Earthquake (9 page)

His gaze is
so fixed, so intense, I can’t look at it for very long, and I shift my focus to my shoes and simply say, “I need some time to think about it.”

“Of course you do,” Daniel says, and as though there were an audible
snap
, his face returns to the pleasant man who greeted us at the door. “While you are deciding, may I ask that you both go to our medical wing and have full-body scans?”

“Why would we do that?” The hairs on my arms rise at the thought of going back to what is essentially a hospital. To let them look at my brain.

“I don’t like the conditions you were kept in at the Reduciata base,” he says calmly, as though I hadn’t just snapped at him. “You have bruising on your head—Audra told me,” he says, raising his hands before I have a chance to accuse him. “Everyone here reports to me, and I’m afraid you’re just going to have to get used to my, shall we say,
protective
governing style.”

I bite my tongue and think of Audra. She’s okay. I don’t think I would mind
her
checking me out.

“I ask it of everyone,” he says. “There’s a reason our Earthbounds generally live at least into their nineties despite their human bodies. Constant medical evaluation and preventive care that only the Earthbound can give.”

It makes sense but . . .

“I got you out of there,” Daniel says, pinning me with a gaze that says,
you owe me one
. “The least you can do is give me the peace of mind that you were rescued unscathed. Or, at least, without permanent damage. The basic care our doctors were able to give you on the helicopter was only for obvious damage. But I’d like to be sure you both are in as perfect health as we can get you.”

He’s right. And I did hit my head pretty hard. Would it really hurt anything?

“I guess that would be fine,” I say, looking at Logan for confirmation, but he clearly doesn’t feel the same hesitation I do.

“I think it’s a good idea.” He places a hand at my waist, and I feel better. “I fell pretty hard when the explosion happened at my old house. A checkup can’t hurt, right?” he says, but this question is only for me.

“Guess not,” I say, squirming with guilt over the arson that killed his family. Not that it was my fault, but if I had only . . . that’s a road I just can’t go down.

“Great! Let’s get this over with then,” Daniel says in a surprisingly chipper tone.

“So, you have a whole medical
department
?” I ask as we all stand and turn toward the door.

“Where do you think all the very best doctors in the world come from?” Daniel asks, casually grabbing a set of keys from a hook on the wall and depositing them in his pocket.

“You just keep a bunch of doctors around?”

“About half the ones we have. And of course, we have an exceptionally advanced medical facility as well.”

“Why?”

Daniel looks up at me now. “Research, mostly. Studying Earthbound anatomy. Finding cures for incurable diseases. Figuring out a way to introduce these treatments to the medical world without being discovered for who we really are. A doctor with the powers of an Earthbound can do so much more than any human doctor, you understand?”

I do now.

“So, Daniel?” I pause when he turns back to look at me. “I need to know the truth. Am I a guest or a prisoner?”

He holds his hands out to the side. “Do you see any bars?”

“Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that’s what matters?” I say in the same even tone.

He’s silent for a few seconds, and then a sheepish smile emerges. “All right, it’s only fair I be straight. We’re in a remote location. For our security. It’s not like you can walk out a front door to some main street in a town somewhere. But beyond the inherent complication of our location, yes, you are free to go at any time. But I hope you won’t.” Daniel escorts us out of his office back to the tiny entryway, and I expect the solemn woman to return to lead us upstairs, but when the elevator doors open, Daniel steps in with us.

“Oh. I—I assumed—”

“That I don’t go out among the masses?” he says with a chuckle. “I do enjoy my privacy sometimes, thus the apartment on the lowest floor, but I think it’s important that the Curatoriates see me,
know
me. I’m no better than them; I simply do more paperwork,” he says with a grin.

As the elevator begins to rise I realize something I missed only a minute ago.

He told me I’m free to go, but he didn’t show me the way out.

Before I can consider that thought further, the elevator doors open to the atrium. I’m instantly surprised to see that it’s not the semi-chaotic milling of people we saw only an hour ago. Everyone—and I’m pretty sure by the sheer numbers that it
is
everyone—is gathered around a bank of enormous flat-screen televisions that weren’t there earlier.

