Burn (19 page)

“I knew you would figure it out.”

Harm clapped his slender fingers together. “I knew it would be harder for you to figure out to come here. But it had to be harder. If you'd just gone to the old lab, we wouldn't have known if it went back far enough.”

Lona stopped a few yards away. She'd forgotten how beautiful he was. Harm had always had an ethereal quality. As if he hadn't been born, but designed by ancient gods. His skin was smooth and white; his eyes were a turquoise pool, his hair was a glowing ember. He was taller since the last time she'd seen him. Six months ago, he'd been the same height as she was. Now he was half a foot taller, lanky, with sculpted muscles.

“I knew if I was patient,” he continued, “and it was hard to be because I wanted to see you again, but I knew if I was patient, you would figure it out.”

“You brought me here?” she sputtered.

“Technically, you brought yourself here.”

Her brain was spinning. He'd said he had to know if “it” went back far enough. What was “it?” The memories?
How would he know anything about the memories? Why would Harm have anything to do with any of this at all?

“You're even faster than I told them you would be,” he said. “And I told them you were very good. How did you find it? What was the final clue?”

“A woman named Maggie Croft. She gave me the address.”

“But you knew to ask for it. You would have gotten here on your own eventually.”

“What are you doing here, Harm?” That was good. Ask him direct questions. Don't allow him to throw you off balance. It was all coming back, the tips and trips for how to deal with Harm. This pungent blend of attraction and revulsion and fear that came from being near him.

“Mostly, I was waiting for you. Working on some other things, too, but mostly waiting for you.”

“That's nice of you to wait for me. I didn't think I'd see you again.”

“I hoped I would.”

What are you doing here?
She screamed at him again in her head.
Why did Zinedine's memories lead back to you?

“So do you live here now?” she asked out loud.

“Why don't you come inside?” He opened the door wider and made a grand, inviting gesture with his arm.

Obviously, she shouldn't. She should call the police. Or if not the police, Julian – Harm listened to Julian. Or if not Julian, Talia. Nobody even knew where she was.

But what would she tell anybody that she called? Harm wasn't threatening her. Harm didn't have a weapon. Harm hadn't said anything to make her believe that his invitation was anything other than that – an invitation. Not an order. Not a warning.

Obviously, the careful, serious thing to do was leave immediately.

Lona hadn't been making very careful, serious decisions lately.

So she went inside.

The foyer of the building wasn't much more than a landing: an end table, a mirror, a vase with silk flowers. There was a flight of stairs up and a flight of stairs down. The same memory connection that had told Lona about the piñata and the mailboxes now reminded her how the building was laid out: three stories of apartments – sparse, efficient, university-issued two-bedrooms – which they would reach if they took the stairs up. If they took the stairs down, they would reach an open space with concrete floors – a laundry area, shared by and accessible from any of the entrances in the U. A bank of washing machines should be clustered in the center.

There was a noise, a far-off one that sounded like whooshing, that was familiar to Lona but too out-of-context to place.

They didn't go upstairs or downstairs. Instead Harm opened the single door immediately across from the table with the flowers. The building manager's apartment. Was this where Harm lived now? The walls were off-white and empty; the furniture was sparse and impersonal: a sofa, two chairs and a stereo piled with music. Old jazz, it looked like – at least, she could see a picture of a saxophone.

“Here, sit.” He gestured to the chair – a boxy, Swedish-looking thing – farthest from the entrance. She didn't like that. The only exit that she could see was the door they'd just come in through, and Harm was now sitting between her and that door. She didn't like that at all.

“Would you like something to drink?” he offered. “Or eat?”

“I'm fi—” she started to say, but he looked so disappointed by the refusal that she cut herself off. “Water. If you have any.” He leapt to his feet – floated, rather. Harm never leapt; he glided – and returned with a pitcher of filtered water, a glass and a plastic bowl. The bowl was filled with lemon wedges, one of which he delicately placed on the rim of the water glass.

“I've been practicing my hosting skills,” he said. “If you're a good host, your guests will feel more comfortable.” He said it like he'd read it somewhere – a Miss Manners column or an old issue of
Good Housekeeping
. He set the glass precisely down in front of her. This form of hosting wasn't like Maggie and Jeremy's hosting, which was haphazard and warm, and therefore truly comforting. This was formal and labored in a way that made Lona uneasy.

