“Kalan, go,” I hissed. “Down the hall behind you to the other stairs. It’s the cops.”
He hesitated, eyeing my father. He moved.
And I did the unthinkable: I grabbed his hand. My bare fingers linked with his, our palms separated by the small square of the Memo. Sparks popped across my skin. Familiar sparks.
I’d touched him before. My body knew him, even if my mind didn’t.
“Gena!” Mom said again. Like it was the only word her flummoxed brain could come up with.
Dad’s mouth worked soundlessly. Behind him, Jackson and another cop stepped into view.
“Go.” I folded my fingers around the Memo, hiding it. I pushed Kalan away. A wide, hopeful smile spread over his face.
He dashed down the hallway.
“STOP HIM!” Dad roared, flinging his hand after Kalan.
Dad, yelling in public? One point to me.
“Gunner, he’s Populace, stop him!”
The two startled cops took a moment, then bolted. Even Jackson’s catlike lope wouldn’t catch him up to Kalan. Jackson’s partner slowed before even reaching the stairs, giving up already.
Dad spluttered. I wanted to laugh with the triumph of the night. Until Dad turned to me. The fury in his taut neck muscles and narrowed eyes made a vise coil around my lungs. He wouldn’t hurt me, he’d never hurt me. It was ridiculous to be afraid of my own father.
Mom shoved the bouquet of roses into Dad’s arms. “Let’s get home, Kierce. We’ll talk about it there.”
Crushing the flower stems, Dad marched down the stairs.
The squeezing bands around my chest released. “I need to change,” I said, hoping to buy myself time away from Dad. “And tell Zahra—”
“Now, Genesis.” Mom snapped her fingers and pointed down the stairs.
With shaky legs, I padded down the stairs after her. I shouldn’t feel disappointed in myself for meekly following orders. Where would I go if I didn’t go home? Cora waited at the exit, holding my shoulder bag. She’d known what the backlash from that dance would be. It was almost funny. Almost.
I snagged the bag. “Thanks . . . for the song.”
She nodded, and her shoulders drooped. Like the emotion of the day had emptied her and that was the last effort she could make tonight. A tremor shuddered through me.
I had to get her Links back. Something whispered there wasn’t much time.
The cool night air brushed my bare shoulders. I pulled my jacket from my bag and shoved my hands into the pockets. The edges of Kalan’s unseen Memo bit into my sweaty hands. With any luck, Mom and Dad would banish me to my room the second we got home.
T-minus twenty minutes to the truth.
21
He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam LXXXII
I curled up on my bed, Kalan’s Memo unfolded next to me. My banishment had happened almost like I’d expected. I’d had to endure a bit of shouting first. Then Dad stormed to his room to rant to Mom about their disobedient, disappointing children.
I picked up the Memo, staring again at the small menu. Two choices: investigation and personal.
For the last hour, I’d devoured more than enough personal stuff from the Investigation memories. I wasn’t ready for whatever truly private things existed in the Personal menu. A moment Kalan had shared from the hospital replayed in my mind.
I almost remember him, Valeria had said. And almost is torture.
I hated the image of her standing tall but somehow wilted. Living a life of almosts.
Kalan’s whole existence lingered on the tip of my tongue. What had we been to each other? I’d never know, because my side of the story was in my own lost memory. I felt hollow. I felt almost.
But I had missed him all morning. Even before I knew he was gone. I couldn’t remember him—but I hadn’t completely forgotten him.
Another Memo moment flashed across my mind. My face, so close to Kalan’s. His arms around me. The dark of the cliff wall, the light of the moon on my black hair. My hand touching his face, taking out the memory I’d stored in him. I could see it all, and I hated seeing it. Seeing was nothing. I wanted to feel it. I wanted everything that moment had been, not this secondhand version of looking back on it. Feelings in the moment and feelings looking back on the moment were never the same, and I’d never had to go without one of them before.
