Mindwalker (12 page)

Maybe it doesn't matter. After our final session, those memories will be gone from Steven's mind. His eyes will open, soft and puzzled, like the eyes of a sleeper awakening from a long, dark dream. He will forget me, too. He'll leave, fresh and clean as a newborn, with all his horror and sadness scrubbed away.

But that horror will remain within me. I will never forget what happened in that small, dark room or the tears of that terrified boy.

I hug my knees to my chest.

If Father were here, he'd wrap me up in his arms and know the exact words to say. He'd help make sense of this mess in my head. I'd do anything to talk to him again, just for five minutes.

I know I won't be able to sleep, so I go down into the bare, tiled room and turn on the Gate. I face the hard drive and wave a hand over the sensor, bringing up the holographic monitor, which displays a rotating image of a brain. Steven's brain. I find myself staring at it, hypnotized by its slow turning.

The room is dim—I didn't bother to switch on the overhead fluorescents—so the only illumination is the screen's pale glow. I replay the readings from the session, watching the flow
of neurological activity, like weather patterns moving over the landscape of his gray matter. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of activity in his amygdalae, the tiny almond-shaped structures connected to fear and memory.

All the horror and sorrow of the human condition—as well as all the joy, wonder, and love—can be reduced to this, chemicals in an organ resembling a lump of cauliflower. Sometimes, I find that comforting. Sometimes, it just makes me feel empty.

I tap spots on the screen, zooming in again and again, until I can see the sprawling networks of neurons, rendered in a soft, transparent blue. I blink a few times.

That's odd.

The untrained eye would see nothing out of the ordinary. But to me, the difference is as striking and bizarre as looking at
The Last Supper
and seeing a cartoon duck sitting among the disciples. I look again. Yes—there's a distinct pattern aberration in his neural networks. Now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. I place my fingers against the screen and glide through the forest of neurons, following the pattern aberration downward and deeper, along the curved ridge of the hippocampus, toward the center of his brain. It's a scar, buried in his nervous tissue.

I zoom in and out. As I pull further back, my stomach turns hollow.

It's not just
one
scar, but a tangle of jagged overlapping lines, like a war zone pockmarked by land mines and grenades. Did Pike do this to him? He must have. But
how
? This doesn't look like the result of torture or injury. In fact—I squint, studying the screen—if I didn't know better, I'd say this was done by a Gate. The patterns are similar, but there's no way a Mindwalker
would ever be this sloppy. This is butchery. Nausea squirms in my middle.

I close the program and bring up another recording—the memories themselves, played out like a movie. The recorded images are grainy and blocky, rendered imperfectly from neural impulses, but I can make out the basement prison and Pike's grinning face. I don't want to see this again, but I have to.

I lean in, watching closely.

Something changes. The image flickers and shifts. It doesn't disappear, but for an instant, I glimpse another image
through
it, like something seen through foggy glass. Beyond the dirt-streaked cement walls, there are other walls, blank and white. Briefly, Pike's face becomes another face. There's something disturbingly familiar about it, but it's gone too quickly for me to make out the features. The dark basement settles back into place, and I'm left staring, shaken.

What the hell is going on here?

My chemistry notes are a blur. They keep floating around on the page, refusing to stay still regardless of how hard I strain my eyes. I swear, I can hear them giggling at me like malevolent imps.

And chemistry is usually easy.

My gaze roams the classroom, which is identical to nearly every other classroom in Greenborough—huge and gray, crammed with desks, watched constantly, filled with listless students who accept it because this is all they've ever known. I rub my dry, sleep-deprived eyes. The teacher's talking, but the words slide through my mind without leaving a mark.

Last night, I spent hours watching and rewatching the recordings from Steven's immersion session, but that flicker—that moment of seeing another image behind the memory—didn't happen anywhere else in the recording. It could be a glitch. But the scars in his brain are certainly real.

What am I supposed to tell Steven? How can I explain it when I don't even know what it means?

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I've fallen into the risky habit of taking it to class, in case he texts me. Like a girl with a crush. But I don't have a crush on him, I remind myself. I'm helping him. That's all.

I check the phone and open the text he sent me.

HEY, DOC. YOU OKAY?

YES.

I'm lying, of course.

YOU SURE?

How does he know? Is it my expression? My posture? Either way, I need to get ahold of myself. Dr. Swan probably reviews the video feeds from my classes from time to time. If I'm showing any obvious distress, he'll notice.

I quickly type in my reply.

I'LL TELL YOU AFTER SCHOOL.

Hearing footsteps coming close, I tense and look up to see the guard approaching. He holds out a hand. “You know the policy on cell phones.”

His tone isn't angry, but it's firm. The guards confiscate things from students all the time. It's routine.

“Come on. You'll get it back later.” He smiles. “Nothing to
worry about. People don't get reclassified for texting in class, you know.”

Reluctantly, I hand over the phone.

Even after it's gone, I can't focus on the teacher's lecture. My mind drifts.

Last night, after I discovered the glitch in Steven's memories, I went to my room and summoned Chloe. She materialized and asked in her cheery, high-pitched voice, “What can I do for you, Lain?”

“Give me all the information you can find on Emmett Pike,” I told her.

For a few seconds, she groomed herself, eyes flickering as lines of glowing green text floated across the paler green of her irises. Finally, her eyes projected a bright square into the air. The floating screen displayed surprisingly few results. A smattering of articles, nothing else.

“Open the first article,” I told her.

