Shattered (32 page)

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Everything happens very quickly after the broadcast.

Prime Minister Gregory makes his resignation official, as promised. Amid public outcry and international pressure, Parliament is dissolved, and elections called. And it is almost like Aiden always said it would be: once everyone really knew what went on, they said,
no
,
no more
. And the Lorders were no more.

Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. There were high costs on both sides – pitched battles in some places, like Cumbria, where Astrid’s followers refused to accept they weren’t in charge any more – but the cost wasn’t as high as living with constant fear under the Lorders. They did it: MIA really did it. DJ, Aiden and an international council have put a provisional government in place pending elections, and new political parties are forming, setting up candidates.

Gregory is still hunting for Sam, my mother, but now months have passed I’m starting to accept he may never find her. Mum and Amy are okay: they hadn’t been found by Astrid’s Lorders, and I’m staying with them for a while back in our newly repaired house. Skye survived and is here, being nursed back to health and spoiled by all three of us. Slating is banned, and Dr Lysander has been busy removing Levos and brain chips from Slateds, including mine.

But while part of me is rejoicing in the changes that have happened and are yet to come, more is in limbo. Licking my wounds and waiting for this one day.

Dr Lysander sits opposite Ben and me at her desk. ‘There are no guarantees: we don’t know who you were before you were Slated.’

‘I know, I know: Lorders destroyed my records, none have been found,’ Ben says. He holds my hand tight.

‘We don’t know who you were, but do we know enough?’ I say. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘I want to.’

Dr Lysander goes through her list of cautions, not for the first time. Results of memory adjustment are not predictable; he may recover memories he doesn’t want and not ones that he does; there is a risk of brain damage, seizures and death. While simple cases of readjustment have been successful, his case is unpredictable due to the multiple procedures to which he’d been subjected.

‘Is that everything?’ Ben asks.

‘Are you sure you wish to proceed?’ she asks.

‘Yes. Can Kyla come?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it, but if she wishes to do so, it is your choice.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I say, unwilling to let go of his hand. Despite the things he has done, it was the Lorders – their procedures and manipulations – that led him to betray us. I can’t erase the things Ben did; I still wake screaming late at night, visions of Florence and the others dying at All Souls haunting my dreams. And I still can’t shake the
if only
s from it all. If only Aiden hadn’t brought Ben there; if only I’d tried harder to get through to Ben. If only I’d recognised what was about to happen, and stopped him.

If only
.

But it wasn’t
Ben
who betrayed us: it was the Lorders’ creature. After all that has happened to me, all the identities that have been forced or taken, I can understand that better than anyone. I can’t abandon him while there is any chance of calling him back, no matter how torn I feel. I won’t.

They get him ready. He’s on one of those beds that hugs you like when I had IMET; they’re checking things, monitors, wires, IV drugs, and a scanner all around his head. All the while he grips tight to my hand.

‘What if I sneeze?’ Ben jokes. He’d found it endlessly funny that the microsurgery goes through his nose.

‘You know you can’t; you’ll be immobilised. Almost paralysed except for speech.’

When the drugs take hold, his hand slackens. ‘I’m still holding it,’ I tell him; ‘everything is fine.’ But I’m afraid.

These months have been difficult. Once Ben really understood what had been done to him, how he’d been subjected to procedures and manipulated to be a Lorder agent, he’d been in a dark place. And both of us struggled to come to terms with Tori’s role – that she retained her memories, but still chose to act for the Lorders – and her death. Ben only started to come back to life with the hope of this: experimental microsurgery to give him back what was stolen.

Dr Lysander meets my eyes over a sea of equipment, nods once. ‘All right then, Ben. Shall we begin?’

‘No, I changed my mind. Just kidding! Go for it.’

‘All right. First I am removing your chip: this is routine.’ So no chance of anyone activating it to cause him pain, or kill him like Tori was, ever again; mine was taken out weeks ago.

Dr Lysander peers into control screens, remote operates using the scanner and microscopic robotic tools. Time passes slowly; seconds feel like minutes.

‘Your chip is removed,’ she finally says. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’m fine, having fun. Carry on,’ Ben says.

