Page 36 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

I awoke in a brightly lit room. Every part of my body ached, but something was different. The sense that death was gripping me was gone. I felt different inside. As if something horrid and sick deep within me had been cured, a tremendous fear eased.

I wiped my eyes and looked around the room, but it was empty. It seemed to be some kind of small medical suite. Was it possible I’d been taken all the way to a hospital and didn’t remember?

“Hello?” I called softly.

I tried to move, but found that I was too weak.

I sank back down onto my pillow and drifted back to sleep again, dreaming of trying to fit an odd-shaped key into a lock, but the lock kept morphing until finally I realized it was never a lock, but a rose, and its petals fell away, broken and bruised.

And then someone touched my forehead.

I opened my eyes and saw Aspen standing over me. She was applying something wet and cool to my face with a cloth.

“You’re awake,” she said, smiling down at me.

“Where am I?”

“In the infirmary, down below my garden.”

“You saved me,” I said, my voice breaking with emotion.

“Well, Lexi did the dirty work. I just did a little bit of something to help bring you back from the brink. That psycho did a number on you.”

It was only then that I remembered Lexi slitting his throat. A shiver ran through me. Who exactly were these people?

“Oh god,” I moaned. “Is he…”

“Dead?” I heard Lexi say. Turning my head, I saw her sitting on a couch over in the corner, cool as a cucumber. “Yeah, he’s dead.”

“Oh god. Oh god, what are we going to do?”

“Look at me,” Aspen said, grabbing my chin like one would a fractious child. “You have to forget about that business.”

“Business?”

“Yes. It’s over now. A man attacked you, you don’t know who he was, and he got away.”

“But he’s dead,” I whispered, the loss of human life bearing down on me like a weight I’d never even considered. “His name was Guillaume.”

“It was him or you. We made a choice.”

“But the body.”

She shook her head. “There is no body. You hear me? We took care of it. Don’t mention it again, understand?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But could you let go of my face?”

She released her grip.

I tried to clear my head, to understand what I was hearing, but everything seemed too chaotic and unreal.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did he attack me?”

Over on the couch, Lexi yawned and stretched. “I think he said something about his sister.”

“But I had nothing to do with his sister. She was the girl who was attacked by an animal. How could I have anything to do with her? And why were you there? You couldn’t have just been there randomly.”

“Oh, we weren’t,” said Lexi. “We were following you.”

I frowned. “But why? How could you know to follow me?”

Aspen cleared her throat as if she were uncomfortable.

“We’re always following you,” said Lexi.

A cold shock shot through me. “What?”

I looked at Aspen, hoping to see her laughing as well, but she looked very serious.

“Aspen?” I said, and it was really more of a plea than anything else.

“Sit up,” she said.

With some effort, I did as she directed. She retrieved a small purple cup from the table and handed it to me.

“Drink this.”

The liquid in the cup was a strange color, almost blue, and it smelled musty, of herbs and the earth. Bitter.

“Not again. What is it?”

“It’s not hallucinogenic, I promise. It will help with the pain, give you strength.”

Instead of tasting bitter, it was unexpectedly sweet and clean-tasting.

Staring over at Lexi, I tried to reconcile what I knew of her with the image of her slitting Guillaume’s throat.

“You really were following me?”

Aspen nodded.

“But why? Why would you follow me? I don’t understand.”

She pressed her fingers to her temples and looked over at Lexi. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

Lexi nodded. “We have to. Finn is wrong. We can’t just keep waiting for her to figure it out.”

“They’ll be pissed if we do this.”

“Then we won’t tell them.” Lexi cocked her head. “You know I’m right.”

Aspen sighed and seemed to prepare herself to speak. “Let’s try this one more time. Tell me what you know. Everything you know about this place.”

Blinking, exhausted, I did my best to reply. “I told you. You do something covert, something with the government or alchemy. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “you know more. Tell me anything you can think of. Tell me what you know.”

The pain was subsiding, but I could feel the swelling still, and was having trouble thinking clearly.

“The island,” I said. “Something about the island.”

“Yes!” said Aspen with wide, excited eyes. “What about the island?”

“I don’t know. Isabelle was killed out there, wasn’t she? She saw something they didn’t want her to see.”

“Who’s they?”

“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “The people who run this place. They killed her to keep her quiet.”

Aspen sighed and sat down on the stool. “No. She didn’t die. She left, and she took something very important with her when she did. Do you have any idea what that was?”

“No,” I said, feeling increasingly disoriented. “Why would I know that?”

“It was a code. Do you have any idea what that code might be?”

“What? No. I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me, but I know what really happened. There’s blood out on that island, all around a pillar. That’s her blood, isn’t it?”

Aspen shook her head. “That’s not her blood. No one killed Isabelle.”

My mind raced, desperately trying to piece something together, but my head throbbed and my body ached.

Above us, the fluorescent light started to flicker. Now off, now on.

“Listen to me. I need you to remember,” she said, and the room became deadly still except for the light, which dimmed and flared, shivering like the beat of a thousand straining insect wings.

“What?” I asked, my voice catching, breaking.

“Focus,” she said. “I asked you before what you thought we did here and I’m going to ask you again. What do we do here?”

“Alchemy,” I said, my head feeling strange, like I was swimming, like the entire world was somehow turning inside out.

“No,” she snapped. “What do we do here? What does Isabelle do here?”

“Cognitive neuro-programming.”

“That’s right. And what does that mean?”

I was feeling increasingly on edge, like electrical currents were zapping through me, lighting up my spine, setting the base of my brain on fire.

“She studied the brain—perception, cognition, memory.” I paused when I said that word, memory, and I looked up at Aspen, suddenly terrified. “No,” I whispered.

“Who do you think you are?” She was standing over me.

My head was throbbing, and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

It was coming together now. All those bits and pieces, all those things I’d blocked out, that I hadn’t wanted to see.

I stared down at my hands. I touched my swollen cheek.

“Come on. This isn’t that hard, is it?”

All the subtle things I’d recognized, all those things I shouldn’t have known—the way Jim seemed to know me when he picked me up at the airport, the way I’d instinctively known how to unlock the basement gate.

“No,” I said, tears spilling from my eyes.

The way they’d all looked at me right from the start, as if I was something dangerous, but also something familiar.

“Tell me,” Aspen commanded.

They’d looked at me like they’d known me. Because they had known me.

Silence filled the room as the light shuddered and beat.

“I’m her, aren’t I?” I said, breaking.

Aspen started laughing, a broad smile slitting her face.

The light flickered off and then burst back on.

“Welcome back, Isabelle,” she said. “Now, where the fuck is Charles?”