Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (4 page)

An alarmed Ninety-Nine, her eyes widening with fright, hurriedly queried her companion. “They don’t honestly expect the truce to last, do they?” she asked. “Seven achieved the improbable by brokering it, but a lasting peace is statistically impossible. By my calculations, there’s a seventy-four percent chance that the truce will utterly collapse within the next four months!” Ninety-Nine argued. “I’ve run the math repeatedly. Neither side wants to meet the other’s demands. At the end of the day, they would still prefer to have the other side dead.” Ninety-Nine paused to let her numbers have their intended effect. Her voice became ominous when she predicted, “War will return to this city.”

“It can still be averted,” Eight whispered, shaking her head. “I’m not his biggest fan but Seven has a way of cajoling people into seeing things from his perspective. But he’s been so removed from the negotiations since the truce went into effect...” she admitted in a moment of unintentional honesty, her typical disdain for the man replaced by a long sigh of disappointment. “I don’t want to fight this war for the rest of my life, but I can’t make him focus on it, either.”

“Then you’ve noticed his erratic behavior as well?” Ninety-Nine answered, releasing a breath held back by anxiety. “I know there’s a certain amount of unfinished business between you two—”

“Unfinished business? It’s hard to have unfinished business when there was never anything between us to begin with,” Eight snorted with angry defiance, rolling her eyes and turning away from Ninety-Nine. Her friend had broken their circle’s singular taboo: to leave unspoken the tension that divided Seven and Eight.

Ninety-Nine shrugged, nonplussed by the open nerve her words struck. “All I was saying is that I took into account his many emotional distractions and yet nothing adequately explains the way his focus and determination have evaporated,” Ninety-Nine diplomatically parried Eight’s heated argument.

Betraying her growing curiosity, Eight asked, “Then what’s bothering him? How did your concern for Seven’s welfare draw you to this university? To this building, for that matter?” She felt liberated that someone else had taken note of Seven’s listless behavior. Despite her tense and often unfriendly relationship with Seven, Eight would earnestly vouch to Ninety-Nine that her interest was benign.

In Eight’s purely pragmatic opinion, the sooner that Seven’s issues were resolved, the sooner that he could help pioneer a lasting peace between the city’s government and the militant faction at war with it. Yet the gaze that Ninety-Nine regarded Eight with revealed a silent distrust. Eight gathered that Ninety-Nine struggled with the choice of either sharing the truth or producing a lie.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Eight conceded, unwilling to make her friend uncomfortable.

“I want to tell you,” Ninety-Nine confessed. “I do. Can you just...promise me that Tobias won’t find out?”

“Ninety-Nine...” Eight groaned. “Tobias is my husband.”

“I know, but Tobias and Seven already hate each other as it is. I don’t want you to give Tobias anything to use against Seven. Besides, if we don’t at least try to keep the peace between them, we’ll have a much nastier war on our hands.”

“Tobias will never know,” Eight promised earnestly.

Reassured, Ninety-Nine began, “Seven came to me about two weeks ago. I thought that his abrupt behavior changes might be grounded in chemical imbalances. Maybe he’s sick? Or maybe it was something worse than that?” Ninety-Nine reasoned audibly, moving to Eight’s side and punching a rapid series of codes that suspended Eight’s diagram and replaced it with her own.

Another DNA strand appeared, equally as complex as Eight’s sample but remarkably different in a few key places. Numerous red pins highlighted points of interest along the strand and above the floating diagram was a classification: One-Six-Two-Seven.

“Seven is in good health and there’s nothing biologically wrong with him within the strictest sense. However...” Ninety-Nine’s voice narrated, wavering somewhere between excitement and fear, “There’s something unique about his genetic structure. Something that is fundamentally different from the rest of ours. A mutation. An anomaly.” She paused, studying the rotating diagram in muted awe. “I believe it’s the source of the headaches and the nightmares he’s been experiencing.”

“Headaches? Nightmares?” an alarmed Eight pressed.

