Survival Colony 9 (16 page)

Impossible.

But if Laman’s story was true, one of those things had taken control of me. And, for some reason, had spared my body, leaving its mark only on my shredded mind.

“You can see now why you’re so important to the colony,” Laman Genn said, and even with all that had happened he could barely restrain the eagerness in his voice. “Somehow, in a way we don’t pretend to understand, you withstood a Skaldi attack. The creature took hold of you, tried to consume you, but failed. We think, Aleka thinks, the effort to master you destroyed it, because after it fled she could find no sign of it. In fact,” he added grimly, “by the time it abandoned your body it had left itself practically nowhere else to go.”

My mouth had gone so dry I had trouble forming words. “Aleka saw it happen?”

“She saw you convulse as it happened,” he said. “She had attempted to track the Skaldi through your camp, had seen one victim after another fall before it. All the usual factors—darkness, the confusion of the attack—made it impossible for her to follow its movements with certainty. All she saw was a fellow colonist collapse beside you, then your body go into what appeared to be a seizure. A violent one. When you relaxed and opened your eyes she assumed you were infected and was about to feed you to the fire, but something stopped her.”

I thought again of Korah, of Aleka’s words:
I looked into the eyes of a girl I loved
. I couldn’t bear to say the rest, even to myself. “What stopped her?”

A weird light shone in his face. “She says, and these are her exact words, that there was no hatred in your eyes. No cruelty or malice. Just confusion. You seemed disoriented, couldn’t recall your name or anything about yourself. You said you felt dizzy and sick to your stomach, and then you stumbled and fell. She saw your head strike the ground. When you arrived at our camp you’d been unconscious since that moment. We performed all the tests on you, as we did on Aleka and Yov and the rest of the camp as a precaution, but we saw no further sign of the Skaldi’s presence.”

He licked his lips, leaning forward as if itching to peer into my mind, my past. The stones I’d arranged without thought or plan lay spread between us in a crooked line like a stitch in the dead ground. I had the strange feeling that so long as the barrier remained in place, he’d be unable to touch me. “So you believe . . .” I began guardedly.

“That there’s something about you the Skaldi can’t reach,” he said. “Yes. Something neither we nor they knew existed. Some power, some . . . we don’t know what to call it. Not strong enough to protect you entirely from damage. But strong enough, it may be, if you could remember what it is and help us harness it, to protect us all.”

His eyes flicked over my face, searching, eager. For a second I thought I saw the veil drop, and I knew he was hiding something.

“You know what it is,” I said. “The thing that protected me.”

“I swear to you I don’t.”

I almost laughed. “You’re a lousy liar, Laman,” I said. “If you didn’t at least suspect something, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

He rocked back, seemed to wrestle with himself. Finally he spoke again.

“I’ve heard rumors,” he said. “From the early days of the survival colonies. I didn’t believe them at the time. People talked of—experiments. Attempts to find a cure. Even though we didn’t know what the disease was. And even though there wasn’t enough left of the bodies that caught it to take a decent sample.”

“So now you’ve got a body,” I said.

He drew a deep breath, let it out. “Now we’ve got a body.”

“So what’s stopping you from taking your sample?”

For the first time since the conversation began, his eyes flared with anger. “We no longer have the means,” he said. “If we ever did. All we have is you.”

His voice fell silent. I dropped my eyes from his penetrating gaze and turned them inward, trying to feel the thing he told me I held within, the power he couldn’t or wouldn’t name. The experiment, if that’s what it was, that had been performed on my body. I felt nothing, though. Nothing but the absence I’d carried in my gut as long as I could remember. Maybe, I thought, I’d possessed this power all my life. Or maybe it had come to me only when I needed it. Either way, I could no more
remember
it than I could remember my heart doing its work or my brain sending its signals. “So you took me in to save yourselves,” I said.

The anger never left his eyes. “We took you in because you would have died if we hadn’t,” he said bluntly. “We’ve taken in others under similar circumstances. But there’s no point denying that our interest in you changed once we learned your history. Enough so that we decided, all of us, Aleka and Yov included, to treat you as if you’d always been with us. For the two of them, that meant withholding their own history from you as well. We agreed to create a past that would serve in place of your actual past, until it returned. If it returned. Until such time as you could tell us yourself what happened that night.” He looked levelly at me. “As commander, I assumed the primary responsibility to sustain that fiction.”

