Read Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition Online

Authors: Brendan Mancilla

Tags: #action, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction

Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (10 page)

BOOK: Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition
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“It could be anything,” Eight admitted, the act itself as painful to her as if science were a bone broken somewhere within her body, that she alone must reset. “Time travel? We each have memories from different periods. That’s one of the only logical explanations.”

“Time travel?” Twenty asked, his cynicism clawing back into his voice.

“We have no idea how advanced these people were. Maybe they experimented with the technology, successfully brought us forward, and wound up killing themselves as a result?”

“Wouldn’t the whole city be missing if that was the case?” Twenty asked in one of his rare moments of insightfulness. “If you’re from their past, and bringing you forward wiped them out, then everything they built would be gone.”

Eight, shocked that Twenty’s reasoning had outdone her own, acquiesced with a simple nod.

“Yes, a paradox would have occurred. But time travel isn’t an exact science by any means,” it was Eight’s turn to sound defensive and sarcastic. Seven marveled at Twenty’s modest victory.

“Because it’s not a science at all,” Twenty scoffed. “We’re hungry, we’re dehydrated, and we’re stressed beyond tolerable levels! Do you know what that adds up to? Hallucinations! And now that we know that the mothball monster can make us see things, we shouldn’t be putting any stock in our mystical visions of the past,” he jeered.

“I’m not calling any of this mystical. The only point that I’m trying to make is that in some form all of this is connected,” Eight insisted in a heated tone. “Either way, we need to get to the Great Library before nightfall. Not only is it the place where we’ll find answers, it’s also the best shelter we’re likely to find.”

For a time afterwards Eight motivated the group to continue its sullen march forward in its endless quest for meaning and discovery. Twenty and Null, in spite of their mutual dislike, soon took the lead. Seven walked alongside Eight, whose prolonged silence suggested to him that the circumstances of their presence in city continued to baffle her.

“You’ll figure it out,” Seven decided abruptly.

“Such confidence,” Eight remarked, the sarcasm better fitted for Twenty than for her.

“You’re the smartest person I know. I have every right to be confident,” he answered with discernible pride.

Eight’s silent examination of Seven caused the young man to feel the whole spectrum of awkward discomfort that accompanied the woman’s unapologetic gaze. A myriad of suggestions wandered to the forefront of his mind. Stand up straighter. Speak more clearly. Make more eye contact.

A thousand suggestions from a lifetime he didn’t remember slipped into his consciousness but Seven couldn’t change; not now, not when she already knew him. He tried to remain mindful of the helpful ideas but eventually gave up and focused on walking.

For Seven the decision was rooted in wanting to spend as much time with a person he considered fascinating, and mesmerizing, rather than racing as quickly as possible to the next set of wreckage.

Only when they were almost on top of the Great Library did Seven give it any attention other than fleeting glances. Twenty and Null were stopped at the highway’s offramp to the concrete plaza that held the library, waiting for Seven and Eight out of companionship. Or, perhaps, fear? Seven couldn’t say but when his eyes came to rest upon the Great Library he understood the intimidation it caused.

At night, in his memory, the Great Library had loomed over the flatness of its surroundings but in daylight the building’s grandeur lorded over the deadened wastes that encircled it. Circular in its design, the library rose high into the air and was kept aloft by thick columns forged from white stone and tall windows pieced together by stained glass. If the building truly contained the combined history of the ancient city then its width justified the assumption and Seven wondered how long it would take to do a lap around the building.

Together, the group of survivors descended the ramp to the empty streets that came from all directions and met their ends at the Great Library’s campus. While it was in noticeably better condition than the Voice, the Library also exhibited how old and neglected it was. At close distance the colors of the stained glass that composed the windows could hardly be identified through the densely compacted silt.

“Those windows must have been beautiful. How many patterns are up there? It must have taken thousands of workers to build this place,” Eight mumbled, her awe caught under her breath and Seven watched her appreciate the Library, refusing to interrupt her reverie. In the present the quality and charm of the windows survived but not without being severely diminished.

Whereas the stone was white in some places, it had browned to a burnish in almost every other spot. Stains marred and darkened the corners, the ledges, and the rooftop of the Library in a way that confirmed to the survivors that it was as abandoned as everything else. Brutally, quickly, and unforgivingly.

“Look at these!” Null exclaimed, approaching the statues that Seven had seen in his memory. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had seen them before in another time, in another life, but could he even claim as much to himself? “Each statue is taller than the four of us combined!”

In the aging sunlight the rows of golden statues that encircled the Great Library betrayed their rusted and battered bodies to the visitors. Like the guardians of a tomb they kept an eternal and indifferent watch.

“From their placement and numbering, there must be at least two hundred statues ringing the Library,” Eight concluded. Seven guessed that whatever his strength was, math wasn’t it, because her ability to reach such a number baffled him.

“I think that’s the entrance over there,” Twenty lobbed an accusing finger to an enormous archway in the building. Seven suspected that Twenty feared being out in the open more than he feared a building full of books, but Seven refused to be taken by surprise. What if the Library had drawn other likeminded survivors?

“What are you thinking?” Eight demanded of Seven as the group headed for the Great Library’s entryway. Seven shook his head and tried to word his thoughts accurately.

“I keep coming back to the fact that everywhere is like this. A whole civilization died, or disappeared, and we’re all that’s left. Why did we get to be so lucky?” he asked her, hoping that she might be able to shed a rational light on his conflict.

“Lucky? You call this lucky?” the voice that answered wasn’t Eight’s, it was Twenty’s, and filled with his usual sneer. “Lucky would have been to die with everyone else and be spared this nonsense! I have no idea how to survive. I didn’t deserve this. Where’s the luck, or even the justice, in this?”