The bristly woman from before is wading through the crowd, and her eyes look frantic until they light upon Daniel. I glance at Logan, and we speed our steps until we’re close enough to hear the words of the reporter as the screen switches to a satellite image of . . . the ocean? I don’t see anything unusual until the man’s nearly frantic words finally worm their way into my consciousness.

“As you can see, there is nothing,
nothing
, where only yesterday over a million people lived. It’s hard to comprehend how something this extreme could be anything but a hoax, but a written statement from the president confirms that these satellite images are real and accurately portray what can only be described as the most devastating natural disaster in recorded history. We’re being told that the loss of life is expected to be nearly total in a radius that best estimates suggest is many thousands of miles. There’s hope that some survivors will be found among the literally
tons
of wreckage and debris floating free in the water, but even if rescue vessels find them, they’re unsure they can reach them in time.”

“What happened?” Daniel asks a middle-aged woman beside him with tears streaking down her face.

“The Pacific Islands,” she says, gesturing at the television. “They’re
gone
.”

“Gone?” I ask. “What do you mean gone?” Surely even the most powerful Destroyer in the world couldn’t do something like this. It’s too big, too vast.

Too deadly.

“Shh,” the woman says, as the camera goes back to the reporter.

“Scientists are at a loss to explain this incident as ships filled with research technology are even now making their way across the Pacific Ocean to the place where Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, and dozens of smaller islands once were. At the moment the only speculation that has been reported is a massive settling of the tectonic plates beneath these island paradises. The north and east coasts of Australia have been put on tsunami watch and ocean wildlife is also expected to suffer from this massive disruption. Even now, no one can be certain what the secondary consequences of this incident will be.”

“This isn’t right,” I say, staring as the screen goes back to the empty ocean. “There’s nothing
natural
about this at all. There can’t be.”

“Reduciates?” Logan whispers.

But I shake my head. “It’s too big. It’s more than that, it’s—” But my words cut off as Daniel pushes by me, through the crowd. Toward the grand staircase. He climbs about four steps and lifts his arms in the air for attention.

“Curatoriates, let’s not panic. Obviously this is a tragedy we need to examine and research to figure out how we can help. What we can do.” He lists some names and points into the crowd. “Please join me in our computer lab; we need to find the facts they aren’t releasing to the public.” More names. “Make a rescue team. Get out there as fast as possible and do whatever you can. Whatever they need. Go.”

The word is a command, but it’s so quiet. So devastated. Nevertheless, it works, and the people around us start to move away.

“Come on,” I say, taking Logan’s hand and weaving my way through the crowd to get closer. It’s like wedging myself through a garden of statues placed too close together. Everyone is utterly unaware as I tap shoulders, whispering, “Excuse me,” over and over again.

Finally, I reach the staircase. Logan and I continue to clasp hands as we climb up the steps toward Daniel. “What
actually
happened here?” I ask him the second we arrive at his side. Demand, really. Daniel must know. He
has
to know.

His eyes are a hurricane of emotions that whirl so fast I can’t even begin to read them. “The first Earthbound has been permanently killed by the virus,” he whispers.

I stand silently, waiting for him to continue, not understanding.

“Whoever created those islands—the surface of the land beneath the ocean—they’re dead. Forever.”

I gasp and whirl to face the television again. Then I shake my head. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Other Earthbounds have died forever. That’s why you know about the seven lifetimes thing.” I stretch out an arm, pointing at the awful image on the television. “And
this
did not happen.”

He nods. “In those cases the Earthbounds slowly faded from existence in an entirely natural process. But when the life of an Earthbound is ripped away—there’s nothing natural about that. It’s too extreme, and so it has violent consequences.” He takes a shuddering breath. “It’s something I only considered in my darkest dreams.”

Anger tingles in my fingertips. “So you
knew
this might happen? And you didn’t warn anyone?”

