Broken Mirror (2 page)

When Victor had visited the Class Two rancho in Carmichael, Granfa Jeff had pointed out all the innovations that had made it a kinder, gentler prison. The Class Twos held elections for a chief who advocated for better food and recreational opportunities. The library had been fully stocked. If someone could resign themselves to a slow, sad decline into catatonia, it wouldn’t be a bad place.

“Ten years he’s been locked up,” Ric said. “They caught him protesting the first Carmichael Law. One cheek swab later . . . He hasn’t been home since. I send him packages of black cardamom seeds every month.”

“Why those?” Victor asked.

Ric shrugged. “It’s the only thing he asks for. He doesn’t want me to visit. You’ve been to one?”

Victor nodded. “Once. When I went back to Carmichael after
—
after we moved away. My granfa helped set up the visit. They have a patient council with elections, but it still feels like a prison. And Mesh BioLoc transmitters are fused to their bones.”

Ric winced.

“Sorry I said that. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.”

Ric’s shoulders slumped. “I hope you’re right. See you next time.” He trotted back into the shop.

Victor reached into his pocket, pulled out his cigar-shaped MeshBit, and checked the timefeed
—
five minutes until his appointment.

***

Victor tried to jog on his walk home, but the Personil slowed him down. When he arrived, he climbed carefully in his car and drove along the east side of City Lake, turning onto a sinuous road that led up to Oak Knoll Hospital. He imagined Dr. Tammet’s sad eyes when he failed her tests. He didn’t care what the world thought of him, but he couldn’t stand a second of her disappointment.

On campus, Victor parked and hiked up the paved path to the hospital entrance, a glass facade between two towering, white concrete wings. The Personil blotted out everything except the doors in front of him.

When he approached, the two glass doors failed to slide open automatically.

He checked his MeshBit again. The timefeed read 11:07 a.m. He looked around. His car sat by itself, the parking lot otherwise empty. In his rush and his mind haze, he hadn’t noticed.

Heat suffused his cheeks. He should have realized something was wrong the second he pulled off the main road. At least a hundred cars should be in those spaces.

Victor paced in front of the entrance. His face smoldered like a piece of charcoal about to catch fire. He tried to pry the doors open, but they wouldn’t budge. The precision-cut edges held together seamlessly. There wasn’t even room to slide a slip of paper between them.

Victor felt the urge to vomit. If he couldn’t see Dr. Tammet, he would have to go without his therapy. Panic sliced through the Personil fog. A resonant episode grew more likely every second.

The world blazed sun-white as a shiver ran up his spine. He’d felt panic like this in Carmichael when he was four years old, locked in his house, crying at the sounds of explosions and screams outside, wondering if his parents would ever come home.

Victor also remembered Samuel Miller, whom he’d called the Man from Nightmareland, because his wide, shell-shocked eyes had appeared in Victor’s dreams many times during the weeks prior to the massacre. Samuel Miller had rampaged through Carmichael, stalking the town’s citizens and killing with a stunstick and explosive traps. Thanks to him and his preferred method of murder, “shocks” became a curse word in SeCa.

Victor had seen Samuel from his second-story window and froze with the curtain clutched in his hand as Samuel looked up. He’d held his breath until it felt like his ribs would break. Then Samuel had moved on to help more people “cross over.”

The resonance filled Victor like water gushing into a clogged bathtub. He pounded on the hospital doors and, straining to see inside, shielded his eyes with his hands. He could tell that the large atrium was bereft of people, an unlit gloom. Vidscreens above the information counter were dark.

When he stepped back, his reflection stared back at him.

A mess of hair. A mess of a day. A messed-up life.

Victor stumbled forward, dropped to his knees, and pressed his forehead against the glass, feeling blankness nearby. Was his own rampage about to begin?

As a Class Three, Victor could live a relatively normal life (if one considered taking daily medication and going to multiple therapy sessions every week to be relatively normal). But some day he would become a drooling, insentient bed wetter, and every resonant episode brought him closer to that fate. At some point, the blankness would take over, and he would be gone.

Victor rubbed his palms together, changing the rhythm of the movement every few breaths. That was one of Dr. Tammet’s techniques, and a useful one, especially when there was no one around to see him acting like a frenzied faith healer.

