The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (40 page)

When I lost track of her
.

Oh no.

The thought had yanked itself free of the swirl in my head. And now more.

I was supposed to be watching her, but she ran off. She loved to run off. She . . .

I looked at Leech. I didn’t want to, couldn’t . . .

But suddenly it was there.

“She’s my sister.”

MOM HAS TAKEN US TO SEE THE AFTERMATH.

The dream washed over me, no, the
memory
, the one that had been sticking in my head the whole time, the one that had been turning itself over and over in my dreams . . . taking other information and wrapping it together, collaging, trying to show me this, the truth, and now it wiped out the world and I lost track of myself and everything as the storm of understanding raged.

Mom takes us up to the ledges the morning after the Three-Year Fire, to see the smoking caldera, to see the oceans of ash and the charred trees that look like dark guardians. The sky is a swirl of turbulent clouds, and the ash and the sky seem to be one. It is so different from the night before, when the flames and the dark scared me. Mom thought it might be scary and that’s why we didn’t wake up Elissa, Elissa who is only three. But today it is safe and so she has come along because Dad is at work
.

We are up there, and Mom spies a friend. Elissa is just playing with some pebbles, sitting peacefully, and Mom tells me to keep an eye on her. She goes over to talk. Elissa is busy drawing happy faces in the ash with her finger, the faces with little S-curves of hair off each side. She always draws herself. I can’t help gazing out over the ashscape and I catch a glimpse of something moving down on the gray. It’s a little vole, padding along, leaving a faint trail of footprints and tail in the soft gray-white blanket, and I think that it’s amazing that this creature has survived the night, and now here it is surveying its new home, not oohing and aahing or moaning for the loss of what it once knew like we humans always do, but getting down to the business of what is now
.

I watch its nose swishing along—

But then my mom is screaming OWEN! and I see her running toward me, her face wild with panic, and I spin, because I know in an instant. Elissa is gone
.

Where?

The trail, the one that zigzags in switchbacks from the ledge down to the flats. And I look down it and there is a flash of white pajamas, the ones with the little frogs that she would not change out of this morning, putting up a huge fight until Mom finally gave in and just put her boots on with the PJs, and all I see is a glimpse of them because Elissa has fallen into the ash, into what we’d later call a sucker hole, where the ash blanketed a crosshatch of burned logs, concealing a hollow space beneath
.

We run down. Elissa’s shoulder and arm are visible. She is wedged sideways between logs, and some of the black cinders still have glowing red underbellies. They crackle and hiss, and down here the world is blurred by updrafts of heat. This hole that Elissa has opened is a chamber of leftover anger. The black smoke plumes up and there is no way she has air in there. No way
.

Mom lunges for her but her step crushes into the hole, too, and she sinks up to her waist and she will have bands of burn around her leg that don’t heal, even years later
.

—She never left—

Memories flashed in concussions.

Adults swarm and drag Mom out and then a chain of people are able to grab Elissa by the arm and when they pull her out, we see the singe marks on her pajamas, the ash streaks on her face, and the puffy awfulness of her eyes and nose and throat, all locked up in desperate defense. We can’t get her free because her arm is stuck, and finally it gives and something pops free and we see that Elissa’s hand is still gripping her plush crocodile. Mr. Teeth, she called it, and it has lost a leg to the sucker hole, and is singed black, too, but what is important is that she has survived . . .

Mostly. We will learn in the next few days that her lungs are scalded and will never be normal again. She will need nebulizer packs and a rebreather, just like her father—

—Not just your father sitting on the couch during the Federation soccer games, Elissa is there, too, both of them coughing, all of you eating pizza. Mom is there as well, Mom who never actually left—

Mom and Elissa filling back into my memories, as if they had been erased, the images I thought were real actually scrubbed, made incomplete.
Elissa, Mom . . .

“There, there, honey,” a voice said from somewhere far out on the surface.

Mom . . .

Elissa does okay and most days are fine, but when the black blood plague comes nine years later, she succumbs early and severely. Her lungs are too weak. I can fight it, I am older, and I survive long enough for the World Health team to arrive. Arriving, too, is a team from EdenCorp. All attempts to save Elissa are too late. And I have it bad, too, very bad, in a bed, wracked with fever, Mom bending beside me, comforting me
.

I felt the thumb press against my cheek. I looked up. Mom was standing beside me and she began to inscribe the clockwise circle.

But still more . . .

The circle being inscribed, by my mother. She sits beside my bed. I look down and see that I am in a gown, and all my veins are clogged with the black sludge of plague. All efforts have been exhausted—

—your scar is not from a hernia, it’s from removing your spleen, because of the plague, and since you were already open there, the incision could be used again to install the cryo monitors and tubing, you know it, you know it—

I am dying, they tell me. It is only a matter of time, but there is a possible solution. I have been offered an opportunity, to sleep for now, to be cured later, and I have been assured by the man at the foot of the bed that I will wake up intact. His name is Paul, a man with kind eyes—before his circuits and glasses. “You will still be YOU,” he says, “only better. Cured. And there is a special future that awaits you.”

By the door my dad still doesn’t understand quite why they are offering to do this and Paul says, “Because Owen is special, and it is either this or death.” A terrible choice, Dad will lose his son either way. He has already lost his daughter, but at least I will live
.

And so Dad leans over my bed and rubs a hand on my sweaty forehead and back through my hair, and he coughs because the emotions are making him well up and that is making his breathing bad. In a hoarse whisper he says, “Good-bye, Owen. I love you, Son. You’ll be okay.”

