I yanked the cords tight, wrapping them around my hands so snuggly that the skin stood out in white clumps between the wires, and pulled harder. The fight was out of her, and she was back to trying to work her fingers into the wires and jerk them away, to get air into her aching lungs. I yanked so hard that I was worried the cords would snap and it’d all be over.
Her legs kicked weakly against mine, her body sliding against me. She tugged at the wires as hard as she could with one hand then used the other arm to elbow me in the ribs and belly, anywhere she could. The sharp bone of her elbow found the bullet wound in my side, and a new wave of pain shot through me. The world went black and spun. Still, I hung on, clenching my cramped muscles to keep her from escaping. She reached back, raking my face again, and her nails came dangerously close to my eyes. Her face was turning purple, and she was, very slowly, getting weaker. Her movements grew slower, but I didn’t let up. I couldn’t. The plastic sheathing of the cords bit into my palms, killing the circulation to my hands and turning them into numb, frozen weights.
After an eternity, her body finally relaxed then stilled. One arm slid down against me, then the other. Still, I held on for a good long while, wanting to be sure. Slowly, the pain in my muscles subsided, and I could breathe easier. My stomach uncoiled and relaxed. The medichines stopped their onslaught as their commands to betray me died with their master.
“She’s done,” Kaften said, tapping my shoulder.
I forced my arms to relax, the coiled tension bleeding over into throbbing pain and stiffness. Kaften pushed her off me and helped me to my feet. I couldn’t move my fingers, and the entire length of my arm was filled with sand and needles. I had to shake my arms, flex my fingers, and rotate my hands to get the blood moving again. With every infantile step, pain stabbed through me from the gunshot wounds to my torso.
A small bubble of spit bloomed in the corner of Alice’s mouth. I nudged her with my foot, waiting for her to spring back up. She was still. Dead. Mesa was still, too. As good as dead, after what they’d done to her.
I stood over her and smoothed out her hair. I pulled her eyelids down to cover her blank gaze and felt the warmth of her breath against my bare wrist. Kaften pulled over a chair so I could sit before I fell over. I wanted to talk to her, but I didn’t know what to say or where to even begin. Words failed me, and we sat in silence.
Kaften found gauze with the surgical equipment on the tray beside Mesa, and he did his best to patch me up. He taped gauze onto my chest and side, but his eyes said I was a lost cause. He went through the motions anyway, like a good little soldier in an impossible predicament. Having done all he could, he looked from me to my daughter then nodded at me. He left us be for a time, and I had the grim realization that I was in a room filled with the dead and soulless.
Mesa’s skin was warm. I was cold and searched for something to cover her with, to keep her warm, but I found nothing.
I wanted to apologize for failing her. My mouth opened and closed of its own accord, but every time I found something to say, my tongue tripped over the words, and I decided to be quiet. I held her and cried into her hair. Eventually, I was able to tell her how sorry I was. She did not move. The world swam around me, and I was dizzy and light-headed. My vision blurred from the loss of blood, and I didn’t know how much more time I had.
I held her hand, my grip loose, her fingers limp against mine. I followed the long curve of the dragon’s tail tattooed around her forearm and traced upward, to the thick body and the clawed feet that gripped the stubby ends of the strong Gaelic cross in a field of flowers. A story of her heritage. Of her mother and me. Of life, death, and rebirth. Her tattoo was a construct of imagination and fantasy, but I wanted her to know the truth of it all, not merely the idealized version. I wanted—needed—to help her remember and to rebuild her mind from whatever horrible damage Alice Xie had wrought.
A sharp dagger twisted below my lungs, and the world went black for a brief time, reminding me that what I wanted or needed didn’t matter. The choice wasn’t mine.
Kaften came in and told me it was time to go. He said the medics would come and take care of Mesa. He said she would be fine, but we both knew that was a lie.
I was sweating and bleeding. A long stretch of red stained her white skin. My blood.
I sat still as the sound of footfalls rushed down the hall toward us. Then I said good-bye to my daughter. I squeezed her hand, hoping still for some sign that she was in there, that a piece of my Mesa still lived within that pale, fragile body. Her hand was limp and unmoving.
I closed my eyes and joined her in the darkness.
Chapter 20
Watching the rain fall over Seattle, I drank a small glass bottle of Canada Dry.
Mesa slept in her hospital bed, her eyes occasionally twitching beneath closed lids.
A dull throb beat in my chest, a small pain brought about by the change in weather. It had been sunny and nice a few days ago, but the forecast called for showers over the next few days. My hand was sore, too. The phantom pain reminded me of the missing segment of finger.
I sat in a small chair, facing a small window in the small room. The doctors, corporate hacks more than anything else really, said they needed more time to conduct more tests, make more observations, and take more notes. They said she was doing well, and the way they explained it, without really saying anything, made it seem as though she was okay the same way a vegetable was okay.