“Thank you,” she said.

I'm having ice water with Harm. I'm at my mother's old house, chatting with the boy whose teeth have ripped into human flesh.

Now the apartment door opened, without a knock. It was a man, with kind of a squished face, like someone had taken their thumb and forefinger and pinched his features together from top to bottom. She exhaled in relief. It was better for someone else to be here. Probably.

“Sir?” Squish-face's voice was low and nasal; she wondered if he might have a cold. “I know you have a visitor, but can you come and look at something downstairs?”

Sir. So others were here, but Harm was still in charge. He looked irritated by the interruption, pressing his lips together, widening his eyes.

“Will you be okay here while I take care of something?” he asked Lona. “Please feel free to play some music while I'm gone.” Again, she felt like these quotes had been copied from an etiquette book. “Or I could bring you something to read.”

“I came here to find somebody, Harm. I came here to find—” She didn't want to admit that vulnerability while Squish-face was standing with one hand on the doorknob, looking impatient. “I need you to explain what you're doing here, and then I need you to help me.”

“How about I leave you something to read?”

“No.”
Remain calm. Be declarative. Don't be afraid
. “How about you help me? I've been through a lot to come here, and I need you to tell me what this place is.”

He was ignoring her, disappearing down a hallway that she presumed led to the bedroom and returning a second later with a white stack of papers.

“Have you, in your search to find this place, come across something called the Julian Compact?” he asked.

Blood pounded in her ears. “I found a file labeled that. It had an address. Not this address, though.”
Give those to me.
She reached out for the papers but he didn't hand them over yet.

“At one point, the file had a lot of additional information. Like this.” The papers rustled in his hands. “This used to be in the file.”

She feared that the papers would go up in flames or dissolve into pulp before he would pass them to her, that this was somehow a trick. But he placed them on the coffee table, turning on the floor lamp next to her chair for extra light.

“I'll be back in a couple minutes,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

When he opened the door to leave with Squish-face, she heard the noise she'd first noticed coming into the building.
Pods
, she thought. Pods made that noise. There are pods in here. Her hands felt icy in her lap and for a second she had to remind herself to breathe.
What was Harm doing with pods in this building?

The document in front of her didn't look official – it wasn't printed on any special letterhead, it didn't have a watermark. It didn't even look like much of a document. There were sentences with lines through them, blank spaces marked with X's – all things that she did when she was working on the rough draft of a school paper, when she was just trying to get her ideas down on the page. Fenn was much better – he bothered to make outlines before even starting on papers; by the time he started writing them he knew exactly where he was going.

Call Fenn,
she thought.
Call somebody. Tell somebody where you are.
She looked at her jacket hanging on the coat rack, with her cell phone in the pocket. That would be the smart thing to do. But Harm had said he would be back in a few minutes. What if he took the papers away when he returned?

Funding Proposal for The Julian Compact [DRAFT]

Problem:

Since the Julian Path's inception, a primary issue has been the program's reliance on cumbersome equipment. Children who are on the Julian Path are, because of the affiliated technology, bound to pods and visioneers. This results in many negative repercussions. Some examples:

It is difficult to relocate on-Path children from center to center.

If a pod breaks down, the Pather's entire experience also breaks down.

Because the participants of the Julian Path are children, they are still growing. Constantly updating their pods to accommodate their changing size is both complicated technologically, and a drain on resources.

Although strides are being made in improving the safety and comfort of the pods, they are still prone to causing occasional bedsores, endangering the health and safety of the participants of the Julian Path.

Hypothesis:

It might be possible to construct another experience that serves the same function as the Julian Path, but which is not tethered to equipment and large technology.

