“Over here.” This time it was a boy’s voice. Husky. Choked. Not Adam’s. I didn’t dare feel relieved.
I scanned the area and found two hunkered shapes beside a thin, bone-cragged tree trunk. A ring of people crowded around. I pushed through and there, to my relief, was Adam. He caught sight of me at the same moment, and he took three decisive steps over, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pressed me into his chest. He said “Victoria” into my hair, and I felt a flood of gratitude. “I thought you were hurt.”
“I’m fine.” I shook my head and let him squeeze me to him for another moment longer, even though his grip was too hard, and when he released me, I rubbed at the spots where his fingers had surely left marks.
When we separated, it was to find Emily O’Malley kneeling and crying in the dirt. Her boyfriend, Mason Worth, stood frozen behind her.
“Is Emily hurt?” Now it was Cassidy. She huffed and put her hands on her knees to breathe. Knox showed up in the small circle of onlookers, too. It was then that we saw it.
Or rather him.
The body leaned against the trunk of a sycamore tree. Someone aimed a flashlight at the lifeless form, and a gasp shot through the gathered crowd. The copper teeth of a bear trap closed around his calf, leaving scores of dried blood and flesh torn from the bone. I swallowed hard. Patches of red stained the grass beneath him. The opposite side of his shorts dangled, shorn just below the hip. Sinewy threads clung to the base of the fabric, hanging on to nothing. The boy’s right leg was completely missing.
EIGHTEEN
I call it the “electrification pallet,” but I hoped someday it’d get a new moniker based on my name. Like Bunsen burner or Erlenmeyer flask or galvanism. You know, that kind of thing. It's designed to be a built-in conductor plate with ports to negate the need for new incisions. It's brilliant.
* * *
That was how the second body was found. At night. In a field. By teens who’d had too much to drink. It was ugly and real and had left tiny spiderwebs of death clinging to those who’d witnessed it so that I knew, in some small way, each student there would be marked forever, just as I’d been from the moment I found my father.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the eerily positioned cadaver cast in silver light as I stared down at Adam lying on the metal gurney the following day. I glanced away, trying to shake the thought, but my look landed on Adam’s legs and my mind instantly formed the image of the porcelain bone sticking out from beneath the snapped trap. The boy’s death wasn’t a hunting accident. The missing leg had made that clear. Whoever had killed that boy had made good and sure he was dead. I rolled the scalpel handle between my fingers. If there was good news, though, it was that if someone knew about the car accident or about Adam, they seemed to have decided to leave us alone. There had been no more tire marks or evidence from that night left at my doorstep. In fact, the missing boy’s death had in some ways offered Adam, Owen, and me a scrap of cover.
“Adam,” I said, and I surprised myself at how much I sounded like my mother from when I was a kid. Back before my father had died. “I need you to look straight up at the ceiling, okay? Don’t look at me until I say so. Can you do that?”
“But why? You’re here, Victoria.” He grasped my hand. I set it back down on the gurney, where I gave it a gentle pat.
“Because. I’m—we’re—” I gestured to Owen, who was milling in the background, shifting his weight between untied sneakers. “We’re going to install this … plate.…” I pointed to my surgical tray, where Owen’s gadget lay next to forceps, clamps, and two more razor-sharp scalpels of different sizes. “So that it’s easier for us to keep your energy supply charged. It’s an electrification pallet. I invented—” Owen coughed. “We invented it. For you.”
Adam nodded, looking every inch the child waiting for his measles shot, and directed his eyes up toward the crumbling ceiling.
I pulled a pair of plastic gloves from their box and slid them over my hands, popping the wrists into place, and then slipped into a shabby lab coat. “You’ll tell me if this hurts,” I said, still wishing we had access to an anesthetic, even though, with Adam, we shouldn’t need one. “Owen?”
He stared down at his shoes while he put on a pair of gloves. I could hear him breathing through his nose. He edged around to stand on the other side of the gurney. I zeroed in on the center of Adam’s bare chest where his rib cage joined together at the sternum, a flat piece of vertical bone that ran from his collarbone down to the bottom of his lungs. I placed my pointer finger high up on the blade of the scalpel and positioned it in the narrow crease between his pectoral muscles.
Blood seeped out. I drew the incision down twelve inches, slicing through the tree-branch tapestry that decorated his skin. Owen whimpered. At the top and bottom of the line I’d cut, I made two horizontal lines, half the length, so that it looked as though I’d drawn an I on Adam’s chest. I paused to examine my bloody handiwork.
I then replaced the scalpel on the surgical tray and retrieved a pair of forceps. Using my fingernails and the forceps, I was able to flip up a corner of Adam’s skin at the middle seam and peel it back, opening him like the pages of a book. Owen choked. My eyes flitted to him. Milky white had crept up his face and neck. Fog coated his lenses, and his tongue kept protruding out of his mouth before he was able to swallow it back.
“Hold this,” I ordered. Owen pinned back the flayed skin.
“Can I look yet?” Adam asked, pointing his eyes obediently to the ceiling.
“No,” Owen and I both snapped in unison.