‘Now tell me what you experience.’ She’d explained that different neuronal areas of the brain will be microstimulated as she navigates his memory storage areas, reattaches broken neural connections according to his responses.

‘Okay, here goes,’ Ben says. ‘Blue, the blue sea. Soft fur, a puppy! It’s Skye; I think it is. Fish: I smell fish and chips. A woman, I see a woman. My mother?’ he says, and starts describing her, but going by what he says it’s not his mum from when he was Slated. Then his voice changes – ‘Mummy? Mummy?’ – a high-pitched note of panic, a child’s voice.

‘You’re okay, Ben,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’

‘Who’s Ben? I’m Nate. Mummy?’ Then, ‘Kyla?’ he says, back to his voice again. ‘I remember my mother!’

‘One up on me there, then.’

‘This is good,’ Dr Lysander says. ‘Carry on describing.’

He is quiet.

‘Ben?’ she says.

‘I’m still here. Things are zipping through too fast to tell you, sometimes like I’m there, sometimes like I’m looking at a photograph.’

‘Memory can be like that. All right, I am reattaching the final deep links; this is the tricky bit.’

‘Great to know.’

‘Describe, Ben.’

Words are spilling out: people and places are garbled and quick, and then…

‘Kyla?’

‘Yes?’

‘At Group. I ran in late, you were sitting there. The new girl. I remember! The first time I saw you, beautiful, gorgeous girl.’

And I know he can’t feel it or squeeze back, but I’m holding his hand tighter, tears threatening: it’s working. He remembers me.

Then he gasps. ‘Pain, hot pain, in my side.’

‘Yes, you have a scar, an old knife wound,’ Dr Lysander says. ‘And what else? Ben? Answer me.’

‘No,’ he says, his voice changed, angry. ‘No!’

‘Ben?’

‘Ben?’ she says again.

He is silent.

‘Ben?’ I try. ‘Nate? Are you all right?’

‘Dandy. I’m dandy, thanks for asking.’ And with his words I can breathe again, but his accent – was it changed? Into something more London, less country.

‘We’re nearly done here,’ Dr Lysander says.

Before long, the scanner is pulled away, the microtools removed. One tiny drop of blood under his nose is wiped away; that is all.

His eyes are closed, sedation increased; he will sleep now.

‘Go home, Kyla,’ Dr Lysander says. ‘He goes into Recovery now for monitoring while he sleeps. It will be a day or two before we know how it went.’

But I stay. With Ben/Nate: whoever he is, he remembers me now.

EPILOGUE

It’s late summer. I insisted on coming alone, across the fells. Skye bounds along beside me, still with a limp but it doesn’t slow her down. And as I walk I think. So much of what has motivated me for so long has been trying to find out who I am, where I come from. Each new revelation knocked down walls in my mind, but came at a cost. Will today give any closure?

Everyone is searching for something, or somebody. The bit they haven’t got to complete them. Why should I be any different?

Mum’s son, Robert, hasn’t been found, but she is still looking, with the help of MIA – now a government-sanctioned agency, and Mac and Aiden’s full time mission.

Mum refused to run for Prime Minister, despite all who wanted her to. Gregory, who I see now and then – no matter what he was, he is my grandfather, and so much of how things turned out better than they might have in the end was down to him – said those suited for power don’t want it, and those who want it, aren’t. He didn’t say which category he was in. Anyhow, some new guy who wanted power is in charge, a whole new government has been voted in, and DJ and his friends are still here to keep an eye on things for a while.

Will everything be all right now? Time will tell, but already I’m not sure everything is good. Like all the new technology flooding in from outside now that the borders are open, all the endless internet channels, the portable devices and plug-ins so you’re always linked in. The travelling curious from other nations rushing to see how quaint we are before we become just like them. Gregory says that is why the world stepped in: not to save anybody, but to have a new market to sell their toys.

With repeal of the YP laws I’m now sharing a flat in Keswick with Madison. She was in Astrid’s slate mine prison like Len thought she might be, and released with all the other illegally held prisoners. Finley had gone into hiding not long after I left Keswick; he came out when it was safe again. Madison’s not the same, but with Finley’s help, she’s getting better all the time.

