Mom stomped into the kitchen wearing her grumpy face. “Morning.”
“Hey.” My bagel popped up. I slathered it with cream cheese and poured a thermos of coffee from the pot Dad had left.
Mom rustled her sleep-wild hair. “That’s a lot of carbs, Gen.”
“Zahra called us in for extra practice before the recital.” I ripped a bite out of my bagel. “I’ll be working it all off soon.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, hon,” she said.
She poured a glass of orange juice. There was something different about her face. It looked tighter, younger. I choked on my bagel bite. Mom had had a Chameleon treatment, like Mrs. Harward on the tram. Ascalon-created fake DNA had firmed up her face.
I hated it.
Mom turned to Dad. She cleared her throat. Dad finally pulled out his Link buds.
“Yes?” he said.
“Gena’s leaving for dance,” she said.
“Oh!” His stern expression cracked with a smile. “Work hard today, hon. I’m looking forward to this recital. I hated having to work through your last one.”
“It’s okay.” It was the only recital he’d ever missed. Mom had still brought the traditional donuts and flower, but I’d missed the dramatic bow Dad always gave when he presented them.
An urge to hurry gripped me. Like I was supposed to do something more urgent than a simple dance practice. For some reason, that brought a wave of sadness. Weird.
I stuffed the last bite of bagel in my mouth. “Gotta run.”
“Itinerary?” Mom asked.
I shoved my thermos in my bag next to my pointe shoes. Like they didn’t check my GPS twelve times a day anyway. Technology meant parents didn’t have to be present to interfere.
“Dance all morning,” I recited, “Cora’s house after that. If my plans change, I will text you. I will not go anywhere else, and I will be home before it gets dark.”
My voice was terse, and Mom’s eyes pierced me. “Watch your attitude.”
“Sorry,” I replied automatically.
“And I don’t want to have to tell you again,” Dad added with a dangerous overtone, “don’t you dare miss curfew. I don’t care how bad Cora needs you. Eight o’clock tonight.”
Eight o’clock! I turned to ask what the devil I’d done to deserve a sixth-grade curfew. He’d already buried himself in the news again while Mom rummaged for her bran cereal in the cupboard.
I wouldn’t dare miss that curfew. Somehow I’d really pissed him off.
As I left, Dad called out, “Love you, Gen.”
Winding my Sidewinder around my wrist, I boarded the tram. The engines hummed a melancholy tune and the unexplainable ache in my heart sang along. What was I sad about? Eight o’clock curfew was nothing to cry over. My legs began to bounce. I needed to dance this away. The tram couldn’t move fast enough.
The familiar taps and thumps of varying dances greeted me when I entered the air-conditioned sanctuary of the dance studio. Teachers counted rhythms behind closed doors, and music clashed in the hallway. I made my way to the main practice room. The smell of floor wax and lingering sweat was oddly calming. My dance teacher, Zahra, stood at the far end of the room fiddling with the wallscreen, wearing a bright pink hijab and her black unitard.
Maybe it was growing up away from Havendale, or maybe it was just her, but she was sort of a techno-phobe trapped in a city of techno-mania. She’d only had the wall painted with tech-paint to turn it into a wallscreen because her ancient stereo system died.
Zahra turned. “Eh, ma chouchoute!”
She rushed toward me, the dance mirrors reflecting a dozen images of her reaching out to me.
Her gentle French accent warmed me and she touched my shoulder. Since Grandma Piper died, Zahra was the only person I had physical contact with. The only person I could rely on.
“I hate it when you call me that.” I smiled.
“Why? It is an endearment, yes? It means you are dear to me.”
“It also means cabbage.”
She laughed. “It does not! Not when said this way.”
Her laugh dropped off, and lines of worry etched her dark face. Too many lines for someone under thirty. I knew life had been rough before she moved here. A scar slashed her cheek next to her ear, but she’d never gone into detail about how she’d gotten it.
She had lots of good stories about beautiful Paris, though. It was number four on my list.
Zahra studied me. “It is a difficult time for you and Cora, non? Do you want to talk about it?”
I hesitated. “No. Not yet.”
