by B. C. Palmer
Our job, as far as Amelia was concerned, consisted of keeping watch, feeding her books, redirecting her focus when it wandered, and watching for signs of fatigue. She hit her first wall halfway through the third text. First a wince, which was probably a sudden, brief pain behind her eyes. Next would come a far more painful jab.
“Better take a rest,” I said when I saw it. “Close your eyes; let it all sink in.”
When she didn’t look away from the page, Isaac gently pulled the book out of her hands and set it aside.
“I was almost—” she said but winced again. “Ow. Okay, I shouldn’t be able to identify what muscle just spasmed behind my eyeball.”
Isaac gestured for her to close her eyes, passing a hand over them for emphasis. “Take a break and that’s where it stops. That was a good hour and a half, so we’ll do hour-long intervals from here.”
“It was an hour and twenty-eight minutes and fifteen seconds and three-tenths of a second,” Amelia rattled off, her eyes closed, her mouth splitting into a self-satisfied grin. “Why don’t we just read all the books of magic like this? You could memorize spells and hand signs and theory overnight. You’d think people would be mastering magic in a year.”
“Magical knowledge is different,” I explained. “It’s not about memorizing. Building up the theory in specific steps, learning the meaning behind each word, each gesture, every component, is a process of digestion. You could learn your primer spells this way, but you’d still need to practice. Learning more complex magic, it just isn’t viable. More than that, learning each spell changes you just a little bit inside, and your mind and spirit have to make adjustments. Packing it all in too fast… not a good idea.”
“People have tried it,” Hunter grumbled. “The ones that didn’t die went insane. So don’t get ideas.”
I shot Hunter a pleading look. Can we not send her into a horrific spiral of her worst fears all highlighted in perfect clarity?
He seemed to get it because he gave an exaggerated shrug and shut his mouth, scratching at his beard. Which was in terrible shape, now that I was looking closely. It made my heart ache to see him like this. Maybe now that he was here with us, he would talk to us again. I wasn’t about to hold my breath for it but stranger things had happened. Not much stranger, but close.
“It’s so hard not to get pulled down,” Amelia muttered, her eyes tracking back and forth rapidly behind her eyelids. She was still smiling at least. “I can remember my freshman year, the first day of school, perfectly. Ugh, I didn’t eat breakfast. That was a mistake, I had such a stomachache. It was… oh… uh, Jesus, it’s like it’s happening—”
Hunter frowned at Amelia, and Isaac snapped his fingers. “All right, hey, hey. Open your eyes. Let’s keep going. Be careful about sensory memories; they can be intense.”
Amelia did open her eyes and looked a little pale. “Yeah, I guess so. Um… I was on predynastic Cantonese. Page 127.”
Isaac opened the book again and put it in front of her, and Amelia poured herself again into reading through the pages.
Each time she took a break, Isaac allowed her a minute to peruse her memories, just like we’d discussed. But he kept turning her attention to recent events—high school and some middle school. Getting her acceptance letter to MIT. A number of birthdays. By her fifth break and the second refill of the carafe, Hunter was pacing slowly by the bookshelf and I was giving Isaac meaningful looks every time he asked Amelia about some inane event in her life.
As fascinating as Amelia’s life was now, the rest of her life had been utterly mundane compared to a magician’s usual childhood. She’d been raised by her godmother, who was a fierce woman by the sound of it and almost militantly focused on Amelia. She’d turned away all interested parties and given up any interest in dating in favor of tending Amelia. I wondered at that. They must have been so close. Isaac was careful not to get too close to her memories of losing her godmother, especially mindful anytime it seemed like Amelia was going that direction on her own.
What he was also doing was avoiding taking her back before the age of five. We needed to know, and with the way he was waffling, we’d lose this chance.
“Isaac,” I said, “you want to help me grab a few of the Akkadian epics? It’ll be tricky, getting the context right.”
“I’d better stay—”
“I’m okay,” Amelia said without looking up from her seventh language binge. “I’d love to memorize some Akkadian poetry, their language was so beautiful.”
I spread my hands, victorious and helpless to Amelia’s hunger for knowledge. “Help me pick.”
He ground his teeth and stood hesitantly from the table before following me into the stacks. I turned on him as soon as we were far enough away that Amelia shouldn’t have been able to hear us whispering. Just for good measure, I flicked a noise cancellation into the air behind him. “What are you doing? You’ve got to let her go further back.”
“She doesn’t remember losing her parents,” Isaac whispered. “I can’t risk her emotions like that. If she goes back to that time—”
“So skip her past that. Ask about her early memories, her parents, things they said. Happy times, and go from there.”
“You can be an especially selfish kind of prick when you want,” he shot back, his face beginning to redden. He waved behind him in Amelia’s direction. “She has nothing to do with Nathan and his obsession. This was a bad idea, and do you really think her parents just stood around discussing what they did when they were in school? If anything, they would have avoided the subject, don’t you think?”
