Page 17 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Ten

Ten years ago

In the tropics, twilight is fleeting and darkness descends quickly after sunset. By the time they have cleared up everything from dinner, the constellations are already out. The girl spends a few minutes on her raft to brush her teeth and think about the decision she has made.

When she returns to the beach, the boy has spread open a blanket on the sand. His weight braced on his hands, he leans back a few degrees and gazes up at the sky.

“What do you think about when you look at the stars?” she asks, tracing the edge of his blanket with her toes.

“Depending on the night, I guess. The droids on Titan—whether they’re still waiting for human settlers to arrive. Or Proxima Centauri—we were this close to sending that swarm of probes. Proxima dodged a bullet.”

She was thinking of Proxima Centauri only last night. It’s a sign, isn’t it?

She sits down a few feet from him, wraps her arms around her knees, and inhales deeply. “When we say our goodbyes tomorrow, it doesn’t have to be farewell. You’re plotting your mother and sister’s escape anyway. Come to New Ryukyu. I can help the three of you get settled.”

There. She’s put her cards face-up on the table. If he believes her to be the future Sea Witch, then her promise must hold some weight.

He turns toward her, starlight a glimmer across his features. But then he tilts his face up to the unreachable universe again.

She digs her heel into the sand and studies the faint silver sheen on the surface of the sea. Has her offer been unceremoniously rejected or is he waiting for her to elaborate? She bites the inside of her lips and asks, “You said it wouldn’t be long now before they must escape?”

His gaze remains skyward. “They have trackers installed on them.”

She has just dug beneath the surface of the sand to the damp layer underneath. It feels cold against her sole.

“They’re crude devices, the trackers,” he continues, his tone grim, “but they’re installed in such a way that to remove them would cause extreme neural pain, enough to kill someone with compromised health and maim strong individuals.”

Shock spikes into her. A moment later, anger radiates outward. She clenches her fist. “Then how will they get away?”

“I can take their pain—that is my concurrent ability.”

She allows herself a minute to digest that. “What is the cost of your concurrent ability?”

Sea Sense is a gift from the universe, to make up for the near eradication of humankind, perhaps.

Concurrent abilities, however, carry a price that must be paid.

She, for her power to sense malice, can never hear music—it will always be just noise to her.

She prays that his cost is likewise tolerable.

“It erases my memories. Not all, obviously, but people and events leading up to the time I exercise my ability. When I was six somebody tampered with my mother’s tracker, to make it look like she tried to escape.

According to her I must have taken her pain when she fell unconscious.

When she woke up, I was unconscious. And when I woke up, days later, I not only couldn’t tell her what happened, I was confused about her and kept asking her why she looked different. ”

“But you didn’t forget her.”

“She thinks I did, but believes that we were able to become mother-and-son again because she was at my side all the time while I was losing my prior memories of her.”

The gears in her head churn. Assuming she has correctly understood the logic of its cost, if he doesn’t exercise his concurrent ability before they part ways—and she sees no reason why he should—then his memories of her just might survive this amnestic curse.

As if he heard her trying to find a lucky escape, he says, “And then it takes away something else, something unrelated to the central event.”

She can no longer feel the temperature of the sand beneath her toes. She can’t seem to feel anything. “Such as?”

“After I took my mother’s pain, I could no longer read.”

“What?!” Now she can feel something—her nails digging into the center of her palm.

“Fortunately I was young enough that my official schooling hadn’t started yet. Only my mother knew of my literacy, no one else, so no one noticed its loss.”

The sensation around her heart numbs and burns at the same time. “What else have you forgotten?”

“When I was eight, I used my ability again, this time for my brother Eighteen, the Noble Consort’s younger son. Afterwards, not only did I forget Eighteen, I forgot about our cat.”

He scoops up a handful of sand and lets it fall from his grasp. The susurrus of fine sand striking fine sand has never sounded so chilling.

“Her name was Lump and she’d died the year before, but I grew up with her and loved her greatly, according to my mother.

And I didn’t forget her right away. Two weeks after I woke up, I said I missed her.

