I try to remember. So much happened all at once. I was furious and terrified.
“The little one said, Take her. I remember that part, but the rest…I’m sorry, I’m not sure.”
Gaston scratches at his ear, thinking.
“I don’t doubt what you tell us,” he says. “I don’t know that they were monsters, but whatever they are, they’re down here with us. If we can learn something about them, it could be important. So try and remember, did they say anything else? Anything at all?”
He wants me to remember more, but I don’t want to remember any of it. It was such a blur. That cold hand on my wrist, pulling me. They got Bello. They almost got me. My body starts to shiver. I don’t want to think about that anymore, I don’t, and yet…I do recall something else.
“The one Bishop killed. After Bishop stabbed it, it said, I gave up everything.”
A murmur rolls through the crowd.
Gaston waits for me to say more. When I don’t, he holds up his hands, annoyed.
“That’s it? What does that mean, Em?”
I shake my head. How would I know what that thing meant? Wait…the tall one said something else…what was it?
My shivering stops. My breathing stops. Maybe my heart stops.
I know what it said.
You always were a bitch, Savage.
It knew my name.
If it thought I was a bitch, it knew more than just my name—it knew me. That monster knew the person I was before the coffin stripped away my memories, before it erased my life.
And now that monster is dead.
But there are more of them. The little one, at least, and I didn’t see how many actually took Bello. The monsters might know who I am. If I can find them, I can make them tell me.
This is important information. I should share it but I stay silent, like I did about the familiarity of the little monster’s voice. There is something lurking in the muddy parts of my brain, something beyond a simple memory or two. When I think of discovering my past, an emotion overwhelms me.
Horror.
Who am I, really? What have I done? And do I actually want to find out?
Spingate finally stands. Her face is so smudged she looks ridiculous.
“A circle,” she says, satisfied and proud. “We walked in a circle.”
Her comment is random and jarring. A circle? What is she talking about? We walked straight.
Aramovsky steps toward Spingate. He smooths his hands down his white shirt before he speaks, as if wrinkles might get in the way of words.
“We didn’t turn,” he says. “To walk in a circle, we would have to turn right or left. Don’t you know that?”
Spingate points to the ceiling. “Remember how it felt like we were constantly walking uphill?”
She scans the floor, looking for an untouched patch of dust among the hundreds of footprints. She finds a spot next to a coffin that holds the dried-up corpse of someone who was once named N. Okadigbo. Spingate kneels, draws a new circle. Inside that circle, on the bottom, she draws something I recognize instantly—a stick figure of a person.
Spingate puts her finger to the left of that figure, then slowly slides it through the dust, following the circle’s inner curve.
“We did walk in a circle,” she says. “That circle was beneath our feet. The floor kept curving up, but the circle is big—really big. We didn’t understand what was going on.”
She makes a new drawing: an oval. From the top and bottom of the oval, she draws two straight, parallel lines leading off to the right. She then connects the ends of those lines with a curve that itself runs parallel to the oval.
It’s a cylinder.
Inside the cylinder, she draws another tiny stick figure, this one standing on the bottom line.
I realize what she’s saying. I hear people murmuring to each other as they realize it, too—Spingate thinks we walked up that curve, gradually looping around until we returned to where we began.
We did walk straight, and we are here, so the picture makes sense. Kind of. But if we walked up the cylinder wall, why didn’t we fall back down? I start to ask her, then stop myself: I’ve made enough mistakes already. If I ask a stupid question, everyone might think I’m too dumb to lead.
Spingate wipes her sleeve across her face, removing some of the dust and smearing the rest into long, gray streaks.
“The scale is wrong, though,” she says. “The stick figure is way too big for what I drew. I think I could figure out how big the cylinder is. I need to do the math, do some…ah, what’s it called? Oh! I remember now—I need to do some geometry.”
This word pleases her, or perhaps she’s just thrilled that she remembers something. Maybe our past isn’t erased. Maybe it’s just hidden away from us.
Gaston steps forward, pushing people out of the way more than sliding around them as he usually does. Stunned, he stares down at the image in the dust. He then looks up at Spingate.
“Amazing,” he says. “You are amazing.”
Spingate’s proud smile blazes.