Earlier, when she’d been awake, the nurses had helped her walk up and down the hallways, her hands clutching a walker and slowly pushing it forward. Her muscles were fine, and her reflexes were good. If they tickled her foot, she jerked it away. Tapping her knee with a rubber hammer made her kick forward. All good signs, they said. And although her muscles were nice and toned and could support her body, she still had to relearn how to walk because that was just one more memory, an ingrained lesson at the core of her being, that had been stripped away.
“It’s a good sign,” her doctor, who was one of many, had said.
The PKMzeta enzymes responsible for storing memory had been utterly destroyed, turning her brain into a blank slate. Her team of doctors had been injecting her with fresh enzymes so that she could establish a new network for memory storage. While her steps were steady and unsure, we had all noticed confidence, a level of comfort with motion, beginning to reassert itself. She was relearning how to walk and storing that information so that she progressed each day.
Learning to talk was more difficult. She made mistakes pronouncing words and kept to simple things. We were teaching her names and how to say “daddy.” When she was awake, I no longer appeared so alien in her eyes. I was no longer a stranger to her.
I didn’t know yet who this girl would become, but I vowed to protect her. I loved her, because really, she was still my daughter, everything else be damned. She was still my Mesa.
In the closet by the entry, I had a bag full of memchips from our old house, of our old life. Good memories—clean ones that I’d avoided for too long. Maybe, when the time was right, it would help us reconnect and rediscover the lives we thought we’d lost.
The memories encoded on those chips would be shallow, though. Without the context of the life lived around and through them, they would be nothing more than superficial glances into the life of another person from another time. They might invoke feelings of warmth, but it would be nothing more than surface deep. If she wanted them, they were hers. They wouldn’t rebuild her or restore her memory, but they could, maybe, be a window into her past life.
Whoever she was going to become was up to her.
Alice Xie had told me nobody gets a second chance to recreate themselves or become somebody else, somebody better. When I looked at the girl in the bed, I knew that Alice had been wrong. Mesa would recreate herself like a phoenix rising from its ashes.
I waited for that day, and I would continue to wait for however long it took. In the meantime, I sat and watched the rain. I p
ut my feet up on the windowsill, cocking the chair back on its rear legs to make myself comfortable.
The nurse knocked lightly on the door before opening it. She plugged her datapad into Mesa’s port, asking me how she was doing.
“Okay, they say. She’s sleeping good.”
The nurse nodded and smiled, reading off her datapad as if everything was good and fine.
Some nights, Mesa woke up crying. Most nights, I stayed awake while she slept so I could watch her. There would be a series of rapid eye movements. Occasionally, a limb would twitch, or if the dream was bad enough, flailed and flung the covers away. The nightmares came soon after they began injecting the fresh enzymes, and I was left to wonder at the horrors of her dreams. What was her subconscious mind, perhaps as new and fragile as the rest of her brain, inflicting on that blank slate? What sort of confusing tapestry had her mind created to scare her so badly that she woke up screaming, tears running down her face? She couldn’t say, of course, but she calmed soon after waking and was able to slip back into sleep after a short while.
I had no idea what was going on in her head, so I would hold her and say soothing things that she couldn’t comprehend, hoping that the softness of my voice would console her. After a time, it did. She would calm down and let me wipe the tears from her face as she stared at me without comprehension. On the third night, she wrapped her arms around me and held me tightly until she fell back to sleep. I kept my chin resting on top of her head, telling her everything was okay, my own tears wetting her hair until I was able to lay her back down. After these episodes, she would sleep soundly through the rest of the night.
In the morning, the nurses came to help her through her exercises, walking her up and down the hall, encouraging her every few steps, and telling her how well she was doing. When they brought her back, she looked at me furtively, a small smile on her face. She came to me and put her arms around me. She whispered my name, and it tore at me.
One of the female nurses helped her get cleaned up in the bathroom. Mesa grew agitated when the tattoos on her arm did not wash off, and we had to console her. Her wet hair soaked my shirt as I held her, calmly telling her what the tattoo meant. She lacked context for the empty words, which meant nothing to her. The representations of her heritage were lost on her. She was a woman without a mother or father, completely without history. A tabula rasa.
The temptation to load her with memories was powerfully strong, but that would have been just as false, no better than what Alice Xie had tried to do. I had no backups of her memories, only mine. If I loaded her up with what I had, she would have a skewed perspective on a lot of issues. My memories would create more damage and cause more problems for her. I convinced myself that this way was better. She’d learned all of this once before, and she could do it again. I tried to tell myself I was already seeing some of her old personality coming back up to the surface, in small snatches here and there. I tried to think back to when she was a baby. Comparing things, I decided they were the same, but different. Harder than it had been then. More painful. Less confident.
The doctors said that although she would never be able to have her past memories restored, her ability to create new ones was unaffected. There was no reason she couldn’t have a perfectly normal life again, given time.