A month after that, I came across a pencil portrait of Lump.

When my mother saw me studying it, she asked if I still missed her badly.

But I was only wondering why my mother had taken the trouble to draw this extraordinarily ugly cat.

That was when she realized I could no longer recall anything about Lump.

When she became convinced that I would have forgotten her too if she hadn’t been a constant in my life. ”

“I didn’t forget everything about Lump, though.

In that month she first slipped from my memory, I sat by the pond in my mother’s courtyard a great deal, feeling sad for no reason.

Later, when my mother pieced together what must have happened, she told me that I used to read there with Lump on my lap. ”

At last he turns toward her. “When I send off my mother and my sister, you too might slip from my memory. But maybe I’ll remember this sky.”

She bites her lower lip, hard. “I knew a pretty boy like you would have something wrong with him.”

“A whole day in my company and it’s the first time you think to yourself that something is wrong with me?”

When she doesn’t reply, he adds tentatively, “Maybe we can redo the blessings and you can wish for me not to forget you.”

“We can’t redo the blessings.” New friends sharing a cup for the first time and wishing each other well, that’s the strongest blessing.

She looks up. The sky is so heavy with stars; it’s a wonder they don’t fall in a deluge of brilliance. “I guess if you’re going to forget me, then so be it.”

“I am not going to forget you. I am going to hold onto you tooth and claw,” he says vehemently.

Then the vehemence drains out of his voice, leaving behind only numb resignation.

“But that may not be enough when the day comes. With my mother around, she can act as the guardian of my memories. But when she leaves, I won’t even know what I have lost. I’ll be left with this ache where you used to be, wondering what happened and why there are pieces of myself missing. ”

* * *

Her incomprehension slowly gives way to a sense of futility. So…they have been doomed from the very beginning.

No, he is not doomed. He won’t remember a thing.

She clutches her head. When complicated, dangerous, melancholy boys tell you to stay the fuck away from them, you sail as if a typhoon is behind you. But she, in her infinite arrogance, had to learn the hard way.

Suddenly, her anger surges like a volcanic eruption, hot enough to melt rocks. “How dare you manipulate me!”

He recoils. “You’re accusing me of manipulation?”

“Don’t act so innocent. Whether in offense or in self-defense, everyone who manages to come of age in the Potentate’s Palace is an expert manipulator.

Maybe your story is true. Maybe it’s even poignant.

But in telling me, you are still maneuvering.

You’re putting me not where I’d like to be but where you’d like me to be. ”

“Because I want you to remember me? Because I want someone to remember us?”

“We are not us,” she retorts, completely sidestepping the offer she made only minutes ago in the hope of making them into us.

“To me we are, but that’s beside the point,” he says quietly.

“You’re right, I do know what manipulation is.

I grew up surrounded by every kind of subterfuge and I can sense manipulation like a compass can sense a magnetic field.

But I have no more manipulated you than you have manipulated me.

And if someone as suspicious as I am can come to see that your lunch invitation was nothing more than a straightforward attempt at seduction, why can’t you see that my invitation tonight was…

It was an appeal, to the only other person who might care to hold onto the memory of who we are at this moment. ”

Her anger boils over. “You’re a boy I tried to pick up far from home.

That’s all you are and that’s all you should be.

We have a pleasant time together, we say goodbye, and I don’t think about you again except occasionally and never mention you unless it’s to take part in a drinking game—Drink, unless you’ve also been followed by a stranger who was at least somewhat serious about capturing you for ransom. ”

“But—”

“Don’t bring up what I said just now. That resulted from the mistaken idea that we could be in the same place again before too much time passes—within six months, no more than a year.

I have not signed up to make you a permanent part of my life in absentia.

I am not going to devote myself to this sacred memory of ‘us’ day after day, year after year. ”

She can’t bear to think about what life will be like for him, waking up all alone in the wake of his mother and sister’s escape, unable to remember what happened, unable, perhaps, even to remember the ones for whom he’d made the sacrifice.

No, she won’t think about it. Ever.