I see Stella once or twice a week; a fragile trust is beginning to grow between us. She is slowly coming to terms with all that Astrid did; with Dad not being behind my disappearance. With how much she had it wrong. She’s had trouble accepting my refusal to let Dr Lysander try to return my memories, but they’ve been mucked around with enough. From now on nobody but me has any say in what I choose to remember, what I choose to forget.

For now I’m working with Parks as a fell checker. Len is on the list of those missed: he died in the struggle against Astrid’s faithful. Being alone in the high places above the world in all weather, the mountains under my feet that have been, are, and will be long after I’m gone, I feel a release never felt anywhere else: it is really why I came back to Keswick, despite Mum and Amy. It is the only place I can think about
anything
and not be overwhelmed.

I still might go back to school myself, then get into teacher training one day and be an art teacher, like Gianelli, but not now. The happy little faces are too much for me, after all the Slated children from Astrid’s orphanage experiment were found: dead. Killed by Astrid’s minions to hide what they’d done, but they were caught before they could destroy the bodies.

At least I know Edie survived, and that Ben never told the Lorders where she was: their house was empty that day because they’d heard what happened at All Souls and bolted in a hurry, gone into hiding. When they reappeared, I went to see them. Edie said I could keep Murray, that I was more alone than she was.

That is one place where I know Ben told the truth, after all the lies that followed. He kept up an act long enough to get out of hospital, and then some of the truth came out. He’d committed crimes worthy of Slating before we’d even met, to add to the ones later at All Souls. He said the only time he was ever happy was when he was Slated.

And then he stole a car and disappeared. No one knows where he has gone. All I know is he doesn’t want to be with me. For whatever reason, good or bad, at the end that is the truth.

Should I have seen it coming? I could never really hurt anyone, Slated or not. Ben could, and did: with the Lorders he may have been experimented on, manipulated and escaped legal responsibility because of it, but in the end it was still him who caused and took part in the All Souls massacre. Did that say something about who he was to start with? Dr Lysander hinted as much; she warned us again and again, but left the choice to Ben.

Sometimes I wonder if he ever really was mine, or was it all illusion from the start. Like Aiden said: how can you truly love somebody when you don’t know who they really are?

But most of the time I know we did. Back in that time and place when we were just what we were then: blank slates. Innocents. Before my memories started to return; before Lorders manipulated and changed him, and Dr Lysander returned his past. It was real, at least to me. My evidence is the pain left behind.

Seeing how Finley is with Madison tells me it is possible for love to last, to grow. Just not for me, not now. One final lesson the Lorders have taught me is this: there are no second chances. I chose Ben, turned my back on Aiden, and I can’t take it back. But Aiden was right, wasn’t he? Ben was the past. I don’t miss him the way I do Aiden: with Ben it is more grieving for something that
was
. Not something that could have been.

That should have been.

One last climb and I finally reach my destination: Astrid’s slate mine prison. She is the only prisoner there now. Behind it are unmarked graves, with flowers and a memorial; a public ceremony today to unveil it. Mum is here, and Stella. Gregory and Dr Lysander also. There are survivors, women newly released from the prison along with Madison, wearing both the marks of their ordeals and nervous joy at unexpected freedom on their faces. Along with survivors are family and friends, like us, of those who didn’t make it.

And one surprise. I almost stop breathing when Aiden walks up to me, gives me a hug. He doesn’t say anything, just holds me a moment, and I cling to him, tight.

The ceremony begins. Gregory had been as good as his word: he’d found his daughter. Turns out she died just weeks after I was born – natural causes. If you can call dying of untreated infection after childbirth ‘natural’. Maybe, it was an escape? Though I like to think she would have stayed with me if she could.

I stand with Mum and Stella for the two minutes of silence, but as if that isn’t enough, it persists long after the time is marked.
More sinned against than sinning
: I stare at the words carved in the memorial over the graves that include the mother I’ll never know, standing between the two that I did.