It wasn’t that those remembered feelings were gone. They just weren’t tied to the moment anymore. They floated, confusing me, making me guess where they were supposed to fit. The random wanting that coursed through me—that was likely tied to Kalan. The betrayal that pulsed like a sludge in my veins. That one, I could guess, belonged to Ren. But even when I knew where they should go, the feelings didn’t knit themselves back to the memory.
Something niggled at me, a piece out of place. Ren had been in the business of stealing Links. She stole a Link from Cora, someone she’d known for ages. So why was she taking my memories piecemeal, through siphoning? I rubbed my eyes. My brain flipped through facts like pages of a book.
I rocked back as the domino effect hit me. Random memories collided in my brain.
My memory of Ren as the thief, still stored in Kalan’s skin—something Ren would have come for if she’d taken my memory of giving it to him.
You! Dad’s shout to Kalan after my dance. Recognition rang in his voice.
Kalan and I had thought someone was stealing my memories of our investigation. That wasn’t it at all.
Someone was stealing my memories of Kalan.
Kalan was Populace. The last person in the world my parents wanted their perfect daughter associating with. It would be so easy to make me forget him. And if they had siphoned them away, those memories might still be here. Somewhere in this house where I wouldn’t find them. Where I wasn’t supposed to go.
Before I could think twice, I was out of bed. The voices from my parents’ room were finally silent as my bare feet sped up the thin twirling staircase to Dad’s study. I paused at the door, my hands hesitating in trained fear. I twisted the doorknob.
It was warmer and darker than the rest of the house. In fact, it didn’t look like it belonged in our house at all. Wood framing jutted from the walls, waiting to be filled with drywall. Rough, unfinished floorboards scraped my feet. A low desk hunched in the center of the round room, bare except for a large, cloth-covered lump. An old wooden chair rested under the desk.
I slammed open desk drawers. They had to be here. Sequestered Links, a random knick-knack, anything. Every drawer was empty.
I whipped the fabric off the lump squatting on the corner of the desk. A bulky, electronic contraption—a Shared Link System. What was Dad doing with one of those? They were so tightly regulated you practically had to kiss the mayor’s feet to get one. Houses didn’t even have ports to connect to the grid.
The machine squeaked against the desk when I pulled it toward me. Two cords—a plug, and a thick, plastic-coated wire winding to a patched-up hole in the wall. We did have a grid port.
Which had to be totally illegal.
My eyes came back to the SLS. The complex hardware needed to process memory files made all of them large, but this one was bigger than Mr. Soto’s standard-issue at school. Otherwise, it looked the same. The quartz port to store the memories before they were transferred to the network, a screen to navigate the system. I squinted below the screen. That was different. An infrared Share port. Useless. An SLS didn’t share data with other wireless devices—it couldn’t.
My fingers swept over the screen. This odd SLS had to have something to do with my missing memories. Maybe they’d been stored on the SLS network somewhere.
I flipped the on-switch. The screen glowed and a menu came up.
MEMORY IMPORT
MEMORY EXPORT
MEMORY FADE
I read it three times. My fingers clutched the edge of the desk. Were my memories here,
stored inside the SLS? Or . . . what did fade mean?
“You’re not supposed to be up here.”
I didn’t jump at Dad’s voice, though I hadn’t heard him climb the stairs. He sounded tired. For some reason, that completely pissed me off.
I turned. “What. Is. This.?”
“It’s protection.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers into the tear ducts. Mom stomped up behind him.
I ignored her and stared at my father. “You’re the one who has been taking my memories.”
“Gena!” Mom exclaimed. “What are you talking about?”
She didn’t know. My throat tightened with gratitude that at least my mother hadn’t betrayed me.
“How long, Daddy?” I whispered.
“Genesis—” Mom stopped when Dad held up a hand.
“I programmed it the night Cora lost her Link,” he said. “You came home late, and you refused to talk to me about it. I needed to know why. After you fell asleep, I checked on you to see what had happened.”
