The Fifth Queen

by Ali House

  When she arrived at work that morning, she hunted down as much information on the fire as possible. Most people assumed it had been an accident; that some of the chemicals stored in the studio had mixed and gone volatile, but she wasn’t so sure. Vaughn had been a photographer for a long time and he was careful with his materials.

  The part that scared her was how isolated Vaughn’s studio was. It was in an older area of the island, near small businesses that weren’t usually occupied at night. If that person hadn’t been in the area at the right time, noticed the fire, and pulled Vaughn to safety... She didn’t want to think about what might have been.

  She couldn’t think of any reason that anyone would have for wanting to hurt Vaughn, unless it was another artist who was jealous of his work. But would someone take that jealousy so far as to try to kill him? Maybe someone had simply gone out for a bit of nighttime arson and they didn’t realize that someone was inside the building or what it contained.

  The police would have to investigate the matter, as they did for all accidents. Although Zenyth trusted her co-workers she was worried that if they went in there not suspecting foul play, they might miss something. She needed to get put on that team.

  When she knocked on the chief’s door, he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see her.

  “Anything on your mind, Hansen?” he asked, gesturing to the chair across from his desk.

  She shook her head at the seat and remained standing. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s about the explosion on the South-East end yesterday. You’ll need to put together a team to investigate and I’d like to be on it.”

  The chief sat back in his chair. “If I recall correctly, you’re friends with the man who owns that studio and who was caught in the explosion.”

  She nodded.

  “You know that we don’t usually put friends or family on cases. It muddies the water.”

  “I know, Sir, but I can keep an impartial mind, if that’s what you’re worried about. I only want to make sure that every possibility is examined.”

  “I see...” He paused again, thinking the matter over.

  He thought for a long enough time that Zenyth wondered if he was deliberately trying to make her second-guess her request. She could think of a few times when they’d had people work cases involving their friends, so it wasn’t such a strange request for her to make, and if she had to, she’d bring those cases up to prove her point.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “I suspect that if I don’t put you on this team, you’ll be spending all your free time gathering every single report and piece of evidence to go over.”

  He was right, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll put you on point. However, if I hear one word that you’re following another agenda or abusing your power to search for clues that aren’t there, I’ll have you back on desk duty so fast that it’ll make your head spin.”

  Zenyth nodded gratefully. “Thank you, Chief. I won’t let you down.”

  “Now, before you leave, have you given any thought to the Briton Assignment?”

  For a second, she was taken aback. Vaughn’s accident had pushed every other thought out of her mind, and there was no way she could think about leaving while Vaughn was lying in the hospital. “Well, I had been thinking about it before all this happened.”

  “I’d really like you to consider going over. I know how hard you work, and I think the team would benefit from having you on it. But we can talk about it after this investigation is over.”

  “Thank you, Chief.”

  He waved his hand to dismiss her, and she quickly left the office.

  ≈

  The investigation started that afternoon. A couple of eyebrows had been raised when Zenyth was announced as the lead, but nobody wanted to question the chief. Naydir gave her a supportive nod, but didn’t say anything.

  When she first saw the state of Vaughn’s studio, she was careful to keep her emotions in check. She didn’t think about what it used to look like or how Vaughn had been lying unconscious while the fire raged around him. Instead she thought about the usual protocol for suspicious fires and formed a plan in her mind.

  First she sent Officer Decker around the outside of the building, to see if she could find anything suspicious. Then she took the rest of the team inside, giving them information about the studio as they walked through. The first room was a waiting area, left over from the building’s previous days as a business, with three doors along the back wall. These led to a bathroom, a dark room, and a storage room. Zenyth knew that Vaughn stored most of his materials in the storage room, but they were put to use in the dark room. Although there were burns all over the room, the patterns seemed to point to the storage room as the place of ignition.

  The team arrived at the same conclusion, but she told them to keep their eyes open for anything that might contradict that theory before splitting them up and assigning them each an area in which to take photographs and gather samples. She didn’t take an area for herself, choosing instead to float around and make sure her team was working hard.

  As she walked around the back of the building, she saw Decker taking photographs of a huge burn mark on the wall.

  “What do you think about that?” Zenyth asked her.

  Decker lowered her camera. “Well, it looks like a possible ignition point, since the burn’s so tall and charred. Someone could have set the wall on fire out here, or it might have resulted from the ignition point being on the other side.”

  “I’m pretty sure the storage room is on the other side. I’ll make sure we take note of any chemicals or materials that might have been stored against this wall.”

  Zenyth left Decker and decided to check out the storage room. If there were no combustible materials close to the wall, then that could rule out an accident. It would be helpful if they found fire-starting materials outside the studio, but even the absence of matches wouldn’t prove that it hadn’t been arson. Any Fire Elemental could have started the blaze with a thought, leaving no evidence behind.

