Jack spins the other control room chair around and plops down into it. “Told you so,” he says, but his voice is sad.
“It’s not like my memory can just be wiped. Memories don’t work that way. You can’t just erase a person from your past.”
Jack looks at the monitors and brain scans. “Maybe you can.”
I roll my eyes. “The mind can lose memories—amnesia is a scientific possibility. But it’s not selective. I mean, it can be, but not like this. I have memories of the past few years. They’re just… different from yours. The brain doesn’t function that neatly. Real science is messy. This isn’t a sci fi novel.”
Jack raises an eyebrow. “We’re doing brain scans in a mental spa, love.”
“So? And don’t call me ‘love.’”
Jack runs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know,” he says. “Xavier’s brilliant, and I’m no idiot, and we’ve not been able to figure out how this is happening. We just know what it’s not—it’s not cloning, it’s not being replaced by an android. The people who come back—”
“Like Akilah,” I interrupt. Like me? I want to ask.
“Like Akilah. Those people are still people. They’re just… missing parts. In their brain—like memories, but also other emotions.”
“I have emotions,” I whisper. I am nothing but a black hole of emotions.
Jack shakes his head. “I don’t understand it,” is all he says.
“The reverie drug is designed to enhance memories you have, but there’s not a drug that can just erase them, rewrite them.”
“But I knew you,” he says gently.
And—as impossible as it is—I cannot deny it.
forty
The next morning, I wake to the smell of bacon.
I stretch and throw my comforter back. I stare at the blue-and-brown damask pattern. Jack knew this comforter. Jack knew this bed.
I shudder, heat rising in my cheeks.
Jack knew me.
After the reverie, Jack left, telling me that, should I need to find him, I could go to the lower city and hire the black-and-yellow auto-boat again. I had thought that I would uncover the secrets of the Zunzana, and that I could hand them straight to Ms. White and the UC… but I no longer know what’s right or wrong, what’s true or not.
And I no longer know who—what—I am. I’m still me, of course. But those missing memories bother me, nagging at the edge of my mind like a buzzing bee in my ear. Has something happened to me to make me…other? Is that where my memories went?
The bacon is burning. I taste bile on the back of my
tongue as I remember the last time I smelled burning, the explosion of the androids in Triumph Plaza, that one stump of a foot of the man I’d spoken to moments before. The explosion in my own home, the gaping hole, now covered with tarp, where our interface room used to be. I can’t let myself get distracted by whatever Jack is, or what I am, or what we used to be. I have to focus on finding whoever is attacking my nation—and my family.
Bacon… burning. I shoot out of bed and race to the door. Mom shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t be making bacon. She’s too sick, too weak. I slide on the slick tile floor as I race down the hallway to the kitchen, where I can hear the sounds of grease popping. We’ve not had bacon in the apartment for… for ages. More than a year. Mom’s had trouble with greasy food, and it was just safer to serve her protein in pill form and give her soups and vegetables.
But when I step into the light, blinking, I see Mom standing over the stove, a cast iron frying pan sizzling with slices of bacon. She’s wearing blue jeans, the ones with the holes in the knees. The ones she’s not worn for years, forgotten in her closet as she opted for stretchy pants that were easier to get on and off. There’s no sign at all of the nurse Ms. White hired for Mom.
“Mom?” I ask in shock.
She turns, a huge grin plastered on her face. She’s paler than usual, and still too-skinny, her cheeks sunken in that hollow sort of way that shadows people with a long-term illness. But she’s standing on her own, cooking.
“Mom?” I whisper, creeping forward, cautious joy rising in my throat.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” she says. “After my relapse, Dr. Simpa tried me on a new therapy and medication.”
“You’re… better?” I can’t seem to grasp simple things, like words.
Mom’s smile falters. “Not entirely. I’ll always have Hebb’s. But… I’m a little better. Better enough to do this.” She flicks a piece of crispy bacon from the pan onto a paper-towel covered plate, then plucks it up and pops it in her mouth. “Mmm,” she says, grinning. “Life’s not worth living without bacon.”
Mom hands me a plate of already cooked pancakes and deposits a healthy portion of bacon on the side. I drown everything with syrup and stuff it in my mouth. Mom only eats one more piece of bacon and one pancake, but it’s more solid food than she’s had in weeks.
“This is… sudden.” I think back to only a few days ago, when the only thing that would help her sleep at night was a reverie and a pile of pills. She could barely stand then, and now she’s cooking breakfast?
“I didn’t want you to expect this,” Mom says. “My Hebb’s seemed to be going back into remission, but we weren’t sure about it… and I was definitely getting worse before I got better.”
“Remission? Is this something permanent, or…?” I don’t know if I can handle seeing Mom sick again, not after this glimpse of her almost well.
Mom smiles. “It’s still too early to tell, but the scans have been good. I hope, one day, one day soon, this will be normal.”
There are tears of happiness in her eyes—and mine, too. I let my fork drop on the table. “This is just… it’s so quick!”
“I’d slowly been feeling better for a while now,” Mom says. “But like I said, I didn’t want you to get your hopes up, not if it wasn’t going to work.”
