Burn (6 page)

It was almost two in the morning. Fenn's eyes were closed; he'd fallen asleep as soon as she'd told him everything was all right. His arm was draped around her waist and the corner of his mouth was twitching in what looked like a happy dream. She envied him. Her mind was moving too fast for sleep.

One time for Julian's birthday, he and his best friend Nick had gone to a visiting carnival. He was turning ten, she thought, or eleven. They went on two rides and then Nick got sick to his stomach, so they spent the rest of the day playing games. Nick liked Whack-a-Mole, where the goal was to use a mallet to smash down a plastic mole that kept coming out of different holes. That's what she felt like now. Every time she managed to make progress on one thing in her life, another popped up, unexpected, never what or where she thought it would be. She had made things better with Fenn, but only because she had lied. She hadn't found her mother in a security video, but she might have found the subject of her dreams in an old man's scrambled brains.

Lona shivered. It had been a long time since she'd used a memory of Julian's as a reference point for her own life. It was so comforting, to sink back into the time when she had been a passive participant in her own life rather than an active one. She tried not to let herself now, though. She wanted her own memories, her own identity.

She wanted to feel like she was taking control of her own destiny. And her destiny was there, right in front of her. Or destinies, rather. Three distinct paths and she needed to choose one.

She could go to school with Fenn. They could study at the café with the bad open mike guitar players, and they could go to end-of-semester parties like ones she'd seen advertised on the public bulletin board in the campus center. “Celebrate Christmas Break,” they said. “Come dressed as your favorite elf/reindeer.” She and Fenn could do that, all of it.

She could keep searching for her mother. The video had led nowhere, but there still might be other records, somewhere. Talia would help her, she was sure of it. Talia would protest and worry, but then she would help. She and her mother could live happily ever after.

The third option was crazy. It involved chasing dreams. It involved trying to reawaken the memories of a shattered old man. The third option shouldn't even be an option. It shouldn't even be one of her choices, because it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with Warren. And a man named Ned, whom she had never met.

Sleep wasn't coming. She slid out from under Fenn's arm, holding her breath and easing her legs off the bed one centimeter at a time. He stirred but didn't wake, and after a few moments, she tiptoed to the door.

In the hallway, she heard the low sound of the television. She headed into the living room to turn it off, but while she was looking for the remote, the fluffy comforter at the end of the couch suddenly moved. Gamb had fallen asleep there.

“Are you just getting home?” he yawned, unburrowing himself and stretching his arms over his head.

“I couldn't sleep.”

Gamb fished the remote out from underneath his blanket. “Do you want to stay up with me and watch bad television?”

“I don't know if I'll be great company,” she hedged.

“Bad television doesn't require great company. It just requires a warm body.” Gamb patted the sofa cushion next to him and, when Lona sat down, shoved half of the comforter in her direction.

“Now,” Gamb continued, scrolling through the channels on the deluxe cable package he'd insisted would be a good investment. “Should we watch competitive bass fishing? Or this reality show about beauty pageants? Or – what do you think that ‘Killer Gymnasts' is about?”

“I'm just the warm body. You're the driver.”

Gamb settled on a Spanish melodrama set in a hospital. As far as Lona could tell, the plot was about a pretty nurse who was torn between her handsome surgeon coworker and her handsome dying patient.

“Oh, Maria,” Gamb fake-translated from the screen. “Stay with me. Stay with me, I am such a beautiful man.”

“I can't,” Lona played along. “I must go with my surgeon, and his thick and lustrous hair.”

“No, my baldness is sexy, for it means I have suffered. Stay with me. Stay, and I will give you some of my Jello.”

“Is it strawberry? I only eat straw—”

“You know what? Jello sounds good.” Gamb paused the movie. “I'm hungry. I'm going to go find some snacks.” He shrugged off the blanket and darted into the kitchen. Lona could hear cupboard doors opening and closing. On the screen, the handsome surgeon was frozen in space, discussing the contents of a clipboard with another colleague wearing a white lab coat.

“Maria,” Gamb called from the kitchen. “I know you said you only eat strawberry Jello. Do you eat popcorn? I will win your heart with popcorn.”

Lona opened her mouth, but nothing would come out. She couldn't stop staring at the screen. At the doctors. At what they were wearing.

Of course. In the Path program, Monitors like Talia wore black pants and shirts, blending in with the darkness of the control room and the bay. Touchers wore street clothes. Sweaters and jeans and comfortable shoes. Path doctors wore white. When they came to test Pathers on their motor skills and intellectual development, they wore long white lab coats that made them seem enormous to Lona when she was a child. Long white lab coats, and plastic nametags.

Why else would Warren have been there? How else would this be tied at all to Lona?

“Maria?” Gamb called again. “Lona? I'm just making popcorn, okay? Do you want anything else?”

