MEMORIAM (3 page)

“Is she alive?” he asked, half ready to scream. He ran a hand through his hair, facing Plantarch. “Is. She. Alive?”

“I’m sorry, Pately. Her memories have been…tampered with. There are certain things she won’t remember.”

“What did you do to her?”

“I told you, I’m just the messenger…”

“TELL ME!”

Plantarch was frozen next to the stretcher. Sam’s insides twisted. He needed to know the truth about what had happened to his fiancé, even if it killed him.

“I don’t
know,
” Plantarch said.

“Liar.” Sam lunged for him. They collided with the stretcher and hit the ground, Sam rolling over as Plantarch’s hand vanished into his pocket and came back out with a klave. He pointed it at Sam.

“You make one move and I’ll shoot. You won’t get another second chance.”

There was a noise and Sam scrambled to his feet, standing over the stretcher. Violet was stirring.

Plantarch got to his feet and dusted off his jumpsuit. “I’ll return when the process is complete.”

“Process…”

Bronte came out the back room.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Sam asked Bronte.

Violet opened her eyes. Sam smiled in relief and reached for her hand. Violet flinched and pulled it away.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel weak. Like a hole’s been punched through my chest.”

Sam chuckled. “Same way I feel.”

Violet’s eyebrows knitted together. “Did the same thing happen to you, too?”

“No, I thought you were…you were talking about us?” His voice grew quiet. Sam felt sick. Now he knew what Plantarch was talking about.

“What do you mean,
us?
’”

Sam shook his head. “No. He can’t do this.” He pointed at Bronte. “He can’t do this. He can’t…” Sam punched the empty bed beside him. “This cannot be happening.”

“Is he okay?” Violet asked Bronte.

“You know what’s wrong, Violet! Say my name! Please say my name!” Sam’s mind was racing. Did she know who he was at all?

“Is this some kind of joke?” she asked.

“Please just say it,” Sam croaked. He leaned across the stretcher and stroked Violet’s face, thinking that if he could trigger her memory then she’d remember him. Violet gave Sam a hard shove. He stumbled back.

“What are you doing? I don’t even know you.”

All emotion left Sam’s body. He stared into Violet’s hazel eyes and saw nothing. No spark, no passion, no love. He’d never seen her eyes empty like this. “What did they do to you?” he asked.

Bronte passed Sam and wheeled up a tray with an intoxicator. Violet was still staring at Sam when Bronte opened Violet’s mouth and rested the intoxicator between her teeth. Within seconds Violet slumped back down onto the stretcher. Bronte ignored Sam as she bustled around Violet, placing sensors on her body so she could track her vitals through a memory disc. Sam rubbed his forehead, taking deep breaths.
Violet’s memory is gone. She can’t remember me.
He kept repeating it. The sensor connected to Violet’s chest began to beep, pushing her chest up and then back down. Her left hand twitched. Bronte came around the stretcher and sat down next to Sam, passing him a memory disc.

“They want you to sign it.”

He stared straight ahead.

“Sam.”

“They want me to prove that she doesn’t know who I am. They want to humiliate me.” He rested his head in his hands. “They took her away from me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sam took the disc from Bronte and held his hand above it, waiting for his print to be processed. It beeped. He handed it back to Bronte.

When Sam and Violet were first put into the base together, Violet was often pulled out of her bed by skryers in the middle of the night and beaten, sometimes whipped. She began having nightmares, so she’d sneak from her tube and visit Sam in his quarters, staying for hours on end to lie in the silence.

Sam pulled a chair over to Vi’s side and sat down, surveying her wounds. He touched her fingertips, flipping her hand on its backside to trace the lines in her palm. Her eyelids quivered but she stayed asleep. He wondered what she was thinking of. Countless times he had asked her what she was thinking and she never replied. Half the time when she did reply he knew it was a lie. He wondered if his talk of marriage scared her. She never seemed to share her true opinion when he asked.

Sam reached down in his shoe, removing his heel and pulling out a ring. A string of olive leaves were etched out of murkwood, synthetic wood material, with silver ridges along the border. Sam had known Violet was the one back when they slow-danced in his room. He’d waited forever to give the ring to her.

