But I am standing before he is. I take one last breath of air as he begins to rise. I kick him back to the ground and then turn and toss the oxygen over the building. It tumbles out of sight. Pain shoots through my leg, but I ignore it. I run for the tunnel.
* * *
I fall onto cold, hard snow. I suck in huge, beautiful breaths of air. My mind struggles to fit the pieces of my new environment together. Not new, I was just here. My mantra—I am Little Mouse. No, that’s wrong. I am Molly Gardner. I am a member of the Elementalists. That’s wrong as well. The ISD. My name is Molly Gardner. I am an agent with the ISD. And my mission has gone all to hell.
I am on the ledge. The gate is only a few feet behind us. Down on the hill, Genevieve, Ishimwe, and Peter are still kneeling on the snow, watching. And the girl, me, is climbing out of the back of one of the trucks. The thin woman and Leung are trying to stop her, but she wrenches free of their grasp.
The wind whips at my thin coat and snowflakes whirl around me. The brilliant white snow and the screaming wind assault my senses. I feel a tingling of electricity and turn to see Phaedrus appear out of the gate. He falls tumbling on the snow behind me. I scramble up, my feet numb in the ballet flats.
There’s a flash of blinding light and a crack of thunder.
The girl—me—is running straight for me.
I feel a tug and see Phaedrus, his hand on the edge of my coat. I struggle to free myself from his grip, but pain shoots up through my thigh and I fall, hard onto the ground. Phaedrus pulls himself forward, hand over hand, up the length of my coat. I reach out, grabbing his face and push it out of the way. The skin and muscles give under my fingers as if the Phaedrus inside Henri isn’t totally in control.
He lunges forward. The metal-gloved hand closes around my forehead and everything goes black.
An invading presence of foreign electrical currents probe at my synaptic pathways. Memories come, unbidden. I am a little girl in Minnesota, ice skating on the lake with my father. I am with a high school boyfriend, a skinny boy with a mop of red hair. And then James, with his crooked smile and curly brown hair, is smiling at me across the parking lot of that overpriced grocery store in Brooklyn. We’re dating. Traveling. Honeymooning in Paris. I see the car-crash, and James swimming desperately toward me.
My memories recede into blackness and the invading presence returns, bringing a rush of images. There’s a boy. He’s poor and hungry, so, so hungry. I am inside his head now, seeing through his eyes, feeling what he is feeling. I lie in bed at night, kicking away the rats that nibble at my toes. The rats are as hungry as I am. I count my ribs but I don’t bother remembering the number because it'’ the same every time. I’ll remember that rat in the morning. I’ll kill it for food. It’s daytime and I’m scrabbling around abandoned basements of my crumbling village. I eat rats and cockroaches and rabbits and dogs—anything to fill the hunger as the crops die out. And at night, I crawl to the top of the hills and gaze out at the gleaming city in the ocean beyond.
I’ll make it there someday. And then I’ll escape, just like the rest.
There’s the distant sound of a gunshot and feel a spray of dirt on my face. The darkness recedes, my vision irises back open, and I am on the ground, gasping for breath.
“Stop shooting!” Phaedrus yells.
He reaches for my head again; I yank his hand away, but he grabs my wrist with his free hand and cold steel presses my forehead.
The darkness rolls back.
I remember another life. Growing up in a San Francisco orphanage, then a tiny suburb in Chicago, finally Manhattan. James is in some of those lives. In some other lives, he is not.
Phaedrus has found me before, taking me from my home just as he took my younger self and brought her to Paris. Of course my dreams have been changing, because merely by being here, my history is changing. And after this he’ll drop her somewhere to live another life before he’s back again, taking me at another stage in my life. Changing my life again.
How many lives have I lived?
Around the memories, a shadow closes in, threatening to overwhelm me. It’s Phaedrus. I can feel him pushing back through the memories. And they’re all real. A life with James. A life without him. They’ve all happened and exist in memory. Somehow he’s accessing all of them as easily as scrubbing through a video file on a computer.
