Zoe Thanatos

by Cierlak, Crystal

  “I think I remember a lake we once swam in as kids.” Her eyes froze on the middle-distance as a forgotten memory came back to the forefront of her mind. “There must have been a few of us there. The water was cold but we welcomed it. We swam until we were tired, splashing each other and having contests to see who could hold their breath underwater the longest. One of us, I can’t remember who, stepped on the jagged edge of a rock that was hidden in the ground beneath the water. I’d never seen blood like that before.”

  It was a familiar story. “That happened to me, too. I ended up with a scar in the shape of a half-circle on my instep.”

  Eva’s eyes focused on her, a curious expression on her face. “About the size of my fist?” She held her hand up to demonstrate the size.

  Zoe’s memory was fuzzy at best, but she definitely remembered the pain and the ugly scar. “Yes, about that size.” She brought her right leg up, knee to chest, and set her heel on the edge of the seat. She unlaced the heavy military-style boot Eva had lent her and pulled it off. It fell to the ground with a loud thump. She angled her foot until they could both see the half-moon shaped scar carved into her skin.

  Eva looked astonished. “It must have been you.”

  “No, I remember. This happened at the lake in-” her mind went blank. She’d had the memory in her head not a moment before, and now it was gone, the walls of the memory fading away into one she didn’t recognize. She was certain she’d been alone in the memory, but now there were others, one child clearer than the others. It was a girl with dark chestnut hair and bright blue eyes, and a cute face with an exuberant pink smile. She looked like Eva.

  “Are you okay?” Eva asked.

  “I’m fine. It just makes me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “What else about my memory is wrong?” She had little recollection of her time on Earth and yet she had been there for possibly hundreds of years. At least one childhood memory from Terra had somehow rewired itself for Earth. Were there others?

  Eva’s hand went to Zoe’s and squeezed it gently. “If everything goes according to plan you’ll be remembering an entire life. I wouldn’t expect it to be easy.”

  Zoe nodded. “I know. I just wonder if I’m ready for my entire identity to change literally overnight.” She looked up at the depressing scenery of Terra as the transport catapulted them along the length of the city.

  “We should be arriving soon.”

  “Are you sure they won’t track us there?”

  “The transport makes a route from the main Transport Station all the way to Last City and then back again. Unless they’re specifically looking for us we’ll be fine.”

  “Have you ever been there before? The Forgotten Gardens?”

  “No. I don’t know anyone who has. Until the King mentioned it I assumed it was just some mythical place that my parents used to tell me stories about when I was little.”

  “Then how do you know it’s real?” She’d just assumed they all knew about the Forgotten Gardens. It didn’t even cross her mind that the place might not physically exist outside the realms of mythology.

  “Well, supposedly it is our very own Garden of Eden, a city rich in green life and water, not at all dissimilar to your Earth. Take a look around you though,” she uttered, motioning to the view of the barren landscape around them. “Does it look like there’s a paradise anywhere?”

  “So that’s what makes it mythical? That no one is sure that it even exists?”

  “Not exactly. I haven’t heard the stories since my parents were alive but from what I recall, it’s where our ancestors lived before Royal City was built. I guess it’s the original Royal City. My mom used to tell me that it was the resting place for all the original families, that their spirits lived on and that’s why it’s called the Forgotten Gardens.” She let out a shallow breath of air. “For all we know it looks no different from the rest of Terra.”

  A foreboding feeling weighed Zoe’s insides down. There were too many unknown variables and for all she knew they were heading into a trap, or worse. There was also the issue of the gate in Last City. From everything she’d heard from Eva and Evan, the gate was essentially a crude imitation of the gates in the Transport Station. How could they know for sure it would work the same way? The residents had supposedly used the same technology as the real gates, but there was no way to know if it was a true and working replica.