  Even though she thought that arson was more likely than carelessness, Zenyth still couldn’t come up with a valid reason why anyone would want to hurt Vaughn like this. Why had this building been set on fire? Why last night? Was it a terrible mistake that someone had been inside or did the arsonist deliberately set the fire while Vaughn was there?

  In the storage area, Officer Hale was taking meticulous photographs. Nothing had been touched yet, and nothing would be until it had all been categorized. She decided to leave Hale to his work and see how the rest of the team was doing.

  The work went slow, but they were careful, taking all of the necessary photos before they started moving things around and taking samples. Zenyth made sure that every sample collected was properly tagged and carefully packed in the police car.

  Most fires that they investigated were on a much smaller scale, and the bigger fires were usually in homes and didn’t need much investigating. This place had chemicals and equipment, and a lot of items that needed to be tagged and sampled. Nothing about this job would be easy.

  As Zenyth watched her team work, she knew that they had a long day ahead of them.

  Chapter 23

  The phone was ringing, but Kit was too focused on her task to register the sound. Spread out on the floor in front of her were all the letters she had received from Wes, along with a multitude of pages filled with handwritten memories. The pages contained everything she could remember about her life, from growing up on Briton all the way to yesterday. She’d written down every recollection of her time in university on Aesira, when she’d moved to Stanton, and then working for the ISS – everything she’d regarded as her real life. After that, she moved into her memories of being brainwashed by Tecken and everything that had happened while she’d thought she was one of them, along with the events of the Second Invasion. It had taken her days to sort throu
gh all of her thoughts and she still wasn’t finished. Every now and then she’d remember an odd detail and would have to pause to write it down before it was forgotten. Her hand was aching from the non-stop writing, but she couldn’t allow herself to take a break.

  The act of writing had become almost trance-like. She hadn’t been sleeping well, but that was par for the course. A few times last night she’d found herself startled awake, so she must have slept a bit. Thankfully there were no memories of dreams, which was a welcome relief. Maybe her brain was too overworked and had decided to shut down while she slept, or maybe it had realized that the reality of her life was worse than anything it could come up with. Whatever the case might be, she’d take it. Her head was muddled enough without any strange dreams adding to the confusion.

  At first she’d tried to keep the memories in chronological order, but as more and more pages were added to the pile, it grew difficult to figure out the exact order of certain events. The piles became larger and messier, and after a few days she gave up and vowed to sort them later.

  The phone finally went quiet. She continued to write, pen moving as fast as possible over the page, not stopping to correct spelling mistakes or missed words. There was a pause as she tried to remember a detail that was missing, but it appeared that particular piece of information was gone for now and the pen was put back to paper.

  It was late afternoon when she finally finished, putting the paper and pen down and letting out a huge sigh. As she massaged her tired hand, she tried to make sense of everything in front of her.

  This exercise had brought back a lot of memories, but not one single memory of growing up on Tecken. She remembered being in the park with her parents, and her father reading bedtime stories to her, but that had all happened in Briton. Briton had to be the true memory. It was where her father’s memorial was, after all.

  But why don’t you ever visit the memorial? a voice in the back of her mind asked. She tried to think of the last time she’d gone there, but it had been long before her mother had remarried. In fact, she may have visited it only once, during the farewell ceremony. It had been difficult to look at it, knowing that the small plaque represented all that was left of her father. Even as a child, she’d only wanted to remember his life, not his death.

  Shaking the doubt out of her head, she tried to get back on track. There weren’t many details of her past that were specific to Briton, but a lot of her memories had mostly faded to vagaries. It made sense, since it had been over a decade since she’d been on the island. She’d also deliberately tried to suppress a lot of her memories after her mother remarried a Humanist.

  It was possible that the ISS had decided to overwrite all of her Tecken memories with memories of Briton. She wasn’t sure how someone would achieve that kind of thing, but she also had no idea how any of the reassignment techniques worked and she’d experienced them first-hand. Maybe the ISS had put in a bunch of new memories that were terrible, to ensure that she wouldn’t focus on them. It made sense.

  Suddenly there was a knocking on her door. She jumped, but didn’t make a sound. The knocking continued, but she stayed where she was, trying to be as silent as possible. Keeping her eyes on the door, she counted the knocks in her head, waiting for the person to give up, which they did after six. In the silence that followed, she continued to stare at the door, waiting to make sure that the person didn’t come back. It was probably Naydir or Sav, checking up on her. She knew that she should answer their calls and let them know that she was all right, but they’d probably want to spend time with her, and she needed every available second to figure this mystery out. She’d talk to them once she knew whether or not she could trust them.

  The knocking had been enough to distract her and she realized how long it had been since she’d eaten anything. Being careful to move quietly, she stood up and went to the kitchen to make a quick snack.

