by Cody Sisco
4
I saw four new ghosts today, surrounded by their primal auras. The ghosts work at the school with me. Now they’re on the list and their time is almost up. I will help them cross over.
—Samuel Miller’s The Carmichael Journals (1971)
8 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
As Victor stepped outside, jackhammering rattled his skull. Warm, sticky air carried the tang of red dirt and plaster dust. Every building on BioScan’s New Venice campus was shrouded in scaffolding and plywood tunnels, shielding employees from tripping hazards and falling debris. Victor covered his ears to block out the rat tat tat and navigated through twists and turns to emerge at the edge of the Petit Canal.
Victor could handle the noise and chaos of construction on the BioScan campus. He could handle the stares of the townspeople, who surely recognized him as an Eastmore. He could even handle Karine. These were all bumps in the road as far as he was concerned.
But becoming the face of a system designed to control people like him? He would be a hypocrite and a spectacle.
Samuel had killed hundreds of people to satisfy his delusions. Most of Carmichael’s population had fallen to rampaging self-driving cars, explosions, and Samuel’s lethal stunstick. Victor, only four years old at the time, had hidden in his home, terrified by the man he’d seen in his dreams for weeks prior to the rampage. Samuel Miller, the Man from Nightmareland.
To prevent violence by people like Samuel was the entire reason the Classification Commission existed in SeCa. Once Samuel arrived in New Venice, people would look at Victor differently. Victor had left SeCa to escape the stigma and persecution that went along with being a Broken Mirror. But could he ever really get away?
Banging from somewhere uphill sounded like the earth was cracking open, and Victor’s teeth ground against each other. How could any of the clinic’s patients hope to recover from their addictions with all that racket? The mind-rending cacophony of bulldozers, earth pounders, tugboat engines, and trucks backing up with high-pitched beeps made Victor’s skin itch.
Jefferson’s message had implied that the data egg would open if Victor was physically close to Samuel Miller. So he had to make that happen. But looming in Victor’s mind was the fear that Samuel would somehow infect him, cause him to lose control of his condition, and drive him headlong into blankness. It was an irrational fear, and nothing Victor did could extinguish it.
How long would he keep his sanity once the monster arrived? Days? Weeks?
The drug huts lay scattered on the hillside. Each had a wraparound deck that began on the uphill side and hung over the downhill side with flat-earth views of the Passage and Caddo Lake further downstream.
Victor found Pearl on the uphill deck of one of the huts talking to a clinician.
“We need to talk,” he said. “About Jefferson. When the data egg opened—”
“Not now, little owl,” she said.
“You don’t understand! They want me to—”
Pearl put a finger on Victor’s lips. Waves of tingling pleasure rippled from his face to his toes. The world seemed to be made of fabric whipped by the wind, undulating drunkenly. His skin felt like a balloon stretching bigger and tighter, bright and hot, like sunlight at the beach. He tried to speak but vomited a white fog, blocking out the world. He was too stunned to fight—the blankness took him.
***
The world reformed from blank white haze into shapes with color, depth, and meaning. Victor found himself sitting on a shaded park bench overlooking barges moored to the new harbor’s quay. Elena sat next to him. Reflections off a nearby artificial pond shimmered in her hair, which was long, brown, and draped loosely off one shoulder.
His mind moved with gummed-up slowness. Pearl hadn’t wanted to talk. He remembered nothing after that.
“Did you follow me here?” he asked hesitantly.
Elena said, “You were yelling at Pearl, and then you got that look. I led you here by the arm. I don’t think anybody noticed you were blank.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I owe you one.”
“Yeah. One or two. You okay now?” Elena asked.
“When have I ever been okay?” Victor tugged at his shirt collar to waft air onto his sweaty chest. A truck rumbled along the waterfront and stopped next to a barge. Hydraulic jacks lifted one side of the bin, and dirt and rocks tumbled into the barge’s container, filling it up.
