Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  How could she kill Apollo if it meant killing Tyler? But how was she supposed to disobey orders?

  “You can hear me, Shannon,” Tyler said. “I know you can. Somewhere deep down, you’re still awake. Just break out of it. You have to remember, Shannon. Do you hear me? You have to remember.”

  Her grip slackened as horror engulfed her. She stopped struggling. As tears flooded her eyes and a pained sob tore from her chest, the knife clattered to the floor. Her legs gave out seconds later, and together they dropped to their knees. She barely felt the ground.

  Tyler still held on to her, restraining her arms at her sides.

  The memories came crashing down on her with all the force of a train wreck, devastating her in an instant. So many kills. She recalled the slickness of blood on her hands. So many people whose lives had been ruined because of her.

  She curled inward and tried to press her hands to her face. When she found she couldn’t do that, she just dropped her head and wailed.

  Tyler rode it out with her, never letting go of her wrists, and continued talking. “Shannon, where were you born?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice wet and hoarse. She fell still against him, panting, her chest heaving.

  “What’s your favorite color, Shannon?”

  Each time he said her name, she felt a little more like herself.

  “Blue,” she mumbled.

  “Like the sky?” he asked.

  “Like the sea.” She cleared her throat and tried to lift her hands to wipe at her eyes. His grip tightened, not hard enough to cause discomfort but enough to keep her still.

  “Favorite holiday?”

  “Halloween.”

  “Figures,” Tyler said and smiled thinly.

  “You can let go of me. I…I feel better now.”

  Before he released her, he rose to his feet, pulling her up with him. Then he stepped onto the blade, as if he was afraid she would lunge for it.

  She sank against the doorframe, closing her eyes. Over the blood rushing through her ears and her pounding heart, she could hear the rain. The deluge only seemed to have worsened since Tyler had arrived.

  “I killed them.” She barely distinguished her own voice, and for a moment thought someone else had spoken. A different, darker girl. One that looked like her and sounded like her, but who sometimes answered to the name Artemis and sometimes answered to the number Five. “I don’t understand. How… Why? Why would I do something like that? I just…”

  She knew how. She could hear Zeus’s voice in her head. Urging her on, insisting she complete the job. His presence even seemed to pervade into her nerve endings and muscle fibers, drawing her eyes to the knife, then to the throbbing vein in Tyler’s throat. Her fingers were racked by hidden spasms, closing around air as she imagined the weight and feel of the blade.

  As if aware of what she was thinking, perhaps having noticed a subtle shift in her gaze or posture, he picked up the knife. He bent down slowly, warily, never looking away from her. He was probably worried she’d try to kick his head in, and he had every right to be.

  Tyler straightened up. “Where should I put this?”

  “Somewhere far away from me,” she muttered.

  One side of his mouth rose in a meager attempt at a smile, though it didn’t seem like he found it very funny. He watched her with guarded tension, maintaining constant eye contact.

  He eased the knife to his side, turning the blade so that its sharpened edge faced away from her. “I’ll just hold on to it for now, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Be my guest.” She wasn’t worried about him trying to use it. Except maybe it would be better if he did. For the best. Cut Zeus’s voice right out of her. End the funeral procession of faces. Just a quick, sharp pain, then a flood of darkness even greater than the downpour outside.

  “Is there someplace we can sit and talk?” Tyler asked.

  “My bedroom, I guess.” She had a feeling what he meant was a place where there were no weapons, no distractions. She would have suggested the living room, but it was separated from the kitchen by only a wet bar. If they sat on the couch, she would have a clear view of the other room. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the counter or utensil drawer. Even in the foyer, she might envision the knife block and again feel compelled to go to it.

  He followed her down the hall, past the broom closet and kitchen. She looked down at her feet as she climbed the stairs.

  When she opened her bedroom door, he waited for her to walk in first before going in after her. He seemed pretty uncomfortable holding the knife, but he didn’t set it down or ask where he should put it. It was pretty obvious, even to her, that he didn’t trust her. She didn’t blame him. He had every right to be concerned. She didn’t even trust herself.

  Once she sat on the bed, Tyler shut the door and leaned against it. He looked around, taking in the posters, the rat cage, the tiny lights laced over the walls and bedframe. Finally, he placed the knife on the dresser, next to Snowflake’s cage yet within easy reach.

  “I’m sorry that it’s messy,” she said, because it was better than talking about the woman they’d killed. She knew that if she confronted her crimes, the guilt would eat away every conscious thought and leave her with an emptiness she couldn’t fill.

  He smiled thinly. “It’s not messy at all. You should see my room.”

  Shannon looked at her feet, avoiding eye contact. The compulsion was already weakening, but she didn’t trust herself just yet. She didn’t know if she’d ever be able to trust herself again. She felt victimized, violated in her own body, by her own body. It was a terrifying thing, being afraid of herself. It was almost unbearable.

  “Now I understand why you had the cell phone,” he said. “I thought it was that other boy’s. That’s why I came here.”