“No, no. Far from,” Daniel says, his eyes still fixed on the television and looking very tired. “It was a tiny suspicion.” He turns to me, a small light of frustration shining in his eyes. “And what
should
I have done? Warned everyone in the world that their home
might
disappear at any moment? Take a survey and try to figure out who shaped which parts of the earth?”

I open my mouth to say that might have been a good place to start, but Daniel doesn’t give me a chance.

“Everyone’s memories of being Earthmakers back before the curse are so shady they may as well not exist. Do
you
remember what you made?”

I clamp my mouth shut. I’m not ready to tell him that I know I made the Grand Canyon. That Marie told me.

But
remember
? No. I remember nothing.

“And all of this for a dark fear? A worst-possible-case scenario I didn’t actually expect to happen?” Daniel shakes his head. “I thought the earth was in enough turmoil with the more obvious aspects of the virus.”

We turn as a new voice—with the tinny sound indicating a weak satellite connection—comes in extra loud over the newscast, the chop of helicopter blades in the background. “We’ve been out here for hours now, and I know you can’t see much with the sun down, but what you don’t see are lights. Homes. The cities. Amy, there is
nothing
left here in the place where the bustling city of Suva—the capital of Fiji—sat only yesterday. Rescue ships are on their way, but even so, we’re estimating the death count to be over 1.5 million lives. A number so tragic as to be almost incomprehensible.”

My knees feel weak as I make myself consider over a million people suddenly dumped into the middle of the sea. In their beds. In their houses. Trapped and drowning in the middle of massive apartment buildings. I almost feel the water filling my own lungs at the agonizing thought. The reporters are right—the death rate has got to be almost complete. Even those who had boats would likely have been trapped in their homes under roofs meant to protect them, that instead held them under. My throat closes.
Schools. Daycares.
It’s nighttime in the Southern Hemisphere
now
, but what time did this happen? Were people awake? Asleep?

Children, infants, elderly, and everything in-between. Just . . . gone.

My voice cracks as I say, “At this point the destruction of the earth will kill people faster than individual cases of the virus.”

Daniel nods. “Unless we find a way to safeguard all the known Earthbounds,” he says with a significant look at me. “Because remember, it’s also the virus that’s causing the destruction of the earth.” He stretches out his hand to point back at the television.

He may as well have said it outright: help me or the next one’s on
your
head.

But he doesn’t have to say it.

I know.

And he’s right. There’s no question now. My doubts are still there—as strong as ever, but I could never live with myself if I didn’t do something.

I should have started yesterday.

“Tell me what to do,” I whisper.

But we still
end up in the medical wing. I tried to convince Daniel we should start working on the vaccine right away, but he shook his head and insisted that he had to “handle this first.”

“I could help with the fallout,” I said.

“
We
could help,” Logan amended, holding my hand as he and I stepped forward as one.

“What I really need is for you to be rested and ready to start tomorrow with focus. And healed of any damage that might have been done to you in that hellhole,” he added. “Then we have work to do.”

And so I’m here. Waiting for Audra to come in and tell me what they’ve found. Or haven’t found. Hell if I know.

I don’t know where Logan is other than
in the medical wing somewhere
. They separated us. Logan argued. I didn’t.

Even though he knows—even though it’s not a secret—explaining exactly how your brain is
damaged
is still . . . just difficult. Awkward.

But even with that looming my thoughts are still buzzing from
the incident
. The incident. It sounds too tame to describe something that killed over a million people and completely erased a section of the world.

But is there a word so vast? I don’t think so.

All my doubts are gone. Well, perhaps not the doubts, but the hesitation. I
have
to help. However I got these new abilities, this strength, I have to use it to save people. I can’t run away like Sonya did. I have to face it. What happens after that is a bridge I’m going to have to cross later.

A light knock on the open door makes my head jerk up, but it’s just Audra with a tablet computer in her hand. “I’m waiting for one of our specialists to e-mail me one more report, but I didn’t want to leave you sitting alone. Not after—” She swallows hard. “After today.”