“I can’t even look yet,” said Owen, voice high with held breath. He stared up at the ceiling, too. “Not much of a view, eh?”
While Owen held Adam’s flesh in place, I fetched the plate. Owen had designed it exactly as I’d envisioned, only better. I slid the plate into the gaping wound. The metal grated against bone. The plate was outfitted with four holes, evenly spaced around the perimeter.
“You can let go now.” There was no need to tell Owen twice. The flaps of skin fell back into place, and the plate disappeared from sight. Owen cupped his hands over his mouth and breathed hard. “The worst part’s over. Now you can stop overreacting.”
“Over…” His voice shook. “Overreacting. To this?” He waved his hand over Adam’s body. “There’s a person under there, Tor.”
I stared at my nearly completed design. Pride swelled in my breast. “I know.”
With a needle and thread, I made quick work of the stitches needed to sew Adam back together. I flipped my composition book open and examined the device measurements, using them to mark his chest where the holes were fitted in the plate. “There … there … and there,” I told Owen. “Now for the finishing touches.”
Owen’s hand shook as he took the small hand drill from me. He stared for a long moment before positioning the drill over the first hole. A bead of sweat quivered off the tip of his nose as he turned the crank and punctured the skin.
Four times he drilled the holes and four times he filled them with shiny, silver rims through which you could peek through and barely see the plate below.
“It’s perfect,” I exhaled.
Owen’s tongue spilled out of his mouth again. He heaved once and dropped the drill. His shoes pounded up the stairs. He pushed open the hatch door and crawled out into the open air, where I could hear him retching aboveground.
“You’re finished,” I told Adam.
Dazed, Adam sat up. He pinched his chin to his chest. “Can I see?”
I scanned the room for a mirror. When I couldn’t find one, I dumped out the surgical tray and handed it to Adam. I stood over his shoulder while he stared at the distorted reflection without uttering a word.
“See? Instead of new incisions, the wires will go here.” I touched the silver rims gleaming on his chest. Owen had even installed the radio transmitter so that the diathermy device no longer needed to be taped to Adam’s chest.
It was another breakthrough. Ada
m ran his finger over and over the length of the incision. Nearly perfect.
Nearly.
NINETEEN
Adam articulates primitive levels of distress at the lack of identity that stems from his memory loss. Teenage identity crisis with a twist. With more experiences, he’s showing more promising signs of self-expression.
The recharge process does not seem to be further damaging the nervous system. Rather, the damage to the neocortex and other brain structures appears to have occurred at death and the electricity post-reanimation may be having the effect of jump-starting physical sensation. Physical therapists use a similar process of “waking up” muscles after invasive surgery by using shock therapy.
But I’m not holding my breath.
* * *
The storm cellar door clanged open, and I climbed out of the hole in the ground and onto the surface, stepping into the yellow glow of the flood lamps, where moths were swarming. I took a deep breath of fresh air and wiggled my fingers, which were finally free of the blood-soaked gloves. Owen was sitting on the hood of his Jeep. Einstein lay curled up in the dirt next to his tire. He hopped off and dusted the back of his jeans.
Patches of color had returned to his cheeks, but there were sickly circles underneath his eyes. “Are you reviving him or torturing him for matters of national security?” His chuckle was weak.
I glanced over my shoulder, back down to the cellar laboratory’s depths. I’d tested the new device. It had worked, but it hadn’t stopped Adam from screaming the entire way through, all the way up until when I shut down the power.
The screen door to the house opened with a loud thwack, and Mom ambled unsteadily onto the porch steps. “Tor!” Sometimes when Mom drank, she reminded me of an angry toddler. “Tor!” Reluctantly, I looked back toward the house.
“What, Mom?” My body tensed at the idea that my mom might have heard Adam screaming, too. I looked at Owen, preparing to blame it all on him if necessary.
She craned her neck to look at the roof. “Don’t you hear that racket?” My heart thudded. “I thought I told you to fix that weather turner. I know I told you to stop that squawking, Tor.” A deep sigh of relief. The first hints of alcohol laced her words, turning them slow and lazy, a telltale sign. It was a Saturday, so she didn’t have to work at the law firm, and I knew she’d been nursing her first drinks early.
“It’s a weather vane and it’s just rusty. Mom, we’re busy out here. Owen and I are working.” The first sprinkles of stars gathered in the translucent sky.
Her lips pursed, forming deep lines around her mouth. What would my father think of her if he could see her now? She grumbled and glared at the roof again, where the metal rooster spun a quarter turn and let out a hair-raising screech. “Suit yourself.” She spat on the ground and disappeared behind the screen door.
“One of these days she’s going to figure out what a terrible daughter you are.”
I rolled my eyes and rubbed my forehead like a doctor coming out of surgery to deliver the prognosis. “She’s not exactly going to be named Mother of the Year,” I said, feeling a flush of embarrassment for her. “Anyway, forget her. Adam’s in there muttering that he just wants to remember. I can’t get him to say anything else,” I said. “He’s practically catatonic. I don’t know. If I could just get him to feel something, maybe it’d help.”