Proposed Research:

Currently, the memory data affiliated with the Julian Path is transmitted through pods and visioneers – external media. The experimental project would size this data down to a nano-level. Instead of being streamed externally, the experiences would be transmitted internally, time released over the course of several months or even years. The “Path”, as it were, would now be a portable, compact program. There are several obvious issues with this hypothesis. The first, and most obvious, is—

It went on for several increasingly technical pages. Lona read as much as she could understand. A portable program. A portable Path.
The Path is in you
, she thought. That had been one of the Julian Path's slogans, cooed into her ear every day back when she was on Path. With the Julian Compact, that would literally be true. The Julian Path would literally become a part of her, coursing through her blood, no matter what she was doing or how far she ran.

This whole time, she'd been thinking that the word “compact” referred to a covenant or agreement. It didn't – the Julian Compact referred to the fact that it was literally compact, small enough to be carried in someone's body without them ever knowing.

“Do you see now?”

She hadn't heard Harm come back in the room, but he was there, standing in front of her with his arms dangling simply by his side. “Does it all make sense?”

All of it? No. But some of it did. Her mother's memories, slithering out from a needle, pierced through flesh, passing from Zinedine's body to Lona's. Zinedine's last act before she disappeared.

Lona swallowed thickly. “Why wasn't this in the original file? The one that I found?”

“The person who made it tried to delete it. All we could recover was a draft.”

“Did anybody ever build the Julian Compact? Did anybody ever figure out whether the technology was possible?”

“I think it's pretty obvious who built it, isn't it?”

“But why did you need
me
?” That was the part she didn't understand. Her mother might have built the Julian Compact, but that was years ago, before Lona was born. Lona didn't even know what it
was
until seconds ago. “You wanted me to come here and do what, exactly?”

“We wanted you to come here, period. We needed to see if you could. Our scientists think they've been able to replicate some of your mother's research from seventeen years ago. The problem is that they can't make the memories stick. And they can't replicate the seventeen years. There was no way to make sure that implanted information would stay as long as they needed it to, because no one had ever tried it before.”

“Except on me.”

“Except on you. You were the only test case.”

“And that's why I'm here, instead of at Zinedine's old lab.” That's what he'd meant about seeing if it had gone back far enough. “Because this is the oldest memory.”

“Because remembering this place doesn't just pull you back to the beginning of your life. It pulls you back to the beginning of hers. Two generations of memories. We need Zinedine's expertise in how to make memories stick, but first we needed to make sure that she had successfully done it herself.”

He made a gesture, like he was spreading those memories out over a table, to look at or sort through and put in a photo album.
That's what I am
, she thought. My whole life has been a photo album of other people's memories, other people's experiences laid out on acid-free paper.

“But why are
you
here?” she asked again. She was connected to Zinedine. Harm wasn't connected to anyone.

He shrugged. And though the gesture was meant to look casual, she had the distinct impression the question had made him tense. “I'm in charge. Mostly. I'm mostly in charge of this whole program.”

“You?” she sputtered. “But you're just—”

“I'm sixteen.” He jutted his chin out defiantly. “I'm the same age you were when you helped shut the Path down. Doesn't it make sense that they would turn to one of us when they wanted to build another kind of Path up again? We know what it feels like. We know what it can do. Or what it can't do,” he added softly. “We know what it can't do, too.”

Inside, she crumpled. Over the past three weeks, she'd convinced herself of so many things. That her mother was searching for her. That her mother wanted her. That her mother needed to be saved. That Lona was going crazy. It was none of those things. Lona wasn't the hero in this story; she was just a pawn, a way to test the success of an experiment.

Was her mother even here? Probably not. Her mother was probably in a federal prison cell somewhere, someplace with orange uniforms and plastic utensils. Her mother was probably in a three-bedroom house with a swing set in the backyard and other children who looked more like her than Lona did. Her mother was probably in Finland or Estonia, or whatever cold climate she'd told Jeremy and Maggie she was going to. Her mother was probably dead.

“What are you thinking about?” Harm asked. He'd leaned in closer, looking at her like her brain was something to be decoded. “What are you feeling?”

“Nothing.”

He frowned and pushed the water glass over a few centimeters, then back again, watching the water slosh to the brink but not ever letting it spill over the side. He didn't like that answer. “You're feeling nothing?”

“I'm feeling nothing that I can put into words right now, Harm. You can't explain all of your emotions. Some of them are too complicated.”