“But why?” I said. “If Aleka and Yov knew who I really was, why not just tell me?”

“That’s complicated,” he said, so matter-of-factly he might have been talking about a troop maneuver and not the lie that had controlled my life. “Aleka was in favor of disclosing the circumstances of your coming to us, but it was Tyris’s opinion that you’d feel safer if you thought you were among friends and family. That the truth of what the Skaldi had done to you and your colony might overwhelm you, even further the damage. You have to realize, we were shooting in the dark. Nothing like this had ever happened to us. But we felt, I felt, that to help you regain your memory we’d have to establish a relationship of trust.”

“By lying to me.”

“If that’s the way you choose to see it.”

“What other way is there?”

“We were on the brink,” he said. “We’d been on the brink as long as I could remember. And suddenly, unexpectedly, beyond all possibility of life as we knew it, an opportunity presented itself to fight back. To recover some of what we’d lost. I wasn’t about to let that opportunity pass us by. If the price of saving our species was keeping the truth from one of its members, that was a price I was willing to pay.”

“What a fatherly thing to do,” I said.

He glared at me, brows lowered. “You’re in no position to judge,” he said. “A father cares enough about his children to—”

“Sacrifice one of them?” I said. “The one who just happens not to be his own?”

“I’m not going to apologize to you, Querry,” he said. “If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ve got the wrong man. I took on the role of your father because I strongly believed you would respond to me as you would not to a stranger. That you would listen to me, learn what you needed from me. And then, when the time came, if the time came, it would no longer matter how it had come. When the time came, you’d tell me what you yourself had learned, and help me use that knowledge for the salvation of our kind.”

I mulled that over. It seemed incredible that he’d think I’d help him after finding out what he’d done. But then, it seemed incredible that he’d done it at all.

“The memory exercises,” I said. “Were those your idea too?”

“Tyris’s,” he said. “They were all she could think of. And we have reason to believe they have made a difference. Prevented you from losing more. And possibly”—here he paused for a long time—“helped you begin the process of recovery.”

At first I had no idea what he meant. Then it hit me, and I felt my stomach drop like one of the stones that lay before me. “The dreams,” I said. “The night terrors. You think that means my memory’s coming back?”

He nodded slowly, warily. “Tyris believes the dreams might represent your mind’s unconscious attempts to access your past. Attempts that, as we both know, have been unsuccessful so far. She believes the terror associated with those dreams might be a result of the event you’re trying to remember, the event you can’t remember. If it’s true you were subjected to some sort of—procedure, it might be that the terror has as much to do with that as with the attack. But Tyris believes the intensifying of the panic attacks means you may be close to calling those memories back into consciousness.”

“Intensifying?” I said. “You really have been keeping an eye on me, haven’t you?”

He said nothing.

“And what makes you so sure I’ll ever remember?” I said. “Maybe there’s nothing
to
remember. Or maybe it’s gone for good.”

“Nothing is sure,” he said. “All we know is that if
you
can’t remember, no one can. Aleka and Yov don’t know what it was that protected you. And there’s no one else left.”

“That’s a pretty slim hope,” I said.

He smiled humorlessly. “A slim hope is all we have.”

His eyes locked on mine, but this time I didn’t look away. I simply sat and stared at the man in front of me, the man who could confess so calmly to deceiving the person he called his son. But there was one thing more I needed from him, one more piece of my past I wanted to hear from his lips. So I said, “What about my real family? My father and mother? What happened to them?”

“Lost,” he said. “To the Skaldi.”

“So you’re all I have left.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Well, guess what, Laman,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice before. I do now.”

I stood and walked away from him.

“Where are you going?” he said.

I didn’t stop, didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

“It was no accident,” he called out. “The one that took Korah. It was no accident it sought you first. I didn’t want to admit they could outflank us, outsmart us. But it’s the only possible explanation. Petra was right, Querry. They’re hunting you. They know.”

I felt a shiver run down my back, but I kept going.

“I’m not your father,” I heard him say. “But I’m still the commander of your colony. Let me help you.”