“When she was around, maybe,” I agreed. “Or they might have spoken about it in a dead language so she wouldn’t understand. Luckily, she now speaks half a dozen of them.” I sighed, and pulled Isaac to me to press my forehead against his. I understood what he was feeling. “Look… I don’t want to cause her pain any more than you do. I really don’t. But we’ve got one chance to get some kind of answer. To find out what happened that year and why Nathan was so obsessed. And if we find that out, if we can use even one clue to open it up, then we might understand what happened to him. We can ask forgiveness later, and if you want we can tell her everything so she understands. We’ll do whatever it takes to make it up to her if she’s upset. But we can’t just give this chance up.”
I knew when he caved. Isaac always did the same thing. His shoulders slumped a bit, he gave a long, quiet sigh, and he rubbed the back of his neck as he withdrew from me. “Okay,” he breathed. “But afterward, we tell her. She’ll want to know anyway if she remembers anything. If Jakob and Rosalind ever spoke of it once they left here.”
“They were two of seven people that survived,” I said. “Out of 130 students here at the time. They talked about it, Isaac. Anyone would talk about it. Any magician, anyway.”
He turned away. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Mara poked her head around the side of the bookshelf and glowered at us. “No casting in the library, Mr. Roth; Mr. Taylor. You both know better.”
“Sorry, Mara,” I said, giving her my most charming smile. It didn’t affect her in the least, but I’d already banished the spell. “Won’t do it again.”
“See that you don’t,” she murmured and glanced back at the study tables. “Is someone with her?”
“Hunter,” Isaac said. “We were just getting back.”
I snatched a book of Akkadian epic poetry from the shelf and followed him back while Mara gave us both the long eye.
Hunter had left Amelia to herself, but he’d moved to our table—the far end, with a seat between him and Isaac, and two between him and me. “She’s on to middle-kingdom Sumerian,” he said when we sat. “I’d give her Atlantean next—the syntax is almost identical, and there are about four hundred loan words that will make more sense.”
“It’s in the stack,” Isaac said. “Mara’s suggestion as well.”
Hunter gave a quiet grunt.
When Amelia had finally made he
r way through middle-kingdom Sumerian, Isaac suggested another break. It was still another five hours to dawn, but ideally, Amelia would take the antidote several hours before—she’d need sleep after this, and a lot of it.
As before, she closed her eyes. And this time, his own eyes closed, Isaac asked the question. “Amelia, how far back in your… early childhood can you remember?”
She frowned momentarily, concentrating, and I worried that it would quickly turn to pain. Instead, she smiled, and a tear sprang up from under her eyelid and trickled down her cheek as she gasped softly. “Oh, my… Mom?”
Amelia
“Mom,” I said, softly, as if she might hear me if I were too loud. Her face was so clear that I could reach out and touch her. I did, with hands that were too small and smooth. She smiled down at me, and there was something about her eyes—the way they pinched at the corners. There were lines on her face, too many for her age. And gray hairs. About a hundred and thirteen of them, divided evenly between two patches near her temples, sweeping back into a practical sort of ponytail. “What happened to you?”
“How old are you?” Isaac asked.
His asking seemed to bring the information right up to my mind, the product of some internal clock. “One thousand, two hundred and ninety-one days,” I said. “Three going on four. She’s so beautiful.”
She kissed me on the top of my head in the memory and, like a chain being dredged up from some dark place, a whole long line of related memories came with it. All the hundreds and hundreds of times she’d kissed my head like that, sweeping past me with perfect clarity. “She used to kiss me just like that,” I said, my eyes burning and wet under my eyelids. “All the time. Before bed, when I woke up. Every time she was close to me, it seems like. How could I have forgotten all those kisses? All the way back, like a little ritual I never even noticed, from the very first… from the first time we met…”
I was right there, my cheek on my mother’s bare chest. The sound of her heartbeat was reassuring but in a strange, thoughtless kind of way. Pure instinct, without any words, with nothing between the feeling and me. My throat was raw, I’d been crying, afraid and cold, and my eyes hurt from the light—and then I was warm again, and there it was; that steady, soft sound. Her lips touched the top of my head, and the smell of her filled my nose. It was the first time I’d smelled her but I knew in my bones who it was that held me. That I was safe.
“It’s done then,” my father’s voice said. “There’s no going back now, Rose.”
“It was going to happen no matter what, Jake,” my mother said. “I’m not going to regret it now. There’s no point. She didn’t ask for this.”
The coldness in my father’s voice stabbed at present-day me, and I put my hand to my lips. “He didn’t want me…”
“Who?” Lucas asked. His voice was distant. I hadn’t gone this deep into my memories before, Isaac had been helping keep me afloat. “Who didn’t want you, Amelia?”
“My father,” I said, “he… they argued…”
All the other times I’d heard his voice came flowing back to me, and then I was somewhere else. Somewhere… primordial is the only way I can describe it. No thoughts—there were no real memories from my own mind, just sensation. Warmth, pressure. The ever present thump-thud of a sound I didn’t recognize as a sound at all—it was the universe, my reality, an ever-present element that simply was. And beyond it, from somewhere far away, distorted to my present-day ears, came two voices. One that seemed to be all around me, and another that came from somewhere else.