Even if Violet didn’t remember him, he loved her. Her freckles that covered her face and her hazel eyes that widened when she got excited were what made Sam fall for her. He loved her silent laugh and the way she mumbled nonsense when she was tired. He would kill for her eyes to light up like that one more time.

Bronte peeled the sensors off Violet’s wrist.

“Her treatment’s finished. Can you please remove her intoxicator?”

Sam’s hands shook as his fingers brushed against Vi’s lips. He gently slid the intoxicator out from between her teeth, lifting her chin slightly as he pulled.

He had only minutes before she would wake. Sam picked up the ring sitting on the edge of the bed and slipped it back in his shoe, then stood and crossed over to Vi’s side, stroking her forehead. He bent down, kissed her temple, then closed his eyes. “Please try and remember ‘us,’ Vi. Remember what we were, who you were. Who you are.”

He watched as her chest lifted and her eyes fluttered open once more.

***

I opened my eyes to see a healer standing over me. Bronte, a healer who I did recognize, was by my feet. She had always been friendly to me when she came by the kitchen division for routine injury check-ups.    

“What happened?” I asked.

“You had a moderate brain injury – a concussion, to be exact. It was out by the tubes last week.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Most patients who suffer a head trauma such as yourself don’t.” Bronte pursed her lips. “You’ll make a full recovery, though.” She came over and rested her hand on my back, sitting me up. “Someone will be with you shortly to give you your assignment.”

“Assignment? I already have one. I work in the kitchens. Why am I getting reassigned?” I asked the other healer.

The healer had a strange expression. He said nothing but turned, gathering the blanket off my stretcher. I studied his face. He looked familiar but I couldn’t recall where I had seen him before.

I crossed my legs and held my hands together as if in prayer. I knew that was the Pax in me because the Trux would never think to pray. My worn grey shoes skimmed the ground as I swung my legs back and forth.

I heard the doors
swoosh
and saw a man, whose scalp was shaved along the sides, come through the door. I wondered if he had the Pax symbol on his wrist like me. He wore a black jumpsuit with a black band on his upper left arm. Most of us wore dark grey jumpsuits and were given a colored band so skryers could easily identify what division we were in. I didn’t recognize the black band the man wore.

“Plantarch.” Bronte greeted him. He acknowledged her then turned his attention to me.

“You’re Violet Hansen?”

“Yes.”

“It appears you’ve been reassigned to hunter.”

The healer shook his head and rested it against the bars of the stretcher. My eyes stung and my throat tightened.

“A hunter?”

Plantarch nodded. “We’ll need to do one more procedure to complete the process.”

“Why was she assigned to this?” the healer asked Plantarch.

“I do not make the decisions, Pately. It is the Head’s choice when it comes to hunters.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “We are the Head’s last concern. He wouldn’t care whether I was a hunter or not.”

“Don’t, it’s not worth arguing over,” the healer said.

“You should feel lucky,” Plantarch said. “Hardly anyone rises from the rank.” I knew he was talking about me, and that I came from the bottom. Most of us did. Just one look at the tubes would tell you all you needed to know about these bases. If we didn’t die from starvation, we would die from the skryers. They showed no mercy and found any excuse to whip you. It was hard to believe that skryers were once Pax who’d been taken and brainwashed. I didn’t want to think of how many people who had died in this place because of skryers. It made me sick.

“Can one of you escort Violet to the branding room and then to her new living quarters?”

“I have to be branded?”

“All hunters do,” Plantarch said. I stared at the white Pax symbol on my wrist - two hands holding a heart. It felt symbolic, like I really was preparing myself for slaughter.

“I already told Bronte I don’t want anything to do with this,” the healer said.

“I can’t because I’m on duty,” Bronte said.

“Fine. I’ll meet her in the centicular, but I won’t be there for the branding.”

Plantarch stood back as I scooted off the stretcher. I noticed the healer glance over his shoulder at me as I was led away by Plantarch to the back of the healing center. Plantarch led me through a side door where there was a chair in the middle; it was cold and hard when I sat down. Plantarch took my wrists and locked them against the chair, strapping my torso and legs down as well.