Victor sensed that Elena had something else to say. Though she was guarding her feelings closely, he saw black fearful murk around her eyes.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her lips pressed together in a taut line.
Victor remembered another time—it seemed like years ago, though it was only a month or two—when he and Elena sat on a bench outside a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains and she confessed her stim addiction. He’d been shocked. That’s when he started to think of Elena as broken like him.
It was fitting they had come to New Venice while it was being remade. The land east of the Petit Canal was a vast construction site for BioScan’s “Evolving Together” initiative. The company’s investment in a new treatment and research center would revolutionize treatment for sufferers of mirror resonance syndrome as well as curtail stim addiction. Victor hoped the ripples of change lapping on the town’s shores and sloshing against its canal walls would transform both him and Elena and mend their brokenness.
“Tell me,” he said. He’d do whatever he could to help her. And she would help him stay sane. That was the sum total of their relationship.
Elena sighed. “My therapist thinks I should take a break—from you.”
Victor thought he’d misheard her. “A break?” Where was this coming from? They weren’t a couple. What would a break even mean?
Elena said, “I told her what happened in Amarillo.”
Victor jumped to his feet. His chest heaved as if his organs were battling each other, kidney versus kidney, lung versus lung, spleen and liver punching it out in his ribcage. White blankness feathered the edges of his vision.
“That’s—that’s—You told her?” His heart hammered in his chest.
Elena hauled him back to sitting. “Not everything. I told her about leaving SeCa with you and the fighting between the Corps and the Puros in the R.O.T. I didn’t say anything about Jefferson being murdered or what happened in the lodge.”
That should be a relief. Too bad his body was off to the races. Elena was watching him. He patted her hand. “Give me a minute,” he said.
He clasped his palms, closed his eyes, and murmured the owl mantra to himself. When he felt in control, he opened his eyes. The barges sat lower in the water as the dirt piles in the holds grew. Two earth movers were queued at the bottom of a dirt track, waiting for a truck to pass so they could return up the hill. He looked beyond the barges downstream. Murky, muddy water undulated in the breeze.
Victor was torn. On the one hand, he wanted Elena to tell him exactly what she’d told the therapist. On the other hand, he didn’t want to remember anything about the Republic of Texas. He never wanted to return there, not in real life, and not in his memories.
There was one problem, however, a problem not even Elena knew about: Victor was certain that Jefferson had done something to the Lone Star Kennel dogs, something that had to do with a cure for mirror resonance syndrome.
Elena’s fa, Hector, had admitted to knowing something about it, but he had refused to give specifics. At some point Victor would need Elena’s help to get her fa to talk. Of course, even Victor was sane enough to know that this wasn’t the right time to bring it up. And he was cowardly enough to avoid making any plans to return to Amarillo.
Elena said, “You and I’ve been through some stuff together.”
He almost laughed. “That’s an understatement.” He realized with relief that the blankness was receding.
“Shocks, yes!” Elena smiled. He chuckled, and she went on, “The therapist says
that I’m in the habit of transferring my goals and emotions onto you, that I need to focus on me, figure out who I am, and a bunch of other bullshit.”
“Do you agree with her?” he asked.
Elena looked at her hands. “Not really. I’m going to give it a shot anyway. She says addiction is what fills the empty spaces in our psyches, and I need to learn to live without my addictions. All my addictions. You understand, right?”
Victor caught a loose strand of Elena’s hair and tucked it behind her ear. Therapists had a way of extracting the truth bit by bit. Could he trust Elena to keep his secrets?
He said, “I want the best for you.”
“Same,” she said. “Things are going well here for me. So many new addicts arrive every day that I’m like the matron of the place. I don’t feel pulled to stims. I don’t even really think about them. I have to make new habits, the therapist says, a new mindset. For when I get out. She won’t say when that’ll be…” A bitter look crossed Elena’s face. “I’m under the impression I might get out sooner if I follow her advice. Then I’ll be free of this chip.” She rubbed her shin.
