Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) (24 page)

Julian must notice my change in mood, because he brushes my hair back over my ear with his fingers in a gesture that’s probably meant to be comforting. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it? I didn’t want to tell you . . . but you forced my hand.”

“You should have told me back at my hive,” I say.

“No, I couldn’t. You wouldn’t have come with me. We needed you.
I
needed you.” He takes my hand and rubs semicircles in my palm. “I still do.”

I don’t even have enough will left to tear my hand away. “Oh, don’t start that again.” A weak protest, but he retreats.

We stand there in silence. For the first time in forever, I have no idea what I want to do. Would I be better off fleeing with Julian and then ditching him the first chance I get? Going back to the rebels so I can at least make sure Virginia is safe? If I stay in a hive, chances are I’ll be picked up by the Morati and infected with the rage virus. I may be emptied out, but I couldn’t stand to be filled with that.

“If we do go on the run,” I say, musing aloud, “won’t Eli be able to find me again, because he’s touched me? We wouldn’t get very far.”

Julian snorts. “Well, first of all, a far more important
basis for finding people is a deep connection and mutual affection. Like a long-standing friendship, familial bonds, or a committed romance. Eli touched you, yes. But you barely know each other. His power to find you will fade over time.”

“But what if it doesn’t fade fast enough? Eli could be looking for me right now, and he’s found me before.”

“They all likely headed to rebel headquarters, which is across the isolation plains. We’re still on the other side, so Eli can’t reach you because of the fog interference.” Julian moves toward the door. “But whatever we do, we shouldn’t stay here. It’ll help to get some distance between us and them, at least while we figure out a new plan.”

“Yeah, okay,” I tell him, materializing a hair band and pulling my hair back into a ponytail. I follow him, ready to run.

Julian peeks out the door, and then jumps back, knocking into me. “Change of plans,” he says as he whirls around to face me, his eyes huge. “We are going to have to go through the isolation plains.”

“What do you mean?” I thought he just said we shouldn’t go that way if we want to avoid the rebels.

“An army of the infected is out there, and that means some of the Morati are probably with them.” He grabs my shoulders. “Stay close to me. Don’t look behind you.”

Julian slips out of the hive and flattens himself against its cracking wall. I do the same. We advance quickly toward the fog, picking our way through debris as we try to stay
out of sight. I think I hear hissing behind me, but I keep my sights ahead, pushing down my panic.

At the border to the isolation plains, Julian takes my hand. The fog is denser than before. I can see nothing, and if it weren’t for Julian’s fingers curled around mine, I might think I have ceased to exist. The fog howls my name over and over until I want to claw all consciousness from my head and forget who I am. But Julian pulls me steadily, and guides me to the other side.

The fog has invaded my throat, and I choke it out with a cough. As we run through the isolation plains, Julian holds on to me tightly. He probably thinks I’ll try to save Beckah again, but I know now she’s a lost cause. I say a little prayer for her when we pass by her mini-hive, and I silently beg for her forgiveness for not being able to help.

Gradually the white moss grows deeper and thicker, shin deep, knee deep, until it’s like a morass around my thighs. I imagine sinking into it, suffocating.

“Don’t worry—this is the deepest point,” assures Julian. “We’ve almost made it.”

We reach a steep incline and climb up, and when I look back to survey the plains behind us, I stub my toe. Have I accidentally walked into one of the tomblike hives?

No, it’s not a hive but a low wall surrounding a fountain. The clearest, most inviting blue water I’ve ever seen gurgles out of it, and my heart fills with the desire to submerge myself in its depths. As if in a trance, I pull out of Julian’s grasp, but he catches me before I can dive in.

“No! That’s the Lethe fountain.” He twists me around to face him and shakes my shoulders. “If you drink of it, you will forget yourself forever.”

Maybe that’s what I want. Finally I am getting a chance to let everything go and to swim in eternal bliss. Before Neil, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. And now? I wrestle with myself. There’s the part of me that begs for release. Beckah’s all but gone. Virginia’s probably captured. Neil is lost to me. Who’s left but Julian? And he’s merely someone who thinks obsession equals love. Then there’s also the part that assures me I’m strong, that giving up is not an option.