I can feel him pushing further back to an earlier reality.
I remember gleaming towers. I am gathered with my family on the roof of the superscraper. We shuffle with a line of people toward a gate. My parents are embarrassed, trying to hide my tantrums.
“What about my friends?” I scream.
“They’re all coming too,” my father says.
“Not Paul,” I cry. “Paul’s not coming.”
“Come along, Molly,” my father says.
“My name’s not Molly,” I shout. “My name is Mouse. Call me Mouse!”
My mother is shaking her head. “We should have never gone to visit her cousins,” she whispers. “Filthy land-dwellers.”
My father scoops me up in a hug and whispers into my ear, “But I can fix it,” he says. “Remember? I’ve told you I can fix it. It’s just a matter of time.”
The images recede into darkness and then the darkness is gone as well.
The metal glove slips off of Phaedrus’s hand, falling to the ground with a thud. I see sadness in Phaedrus behind Henri’s eyes and suddenly I remember Paul. My young cousin from many lives before. When did Paul become Phaedrus? For a moment, empathy wells inside of me. The life he had to live compared to the life I lived some untold number of lifetimes ago. I see the glove again, lying on the ground
I snatch the glove from the snow and climb to my feet.
“My father?” I say. “It’s him you want?”
Phaedrus climbs to his feet. “He knew how to stop everything.”
“So why didn’t he?”
Phaedrus shrugs. “Fear, cowardice. People didn’t listen to him.”
I point to the gate. “So go to him yourself. Why do you need me?”
Phaedrus shakes his head. “He’s gone. He removed himself from the picture, before he came up with the cure for the world. But memories ” He points at my head. “Even when time changes, it stays in the memories.”
“But you couldn’t get them from her?”
“The mind of a child is too confused. It takes a more developed mind to access deep memories. Please, Molly. Help me.”
I step back. “Go to hell.” I turn and run.
The wind howls, whipping up ice particles from the ground and cutting through my clothes, but I ignore it. Pain shoots up my leg, and I ignore that as well. I stumble down the ledge toward the cars. Peter lunges into the Scarecrow, knocking her down. Ishimwe and Genevieve turn on Fatty, behind them.
I expect to see Phaedrus sprinting after me, but he’s not. Someone is firing at him. He scrambles in the snow, hiding behind a rocky outcropping. I stop, but I can’t see where the shots are coming from. Genevieve and Ishimwe are by the second track. They have Fatty on the ground and are taking his guns from him while Peter is in a full-blown punching match with the Scarecrow.
I look for the girl—me—and find Leung and the thin woman holding her by one of the trucks.
Leung leaves the girl with the thin woman and moves toward me, firing off one shot after another. I plant my feet in the snow and then run directly toward her. One bullet flies so close by me that I feel the wind from it as it passes. I yell, dimly realizing that I have no plan beyond running. Which is what I’ve been doing, almost every moment, since arriving through that damn Paris tunnel.
Then Leung drops suddenly to the ground, red blooming from her shoulder.
I stop, nearly falling over in the snow, and spin around in confusion.
Vic emerges from behind the second truck, standing next to Genevieve. He waves for me to follow him, but I hesitate. It’s not the Vic I know. He’s in a leather coat that I’ve never seen before
and has a mottled scar down the side of his face.
“Come on!” he yells, firing off another shot.
He stops firing and waves again for me to come. For everyone that has betrayed me in the last two days, Vic is not one of them.
I run for the truck and scramble behind it with Genevieve, Ishimwe, and Peter. Ishimwe grins at me. Peter gives a curt nod and leans around the car, continuing the suppression fire. Genevieve only gives me a quick glance before joining Peter.
I turn to Vic. “Where’ve you been?”
Vic hands me a gun. “Couldn’t find you after the fire,” he says. “I got a little chewed up, if you couldn’t tell.” He shoots me a grin, “So I took the long way home. Made it back to the ISD and they told me they’d gotten your message. They sent me back after you.”
“How long?” I ask.
