Escape from Memory (12 page)

“Well, I’m sure I don’t have any secrets that came from my parents,” I said, trying to sound certain. “Can’t we just tell them that?”

Mom’s steady gaze was driving me crazy.

“Oh,” she said slowly, “but that’s where you’re wrong. You see, you do have the secrets. You know them.”

I
FELT LIKE
I’
D BEEN ON ONE OF THOSE AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES THAT
batter you from side to side, up and down, until you’re so dizzy, you can’t walk straight when it stops. Mom was supposed to be telling me the truth, correcting Rona Cummins’s lies—like plain old, reliable gravity after a wild roller coaster. But now it was Mom’s story that I couldn’t believe, Mom who sounded crazy.

“Right,” I said, hiding behind sarcasm. “How silly of me to forget.”

Mom didn’t answer.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “If I knew these secrets, wouldn’t I know that I knew them?”

Finally, Mom looked away from me. She peered down at her hands and spoke so softly that I had to move close to hear.

“What your parents did was like building a system to replicate memory on a computer. But it was human memory they could copy, not digital. I—I didn’t understand it. I was just the stupid younger sister, tagging along, asking dumb questions.” Mom sounded like she was going to cry again, but she swallowed
hard and got her voice under control. “Once they linked a computer system and a human mind, they could pick and choose, enhance some memories, delete others. But Toria said they would never permanently delete a memory. They would just store it on a computer and block it out of the mind.”

“So the war veterans didn’t remember the war” I said.

“Not on an everyday basis,” Mom said. “If they wanted to recall it, they’d have to go to the computer.”

Mom’s spooky voice was scaring me more than I wanted to admit. And what she was telling me was just too freaky.

“Toria and Alexei had lots of ethical concerns about their inventions. They wondered if it was right to give some people virtually unlimited capacities for memory. And they worried about people being forced to forget memories they wanted to keep,” Mom said. “They were terrified of what Rona Cummins kept calling ‘commercial applications.’”

“What does she want to do? Sell this stuff at the grocery?”

Mom shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. But in the wrong hands … What if the British forced the Irish to forget their years of strife? What if the Israelis made the Palestinians forget that they have any claim to the Holy Land? Or, conversely, what if the Palestinians gave the Israelis the same kind of amnesia?”

“Hey, maybe everyone would stop fighting,” I said.

“It’s not that easy,” Mom said. “All those people would lose their identity.
I
think they’d fight more.”

I frowned, my head spinning. I didn’t want to think about all the problems my parents’ inventions could unleash on the world.

“Mom, honest,” I said, “I don’t know anything about this stuff. Remember? I barely squeaked by with a B minus in computer
class last year. And that was because Lynne helped me.”

Mom was back to giving me her earnest gaze. She’d looked me straight in the eye more in the past fifteen minutes than she had in the previous thirteen years.

“Before I took you from Crythe,” she said slowly “your parents implanted what they called a ‘memory chip’ in your brain. It held copies of both of their memories. They wanted you to be able to understand, when you were older…. They hypnotized you so you’d have no access to the memories until then. You only need to be hypnotized and told to seek out those memories, and then you’ll know everything.”

I shook my head, not wanting to accept what she was telling me. Automatically, I reached up and touched my scalp, my fingers searching through my hair. I didn’t know what I was looking for. A scar? A USB port?

Mom put her hand over mine, stopping me.

“You can’t feel it now,” she said. “It’s all inside, embedded in your brain. Everything external healed over a long time ago.”

Mom was looking at me kindly—even lovingly—but she made me feel like a freak, some sort of cyber-monster my parents had cobbled together.

“When were you planning on telling me all this?” I asked angrily.

“In the beginning I wasn’t sure. When you were a toddler, I thought fifteen, sixteen, seventeen was old enough. I thought I’d recognize the right time when it came. I didn’t want to keep the secret all by myself forever. I wanted … company. But then we put down roots in Willistown. We weren’t Crythian anymore. You were like all the other kids. These last few years I was beginning to think … never. You didn’t ever need to
know anything. What good would those memories do you?”