“Let me make my own choice, Julian.”

He looks at me, his eyes pleading, but he lets me go.

I kneel beside the wall and reach out the fingers of my right hand to the water, skimming over its turquoise surface, and breathe in the fine mist. It’s heavenly, so much so that my thoughts begin to float away like soap bubbles on a breeze. I lean in, closer and closer, until the tip of my nose is submerged in the warm pool, until my lips touch liquid, parting to let my tongue taste sweet release from all my pain.

But before I can take a sip, I picture Neil and think of his unwavering belief that our trials shape who we are and make us stronger. Yes, I’ve lost him. But I don’t have to lose myself.

Gasping, I pull back and collapse at Julian’s feet.

“You passed the test,” he says simply as he helps me up and pulls me into a hug. There’s not a trace of passion in it,
just relief, and I burrow my head into his chest.

I almost threw myself away. But I didn’t, and now I know I never could.

After the fountain we cross through the northern border of the fog, and this time its cries barely register. Then we’re back among the hives. This quadrant has more damage, more crumbled hives, and more debris to climb over and avoid.

“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I think our only chance for survival at this point is to go to rebel headquarters like we originally planned,” says Julian as we run. “I’ve seen the army—and if we stay on our own, we’re going to be swept away.”

As much as I dread seeing Eli—being used by Eli—it’s still the best option to join the rebels against the Morati. The two rage-infected drones were threatening enough; I can’t imagine facing a whole army by ourselves. “I agree.”

Julian trots over to a nearby hive, still completely intact, and signals for me to follow. He taps the code, and we’re in. “Let’s take a tactical break. You toughen yourself up with the most horrible memory you can think of, and I’ll work on contacting Mira and Eli to see what they know.”

Fortunately, this hive is only about three-fourths full, giving me plenty of berths to choose from.

I need to be as strong as possible for our reunion with the rebels. It’s time to face the memory I most dread, the one that scares me even more than reliving my own death. I take comfort in telling myself that I don’t have to go all in.
I can fight to float above, like I did when I fixed my damaged campfire memory with Neil and inserted myself into Virginia’s Ouija board memory. I place my fingers in the grooves, lighting up the screen, and then go in.

Ward, Felicia. Memory #31666

Tags: Germany, Autumn, Nightmare, Myanmar

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I’m Felicia, but I’m not. I’m her shadow twin, inexorably connected to her but physically detached. As much as I yearn to, I can’t change the ending of this story. I can’t whisper into her ear and tell her to make different choices—and even if I could somehow manipulate the memory, it wouldn’t change what really happened. For I am a mere observer, and what she is about to experience for the first time is set in stone.

She’s upset, or, better said, livid. Events of the past few weeks have had her simmering, and her latest setback—a meeting with Mr. Bennett where he kicked her out of his advanced writing seminar and asked Autumn to join instead—has finally caused her to boil over. It’s lunchtime. She has classes yet to attend. Tests yet to take. But she can’t breathe in the air of this school for one more second. She needs to escape.

We’re on the bus now. Felicia is officially skipping for
the first time in her life. Her nostrils flare as she jabs her pen into the hideous fabric seat cover she’s sitting on. Defacing public property. Add it to her growing list of crimes.

The consulate housing complex seems different this time of day. Most everyone she knows is at work, or school. The playground is booming. Shouts and squeals of happy toddlers worm their way into her consciousness, but she pushes them back. Shuts them out. Misery wants company, not a painful reminder that other people’s lives are happy and uncomplicated.

Slamming her way into the apartment, Felicia wants nothing more than to strip off her clothes and stand for hours under scalding hot water. But that is not to be. Because when she enters her bedroom, she’s greeted by the most gruesome sight she can imagine, and at first she thinks it must be some sort of sick joke Autumn is playing to get back at her.

But the stench. That’s what finally convinces her that what she’s seeing is real. Autumn is dead, lying spread-eagle on Felicia’s bed, her mouth open, her eyes empty. She’s crisscrossed with deep slashes that have bled crimson onto her once white tank and shorts, and Felicia’s once white bedspread. Autumn is not going to get up ever again. Not to yell at her. Certainly not to forgive her.