She touched my shoulder again. “Remember, ma petite soeur. You are a dancer. You are strength and grace and stubbornness, and many other things. You will be alright. So will Cora. Now, go stretch.”
The other girls trooped in, Darena and Marine laughing. Leigh, the only Populace in our age group, trailed behind them. Ignored. I hadn’t had a real conversation with Leigh in years, but still. She’d been in our dance class forever. Zahra noticed the snub too, and frowned. The only time she ever got mad was when her Populace students got harassed.
Cora came last, slinking through the door like a shadow. She hugged her arms close to her chest. When she sat on the floor next to me, her muscles unclenched a little. She reached for her toes.
“Hey,” she said. The shadows under her eyes and fly-aways in her hair caught me by surprise. “How was last night?”
“Huh? It was fine.” But her words set off alarms in me again. Like last night was supposed to be more.
Zahra called us to the barre to start practice, inspecting each of us through our routine. “Come on, ladies, bellies in, necks straight! Nice clean lines. Gena, this is not proper turnout. Better!”
We moved to center floor to run through our group numbers for the recital, dancing adagios and practicing pirouettes. The cadence of the French terms rolled in the mouth like something decadent. Zahra’s accented voice called out the dancing words, and we moved in beautiful unison.
But something was missing. An emptiness inside my dance wasn’t filling. My movements became uncontrolled as I lashed out with my limbs. Where was this feeling coming from? My brain shuddered, trying to find a reason, to connect the dots. All the dots weren’t there.
Zahra called for us to stop, and we went for our water bottles. I gulped down half the bottle, like filling my stomach could fill the rest of me. A blue light blinked in my bag. New text.
Text from Kalan Daniel Fox to Genesis Lee, TDS 09:10:09/5-7-2084
They let me out this morning. I’m really sorry about last night, Gena.
My fingers stiffened around my water bottle. Wrong number. It had to be.
Except it had my name in it.
Kalan Daniel Fox. The name brought nothing to mind, but it sure brought some tingles to the rest of me. I scratched my arms as the tingles turned to jitters, then to shakes. Don’t freak out. Not a big deal, not a big deal . . .
Cora sidled up next to me. “So did you and this Kalan guy find out anything at that meeting last night?”
Not good. Very much un-good. Acid scorched my throat. The sad, hollow place inside me began to ring, a gong in the emptiness. My breath shuddered with each inhale. What was wrong with me?
“I don’t feel right.” I shook out my hands. “Something’s wrong, I don’t feel right.”
Cora wound her towel around her hands. “Are you sick? What’s wrong?”
I needed to not feel anymore. Needed someone to tell me why a strange boy knew my name. “I don’t know, I can’t think straight and I feel . . . wrong, I don’t know. And then I got this text . . .”
“Was it Kalan? He didn’t, like, call things off did he?” Her face pinched tight, like she was afraid to hear the answer.
I was afraid to give it.
“I—I don’t know a Kalan. He texted me, but I’ve never met him, I don’t . . .” My voice echoed like it came from some cavern inside me.
“What are you talking abo
ut?” Cora demanded. “You said you were helping him find who took my Link.”
“Finding the Link thief?” My breath left in a whoosh. “I’m not . . . I didn’t . . . when did I say that?”
“Yesterday.” Cora pressed her hands to her stomach. “He texted you. You went to meet him.”
“No.” I skimmed my memory of last night, and it was patchy. Like an audio feed that hadn’t loaded all the way.
“Zahra.” Cora’s voice, laced with an edge of panic, reverberated in my ears.
Zahra turned, looking concerned, and nodded toward the door. Cora nudged my shoe and headed out. I followed, and she led me upstairs and onto the empty stage, hiding us in the maroon curtains.
“Show me your Links.” The folds of thick velvet muffled her voice.
I fumbled with the sleeve of my leotard. My fingers ran over and over and over my bracelets. “They’re all here. They’re all here, how do you know this guy and I don’t?”
