Page 26 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Fifteen

Ren wakes up to the sight of a woven straw mat overhead, acting as a canopy to shield him from direct sunlight.

It looks familiar, this mat. Then he remembers.

When Lanzhou invited him to lunch on her raft all those years ago, they sat under such a canopy, while she undressed him eagerly with her eyes.

He…remembers?

He dares not move. But he does remember.

He remembers staring into the pond in his mother’s garden with Lump at his side.

Playing hide-and-seek with Eighteen. Combing Nin’s hair and braiding it into a whole crown of plaits.

Blushing as his mother slides a wrapped volume toward him, telling him, If you’re going to read erotic novels, at least try something that teaches you what girls like.

And he remembers his first sight of Lanzhou, in a white tank top and a pair of loose shorts, dancing on her raft. Not seductively, just happily, doing a high kick here, a cartwheel there. The siren who showed up at his boat two nights later nearly gave him a heart attack.

“Hey, you’re awake. Are you okay?” She kneels beside him, her hand on his cheek, looking pale and anxious.

Lanzhou!

Her name, his most prized possession, he will think it in iterations of thousands, tens of thousands.

“I think so. I feel fine.” Except for the part about having his memories back. That is just odd, as if he can see himself from three hundred sixty degrees all at once.

He sits up, takes her hand in his, and presses a kiss to her knuckles. “Are you okay?”

“Of course. I couldn’t be more okay.”

She does appear to be in robust health. Worried, yes, but not suffering physically.

Yet he has this phantasmagoric memory of her high-fiving Old Friend, who had a nerve gun, of all things, on her fin. And then she was writhing in pain. He tried to take her pain and…somehow ended up in the water?

Has he been hallucinating?

He looks about. They’re surrounded by shining, aquamarine sea. The morning breeze is not yet hot, just pleasantly mild. To their west looms a large, mountainous island, completely under Plant Cover. “Is that Old Ryukyu? How long was I out?”

“A little more than an hour. That is indeed Old Ryukyu. We’ll cross the Tropic of Cancer before too long.”

So he was unconscious for a while. Are they not going to talk about that?

At least she’s no longer wearing that damnable collar. He doesn’t see the device either. Without those distractions, she is absolutely magnificent in her green dress. He, on the other hand, has on only a pair of loose trousers that he wears to go to sleep.

Loose, but dry. He’s been changed out of his wet clothes.

“Tropic of Cancer, wow,” he murmurs. “I’ve never been that far north.”

She combs through his hair again, the same gesture as earlier, as if she’s trying to make a headache go away—except he’s under no affliction whatsoever. “You’ll love the temperate climate. Autumn is beautiful and winter is fun.”

“I’ve always wanted to see snow.”

“I’ll take you to see snow.” She peers into his eyes and it’s clear that snow is the last thing on her mind. “Is your head okay? Is your stomach okay? Can you eat something?”

Now that she mentions food, something does smells divine nearby, the aroma of perfectly caramelized starch. He is feeling extremely clear-headed and equally famished. “What do you have?”

He’s sure she hasn’t been diving for sea cucumbers.

“I made some scallion flatbread. It’s my specialty.”

“Is it?”

He can’t quite keep astonishment out of his voice. Is this the same woman who didn’t know that she needed fat to create lamination? But come to think of it, she did say at dinner last night that she makes a better flatbread than his cook.

“Even my mom says it’s good.” She puts an already cooked one to reheat on a camping stove and refuses to let him help with setting up the folding table and folding stools. “She tells me in private that it’s better than my auntie’s and we all thought Auntie’s was the gold standard.”

He remembers her talking about her auntie’s scallion flatbread—he’s living in a miracle. He remembers her dress glittering in the golden light of sunset, the tiny flecks of flour stuck to her forearms, her bare feet on the beach, never remaining still, always marking squiggles in the white sand.

She brings him a beautifully golden disc accompanied by—will wonders never cease—a bowl of rice porridge, which only the old people of New Ryukyu eat for breakfast, if he’s not mistaken. When he bites into the disk, he is astounded by the layers upon layers of lamination.

“Perfect, right?”

But it was already perfect last time, he wants to tell her. Every day of the past ten years he would have swum across the Disputed Waters, with its oversized sharks and crazed sea serpents, to gorge himself on that enormous, questionably cooked scallion flatbread.