My stomach heaved. “Checked on me? You mean you looked into my memories?”
“Only a little.” He sniffed. “All I saw was that Populace boy, he filled your whole mind. He was obviously the problem.”
The problem. He took one brief glimpse into my life and saw what he defined as the problem. My anger cranked up a notch.
“And you made me forget him. Took away my memories. With this.” I gestured to the SLS.
Mom’s eyes fixed on the machine. “Kierce, what is that?”
“An SLS prototype.”
“And you used it on me?” I said. “What did you do, steal it from Ascalon? What about all your we-don’t-play-with-our-minds talk, and how dangerous it is to tamper with memory?”
“It’s more dangerous to fraternize with a Populace boy who was on our side of town after dark.” Dad pressed a button on the side of the machine. The SLS screen winked off. “You were terrified. I didn’t want you traumatized by him.”
“He didn’t traumatize me, he helped me!” I wanted to throw something, but I had nothing to throw.
And oddly, it was Dad staying calm this time. “You were making poor choices. I was protecting you from the mistakes teenagers make.”
I could barely breathe. “They were not mistakes. And if they were, they were mine to make. My choices, my memories.”
Dad placed both hands on the desk and bowed his head. “Gena, honey, you’re young. Ren is too. She made all the wrong decisions, and I didn’t want that for you. This was a second chance for you to do things better.”
“You don’t know that I can’t make the right decisions.” I gripped my pajama pants so tight, my hands cramped up. “How can I possibly choose anything at all if you’re making me forget everything?”
“I wasn’t making you forget everything,” Dad huffed. “I just faded out the memory of that boy, that one night. So you wouldn’t have to worry about him. I didn’t know he’d been following you.”
Liar. “So why do I have days’ worth of memories missing?” My throat felt raw, though I wasn’t yelling.
Dad waved a hand. “You don’t have days missing.”
“I do! I went through them, and there are pieces gone.”
“That’s not possible. I haven’t touched your memories since that . . .”
His sharp inhale pierced the momentary quiet.
“Your Link buds.” His voice rose. “How many times have I told you not to sleep with them in!”
Sometimes I listened to music to help me fall asleep, like Mom. “What does that have to do with it?”
“It uses the Link buds to connect the SLS to your memories. Every time I turned it on and you had your Link buds in, the SLS followed its programming.”
And stole any new memories of Kalan. Thin lines on Dad’s face deepened into shadows. He wasn’t lying. He didn’t mean to hurt me.
Yes he did. That first time, he meant it.
“You had no right to make me forget anything at all.”
He bristled. “If you had left that boy alone, you wouldn’t have forgotten much.”
Now he was going to blame this on me? “How did this tap into my memories through my Link buds? My connection wires weren’t plugged in.”
Dad rubbed his face again. “It’s new technology. It uses signals similar to our brainwaves and nerve impulses. The same as how we move memories from Link to Link. I only had to sync your Link buds once.”
I barely had the presence of mind to be impressed by this. A sound from Mom, half-gasp, half-sob, made me turn.
She stood, tall and pale, gaping at Dad. “How could you . . . ?”
“It’s not like we haven’t done it before. It was your idea, that time.”
Mom’s face contorted. “Shut up. That was different. We had to.”
We had to. The words echoed in my brain. They’d done it before. They’d taken memories from me, stolen my moments before now. Even my mom. How much of my life was real?
“What did you take?” I asked her.
“Nothing, I didn’t know about this . . .”
“When did you do this before?”
Dad spoke. “You don’t need to know. There’s a reason we took it from you.”
It. Only one memory. A few moments of my life that I’d never known were missing. But feelings would have remained. Unexplained emotions with no memory to attach to, unexplained fears that filled me with anxiety . . .
“Something scared me,” I said. “So you took it away.”
“You were so young, Gena.” Mom lifted her hands, begging for me to understand. “Barely eight, you couldn’t deal with it.”
