Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (14 page)

“The composer of the music,” Eight supplied.

Seven met her gaze.

“No,” he countered.

“Yes. You wrote the music that brought us together. I dreamt about it last night and I know that counts for something,” she assured him. “I think, in this life or the last, you’re more interesting than you give yourself credit for.” Eight’s quiet laughter made Seven feel better, in spite of the tightening sensation in his chest.

“Not interesting enough to stop whatever happened to Haven,” Seven said. Looking up at the anonymous face high above himself and Eight, Seven posited aloud, “I wonder what the Founders would think if they could see this...”

Eight looked away from him and turned her eyes to the city that had become a graveyard.

“I don’t know,” she answered at last, “But it wouldn’t be anything good.”

Chapter Five:

Among the Shallows

Though Seven called for them to leave the Great Library less than an hour later, the sensation that accompanied their departure felt more like fleeing to Eight. None of the survivors could make eye contact with the statutes that towered high above them in the Round of Heroes and passing through their shadows in the mid-morning light was enough to make Eight want to run as fast as she could. To stare at the commemorative statues of the Founders would be to invite some form of judgment from them and, in light of their present ordeal, they could do with less bad luck.

Equipped with a crudely drawn map, Twenty undertook the task of navigating the group to the northern shore of Haven. Eight noted the dramatic shift in his attitude as he tried to adopt more responsibility in deciding their course of action. According to Null and Ninety-Nine, while Eight and Seven were outside, Twenty reactivated the Unimatrix in the hopes of acquiring practical and helpful information.

Twenty had not been disappointed by the Unimatrix. It assisted him in plotting a course and calculated supplies while estimating a travel time. After Eight convinced Seven to return to the Great Library they had found the others walking towards them already packed and ready to depart. Eight wondered if somewhere in the course of the earlier argument Twenty’s mind had been more forcefully changed than she originally thought. His interest in reaching the distant shores of Rose Garden seemed genuine and Eight, with no other options, accepted it.

Though Twenty’s usual sarcasm hadn’t entirely vanished, not by a long shot, his seemingly boundless anger had. An almost irritating optimism commandeered his interactions with Seven, causing Eight to guess that voicing their former friendship had somehow rekindled a spark of it.

Eight dared to see the best in Twenty. With only five survivors across the whole island she did not have the luxury of expecting the worst from her companions. Haven, in its deathly silence, experienced a brief revival as Twenty recounted his lonely memory of the art exhibition to Seven. As in love with the sound of his own voice as ever, Twenty convinced them that there had been a time when Haven was more than rotting towers and empty streets.

Twenty’s abrupt pauses and lengthy silences bothered Eight. When she asked him about it, the man lamented the unfair gaps in his memory. It served as a reminder to her that no attitude shift was strong enough to overcome their shared amnesia.

Seven clung to his every word. Seven’s memories, from what Eight gathered, were fleeting and incomplete; vague to the point of frustration. Twenty offered a specificity and detail, a glimpse into a past life, that Seven lacked. The two of them led the group while Eight, Null, and Ninety-Nine stayed back.

“Why do you think Seven’s memories are only from one period when ours seem to be spread across history?” Null asked.

“Maybe the monster didn’t affect him like it did us? Or maybe Seven is subconsciously trying to remember a particular event?” Eight supposed.

“Those are the most likely possibilities,” Ninety-Nine answered, drawing the curious gazes of Eight and Null. “The monster is a biological weapon that was use to purge Haven, that much we know for certain. It stimulates the minds of its victims and incapacitates them, but while we were reliving memories from across history Seven recalled an event from before the city’s demise. That suggests a biological defense of some kind, perhaps a genetic abnormality specific to Seven?”

“A genetic abnormality?” Eight repeated, her eyes moving to where Seven and Twenty were, leading the group on their sojourn to Rose Garden. Seven and Twenty were so entrenched in their own animated conversation that Eight doubted they could hear the women even if they tried to eavesdrop.

“Certainly. It’s not unknown for immunities to develop over time and be passed down through generations. I doubt that the monster is a naturally occurring phenomenon but that its abilities might have once been and were therefore appropriated and reproduced,” Ninety-Nine categorically explained. “Has Seven mentioned any other memories?”

“When we met, he made a comment about guarding Haven,” Eight dredged her memory for specifics. Seven’s statement had been ambiguous, filled with all the loss and longing that came from waking up with amnesia.

“That confirms that his memories are returning to him sequentially. One after the other.”

“Or maybe the monster is just afraid of him?” Null replied, her defensiveness a response to the Ninety-Nine’s blithe attitude.

“Possibly, but the monster seems to be incapable of actually hurting any of us,” Eight remembered how the monster had swarmed them outside the Great Library and death seemed moments away. Instead, the beast had fled but not before teasing awake some lingering memories.

Null shrugged and officially detached from the conversation.

Their silence augmented Haven’s shadowy depths. Rather than return to the highway and risk another encounter with their avowed predator, the survivors were traveling the surface streets of Haven. Haven’s obelisks, paralyzed and faded, lined the streets and perpetuated the city’s eery and monotonous uniformity.

Even the streets were exactingly reproduced; never more than six lanes across. Null expressed a theory that the public transit perfectly accommodated the city’s travel needs to the point of making streets unnecessary to any but the most loyal of urban explorers. Ninety-Nine, detecting the unspoken tension between herself and Null, readily agreed and inquired about the specifics of such a system.

“I’m certain the transportation network is entirely underground. We’ve already seen portions of the overland network but the maps at the stations I’ve examined suggest hundreds of routes with thousand of trains capable of transporting millions of people in a day,” Null explained, her own voice holding the slightest note of condescension. Ninety-Nine graciously inquired further and further until she decided that she was redeemed in Null’s eyes.

