The Unhappening of Genesis Lee

by Shallee McArthur

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You okay?” he asked. “Last night was rough. But no permanent record for me, only a night in jail. And the doctors said Anabel’s going to be fine. The rock just grazed her before shattering the window. She still had a nasty concussion, but they’re sending her home tonight.”

  Okay. Tally for last night: hospital and jail. What kind of crazy had I jumped into?

  “That’s good,” I said vaguely.

  I felt like I needed to memorize him. My brain wanted to catalogue all the details I’d lost. He wore a simple green t-shirt, and wiry muscles stood out on his long arms. Must work out. He twisted something in his fingers, a ball. A nervous habit, maybe, needing something to play with. His smile was wide and goofy, but he had a strong jaw. Like once he latched on to something, he wouldn’t let go.

  “So you’ve got to explain more about last night . . .” His eyebrows gathered. “Okay, what? You’re looking at me like you’ve never seen me before.”

  His smile dropped, his eyebrows sank low, and he knew.

  “Gena.” His lips softened my name. “Do you know who I am?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  The shouts of happy children grew louder.

  “You don’t remember me. You don’t remember. I should have . . . No, Gena!”

  The anguish in his voice pierced me. I opened my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “Always sorry for things that aren’t your fault.” His jaw clenched, but the rest of his face was soft and vulnerable. “But you were fine, you sent me that long message.”

  He dug a cheap phone from his pocket. People walked past us, laughing, and splashed each other in the pond, laughing, and rode their bikes over the bridge, laughing. Secure in a public place in the sunlight. Somewhere their Links weren’t in danger.

  What would they do if I told them I still had my Links, but my memories were vanishing?

  I held my breath against a moan. I was afraid of the boy in front of me. If I abandoned Kalan after today, then later found my memories of him, would I regret leaving? Or regret taking the memories back?

  “Right here.” Kalan lifted his head. “The message didn’t get delivered until today, but you sent it to me last night just after ten. You must have sent it while you were walking home.”

  And someone had caught me, still on the street. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t say that,” he groaned. “Do you remember anything? Anything about the two of us?”

  I shook my head.

  More silence. He stepped toward me. I stepped back.

  “I’ll help you remember me.” He stepped forward again, ferocity ready to lash out of him. “And if I can’t do that, I’ll help you know me again.”

  “I don’t want—” I gripped my elbow with my other hand.

  His eyebrows contracted, releasing his fierce expression. “You don’t want to know me again?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to. If it’s too hard.” His voice was steady, but his shoulders drooped. “What do you want?”

  “The Link thief.” To stop him. To get him arrested. To pummel his face into the dirt.

  “I can help you with that.”

  That was the reason I came. Wasn’t it? To get information from this boy, not for the boy himself. I nodded.

  “Okay. Okay. I guess we go back to the beginning.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’m Kalan.”

  And although he already knew, I said, “I’m Gena. Gena Lee.”

  * * *

  We sat on the shaded concrete, our backs against the Memoriam. Kalan had explained everything while staring at the sky. He said it was easier to pretend he was telling someone else so he didn’t leave anything out based on the assumption I should know it all.

  Details of our “case” mixed in my mind with less important reveals—Kalan’s preacher-father, Elijah; the woman Anabel who’d had a rock thrown at her; meetings at a sushi dive. It sounded like someone else’s story.

  I ran a finger over my lip. It helped me not to look at him, too. I could pretend I was thinking out loud and not talking to an unfamiliar boy. One I might leave behind.

  “Okay, so the thief is a girl. And a Mementi.” I swallowed. I’d found the Memo he’d given me of our first meeting tucked in my bag, and I still couldn’t shake the shivers of seeing myself in a moment I didn’t remember. “We don’t know why she’s stealing Links. Or why she’s siphoning from me, or why she stole only one Link from Cora.”

  “Right.”

  “We know from Jackson’s text that Blaire had some kind of evidence. Either she or her evidence is likely the connection between the theft victims—the thing they needed to forget.”