This time I did turn to face him. Crouching on the ground in his grubby coat and beard, with his head jutting forward and his eyes lit by a fierce light, he looked about as much like the commander of a survival colony as the lunatics who hoarded their own spit and eyelashes. The arc of stones I’d placed between us enclosed him like a crazy cage. Within their circle he seemed, at long last, like the man he’d always been. The only difference was, now I could see him for what he truly was.

I took the red-handled knife from my pocket, flung it toward him. It skidded to a stop at his feet, inscription facing up. He looked at it, at me, but made no effort to touch it.

“You’re nothing to me, Laman,” I said, and walked away.

15

Beast

A voice spoke to me, telling me that the people and places we know will always be there.

“But that’s not really true, is it?” I asked.

No answer came. Instead, a figure approached me, wrapped in darkness like a cloak of shadows. From its depths a bleached hand emerged, groping. I stood paralyzed, my mouth wide but the sound refusing to leave my throat. The darkness surrounding the figure seemed to grow, obliterating the world, turning all to night. As if through a storm of black dust I saw swirling forms in violent motion, heard the terrified cries of loved ones. Wind and distance muffled their voices, but I thought I heard them begging me for help.

Then all sound ceased and the veil of darkness lifted just enough for me to see that the ground at my feet was strewn with bodies.

Anguish contorted their limbs and faces. Spirals of smoke curled from their vacant eyes. As I watched, their bodies disintegrated, sinking into the dust as if they’d never been. I sensed two hazy figures standing on the periphery of my vision, but the creature’s arm brushed them aside before I could reach out to them or call their names.

It turned its full attention to me. Its maw stretched wide, enveloping me in a smell as sickly as curdled blood, and a wordless howl rushed over me like a gale. I felt ensnared, suffocated, consumed. My gut heaved as though my insides had been wrenched from my body. The world wavered and grew black, a candle’s flame sputtering in the wind.

Something whispered to me, as if the creature’s wail had turned to words. I couldn’t make the words out, but the whisper tugged at my body, my mind, urging me to follow it into the dark.

Then I experienced a sudden outpouring of warmth, as if a fire had bloomed deep inside my blood and bones. The whisper slid into a panicked shriek, and a feeling of relief washed over me. The heat no longer seemed to come from my veins but from outside, as if the fire had been transferred to the thing that had attacked me. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it thrashing at my feet. I took a step forward but found myself falling, falling toward the unseen ground, falling into darkness.

The voice sounded again from the void, pronouncing a single word: “Querry!”

Querry.

I clung to that word like a lifeline.

But I didn’t know what it meant.

The next thing I knew, the darkness surrounded me, and I saw it was the natural darkness of night, silvered by a tiny slice of moon.

My skin felt cold and wet. My pulse hammered in my temples. But nothing shared the night with me, no sound except my own breath broke the stillness. The ground held only the common dust of this dead world. I was alone.

I’d been asleep. I’d been dreaming. The significance of that fact didn’t strike me for a second.

I’d been dreaming
.

And I remembered the dream. It chilled me to remember it, but I did. I could play back the details just as I’d experienced them in my sleep, and each time I replayed them they grew stronger, sharper. The voice, the whitened hand, the bodies, the whisper, the fire, the fall. The details became solid shapes in my mind, and the feelings of horror and relief they produced became as firm as my own flesh. And I knew what that meant.

This wasn’t just a dream.

It was a memory.

It was a memory of the night memory had failed. A glimpse of the attack that had stripped my identity away. After six months of nothing, a fragment of my past had finally returned.

I rose to a sitting position, hugged my knees. From the corner of camp where I’d moved my blanket, the moon’s slanted smile showed me the shapes of sleeping bodies, the half a colony that had followed Laman Genn deeper into the Skaldi stronghold. I couldn’t tell which of the huddled forms belonged to him, which to Aleka. Last night he’d let me walk off undisturbed, and neither of them had approached me as I lay down and fell into a feverish half-sleep. I’d listened to the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears, felt the presence of my own thoughts crowding my mind like ghosts. I’d struggled to locate the power I supposedly possessed, the power that had driven the creature away. I tried to detect any last trace of that creature lurking in my cells or bloodstream, eating at the roots of my being. I remembered what Korah had said that night at the pool. What did Skaldi feel like? Did Skaldi know they were Skaldi?

But I felt nothing. No power, no parasite. All I felt was me.

