MEMORIAM (7 page)

“I promise,” Sam said.

Mary turned and disappeared into the fog again.

I frowned at Sam. “What was all that about?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve never mentioned her before.”

“She’s just a friend.”

“I won’t rat her out if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Oh.” I wanted the truth from Sam but was afraid to push him too hard.

“Mary is an old friend. You might have met her before but don’t remember.”

That stung. I don’t know why it hurt so much. The mysterious scars on my back crossed my mind along my apparent memory loss after my accident, and I thought of Sam. Did he know how I got those scars on my back? Were there more things that I didn’t remember than I realized? I did not want to be mad at Sam, but I was. He and Vince had now both confirmed my theory that they knew more than they were letting on. Why were they hiding the truth?

“What do you mean, I might have met her before?”

“I need to get going.” Sam got to his feet. I glared at him.

“Sam, why are you avoiding the question? You said I’ve met Mary before but I only met you a few weeks ago. Do you know something I don’t?”  

Sam ran a hand through his hair.

“Sam?”

“They messed with your head!” Sam exclaimed. He took a step back and sighed. “I’m sorry…”

My mouth went dry. I closed my eyes and thought back to that morning when I woke in the healing center. Sam had been mad.

“Bronte said it was an accident out by the tubes.”

“They lied to you, Violet. Even I don’t know what happened to you. No one does. Bronte was forced to write a fake injury report.”

“Why would someone cover up my injury like that?” I asked.

Sam said nothing. Could I ask Vince for the truth? I knew Vince had asked me if I remembered him before that first day when I met him, but I was unsure if I could trust Vince to tell the truth about what he meant by ‘before.’ Did he know if and why my memories were tampered with? What if he didn’t? What if no one did?

“I need to go.” Sam took off, leaving me standing against the wall, my heart in shambles as tears streamed down my face. The unknown was a scary place.

CHAPTER THREE

It had been days since I had seen Sam. He made me doubt what we were; if we were even friends at this point, or if we were just two prisoners thrown together, hanging on to whatever we had left so we didn’t go insane. Emotionally, I was losing it. After my conversation with Sam about my tampered memories I felt exposed and vulnerable; like everyone knew my secrets except me. On top of that my emotional/mental training was more than I bargained for. Running into a pair of skryers was what topped my list.

I was on my nightly run when it happened. Beams of the weak sun strung over the dome and hit my face as I ran along the wall. Sam was on my mind, to my displeasure, along with the fact that we hadn’t spoken in days. I missed him. 

I passed the tubes, rows upon rows of them. People gawked at me as I passed. I felt like a traitor in my hunter uniform with a red band around my arm. My stomach lurched when I came around the end of the tube and saw a large man hunched over.                       

Two skryers stood over him, one holding a whip. The skryer raised his arm and snapped it back down, licking the man’s back with a loud
crack!
I winced and looked away. His moans grew louder and louder.

“I’m sorry, please no! NO!”

There was another crack. I found myself moving closer even though I wanted to flee the scene. I was only ten feet away now. A small crowd formed around the beating. The man was crying, tears creating rivers through his dirt stained face. His uniform was shredded and blood oozed out of the large gashes in his back, turning the mud around him red.

A young woman burst through the crowd, shoving them aside and running forward to the man’s aid. She grabbed the skryer who stood by the side watching and clawed his neck. The skryer panicked, his arms flailing as he tried to pull her off his back. The other skryer who had the whip must have seen the spectacle. He lashed out at the woman, cracking his whip over her back.

She fell to the ground crying out in pain. “Run, Jerem! RUN!”

The man tried to get up but his knees gave out. I wanted to help but I was cemented where I stood, horrorstruck. The woman reached for the man to help him up. The skryer reached in his holster for his klave and fired it. The man was dead.

I left after that. I ran as fast I could back through the dome to my quarters. The dead man’s eyes kept looking at me. My heart burned with shame. I should have helped the man, but I was afraid of what would happen to me if I did. In that moment of selfishness I let a man die. It could or could not have been my fault, but it was easier to say it was than to claim nothing could be done.