I don’t even know what to say. Hot tears slide down my cheeks, and I realize quite distantly that these are tears of joy. For the past year, as Mom has fallen further and further into the clutches of her disease, I’d nearly given up. I’d been waiting for the day when the doctors told me to quit bothering with the medicine, that it would be better for Mom to just silently slip away. I’d been prepared for the goodbyes—as prepared as anyone could be, I guess—but I wasn’t at all prepared for a hello.
I throw my chair back and wrap my arms around Mom. Already she feels more substantial. Before, when I helped her into the reverie chair, just a few days ago, she’d felt almost wraith-like, already half-ghost. But she’s solid now, real. She’s more my mom in this instance than in all the year previously.
“I just can’t believe it,” I say snottily into her apron.
She strokes my hair. “Believe it. It’s about time we’ve had some good news, no?”
I nod, holding her tighter. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do: Hold my mother against me with the promise that she wouldn’t go away.
When I let her go, I feel a hundred pounds lighter. I had not realized how heavy the weight of her disease was on my shoulders.
Mom smooths down my hair, an indulgent smile smeared across her face. “Let’s go out,” she says, her voice giddy and young. “A picnic. In the lower city. We’ll hire a luzzu and sail around the waterways and then eat sandwiches and watch the tourists get sunburned. What do you say?”
I’m dressed and ready to go in ten seconds flat.
We meander through Central Gardens toward the lifts. Mom’s chatting happily, and I’m barely even listening to the words, just the sound of her voice, rich and whole and not cracked with tiredness.
Someone big bumps into me, so violently that I nearly fall to the ground. A mitt of a hand grabs me as I stumble, jerking me upright.
“Sorry about that,” the man’s voice says in a deep rumble with a French accent.
I start in surprise. This is the giant Jack has working with him—what did he call him?—Xavier. My eyes wi
den in shock, but Xavier dips his head close to me and whispers, “Shh.”
From the opposite direction, a small girl in a bright orange sundress bounds forward, seemingly distracted by her eye bots. As she passes Mom, the large anaconda tattoo coils up her arm, circling the girl’s neck and hissing near her ear. I see a flash of something metallic in Julie’s hand—a scanner, flashing red.
“Are you okay?” Mom asks, knocking Xavier’s hands away from me. All of this has taken place in just seconds, and even as I stand there, Xavier and Julie disappear into the crowd.
“Yeah,” I say slowly, staring at the crowd.
It’s still too early for many tourists, but at least the lifts are operational again. We get one fairly quickly, mostly to ourselves. I watch as the upper city fades away and the sprawling water world of the lower city blossoms on the other side of the glass lift.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Mom says softly, leaning against the glass. “Especially from up here, where you can’t see the people properly.”
I press against the glass, peering down at the glittering waters of the Mediterranean, and for just this moment, I allow myself a moment of joy.
My cuff vibrates on my wrist.
I look down and read the screen.
That woman with you is not your mother. Be careful. —Jack
forty-one
When the door dings open, Mom’s the first one out, already heading to the row of luzzu boats lined up. The luzzoliers cat-call at Mom, which makes her smile. She relishes the attention—the first attention she’s had in a long time that’s not pity or concern.
“Oh, this is delicious!” Mom says, grinning hugely. I stare at her. She’s never used “delicious” as an adjective for anything other than food.
“Something wrong?” she asks, motioning for me to catch up.
I swipe the screen of my cuff blank, and look into my mother’s eyes. Her wide, bright eyes, set in full cheeks that do not look like they belong to a woman who, days ago, was counting down the days to her death. “The eyes are the window to the soul,” my dad always said. But I don’t see her now.
“What’s wrong, Ella?” the woman who looks like my mother says.
I shake my head.
I want to believe it.
Even if…
Even if her cure was a bit too miraculous. Even if a small part of me has doubted this from the start. I think about the flashing red screen on Julie’s scanner.
No. No. She’s Mom.
She has to be. She has to be.
Mom leans forward, concern etched on her face. “Ella?” she asks again.
I force a smile. “Sorry, Mom,” I say. “I was just thinking about the last time we did this.” I wave my hand at the luzzu boats and the touristy crowd.
“When was the last time we did this?” Mom asks curiously.
I laugh, my voice too high. Inside, I’m screaming, screaming. “Oh, Mom! You always called it ‘your last good day,’ the day you and me and Dad came out here to the lower city, just before you were diagnosed with Hebb’s Disease.”
“My last good day?” Mom asks, a slow smile playing on her face.
I nod. “Don’t you remember? You and me and Dad came out here for a picnic on the beach. It was before you got ill.”
This is a lie. All of it. We’ve never been on a picnic in the lower city, and even if we had, this is not Mom’s last good day. Not by a long shot. Her last good day is the one she repeats in every reverie she does, over and over. The
house in Rabat, dancing with Dad when I was a little kid.
I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.
“Oh, of course!” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?”
And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not.
“Come on, let’s go! I have a surprise for you.”
She starts to pull me toward a luzzu, but I hang back. “A surprise?”