He eats two pieces in silence. Then he says, “Improved from last time.”

She, who has been sending worried looks his way once in a while, replies, “Still stingy with a compliment, I see.”

Then her spoon falls into her nearly empty porridge bowl with a clang. She stares at him, her eyes enormous. “You—you remember?”

A great fear pulsates in him, outmatched only by an even greater hope. “I’m almost afraid to say yes, but I do.”

“So you remember me?”

“And the scallops. But as far as I can tell, I did nothing special with them. So I’ll never be able to duplic—”

She bolts out of her stool, nearly knocks over the folding table, and drags him to his feet. “Write everything down. Right now. I forgot to tell you, when your mother and sister came, they also brought—”

“I remember. Four years of my journals.” A very incomplete account of his life in those years, what with the ever-present fear of prying eyes. Still… “I wish I’d thought to do the same for the last six years.”

Her hand comes over her mouth. Tears stream down her face. “I can’t believe it, it worked. It worked. But I don’t know if the recovery will be permanent or…”

Her voice trails away. He gathers her to him and holds her tight. “It doesn’t matter. This moment is enough grace from the universe—it will always be enough.”

He pulls back a little so he can see her face, still full of tears and more beautiful than ever. “Now please tell me what worked.”

She trails her fingertips across his cheek—belatedly he realizes that she’s wiping away his tears.

“A few months after she finished her reclamation service, Nin told me that you might have remembered me while you were trying to take away her pain.

She said she was nearly unconscious when you brought her and your mom up to the surface for air, but she heard you whisper, ‘Lanzhou, her friends call her Lanzhou.’

“Apparently by the time you were allowed to see your mother, after the business with Prince Eleven and the Risshvai seaplane, you could only recall my official name. So Nin didn’t understand what you were saying—she thought you must have been hallucinating under extreme duress.

Until the day I asked her to call me Lanzhou, because we’d become friends. ”

Perhaps he remembered her official name longer because she gave it to him only after he’d taken away her neural pain, and not before.

And thank goodness the Potentate hadn’t kept him isolated for too long, once he found out that it was true Eleven was up to no good.

By the time Ren saw his mother, he still retained enough of the events to entrust the memories to her.

But of course when she and Nin left, the effort of taking on their combined pain was such that it wiped out everything, including any and all secondhand memories.

Lanzhou slides her palm across his other cheek. “I became obsessed with the idea that your memories might be recoverable. Our historical museum was planning to destroy some old torture devices they had in storage. I jumped through hoops to have them keep the nerve fryer a bit longer.”

He holds her face between his hands. “Please never go anywhere near that infernal device again. I’ll smash it myself if I see it in the future.”

She giggles. “My mentor wondered if I was having a breakdown when I confessed I planned to use it on myself. But once I convinced you I had a good reason for being in pain—Old Friend was very patient about the model nerve gun being temporarily glued to her fin—I had to be in pain. The scary part was that I didn’t know if I’d be lucid enough to turn off the machine in time, so I had two backup timers installed.

“Turns out I did manage to turn off the machine, but I couldn’t get you to let go of me.

In hindsight, since my pain went away, it probably didn’t matter too much whether you kept holding on.

But I was afraid we’d miss the best window to recover your memories, so when you wouldn’t budge I kicked you. ”

The hilarity of what must have transpired tickles him so much he bursts out laughing. The next moment he’s again close to tears. “Thank you. Thank you for remembering me all these years when I couldn’t remember you.”

She gazes at him. “But you never forgot me. I know that.”

To his surprise, she goes to the folding table and starts cleaning up. He can’t stand by while she works so he joins her. When all the dishes have been washed and all the leftover food put away, she takes away one of the folding chairs and brings out a sleeping mat from the understructure.

“Go ahead, write things down.” She unrolls the mat. “I’ll take a nap.”

His first thought is that she did stay up all night. But then he catches her peering at him. He takes hold of her. “When did you become so indirect, Lady You-are-now-mine-to-do-with-as-I-wish?”

She prods a playful finger into his chest, but her tone is only half-joking. “You were unconscious for an hour. You shouldn’t exert yourself more than necessary.”

He catches her hand. “Then you exert yourself. Wait, no, you were in neural pain. You shouldn’t do anything until you first see a doctor.”