Cora trembled, her eyes unfocused. She sank to the floor, resting on her heels. I couldn’t have forgotten. Not an entire person. My brain ran circles around blank spaces. Nada. Empty. Like my lungs that couldn’t inhale, like my heart that couldn’t beat. If this was forgetting, it was a hollow kind of hell.
I shook my head until it felt like it detached from my shoulders. Proof. I could prove it wasn’t true. My fingers fumbled with my Sidewinder, searching my texts from yesterday. And there he was.
Kalan Daniel Fox.
I’d never heard that name. I didn’t remember this boy. My mind raced through my Links, searching for a face, a gesture, a shirt color. Anything to connect a boy named Kalan to me.
Nothing. I felt myself rolling to a stop while the world spun faster. I fell to the floor and yanked off my gloves. With shaking hands, I felt the grain of the wood floor. Solid and smooth. Tiny particles of dirt pressed into my skin.
Real. It was real. It couldn’t be real. Because this was a nightmare.
“This is impossible.” Cora’s shoulders hunched. They rose and fell slowly, like she had to work to breathe. “But of course it isn’t. I’ll never get my memories back. They’ll never catch him, not a memory thief.”
Scream, Cora. Go nuclear. Scream and rant and stomp out all the fear and anger so I can release it too. You’re never defeated, you always rage.
The dusty curtains thickened the air. I took shallow breaths, hoping for vicarious relief through a Cora outburst. It didn’t come. And it scared me almost as much as the hole in my memory. She was losing herself. Like . . . someone had said. Who had said? I blinked, sensing another scene that had been chopped into bits.
Not real, not real, not real.
“Someone is stealing my memories.” I clapped a hand to my mouth. No vomiting. I swallowed, twice.
Cora didn’t answer.
“It doesn’t make sense, it can’t happen, my Links are all here.”
“Siphoning,” she whispered.
Another Mementi. Not possible.
A lot of not possible things were happening today.
“I was really looking for the thief?”
“I guess.” The curtains absorbed her words. “You probably got too close. The thief must have a Mementi working with him.”
So. They were stealing memories so I couldn’t find the person stealing memories. A wild laugh escaped my lips. The idea of me hunting the Link thief was as insane as me hunting dinosaurs.
“We should call the cops.” Cora toyed with the Sidewinder around her wrist.
“No!” The coppery tang of fear filled my mouth. An unexpected reaction. Why was I afraid to go to the cops?
Cora’s head came up, her face pale. “Uh, yes.”
“They’ll . . . they’ll lock me in the house, they’ll want to go through all my Links to find out what’s happening.” I clutched my Links. Of all the idiotic excuses. But the police. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
“Gena,” Cora said slowly, “why are you freaking about the cops?”
I rubbed a finger across the shiny wood floor.
“It could be anybody. Anybody. Do you suspect—”
“I don’t . . . remember.” The words scraped my tongue like sandpaper.
Cora shrank into the curtains behind her, nearly disappearing into the thick folds. “Who do we trust now?”
No one. I couldn’t trust Mom or the cops or crazy Mrs. Bent with her weird love of tomato soup cake. I couldn’t even trust my own memory. But . . .
“What about this guy?” I said. “Kalan?”
“No way. Suspect number one.”
But he couldn’t have siphoned from me. He was Populace—his name wasn’t tagged on my text with a Sidewinder GPS indicator.
Cora apparently didn’t know that. Now was probably not a great time to tell her. “Why would he steal my memories about him, then text me?”
She pressed her lips together.
“He’s safe, he wouldn’t have contacted me otherwise. He could help me.”
The thought of meeting a Populace boy I didn’t remember terrified me only slightly less than meeting with the cops.
“I guess.” Cora tapped on her fingernails through her gloves.
Her agreement filled me with relief. This was a good plan. “I’ll text him. Have him meet me somewhere.”
I pulled up his text and hit “reply.”
Text from Genesis Lee to Kalan Daniel Fox, TDS 9:31:13/5-7-2084
Can you meet me at the Memoriam?
Text from Kalan Daniel Fox to Genesis Lee, TDS 9:32:57/5-7-2084
Church just started. How about 12:00?
“He’s churchy,” I said, surprised.