  Blaire. I couldn’t think about what it meant that she’d left her own Memorial Link. I hadn’t seen her in ages, but her not being there at all? My insides twisted.

  “We know something else, too,” Kalan said. “The thief would be somebody you talked to recently, someone who knew you were looking for her.”

  Someone who knew I needed memories wiped again.

  “Or not.” I squinted at the clouds. “If Jackson saw me here last night, he could have called the thief. Even siphoned from me himself.”

  “In other words . . . the thief could still be anybody?”

  I sighed. “It could be my own freakin’ mother for all we know.”

  I banged my head on the mirrored glass behind me. Pain shot down my skull and I winced.

  “So,” Kalan said, “we need to find out more about this connection between Blaire, her mysterious evidence, and the theft victims. See if that gives us an idea of who has a motive to steal Links.”

  The frustration of forgetting overwhelmed me. “We don’t even have witnesses. Anything the theft victims knew, they don’t anymore.”

  I turned to him. And, whoa. Right. Stranger sitting next to me. I’d started talking to him like we were partners. Like it was natural to talk to him this way. Like hunting the Link thief was something I had decided to do when I didn’t remember deciding to do it.

  There was Option A: Team up with crazy/cute jailbird who scared the socks off me. And Option B: Hide under my covers. Kind of a fan of that option.

  I had a sudden frantic wish to talk to Grandma Piper. Sometimes a girl just needed a lemon drop and a bear hug. And someone to tell her to cowboy up. I rested my head against the Memoriam.

  The Memoriam. Grandma Piper was inside. She’d died when I was nine, and I hadn’t seen her for a full year before that. Mom and Dad had cut off all communication with her for some reason after my eighth birthday. When I’d tried to sneak to her house anyway, she’d actually yelled at me to leave, crying the whole time. The memory tasted as sour as her lemon drops.

  I couldn’t talk to her, but maybe I didn’t have to.

  “I need to think,” I said. “Can I have a minute?”

  “Sure,” Kalan said.

  I circled the Memoriam, found the glass door, and went inside. Kalan followed me. I suppressed a growl. I’d meant a minute alone.

  He craned his head back and took off the cadet cap. “Wow. What is this place?”

  I stared into the hollow spiral of the tower. Hundreds of memories buzzed inside me like strange music. Patterns of pale pine, deep walnut, and rich cherry wood blocks played on the walls. Stairs wound upward on three sides, stopping at curving balconies. Sunlight streamed through strategically placed windows that shot beams of light in artistic weaves. In tiny increments, the weaves rotated with the path of the sun. Inside the Memoriam, even death had a dance.

  “This is our cemetery,” I said, my words echoing. “The memories of those we love are stored here with their ashes after they die.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  I spiraled up the stairs with Kalan close behind. Where was the awkward? There should be a little bit of awkward with this stranger in a personal place. I couldn’t dredge up even a hint of it. My own comfort made me climb faster to get away f
rom him.

  We reached the third balcony and I turned left. Though it had been a while since I’d visited Grandma Piper and Grandpa Scott’s Memoriams, I knew the exact spot where their bricks were placed.

  “So everyone’s cremated?” Kalan asked. Carved names gleamed on the wooden blocks we passed.

  “Yes. The ashes, and usually their Links, are sealed in a plastic box inside the wood. Before they die, they leave behind a few memories they want to share, and those get stored in the wooden block itself. Some people leave all their Links and relatives pick their favorites.”

  Like Grandma. Dad had never visited her before she died, but he had at least gone through her Links to make her a Memoriam. He’d stayed in his room for two days, and Mom had looked haunted the whole time. I shivered at the memory. I still didn’t know why my parents stopped talking to my grandmother.

  “You can relive their lives here?” Kalan asked. “That’s a little creepy.”

  “It’s not all their memories, just special ones.” I lifted my chin and sniffed. It was a wonderful tribute to the people we loved.