Ninety-Nine’s impressive genius seemed at odds with Null’s pragmatic intellect but something in their shared history, defined by their clouded memories, cajoled them both into staying on good terms. Eight felt herself sliding into the link between them; not intellectually, but socially. She could read them both with ease but Null and Ninety-Nine had difficulties understanding the other. Yet, as always, that tenuous friendship was there and persisted in binding them together.

Eight kept her contributions short. She agreed as often as possible but realized that the only person she felt compelled to talk to was Seven. Not having the opportunity to talk to him made her feel hollow. As if she was wasting a rare chance to get to know him better. But how? How could she get to know Seven when the totality of their lives accumulated to mere hours?

Her inner scientist, the scholar, began whispering to Eight that this whole experience had been engineered long ago. Too much of their trek through Haven was guided by the unseen forces that had dropped them across the city, hidden roses at the opera house, and placed supplies at the Great Library. Now, she and the others were on their way to a place known only as Rose Garden.

Eight reviewed the circumstances thus far.

Haven had been purged of life by a malevolent force hundreds of years ago. After successfully murdering everyone else how had the AdvISOR missed five people? How had the survivors endured the five centuries since then? Who was helping them along their journey through Haven?

Her curiosity didn’t nag at her as badly as it could have because the answers, in one form or another, resided at Rose Garden. Patience would be her mental restraint until then. When Eight refocused her attention on the others she noticed a subtle change in their surroundings. Less dense than normal, the buildings thinned.

Signs that had survived the purge commanded motor vehicles to obey slower speeds and the faded paint at road crossings spoke to how brightly they had marked their intersections. Seven and Twenty were halted at a corner ahead and when Eight, Null, and Ninety-Nine reached them they understood why. Ahead to the right was a low, wide compound. Most of its windows were long since perished but a few grimy panes remained. Eight counted no more than six stories which made it small when set against the imposing towers in the background.

More ashen dirt. More cracked asphalt. A sign on the other side of the street named the structure which Seven grievously spoke aloud, “Helix Fyne Primary Academy.” Another school, Eight realized, except this one wasn’t for grown adults. This school had been filled with children.

Seven stepped past the sign and onto the campus. A wide swath of deadened ground, aged to the point of being as featureless as sand, separated him from the school but he proceeded towards it anyways.

“I don’t want to go in there,” Twenty announced darkly. “There’s only more death in there.”

“I can’t let him go by himself,” Eight said and went running after Seven. Soon they were all moving towards the school. Seven didn’t say a word to her when she arrived at his side. A conversation would be pointless. She thought she understood his compulsion, knowing that until now there had been no suggestion of children at the time of the city’s fall. It had been so much easier to consider Haven as a population of adults.

“Oh no,” Null breathed.

They had reached the building and found an entrance to its halls, courtyards, and walkways. Murals were faded to the brink of oblivion and yet the amateur paintings of children, shapes, and animals betrayed the ages of their makers.

“How old do you think they were when they painted these?” Seven asked her.

Eight shook her head.

“Too young for what happened,” she answered.

Twenty’s shaking hand was placed against the mural. He didn’t speak. Ninety-Nine wandered into the heart of the dead courtyard. Maybe she was thinking about the plants that might have lived in that exact spot five centuries ago?

Seven found a broken classroom door and stepped inside. Eight hesitated before following him. This made it too real. The deathly aura was intolerable but her attachment to Seven dragged her into the classroom. A forbidding luster shone through the shattered windows and illuminated a classroom whose floor was covered in tattered books, overturned chairs, and broken tables. Age, dust, and wreckage claimed the room.

Eight picked up a shattered glass tablet.

“Their classrooms were advanced,” she noted.

“But they had a fondness for tradition,” Seven agreed, holding a shredded book in his hands. He closed it and set it down gently. Displays that had been powered by unseen computers were cracked and lopsided, covered in dust. What knowledge had they imparted upon the young learners in the minutes before the end came?

“Still no bodies,” Eight noted.

“Or clothing. Or shoes. What happened to the bodies?” Seven asked desperately. He slumped into a child’s chair and the thing managed to hold his weight. It might have been comical if it weren’t for the understanding that, in all likelihood, the last time a child had used it had been seconds before the city’s death. He asked, “Why would the AdvISOR do this?”

Helpless to answer, Eight shrugged.

“Can we please leave?” Twenty asked. He, along with Null and Ninety-Nine, appeared in the classroom’s doorway. “Please?”

“Yes. It’s time we left,” Eight answered decisively on Seven’s behalf. They returned to the street and to their chosen path. Twenty did not waste another minute in getting them back on track to Rose Garden. Like Eight and the others, the visit to the school had shaken him. Compromised him.

Haven’s death was less remote. It suddenly felt as if it had happened two days ago.

Eight hoped that the Helix Fyne Academy would be the most notable event of a day spent on the road. Haven was already exacting a high cost for permitting their travel through it, but when would the price become too high? Eight’s answer greeted them sometime in the afternoon. Twenty’s path brought them close to the shore; closer to it than she had been since waking up on a beach yesterday. As they neared the turn that would bring them to the beach, to a place identical to where her journey had started, an unusual static filled the air. Inaudible yet present, Eight instinctively reacted to the sound with quiet hostility.

Eight and the others fell in step with each other.

After making the last turn they were faced with a steep incline but the vacant streets and smashed windows remained the same. Slowly, because they were unaccustomed to anything but Haven’s flat streets and sidewalks, they reached the top of the hill.