And now this dream, this memory. I didn’t understand it completely, couldn’t grasp what had happened to the creature that had threatened my life. But I got the gist. Laman had lied about many things, but not about the attack that had brought me to Survival Colony 9. I
had
been infected. One of the Skaldi had tried to hollow me out, to drain me like Korah, like Danis, like Mika. It had succeeded in gaining access. But it had failed to complete its work. Somehow I had driven it away. Something in my body, born there or put there, had stopped it. The creature had killed my memory, but it hadn’t killed me.

And that meant there was yet another part of me I knew nothing about, a part that no one, not even the Skaldi, knew. The creature that attacked me hadn’t known. It had seen me as just another body, one more tidbit on its way to devouring Survival Colony 27. But when it tried to feast on my body, it was the one that experienced pain. It was the one that got consumed. Triumph had turned to torment, and its body had crumbled to cinders and ash.

I guess that should have made me happy.

I was alive. The invader had fled. Whatever had fought off the infection had succeeded. I was me.

But that thought didn’t make me happy. It didn’t make me want to forgive, much less forget.

For the past six months, Laman Genn had been hounding me for a single reason: he wanted to pick my brain for the secret he thought I possessed. If he found out a shred of my memory had returned, the hounding would never stop. Not from him, not from any of them. They’d poke at my mind—and if they figured out a way to do it, my body—in an effort to tap the power they wanted for themselves. As more memories surfaced, as I recovered more of the life I’d lost, I’d lose it once again to their dreams, their demands. If I finally got to the bottom of it, learned who I was and how I’d fought the Skaldi off, I’d become an experiment for good. A pawn, not a person. Other colonies might even get into the Querry business.

I’d never be free of them.

The moon cut a bright scar in the sky. I squeezed my sides, tried to clear my head. There had to be another way. A way to discover who I was without the members of Survival Colony 9 finding out, tricking me, trapping me, using me for their own ends.

Then it hit me.

I could never be me as long as I stayed with them. Which meant the only chance I had of being me was to leave them behind.

I rose to a crouch, training my eyes on the sleeping bodies. I waited a couple breathless seconds in case anyone stirred. I knew Petra roamed somewhere out in the night, keeping watch on camp, but I trusted her not to show up except in an emergency. When I felt sure everyone was sound asleep, I crossed to the area where we’d piled our supplies. There wasn’t much left, but I didn’t need much. In fact, the less the better. Speed and secrecy were what I needed most. I reached out for the battered rucksack I’d been carrying the past six months.

I had just laid my hand on its scratchy surface when a scraping sound from behind me made my heart freeze. I spun, my hands held guiltily in front of me, my lips poised to formulate a lie.

But no one had moved. My heart thudded in my ears as I stood there a long minute, trying to detect a change in the sleeping forms, but there was nothing to see.

The scraping sound caught my ears again, louder this time, closer. I held my breath, stared into the wan moonlight.

Nothing.

Then I saw it.

Something had entered our camp.

Where it had come from I couldn’t tell. One second I saw only dust and darkness, and the next a pale shape appeared, not thirty feet from me. For the briefest moment I thought it might be Petra, returning from her surveillance to check on our safety or report something to Laman. Or maybe, I thought, Petra had been overconfident and we’d been tracked by someone from the rebel camp, a scout, a spy.

But it didn’t take much more than a moment to realize the thing before me wasn’t Petra. It wasn’t one of Araz’s people.

It wasn’t even human.

It had been, though. Before its body fell prey to the Skaldi.

My heart rose to my throat as I got my first good look at it: a being no larger than Keely, creeping on all fours into our camp. But its face, I realized with relief, had never belonged to Araz’s son. Its features looked not childlike but terribly old, wasted and worn. Its oversize head drooped at the end of a scrawny neck, its hands and feet scraped the ground as it dragged itself across the dusty terrain. The moonlight showed skin the same red-brown color as the dirt, arms and legs so bony it might have had no flesh at all. It looked like it had crawled through the desert for weeks, its stolen body deteriorating moment by moment, until practically all that was left of it was dust.

My mind flashed back to the day we’d found the gated compound. Wali had sworn he’d seen something in the distance, something the color of the land crawling on all fours. This thing matched his description to the letter.

I braced for its approach. There was just me between it and the rest of the colony, all of them fast asleep and defenseless a hundred feet away. Maybe I’d have a chance to test Laman’s theory for real. A chance to save the people who had lied to me.