“Still nothing?” I shook my head. Owen’s mouth twisted. “And emotionally?”
“Still not much improvement there, either.”
“Well, what’d you expect? If there was ever an excuse for a man to be emotionally stunted, death has to be it.”
“Except he’s not really dead.”
“Vitally challenged? Is that more politically correct? I’d hate to offend here.”
“For your information, he has all of his vital signs.” Another unwelcome reminder of the body found in the field. I was only seventeen and already I’d seen three dead bodies in my life. It was beginning to feel excessive. “Anyway, I’m not sure finding a dead body shortly after his own death helped in the emotional-stunting department.”
Owen sighed. “Can I see him?”
“Okay, but be nice,” I warned, and led him back in. Einstein’s collar jangled after us.
Downstairs, Adam straightened upon seeing Owen. His skin was clear and his eyes were sharp with the fresh dose of energy. “Rough day,” Owen quipped. Adam didn’t flinch. “Right.” Owen pulled up a spare stool and took a seat opposite Adam. “A couple questions of my own, if you don’t mind,” he said. “What’s making you, you know, yell like a banshee when Tor recharges you, Adam? Is it pain?”
Adam stared down at his lap. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“So you’re not feeling physical pain then? You’re screaming about something else.”
“I don’t feel anything. Except sometimes. Right after. My fingers.” He waggled them. “They get … tingly.”
At this, Owen glanced at me. “That’s improvement. And what about happy or sad? Do you feel any of that?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. Mostly, I feel blank.”
Owen nodded. “That’s what I thought. There’s a technique I’ve been studying since … since you came along called emotion and memory retrieval. See, the amygdala, along with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex”—he pointed to different spots along his own skull—“store emotional memories even if you don’t know it. Emotional stimuli are used to retrieve buried feelings along with any associated memory. Since we’re working with a blank slate, so to speak, I think we’ll have to prompt the resurfacing of those feelings. We’ve got to create the memories rather than just rely on a mood-dependent memory retrieval system.”
“Somebody’s been doing extra credit,” I said. We’d been taking turns researching Freudian studies of psychosocial development at night, but this was beyond textbook psychology. “So you’re saying we’re going to unbury what’s already in there.”
Owen blushed. “It’s simple cognitive neuroscience, really.”
Adam rose to his feet. His height cleared Owen by nearly an entire head. He peered around the room and then his gaze landed on a small hand shovel. He crossed the room and picked it up. “Here,” he said to Owen, eyes wide. “Unbury them.”
* * *
BRIGHT, COLORED LIGHTS twinkled off the fairground tents. Our shoes kicked through dust. The crowd was thin for a Sunday night. We were arriving on the tail end of park hours. A country song blared through the loudspeakers as we snaked between booths.
Much to Adam’s relief, we’d explained that we wouldn’t be using an actual shovel to create memories and uncover repressed emotion and physical sensation. Owen suggested that we start by getting Adam out of the laboratory more, and the fairgrounds were his first thought. I stared wide-eyed at the flashing lights of the Milky Way, the main stretch of carnival games, at the entrance of which a man with a handlebar mustache was advertising goldfish as prizes.
“If we’re going to make you memories, we better start from the beginning,” Owen declared, throwing his arms out wide to welcome us. “Childhood ones.” I plugged my ears to block out the sound of a twangy guitar. Owen pushed my hands down. “Stop it. I made some of my best memories here.” He reminded me of Willy Wonka, and this was his chocolate factory.
It had been at least ten years since I’d gone to a fair, and even then it was hard to imagine a miniature Tor dying to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Adam sniffed the air. “I’m starving, Victoria.”
“Adam, we’re here for a reason.” I pulled a pen and notebook from my purse. “Now, where to go for maximum impact…” I bit the cap of my pen.
“The man needs to eat.” Owen rolled his eyes and thumped Adam on the back. “When it comes to caloric intake, my friend, you’ve come to the right place.” Owen led Adam over to a large stall where I could practically taste the grease and burning sugar, and it made my mouth fill up with spit. “They will fry anything here,” Owen explained.
Owen looked up at the sign. “Fried Oreos. Fried cheesecake. Fried honey bun. Fried butter.”
I scanned the fair. “Now, how to test our hypothesis.”
“Tor, what do you want?” Owen nudged me.
I glanced at the menu. “Does everything have to be fried?”
“Owen said that you fried me, too, Victoria.”
I glared at Owen. He scuffed his shoes in the dirt and whistled, ignoring the fact that I was shooting lasers through his head with my eyeballs. After a few moments of deliberation, he ordered us four fried Oreos and a corn dog to share.
“Now can we please get back to the experiment?” I stomped my foot impatiently.
Owen stooped down to whisper in my ear. “Pro tip: You might not want to refer to the human standing beside you as an experiment. It’s tacky. Here, have a corn dog.” He shoved the stick between my fingers.
For his part, Adam took in the fairgrounds slack-mouthed and blinking rapidly. A tattooed carny with a giant mallet offered him a chance at a swing to ring the bell. “First one’s free,” he said, leering. Adam skittered back.
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