Something in the darkened hospital atrium caught Victor’s gaze. A figure moved closer. It was Granfa Jeff. His white and gray hair floated in wisps. His face, all dark freckles on brown skin, drooped as if he hadn’t slept well.

The doors opened. Granfa Jeff stepped out and secured the doors behind him. He rested his palms heavily on Victor’s shoulders. “I have some news that may upset you, Victor.”

Victor used Dr. Tammet’s techniques to read his granfa’s facial expression. Deep blue sadness dimpled the skin around his eyes and mouth, but Victor noticed something else. He couldn’t tie his intuition to a specific observation, but he noticed a shadow
—
a different emotion struggling to the surface.

In a low voice, Granfa Jeff said, “We have to scuttle the research into your cure.”

Victor’s mouth felt dry. He blinked, not believing what he’d heard, waiting for Granfa Jeff to correct himself. They couldn’t do that, could they? Victor peered into the hospital’s gloomy atrium. “Where’s Dr. Tammet?”

“I’m closing Oak Knoll, Victor. I let the staff go, you see. Another doctor will see you privately from now on. We’ll make arrangements.”

After years of therapy, hundreds of appointments, and who knew how many ounces of Victor’s blood drawn for tests, Granfa Jeff was going to shut down the research program? A cure was his only hope to prevent permanent catatonia.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Victor asked.

Granfa Jeff’s expression darkened, and Victor felt the blankness rise up again.

Let me be clear. We’re not talking about slavery, imprisonment, chemical lobotomization, or any of the other rumors and lies flying around about the Commission’s work.

The protections proposed by the Commission are reasonable, proportional, and necessary to prevent another Carmichael incident.

Class Threes will live freely with supervision and annual re-evaluations.

Class Twos will contribute to society through decent work in self-sustaining communities that will ensure their well-being.

Class Ones will receive the best care available in facilities equipped for their special needs.

This approach is about the health and safety of our communities. It’s about helping those who suffer from mirror resonance syndrome and about the safety of their families and friends.

This is about a better world for everyone.

—Mía Barrias, public comment, SeCa Classification Commission records (1978)

The vidscreen on the wall of the Ludlum Middle School classroom showed houses destroyed by fire and bodies crushed under the tires of self-driving vehicles. By now, at age twelve, Victor Eastmore had seen the vidfeed many times. Having survived the massacre when he was only four years old, he’d experienced for himself the horror that Samuel Miller had inflicted on the town of Carmichael.

Every year on the anniversary of the incident, as part of a nationwide mandatory remembrance ceremony, the documentary played in schools and public buildings throughout Semiautonomous California. Now a woman with haunted eyes described how she survived the massacre. Victor recognized her, of course: Mía Barrias, the woman who’d saved him from one of Samuel’s booby traps. She detailed her encounter with the killer on the day of her honeymoon, how she’d watched him murder her fiancé with a quantum-triggered Dirac stunstick pulse to the head, and how she’d escaped and got help from police in a nearby town.

The vidfeed was all too familiar.

When the Man from Nightmareland’s crimes introduced Semiautonomous California to the dangers of mirror resonance syndrome, the government responded by developing the Classification system to gene-scan and control people with MRS.

Being classified was worse than being any of SeCa’s other untouchables.

The Catholics—weakened, anemic, and banned from other nations in the American Union
—
were tolerated only on the outskirts of Oakland & Bayshore, not downtown. The Asian Refugee Act had expelled from Oakland desperate refugees from the Great Asian War, forcing them onto the farms in Long Valley and the slums of Little Asia on the San Francisco Peninsula; they couldn’t settle in Bayshore.

People with MRS were the enemies within: unpredictable, dangerous, terrifying.

Victor, with his blood-soaked, strange, and prescient dreams, had always felt different
—
no, not just different, peculiar
—
and completely out of step with the people of SeCa, who, from the days of the first Cathar settlers, had exalted in freedom from violence. The single incidence of mass killing in the nation’s history
—
Samuel Miller’s campaign to destroy Carmichael
—
had led to the demonization of people with MRS.