“Because we are connected, somehow,” Eight answered Seven, annoying Twenty’s outburst. “You were in my vision. I saw you what must have been a thousand years ago.”

Seven, without realizing it himself, began to drift away from Eight. Who was right and who was wrong? If Eight remembered Seven from a thousand years ago then that meant they were, nearly, ageless. Immortality, or whatever it was that saw them through the eras, had eventually betrayed them. The dead city was proof enough of that.

With the sun setting behind the prodigious building, Seven quietly decided that the facility would double as housing for the night. Null and Twenty reached the doorways of the Great Library ahead of Seven and Eight. Whatever modest excitement, whatever quiet relief the group had begun to feel upon their arrival was tempered by a simple but frightening fact.

The doors to the Great Library were thrown ajar.

“It’s not like this is bad,” an agitated Null tried to justify to Seven and the others. “I’m sure there are thousands of open doors across this city.”

“Do you recall seeing any? Because I’m pretty damn sure every door I’ve seen has been closed,” Twenty shot back scathingly. Turning to Seven and Eight he remarked, “There’s something in there.”

“Someone could be in any of the buildings,” Eight rolled her eyes.

“You don’t know that!”

“What are we going to do? Search for somewhere to spend the night that meets your criteria?” inquired Seven.

“We can try!”

“You can try,” Eight corrected Twenty. “The monster didn’t come into the opera house with us, why would it go in here?”

“It’s not the monster that worries me,” Twenty groaned, fighting his imminent defeat. He looked to Seven, pleading with his eyes despite his silence.

“I say we take our chances,” Seven didn’t feel brave but neither did he feel endangered by entering the Library. “I’m sorry but I’m ready to call it a day and the Library is right here.”

Seven took a step ahead of the others, detecting that they needed a leader in this very fragile moment. The doors to the Great Library were unnervingly appropriate for the tomb that the city had become; chiseled into the stone doors were dramatic scenes of warfare that gave the depicted conflict an airy and regal repose. Seven continued past the doors into the main hallway that lined the outer corridor of the Library.

Twenty followed in tandem with Null and Eight, apparently glad enough to let someone else walk into what he was sure was imminent danger. Of the foes that immediately presented themselves to Seven and the others, the most fearsome were dust and darkness. A forlorn light reached through the doorway behind them and seeped through the dirty windows, revealing dozens of carpeted areas with furniture.

Despite the common signs of abandonment that manifested inside the Library, it possessed a homely feel. What furniture remained was badly deteriorated with stuffing poking out of torn corners, threads colorless with age. But, Seven relented, it must have beckoned to scholars back in the city’s prime. The Great Library had provided scholars and academics with a refuge, a welcome respite where citizens could retreat to learn and read and research in a controlled calm. When the city had died the Great Library had died with it.

Seven collapsed onto the dusty sofa and coughed through the eruption of soot that followed.

“Twenty was right,” Null remarked harshly. “We’re not alone. Can’t you feel it? It feels like someone else has been here. Somehow I can tell.”

Seven lifted his head from the couch and stared off into the darkness. Seven’s eyes wanted to slide shut, a moment’s relaxation had informed him how tired he really was, but Null’s voice carried through the growing darkness and roused him. If Null didn’t feel safe then Seven resolved to search the Library until she did.

“I’ll go take a look,” he decided, shocking the others with his unilateral decision.

“I can come with you,” Eight rose from the armchair she had slumped into.

“Well if you two are going,” Null reluctantly composed herself for the expedition, unhappy with the idea of venturing off into the waning light. Seven nodded appreciatively to her while enduring Twenty’s virulent glare. Rather than deal with the man, Seven inspected the interior of the Great Library.

This first corridor obviously ringed the Library and had been constructed to impress any who entered it. A curved roof, held in place by cracked pillars, lacked the height of those adorning the Library’s exterior but created their own sense of wonder.

If true sunlight, not the pale excuse for it outside, could pierce the grime layered on the windows then the hall might be fully illuminated. To Seven’s eyes everything was graying into obscurity: the paint on the walls, cracked and faded, echoed the ashy color of the furniture. Even the stone floor beneath their feet had lost its sheen.

Hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand, could fit into the corridor with Seven and the others. Yet they never would, a baleful Seven realized, because every one of them was dead.

An involuntary shiver ran up Seven’s spine and the words tumbled out of him, triggered by the unseen presence of instinct.

“Day of wrath! Oh day of mourning,” Seven began.

“See fulfilled the Founders’ warning,” Eight continued as the familiar tune overtook them.

Twenty, sickened to be repeating it, said “Haven and Earth in ashes burning!”

“When from skyward we descend,” Null offered quietly, watching Seven.

“On whose sentence they depend…”

Even though he had acquiesced to the idea of not being along in the Library, hearing another voice still shocked Seven. Twenty, Null, and Eight were the only other living people that Seven had encountered and heard; their voices were the sounds of their shared existence. Into the fray, into the mystery, came another.

“That’s right. Two roses were missing from the granite table at the opera house. We found Null earlier and until now one survivor was unaccounted for,” Eight concluded in a moment of revelation, nudging Seven as if it made sense.

Eight studied the area that the voice had come from. Seven watched her eyes trace the outline of a column near the inner wall, struggling for visibility in the weakening light, and she dared to step forward. Perfectly willing to trust a fourth stranger, especially when they shared the mystery of the song and rose, Eight spoke loudly.

“You can come out. We won’t hurt you,” Eight assured the darkness.

“Do you have a rose? Like us?” Null joined the inquiry.

“Not all of you have roses,” the voice replied quietly, the hint of an accusation hiding underneath her words.

“We left ours at the opera house,” Eight explained, gesturing between herself, Seven, and Twenty.

BOOK: Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition
6.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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