“I want to take you somewhere.”
My stomach twists in dread. Go somewhere? With this… thing? This thing that looks like Mom? The terrorists are clever—clever enough to make a copy of Mom, to find a way to get me alone. What do they want with me? To hold me for ransom so my mother will hand over her research?
“Ella?” Mom asks when I don’t move, and she sounds and looks and smells so exactly like my mother that I take a step toward her.
“Let me take you where you need to be!” a cheerful electronic voice calls.
A black-and-yellow luzzu bumps up against the dock. The human luzzoliers try to shove it aside—they don’t want to lose their fare to an automated boat, but I lunge for it.
“Where are you going?” Mom calls after me as
I leap off the dock and land into the boat.
I slam my cuff against the meter, and the boat’s electronic voice says, “Identification: Ella Shepherd. Emergency evacuation initiated.”
Before the thing that looks like Mom can say anything, the luzzu roars to life, knocking other boats out of the way and sending a tourist couple splashing into the water. I glance back behind me, a spray of seawater obscuring my vision. Auto-boats are only supposed to travel at a sedate pace, but this one’s practically flying across the water. From the dock, I can still hear Mom screaming my name.
My wrist buzzes again, and I accept a com from Jack. His face fills my vision as my eye bots project a holographic image of him across from me.
“You made it to the boat,” he says.
“What the hell is going on?!” I scream.
“I’m sorry—we don’t have time. Look under your seat—there should be a burner cuff there for you. Cut off your own cuff and drop it into the water.”
The boat is taking me straight out, away from Malta, away from Mom. I’m blinded by sunlight—real sunlight, not the false light from the solar glass that lines the roof covering the lower city. Ahead of us is nothing but waves.
A siren cuts through the noise, and I twist in my seat. A pair of police boats are making their way toward me.
“Jack—what—”
“Ella! Cut off your cuff! It has geo-locators in it! You’re going to have to run!”
I drop to the boat’s floor and peer under the bench seat. A knife and a cuffLINK is taped to the wood. As the sirens grow closer, I slip the knife edge between the thin tech foil and my skin, slicing through the cuff. It takes some sawing, but a moment later, I’ve sliced through the mechanics. I gasp in pain as I yank the cuff off—the tiny needles connecting the cuff to the nanobots inside my body aren’t noticeable until they’re torn out of my flesh. My arm feels naked and weak without it, the skin where the cuff had always been too pale next to the rest of my body.
I drop my cuff into the Mediterranean.
The burner cuff is one of those temporary things that you wear if you somehow break your cuff. I slip it on—it feels alien against my skin, too rough, not like my cuff. When I swipe my finger across the screen, I see that the cuff identifies me as Carly Pucket, native of Gozo, orphan, factory worker. It’s a good hack—it looks legit, down to the photo on the ID screen.
As soon as it’s on, a program downloads to my nanobots. The boat veers sharply right, heading back to the island, and the police boats change course.
My hands clench into fists, my fingernails digging into the skin of my palms. I have two options. I can make sure the police catch up to me. Go home. Forget about this all. I could jump out of the boat; I could tip the boat over.
Or.
Or, I could run.
forty-two
Panic rises up in me as the boat automatically speeds up, aiming not for the touristy area of New Venice, but the Foqra District, the poor area behind the shiny surface of the city. I’ve never been there before, but Akilah lived here before she went to the military. br />
Akilah—cutting my cuff cut my communication with her, too. But… she was like Mom. The same, but different.
Something made that thing that looked like Mom. If Jack’s story is true—and I’m inclined now to believe it is—the government is really responsible for the android attack. And the android attack was, in part, focused on my own home and the Reverie Mental Spa internal interface system. And Mom—she’d been seeing a new doctor, one who worked at the UC labs. Her “cure” must have come from there.
A flood of questions rises up inside me. Do they have my real mom as a prisoner somewhere? Jack said that the soldiers, the ones like Akilah… they died in battle before they were turned into the doppelgangers. My eyes burn. Does that mean Mom was killed? No—not if they want her research. Surely they wouldn’t kill her.
After all, a very small voice in my head says, they did something to my memory, and I didn’t die for it to happen.
Over the sound of the crashing waves and the rising sirens behind us, I can hear the buzz-zzz-buzzing of a bee in my ear. I swat at my face, but there’s nothing there.
I take a deep breath, quelling the panic that’s choking me. I can’t break down. Not here. Not yet.
The boat swerves behind the docking station, the long platform that extends the entire width of the lower city. In the center are the rows of lifts that connect the lower and upper city, and while luzzi crowd the open area at the front of the docking station, the entire back of it is made of giant electronic displays advertising hotels and restaurants, spas and tourist attractions.
I’ve never been behind it.
As the boat approaches, the program automatically downloaded from the burner cuff lights up. It’s similar to the one I used when I followed Dad’s ghostly image to Jack. But as I see just what the Foqra District is, I find it difficult to focus on the program.
Because the Foqra District is a city. A city made of boats.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of luzzu boats crowd behind the docking station all the way to the natural coastline of the island.