Once, Sintra had asked about the people in the photo. He’d said he didn’t know them. That he’d found the photo on the street and liked it. True, to a point. Hadn’t known the four-year-old. Never really knew his grandparents. Just another nonmemory from a lost life, and most days he didn’t regret that.
On the back of the photograph, his father had scrawled a few lines: “Sometimes a man will see in his own image a desert, and it is the need to make that desert bloom which drives him again and again to action, as hopelessness compels us to our end. Sometimes, too, a man will flee in the enemy’s direction, eager to weather any punishment—physical or mental—that proves he is still alive. Or, he does so from a pride that lies to him, tells him he can change what seems unchangeable.” From a book? His own thoughts? Finch would never know.
Feral jumped up on his lap. Began to purr as Finch petted him.
The rough-smooth taste of the whiskey scratched and soothed his throat. He sank farther into his chair. Maybe Sintra would come by tonight.
Never lost.
“Yes, I know, fat boy,” Finch murmured. Could sit there all night. Forget what he had to do and pull out a book that he’d read three or four times already. Pretend he lived in a better world.
Turned on the small radio on the table next to him. Feral stopped purring for a second. Only one station across the dial: the gray caps’ station. Gone any cacophony of voices and music. Usually just a single signal, filled with cryptic clicks and whistles. Punctuated by propaganda delivered in flat tones by human readers. “… A spy is caught and killed just outside the Zone … Sector 509 has been scheduled for renovation. Anyone living there should relocate immediately.”
But, tonight, nothing. That made thirty-seven days of static. What did it mean? Was it just another slackening of attention? Or something more serious? Finch had noticed a pattern. The new dislodged the old. A puppet government in place for six months dissolved when the gray caps turned to building the camps. Electricity no longer reliable since they’d started in on the two towers. These failings brought a twisted optimism. Maybe they can’t do everything at once. Or maybe there was a purpose to all of it that he just couldn’t see.
He pushed a complaining Feral off his lap. Walked back into the kitchen.
The memory bulbs lay on the counter. Vaguely round. Pitted and whorled. Smelling of both salt and offal. Already rotting?
Finch looked down at the cat, which had followed him expecting a treat. Wondered what would happen if he fed a bulb to Feral.
“You want to eat one of these and I’ll eat the other?” he asked Feral.
The cat walked back into the living room. Finch laughed. “Smart choice.” Picked up the phone receiver, dialed Rathven’s number. A crackling interference. At least it’s working.
Through the static: “I’m taking one now. Give it an hour. If I don’t call back, check on me.”
“I will. Be safe.”
“Thanks.”
Finch put the receiver down. Be safe. Don’t slip on the carpet. Don’t fall out the window.
Which poison first? Finch picked up the orange one. Get the worst over with first.
Each time he ate a memory bulb, he became someone else. Different when he returned.
These would be his fourth and fifth. The first had belonged to a girl of ten and had given him nightmares for a year. Montages of a ragged doll. Soup made with dog bones. A bleak apartment without even wallpaper. Turned out there’d been no foul play. Her parents dead, she’d starved to death. The second had been a young man, the third a young woman. A double suicide unspooled in his head. Left him with longings he didn’t know he had. Regrets that weren’t his. Memories of people he didn’t know. Or want to know.
Finch had never eaten two in one night.
How many would change him by just a little too much?
Fuck it.
Opened his mouth wide. Placed the bulb on his tongue. The taste of the gray cap bulb was dry. Like dirt and sand. The worst part was you had to eat them whole. Crunch down on the ridiculous size of it until your jaw ached. No good cutting them up, grinding them down to paste, adding them to food or water. Ruined the effect. His skin prickled as his mouth took in the strange texture, the taste. An odd, sickening blend of cinnamon-pepper-lime. Sour breath.
Dread, and yet also a thin layer of anticipation. To be taken out of his own life. If only for a little while.
He stumbled into the chair. Feral butted his head up against his slack arm.
Memories didn’t come out the way one might expect. Nothing logical or ordered about them. Almost as if you were standing on a street corner as a motored vehicle raced by. As it passed you, a thousand pieces of confetti flew up. You had to try to catch as many of them as you could before they hit the ground.
Finch closed his eyes.
Leaned back.
Let it hit him all at once.
Come to:
At the bottom of a well. Layers of rough stone spiraled up to a distant pale light. A wriggling mass of worms or insects or something thick and strange pushing down through the light, extinguishing it. Sudden image of a monstrous City, balanced atop a single building greater than anything ever built in Ambergris, and it all housed in a cavern so huge that the ceiling is lost in blue-tinged darkness.
Come to (faster now):
A stumbling, jerky run through a tunnel. A surrounding mob of gray caps click and whistle with insane speed. A glimpse of blue sky, winking out. A burning motored vehicle, ancient model. A parade with a huge black cat caged and orange-yellow-green lights spread out along the route. Superimposed: an enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin. A dark-green frond of fungus five stories high. Blood, lots of blood, pooling out across the ground. A man’s face, in extreme agony, suddenly gone black in silhouette, turning into a huge door made half of volcanic rock and half charred book cover. And on top of the door a smaller door, and a small door set into that one. Hand on the doorknob. Opening …
Come to (slower now):
A stone fortress in a desert. Spinning out into open space—falling, falling, falling. And then a face Finch recognizes, the dead man’s, smiling. Beatifically. More mud and dirt and the smell-sound of a river nearby. Side view of water flowing, ear to the grass. Something licks the moisture from his eyes before huffing and going on its way. Falling again, through black fabric studded with stars. The dead man falling, too, staring right at Finch, expression oddly calm. Words from the man’s mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps’ language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put into words.
Come to:
Moving slowly among a thousand swaying fungal trees in a thousand vision-shattering shades of green. Nearby, a rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies. The sound of footsteps. A hint of movement other than spores, strained through the heavy sky. Hunting for something. But what? A man. Moving in front of them. Night. Strange numbers and words spilling out emerald against a field of darkness. Shadowing the man. The orange sky dominated by the shambling hulks of floating fungal fortresses. Things crawl and fly and swim between the fortresses. Running now, just yards behind the man. But the man was turning to face them. The man was looking right at him when he disappeared. Winked out. Leaving only the smile. And that only for an instant. An intense feeling of confusion and surprise. Then: falling through cold air and couldn’t feel his legs.