I hardly slept that night. Nightmares haunted me and I woke up several times, screaming. It reached the point where I couldn’t sleep anymore. My hands gripped the sides of the sink as I gagged, trying to get the man’s face out of my head. Relief flooded through me when I heard the loud hum of hunters leaving their rooms in the morning.

It was my second day of mental training. Trent had told me I would be meeting him in the weaponry today. I had never been to the weaponry before. It was underneath the centicular, past the laundry division in the caverns underground. I took the lift down with a group of laundry workers and got off when the lift opened up to the weaponry.

It was much colder down here and wet; somewhere in the distance was the faint
pit-pat
of water and to my right up ahead was a large open space. A rumbling sound echoed off of the cavernous ceilings above.

Trent was waiting ahead in the large cavern. I crossed the uneven floor and greeted him as I came closer. 

“Congratulations. It’s your last week. Like I said before, the third week is devoted to emotional and mental training. There are psychological issues that many hunters deal with, and as a result we train you in advance so you don’t run into these problems. They’re meant to strengthen your mind as you prepare to hunt. As you’ve already noticed, we’ve done most of our training in the other room. Now we are switching gears. We’ll start with Memoriam. After that we’ll lead into the simulation room and rotate between the two until your training is complete.”

“What’s Memoriam?”

“It was a program designed by the Trux twenty years ago, used against the rector, Catedo. It was designed to create new memories out of past recollections and present fears. The purpose was to confuse the patient between reality and dreams, therefore numbing them to the actual present.”

“How does that work exactly?”

“You enter a type of dream state, where the program then searches for memories. It latches memories onto present fears that you have and combines the two to create a new memory.”

“Do the Trux only use it on hunters or on other Pax, as well?”

Trent met my eyes and I knew then that I had crossed a line. “That’s not for me to say.”

“Have people lost their real memories amongst the fake ones during Memoriam?”

Trent’s eyes narrowed. “It’s been rumored that some have.”

I assumed he wasn’t going to say anything else so that meant I had lost my chance to ask him any further questions, though the answer of what happened to my memories felt close.     

Trent led me through the cavern until we reached a hallway. He stopped next to a small door and opened it, leading me to the middle of the room where a chair sat with cords hanging around it. It was eerily similar to the room where I was branded. I couldn’t help but shiver as I touched the ‘H’ on my wrist that had finally healed. It disgusted me how easily I was marked up, like an alleyway on the outskirts of Stoclo.

“All right, sit down.”

My heart was pounding. I took a deep breath and stepped up into the chair, lying down on my back. The cold metal seemed to seep through my jumpsuit like ice. Trent went over the wall to a tablet and tapped a large button, activating metal cuffs that slid across my wrists just like when I was branded. I swallowed as the final one slid across my neck. How dangerous was this procedure?

Trent pulled the cords hanging from the ceiling over to me and attached them to different parts of my body – my chest, wrists, ankles, and shoulders. My ears were ringing now.

“Trent?”

“Yes?”

“Does it hurt?”

Trent had a guilty expression on his face. “In your heart more than anything.”

My throat tightened. I wished I had Sam by my side right then. The ringing in my ears grew louder as the ceiling blurred.

“Trent?” I tried to turn my head to see where he was but couldn’t. My heart quickened. Shapes blurred and everything went dark for a second. I blinked several times, gaping at the image that I saw.

There was a huge chandelier above me, a thousand jewels showering over me, each one glinting in the sunlight. The jewels were strung like the inside of a flower, gathered in the middle then fanning out. My fingers skimmed the five jewels that hung lower than the rest. They started to sing. It was a gentle hum, like a faint whisper in the wind that grew louder, singing beautiful notes like water in a brook. It reminded me of the field from my memory: quiet, yet beautiful for its simplicity. The chandelier began to shake. I let go of the jewels and stood back, looking around for the cause of this sudden shake. The chandelier suddenly snapped and fell, each jewel flying through the air, whistling its dying breath, and hit the ground with a deafening crash. I didn’t realize I was bleeding until I looked down and saw my arms covered in blood. I wiped them on my clothes, looking around for something to bandage them in.