She thought he might press her on it, but instead he asked something else.

“Where did you go?”

“Excuse me?”

“Six months ago. When the Architect took you and I distracted the guards in the bay,” he continued. “When I let them take me so they couldn't take you, where did you go?”

She was startled by the incongruousness of his question. “He took me to be remmersed, Harm. You know that.”
He wants to know about the blood
, she thought.
He wants to know about the white room and the red walls, and Julian and Warren fighting over a gun.
She didn't want to tell him about that. She didn't want to play trauma currency, where she paid for information with bloody details. “I went to the remmersing center, and Genevieve died.”

He was already cutting her off though, shaking his head impatiently. “I mean after that. I mean, where did you go next? Where have you been for the past six months?”

“I went away with Fenn,” she said slowly. She still didn't know what he was asking. She never trusted Harm's questions. They always seemed too personal. “I went back and lived with Fenn and Ilyf and Gamb.”

“I thought that's probably what happened. Fenn loved you. His eyes dilated when he was around you. You loved him too, but you didn't know it yet. I always wondered what that would feel like.”

“To love someone and not know it yet?”

She was confused. Talking about love with Harm. It wasn't a concept she would have thought possible.

“Do you know what happened to me after you left?” said Harm. “Where I went?”

He hadn't answered her question, and now there was something hard added to his voice. Not hard. Brittle.

She
didn't
know what happened to him after she left. She had casually wondered about him. She'd had nightmares about him. But she had never, not even when she was trying so hard to unravel every other mystery, tried very hard to find out what had happened to Harm. She should have tried. She saw that now.

“I don't,” she said.

“They took me for tests,” he continued. “Do you know what kind of tests they took me for?”

“I don't,” she whispered again.

“They weren't painful. Not most of them, at least. Some of them were. Some of them were designed to test my responses to things. To see if they were normal. Or actually, on the ‘normal spectrum'. That's the term they use. ‘The Normal Spectrum.' Some of those tests were painful, but when they figured out that my physical responses were all N.S., then all of their tests were mental. Pictures. Flashcards. Electrodes attached to my forehead and my heart while I watched movies or listened to recordings. I was in a room, by myself. I was lonely. I told them I was lonely, and they said I couldn't be, because loneliness was an N.S. emotion that I hadn't registered. They thought I was faking it, because I wanted to get out.”

He said everything so matter-of-factly, so chronologically, like reciting a grocery list. She still couldn't ignore the brittleness behind his words, or keep from thinking about what was unsaid in his story. Where had he been kept? In a hospital bed? In restraints? When Gamb and Ilyf were singing her birthday songs and she was eating cake, or when she was babysitting Gabriel or talking about school with Talia –
when she was lying next to Fenn in the dark and his lips were traveling lazily over her collarbone –
where had Harm been then?

“Anyway,” he said. “I don't know how long that was. Then some men came and asked if I wanted an assignment. They said it would involve leaving. I wanted to leave. So I said I would come. And they brought me here to be in charge of this.”

“Harm, I'm sorry. I should have come looking for you. Julian did. Julian tried to find out what happened to you.”
But not very hard. None of us looked very hard
.

“It's fine,” he said. “I was just sharing. I've been reading a book about making small talk. It's called
The Art of Easy Conversation
. Have you heard of it?”

“I haven't.”

There was a sharp rapping sound on the doorframe. The man was back again, Squish-face, still looking irritated.

“Anders?” Harm said testily. “Can I help you with something?
Again
?”

“Katie has reached the end of one of the cycles. Do you want us to start it again, or rest the subject, or start her on a different one?”

Harm rose to his feet. “I'm sorry,” he apologized to Lona. “We're about to begin a new phase of testing. They can't do it without me – they don't know what signs to look for. I have to be there.” The explanation made no sense to Lona.

“You want me to wait here again.”

“You could.” He hesitated. As if she had a choice. What would he do if she refused? She still couldn't tell what she was. His prisoner? His guest?

“Do I have a choice?”

He looked surprised. “Of course you have a choice, Lona. You came here to us and you can leave when you want to. But now that you're here, I thought I might take you to someone. Someone who I think would appreciate the company.”