False Hearts (17 page)

The lobby of the minuscule apartment complex is empty. Crumpled leaves on the ground crunch beneath my feet. I climb the stairs, following the vague prickle of intuition that leads me to the top floor.

I hear the screams first.

The door opens for me into a barren room as long as the building. The concrete floor is cracked, the paint on the walls peeling off in layers. Exposed wires hang from the ceiling, and a flickering overhead light casts a harsh light on the two figures before me.

One is Mia. She’s strong here, as she no longer is in real life. Her bare arms ripple with muscle, the fitted jumpsuit hugging her full breasts and thighs. Her hair is long, like it was in Mana’s Hearth before she left when Tila and I were eight. But she is a long way away from the gentle woman in soft dresses that I recall. This Mia’s face is twisted in rage and bloodlust, and she’s wielding a scalpel stained with blood.

I shudder, my hand involuntarily going to the scar beneath my dress. Mia’s tool falls, and she bends over. My eyes finally rest on the other figure.

It’s Mana-ma.

Our former leader has collapsed to the ground. She’s alive, breathing hoarsely. The black robe she wears is heavy with blood. On her back, she gapes at the cracked ceiling, her mouth opening and closing. Mia has cut out her tongue. It lies next to her like a dead fish.

I cry out, stumbling away.

Mia pauses in her terrible work, her eyes meeting mine. Her face goes slack in surprise.

“Taema.”

I’m dressed as Tila. I have her face, and her tattoo snaking down my thigh. Despite this, Mia still recognizes me.

“Why are you here?” she asks. “You’ve never been in my dreams before.”

That’s a comfort, I guess. She’s never wanted to kill me. Mia’s covered in blood, and the broken shell of a replica of the woman who leads Mana’s Hearth cowers beneath her.

“Mia. Something’s happened to Tila. I need your help.”

“You’re … not part of the dream?” Mia seems confused.

Mana-ma gives a strangled gasp, more of a high wheeze. Without batting an eyelid, Mia brings down the scalpel into Mana-ma’s neck. The colors of the warehouse grow brighter, sharper, until they’re hypersaturated. I step back, horrified.

Without realizing what I’m doing, I focus on that mental state I found while in Meditation at the Hearth. The clear, calm stillness. “Stop,” I say. Mia’s eyes widen, but her hand jerks back, taking the scalpel with her.

“You don’t tell me what to do! Don’t make me do what I don’t want to!” she shrieks.

Did
I make her do that?

Blood spurts out of Mana-ma, and once the blood—the reddest blood I’ve ever seen—leaves her body, it turns from scarlet to black. The dark oil rises, covering Mana-ma’s corpse, and then the figure collapses into a puddle. It reminds me uncomfortably of the spread of blood of the crime scene recreation.

The scalpel is still in Mia’s hands. I hold up my own hands, spread wide, to look unthreatening. “No, I’m not part of the Zeal,” I say. “They couldn’t pull you out, so I took a small dose and came in.”

Mia shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can believe that. They all say they’re real when they’re not. Either way, you shouldn’t have come. You’re too innocent for the Zealscape. Especially mine.” Her face creases in a grin, and I take another step away. She is utterly transformed from the woman who took us in just after the surgery, when we were weak as kittens and just as innocent in the ways of the world. I remember the way she pushed my hair back from my face, kissed my forehead goodnight. She took us to museums on weekends, patiently explaining so many things to us that we didn’t understand. Mia, my second mother in many ways, is looking at me like she wants nothing more than to stick that scalpel in my eye.

She shakes her head again, mystified. “Can’t believe a girl who escaped the Hearth would ever step foot somewhere where they mess with your brain. Didn’t you have enough?”

“Didn’t you?” I counter.

That same sly grin. A gesture at where Mana-ma’s corpse had been. “Do you really think I actually escaped the Hearth? It’s always here.” She taps her temple, and then considers me. “Maybe it’s still in you, too.”

My breath hitches. I don’t want to talk about the Hearth. “Tila’s in prison. She’s been accused of murder.”

That penetrates through her Zeal-fog. “Out there?”

“Yes. Real murder. I’m trying to prove she didn’t do it.”

I have to cling to the hope that she didn’t do it, even if the crime scene re-creation left so little room for doubt.

“So why come here?” Mia asks.

“She … wrote your name at the crime scene. She led me straight to you. You tell me why, because I have no idea.”

She shrugs, the scalpel flashing in the light. “Don’t know.”