Barely eight. Memories clicked together. That was when we stopped seeing Grandma Piper. “It’s about Grandma.”
“You don’t need to know,” Dad said, his voice gruff.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me?” The heat of rage flooded my face. “You might have taken away the event, but you never took away the fear. I’ve lived with it for nine years, and it never went away because I didn’t have the MEMORIES to tell me what it was for!”
“But you’re not afraid, Gena,” Mom pleaded. “You’ve grown up so well, you perform your dances without hardly getting nervous—”
“That’s not what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of you. Of punishment and pain. Of judgment.” Even my own judgment. I wanted to take years’ worth of that fear and shove it down their throats, to make them feel what they’d made me feel.
Mom stumbled into the wall. “We thought . . . we didn’t want . . .”
“I don’t care what you want. I want them back,” I said. “All of them, any memories you ever took from me. I don’t care if they’re in other Links or in the SLS, they’re mine. I’ll go get my Link buds, and you can restore everything you took.”
I headed for the door, careful to leave a wide berth between my parents and me.
“No, Gena, I can’t.” For the first time, a hint of guilt crept into Dad’s voice. “Your memories of that boy aren’t stored in the system.”
I stopped, my foot slamming to the floor. “Where are they?”
“I used the fade setting. To make the memory dimmer, without taking it from your Links. Whatever hints you still have of that boy is all you’ll ever have.”
I turned slowly. “I don’t have hints.”
A flash of confusion crossed Dad’s face.
My heart pounded in my throat. “I don’t have dim anything. I have nothing.” Only the un-Link-able, disconnected emotions. That wasn’t enough.
Dad paled. “You have to have something. Dim images, the whisper of a voice. I set the fade on high, but you have to have something left.”
“I have nothing.” He was lying. He had taken them, he could give them back, turn them bright again . . . “Give them back.”
He spun to the SLS, slamming his hand against the button to turn it on. His fingers slashed and stabbed at the touch screen. I reminded myself that I knew how to breathe.
And then my always-appropriate father swore.
“They’re gone.” His hoarse voice scratched at me like a desert sandstorm.
“Memories are never gone.”
“They’re gone.” His shoulders hunched. “The fade setting. Something went wrong. I didn’t know, I just wanted you to be safe. The fade hasn’t been tested that high, but I didn’t know it would . . . it faded them to nothing. They aren’t stored anywhere now.”
The dry heat in the attic room sucked the moisture from my mouth. Gone.
Memories couldn’t be gone.
Those things had happened, so the memories couldn’t be gone.
But they were.
And so was the me I had been in those moments.
Faded to black.
Unhappened.
“What about the other one? The first one?” I choked out. I wasn’t sure I wanted the missing memory of Grandma. Maybe in the end, I’d rather keep the happy ones I had.
“It’s been destroyed.” He straightened and looked me in the eye. “Some things are best forgotten. I know the weight of abuse, and you’ll never have to.”
Abuse.
Grandma had spent her childhood getting hit by her own father. Being nearly killed by him. The Memor-X had fractured those memories until the pieces sliced at her with every internal movement. I’d seen the evidence in her short temper and angry outbursts. Dad had never said she’d abused him. But he’d never wanted us over there alone.
“I need to know,” I whispered. “Please. So I can get past it.”
Mom slid to the floor, her hands over her face. “She hit you, Gena.”
“Hazel.” Dad had the warning tone.
Mom ignored it. “Only once. But you were hysterical. You idolized her. We just wanted you to hold on to the happy memories. Not the hurt.”
A ragged pain ripped through me in the place where my memory of Grandma had been torn. I had a glimmer of understanding. My parents had seen only my pain. They wanted to protect me. Wanted me happy and whole. I could almost forgive them for wanting to take that hurt away.
Except I’d borne the weight of it anyway. All they’d done was draw out the pain. Who would I have been without those years of irrational fear? Who would I be now if memories of Kalan filled my empty spaces?
The Unhappening of Genesis Lee Page 20