He shrugs. “About fifteen months. I’ve been hanging back since we came through the Paris tunnel, trying not to get too close. I just about lost you all at the Listening Station. I still don’t know what the hell happened there. Then I figured you all were headed back by train on your original route, so I found a car and drove all day and night the last two days to catch up. I almost caught up to you last night when you ran out of the train, but I couldn’t track you in the snow.”
So that was Vic in the storm.
I feel a welling of pride for my partner. “You must be the best damn agent in the ISD.”
Vic shakes his head, and then peeks back around the side of the truck. “Naw, just have nothing better to do.” He glances down at the gun. “You going to help or what?”
I hear thunder and look up. The clouds are turning in a circular pattern. Lightning flashes through the clouds. The snow is turning to sleet.
Vic reaches into his jacket pocket. “One more thing. I went back to the train after I lost you in the snow. I figured the others would need to come back for their trucks and then I’d wait to see if they had you or not. I found this.”
He lifts out my necklace with James’s ring. At first I want to tell him to throw it away, as far as he can from us, because it’s compromised—a magnet—and then I see the other ring, fused together with the first, nearly bisecting it.
“I’m guessing this is how they tracked you?”
I nod.
He holds it out for me to take. “Well, it should be harmless now.”
I take the necklace and slip it around my neck. I have the memories of a life without James but the memories with him are still there, too, and with the ring I feel those memories growing stronger.
“They’ve stopped shooting,” Peter says.
He’s right. The firing has stopped and the wind has increased. The sky is a whirling mass of black clouds.
I peer around the side of the truck. Fatty and the Scarecrow are retreating up the hill toward the gate. The thin woman stands in the middle of the snowy hill, the girl—me—next to her. The woman stares up at the sky.
I follow her gaze to see a whirling maelstrom of ice and snow forming in the clouds.
I need to get out of here.
“We’ve never had an opportunity like this,” Genevieve says. “Ishimwe, move around to the other truck to provide cover. Peter and I will move on them now. Molly, you stay here with Vic. We can take them, and finally have access to their gates.”
I look over at Genevieve. She said gates. Is it so obvious a word that she would happen to use the same term that Phaedrus had? Or does she know even more that she hasn’t told me about?
I peer back around the corner of the truck as Ishimwe moves for the other vehicle.
“Molly!” It’s Phaedrus. He steps out from behind the outcropping of rocks. He has a hand out, and he is calling to the young me.
If he gets her, then he can send her off wherever he wants to live a different life and start the process all over again. Hunting me, capturing my younger self, doing anything he can to steal the memories from my head. How many times has he tried already? An endless cycle of pursuit and flight spirals through my mind. The thought sends a wave of horror through me and I push it away.
I rise to my feet, but Genevieve grabs my arm. “What are you doing?”
I shake free of her grip. “You don’t understand,” I say, my voice sounding surprisingly calm to my own ears. “He told me what he wants with me. But I think I can stop it. Or at least,” I pause. “At least give myself a fighting chance.”
I look back to the younger me. Phaedrus is walking toward her, arms stretched.
I pick the metal glove up off the snow. It feels oddly warm in my hand. Genevieve looks at it, noticing it for the first time.
“Molly, don’t use it. You don’t know how it works.”
I tighten my grip on the metal glove, and before I even know what I am doing, I am on my feet, running across the ground. The sleet is turning the snow to slush. My leg burns, but I don’t care.
“Hey!” I shout as I slip the glove around my hand.
The girl turns toward me. The howling wind pushes at me as if it is trying to throw me back. I feel a pinch in my wrist as something punctures the skin. An array of graphics suddenly appears, superimposed over my vision. I blink in desperation, and the images disappear.
My younger self has turned back toward Phaedrus.
I hear a shout, and see Vic, Genevieve and Peter all running toward me, and I know that he knows what I’m about to do. I turn my gun toward Vic as I stumble across the snow. “Don’t you dare stop me!”