The screen changed, and I found myself staring at a grainy photo of a man with solid, heavy features, dark eyes, and a scar running down the left side of his face. He looked into the camera with a dull, blank expression. A shudder ran through me. That was him—the man who'd haunted Steven's nightmares for the past ten years. But the article itself was brief and contained nothing I didn't already know. “Scroll down,” I told Chloe. “Show more results.”

Her tail flicked back and forth. “I'm afraid that's all.”

“That's it? That can't be it.”

“Sorry, Lain.” Her ears and tail drooped.

“It's all right. I trust your results. I'm just surprised.”

Her ears perked up. “Do you need anything else?”

I shook my head. “That's all.”

After Chloe vanished, I stayed awake, musing over what I'd seen. Or hadn't seen, rather.

According to the scarce information, Emmett Pike came from a tiny, isolated town in the Northeast Quadrant, far outside the boundaries of any major city. He grew up in one of the few remaining places without street cameras, so there's no video footage of him in existence, and no one alive who had a personal relationship with him, either. No relatives, no friends, at least none mentioned in any of the articles. Of course, a psychopath who murdered children probably wouldn't have many friends, but even so, the lack of information is a little too convenient. It's as if he never existed.

I remember that other face flickering behind Pike's, and ice water trickles through my bloodstream.

***

When I arrive at the Underwater Café, Steven's in our usual booth, arms crossed over his chest. “So,” he says, “we gonna do another session today?” When I don't answer, he frowns. “What's wrong?”

I interlace my fingers, pull them apart, and lace them together again. My palms are hot and damp. “Steven, have you ever had any neurological alterations performed on you before this?”

Bewilderment clouds his expression. “Is that a trick question? I mean, don't people usually forget that they've had their memories modified?”

“You're right.” It's a moot point, anyway. If his memories
were
modified, there'd have been something about it in his file. Unless …

The technology involved in memory modification is strictly controlled. But there've always been rumors of illicit back-alley Mindwalkers who will perform any job, no matter how unethical, for a price. Until now, I never put much stock in those rumors, but what if there
are
such people? Is it possible that Steven's memories have been illegally modified? Maybe even against his will?

I clear my throat. “It's just that after the session, I looked over your readings, and there was a pattern aberration in your neural networks. Microscarring in your cortex and hippocampus.”

“English, Doc.”

“Something odd in your brain.”

A shadow of unease slips across his face. “You don't think it's, like, cancer or something, do you?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It looks like the result of a procedure.”

“Well, could it have come from Conditioning?”

I shake my head. “Conditioning's not invasive. The effects are temporary.”

“Then what?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.”

Steven frowns and runs a hand through his cornsilk hair. I glimpse a tiny, round scar on his scalp.

A memory flashes through my mind. I'm back in the filthy basement, my wrists rubbed raw from ropes. “Please,” I say between sobs. “Please, I swear, I'll never try to escape again.”

Pike looms over me, a whirring drill in one hand. “I know
you won't.” His voice is low, almost gentle. “You got everything you need right here. Why would you try to run? That's just crazy.” His eyes glint in the dim light. “You know what they did in the Dark Ages when someone started acting crazy?” The drill moved closer, buzzing like a huge hornet. “They'd drill a hole in his skull to let the demons out.”

The tip of the drill touches my scalp, and blinding pain sears through my head. I scream.

“Doc? Hey, Doc!”

I snap back to the present, trembling. Did I scream out loud? I look quickly around the room, but no one is staring. I exhale a small breath of relief. “Sorry,” I murmur, pressing my fingers to my head.

Could that incident have … ? No, of course not. A simple drill wouldn't cause that type of scarring. Pike pulled back before it actually pierced Steven's brain, anyway.

This would be so much easier if I could talk to my superiors at IFEN, ask them about the correct course of action. But given the circumstances, that's out of the question. And I haven't even told Steven everything. There was that flicker I saw in his memories, that other face behind Pike's.

“So, what happens now?” he asks.

I bite my thumbnail, my mind whirring like an engine. When memories are deleted or altered, traces of the original memories sometimes linger. It's difficult for even the most skilled Mindwalker to scrub away everything. But those traces are inaccessible to the client's conscious mind, bits of neural debris floating around in the vast, dark space beneath. If I could find some way to probe deeper into his mind, I might be able to access those fragments of information. Maybe I could—

I give my head a quick, hard shake. There's not enough information. If I start telling him all my wild theories, I'll just alarm him unnecessarily. “That's up to you,” I say. “We can proceed with the treatment, or … we can try to learn more.”

He looks away. “I just want to forget.”

Mingled relief and disappointment wash over me. “Then we'll continue the sessions. Though we should probably wait until tomorrow. Greta will be at the house this afternoon.”

He nods.

I pay for my chai, which I've barely touched. We linger a few minutes, watching the holographic sea turtle make its slow, ponderous circuit around the restaurant. Steven reaches up to touch it as it passes, but of course, there's nothing to touch.

My cell phone buzzes, jarring me from my reverie. It's a new text:

SEE U TONIGHT?

I wince and palm my face. “Ian! I completely forgot.”

“Who, what?”

“I told him I'd show up.” I chew the inside of my cheek.

I don't particularly want to go. I'm hopeless at parties. The last time I went to one, I was thirteen—some girl's birthday. I stood in the corner the whole time. A boy tried to strike up a conversation with me, I started babbling about neuroanatomy, and he quickly slipped away.