Even in this twisted dream world, I know she’s lying. I can’t read her as well as Tila, but we still lived with her for years. I heard her, thrashing in the dark, on the other side of our bedroom wall, unable to forget the Hearth when she closed her eyes. She never told us about her dreams, tried to hide them as long as she could as we adjusted to our new, separate lives. It was because of Mia that Tila and I became halfway productive members of society just before she ceased to be one herself.

“Bullshit,” I say.

She cocks her head, but she’s unnerved. Her eyes dart to the side, the tip of her tongue snaking over her dry lips.

“Why did she really send me to you?” I ask. Outside the strange rain grows heavier, thrumming against the window. A flash of green lightning casts Mia in a sickly glow, making her look for a moment like the drug addict she is in the real world.

The black oil bubbles and rises, molding into a new figure.

It’s Tila.

She’s wearing her favorite dress, green like the otherworldly lightning outside, or snake scales. She looks at me and holds out her arm.

“T,” she calls. I can feel the steady thump of my mechanical heart beneath my metal breastbone.

“This isn’t mine.” Mia’s voice is harsh. “You’re affecting my dream world now. With your own memories and fears.”

“How? I don’t feel like I’m doing anything.” Shared people aren’t meant to be able to change the dreamscape much at all if someone has plugged in first. If it’s someone else’s dream, Zealscapes are meant to be like reading a script, or watching a film on a wallscreen, except with more sensory detail. I didn’t concentrate, like I did to have Mia pull the scalpel away. I’ve never experienced anything like this.

“Fuck if I know. I never share my dreams. I’m always here on my own.” She’s shifty, though, her shoulders hunched. She’s keeping something back. Mia holds out the scalpel. “Take this. Maybe you have to exorcise her.”

I can feel her fear spiraling from her, belying her blasé words. She doesn’t like that I’ve changed her dream, much as she didn’t like it when I caused her to pull the scalpel out of the Mana-ma apparition.

My fingers close around the blade, but I don’t harm Tila. How could I? How could Mia think that I would, even hopped up full of Zeal?

“Tell me why Tila sent me to you,” I say.

Mia rocks back on her heels, shaking her head. “Get rid of her first. You’re ruining it. This isn’t my
dream
!” Her last word rises to a shriek, the whole room tingeing red with her anger.

The anger infects me. It pulses through me, as insistent and inevitable as my mechanical heartbeat. Mia’s not giving me what I want. I need answers.

Tila’s apparition gazes at me impassively. I ignore it. The irrational anger bursts and I rush Mia instead, knocking her down. She feels almost insubstantial beneath my hands, as if I see her healthy self but feel the wasted version of her that’s plugged into the Chair. I hold the cold scalpel to her throat. Mia swallows, and the blade nicks her neck, a small trickle of blood running down the column of her throat to pool at the hollow of her clavicle.

“Tell me, or I’ll make both your dreams and your reality a living nightmare. I’m working with people who can make life very difficult for you.” It’s a half-bluff, but it’s the only card I have.

“You’re working with them, too?” she gasps. I press the scalpel slightly harder and she winces. I don’t understand how pain translates to her inert body on the gurney, but she’s scared, and that’s enough.

“Working with who?”

“The Ratel.”

“You’re working with
them
?” I ask, incredulous.

“N-no!” Her wide eyes dart to Tila’s apparition. “
Her
.”

“You think Tila was working with them? Tell me!” The anger still pulses through me, a roiling, dangerous thing. Have I ever been this furious?

“I didn’t mean to tell him,” Mia whispers. “I didn’t want to.”

“Tell who what?”

“About Tila. It’s my fault.” She begins to gasp, almost choking in the intensity of her sobs. I feel a twinge of pity for her, for who she used to be, but I squash it down as low as it’ll go. I press the scalpel slightly harder.

“Tila found something out, and I got scared and told him. He’d never have known. All for a steady supply of Verve. I fucking hate myself. I can never escape him. Never escape. Never.” After that she can’t say anything more, sobbing so much that she hiccups. The drug is also taking a stronger hold, the lucidity fading. Her back arches and her eyes roll up in her head.

“Stay with me, Mia!” I shake her. “How did they give you Verve?”

Her eyes half-focus, and she laughs maniacally. “God, you don’t get it, do you? This isn’t a Zealscape. Why do you think you could infect my dream and change things so easily? This is Verve.”

