When We Wake (2 page)

“Right.”

So the satchel was holding the lock picks and the collapsible
crowbar, and probably a couple of flashlights, too. Alex’s version of exploring meant breaking into abandoned buildings, underground tunnels, and the occasional construction site, ferreting out the secrets of the city. It was a great way to spend a few hours, and not something I thought my mother ever needed to know about.

It was nearly midday, and we were flagging in the heat. Like most 2027 Australians who weren’t sun-loving beach bunnies, we tried to avoid the outdoors between eleven and three in the hotter months, when it seemed as if the sun was maliciously beaming right through the hole in the ozone layer and setting us aflame. I was slathered in a thick layer of SPF 70 sunscreen and wearing dark sunnies and a big floppy hat, and with all that, I knew my nose would still be redder by the end of the afternoon.

But the Prime Minister was meeting the petitioners on the steps of Parliament House at noon, so our sun-shunning habits had to adjust to her schedule.

My pocket beeped. My heart jumped.

“Dalmaaaaaaaar,” Alex cooed.

“If you do that when he’s here,” I warned, and fished out my phone. She was right, of course; the message was from him.

TRAIN DELAYED, TEN MINS LATE XXX

It was a perfectly ordinary message that he could have sent the day before yesterday, or any time in the three years we’d
been friends instead of my big brother’s preachy best friend/best friend’s annoying little sister.

Except for that postscript of kisses.

For once, the flush in my cheeks owed nothing to the sun. I ducked my head under my hat and silently thanked Alex for her mercy as she pretended not to notice a thing.

Not that it mattered. When Dalmar stepped off the train and met us on the platform, I think the whole world could have seen how I felt. But for me, the rest of the world wasn’t there. Just Dalmar, with his easy stride and wide smile.

I know Alex was talking, but I can’t remember a word. I’ve tried, I really have, but it’s all just buzzing.

He leaned into me, and we touched fingertips. It was a game we’d come up with the night before, finding how little we could touch and still be in contact. We were seeing who could hold out longer, but eventually he gave in and held my hand. He had bass-player calluses. He’d built them up fingering those thick strings, and now they were rough, stroking down the side of my little finger. Nothing in the world had ever felt that good.

“I missed you,” he said, relieving me of the placards.

“I missed you, too,” I replied, and leaned my head against his free shoulder.

A narrow hand landed in the small of my back and shoved. It was Alex, her other hand on Dalmar’s back. “We’ve got to catch a train, lovebirds,” she grunted. “Next platform, move move move.”

Dalmar laughed. “You should be a general, Alex.”

“No way, man. Make love, not war.” She darted up the escalators before us, multicolored curls bouncing on her shoulders.

We made it to the platform in time to catch the train to Parliament Station. The car was full of people dressed in Earth Punk fusion; I felt completely underdressed and sweaty in my shorts jumpsuit with a nonmatching long-sleeved cotton bolero thrown on at the last second to try to stop my arms from burning. Dalmar, with his orange safety vest catching the lights in the car, and Alex, with the badges on her protest uniform, fit right in. The train car was loud with debate.

I caught a glimpse of the golden statue of the goddess Mazu, who watched over the shallow remnants of the Maribyrnong River that dribbled by the Buddhist temple. She might bring us good luck today. Mazu was the protector of the sea, after all, and rising oceans were probably one of her concerns.

But I wasn’t Buddhist. Instead, I silently asked the Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea, to intercede on our behalf.

Prayer concluded, I let the train’s motion sway me against Dalmar where he stood braced against the yellow pole. “I wrote you a song,” I whispered in his ear, resisting the urge to kiss his earlobe.

“Really?” He slipped his hand from mine and draped it over my shoulder, pulling me close.

“I’ll play it for you tonight,” I promised. “Just so you know, nothing good rhymes with
Dalmar
.”

“Far. Car. Tar. Star. Bizarre?”

“Help!” I sang, making up the lyrics as I went along. “I need
Dalmar. Help! He’s so bizarre. Help, you know I need Dalmaaaar. Help!”

“You and your Beatles,” Alex said.

“Best musicians of their century,” I said, as I had many times before. “And ours. And all the centuries to come.”

“Let’s make sure the species
has
centuries to come,” Dalmar said.

As the train jerked to a stop, we stepped out together, into the future.

I don’t remember if it hurt.

There are questions I get asked a lot, in therapy, at school, and even at the compound, when the girls loosened up enough to talk to me.
What do you remember? What did you see? How did it feel?

I’ll tell you the whole story. Even the embarrassing parts, even the bits where I behave like an enormous loser.

But I can’t tell you if there was any pain.

The truth is, it all stops with us pouring out of Parliament Station and up the steep steps, with Dalmar’s arm around my shoulders and Alex grinning at how cozy we were together. I was thinking of finding a quiet place to kiss Dalmar, and wondering whether Alex could be talked into letting me do some free-running practice before we broke into whatever abandoned hulk she wanted to explore. I was thinking about whether Owen might bring me something back from Tasmania,
and if Mum might be whipping up my favorite raspberry macarons, and if Dad would be proud of what I was doing today.

And then it all stops. The final memory of my first life is a freeze-frame of me leaning against Dalmar on the way up the steps.

But when Marie thought I was ready, I saw the same footage everyone else did.

It’s awful phone video, not even a real camera. Nothing like the superclear footage you guys have of everything now. But you can still make it out easily enough if you know what to look for.

There’s the Prime Minister in a blue skirt suit standing under a shady canopy, speaking to the protesters, saying pretty things that aren’t quite promises. There’s the dark-haired girl high on the steps, just visible in the corner of the screen. There she is, falling down. There are screams as the crowd starts to realize what’s happened, and someone shouts, “It’s a sniper!” and then the camera turns to the sidewalk as the unknown videographer runs away.

