Burn (5 page)

“Warren, look! Lona's back again today. A visitor twice in one week!”

He looked up from the area rug in the middle of his room, the toes of his stockinged feet curling into the carpet.

“Shoes off.” He pointed to where his Velcro sneakers sat by the side of the rug.

“Maybe you can show Lona what you mean.” Rowena nodded encouragingly, before muttering an explanation to Lona. “He learned last night, all on his own. It's all he's been doing all morning long. Shoes on. Shoes off.”

“Is that impressive?”

“Don't know. We've never had a case like this. But it's not like he's brain damaged. He's just an infant. There's no reason he shouldn't be able to learn things over again.”

“Like, about his previous life?” Lona picked a loose thread from the headrest of the armchair, twisting it between her fingers. “Learn stuff like that?”

“I said things, not memories.” Rowena spotted a few dirty dishes on Warren's kitchenette, efficiently sweeping them up on her way out the door. “Those old memories are gone for good.”

Rowena left and Lona didn't know where to begin. She hadn't talked to Fenn since their fight last night. He'd gone to bed without saying good night for the first time she could remember. She'd thought about knocking, but what would she say? And now she felt unfinished, like something was missing, like her house key or her wallet, but what was missing was the sense of peace she usually got from thinking about Fenn.

Now she was cracking up and the only person who might be able to explain what was happening was the man in front of her. And right now all he wanted to do was take off his shoes.

Lona kneeled on the carpet next to him. It smelled antiseptic and musty. “Warren?”

“Shoes off.” He pointed at her feet. “You shoes.”

“Warren, I need to talk with you about something.”

“You shoes.”

She was wearing lace-up boots, good for cold weather, bad for this children's game. She unknotted the bows and yanked the boots off, lining them up next to Warren's sneakers. “Okay. My shoes are off. Just like yours. We both took our shoes off.”

“Now on.” He picked up his right tennis shoe and crammed his toes into it, using his index finger as a shoehorn against his heel.

“Warren, I had a dream that you were in yesterday. Do you know what a dream is? Warren?”

His tongue protruded from his mouth as he triumphantly shoved his foot in the rest of the way and sealed the two Velcro straps down on his foot, neatly parallel, like the “equals” sign in a math equation.

“In the dream, you were coming to find me. Except I wasn't me. You were coming to find someone else
.
”
How would that explanation make sense to him? It barely made sense to her.

“Story?” Momentarily bored with the shoe game, Warren trundled to the shelf. He picked up a book Lona hated. It was about a marching band, and on every page, squishy rubber buttons that looked like clown noses simulated the noises of the instruments. It was loud and irritating, becoming completely insufferable after more than one reading. A few visits ago, she'd tried to stuff it behind other books on the shelf. He must have found it.

“Let's not do that story now. Let's—”

He shook the book open to a random page, blasting a screeching saxophone with the palm of his hand. With his other hand, he palmed through to a different page, beating down on the tuba button.

“Warren, please, I need to talk—”

Now he was pulsing both buttons at once. Her head throbbed from the noise. He raised his hand above his head and slammed it down onto the red-orange clown nose. The tuba emitted a wet, noisy wheeze. He'd crippled the soundbox.

“Warren!”

Before she could stop herself, she violently wrenched the book out of his hands and flung it across the room. “Stop it, Warren. This is
important
. I need to
talk
to you.”

His mouth gaped open in a silent grimace, tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes. She'd made him cry.

“Warren, I didn't mean—” She reached toward him but he fearfully burrowed further in the corner.

Lona tried to calm herself. The Architect had been in her dream. This man was not him. She needed to keep reminding herself of that. This man wore his skin and shuffled around in his body, but it wasn't him. The man from Lona's dream didn't exist anymore.

Lona sunk to the carpet, folding her legs in, making herself small and unassuming. “I wish,” she said softly, “that I had some shoes with Velcro on them.”

Warren peeked out from around the corner. Lona ignored him, focusing on the rug in front of her. “I wish I did, because I know how to do a special trick, but it won't work on my shoes, because my shoes have boring laces.”

Warren crawled out from his chair and extended his legs toward Lona, the pant legs of his lilac sweat suit riding up his calf.