Best to keep them in facilities and ranchos in the nation’s hinterlands. “Out of sight, out of mind” could have been the national motto.

Victor didn’t dare ask to be excused from watching the vidfeed. Earlier, two girls had passed him in the hallway talking loudly, saying that they could spot a Broken Mirror without trying, everyone could, it was how they looked at you
—
no, hard to say exactly what it was, but definitely they were easy to spot.

Victor was desperate to avoid sticking out because, like Samuel Miller, he believed his dreams were premonitions. Not that he would ever tell anyone about them. Sometimes beliefs are so horrific that they’re easy to keep secret.

After the vidfeed ended, Victor rushed out of the classroom, collected his feedreader from his locker, and blasted through the exit doors, only to find himself surrounded by Alik and his friends in back of the school.

Alik called out, “Hey, freaky face. Why didn’t you cry during the vidfeed?”

A thunderstorm gathered in Victor’s mind. They always picked on him. They made fun of him for the way he talked, or they teased him for staying silent and for the way his facial expressions almost but did not quite mirror theirs. The problem lay deep in his brain. He couldn’t win.

“Look at his hands. He’s gonna rip your face off, Alik.”

It was true. Victor’s fingers were rigid and curled like talons.

“Maybe he’s a Broken Mirror,” Alik said.

“I am not!” Victor yelled.

Alik got closer. Sweat gathered under the boy’s eyes, and heat radiated from his skin in shimmering waves. “Who’s next on your list, sicko Samuel?”

Victor cringed and kept quiet. After Carmichael, he couldn’t be called a worse name.

Someone shoved Victor from behind, causing him to lurch forward. Alik punched Victor’s face. Rage took hold of Victor. His fist struck the underside of Alik’s jaw and sent him reeling into the crowd.

Alik lifted himself, nostrils flaring, and launched into Victor’s belly. The two boys stumbled through the cheering kids. Alik slammed Victor into the wall of the building. Victor tried to evade the fists that Alik rammed into his gut, but the blows kept coming.

Victor twisted free, panicking. He slipped on something slick and grabbed Alik’s shirt to keep from falling. Victor fell anyway, and Alik staggered past Victor headfirst and slammed into the side of a dumpster.

Elena Morales, his friend for as long as he could remember, helped Victor to his feet. She’d always been strong: meaty limbs, broad face, and a loud voice when she wanted. Even her carmel-brown hair had a luster and seemed to glow from within. She whispered in his ear, “That was some first-class martial arts.”

“I wish,” Victor said. He gripped his aching stomach and searched for an escape.

A girl screamed. Victor turned and saw Alik lying limp at the foot of the dumpster, eyes closed, blood trickling from his head.

A male administrator appeared and asked, “What’s going on?” He spotted Alik and yelled at the crowd, “Back away, all of you! Get back!” He spoke into his fist-sized MeshBit to summon an ambulance.

“This is supposed to be a day for peace and healing. What happened?” The administrator scanned the crowd of students.

Heads swiveled back and forth between Victor and Alik’s body.

Victor’s left eye was swollen shut. He took an unsteady step in the direction of the bus stop.

The administrator pointed at him and said, “Don’t move.”

A siren wailed and grew louder. Victor slumped to his knees. Elena squeezed his arm and said, “Don’t worry.” He focused on the feel of her next to him, relieved and gratified that her love of underdogs made her root for him.

An ambulance rolled onto the paved path just beyond the squat school buildings. Pink-uniformed paramedics burst out, spotted the waving administrator, and darted forward. Though the siren had been silenced, Victor’s ears were ringing in a kind of rising and falling
brrrrnnnnngggg
that coincided with the throbbing in his gut.

The ambulance’s green and yellow lights flashed on the children’s shocked faces as they watched the paramedics load Alik onto a stretcher and carry it into the vehicle. Strong arms pushed and lifted Victor, and he found himself in the ambulance. The vehicle lurched forward.

When they arrived at the hospital, a female nurse led Victor inside the hospital and down a corridor, where a pair of brightly lit near-white Helios lightstrips ran along the ceiling like burning-hot steel rails. She brought him to a small examination room and asked for his name and MeshID, entered them on a type-pad, and then examined and treated his eye. She left the room and shut the door.