I rock back. If her Zeal has been spiked by Verve in this lounge, that means the Ratel have been there. Fuck. Fuck. Do they know? Are they coming for us, even now, for mine and Nazarin’s bodies, prone and helpless as newborns?

“Why did Tila send me to you, Mia?” I ask again. “Did Tila tell you anything? I need to know. If you care even a little for us, please,
please
tell me, or we’re both good as dead.”

“She found the link,” the figure of Tila says, twisting her torso back and forth, child-like, the green sequins on her dress twinkling. “The link that no one is to know. He is the red one, the fair one, the handsome one. From Earth, and now he goes back to the Earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.” My false sister laughs, high and insane. It’s almost exactly what Sal said Tila said in Zenith, just after he found her with Vuk’s body.

As I recall the crime scene, it starts to blossom around the figure of my sister. Blood seeps up from the floorboards, the coffee table grows like a mushroom, the broken glass scatters. The colors are so bright and saturated, the real world seems a pale echo. Tila reaches her hands up to cover her ears, rocking back and forth, her mouth open in a silent scream.

“This is you, too,” Mia whispers, watching it with awe.

“Go away!” I shout at the blood and glass. It stays, feeding on my anger.

Nothing happens. The anger and fear threaten to choke me.

I have to push them away.

I let out a breath and close my eyes. I try to let go of the urge for violence. I manage to find that small center for self Mana-ma always pushed us toward. I thrust all emotion away. Slowly, so slowly, the crime scene fades and disappears. I feel the briefest flash of triumph before I turn my attention to Mia. I no longer have the same desire to hurt her. Thank God.

“Tila’s words make no sense,” I tell her. False Tila quoted from the Bible, not Mana-ma’s Good Book. Once, that would have offended me. Now I grind my teeth in frustration, gripping Mia’s shoulder harder, until if this were reality she’d bruise.

“Who’s that man you were talking about?”

Mia starts to shudder. She’s taken control of her Vervescape again, but she’s unstable and it reflects in the world around us. The ground cracks and shudders. Lightning blasts outside the glass window. Thorned trees grow from the cracks in the concrete, slinking along the ground and up toward the ceiling. The trees bear fruit, but in horror, I realize they’re small humans, like thorny mandrakes. They reach their barbed hands toward us, dark mouths open in silent screams. Little red lights pulse from the bottoms of their throats, as red as Mia’s anger. I try to push them back, but they’re too strong.

The scalpel disappears from my hand, and Mia wriggles away from my grasp. False Tila is trapped by looping roots. She twists and turns, trying to free herself.

“Taema!” Her eyes bore right into me, and I can’t help but think that she is my actual sister, here somehow in this nightmare.

The demons grasp Tila, their wooden roots digging into her flesh. Black blood seeps from her wounds. Next to me, Mia cackles. She’s euphoric, fully caught in the throes of the drug.

I struggle on the floor to free my sister—even though rationally I know she’s not real, I can’t leave her. My hands are soon slick with dark blood. Mia attacks the mandrake-demons, plunging knives deep into their bellies until the lights in their throats go out.

The faces of the figures are changing and with a sickening drop of my stomach, I realize that many of them are the faces of the men and women from Mana’s Hearth.
Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.
Is this what Mia meant? She still hates so many people there, all these years later. She never told us why she left the Hearth, and it was never spoken of while we were growing up in the redwood grove. We’d thought it rude to ask.

I’ve seen the darkness that threatened to overwhelm Mia, as she tried to escape Zeal only for its tendrils to delve deep into her again. Now Verve has her in its grasp, and it’s worse. Will she wake up, angry and enraged, still thirsting for blood?

Clutching the facsimile of my twin, I can’t help but fear that maybe I missed the darkness in her, too. Or in myself, because aren’t we the same?

Mia comes back to herself, just a little. “You should thank your sister.”

“Why?”

“She’s protecting you. Or trying to.”

“I don’t need protecting.” Even though it’s a dream, my body reacts as it would in the real world. My ears feel like I’m going through a tunnel at high speed, and my vision darkens to a little point. I am filled with more rage than I’ve ever felt. I want to hurt Mia with that same, shocking intensity I felt before. My sister came to her, confided in her, and Mia ratted her out to someone. If it’s the Ratel, then my cover is blown before it’s even begun. If it’s not the Ratel, then we have someone else to worry about. Perhaps it was Vuk, and that’s why my sister killed him. To keep him silent.