But it didn’t come near me, or anyone else. It veered away from the cluster of bodies and crawled along the edge of camp, moving with painful slowness. I thought I heard a sound coming from it, a feeble cry, nothing like the wail I remembered from my dream. I watched as it crept inch by inch around our campsite, its head wobbling on its emaciated neck. Its body seemed to diminish even further as I watched, as if it was crumbling to dust before my eyes. Then the darkness closed over it and it was gone.

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I told myself it must have been a dream, that my mind must still be reeling from its first solid memory in six months.

But when I went to investigate the path the crawling creature had taken, I found a definite trail. Twin furrows in the dust, exactly what you’d expect from a body dragging itself on hands and knees. I traced the trail back the way it had entered camp, saw that the grooves continued far into the night. Then I reversed course and followed to the point where the creature had disappeared, and once again the trail stretched as far as I could see. The thing that had made the trail, though, had passed beyond my sight.

I returned to camp, skirting the sleepers, back to the supply cache. My legs trembled, but not from the danger that had just passed. I had no idea what would have happened if this Skaldi had attacked, whether the power that had protected me once would have protected me again. But I felt no fear. What I felt was so new I barely recognized it.

I felt excitement.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. Of that I felt certain. The very night my first memory returned, a Skaldi unlike any I’d heard of had entered our camp. A Skaldi that had worn its host body down to near nothing yet failed to attack when a fresh supply fell within its reach. There had to be a connection.

My heart beat faster as I realized what the connection was.

This was the one. The one that had erased my memory. It had to be.

The creature that had attacked me had suffered, been damaged in some way. My dream, my memory told me that. Though everything had been dark and cloudy, I remembered its scream, remembered it falling away from me, its body burning as if my skin had turned into a living flame. I thought the creature had burned away completely. So did Laman and Aleka.

But what if it hadn’t?

What if it had merely been wounded, weakened? What if it had fled to one of the half-consumed bodies that lay at my feet, hidden there while Aleka tended to me? There’d been no reason, and no time, for her to scorch all the bodies after the attack ended. As soon as she could, she’d hit the road with Yov and me, desperate for help. And now, after six months of whatever it took for a Skaldi to recover from injuries its kind had never known, it had come back to find me. To finish the job it had started.

Or, I thought with another burst of excitement, maybe it had spent the past six months trying to get
away
from me. Only now, after all that time, it had failed.

My mind jumped at the thought. It all made sense. The Skaldi that had stolen Korah’s body had known things—about the colony, about her, about me—that it couldn’t have known unless it had also stolen her memory. Skaldi were mimics—how could they pretend to be us if they didn’t share our thoughts? If they didn’t assimilate the host’s mind along with the body? It came as a surprise that no one had ever suggested this to me before. Maybe it was because people like Laman Genn preferred to think of Skaldi as dumb brutes that they refused to believe the things that
copied
us also
became
us.

But in the case of the one that attacked me, my memory was all it got. For six months it had held my past inside its wasted body, somehow clinging to that emptied shell far longer than we’d believed Skaldi could. But now, after a half-year of hiding, it had stumbled across our camp. Too weak or frightened to attack, it had crept away as fast as it could. But it had left behind a fragment of the memory it had stolen: the memory of the attack, the memory that haunted it as much as it tortured me.

And that meant that if I could find the creature again, maybe I could force it to restore the rest of what it had taken.

My past. My life. Myself.

I felt something flame inside me at the thought of confronting it. Defeating it. Winning back what I had lost.

Not for Laman, not for Survival Colony 9, not for the human race.

For me.

I snuck back to where we’d unloaded our supplies. Trying to move fast but as stealthily as Petra, I stuffed all I could fit into my old rucksack. I took a canteen, three cans of food, a length of rope, a tattered bedroll. I looked around for guns and ammunition, but Laman and Aleka had kept them hidden. In the end I decided they’d be useless anyway. I did take a pocketknife for carving, a tinder and flint for making fire, a jar for rainwater. I considered a couple other things, a shovel, an extra pair of boots, but I didn’t want to waste time or weigh myself down. I thought about trading my knife for the one Laman had left where I’d thrown it, but I let it lie. Its pale letters glowed like bone against its red flesh.