The F-Class Awakening

Chapter 8: The Memory

Serena lived above a shuttered printing house in East Halcyon, in a room with no bed.

There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, a sink, a two-ring hob, and a chair she clearly never sat in. Nothing else. Every wall, floor to ceiling, was paper.

Evan stood in the doorway with river water still in his collar and looked at it.

Hundreds of pages. Tacked, taped, pinned with nails, overlapping three deep in places. Most in her handwriting, some in other people's. Lists. Rough pencil drawings, the fast kind you make in the dark. Lines ruled between sheets, and arrows, and along the whole far wall a strip of butcher's paper with a hand-drawn map and dates written along the bottom like a timeline.

"How long?" Evan said.

"Four years." Serena was at the sink, wringing out her coat. She said it with no self-consciousness at all, which was worse than if she'd been embarrassed. "Every fragment. Every time: the date, what I was doing, where I was standing, how long it lasted. I started after the first one because I thought I was ill and wanted a record for the doctor."

"And then?"

"And then the record started having patterns in it." She threw the coat over the chair. "Sit down. You're dripping on my notes."

He sat on the floor.

"Okay," he said. "Show me."

*  *  *

Here is what Serena had, four years of it:

Thirty-one fragments of another life. Some as short as a held breath. Five long enough to walk around in for a minute or more. Twenty-two were set in the warm street with the white-flowering trees, which she called the House. Nine were set in the stone room with the green lamp, which she called the Hall.

And at the end of the far wall, alone under a single nail, was a page with three words in letters larger than anything else in the room.

THE HALL IS THE END.

"You think the Hall is where you die," Evan said.

"I know it is." Serena had come to stand beside him. "I've been there nine times. Nine fragments, nine different moments, all in that room, and the last one is always the floor." She tapped the page. "That's what I've never been able to say out loud. I'm not remembering a life. I'm remembering the end of one, over and over, from the inside."

Evan looked at the nine. He read them all the way down.

Then he said, "You've never counted the windows."

"What?"

"In the Hall." He got up and went to the wall and touched the sheets one at a time. "Fragment four. Lamp, stone floor, a voice. Eleven. Lamp, stone floor, a man's boot. Nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-six." He turned. "Nine times in four years you've described that room, and you have never once described the window."

Serena stared at him.

"I don't know if there is one," she said.

"There is. I've seen it."

He told her, then. Everything he'd seen in the church, and the thing he'd found at three in the morning that he hadn't told her. He stood in a room made of paper and said it like a confession: the green lamp, the older hands, his own voice saying It's done, close it, and the window behind his head. Nine panes. And in the ninth, tiny and warped, a building.

"The Registry Tower," he said.

Serena sat down on the mattress slowly, like her legs had given out.

"The Tower's eleven years old," she said.

"Yes."

"So it can't be a life I've already lived." Her voice was careful. "Nobody in a past life could have seen it. And I'm nineteen, Evan. I keep saying I was twenty-three. That isn't behind me. That's ahead of me."

"That's the first problem," he said. "Here's the second."

He knelt and pulled a sheet off the wall. One of her drawings, the fast pencil kind. The Hall. She'd drawn it four or five times, and this was the cleanest.

"Where's the lamp?"

"Left of the door."

"Where's the door?"

"Behind me."

"Where's the window?"

Serena looked at her own drawing for a long moment. There was a window in it, high on the far wall, nine panes, drawn perfectly. She had never written a single word about it.

"I don't know why I left that out."

"I do." Evan set the page on his knee. "It's the only thing in that room you can't look at. In every fragment you're either on your feet facing the door, or on the floor facing him. You never see the window straight on. It's always behind you, or reflected, or in the corner of the frame." He looked up. "You're not remembering a room, Serena. You're remembering a shotof a room, and something's been keeping the camera pointed one way."

Below them, a laundry machine was running. It was the only sound in the world.

"That's not how memory works," she said.

"No."

"Memory doesn't have a frame."

"No."

"It doesn't have lighting."

"No." Evan sat back on his heels. "So either you're remembering a memory, or you're remembering a recording."

*  *  *

They worked until the small hours.

He read everything. She'd indexed it herself, four years of filing. Evan, who had thirty-four experiments in a notebook because he couldn't leave a question unanswered, went through it in her order and then again in the order the fragments seemed to have happened. Around three in the morning, on the second pass, he found it.

"Serena."

She was asleep sitting up against the wall with her arms crossed. She woke instantly, which told him something about the last four years of her life. He filed it away and didn't mention it.

"Look." He laid four sheets on the floor side by side. "The House. The warm street. What does the street look like?"