In the afternoon, I rode the bus to Pike’s Market and warmed the chill from my bones over a bowl of mac and cheese from Beecher’s. The place was small and crowded. The line of people waiting for food stretched back out into the rain, a line of umbrellas reaching down the sidewalk. I sat on a stool at a small counter. Packed elbows to elbows, we ate with people standing up against our backs while they ate, not wanting to go back out into the cold, damp, and rain.
I watched the fish mongers, dressed in black rubber aprons, carry thick-bodied fish between them down the street, past the flower vendors and men with stands set up to sell hand-made leather belts, belt buckles, and purses. I watched the seagulls fly over the famous big red letters of the Pike’s Market sign and watched people go in and out of Starbucks.
All the life in this vibrant city amazed me. Whatever scars had been left from the war were cemented over as people moved on and the city kept going. The news reported that they were in the last stages of rebuilding the Space Needle and that a momentous reopening was slated for the next month. There would be a big ribbon cutting, probably set to some Jimi Hendrix tunes, and a city official would sign a formal declaration to make Washington State the Province of Washington, Canada, and unveil the province’s new flag and arms.
I found it odd that I didn’t miss California. The Los Angeles I had known was gone, dead and buried, and it would not ever be home again. Seattle, maybe. Could be, given time, same as anything else. We were there because it was where Mesa had wanted to be, and as I learned the city and walked its streets, I found it was also where I wanted to be.
My legs were sore from the steep uphill climbs required to get from one end of any given block to the next. I tried not to learn too much because I wanted to share these moments of discovery with Mesa. But I also wanted to find impressive things to show her, things she might enjoy.
Kaften’s company had an apartment ready for us, bought and paid for. They’d gotten our asses out of the fryer after realizing what a public relations disaster they were sitting on. Kaften’s higher ups had made it clear that our interests were their interests. Kaften got a new assignment; I didn’t know where, doing what, or for how long. He’d held up his end of the bargain, though. I had given him Jaime, and he had given me my daughter. I flexed my left hand, where my index finger was shorter than my pinkie, trying to work the stiffness out of the joints, and I tried to feel something for him. I couldn’t, though. We weren’t friends or colleagues. We were merely two men who had the means to get something the other wanted. We had found a truce, but nothing more. I’d let go of any hard feelings I’d had for him the moment I had put my arms around Mesa. His patch job with the gauze had probably saved my life long enough to allow the doctors to do the rest.
California rarely made the news, unless a significantly nasty earthquake shook the state or a vicious attack from insurgent forces claimed a large enough number of casualties. The latter was rare, and I got the impression that riots, resistance fighters, or acts of terror didn’t happen there—at least as far as the rest of North America was concerned. The state was a non-issue. Old news. The media was soft on the PRC, working hard to avoid a fight with a bully by ignoring it and giving it a free pass.
I was fine with that, though. I had what I needed.
I went back to the hospital and sat with Mesa. She was awake and watching some holovids made for kids. The characters did silly things, and she laughed along. When the vid went to intermission, she looked up at me, and I kissed her forehead. She hugged me the way she had when she was little, her arms tight around the back of my neck.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
“Hi, Dad,” she said, and kissed my forehead. The kiss was wet, her words thick and unrefined, but she was making progress.
The doctors had said she was a fast learner, maybe because something deep below the surface, some residual memories that ran far deeper than simple long-term memory, helped her along. The brain is an oddly complicated, beautiful machine. We may never really understand it, no matter how much we try to toy with it or manipulate and upgrade it.
Rehab was helping her along, though, and the doctors gave her educational uploads through her dataport—small things like the alphabet and English recitations, slowly working up to simple mathematics. They were teaching her as best as they could, at a rate she could cope with and learn from.
I lay beside her on the bed, and she curled up against me, as she had when she was small and much younger. She was, for a while anyway, a small girl trapped in a woman’s body. A simpleton, almost. I hated myself for thinking of her that way.
We watched the vid together, and when it finished, I sat up, pulling her
up with me.
“What do you say we practice the alphabet?” I said. She was happy enough to do it, and we started slowly.
On our fourth time through, she recited the letters in a sing-song lullaby.
I tried desperately not to think of Alice Xie and the damage she had caused or the ruin left in her wake. I tried to find peace and solace with the time I had left, which I was able to spend with Mesa. It wasn’t perfect. Not yet. Maybe it never would be. But we could try.
Alice had said there were no second chances, but I was going to prove her wrong. Mesa was going to prove her wrong, too. Sometimes, people do get another shot at life. Sometimes they have to pick up the pieces of whatever is left and move on. Every ruin offers the chance of rebirth, but I would have to fight for it, to work at it, always. There are second chances, but they never come easy. Not ever.
This was a beginning. The start of something new.
A Note From The Author
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Acknowledgements
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