideas?” She tried to keep her voice as noncommittal as it would be if Zinedine were a stranger, as if this was neighborhood gossip rather than the story of her life.

“Maggie thinks there's something  …  nefarious about the fact that we haven't seen Ned in as long as we have. She's got a whole conspiracy figured out – abusive husband, or undercover CIA mission, or, I don't know, space aliens.”

“You don't think the same thing?”

“I wish I thought the same thing.” He corrected himself. “No, I don't wish that. Maggie worries all the time because she believes Ned was taken away from us. I don't worry as much as I just feel hurt. And angry.”

“You think that she's not missing?”

“If she were really missing, would she send us postcards?”

The olive in Lona's mouth suddenly felt eyeball slimy. She forced herself to chew it. It slid down her throat in a lump. “She writes you?”

“She does. She did. She wrote that we weren't supportive enough about her decision to have the baby before the miscarriage, and that she needed to start over, away from us. She said she was going to take a research position in Finland. Or Estonia. Somewhere cold. Then the correspondence slowed. Her emails started bouncing back. It wasn't a mysterious disappearance like Maggie tells herself it was. It was just her cutting us off. Nothing mysterious about it.”

Except that she hadn't gone to Finland. Or if she had, she hadn't gone there because she'd miscarried Lona. Because Lona had been placed in the Julian Path when she was just two hours old. “Do
you
know who the baby's father was? Was he a researcher, too?”

She'd never imagined finding her father. She'd always assumed that if she could find any parent, it would be her mother, who would have at least had to be present for her birth.

“I always thought it was that lab partner – part of what upset me so much that you'd come looking for him. She worked fourteen-hour days. I didn't see how she could have been seeing anyone who wasn't with the Julian Path.”

Was Edward Lowell her father? Had Thomas been her uncle? Had she met all of her living relatives, without knowing it, in the past week? She'd gone from having nobody to having everybody. Or to having pieces of them. Fragmented memories that had haunted her dreams.

“I never told Maggie this,” Jeremy began again. He had placed an olive on a napkin, hole-side down, standing on its end, and balanced another one on top. Now he was trying to stack a third one on top, an olive snowman. “Because I love my wife and I don't think that revealing this information would ultimately do any good, and mostly because I'm a coward. But a couple of days before she disappeared, Ned and I had a pretty bad fight. I told her what a mistake I thought it was, for her to have this baby. I told her she was going to set herself back in her career – end up in some dead-end staff researcher job with a pharmaceutical company or something, instead of doing the brilliant work she was supposed to do. I told her it wasn't fair for her to expect her mother and me to pick up the slack.”

The olive snowman tumbled to the ground. The head rolled off the table and under the sofa. Jeremy grunted as he sank to the floor, patting the carpet in search of it. “I know it was a terrible fight to have, terrible things to say. I was just worried about her. I'm sure when she lost the baby, she thought I'd wished for it.”

He located the olive, dotted in lint, and stacked it on the coffee table. “So that's the other reason I think she ran away. Because I basically invited her to.”

Lona didn't know what to say. For the briefest of minutes, she thought about telling him everything. But he'd kept his secret for seventeen years, because he thought it would hurt Maggie, not help. Would knowing what she knew help or hurt him?

“Do you want a drink?” Jeremy stood up again, started for the kitchen. “We have so much leftover cider. I told them it was mulled specially for the party, based on a fifteenth-century wassail recipe, but they all drank soda instead. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the class.”

She stood up after him. “No, thanks. I should be getting home. I have roommates – they'll be worried.” She thought, for the first time in almost twelve hours, about Ilyf and Gamb.

“Well.” He brushed his palms together, shaking off the crumbs, and extended his hand to Lona. “Thanks for being my midnight snacking partner. If I get in trouble tomorrow for eating all the food, I'll tell Maggie it was your fault.”

“I'll come back again,” she promised. “Don't tell her it was me who ate all the chocolate, or I won't be welcome.”

“Oh, you'll be welcome any time. More than welcome, in fact. Leave your phone number and we'll do it again. It was nice to have someone to fuss over and put to bed, even if it was in the spare room.” His hand was still there, extended a few feet from Lona. Instead of taking it, she found herself flinging her arms around him, pressing her cheek against his scratchy cardigan.