"Broad. Trees. That's all I ever get."

"Anything at the end of it?"

"A building." She frowned. "Tall. Pale. I've never been able to see the top. There's always something in the way."

"Does it have two fins on the front?"

Serena went very still.

"Yes," she said.

"Same building." Evan put his hand flat on all four sheets. "The Tower. Finished, standing, at the end of the street."

They looked at each other across four years of paper.

"So the House isn't the past either," Serena said.

"No."

"Then there is no past. Neither of them is a life I already lived."

Evan was quiet. His right hand, the good one, had begun to ache somewhere below the wrist, in a place that had never hurt before.

"One more thing," he said. "The man in the Hall had a mark. Say it exactly. What did you write down the first time, four years ago?"

Serena went to the wall without needing to look. Third row, second from the left: a single sheet with three lines in the handwriting of a fifteen-year-old.

She read it aloud.

"Older. His hair's shorter. A scar across the back of his right hand, from the wrist toward the little finger, like something burned him."

Evan turned his own right hand over and held it up in the lamplight.

Nothing. Clean, pale, unmarked. The hand of someone who'd spent two weeks on a dock and eighteen years not being burned by anything.

"That's the hand I saw in the church," he said. "Same scar. Same hand."

"Evan —"

"The man standing over you has a scar I don't have yet." He closed his fist. "And the man you remember loving has the same scar, because you wrote this about him. You didn't write two descriptions. You wrote one. You've only ever remembered one man." He looked up. "Which means the whole time you've been remembering, the House, the trees, the window that wouldn't shut, the chair with the short leg, you've been remembering a version of me that hasn't happened yet.

"And somebody," he said, "has been sorting it for you."

Serena put both hands over her mouth.

Evan got up off the floor. His knees hurt. He was so tired that the room had gone soft at the edges.

He hadn't told her the last thing. Make sure he never remembers. Her own voice, in a room he'd never seen. He didn't know how to say it, or whether he'd survive her answer.

"Nine fragments of the Hall," he said instead. "Nine different moments in the same room, all of them the end. If it were one life, you'd have one ending. You've got nine versions of the same death." He turned to the wall. "You told me you saw my Awakening seven times before it happened. Always three weeks before the crack. You've never told me what the crack is."

Serena lowered her hands.

"Because you'd think I was mad."

"I already think that."

"It's the same crack." She went to the strip of butcher's paper and put her finger on a spot about three-quarters of the way down, where she had drawn a shape. Badly, in a hurry, and more than once, going over the same lines again and again until the paper had nearly worn through.

A long split. Branching.

Running up the north face of a tall pale building.

"Every time," she said. "In the last fragment. In the Hall, just before the end, I hear it happen. It's the only thing in any of it I can hear properly."

The paper was so thin where she'd drawn it that the lamplight came through.

"Evan," Serena said. "The crack is in the Registry Tower."

*  *  *

He stayed until the grey came up over the roofs.

She made tea. He drank it, out of politeness and then out of a genuine and unwelcome discovery that she was right and tea was fine. They sat on the floor with their backs to opposite walls, because the room had no second chair. Neither of them said much. It was, in a way Evan couldn't have explained to anyone, the best hour he'd had in three years.

At the door, with his hand on the frame, he stopped.

"Left, left, right," she said.

"I haven't done it yet."

"You've done it. You do it in your head first." She stood with her arms crossed against the cold, unbothered. "It's the same thing."

Evan laughed. He hadn't meant to.

"Serena."

"Mm."

"I'm going to say something and I need you not to make it strange."

"That's a terrible opening."

"The man in the Hall has a scar I don't have." He was looking at the doorframe, not at her. "Which means it hasn't happened. Which means it isn't fixed."

"And?"

"And I'm not going to let it happen."

Serena was quiet for a second.

"You don't know what it costs," she said.

"I've got a rough idea."

"You have no idea." She said it without heat. "You've had this for three weeks. You've paid an arm and a shed roof and a memory, and you're eighteen, and you've got maybe forty in your pocket and one friend with a flask. Evan, you can't out-argue —"

"Then help me." He turned around. "You've got four years of paper and a map on your wall and nine versions of your own death pinned up, and you've never once asked anybody to look at it. Why?"

She didn't answer.

"Because the only person you ever asked was —" He stopped himself. "Is that who you told? The one time you told someone?"

Serena's face closed like a shop at night.

"Go home, Evan," she said.

He went down the stairs and out into the fog. He'd gone about two blocks when he realized he'd never answered her question, and neither had she. Between them they had just opened the first door in the whole thing that neither of them was willing to walk through.