“Oh. Well, Seven told me about the headaches. As for the nightmares, I learned about those by spying on his sleeping patterns.”

“How could you do that to him? You invaded his privacy,” Eight admonished Ninety-Nine.

“His symptoms were in line with sleep deprivation and he would never have agreed to observance given the choice. I overrode the security protocols for our dormitories at home and used my access to monitor Seven,” Ninety-Nine’s emotionless explanation confirmed her trust in data. In statistics. Ninety-Nine blinked at Eight. “Like you said, there’s very little I can’t do with a computer. And do you realize how little he sleeps anymore? A weekly average of twenty hours,” she immediately answered her own question. “He talks in his sleep, you know. He’s mentioned you forty-one times in three weeks.”

“Then he’s more deluded than I thought,” Eight replied hastily.

“No, I don’t think it’s that it. Rather the opposite, he’s so tired these days that he’s perfectly lucid. Haven’t you noticed that he knows things about each of us that we’ve never told him? Or mysteriously references conversations that never happened? Eight, I don’t think these are headaches or dreams that he’s having, I think they’re
memories
.”

“That’s impossible. Nobody who goes through what we’ve been through—” Eight began, only to be swiftly interrupted by a vociferous Ninety-Nine.

“Don’t make generalizations, Eight. Given what the control group was up to when we arrived—”

“But we already know that’s physically impossible,” Eight retaliated with practiced dreariness.

“Why not? I’m the statistician here and I can tell you with every ounce of confidence I have that the odds of these being the first signs of insanity are just as good as the odds of this being a legitimate experience. Think about it! What if memories can be passed between generations?”

“It’s impossible,” Eight protested weakly.

“What if it’s not?” Ninety-Nine returned, her voice bold with authority.

“Why him? Why now?”

“I can’t answer that. It’s genetic in orign but something has triggered it. Maybe the relief of signing the truce was like releasing a floodgate? Or maybe there was something at Grand Cross? There are literally thousands of possibilities, each as likely as the last.”

“But whatever’s bothering him, the memories and the headaches and the nightmares, they’re increasing? Aren’t they?” Eight inquired, observing a sudden pulse of nervousness spasm through Ninety-Nine. “They are,” Eight declared succinctly, her voice deadened by conviction. “He’s been reclusive. Absent. He’s left the negotiating with the rebels to people the rebels don’t respect. I almost think he’s trying to sabotage the process.”

“Don’t say that,” Ninety-Nine said reproachfully. “However, the timing of his symptoms with the implementation of the truce are intertwined. I believe that the memories that Seven is inheriting are a preamble to something.”

“As if the past has begun to seep out of him. A leak sprung in a dam, starting the moment the truce was signed,” Eight agreed, staring at Seven’s revolving DNA strand with a renewed interest.

“It’s a timer,” Ninety-Nine concurred.

“Which begs the question: what happens when the dam bursts open? What happens when these memories have served their purpose, to weaken or strengthen the only person the rebels will listen to?” Eight asked, her inquiry filling the empty room and being left unanswered. “What will Seven do then?”

Seven put a comforting hand on Eight’s trembling shoulder. He squeezed and the pressure was enough to jar Eight back into her senses. The Cobalt Imaging Pavilion, steeped in darkness and dust, glowered back at Eight.

“Are you okay?” Seven asked.

“I...I don’t know,” she admitted, disturbed by the jumble of images and words being processed by her brain. “I think I remember something, but it’s all slipping away,” she turned her back on the pavilion and fled the building. Seven, keeping pace with her, followed until they were both outside. Eight’s attention was stolen by the expanse of the empty campus and the city that surrounded it. Every inch, every stone, all of it dead.

“Earlier, before I found you, I thought I remembered something,” Seven confessed, trying to make her feel better. “I hardly remember it. It was so pristine at the time, but now it’s fuzzy, like a wet picture in my mind.” Drawing himself up to his full height, as if rediscovering a hidden courage, Seven beckoned for Eight to follow him. “Come on, we need to find something that we can use. Shelter, or food, or anything,” he insisted. Eight allowed him to take the lead. She decided that the reprieve from responsibility might calm her battered nerves.