I nod but can’t speak—my lungs drowned
.

And Mom presses the circle inscription in my cheek and says it will be okay. Sitting there beside me, she smiles through teary eyes and says, “Don’t worry, Owen. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry.”

Beside me now.

“Mom’s here.”

I blinked and swam out of it, out of the storm of memories, back to the pod and the girl, the black-veined girl, my sister Elissa lying dead and preserved, in a bed of white.

The circle completed on my cheek, Mom’s hand moved and rubbed my back. “I’m sure this is hard. But I want you to know it was never our intention.”

“What?” I whispered. Looking at the curves of eyelids and lashes, dusted with glowing frost. Elissa. Elissa who hated when I stole the Spam slices from her pizza . . .

“You were never supposed to see this.”

I wrenched my eyes free of Elissa. I looked across the pod to where Leech was staring hard at me.

I caught a glimpse of metal. Turned left.

To see the gun pointing at Leech.

To see my mother holding the gun.

But the memories in my mind, the re-formed, unerased truths had shown me something more.

“You’re not my mother,” I said weakly, “are you?”

“AREN’T I?” SAID MOM.

But, no.

She wasn’t. Whoever she was, she’d learned my history, learned my mother’s mannerisms, and I’d believed that she was, but . . . no. I could see my old mother now, my real mother, sitting by my bedside long ago, who’d been replaced in some memories and removed from others. Another woman from another time . . .

Another time.

The gaps were filling in, memories unlost: afternoons at school, nights when Dad worked late, and the truths that I had believed, taken as fact:
You never had a sister, your mom left when you were seven. . . .
They fluttered in the rafters of my mind like ghosts that had been exorcised and were still shrieking but powerless. I had a sister. I had a mom. I lived a life in Hub and they had been there, too.

And even more. All these memories, real or fake or somewhere in between, they had all occurred not just a few years ago, but—What did Leech say?—the dates. The fire, in 2052, the black blood in 2061, and since then, for twenty-five years . . .

I’d been in Cryo. Which meant my dad . . . my real mom . . . what had become of them? Were they even still alive? And all my memories of them . . . were they real or fake?

Victoria had called it selective manipulation.

They could change your memories, alter them to suit their needs
, Seven had said.

But not all my memories had yielded. The one terrible scene of Elissa falling into the sucker hole had lingered, stapled to my consciousness as . . . my cryo dream. The last thing I’d been thinking about, way back then, knowing my sister had died but that I would be saved, the guilt, the sense of failure, it made an unerasable mark that no manipulation could fully remove. And it had maybe even made me: the camp Owen who was weak, tentative, unsure of himself . . . How much of that was the effect of decades in Cryo seeing that devastating dream over and over?

“Who are you?” I asked the woman beside me. She was dressed all in black now, with thick boots.

“Her name is Francine.” The voice boomed throughout the cryo complex.

Paul’s voice.

“Sounds like Emiliano has uploaded the new operating system,” said Francine, glancing back toward the reception area where we’d entered.

Behind Leech, the screen on the nearest control terminal flickered to life. All of them were turning on throughout the complex. Paul’s face appeared on every one, a hundred Pauls in all directions. He was smiling, and he’d taken his glasses off, his electric eyes sparking. One was still brilliant blue, but the other, where Lilly had hit him with the skull, was now flickering in pale white. He wore a headset and seemed to be sitting in a cockpit. One of the copters.

“Hello, Owen, Carey. This wasn’t quite the plan,” said Paul. “We were going to get you at tonight’s festival, but here we are and as it turns out, I like this much better. Carey, I’m impressed. You picked up on much more than I thought you had these last couple years.”

Leech was looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d believe me before now. You didn’t trust me, so I wanted to have some proof before I told you. . . .”

I almost screamed at him, but I fought the urge because he was right. If he’d tried to tell me this without showing me, I never would have believed him. I barely knew if I believed him now. Except I did.

“And, Owen,” said Paul, “Francine may not technically be your mother, but she did spend many, many hours with you while you were in Cryo in EdenWest. She was one of my lead team doctors. We’d float you up to near consciousness every now and then so you could get to know her, hear her voice and feel her touch, so that she could imprint on you.” I saw vague memories of this, now, of Francine beside me in a white coat as other doctors fluttered around, monitoring me and running tests. My technicians . . . had that idea come from the cryo lab workers? All these things . . .

“Naturally, to do this, we had to remove your more recent memories of your mother, and then build an emotional barrier to them coming back: That’s why we implanted the idea that she left you. Then we replaced your real mom with Francine in your younger memories. That was all relatively easy tinkering.

“As for Elissa,” said Paul, “the thing about selective manipulation is that the brain can be very stubborn. It holds on to certain keys, like the locks to rooms of memory. You can’t remember everything all the time, after all. We found that there was no way to effectively replace your mother without also removing your sister. She was your key, the central thought to your whole batch of childhood memories. She colored everything, likely because of the guilt you felt for her condition and her eventual death. So removing her was essential for scrubbing away the other things that we needed to remove. And we freed you of some terrible heartache in the process.

“It took a lot of trial and error, but we had plenty of time to get it just right, before we woke you up and placed you on the Mag Train heading to Camp. Do you remember waking from a nap just before arriving at EdenWest? That was a very long nap.”

I couldn’t listen to this. Couldn’t . . . All my ideas about my mom . . . how I saw my life as before and after she left, the idea like some jagged, snaking wall through my mind . . . It had all been fake.