  Kind of odd, though, when you considered how closely we guarded our private memories. But these people had passed on. It didn’t feel violating to glimpse the memories they’d offered us. Come to think of it, some people—a.k.a. my own mother—didn’t mind giving others a peek while they were alive.

  Not that everybody agreed. Cora’s mom hadn’t made a Memoriam for Cora’s grandpa, saying it was a desecration of his life. She kept his Links in a lockbox in her home. And my own father hadn’t been inside the Memoriam since the day of Grandma’s funeral.

  “Wait,” Kalan said. “Your memories still exist after you’re dead?” The squeak of his steps paused behind me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s actually caused a bit of debate about the meaning of death. You know, if Mementi are in some ways still alive because their memories still exist.”

  “There’s no debate on that,” he said flatly. “Your memories aren’t your soul.”

  That’s right—churchy guy. And rather opinionated, too. I didn’t respond. We’d reached what I was searching for.

  PIPER JANE LEE, read the inscription on one deep brown block. Next to it was SCOTT CHI KEUNG LEE. There were no dates or epitaphs. Everything was in the memories inside the wood.

  “Do you know how the Mementi started?” I trailed a gloved finger across the carved letters. “How we came to be the way we are?”

  “Some kind of drug trial for PTSD patients that went bad.” Kalan studied the names.

  “Memor-X,” I said. “It was actually a form of gene therapy on a specific gene that releases a protein that influences people’s ability to store memory. The brain-derived neurotrophic—”

  Kalan turned, his eyebrows shooting up.

  I sighed. “Basically, they played around with this gene so it directed the brain to store certain memories in a biochip implanted in the head. That way patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder could displace their memories for a while. Deal with them a little at a time. But something went wrong. The gene and the protein kept changing the brain until it literally couldn’t store memories anymore.”

  “So it really is a biological thing,” Kalan said.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t like things are now, though. The first generation couldn’t store memories in things they touched, not immediately. They had to use those biochips. Some of them lost parts of their memories but still retained the emotional damage. It caused a lot more trauma than it solved.”

  “So how come you guys can store your memories through touch?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “It was a gradual process for the first generation, and even their reproductive cells mutated so all their kids were born with it. Somehow the brain rewired itself so it connects to the peripheral nervous system. Nobody’s sure how it works.”

  Kalan ran his fingers over the edges of my grandmother’s block. My fingers clenched, though he couldn’t access her memories.

  “So the Mementi came together to help each other heal,” Kalan said, as if rehearsing the end of a bedtime story. “And they sued the company and bought the land for Havendale, where they could live in peace, and started their own biotech company to make the world a better place with their memories.”

  “Not everyone stayed in Havendale,” I said. “Lots of the subjects were military people, and some of them had families and kids so they stayed where they were. And some of the subjects were kids. Their parents took them back where they were from.”

  Like Zahra’s grandparents had done to their daughter, Zahra’s mother. That’s why Zahra grew up in France.

  Kalan stepped away from Grandma Piper’s memoriam. PIPER JANE LEE. My grandmother had known the horror of forgetting what you didn’t want to—and the terror of remembering what you’d rather forget. I removed my gloves. When my fingers graced her name, an array of memories splintered across my mind.

  My father’s tiny newborn body was both heavy and light in her arms. Her mind filled with wonder and euphoria, and the lingering birth pains faded.

  My grandfather beamed at her across a living room strewn with Chinese New Year decorations. Two small granddaughters played on the floor near their parents. I felt my own chubby cheek beneath my hand—her hand. She radiated joy. This was the family she’d always dreamed of having.

  And one more. Stored in emotionless metal embedded inside the block, a memory most first generations had. Their reason for signing up for Memor-X. She was seventeen, arms wrapped around the bloody body of her brother. Her father pressed a warm shotgun to her temple and screamed that he would shoot her too, that beatings weren’t enough anymore, that she would learn.