We both nod, and a heavy somberness settles between us.

Finally I take a shaky breath and break the silence. “So was it weird, suddenly becoming a thirteen-year-old doctor?” I ask.

She gives me a weak smile but seems happy to change the subject. “That part wasn’t all that weird. What
is
weird is being in a teenage body, going through all this teenage physical shit—hormones, sweaty feet, massive deodorant needs—but feeling like a fully grown woman in every other way. Not just fully grown—elderly. I was eighty-four when I passed in my last life.” She gives me a shrug and a
what-can-you-do?
smile, as though she expects me to understand.

Why? Because I’m a teenager too? I
don’t
really understand. I’ve had the same kind of re-awakening she has—sort of—but I don’t feel ancient, or even grown and mature. If anything, I feel younger and smaller.

A beep sounds, and Audra tilts the screen. “Here we go.” Her eyes go rapidly back and forth, and after a few seconds she’s nodding. “As I expected.” She swipes her fingers across the screen a few times then scoots a little closer and turns the tablet so I can see.

They’re MRI pictures. Of
my
brain. The organ that literally makes me who I am. Like my personality splayed out for all to see. My heart speeds up. I’m not sure why—despite their high-tech facility, I don’t expect them to find anything my previous doctors didn’t discover.

“I’m going to get right to the crux of the issue, Tavia,” Audra says, gesturing to the black and white images on the screen. “The damage to your brain is considerable. There are signs of what we call nerve shearing in
three
places.” She points to different spots on the MRI. “In addition, your frontal lobe—right under your scar—was all but crushed. That’s what the doctors tried to repair when they took you into surgery.” She returns to the scans and shows me the scars from where my blood vessels exploded and they put them back together.

“What this all means,” Audra says, “is that your ability to process memory is exceptionally damaged—especially long-term memory. I suspect your human med team was completely and utterly amazed by your level of healing.”

“They called it a miracle, you know, all that stuff,” I mumble.

“As well they should. If you weren’t an Earthbound, you should have basically wandered around, nearly incapable of reasoning beyond about a three-, maybe four-year-old level. And on top of that you probably would have remembered little to nothing about your life before the plane crash.”

I’m sure horror is splashed all over my face as I stare at her. This is
not
something my doctors told me. “Why does it matter that I’m an Earthbound? I essentially have a human body, right? Why is my brain different? Is it . . . stronger?”

But Audra is already shaking her head. “Actually, the human brain is very different from an Earthbound brain, but in ways that a microscope doesn’t show.” She hesitates, and I can tell she’s trying to find the right words. “It’s just
more
. And for your sake, thank the gods it is. Have you had memory problems since you first awakened your memories?”

“I think so,” I say very slowly. Elizabeth had suggested as much, but until I watched Logan’s awakening process, I didn’t fully comprehend that my own remembering wasn’t quite as smooth as it should have been. “I don’t actually have memories of all my past lives. The clearest one is the last time I was with Logan. Quinn then. All the others are either a blur or not there at all.”

I wonder if I should tell her about my dreams of Sonya, but they’re not quite the same thing as memories. I better keep them to myself. For now.

As I look up, I see Audra’s expression change.
Pity.
Is it really so bad?

“The brain cells of a human contain their entire life,” Audra says. “The brain cells of an Earthbound contain the entire life of the
earth
. As a human, when you lose your long-term memory you forget everything earlier than maybe a few months. Tavia, you’ve forgotten everything from before this life. Because a single life
is
short-term for an Earthbound.”

“But I remember
some
things from before,” I protest.

“Was your awakening object something from the life you remember best?”

“Yes,” I say hesitantly, feeling like I’ve fallen into a trap.