“So take another pill then,” my father said, his voice echoing through the waters around me. “It’s still early, Rose. I’ll get another egg and try Chandra’s Termination again; it had to have been a problem with the spell—”
“The spell was perfect,” my mother said, her voice vibrating around me. I realized I was inside of her. “And the pill isn’t going to do anything. It’s not natural, Jake, don’t you get that? We promised a child. She’s seeing to it that we have one. We made a deal.”
“Amelia?” Isaac asked. “What are you—”
I held a hand up and grabbed tight onto the memory before it led somewhere else. “Just… just be quiet.”
There was a loud, sharp sound. I kicked, startled. “Jakob, stop,” my mother said. “Just stop. It’s done.”
“There are other things to try,” he said. “We can go to a clinic. Do it surgically, have them cut the baby out—”
“How could you even suggest that?” my mother demanded. “And what do you think would happen? She’d intervene, Jake. The doctor would be in a car accident, or the nurse would have an aneurysm.”
“Then we keep trying,” he shouted. “Rose, be rational. If we have this baby—if you have this baby, that’s it. She’s done with us. You know damn well what happened to the others. We never should have… gods, what did we do? What can we do now, Rose? One mistake. One mistake and we pay for it with the rest of our lives and now… she won’t stop with us. You know that. We should have been more careful. If we’d just done what we agreed and gone our separate ways before this happened…”
I slipped. I reached instinctively for other conversations, other times they’d fought. Had I been an accident? Or something worse? And the moment I wondered, other memories surfaced. These, though, were even fuzzier. Impossible to even understand. I was a spark, and then nothing, and then…
“L-Lucas?” I asked, grasping at the air. “Isaac? I… I can’t… where am…”
It was darkness. Not the absence of light but a kind of substance, like some Abyssal liquid that didn’t so much press around me as absorb me. I was spread through it evenly, everywhere and nowhere. And that had to be where it was—nowhere, outside of any place that was any place at all. I wasn’t alone.
“There’s something… it’s here with me… I have to—”
“Bring her out,” Lucas said, his voice tense, from a long way away. I tried to open my eyes, to claw my way back, but the Abyss was everything, a whole new vista of eternal memory, or the timeless illusion of memory that clawed at my mind and dragged me further out toward… something. Something vast, and hungry.
“Swallow,” Isaac commanded. I could barely feel my mouth but something rubbery was in it. Liquid followed, and I sputtered before it cascaded down my throat, and it was like being there, in the darkness, unable to breathe or see or feel anything and the hungry presence at the heart of it was coming for me, hunting me. It would catch me, there was no escaping it—it wasn’t a thing in the Abyss, it was the Abyss. It already had me, and it would never let go. I could feel it pushing against me, pressing me against the surface of something else, some limitless light.
It whispered to me, its words impossible to understand as it told me secrets, made promises, told me horrible things that nestled inside me and curled up to sleep, and wait.
I clawed at it, and caught something in my hands and tried to tear it to pieces, to survive. “I won’t go,” I screamed. “You can’t make me, I don’t want to do it, leave me alone!”
“Hold her down,” Hunter barked. “I fucking told you this was a bad idea. You should have listened to me!”
“It’s done now,” Lucas shot back. “She’s taken the other pellet; it’ll only take another fifteen, maybe twenty minutes at the most.”
“She’ll be permanently insane by then,” Hunter shouted. “Mara! We need you!”
My destiny. That’s what the Abyss was telling me, and every word it spoke seemed to write itself into my soul, shaping me until I was carved from the black like some work of twisted art. The pressure intensified, and the voice spoke more quickly. There was some kind of urgency, something was happening fast. It was a race, and there wasn’t much time, everything had led to this moment and I could almost understand what it was saying now. It was another language. Something primal, something beyond comprehension but native in a way that made breathing seem like some alien task. If I just listened a little longer, I could�
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Fire and ice tore through me. My skin itched, pierced with coals and icicles, and I heaved forward and onto my side. Something vile leaked from the back of my throat, and my palms were slippery as I tried to steady myself.
“Breathe, Amelia,” Hunter urged. “Deep breaths. Come on, open your eyes. Look at me.”
“Gods, is she…?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe you should leave,” Isaac snapped.
I grasped at the air and a rough large hand—it could only be Hunter’s—rose beneath it. I held onto it tight, coughing as my mind seemed to close down like a lockbox. The boom of the ‘lid’ slamming shut echoed through my brain and struck the back of my eyeballs. My heartbeat throbbed in my skull painfully, and every wracking cough made it worse, and made my stomach ache.
“I’ll get towels,” a woman’s voice said, her accent vaguely African. Mara, I thought, but I couldn’t make myself open my eyes yet. “You all should be ashamed of yourselves. I’m reporting this, so you know.”
“Mara, please, we need to—”
“I’m especially disappointed in you, Mr. Webb,” Mara said, her voice trailing away.
“Fuck,” Hunter muttered. “Amelia? Say something. Anything. I need to hear your voice.”
I tried to speak but the words seemed to bounce around, playing a game of hide-and-seek with my mouth. With a monumental effort, I managed to get at least one word out. “Water.”
The three of them let out loud breaths, as if relieved. “She’ll be all right,” Isaac said. “Fuck. Amelia, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t…”