Memory loss is a perfectly normal trauma reaction, Marie says, but it still feels weird. Watching that footage doesn’t spark a thing. It could be a perfect stranger dying on the steps of Parliament House.

But it was me.

I woke up one hundred years later.

And then things really went to hell.

There was light in my eyes and soft murmuring at the edge of my hearing, like a radio cycling through stations. Bits of the conversation became clear, then faded out again.

“—activity indicates conscious interaction—”

“—report to General—”

“—my patient. I’ll talk—”

“—press conference in—”

The noise went away altogether, and the light brightened. I tried to blink it away.

Eyelids. I had eyelids, and a face, and a neck and a chest. I tried to sit up, my hands flailing weakly at something soft. I felt like a fish out of water, flopping and struggling to breathe. Once, when he was home on leave, Dad took me fishing, and I
caught one, and then I screamed and screamed when I realized the fish would die.

“It’s all right,” a voice soothed. A woman’s voice, I thought, with a faint accent I couldn’t place. “You’ve been sedated. It’s wearing off.”

“Can’t see,” I choked. “Only light.”

“Your vision should clear soon. My name is Dr. Carmen. Do you remember your name?”

Did I? “Tegan,” I said, relieved. “Tegan Oglietti. What happened?”

“Your date of birth, Tegan?”

“December 17, 2010.”

There was a slight pause, then, “And today’s date?”

“Ummm. September 23. Did I miss the rally? Where’re Dalmar and Alex?”

“We’ll get to that in a moment,” Dr. Carmen said. “For now, I just want to check on you. Your communication centers and memory seem fine. That’s very good!”

Something stung my toes. I kicked automatically.

“And you’ve got good nervous responses. Can you feel this?”

The stinger hit my ankle. “Yes! Stop it!”

“Don’t panic, Tegan. It’s okay. Please say yes every time you feel something.”

I obeyed as the stinger moved up my body, down both arms, and finished between my eyebrows. The steady motion-and-response calmed me down; it also gave me time to think.

“Am I in a hospital?” I asked tremulously. “Is my mum here?”
A shadow passed through the light, and I blinked harder. “I see something!”

The shadow paused, hovering in the middle of my vision. “Keep blinking,” she advised, and I did until the shadow resolved itself into a blurry face. I could make out dark, short hair and pale skin and not much else.

“I can see you,” I said. “But not very clearly.”

“It might take a little while for full vision to return,” Dr. Carmen said. “But your responses are great, Tegan.”

“What happened?” I asked again, with more force. It hadn’t escaped me that she hadn’t answered any of my questions.

Her face moved to one side and then down. She’d sat down next to the bed, I figured after a moment. Her accent was weird—like a little touch of American mixed into a normal Australian accent.

“Tegan, I’m afraid I have bad news,” she said, and my stomach tightened into a knot. There’d been an accident. Someone had set off a bomb. There’d been an earthquake.

“This is going to be very hard for you to hear, but I want you to listen to as much as you can. Do you remember going to the rally?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “We were on the way. Who’s dead?”

She ignored that, as she’d ignored the other questions. She was following a script, probably from a book called
How Soft-Voiced Doctors Break Bad News
, and she was going to stick to it, whatever I said.

“Well, a sniper was waiting to attack the Prime Minister. I’m afraid that—”

“Just tell me who’s dead!” I shouted. “Dalmar? Alex? Who did the sniper hit?”

There was a pause. “He hit you, Tegan,” she said very calmly. “The bullet tore through your heart, left lung, and right kidney. Bone fragmentation damaged most of your other internal organs.”

I sucked in a big gulp of air, and she hurried into the silence left by my shock.

“You were declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. But you’d signed up for the donation program, do you remember?”

The bright yellow cards declaring that in the event of my sudden death, I was donating my body to science. I’d signed up the day I turned sixteen, with my mother’s proud signature on the form. It could mean giving up my eyes, my skin, my kidneys to someone who could use them better. Or it could mean being used for experimentation or dissection by med students who needed corpses to study. It wasn’t as if it would matter to me once I was dead. My soul would go to heaven, so my body might as well be of use to someone.

But none of those things had happened, right? Because I was here, wherever here was.

“I remember,” I whispered. “I was dead? I died? But I’m here!” This couldn’t possibly be heaven.

“Legally, technically, yes, you died. But as you say, you’re here. Most of your organs were too hurt to be donated, but your brain and spine were undamaged, and you were moved to the hospital within minutes. You were a perfect candidate for a new treatment. A cryonic treatment. Do you know what cryonics is?”

“Freezing dead people,” I said automatically. There had been some talk in the news about advancing techniques, but I hadn’t known they’d actually gone ahead with experimentation.

“Exactly. So—”

“That’s what you did?” I gasped. “Where’s my
mum
?”

“You can think of it as being in a coma,” she said. More and more of her face was swimming into focus now. “A sort of frozen coma that lasted a long time.”

Dr. Carmen paused, waiting for the obvious question, but my mind was whirring, and I missed my cue.

“It’s 2128, Tegan,” she said. “I’m sorry, I know that must be difficult to hear. You’ve been in stasis for just over a century.”

It felt like running headfirst into a brick wall—a pain so huge it was hardly pain at all.

My vision hadn’t cleared enough to make out expressions yet, but Dr. Carmen’s voice was soothing. “Tegan, I realize that it won’t feel like it yet, but you’re a very lucky girl.”

“Shut up,” I told her.

She did, while I concentrated on breathing.

“I want to be alone,” I said, and prayed that she’d give in.

I had to get out of there. I had to find Dalmar and Alex. I had to get in touch with my family.

But most of all, I had to find out what was really going on.