“How to explain this?” Audra asks herself, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Whenever you do anything in life, your brain makes it happen through connected synapses. When your brain gets disrupted you have to create all those synaptic pathways all over again. So while your awakening
should
have brought to life every synaptic pathway associated with memories of your past lives, because of the damage, it could only process that one. And even then, only because there was such a direct stimulation to do so. To be truthful,” she says, leaning forward to touch my hand, “the few memories you have of other lives are probably nothing more than shadow memories from
that one
life.”

“But . . .” I think of the way that Marie touched me and invoked a memory of yet another life. The brief seconds that I lived after re-awakening under a cold park bench in England. Despite my misgivings, I go ahead and tell Audra about that—though I keep the details to myself. To my surprise, she’s smiling when I finish.

“That’s very encouraging,” she says, but I can’t figure out how the hell that awful story could be
encouraging
. “It means that you can collect artifacts from your other past lives and use them to force new synaptic pathways into your stored memories. It’s incredible, really.”

Like the braid. The one I don’t have anymore. Another wave of disappointment flows through me at the thought of that loss. “So, if I did find something—another thing I made in my past lives—it wouldn’t . . . damage my brain more?”

“Oh no. If I had examined you before your initial awakening I would have suspected that you might not live through it,” she says calmly. Exactly what Elizabeth was worried about. “But you did, and no other awakenings should be nearly so powerful. Similar, but not as extreme.”

Similar
. I remember the horrible pain in my head both with the necklace and Marie touching me—though, as Audra suggested, not as bad the second time—and don’t even have to ask if it will always hurt.

It will.

“Can you . . .” I pause and take a deep breath and push back the desperate sob in my voice. “Can you fix it?” I ask in a whisper.

The room is silent, and I know the answer from the disappointment that hangs in the air like a thick fog. “You have to understand, Tavia, we’re not miracle workers, as much as people would like to think since we’re, well . . . former gods. In order to fix your brain we would have to go in and destroy your damaged cells and then recreate them from scratch. And even if we could study your individual, unique brain cell structure well enough to do that—it wouldn’t be
you
. You would be a blank slate. Because no one, not even Christina, who you met on the helicopter and who is immensely strong—can rewrite all of your lifetimes’ experiences onto your cells. Only actual experiences can do that.”

“What about . . . specific memories?” I ask, thinking about my dangerous secret. The one even I don’t know, the one that must have to do with my being a “Transformist,” as Daniel called me. “Is there any way to target specific memories, or people, or . . . secrets?”

“At this point I think artifacts from individual lives are your best shot. But this is all new territory for me,” she admits.

“So, I really am stuck like this forever?” I ask. I’m not embarrassed when a tear slides down my cheek.

“For this life,” Audra says, as though it’s a comfort. “The memories of your former lives will still exist in your soul when it travels to a new body. The next time you’re reborn, you should awaken as normal.” Her eyes dart up to mine, then away. “Almost.”

“There’s more?” I ask, terrified.

“Just one more piece,” she says, and though there’s a sad smile on her face, I know she’s trying to brace herself. “Your brain’s ability to store memories is . . . it’s very compromised because of the damage to your frontal lobe. Not only does your brain have trouble retrieving long-term memories, it also has only a limited ability to
store
more memories.”

“But I remember things just fine since the crash.”

“Remember the
big
picture,” Audra says patiently. “You may go your whole life remembering things okay, because one life is very short-term for an Earthbound. But your brain may never get your current life into long-term memory storage.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“If your brain can’t get this life stored in its long-term bank, next time you’re reborn you’ll remember all of your other lives, but you won’t remember this one.”

The significance of her words finally hits me. My life as Tavia,
this
life, will be erased from my memory. My eternal memory. Whatever I do, whatever I choose, I won’t remember it at all. The joys, the pains, all washed away like they never happened.

Like I spent an entire lifetime truly being human.

“And you can’t do anything about that?” I ask in a whisper.

She shakes her head. “It’s all really quite fascinating.” But her forced cheerfulness doesn’t penetrate my cloud of gloom. In the end, all an Earthbound truly possesses is their memories.

So once I die, even though my soul will be reborn, Tavia will be dead.

Forever.