Felicia’s eyes grow huge with that realization, and time seems to slow, to shift. She has the sensation of weightlessness, the feeling that the atoms that make up her body could separate and scatter at any moment. She recognizes this
state of mind. It’s what she felt in Nairobi that day when the muggers attacked her. And her nightmare begins, the same nightmare she had in Nairobi and ever since then.

Light surrounds her, crushes her as it invades her pores, blinding her with its brightness. It’s ice. It’s terror. It’s pain. And then he appears. She can’t yet see his face, just the soft curve of his cheek, shaggy blond hair, broad back, slim hips, strong legs. She gasps. Because she didn’t know who he was back then, when she was at the cusp of thirteen. But she realizes she knows him quite well now. She has tangled her fingers in that hair, dug her fingernails into that back.

He turns then, his dark blue eyes flashing, his generous lips curving into a hard smile. “Time to go,” he says.

She screams. She’s huddled on the floor of her bedroom, heart pounding wildly. Why is Julian in her nightmare?

She can make even less sense of Autumn’s death. She risks a closer look, sees the bloodied blades that made these cuts scattered across the bed. On the floor. Did Autumn do this to herself? Is it all Felicia’s fault? Or was Autumn murdered? But why? She has no answers.

Felicia backs away from the bed, her mind a tangle of half-coherent thoughts. Her home is no longer safe. There could be a murderer on the loose, one who is not done killing. Or will the police think that Felicia murdered Autumn? Nicole can testify about the whole nasty incident that happened on Halloween night. The horrible things Felicia and Autumn shouted at each other afterward in the hallways at school. They’ll say Felicia had motive. No one
will believe her side of the story. She can’t stick around and blindly hope they’ll understand. She needs to go to her dad. Where is he? Myanmar? Yes, that’s it. She needs to go to him. Right now. Before they come, before they look at her with accusing eyes and put her name on a list that prevents her from crossing borders. She’s savvy about these things. She knows how they work.

Like a robot Felicia pulls a rolling suitcase out of her closet and throws some random clothes into it. Her passport. Some tiny shampoo bottles branded with the name of a hotel chain. She can’t wash Autumn’s blood out of her mind, but at least she’ll have clean hair.

She grabs her laptop and the suitcase and stumbles through the living room and into the kitchen in a haze. She pulls the note off the fridge with Dad’s contact details in Myanmar. She knows he’s the only one who can make things all right. He’ll believe her. He’ll support her. He’ll tell the police it wasn’t her fault.

She has to buy a plane ticket, but how? Mother froze her credit card as part of her grounding. The TransAsiatic Airlines VPN. She pulls it up. She knows it’s illegal, but she’s desperate. She uses the password-cracking program Julian left on her laptop. Julian told her no one would know. No one would care. This is an emergency. There’s no time for second-guessing. Once she’s in, she hacks herself a seat in coach for the flight taking off in two hours. If she leaves now, she can make it.

She raids her mother’s emergency cash stash. Two
hundred in U.S. dollars, three hundred in euros. It’s not a lot, but it will have to do. Then she calls a cab, waits for it impatiently on the main street outside the housing complex. When the chatty cabdriver asks her questions about America, she answers him in monosyllables. He soon gives up and puts in a CD of Bollywood hits.

At check-in Felicia realizes she brought her diplomatic passport instead of her tourist passport. She’s sure Myanmar grants tourist visas at the border, but she’s not so sure about diplomatic visas. It’s another concern on a long list of them. At each step along the way—passport control, boarding, the fourteen-hour flight to Bangkok, and the transfer to the smaller plane that will take her to Yangon—Felicia fears being outed as a criminal. Can they hear her racing heartbeat? Smell her guilt? My shadow self, the one who knows the bitter climax of this story, can do nothing but let myself be pulled along.

It’s upon us. The moment of truth. The immigration officer in the diplomatic line at Yangon airport scrutinizes Felicia’s passport. He calls a colleague, and they confer in harsh tones, in a language Felicia has no hope of understanding. Minutes seem to stretch into infinity as she waits for a verdict to be handed down. Finally the officer tells her to follow him. He shuts her in a stifling hot, windowless room with two plastic chairs and a small table.