  If only there was some way she could know for certain what was real and what wasn’t. She had a lot of memories, but it was entirely possible that all of them were fake and that this exercise would prove nothing. Considering how much tampering had been done to her brain, she didn’t feel as if she could trust anything it came up with. Even the pages and pages of memories didn’t prove anything, and in some cases they only made the matter worse. She could remember being in the park on Briton with her father, but had it actually been Briton? Could it have been Tecken instead? And that was only one of the many, many memories that existed in a strange limbo, where she had some details but not enough. For all she knew, that park could have been any island in the Segment.

  How was she supposed to know which version was the truth?

  What she needed to do was visit Briton and see if the parks and streets were the same as the ones in her memories, but the mere thought of visiting Briton caused her lip to curl in disgust. Her last memory of the island had been so terrible that she didn’t know if she’d be able to go back there.

  That feeling was very convenient.

  There was something else she could do other than go to Briton, but it wasn’t much better. It involved going to Tecken instead. She hadn’t set foot on that island since she’d finished repairing the bridges, mostly because she was public enemy number one, for both the people who had followed Erikson and her former friend – the current Leader of Tecken – Akola Allen.

  But those were her only choices – go to Tecken, risk being discovered as the Six-Elemental and run off the island, or go to Briton, risk being discovered as the Six-Elemental, and... She actually wasn’t sure what would happen to her if she was discovered on Briton. As far as she knew, the Humanists were laying low, but she wouldn’t put it past one of them to come out from hiding to attack her. It would probably be a big boost for them if they got rid of her. They could always say that it was an unfortunate accident or blame it on another Elemental. She’d seen a lot of crimes there get swept under the rug.

  A wave of calm washed over her. What was she doing? Of course her past was the truth. All of these papers and reports were simply Wes messing with her mind. This idea that she’d been born on Tecken was absolutely ridiculous.

  Laughing to herself, she started to gather up the papers from the floor. As she did, her gaze fell on the ISS reports. Her smooth calm gained a wrinkle. Wes could have done just as much damage with fake Tecken reports, but faking ISS reports would be so much more effort. And these reports didn’t look fake.

  Groaning, she put her head in her hands. She’d been so close to moving on, and now she was doubting everything again. She had to do it – she had to go to Tecken and see if anything there was familiar. If nothing was, then she could return to Stanton, burn all these stupid letters, and let things go back to normal. If everything was familiar, then... Well, she’d probably have a nervous breakdown in the middle of the island and lose her mind.

  Either way, at least she’d finally have an answer.

  Ϟ

  That night she dreamed of Nathan. They were lying on the grass in a park, side by side. The sky was bright blue with only a few fat, white clouds, and the temperature was perfect.

  They were talking about what they’d do after Erikson had conquered the Segment, laughing about whether they’d stay in the army or get regular jobs that didn’t involve fighting with weapons. She had joked that maybe she’d become an architect and build monuments to Erikson – buildings much taller than the ISS buildings. These monuments would be so tall that the ISS would forever live in Erikson’s shadow.

  Nathan took her hand and looked into her eyes. “Whatever you do, I want to be there with you.”

  The sun shone and the scent of grass filled the air, and they kissed.

  And then she woke up.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was confused why her room was so big. And why was the bed was so large? It was big enough for two people. This wasn’t her room in the base. Where was she?

  Suddenly she realized that she was on Stanton. The side of the bed that V
aughn slept on was cold and empty, and she felt a twinge of guilt for having another dream about Nathan while Vaughn was lying in the hospital.

  She felt haunted by the idea that that wasn’t just a strange dream, but a repressed memory. If her relationship with Nathan had only been for a few months, then why was she still dreaming about him? Why wouldn’t the memories of him fade into time and leave her alone? A few months shouldn’t be enough time for someone to create such a bond. Was it possible that there were other feelings that had been suppressed, that could only come out when she was sleeping?

  Were her dreams trying to tell her the truth?

  Chapter 24

  There was one thing Kit needed to do before going to Tecken, but it had to be quick, before Naydir or Zenyth found her, figured out her plan, and stopped her.

  As she stood in the hospital room, holding Vaughn’s hand, she was torn between wanting him to wake up and wanting him to stay asleep. If he woke up right now, she didn’t know if she’d be able to go through with this plan. She’d probably stay here with him, but the uncertainty would always be there, in the back of her mind, making her wonder What if? Maybe it was best that he stayed asleep until she’d found some answers.

  If it turned out that her life on Tecken was the truth and Naydir and Zenyth had been employed by the ISS to keep an eye on her, then Kit would be heart-broken. The fact that they had pretended to be her friends for so long, all while they were simply following orders... It would be a betrayal of the trust she’d had in them.

  However, if it turned out that Vaughn had been working for the ISS the entire time, she would be destroyed.

  She wanted Tecken to be a lie. She wanted to go to the island and feel completely out of place and return home to her normal life full of surety. Then she could forget about those papers and the letters, and live the rest of her life in peace.