Page 95 of Last of Her Name

Who else was Clio friends with?

Who did she dance with at Solstice Fest last year?

What did my parents give her for her birthday?

Stars, whenisher birthday?

And who raised her? Her parents died in the war, but who took care of her after that?

I have no answers. All the questions, but no answers.

These are basic facts I would know about any other person. Why don’t I know them about my best friend?

I sink to the floor, sitting cross-legged, the way Riyan did when he meditated. I rest my hands on my knees and shut my eyes, and for the next few minutes, I simply breathe. Deep, steady, slow. I push out all thought and focus on the rhythm of air rushing into my lungs, sighing out again.

Then, when I am as still inside as I can possibly be, I dive into my memory.

I reach back, back, to the beginning. I swim through a river of images, until I find my very first memory of Clio Markova.

My parents were inside Ravi’s Diner, ordering flavored ice to carry back home, but I stayed on the sidewalk because the mayor’s new dory was parked there, and I wanted to look at it. I was lying on my back on the road, under the ship, studying its brand-new hover pads and how they were connected to the engine.

Then there she was: a pair of red shoes standing on the other side of the dory. I scooted out and stood, and we blinked at each other. She was skinny and bright-eyed, her yellow hair in a curly topknot. I’d never seen her before, but then, I didn’t know many of the town kids

“Are you getting ice too?” I asked her.

“Yes,” the girl said. “I like grape, but strawberry is the best.”

I smiled, and knew at once we would be friends, because strawberry was my favorite too.

I release a gasp, curling over. How could something feel so real, and not exist? How could someone I’ve known so intently be nothing but empty air and my imagination? How could I love a lie with all my heart, and not know what it truly was?

I pick up memory after memory like shards of a broken mirror, staring at each one until it becomes too sharp to hold. She is in all of them, but it seems the more I try to remember her, the fainter she becomes, until I’m not sure anymore which memories to trust. I think of a day when we found a nest of baby mouskas in the stable, and we knelt and named them one by one. Pol was there, I know. And Clio … Clio is a shadow in the corner of my eye, kneeling in the hay and cooing over the little furry creatures. She was there, wasn’t she? I’m not sure anymore.

I’m not sure of anything.

At the bottom of my pile of broken memories is one I can barely look at, one I’ve never fully recalled until this moment: my mom, sitting me in the chair in her office, telling me Clio was not real. How easily now I slip back into my six-year-old body, pressing my hands to my ears, screaming wordlessly until she gives up and walks away.

“If I keep pressing her,” Mom says to Dad, who’s pacing the room, “she could break entirely. It’s happened before, with some of her ancestors.”

“Then we don’t press her,” he says.

The memory plays over and over, and each time it seems a little more detailed, until I can recall the plastic of the seat sticking to my thighs, the soft lavender sunlight lancing across the floor, and the smell of the antibacterial soap by the sink.

Finally, I end up lying on the floor, spread-eagle, staring blankly. A loose thread curls up from the edge of the carpet. I pull it, and it keeps coming, unraveling along the length of the wall with a sound like tearing paper.

Nothing in my life has been real.

My parents were not my parents.

My best friend never existed.

My name is not my own.

The only person in the galaxy who might care about me—aboutme, not Anya—I shot and left behind. He probably hates me now. Why shouldn’t he?

I’m the girl who left him for a lie of her own making.

I was born to inherit a legacy of madness, and that curse has been with me all my life without my realizing it. It’s been eating me from the inside out, like the red fungus that grows in the slinke trees. It starts at the core and weakens the tree from within. Yet years will pass and the tree will seem perfectly healthy on the outside. But then, all at once, the trunk will buckle and the tree will fall.