I was torn between fury and relief. Mom was right. I hadn’t even known those memories were in my head, and already they’d caused me a world of trouble. And yet—I had longed to know more about my father, about where I’d come from. A lot about Mom and me that I’d never understood was beginning to make sense now. I wanted everything to make sense.

“No wonder you were so upset about my friends hypnotizing me,” I muttered. I remembered my mother’s words on Saturday: “So it will happen.” She’d meant that I would remember everything after all. I had to tell her how wrong she was. “But they didn’t make me remember any of my parents’ memories. Just my own.”

Already I was racking my brain, searching the dark recesses of my mind for some hint of a memory that wasn’t entirely mine. But there was nothing there, nothing I hadn’t experienced or seen or heard or read or dreamed up all by myself.

Mom could tell what I was doing.

“Don’t try to remember,” she said. “You can’t unless you’re hypnotized. And it’s too dangerous. If they even suspect you have the secrets—”

“The Crythians don’t know?” I said. “Rona doesn’t?”

Mom shook her head.

“No, thank God,” she said. “They never would have even known where we were if I hadn’t tried to find out about them. After you were asking me all those questions, I got curious. I was afraid all your memories might, um, surface, and I wanted to know how things stood back in Crythe. Just in case. I took a leave of absence from the library. I was going to be Sophia Landon, ace detective.”

“You were going to come back here?” I asked. “To spy?”

“Nooo, probably not,” Mom said slowly. “I didn’t want to go anywhere unless I had to. I just wanted … time to think.”

Yep, that’s Mom. She’d take a month off work just for time to think.

She kept talking.

“I did a few computer searches at the library. I thought I was discreet, but I guess I’m too much of an amateur,” She looked around wildly, as if remembering all over again that her mistakes had led us to this horrible concrete cell. “I might as well have sent out flares,” she said bitterly.

“Mom, don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was still in shock myself. Then I remembered we didn’t have to be hopeless. “Oh, I almost forgot—Lynne went out to get help. She’ll tell the police where we are, and they’ll come and get us. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right!”

Mom looked at me like I’d totally lost all my senses.

“Lynne?” she said.

And then I explained about Lynne stowing away in my suitcase, and hiding under the bed, and escaping when I went out to give the speech. When I finished, Mom looked almost hopeful.

“Well, you’re right, maybe we do have a shot at being rescued,” she said. “That Lynne can be very convincing.”

“Yes, she sure can,” I said excitedly. I looked back at the door, as if expecting to see it open any minute. The gray walls around me didn’t look nearly so grim anymore. “And she’s smart, too,” I bragged. “
She
should be the Crythian, not me.”

“Oh, Crythians aren’t smart,” Mom said. “You don’t understand.
Having a good memory isn’t the same as intelligence. Intelligence involves insight, being able to make connections, solve problems. If anything, Crythians’ memories get in the way of their intelligence. Except for your parents, the rest of us were always too busy trying to keep track of our memories to truly understand anything. We don’t really think very well.”

I thought again about how all the people had watched me during my speech. They
had
seemed almost stupid, staring and staring. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of everything Mom had told me. My mind kept skirting the biggest revelation she’d made, about the secrets stashed away in my own head. No matter how much I’d wondered about my parents, I didn’t want their memories in my brain. That made me something else: not just plain old Kira Landon from Willistown, Ohio, but a freak of nature, a mutant, a—a—I didn’t even know if there was a term for something like me.

Regardless of what you called someone with a computer chip and other people’s memories in her head, that wasn’t what I wanted to be. And I sure didn’t want anyone else to know what I was.

“If Lynne rescues us,” I began. “No—I mean,
when
she rescues us—the Crythians won’t be able to accuse us of anything, will they? I mean, there’s no way they could guess that I—”

Mom sat up straight.

“Absolutely not,” she snapped. “Your parents never told anyone but me what they did. And I haven’t told Rona or her cronies a thing. Not since they came and got me, right after you left for school. Come to think of it, they were probably watching to make sure you were gone before they got me…. Rona showed no interest in you until I refused to cooperate. I
thought I could just drop a note behind me and you’d be safe at Lynne’s house.”