Plantarch went to the corner of the room and tapped the wall. A screen appeared. He tapped the screen a few times. There was a loud
click
as part of the wall opened up to a steaming iron. I noticed a large ‘H’ at the end of a stick. I tightened my arm as Plantarch picked the rod off the wall and brought it over, holding my arm down as the iron collided with my skin. The searing metal iron melted my flesh. I bit my lip and held back a scream as my lungs caught fire and my head burst. The smell of hot rust filled my nostrils. Curls of smoke wafted past my head and up into the vent in the ceiling where they vanished. My mind flashed to a room similar to this with a different person and the healer’s face I had seen minutes before. I closed my eyes and blocked the image, wondering why the healer’s face had appeared.

It felt like eternity when Plantarch pulled the iron away and covered the ‘H’ with a wet cloth. I swallowed the blood I held back from biting my lip. Even though the cloth covered most of the burn I could still see the shiny pink skin, bubbly and blistering, underneath. My stomach churned.

“It will heal with time,” he said.

I wanted to reply with some rude remark but I couldn’t muster the words. This was how we lived now: in silence. The inhumanity of it all disgusted me. Pax never even treated their animals like this. We believed in peaceful living throughout every part of our life, not just in war. It was our job to keep the peace, an expectation that had been formed over the years.

When the Free Land Amendment, a law installed to privatize several hundred acres across Rinfero in order to preserve uninhabited land, was instated three years ago, many Trux fought against it and as a result the Rinfero Council granted five hundred acres to Trux military. It was rumored that the Pax let the Trux take the land instead of protecting it in order to avoid an uprising.

I remembered the Free Lands before they were militarized. One of the happy memories that I could recall was visiting a meadow in the Free Lands, away from Rinfero’s capital where I lived. The Trux never truly appreciated its beauty like we did. The rare spaces where you could walk for miles and see nothing but rolling hills and the open sky above you were masterpieces.

I imagined what that sky would feel like, and sometimes in those dark moments when I lay awake I would let myself go there and picture the soft grass under my back and the burning sun on my face. There was always laughter in the background, but I never figured out who it belonged to. I knew it wasn’t mine.

I let out a shaky sigh when Plantarch released me. I got off and felt his hand grip mine.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were strained. This was where I felt a human gesture should have been given, as we Pax were known to do. Affection was common; friendship and forgiveness came easily. But I didn’t respond. I pulled my arm away and walked out of the room, heading through the healing center into the centicular, also known as the dome, to meet the healer.

He straightened up when I came closer and strode over to me, wrapping his arms around me. I took a step back.

“I’m not going to hurt you. You just looked like you needed a hug after what happened back there,” he said.

“I think I’m just overwhelmed, that’s all.”

“I understand.”

I scrunched my eyebrows as I eyed the healer. “Why is it that I feel like I know you somehow?”

“Maybe you do and you just can’t remember.”

“I know I’ve never met you before, though.”

He held out his hand. “It’s about time you did. Sam Pately.”

“Violet Hansen. You can call me Vi.”

“Vi. Beautiful name.”

“Thanks.”

He lowered his voice. “So how are you feeling?”

I shrugged.

“I’m so sorry. Truly.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I replied.

“Well I’m here if you do. Come on.” I could not help but notice the casualness of his hand on my lower back as he walked me across the centicular and down a hallway that led to the elite living quarters. I wondered if I would get quarters like this for myself now that I was a hunter.

One thing I learned as time passed was that the base was a maze. Tubes wound in circles around the dome and it could take you hours to find the exit if you didn’t know your way around. Once you entered the dome, there were more mazes and endless hallways, some with dead ends and others that led to nowhere. I only knew this because often times I would sneak out of the tubes at night and explore. I stopped once the skryers found out and started beating me, though.

Sam gripped my arm and pulled me in as two skryers walked past, guns strapped to their belts. I hated knowing I was going to become a killer like them; the only thing that differentiated us at the moment was my grey suit contrasting with the white ones they wore. And the klaves. They always had those. There were only a handful of skryers that carried guns, but most of the time those ones were Trux.