  Her foot tapped rhythmically on the transport floor, the sound echoing around them. She wondered how long it had been since they left the Transport Station. It was difficult to gauge a measurement of time in Terra, what with the artificial lighting and unnatural surroundings. Even the real landscape of Terra gave no indication of the time of day. She vaguely recalled Evan telling her that time worked differently, that it wasn’t measured in minutes, hours, days and years like on Earth but in generations, which could last hundreds of years in Earth time.

  However hard she tried she just could not understand the idea of timelessness. She was used to sunrises, high noons, and sunsets, where the position of the sun and the moon in the sky told her brain when to do what. She wasn’t even sure how long it had been since she left home. Was it merely hours or could it have been days? She had only slept once and barely enough to satisfy her mind’s need for unconsciousness. If not for the constant visual stimulation of Terra her mind might give into the lack of REM sleep and render her utterly exhausted.

  It wasn’t until she felt Eva’s hands on hers that she realized she had been fidgeting in her lap.

  “Relax, Zoe,” she spoke. “You’re not alone. I promised I’d take care of you and I will. We’re in this together, okay?”

  Zoe’s nerves receded and her breathing calmed to a gentle rhythm. She focused on the crystal blue color of Eva’s eyes as her hands and feet steadied, noting somewhere in the back of her mind that her eyes were the color of the Santa Barbara sky. For whatever reason it made her trust her more.

  “So did my stubborn brother finally kiss you?”

  The change in topic caught her by surprise and she found herself laughing, the happy feeling in her cheeks and eyes calming the rest of her unsettled nerves. “How did you know?”

  “He’s a first class brooder. I could tell something had gone on between you two, and that something didn’t.” She jokingly knocked her shoulder against Zoe and smiled brightly. “I admit I had my reservations when he first told me about you, but now I think it’s for the best. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him genuinely smile.”

  Zoe felt her cheeks blush as she thought of Evan and the kisses they shared. Hadn’t he smiled generously and frequently in their time together on Earth? Was it really such a happy place for him?

  “What was he like before we met?”

  Eva chuckled. “Serious. Reserved. Private. He spent a great amount of time away from Terra, out discovering different universes. I think Gaia was his favorite even before he met you. Each time he came home there would be new scenery in our residence. Once our entire common room was nothing but shades of white and blue; hundreds of small black birds waddling about in the distance. There were great mountains of ice just floating about like monoliths. Icebergs. Every time I was in the room I’d find myself shivering just from the sight of so much coldness.”

  “Polar ice caps,” Zoe whispered through a smile. She had never seen them in person but knew they were a magnificent sight. She felt a small balloon of pride inside her at the thought of Evan appreciating Earth, her home. “The birds are called penguins.”

  “He always seemed to have this romantic notion of Gaia, that of all the universes it was the most beautiful.”

  “Why do you think he left so often?”

  Eva shrugged. “Who knows? He just always seemed to be looking for something that didn’t exist here.” She looked at Zoe knowingly, a bit of a sly smile on her lips. Zoe felt her cheeks flush again. As idyllic as it seemed she knew better than to think he was unknowingly looking for her. That wa
s a notion for fairytales and movies, not her life.

  The light in the cabin dimmed around them as the transport entered through a long corridor. The natural landscape of Terra was gone and replaced with the standard concrete, steel and glass.

  “We’re here.”

  Zoe nodded at Eva as she watched the transport descend slowly into the Transport Station parallel to a platform. When they came to a complete stop the doors opened with a pneumatic hiss, beckoning them out into the deserted platform.

  “Come on. It shouldn’t be too far. Keep on the lookout for Crown Soldiers.”

  If there were any soldiers they were hiding very effectively; Last City looked as deserted as a ghost town, a sprawling city interconnected between veins of glass corridors. Zoe let Eva lead the way through the maze until they came to a building marked City Center in a tidy font. The concrete facade of the building shared a similarity with the Brutalism architecture she had seen so often at home.