  I could feel the warm circle of the gun on my head, and the slick weight of the boy in my arms. But not the fear, or horror, or whatever else she may have felt. My eyes stung. That fractured moment was all she had ever remembered of a lifetime of abuse. Memor-X had robbed her of the rest of them, leaving her like the Link theft victims. Struggling with emotions she didn’t understand, and so couldn’t resolve.

  I dropped my hand to my side. The images and sounds cut from my mind, forgotten. I called up my own memories of Grandma Piper. She was more than a shattered victim. My memory held the pieces that were really her. The rise and fall of her voice as she acted out hilarious bedtime stories. The purple tanzanite ring Grandpa Scott had given her that she never took off. The piles of Agatha Christie novels that filled the corners of her bedroom. Her temper that would rise at the slightest provocation, like Dad’s, but was always followed with a tearful apology, unlike his.

  Unchained emotions. Just like Cora and the other theft victims.

  Oh. Oh, oh, oh.

  I brought my fingers to my lips. I thought of Jorge Thomas and his horrid suggestion Ascalon could hack into the victims’ emotional memories and take them away as evidence.

  But we didn’t have to go that far. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Kalan stopped tracing names on the blocks. “Yeah?”

  “We need to go to the hospital. Talk to the Link theft victims.”

  “I thought you said that was a dead end.”

  “I know.” How did I explain this? “But with the first generation, they had all these post-traumatic emotions that hung on after the memories were gone. So they still kind of held on to their experiences through the emotions. The victims are the same way, that’s why they’re in the hospital. Their emotions are going crazy because they don’t have memories to tell them what they’re for.”

  Kalan lounged against the carved balcony rail. “So if we talk to them about Blaire, we might get an idea from their emotions how they’re all connected to her.”

  It wasn’t that much nicer than Jorge’s idea. I’d have to confront the people who had lost more than me. Bring up painful things they wouldn’t remember. Look impending insanity in the face. Sounded like a party.

  “I’m not close to anyone at the hospital,” I said. “The doctors
might not let me in.”

  “Especially with me,” Kalan said grimly.

  With him. I’d told him everything, like I’d planned on him coming all along. Our eyes met across the balcony.

  “Or, I could . . . not go.” He shifted against the balcony rail. “If you don’t want. It shouldn’t be dangerous. But if you want backup, emotional support . . .”

  Emotional support. A paranoid giggle stalled in my throat. Yes, I needed emotional support. Though seeing as he was half the reason my emotions were acting like a dust devil, I didn’t need it from him. But backup. My memory needed that.

  “Yeah. Okay,” I said.

  His entire body seemed to lift, his expression lightening. “Okay. Okay, good. Do you know anyone who could get us into the hospital?”

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  14

  I cannot see the features right,

  When on the gloom I strive to paint

  The face I know; the hues are faint

  And mix with hollow masks of night . . .

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam LXX

  The afternoon sun slanted through the glass of the hospital atrium, illuminating the sparkling patterns etched into the floor. Wallscreens played silent ads for new healthcare advances from Ascalon BioTech. Flowering plants in elaborate stone pots were the only sign of life. No patients were being admitted, no visitors waited in overstuffed chairs, no staff typed behind the desks. Most of the administrative people were Populace—they hadn’t fired them all, had they?

  Good thing I’d made Kalan wait by a side exit. Technically, I had permission to be here; Cora had been preregistered at the hospital a few days ago, and I was on the visitor’s list. That didn’t mean I couldn’t get asked to leave, but Kalan . . . he’d probably be hung by his thumbs in the bowels of the hospital if they caught him sneaking into the psychiatric wing.

  Okay. Maybe that was going too far.

  I headed down a short hall that was barricaded by a large automatic door. I laid a trembling hand on the DNA lock. Click. The door unlatched, swinging slowly open on its hydraulic hinges. A beep sounded from my Sidewinder. I’d been logged as a visitor on the hospital system.