I inhaled sharply and blinked several times. I was staring at a tangle of wires above me.

“Vi, can you hear me?”

I closed my eyes. I was in a room...I swear I was.....with a chandelier...and now I was here. Trent must have released me because the shackles holding down my body came off and Trent was unhooking the cords from my body.

“You look pale.”

“I’m sure it’s just a side effect.”

“Do you want to go the healing center?”

I shook my head. Every time I looked down at my arms I pictured them covered in blood. The chandelier I saw made me think of the Trux and the Pax. I always had this innate hope that it could work between us. It was a peaceful invasion when the other rectors helped the Pax take Rinfero back from the Trux. No military tanks or cops circled above as our presidents shook hands. The sun kissed the Hazmal Mountains as we celebrated this new union of two nations, despite the Trux’s anger at being turned over to the Pax. There were more fireworks at this occasion than when our Pax President was instated, and at the end of the day it was rumored that the two leaders had joined in a drink to celebrate. These were stories told to me and as a child I believed them. I believed anything, as any child would. It is the one weapon children are born with: innocence.

Trent said we had to train more, but after one round of Memoriam he let me go back to my room. I lay on my bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. I tried to remember what the Head looked like. The only thing I could recall was when he was instated as our president. At that point it was impossible to ignore the Trux’s growing power.

You used to hear the Trux rebels chanting in the streets at night as you fell asleep, and in the morning when you went to work you’d see the remainder of their rallies; signs and names of Pax officials littered the streets. Once a Pax council member was taken and raped. Those were the nights I stayed up listening to the chanting. I remembered one night when I was coming back from an interview with a Pax council member about my career options and I spotted a group of rebels walking down the main path of the city, shouting vulgar phrases and throwing rocks against peace keepers’ vehicles. One of them had yelled at me so I started running, clutching my bag to my chest. Inside my bag were documents declaring me a Pax, so I knew if they stopped me they’d see inside my papers. I sent a panic message to the nearest peace keeper through my tracker and within minutes one arrived, taking me home safely in his pod.

I stopped going out at night after that. Stoclo was too dangerous. Rinfero was becoming more and more divided. The Trux seemed so strong compared to us. It was easy for them to get their way and for us to be okay with it.

I hugged my shoulders and closed my eyes, picturing that chandelier. Maybe we were heading for that - destruction. We fell so easily, like a chandelier crashing to the ground. It made no difference if we were the most powerful rector. We were a fallen state now.

Part two of emotional/mental training was the simulation room. Trent took me there after my run the next morning. Vince had given me a hug when I departed with Trent.

“Don’t let it scare you,” he whispered in my ear as he hugged me. No one hugged me like that except Sam. It surprised me how much comfort I felt through that hug. I didn’t realize how open my heart was to the idea of love, of how much the Pax as a whole desperately longed for human touch, but instead we got mankind’s creation: metal. The kind that could stop our hearts and end our lives.

“The simulation room is designed to replicate the world around you. It creates different simulations to help you practice because in the real world things will be very different.”

We stepped outside the training center entrance and went into the door on the right.

“Hunters first.” Trent opened the door and I stepped in.

Inside was a dead forest. Trees shot up all around me. Branches intertwined above me and gnarled roots sprung up under my feet. The sky was a pale mist with a fog that hung low, running across the roots like water. I jumped when Trent snapped a twig.

“Where are we?”

“This is the simulation room. It’s designed to change according to the hunter’s memory.”

“I don’t remember this place.”

“Interesting choice for someone who can’t remember - an abandoned forest.”

The wind tickled my chin. I shivered and rubbed my arms.