Again, they fell into silence. Seven led them out of Demna Clay University and in a direction they hadn’t come from. Soon they were well within the metropolitan streets of the city, abandoned as it was. Eight’s mind processed her memory, the discussion with the woman she called Ninety-Nine and something related to Seven. A truce, negotiations, stalled attempts to permanently end a deadly war...

They had been a part of it.

From the neglect that the city had suffered, their efforts had been in vain. A tragedy had befallen a settlement that was still formidable, still intimidating even from the grave. If they had failed to stop a war, then how was it that they were still alive long after that failure?

Since she didn’t know the extent of Seven’s memory, she kept her knowledge to herself. It might all be the ramblings of a tired, dazed woman if she didn’t have the facts to conclusively support anything she haphazardly remembered. A few hours later, sometime close to noon, Eight thought her sensibility might have finally abandoned her. When it came it took them both by surprise. A long, hideous, drawn out roar echoed through the bowels of the city.

“What was that?” Seven demanded, trying to locate the origins of the roar behind them. The sound had reverberated around the travelers, echoing off the buildings and down the alleys. Eight couldn’t trace the source and stopped trying to, surprised as she was when Seven took a defensive step in front of her. Her mind went dark, clubbed into thoughtless submission, as she watched a man she hardly knew try to protect her from an invisible threat.

Nothing happened in the seconds after the sound. She thought it might have been her imagination. For one joyous moment she began to relax.

The base of a tower down the street exploded, rending chunks of metal, glass, and stone through the air. Violent tremors spasmed across ground beneath Eight’s feet. Their silent attacker issued another predatory roar and the whole building collapsed, buckling and snapping, screeching in agony as it imploded. A garish cloud of debris blossomed into the sky and expanded outwards. Another roar blared in Eight’s ears, rippling the swirling mass of brown dust, while more explosions shot chunks of the street into the air.

Seven broke the spell and reacted first.

“Run!” he shouted, grabbing Eight with his good hand and dragging her away. Eight felt compelled to stay; to study the anomaly tearing the city apart but she couldn’t resist Seven’s pull and burst into a frantic run at his side.

Tremors pulsed beneath their feet as the creature chased them down the empty road, giddily pursuing them with another malevolent shriek. Eight kept looking over her shoulder, but the dust cloud created by the explosions hid their pursuer. Lights flashed as metal and cabling snapped and sparked in the debris cloud.

“Come on!” Seven bellowed, pulling Eight closer to his side as they tore down the empty sidewalks. They flitted past more abandoned shops and stores whose windows were caked with grime, only to hear the sound of glass shattering and metal splintering.

The rapid change in the scenery didn’t register with Eight until they were well into the dead park. Like the university, they fled into a clearing that had become an ashen cemetery beneath time’s neglectful stewardship. Withered trees and decomposed soil flashed around Eight and Seven until they passed through the far side of the park. Seven’s abrupt stop caused Eight to smack into his shoulder.

She saw what had stopped him. An aged stone building where every shape adorned its exterior: ovals, squares, triangles, and rectangles. Statues occupied alcoves carved from different shades of white brick. Wings and horns, shields and swords decorated the immovable guardians. What windows she spotted were blackened by time and nature. One immense staircase led towards the old wooden doors that barred their entry.

The sounds of destruction continued to scream at them.

“In there!” Seven decided, yanking Eight up the stairs. Planter boxes lined the stairway but nothing occupied them. The dirt had turned to poisonous ash. At the top of the stairs, with the sun in the middle of the sky, Eight studied the illuminated park surrounding the building. Dead, like everything else.

Seven threw the doors open, pushed Eight into the darkness of the grand building, and slammed the doors shut behind them. A pathetic amount of light managed to pierce windows layered by grime. It was enough for Seven to see, and to drag her through the empty lobby. He pulled another set of doors open and pushed Eight through, slamming them shut with an exhausted gasp.