“See, your straps are in lines.” She gently reached to his feet. “But you can also do them
this
way.” She peeled back the Velcro and switched the straps so that they crossed each other, forming a multiplication sign instead of an equals. “X marks the spot.”

Warren bobbed his head up and down, insisting that she do the other one before practicing on himself. Lona leaned her head against the wall and glanced at the alarm clock on Warren's bedside table. Almost five. She still needed to stop by the electronics store for a new calculator. Hers had recently shorted out in the middle of practice text. Last week she'd also promised to buy some new earphones for Fenn.
Fenn.

“Story?” Warren looked up hopefully from his shoes, which he'd managed to Velcro together.

“Okay.” She sighed. “A short one. The one from the other day? The pig and the porcupine and the science experiment?”

She found it by the chair where they'd left it and opened it to the first page. Oink sat in his lab, daydreaming about the experiments he was going to conduct. His elbows rested on his messy desk as thought bubbles floated from his head.

“Here's his lab.” Lona held up the book so he could see the pictures. “See how messy it is?”

“Nehhh! Nehhh!”

Warren reached out and stroked his fingers down the page. He did that with books, treating them as tactile objects. Most of his had fingerprints streaking down the illustrations. This one he seemed particularly interested in, jabbing at the scientific clutter of Oink's office.

“Nehhh!”

Lona froze. The office was familiar because it reminded her of her dream. Her dream had been in a lab. It wasn't like the labs from Julian's high school science classes – it didn't have test tubes or Bunsen burners. It had electrical equipment, and reams of paper pouring out of a machine with a needle that looked like it was designed to measure earthquakes or lies.

She mechanically turned the page. The next illustration showed Spike the porcupine at home making a sandwich. Warren shook his head, trying to flip back to the previous page.

“Nehhh!”

Warren didn't have the typical linguistic problems of a developing toddler. He didn't say “pesketti” instead of “spaghetti”, or “lello” instead of “yellow.” Lona had only ever heard him make one repeated error. Sometimes, when he said a word that ended in “D”, he would cut off the end sound, just the last consonant. “Bed” became “Beh”. “Good” became “Gooh”.

When Warren said “Nehhh,” that's not what he was saying at all.

He scrambled on the floor, through the mess of the spilled drawer. His ID badge swung from his neck, the plastic photo clunking against his fat stomach. They were coming. The photo showed the top of straight strawberry blond hair. The last name started with a C, or an O, maybe. It was obscured by the fabric of his pants.

The first name was Ned.

He knew. That bastard. Somewhere in the deep corners of the Architect's broken brain, he knew exactly what Lona was dreaming about.

Fenn was in bed when she got home, his body curled like a C facing the wall. Lona stood over him for a few seconds, debating. Technically they were still fighting. But after what she'd just been through with Warren, she needed to feel comforted. She tossed her coat and the crumpled plastic bag containing her new calculator onto the floor and slid in behind him.

He stiffened when her hands touched his back – so he wasn't sleeping – but he didn't pull away. After a few moments she nestled between his shoulder blades and felt the expansion and contraction of his ribcage and how it mirrored her own. Their breathing always matched, like two instruments playing the same piece of music. In the Julian Path, the pods they lived in sounded like breathing. They made a whooshing sound, an electronic hum disguised as an inhale and exhale, the sound of two hundred Pathers living the same life at different times.

“Hi,” she said quietly.

“Hi.” He didn't ask where she'd been all day.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Fenn. Yesterday—” She could see the dark shadow of his head nodding back and forth, telling her that she didn't have to continue, but she pressed on. “Yesterday I was at Talia's because I asked her to find my mother. She thought she had, but she hadn't.”

Fenn immediately flipped over; she could see his eyes glinting in the dark. “Lona, I didn't know you were still looking for her. Why didn't you tell me?”

She shrugged, even though she knew he couldn't see. “I was embarrassed.”

“About what?”

“I don't know.”

“You're allowed to want things, Lona.”

“I guess – I just didn't want you all to think you weren't enough.”