Victor didn’t want their daily talks to stop. They needed each other. However, he knew better than to try to change her mind.
“I’ll do whatever you think best,” he said, “but please be careful. Before Granfa Jeff and I found Dr. Tammet, we tried out half a dozen therapists. Granfa warned me not to trust anyone who takes power away from the patient. Those kind of people isolate you and mess you up even more.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I agree: I’m messed up enough as it is.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Elena patted his knee. “I’m kidding, silly. Anyway, I’m going to give her advice a chance. Don’t hate me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, leaning over to hug her. She was the only person whose touch didn’t bother him, now that Granfa Jeff was gone.
“How are you really doing?” she asked. “You seemed better before.”
“I was. I hadn’t had a blankout since I got to New Venice. But I didn’t sleep last night because Ozie sent a few terabytes of Karine’s data to dig through. I’ve got to find proof of what she did—”
“What she might have done.”
“Right. Might have done.”
“You told me to remind you.”
“I know. Thanks.”
Elena was right. Granfa Jefferson’s message had said, “I’ve been murdered,” but he hadn’t said by whom. He claimed that it was too dangerous to let Victor in on the secret. Thanks, Granfa.
Elena reached into Victor’s hair and pulled out a fluffy pod with a seed at its center. She tossed it into the air, and it floated toward the water.
Elena sighed and looked toward tiers of rose bushes lining a trail that switchbacked up the hill. “Look at me, getting drawn in again. I have to go. But there’s one more thing.”
Victor shivered. Her voice felt like cold water running down his back. “What is it?”
“Samuel Miller,” Elena said.
His pulse spiked. He gulped, then asked, “What about him?”
“What’s the news?” Elena asked. “When does he arrive? Is there a date set?”
“Not yet.”
Elena let out a string of curses: “Laws!” “Shocks!” and a few Victor didn’t recognize that she must have picked up from the Puros in the Republic of Texas.
“So it’s true. This place is a disaster! A disgusting shit pool of a town and now he’s coming,” she said.
Elena liked to badmouth the clinic’s cramped rooms, the therapy sessions, and the other addicts, and she had a special loathing for tourists. Victor knew her complaints were mostly out of boredom and that she was happily committed to recovery. It was ironic. Victor had a dark sludge of feelings about Samuel Miller. By contrast, Elena’s anger was white-hot and effervescent.
Victor said, “I only know what Auntie shares with me. MeshNews isn’t covering it yet. They’re probably debating how to introduce the story to the Louisiana Territories without causing panic. The Carmichael Massacre was never a big story outside SeCa. Too gruesome.”
“Rumor is he’s going to be housed here, in the drug huts.”
Victor cleared his throat. “Yes, that’s looking likely.”
Elena poked his arm, hard. “If they put him anywhere near me, I’ll choke the life out of him.”
Victor couldn’t blame her.
“Find somewhere else to keep him,” she said.
“Where? There aren’t many options, other than a hole in the ground…” Victor waved his hand at the construction pockmarking the slopes below Cemetery Hill.
“Get him an apartment. Put him on the Caddo reserve. Give him a houseboat. Anywhere but here. Say you’ll try, please? Victor, I—”
“Okay. I’ll talk to Karine about it. Or Auntie, if I can get a hold of her. Can I ask you something? I ran into some Human Life people last night. I’m not sure why they bothered me so much.”
“Forget them,” she said. “They’re Puros on steroids.”
“They didn’t seem crazy. They seemed—”
“They’re cuckoo crazy. All of them.”
“They seemed calm. Like they’ve figured out something I haven’t.”
“They can rant about drugs until they’re blue in the face. You don’t have the luxury of throwing away your pills.”
“But I did.”
“Aren’t you still chugging tinctures like they’re candy shots?”
Victor blushed. “They’re helping.”
Elena raised her hands. “It’s not my place to say. Gotta run.” She stood and hugged him. “Stay away from those people. You don’t need more crazy in your life. And make sure you’re here when I get out. I mean it!”