Cora snorted. “Zahra’d like him.”
Maybe. She might also want to tape him to the floor and tap dance on his face for involving me in a Link thief hunt.
“So now what?”
That tiny, frightened voice of hers was going to send me back into panic attack territory. A wave of shivers threatened to reduce me to a quivering mass on the floor. “I don’t want to think about it for a little while.”
“But when—”
“Please,” I begged. “I’m going to go crazy.”
Cora nodded. “Dance?”
I could have hugged her. She always knew what I needed. “Dance.”
“I’ll help you with your solo piece.” She sat forward with a lurch, like she was forcing herself back into a world she was drifting away from.
“What about you?”
“I’m not dancing in this recital. Some of the steps come to me a little at a time, but I can’t call them to mind on purpose. I’d be dancing worse than in the last three performances.”
“But . . .” I couldn’t think of an argument in the world.
“It’s okay,” she said.
No it wasn’t. Cora had become a stellar dancer in the last year. She’d even been granted a full scholarship to Havendale U. All that was gone. Stolen away.
Our memories. Our selves. Ripped away like pages of a book, parts of our story missing. A ragged pain tore into my chest.
Stop. Focus on the distraction. “My dance needs more . . . something.”
“It needs more of you,” Cora said. “You’re boring when you dance classical. You know, we could change it.”
“Change it?” The performance was in a few days.
“Sure. Zahra’s been helping me choreograph a new lyrical routine.” She paused. “You know. To try to be myself again.”
Ballet and jazz met in lyrical dance like some kind of cosmic perfection. This was my last performance before I graduated. I wanted it to be the sum of everything I’d learned. An expression of who I was and who I was becoming. That seemed extra important now that I was losing myself bit by bit. And since it was my last performance, my parents couldn’t dictate my dancing anymore.
I’d have the steps memorized by the end of today. “Let’s do it.”
We danced.
It didn’t help.
My thoughts kept sucki
ng me into the hole inside where a person named Kalan Fox once existed. Finding him—and the thief—was more vital than ever.
Because if I didn’t, I had no idea how much more of myself I might lose.
13
But thou art turn’d to something strange,
And I have lost the links that bound . . .
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam XLI
Sundays were popular for visiting the Memoriam. The crowd was thinner today, but I still had to dodge picnickers, strolling couples, and children racing on the lawn. Sometimes Populace mingled here too. Tourists, mostly. I didn’t notice any now. The Link buzz reached an almost audible fever-pitch inside my head.
Revulsion nearly made me pause to vomit in a patch of yellow wooly daisies. Someone had reached inside me. Fingered pieces of my soul and ripped them away. Somewhere in this town, parts of me existed inside another set of Links.
People lounged on the benches scattered around the Memoriam. Faces blurred; it was their Links that drew my gaze. Most were hidden beneath gloves or high collars, but they shined under sheer fabrics or made bumps under clothing. Who was it? Who had violated me? I wiped a drop of sweat that trickled down my cheek from under my scarf.
Someone behind me called my name.
The unfamiliar voice reminded me who I’d come to find. My feet grew roots. I’d been all worried about what he looked like and how I’d find him. Now I wanted to un-find him. What do you say to the guy you don’t remember? Long time, no see. FYI, you never existed for me.
It wasn’t just memory I’d lost. It was a relationship. A little world made up of us. How much world had that been, after a few days?
I turned. He was tall and lanky, almost a little gangly. Loose blond curls flattened under a black cadet cap. Bushy eyebrows and a big grin. Cute. Not gorgeous, but cute.
I didn’t recognize him at all.
“You walked right past me.” He smiled. “I didn’t think I blended in that much.”
The warmth in his tone heated my cheeks. I rubbed my face, self-conscious about the automatic reaction. The feeling of missingness in my heart burrowed a little deeper. My mind had lost him, and my heart mourned.
For half a second, I wanted to bolt. Hide. Except there was nowhere to hide from my own feelings. That didn’t mean I had to trust them, though. Just because I needed his help—just because my heart missed him—didn’t mean I had to stick around.
The Unhappening of Genesis Lee Page 13