  The interior of the City Center rose up towards a ceiling that vaulted several yards above their heads. Despite the Brutalism exterior, the interior was strangely art deco, the popular style that evoked the era of the roaring twenties and dancers in fringed flapper dresses. A series of rooms branched off through arcaded walls of golden archways, adding a touch of gothic air to the space. It wasn’t the Spanish architecture her home in Santa Barbara was known for, but the style made her homesick nonetheless.

  “I think this is it!” Eva called. They were separated only by a few feet as Zoe lost herself in the splendor of the room’s architecture. She followed the sound of Eva’s voice until she saw it: a secondhand gate made of glass and steel that closely resembled the gates from the Transport Station.

  “It doesn’t look like it has power,” she observed. The gate she had traveled through had glowed to life in her presence. This new gate sat in the middle of a dimly lit corridor where no one would have thought to look for it, sans glow. It wasn’t very impressive.

  Eva rummaged through the bag she carried and pulled out the glass box from Zoe’s house. With delicate care she removed a loosely-wound scroll before placing the box back into the bag.

  “You’re up.” She handed the old piece of paper to Zoe, who merely looked at her, confused.

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. The King said you would.”

  Zoe took the scroll and unraveled it, the foreign map sketched in careful ink spreading out before her. She stared at it for a long moment, willing the map to somehow show her what she was supposed to do. This isn’t going to work. How could the King have faith in her to know what to do? Many people were putting their lives in her hands and she couldn’t help but think it was an enormous mistake on their part. They were expecting magic from someone who didn’t even know her own identity. The expectation was too great.

  And yet they were counting on her, and more to the point, they placed their trust in her. Obviously they had more faith in her than she had in herself. She could buckle under the weight of their expectation and give in to disappointment, or she could use their faith as motivation. All she had to do was try.

  She stared at the map in her hands and tried to empty her mind of any distracting thoughts. The thoughts dissipated, Last City falling away from her sight as she followed the drawn lines of the map with her eyes. The ambient sounds of the room faded into the background.

  A picture took shape in her mind, colors bleeding in like a damp watercolor across a blank canvas. There was a thick blanket of the greenest trees she had ever seen, spread out like an army and expanding out into a deep forest. There were bright flowers with prickly petals and what looked like antennae, proliferating in sporadic bursts of purple budding off of green vines that tangled around the tree branches. The sky was a vibrant amethyst, stars dusted across as far as the eye cloud see as violent swirls of billowing clouds the color of thunder and the sea coiled around each other. The atmosphere descended around her, the amethyst diluting into aqua and finally a pale gold that touched the tips of the green trees.

  In the distance through the trees she could just make out the sound of a song that sounded like her name. She couldn’t place the scale of distance to judge how far away the sound was coming from.

  A force of mass grabbed at her hand before the sky fell around her. Her body exploded into a ribbon of atoms as she was pulled through the sky like when she stepped through the gate on Earth towards Terra. The movement was too quick to decipher anything visually and the world moved around her in a stream of vaporous color. Even quicker than it had started she felt her body form and reshape, atoms packing tightly together as she materialized. A cold tingling radiated through her extremities. She thought she would never get used to the sensation of coming undone and being put back together again. It just wasn’t natural.

  Her eyes opened into a golden light that settled delicately around her, touching the tips of green trees like she had seen in her mind. Around them the forest rose like spires towards a sparkling amethyst sky, the colors as deep and vibrant as she had imagined not a moment before. She turned in place and saw the forest spread out around her, green into deep purple as the landscape stretched from the ground up to the sky. Was she still imagining it? The world around her looked nothing like the dreary monochromatic world of Terra that she had seen from the transport windows.

  “How did you do it?” Eva whispered, sounding utterly enthralled.

  Zoe hadn’t noticed she was standing by her side. Her face was turned upward toward the sky, her blue eyes wide in amazement. “Do what?”