He grasped her hand. “I’ll be here. Promise.”
5
Celebrity is an advantage, of course, but it’s also a burden. The high cost of public life is felt most by our families and loved ones. We must carefully guard against the false choice between loyalty and duty.
—Circe Eastmore’s Race to the Top (1991)
9 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Circe arrived the next morning and called a meeting of the task force on the treatment of Samuel Miller that afternoon. From the moment Victor entered the penthouse apartment, he felt a terrible premonition, a feeling that the next hour would determine not just his fate but the fate of the world, as if the balance of history would be tipped definitively toward devastation. Through a pair of glass doors that led onto a roof deck, Victor saw a deep blue sky with faint orange painting the horizon. Like flames burning the edge of the world. He pictured floodwaters rising to drown New Venice, hot springs bubbling over with sulfurous fumes that poisoned the survivors, and Cemetery Hill erupting to bury the land in mud and ash.
Auntie Circe wore jangling gold bracelets, and her black curls were gathered at her neck. She circulated between the room’s real leather couches, stuffed velour love seats, and retro modern swivel chairs, checking on each guest and asking if there was anything she could do to make them more comfortable. How does one relax when planning for the arrival of a mass murderer? With mulled wine, ample bourbon, and classic cocktails, apparently. Victor abstained, though he had two vials of calming fumewort tincture in his pocket—just in case.
Pearl sat in a clear plastic swivel seat, feet on the floor, knees together, in an electric-blue suit. She read from a MeshBit and only looked up when someone spoke directly to her. Her composure probably appeared natural and effortless to everyone else. Victor didn’t buy it. He could see the tension in her vibrating yellow-green aura.
Mía stood at the window, looking down on the Passage. They were on the top floor of the Newtonian, a hotel built before the canals, which had attained new prominence when it became the only building on its own island. An offshoot of the Eastmore clan had purchased the building and all the land on the island, preventing any other constr
uction, save for elaborate gardens, a private marina, stables, and guest houses. Circe had reserved the penthouse suite, a more relaxed setting than the cramped rooms of the clinic’s administration building. But no one appeared relaxed, least of all Mía. She stood stiffly, preserving an unnatural though familiar detachment. Victor hadn’t seen her move in over five minutes. She hadn’t said a word to him.
The emotions moving across the gathered faces threatened to overwhelm Victor. Dr. Tammet’s mantra, the untruncated version, played in his head. The wise owl listens before he asks who. The dark forest hides the loudest cuckoo. He breathed deeply and slowly. He blinked his eyes with the regularity of a metronome.
Karine arrived with a young woman whose black hair poked out of a colorful headscarf. She had olive skin and deep brown irises, the same color as Elena’s, but without the hint of green that made Elena’s so special. She made the rounds introducing herself with the same phrase, “Dr. Alia Effendi, neurological imaging specialist.”
Alia approached Auntie Circe and chatted with her over a few nibbles. Victor was tempted to join them, but he knew he’d never get a word out of his mouth. Auntie Circe was intimidating when alone, despite her short stature. In the company of an intelligent and beautiful woman—nope, he’d just embarrass himself.
Looking around, Victor realized he was the only man in a room full of women, the youngest by almost a decade except for Alia, and that he suffered from the same problem as the subject of their discussion. Every time they mentioned Samuel Miller or mirror resonance syndrome, whether they meant to or not, they’d be talking about Victor. He wanted to sink into the couch and disappear.
“Sorry,” Karine said, “we got cornered on our way out the door. Is everybody here?” she asked, looking around.
Auntie Circe nodded and motioned for everyone to take a seat in the lounge. Karine sat on the same sofa as Victor, with Marilyn between them as a buffer. Marilyn, my new best friend, Victor said to himself. Mía sat next to Pearl, and Alia sat primly on a straight-backed chair that didn’t fit the decor—a loaner, perhaps.
