What in Titania’s name was I supposed to do with that?
SIX
THE GIRL FROWNED WHEN I failed to return her greeting, head swinging around until she was facing Li Qin. “Hello, Mother,” she said, in the same stilted tone. It wasn’t formal, exactly: it was more like speech being run through some sort of filter that stripped away half the normal inflections a voice would hold. She sounded . . . artificial. Then she blinked, and for a moment, her expression was all bewildered child, with nothing fake about it. “Where is Mama? I expected her to be here.”
Li Qin said nothing, only stared at her.
The girl turned back to me. “October, where is she? Where is my mother? She should be here, if you’ve found the way to turn me back on.”
“How do you know my name?”
She stopped, and for a moment, it seemed like her image rolled, like she was a reflection cast on still water and someone had just tossed a pebble into the pond. Then she was solid again, and looking at me with clear irritation. “I see. The program is a detailed one, I’ll give it that. But no amount of detail accounts for everything, ever. If it did, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Does someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked. My finger still stung. The wound had healed, but the body remembers pain. The body remembers a lot of things. Thoughtlessly, I stuck my finger in my mouth, instinctively trying to nurse the stinging away.
Blood memory wrapped around me immediately, even more vivid and undeniable than the last one. There was no sensation of a sugar shell this time, just an immediate plunge into recall.
I’m in another strange room, even smaller than the one Li Qin led me to, but the same tall machine is here, directly in the center, tethered by black cables to the four walls. It hums to itself, operating as intended. I look around, taking note of everything I see. Pink walls; a border of purple rabbits, stenciled on a white background. A bookshelf packed with computer manuals and children’s books against one wall, next to another shelf, this one packed with dozens upon dozens of plush rabbits.
A heart-shaped sign above the rabbit shelf tells me this is “April’s Room.” There is no bed. There is no dresser. Only the machine, the bookshelves, and the rabbits.
Only me. I take a step toward the machine. There’s a picture on the bookshelf, the strange girl and a woman with golden eyes and red-brown hair, both grinning widely for the camera. A baby blanket is wrapped around the base of the machine, pink and blue and minty green.
“You’re here,” says the girl from before. She’s behind me. How is she behind me?
I turn slowly. “Hey, April. How are you?”
“Why are you here?” she counters, all scowls.
“I thought I’d come see how you were.”
Her eyes narrow. “I am fine. Why are you here?”
August said blood memory could be controlled, to a degree, forced to show you what you want to see. I had none of her training. The blood had me, and I was going to follow it for as long as it wanted me to.
“I have some questions I think you can answer,” I say, leaning against the wall. This version of me sounds so calm, so confident. I don’t know her. “At least, I hope you can.” I reach over, straightening one worn cotton bunny’s ear.
“Don’t touch that!” April vanishes, only to reappear next to me with a crackle of static and snatch the rabbit away. She glares over the top of its head at me. “This is mine. My mother gave it to me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“My mother always buys me rabbits.” She looks down at the bunny as she strokes its head. “Every time she goes somewhere I can’t follow, she brings me another rabbit. I like rabbits.”
“I can tell.”
“She’ll bring me many rabbits this time, because she didn’t tell me she was leaving.”
“April . . .” I don’t recognize any of this. Blood is supposed to carry memory, but whoever this memory belongs to isn’t me. I was never here. And still I ache for the child in front of me, rabbit in her arms and innocence in her eyes. “April, you understand she’s not coming back this time, don’t you?”
The memory started to dissolve around me, and for a moment—just a moment—I was seized by the irrational desire to push the button again, to draw the knife Melly had given me, to do whatever I had to in order to bleed and keep following a moment that had never happened in the first place.
Instead, the plain gray room returned, Li Qin looking at me with mild concern but no real fear, the blonde girl looking back and forth between the two of us.
Oh, well. None of this made sense anyway. May as well see how little sense it was going to go on making. “Is your name April?” I asked, and was rewarded by the girl’s face relaxing with relief right before she disappeared.
The blood memory still fresh in my mind told me not to flinch when she reappeared next to me with a strange crackling sound, wrapping her arms around my waist. She felt perfectly solid, like any other kid who’d just teleported using a completely unfamiliar kind of magic, and who smelled like a thunderstorm about to crash down on my head.
“I knew you remembered me, I knew it!” she crowed, squeezing tightly. I kept my arms raised and blinked at her, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with this kind of exuberance. “Mother and I have been working on building security failsafes into the network for me, to reduce the risk of power interruptions, and when the power cut off, they activated. I have been waiting for someone to come and let me out. I have watched every episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Twice. Would you like your appendix removed?”
She looked up at me, golden eyes wide and hopeful. I almost hated to tell her no, even if I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“I think I’m good, actually,” I said. “Okay . . . April. I don’t remember you. I’m sorry if that’s disappointing, but I have no idea what’s going on here. Duchess Zhou invited me to Dreamer’s Glass because she needed help solving a mystery, only it seems the mystery just made another mystery. Can you please tell us who you are, and who you think we are?”
“And why you called me ‘Mother,’” added Li Qin. “I think I’d know if I had children.”
“I’m adopted, if that helps,” said April.
“Still think I’d have noticed,” said Li Qin.
“Very well.” April disappeared again, taking the pressure around my waist with her, and reappeared sitting atop her server, weight resting on her hands as she regarded the two of us owlishly through her glasses. “I will explain myself upon one condition.”
“I am the Duchess here, and apparently also your mother, so I hardly think you’re in the position to be making conditions,” said Li Qin.
“You catch on to this ‘mother’ thing quickly,” I said, voice low.
She shrugged. “I wrangle programmers and household staff. How different can motherhood be?”
“What’s your condition?” I asked, returning my attention to April.
“I will explain, but you may not interrupt, even to request clarification, until I grant consent for you to do so,” she said. “I have no idea the scope of your reprogramming, only that it is extensive, enough so as to have impacted the local network storage, and I would prefer to reach a natural conclusion before I am bombarded with your inevitable bewilderment. Do you accept?”