The scientist from her dream. Ned. He didn't just work in a random lab. Lona was dreaming of the history of the Julian Path.

The prisoner had begun to think of itself as an It. There was a time when the prisoner had another name, but the prisoner had had so many names since then, it was barely worth remembering.

The room was familiar. Everything was laid out as it should be. The bed along the wall, the window beside the bed, the poster over the desk, curled around the edges. Could it be the same poster? No. Not even they could find the same poster. This must have been a reproduction.

And maybe the room wasn't familiar, anyway. Maybe it was false déjà vu, an implanted memory. They would know something about memories. If it wasn't familiar before, though, it certainly was now. Spending twenty-four hours in a space makes it feel very familiar. It was twelve foot lengths to cross one corner of the narrow end to the other; fourteen foot lengths to cross the width.

The window had security bars over it, but through the bars it was possible to see grass, a fence, beyond that an alley, maybe. The bars did not look strong. With the right tool or even the right leverage, it might have been possible to pry off the bars, but first one would have to break through the glass. It wasn't possible to break through the glass. The prisoner had tried.

The prisoner had also tried: yelling. Passing notes under the door. Eating the food. Refusing the food. Hoarding the food. Assaulting the person who came with the food, a man with a smushed-looking face, like his features took up too little space. He hadn't been happy about that. He'd said he was some kind of doctor; he seemed to think that should gain automatic respect.

None of these things made any difference, but it was useful to keep lists. Useful to approach things with the scientific method. Construct a hypothesis:
I could escape through the window, if I hurled this chair against the glass.
Test the hypothesis:
I can't.

There was a clock and that was helpful. Dinner was served at six, with a standard deviation of eleven minutes on either side. The sun set at five fifteen now, but it was getting earlier, which must mean that it was getting later in the year. Deeper into winter.

The boy with the flaming hair came at random intervals, not tied to any particular time. Sometimes he brought the food, but more often he just wanted to talk. The others deferred to him. They left when he entered, and they gave him space, and when he talked to them, they looked down. He was beautiful. His hair was the color of bonfires in some light, of candlelight in others. His skin was pale; his movements were graceful and fluid. When he walked, he gave off the impression of a lit match floating across a smooth surface.

Today he came after sunset but before breakfast. He knocked first, he always did. Knocking, smiling, sinking to the floor on his knees as easily as if there had been a chair there. The surest sign of confidence from this man-boy was the fact that he placed himself in such a subservient position.

“How are you feeling today?” he asked. Such careful pleasantries.

The prisoner said nothing.

Hypothesis
: If I say nothing, he will be forced to give me more information.

“I heard they took away your pen yesterday,” the boy continued. They had. He was right. They didn't take it away so much as it had been removed still sticking out of the hand it had been stabbed in. They should have known better. The prisoner had a history with pens. “How did it feel, when you stabbed Anders?”

News: The man with the smushed face's name was Anders.

“Did it make you feel pleased?” he continued. “How much did he bleed, and what did you think when it got on your clothes?”

The prisoner looked away. Those discussions were unnecessarily stomach-churning.

“I'm sure it feels impossible to be without a means of communicating ideas – especially for someone in your profession.” The boy sighed. “But I'm sure you understand that I can't really give you another one.”

He shifted slightly, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crayon. It was new and sharp, a dusty coal color. “Outer Space,” the paper wrapping read. The name of this color was Outer Space. “I thought that this could be a replacement.”

The boy placed the crayon on the floor, equidistant between the two of them. A sign of respect. He would not make the prisoner lose dignity by crawling and grabbing for the crayon.

“I hoped that you could use this to continue with your work,” he said. “And when it's done, I can bring you another one. And after a while, maybe we can create a workspace for you.”

A better workspace. A life outside of these four walls. The prisoner's heart jumped and then thudded back again. This was a ploy. Obviously. This was a way of engendering gratefulness. How long had the prisoner been in this room? Days? Weeks? Long enough to forget memories, and original identities. Long enough to be known as the prisoner.

“Sometimes I can't tell,” the boy said thoughtfully. When he turned his head toward the window, the light caught it and made his hair glow. “Sometimes I can't tell how much it is that you don't remember and how much it is that you're just refusing to say.” He reached down to the crayon, to Outer Space, and, with his graceful fingers, rolled it a few inches away from him, disrupting the equilibrium, conceding the middle ground. “I really hope this will all be over very soon,” he said. “I hate to keep you here like this – not when we should all be on the same side. We need your help, and you can leave as soon as you give it.”

Hypothesis:
That was a lie
.

The flamehaired boy rose to his feet. He brushed the knees of his pants – a gesture that seemed less human than humanesque – as if he had studied humans and had learned they behaved in such a manner.

“In the meantime,” he said. “You must think we're very, very cruel.”