He was stroking her hair now, and she closed her eyes, feeling their argument yesterday begin to melt away. “Is that where you were today again?” he asked. “Something with your mother? Is that where you've been all of the times that you've disappeared?”

Her eyes flew open. “All of the times?” She hadn't realized how many of her absences he'd noticed. She thought she'd been hiding it so well.

“When you disappear and don't tell any of us where you go. It seemed like something has been preoccupying you. And I'd been worrying – does it have to do with me?”

Tell him
, she instructed herself.
Tell him about Warren, now, in the dark when he can't see your face and you're already sharing secrets. Just say it and lift the heavy weight from your chest.
But she still couldn't. The Julian Path had almost killed Fenn. She didn't know what hearing about this would do to him. The act of not telling him was selfless, she tried to convince herself. Her silence had nothing to do with just wanting to make things better between them.

“Yes. That's where I've been.”

But as soon as the lie slipped out, she was flooded with guilt. “Fenn, there's something else. I've been—” She stopped and swallowed, trying to collect her thoughts. “I've been having strange dreams.”

Fenn's hand on her hair trembled. “Why didn't you tell me?” he demanded. “We tell each other about those.”

He thought she meant her usual bad dreams. He thought she meant Genevieve on the tile floor. “I had that dream last night, too,” he said. Lona was surprised. Fenn hadn't even been there when Genevieve died. Apparently the experience was bad enough that Fenn absorbed it into his own subconscious.

“Then you broke your own rule,” she said. “You can't be upset that I didn't tell you about my dream when you didn't tell me about yours.”

In the darkness, Lona could see the shadows change across Fenn's face. A wave of nausea, maybe, or disgust. “We tell each other about the
bad
dreams. I didn't tell you about that one because in my world, that passes for a good one.”

“Fenn.” She stiffened. She knew that he was relieved when the Architect had remmersed himself, and she knew that he'd been angry with Genevieve before she died. Still, she couldn't imagine why Fenn would now say something so horrible.

“The bad ones are where it's you who was shot instead.” His voice broke. “I hate myself, because I wake up from dreaming about Genevieve dying and my first sickening emotion is to be grateful that it wasn't you.” He touched her face, softly with the back of his hand, running his knuckles from her ear down her cheekbone and over her chin. “Lona. Even dreaming that you die kills parts of me. Every time.”

“But I didn't die.” She cupped her hand over his. “I'm here in this bed with you.”

“Do you think we really get to be that lucky? Sometimes I can't believe it – that we got to come out of that program and I get to have you and we get to move on with our lives. I keep waiting for the other toll, the other tax for being so lucky. I keep waiting for someone to tell me that I don't get to have you after all.”

He brought his mouth to hers, parting her lips with his tongue, tasting her while his fingers wound through her hair. She started to speak, to offer some kind of reassurance that everything would be okay, but his mouth pressed down harder, relentless. Through their swollen lips, she could feel his teeth mash against hers, hungrily. That's what this kiss felt like. Hungry. Feral. Desperate. He had kissed her a hundred times before but not like this. Fenn was usually gentle and careful, letting her take the lead. This time, when he finally moved his mouth from hers, it was only to kiss her throat, just below her earlobe, his tongue exploring the hollow underneath her jaw. By then she'd forgotten what she was going to say. Her breath came out in jagged gasps and so did his.

He moved his hand from her hair, resting his forearm next to her face and transferring his weight onto her. She could feel the warmth of his skin through his T-shirt, and below that, the pounding of his heart. His other hand ran the length of her body, from her neck down to her waist and thigh. He always treated her as something precious, but usually it was like a glass figurine, a paper snowflake, something that would break or tear if it fell to the ground. Tonight he acted as though she was something precious like water. Food. Something he could not live without.

In the early days after Path, kissing Fenn had reminded her that she was alive. Not just tied to him, but tied to the earth – a real physical being with her own desires and agency, not just a mind living in a pod. Now it reminded her of that again. Of how lucky she was to be here. Of things that were worth holding on to and things that were worth searching for.

“Fenn,” she said, breaking her mouth away from his. “I can tell you more about – about where I was today.”

“Do you still want to be with me?”

“Yes.”

“Only me?”

“Of course.”

“Then it's not important.”

But it was.