“Mom, I can’t drive,” I reminded her.

“I was trying … Oh, never mind,” Mom said. I noticed she wouldn’t look me in the eye. She shook her head angrily. “That Rona is so despicable! I don’t know how she’s managed to get all of Crythe under her power. Or maybe she doesn’t have complete control, if she thought she had to use you to manipulate them…. I’m so glad you showed her that
you
weren’t going to be one of her pawns!”

Mom sounded proud. I wasn’t sure I’d ever done anything to make Mom sound so proud.

I thought about how differently Mom and I had been treated.

“Have they, uh, fed you?” I asked hesitantly.

“No,” Mom said. “Not since I got here. But I don’t know how long ago that was. They knocked me out at our place, and I woke up here. What day is it, anyway? What time is it?”

“Thursday,” I said. That was the only question I could answer with certainty. It seemed like the day had already lasted several lifetimes, but I remembered that the sun had barely been over the horizon when I’d given my speech to the Crythians. Of course, with the difference in time zones, Lynne and I had probably awakened incredibly early, West Coast time. “I guess it’s still Thursday morning,” I told Mom in amazement.

“Then Rona or her cronies were in here harassing me practically every hour through the night,” Mom said bitterly. “I thought she was just doing that again when you opened the door. That’s why I pretended to be sleeping.”

So Mom hadn’t eaten in more than a day, and she’d had a
night of constantly interrupted sleep on a cold concrete floor, and she was still looking at me like
I
was the one she was really worried about. I suddenly wished I could give Mom even one of those apples I’d rolled under the bed for Lynne.

But Lynne had needed all the energy she could get, I reminded myself, because she was going to save us all.

It was then that I heard footsteps outside the door.

I
POKED
M
OM IN THE SIDE, AND WE BOTH SPRANG BACK FROM THE
door. We watched it unblinkingly. We heard a key in the door, saw the handle turning….

“Oh, please, let it be Lynne,” I murmured. “Please.”

I willed myself to see Lynne’s familiar face beaming at me; my ears waited to hear,
Oh, there you are!

The door opened.

And—yes! I saw Lynne’s brown hair first, the strands that always escaped from her ponytail sticking out on the side. I was already on my feet, ready to race to her in glee and relief, my mouth already braced to scream,
You found us!

Then the door opened the rest of the way, and I saw her face. I froze.

There was not a shred of joy in Lynne’s expression, only terror. Her teeth were clenched, her eyes bugged out; she seemed seconds away from releasing the kind of endless shrieks I’d heard only in horror movies. I couldn’t stand to keep looking. I peered beyond her. Foolishly, I still held some hope that some California police officer would be on her heels, come to release us.

Rona Cummins stood behind her.

Wildly, I looked over at Mom, wanting to signal her with my eyes. There were three of us and only one of the enemy. We could overpower her….

Mom was staring at something between the Cummins woman and Lynne. Lynne turned slightly, and then I saw it too.

A gun. Mom was staring at the gun wedged against Lynne’s back.

“This is all you need to see,” Rona Cummins said. “Just in case you had any wild delusions about counting on this one for help.” She reached out as though she was going to shut the door again.

Mom stuck her foot in the door.

“That girl is an innocent bystander” she said with incredible calm. “Let her go.”

Rona raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, so you can speak” she said. “But I’m sorry I’ll have to deny your only request. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Her parents are undoubtedly looking for her,” Mom said, still with that even, measured voice. “No one’s looking for Kira or me. If you take her home, we can settle this peacefully. Just us.”

Rona laughed.

“You have some nerve,” she said. I wondered how I ever could have trusted her. How desperate had I been? She was still talking. “You think I’m going to bargain? Negotiate? I’m holding all the chips.”

“Are you?” Mom said quietly.

“Am I?” Rona repeated. She was gripping Lynne’s arm so tightly that her hand might as well have been a tourniquet. “Are
you trying to tell me something? Do you have anything to trade for this ‘innocent bystander’s’ life?”