  “I guess it was mine all along.”

  “How much do you remember?”

  “Just fragments,” Shannon said, lifting a hand to her face. She pressed her thumb against one eyelid and her middle finger against the other, applying just enough pressure to keep herself from opening them. She wanted to keep on pushing, keep on digging. She had never experienced such a horrid desire before. But for some reason, the thought of keeping herself from seeing what she had become was morbidly appealing.

  “Go on.”

  She shook her head slowly. Her eyes twitched beneath her fingers, trying to blink. “Like the knife.”

  “Knife?”

  “Another job.” Job. The word left a bitter residue on her tongue. It was a euphemism for murder, cold-blooded murder.

  “Oh.”

  “With him. That boy.”

  “Hades,” Tyler said quietly.

  She nodded. “Darkness. And faces, and I…I don’t even want to think about it.” Her stomach hurt with a muggy, nauseous ache that reminded her of period cramps but worse. “Oh God, I feel sick. I feel like—it can’t be real. It’s just a dream.”

  “I wish you were right, but denying it won’t make it any less real.” He spoke bluntly but softly, as if he couldn’t decide whether to be brusque or tender.

  “I get that,” she said, sighing. “I know that. It’s just…I know about what I did. I know that I…I did it. I did the jobs. But at the same time, it’s like these memories, they’re not my own.”

  “Like you’re seeing it through someone else’s eyes,” he added, giving her a pained smile. He blinked several times, and on the third time she saw moisture trapped in his thick ash-blond lashes. Evidently struggling with how to portray himself, his smile remained even as he wiped his eyes.

  “Right.”

  “Look, just…” Tyler seemed to be searching for the right words. “I get it. Course I do. But you’ve got to put it behind you.”

  Shannon stared at him. How was she supposed to just put it behind her? How was he? Her skin still crawled with Zeus’s influence. And her hands, she would never be able to clean her hands of what she had done. She felt filthy, as thoug
h Zeus’s touch had gone deeper than her mind, deeper than her skin. As though his corruption reached all the way to her bones, blackening them and desiccating her flesh from within.

  “Let it go,” he said.

  “How can you even suggest that?” She wanted to put it behind her. She wanted to discard the memories, but they clung to her as heavy as any shackles. How could the human soul be so weak that it caved to external influence without even realizing it? How could her mind be bent or broken without her being alerted by its tortured throes?

  But she had been alerted, hadn’t she? Through the dreams, the vague unsettling memories, the smell of gunpowder on her clothes, and the ache of recoil in her knuckles. Even before her last killing, she had seen signs, had not known how to make sense of them, and so had ignored them.

  And the blackouts, there were those.

  She’d brought them up with her foster parents, and they had brushed it off like it was nothing. Oh, dear, it’s normal to forget what you did the day before, especially with the stress of school. And you are stressed, aren’t you?

  No, it wasn’t normal. None of this was normal. Something horrible had happened to her, and she could hardly even comprehend it.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said, like that could sum up the tornado that was tearing its path through her life.

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” Tyler said.

  Then her cell phone rang.

  Case Notes 29:

  Persephone

  Sedation was a different darkness than sleep. It didn’t unfurl like crow wings but peeled away in gray dead-skin layers and persisted long after Elizabeth opened her eyes, hazing her vision.

  The room she found herself in was painted bright red, with white crown molding and wainscoting. Instead of a window, there was an oil painting of poppies.

  If the colorful decor was meant to uplift her, it had the opposite effect. Viewed through a drug-fogged lens, with the lamps dimmed, the crimson walls appeared as slimy and noxious as congealing blood. The absence of natural light and the lack of windows made her claustrophobic, a feeling rivaled only by her drowsy confusion.

  As she tried to sit up, she realized that her hands and feet were secured to the bedframe by thick canvas straps. She didn’t test the restraints, feeling so heavy and fatigued that moving her eyes around the room was a challenge in itself.

  A small scratching sound caught her attention, and she rolled her head in its direction.

  “Good, you’re finally awake,” Hades said, sitting at her bedside. He held an object in his hands, but she couldn’t quite tell what it was. She could only see him from the chest up. “I’ve been watching you for a while, Nine. Waiting for you to look at me.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Elizabeth whispered, closing her eyes. She wanted to believe that she was dreaming.

  “Do you hate me?” he asked. “I did what I had to, just like you did all those years ago. I remember it now, and I don’t hate you for it, you know.”

  “This can’t be real.”

  “It probably isn’t,” Hades said thoughtfully. “At least it sometimes seems that way.”

  Her eyes shot open as the chair legs squealed over polished marble, and she found him close enough now that he could touch her if he wanted to.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Have you ever walked through the city and looked up into the night sky? The skyscrapers block out the stars, so it’s like a void up there. Like a flat black ceiling.” He spoke softly, as if sharing something intimate with her. “And then you look down again, but there’s just darkness. Closing in on you. And suddenly, for just a moment, you’re back there again.”

  “Back where?”