The library was busy on a Saturday morning – little kids there for a story hour, and students Lona's age working on research projects. Lona walked past all of them to the reason she'd come to this particular branch, several miles from her usual one.

FEDERAL REFERENCE DESK, the sign said, in all capital letters.

Lona cleared her throat. The girl at the desk had dark red lipstick and an eyebrow piercing, chunky, trendy-looking glasses, and apparently no interest in being helpful.

“Excuse me?” Lona said finally.

“What's up?” the girl asked, but she didn't look up when she said it. She couldn't be much older than Lona.

“I'm hoping you can help me find some records.”

“Yeah. This is kind of the place for that. Were there any particular records you had in mind?” The girl finally made eye contact. She had a large chest, painted fingernails. There was something in her voice that reminded Lona of Genevieve. The standoffishness. The coolness – like she was waiting to be impressed. Lona handed her the index card that she'd carefully filled out, using the instructions on the government website.

“Which records do you want?” The girl moved the computer's mouse lazily over the keypad. On her lap, underneath the desk, Lona spotted an opened comic book. The girl dutifully poised her fingers over her keyboard. Her nails were painted the same deep red color as her lips.

“The
Julian Path
records.” She resisted the urge to poke at where the information was printed in capital letters on her index card. “I filled that in on box four, right under my name and address. I'm trying to find all of the employees of the Julian Path. Especially any of them who worked in the lab.”

“I
know
that. But
which
Julian Path?”

“What do you mean, which Julian Path?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “A couple of years after the paperwork was filed for the Julian Path, a bunch of other patents and copyrights and paperwork were also filed, using the same codes.” She pivoted her computer screen so Lona could see – a spreadsheet filled with letter and number combinations – and skimmed her index finger down one of the columns with exaggerated patience.

“See? These are all the same. They're all filed under the umbrella grouping of Julian Path documentation, but some of them are labeled ‘Julian Side Path', or this one is labeled ‘Julian Alternate Route'. And if I click on
this
one, it takes me to a grouping of records about Julian Path Expansion, which was apparently a proposed initiative to bring the music portion of Julian's education to schools where arts funding had been cut. And if I click on
this
one, it takes me to the documents for the visioneer technology that was licensed out to the entertainment industry. And this one is called ‘The Julian Compact'. And if I click on
it
—”

“I under
stand
.”

The girl frowned, clicking again on whatever link she was trying to open, but apparently failing. “Well,” she said finally. “If I click on ‘The Julian Compact', I apparently just get an ‘access denied' notification.” She looked irritated by the firewall, though Lona couldn't tell whether it was because her access had been denied, or because her smug rant to Lona had been interrupted.

“But you see what I'm saying. Unless you can be more specific about which set of records you're looking for, I'll have to click through each of these individually, and I really don't—”

“The original one,” Lona blurted out. It had to be the original one she wanted, didn't it? Because that one was the one Warren had developed. “Can you just give me the employment records for the plain, original Julian Path?”

“Kind of a purist, huh?”

“A purist?”

The girl looked down pointedly toward Lona's feet. “Your shoes. I saw your shoes when you came in. I knew some costume shops sold Path slippers this Halloween, but yours are the most realistic ones I've seen.”

They looked realistic because they were real. When Lona left the house this morning, her boots were still wet from the night before, so she'd grabbed what was closest – the thin, flexible slippers designed to be worn while living in pods.

“These aren't from a costume shop,” she replied automatically, but luckily, the girl wasn't paying attention.

“Which years do you want?” the girl interrupted. “And which sector?”

“All of them?”

“
All
of them?”

She didn't know how to narrow down the years. Her dream hadn't come with a time stamp. Sectors – she supposed she could estimate sectors. Warren's old company had developed technology for sectors all over the country, but she knew that most of the research had been conducted here, near his home. “All of the years,” she told the girl. “But just this sector. Sector 14.” Her tongue tripped for a minute over the title. Sector 14 had also been her sector. It was how she got her name and her whole identity.

“I never thought any of the costumes were very good, anyway,” the girl said. “Just a bunch of people trying to be clever with whatever's in the news. In ten years, they're all going to look back at pictures and be like, what was I supposed to be that year?” She spun her chair around to the printer behind her and plucked out a paper that had just come out of it.

“Here's what I have.” She laid the page on the countertop, pulling out a pen and circling what looked like an address at the top. Even without reading the page, Lona was disappointed. This couldn't be what she was looking for. Hundreds of people must have worked for the Path. There was no way the information she was looking for could have fitted on this one sheet of paper.

“I thought I could see everyone who worked there? The names of all those employees.”

“You can. Just not right now. You have to fill out a government information request.”

“A what?”

She tapped the sheet. “That's the office you can contact to get what you're looking for, and here's how you describe what you're looking for when you contact them.”

“Will it take a long time?”

The girl snickered. “No, of course not. The government is well known for being efficient.”