  Eva swallowed and lowered her head, allowing her eyes to take in the explosion of colorful life around them. “You brought us here on your own. We hadn’t even stepped into the gate yet.”

  What?! “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me! You must have done something!”

  Zoe’s shoulders shrugged up to her ears. “I have no clue. It’s like it this place just came to life in my mind. I didn’t even know what was happening.”

  Eva’s mouth opened but she made no sound. She closed it and swallowed again, took in a deep breath of air and filled her chest until it expanded out from her body like a balloon. “Okay well we’re here. What’s next? Where are we supposed to go?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes, you!” she cried. “Look at the map again, maybe there’s a clue.”

  They stood huddled together as Zoe stretched out the map in their hands. A knot constricted in her stomach as she realized the map had changed, coming to life with color as the world around them had. Strokes of green flourishes formed a circumference around a gold icon in the shape of a crown, expanding and contracting like the rhythm of a heartbeat. Next to it a second icon pulsated.

  “Is that possible?” Eva whispered from her side, her eyes locked on the two images.

  “What is it?”

  “A laurel wreath. It’s the sigil of my family name, or it used to be. I haven’t seen one since my parents died. My mother wore one around her head when we laid her to rest, just as her mother before her, and her grandmother before that.” Her soft voice clipped as she spoke, the enormity of the words tinged with both sadness and appreciation.

  Zoe gently placed a hand on Eva’s shoulder to comfort her. She could only imagine how difficult remembering the past would be for her. She at least had the benefit of not knowing what she was missing. Eva, on the other hand, knew that a piece of her life was forgotten, and to remember after so long must have been painful. Zoe reminded herself that their journey was not just about her finding answers, but also about all the people whose lives had been taken, wholly or partially, by the Stratons.

  She looked to the crown on the map again and watched it beat against the ancient paper, thump-thump, thump-thump. It was her heartbeat. It echoed against her insides, the pulse moving steadily beneath her skin. Her eyes moved slowly around the circumference of their symbols, taking in the green flourish
es with growing comprehension.

  Show me where to go, she thought. An invisible line bisected the green forming a path. She turned slowly and watched as the crown moved concurrently, the golden tips aligning along the path like an arrow pointing the way. She didn’t need to turn very far. A half circle came to life on the paper, a luminescent silver-white ink rising up, dyeing the page.

  “Are you seeing this?”

  “Look!” Eva gasped.

  Zoe looked up in time to see the trees parting into a serpentine pathway moving between the bifurcated forests. Beyond the horizon of the pathway a white light emerged, blooming like a flower in the distance.

  With the map in one hand, she reached down with her other and found Eva. Wordlessly they entwined their fingers and squeezed tightly, each giving the other the support they each needed. Hand-in-hand they began the long walk towards the white light in the distance.

  Chapter 18: The Escape

  The absence of the daily noises of Terra filled Kyra Straton with an unsettling feeling. She wasn’t used to the quiet. She walked through the corridors of Royal City, the entirety of the public spaces at her disposal. Everyone had been sent to their residences, a temporary lock-down that she could only imagine raised their curiosities. When life was ordinary, residents milled around the grounds of the city going about their lives peacefully and purposefully. As their Queen she didn’t need to do much. There was seldom any misconduct in Terra and her Crown Soldiers effectively dealt with any domestic issues. As far as monarchies went, she was a fairly hands-off Queen. Not like the Queen Mother.

  Korina Straton, the first Straton Queen, was a Queen unlike any that preceded her. She hadn’t inherited the Crown; she fought for it, won it, and wore it with pride on her face and blood on her hands. For years she waited, using her family’s resources to build an army strong enough to steal the Crown from the Thanatos Queen, and she succeeded, taking out the entire family and their loyal companions. Nearly all of them, at least. In the time since the demise of the Thanatos family no one had ever claimed to have seen one in Terra, let alone claim to be one. The fact that anyone could remember the fallen sovereign’s name was in and of itself a near impossibility.