  “You know where.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth said, though that wasn’t quite true, and the waver in her voice revealed that much. She knew exactly what he was talking about. More than once, she had awoken from dreams of the car accident, of coming to in that cramped space with the walls crushing down on her. Like a coffin. Complete darkness.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hades said. “It’s all just a dream anyway, isn’t that right, Nine? None of it’s actually real.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Because it’s who you are.” He stood, set down the notepad he was holding, and walked around to the other side of her bed.

  Still too weak to lift or turn her head, with only a limited range of vision, she couldn’t see where he was going. It unnerved her, but she tried not to show it.

  Her unease blossomed into terror as he emerged on the other side of her bed, fingering a thin rubber tube. In her general confusion, she hadn’t realized she had been fitted with an intravenous line.

  The IV tube began in the crook of her elbow and snaked up to a bedside rack. He held the other end, just below where it was plugged into a bag of saline solution.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Just cutting off the sedatives,” Hades said, twisting a small knob that she assumed regulated the amount of solution entering her bloodstream. The bag stopped dripping.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want you to be conscious.”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  Hades returned to his chair. In the dusky-gold lamplight, his eyes were so dark they appeared almost black. His dilated pupils swallowed up all but the smallest amount of blue, leaving a colored rim only marginally thicker than the indigo limbal ring surrounding the edges of his irises.

  Was he on something?

  “Who are you really?” she asked.

  “You know who I am. You always have.”

  A rift of silence fell between them. He seemed more interested in the notepad in his lap than her. Listening to the soft scratch of a pencil on paper, she realized that he was writing or drawing.

  “What do you think?” he asked, holding up the notepad.

  He had sketched her sleeping face in remarkable detail, contouring her features with layers of charcoal. The drawing must have taken him at least an hour. Just how long had he been sitting there for?

  When she didn’t answer, he tore the paper from its binding and crushed it into a ball.

  “It’s crap. I should have known it.” He threw the ruined portrait into the corner and dropped the sketch pad on the floor. “It’s never going to be right. Never. Everything’s wrong now.”

  “Can you please untie me?” Elizabeth asked softly.

  He didn’t respond. His eyes were flat and lifeless. By the moment, he seemed to be fading before her. No, not fading. Growing colder. Gone were his teasing smiles and warm gaze. There was just a frigid void behind his expression now.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “The tank,” he said. “It’s always this…this feeling, like something’s been cut out of me. And it’s left a wound, and the darkness has filled it, and it keeps getting bigger. Things are falling into it. I feel like I’m going away, Nine….”

  He trailed off.

  “But I’m not the only one who went away,” Hades said quietly. He lifted his head and looked at her. “How does it feel to live a lie?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No.” He smiled. “Of course you don’t.”

  “So then I guess you do?” she snapped.

  “I know there was no accident.”

  Aghast, she could only stare at him. Even within her family, the accident was rarely talked about.

  “No crash,” Hades said. “No brain damage or true amnesia. Those tiny scars on your face aren’t from broken glass.”

  Elizabeth shook her head, not sure what he was driving at. She was afraid to comprehend what he was trying to say.

  After a while, sensing he wasn’t going to leave, she said, “Will you let me go?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you liked me. Was it all a lie?
”

  “I love you. And because I love you, I can’t free you. Not yet, or you’ll run away from me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will as long as you are Elizabeth.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do,” he said.

  With her mind growing sharper as the sedatives waned down, her frustrated confusion was honed into anger.

  “If you’re not going to help, then you can leave.”

  Hades seemed to consider it. Then he rose to his feet.

  This time, he didn’t go for the IV. He leaned over the bed and touched the padded cuff around her forearm, tracing the buckle and snaps. His thumb caressed her inner wrist.

  “Untie me, Hades.”

  “I need you to tell me your name.”

  “If you don’t untie me now, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Elizabeth,” she said as hot tears stung her eyes. She just wanted to go home. She wanted to sleep, wake up, and realize that this was all a dream and none of this had happened.

  “I asked you what your name was.”

  “I told you!” She tried to turn her head away. He seized her chin with his other hand and forced her to look at him. His searing eyes never left hers.

  “That’s not—”

  “Please, let go of me.”

  “—your name. That other girl is dead, and no matter how many plastic surgeries they make you go through, you’ll never be her.” With a scoff of disgust, he dropped her hand and took a step back. “Was it worth it? What you gave up to become someone else? We could have had a life together. We could have had a future, but instead you stole mine.”

  She sank into the mattress, sobbing. “I hate you! Go away!”

  Hades walked to the door and opened it. He lingered in the doorway, backlit by the antiseptic light that poured in from the hall. But his face was lost to the shadows, a silhouette against the white glare. An eclipse. She couldn’t see his expression.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you.” Hades paused. “I didn’t mean to get angry like that in front of you. You weren’t supposed to see that. I like Elizabeth, I like her innocence, but I need Nine more. So you need to remember who you really are. Then we can be together again. Just like before.”