Genevieve and Peter slow, but Vic presses on harder. Now Phaedrus is running too. All three of us converging on the girl. On me. I want to scream, You can’t have her. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t! I reach out for the younger me, fingers grasping for the points where Phaedrus had touched my own head—where I still feel the pressure of his fingers. I see her eyes go wide in fear, but I grab her wrist and press the metal glove against her head.
My vision fades. But through the darkness I can see Vic’s hand wrapping around the girl’s wrist, wrestling it out of my grasp. I see a flash of lightning, bright as a bomb, and everything disappears.
June 30, 1969
It’s warm. I wake from what feels like a dream, but one of those long, detailed dreams where you can kind of make yourself do whatever you want to do. And it feels like I’m floating in water, but it’s warm and feels like a bath, and I get a sudden picture of a big, old tub, the kind with the clawed feet, and I can see myself soaking in it as long as I want, just ‘cause. But I’was younger, nine maybe, when we were still at the little two-bedroom house in—was it Duluth? I’m not sure, but it was forever ago, and I don’t think I’ve taken a bath like that since. My memories are all jumbled up, but the last thing I remember is being on a mountain in the snow with that horrible old man with that strange woman, whoever she is, running toward me.
Sand crunches under my head and back. Above me, there’s a blue sky dotted with white, puffy clouds. I sit up. I’m on a beach and I see miles of gleaming white sand.
But if I’m on a beach, why am I wearing this coat and a dress and leggings and these ugly, black shoes? How did I even get here?
I stand, pulling the coat off. I can’t see anyone else on the beach. Behind me, a road, about fifty feet away, stretches down the length of the beach. No cars are driving down it right now, but there’s bound to be one soon. And then what? What am I going to tell them? That I just woke up on the beach and can’t remember how I got here or who I am or anything?
My stomach tightens in fear.
Why don’t I know where I am?
Behind me is blue as far as I can see. How long was I in the water? My palms aren’t pruney enough to have been in there long. I search the shoreline, looking for a building, or anything where I can hide long enough to dry off, but I don’t see nothin’. I look the other way, and—wait. Is that a man?
Something in me tells me to run. He’s lying in the water, just like I was. So maybe whatever happened to me happened to him, too. But t
hen again, maybe he’s the one that brought me here in the first place. He slowly lifts up his head and coughs out a mouthful of water.
If I was going to run ,then I should’ve run already, because he’s getting up now and he’ll see me any second. He’s wearing what looks like army clothes and has short hair and a burn across the side of his face. He looks freaky as hell but for some reason, I’m not scared. He turns my way and I actually feel a little safer now that I can see his face.
“Hey!” I say.
He groans, and spits out more water.
I don’t know why, but I don’t feel like I need to come up with any of my own plans now that he’s around. For some reason, I just know he can tell me what I need to do.
“What’s your name?” I ask, but I get the sudden weird feeling that I know his name. I think for a moment, and James comes to mind. But no, that feels wrong. I think of one of those lighters. What are they called? Bic lighters. Vic. His name is Vic.
Vic stands up and takes a wobbly step forward. He stops when he sees me.
“Who are you?” he asks.
Something tightens inside my chest. Maybe he can’t help me after all?
“I woke up right over there,” I say, pointing. “Just like you.”
“Okay,” he says.
He blinks like he’s trying to remember something.
“Hey!” I say, louder than I mean to. “If you can’t help me out, then I’m going to go find someone who can.”
“No, no, no,” he says. He stumbles across the sand toward me. “I can help. I really can.”
He stops in front of me and holds out a hand for me to shake. “I’m Vic,” he says.
I shake his hand, and decide not to tell him that I already knew his name, just in case he asks how I knew it, because I can’t tell him that.
“How old are you anyway?” he asks.
I have to think about it for a moment, and nearly stop myself because other memories suddenly rush in at the same time: a shabby looking man kidnapping me after school and dark rooms and odd people and a—a terrible hole in the sky, and a building on fire, and trucks, and the cold, and snow and then a woman running toward me and calling my name. She looked strangely familiar. I close my eyes, focusing. “Thirteen,” I say.
Recursion (Book One of the Recursion Event Saga) Page 10
