“You killed the Brewer boy in our coffin room. He was just a child.”
Matilda scoffs, a sound like gravel scattered across a hard floor.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says. “Not a child, a receptacle. Nothing more than a shell waiting to be filled. You, little leader, are my receptacle. Understand now? You’re not a person at all. Brewer has held you hostage for centuries. He said that if we came after him, he would destroy my receptacle the way I destroyed his. He must be dying. He woke you up out of spite, so that I could know my chance to be born again was fading away forever. He did it to hurt me, to make me suffer. But he made a mistake. Now that you are out, he can’t simply press a button and kill you in your husk.”
It’s all so much, too much.
“Brewer said he protected us.”
Matilda laughs. “Did he? No, it was his threat to kill you that kept me away all these years. But now his leverage is gone. I can finally have the reward I was promised.”
What she says is impossible. Yet, once again, I know she is telling the truth. I am her reward, like some animal to be given away as a prize. But she said I wouldn’t die. Would this process fill in my missing memories? Would it end the madness of not knowing who I am? My parents…I might finally remember my parents.
“If you transfer your thoughts, what happens to me? Would I know what you know?”
Matilda pauses. “In a manner of speaking, yes. We are the same person. The transfer would make us whole.”
She’s not lying, but she’s also not telling me all the truth.
“It would make you whole,” I say. “I asked what happens to me. If you do your transfer, what happens to the person I am?”
“You are not a person! You are—”
I shake the spear at her. “Then make another copy! You can’t have me! You can’t have any of us!”
The red eyes fade to a reddish pink. She visibly calms herself. The loving voice comes back—does she think she can soothe me the way a parent soothes a little child?
“We can’t make more receptacles,” she says. “The process takes centuries. Mental maps, synaptic connections, baseline memories that form neural pathways—if these things aren’t a match, if the foundation isn’t identical, then the transfer can’t overwrite.”
Overwrite. The word instantly terrifies me. The word is worse than death, worse than murder. If Matilda gets me, my body will live on, but who I am—what I am—that will be erased.
I was created to be destroyed.
“So if I’m you, why can’t I remember? I know how to speak and read, but my past is all muddy, all blanked out. Why?”
“Because you don’t really have memories,” Matilda says. “Language, math, science, skills…those things are the framework of a mind. It is our experiences that make us what we are. Individual identity forms in the way we perceive things, the way we react, the way we feel. The knowledge your brain received while you were in the husk provided the biological scaffolding needed to support who I am. You’re a shell, little leader. I am the yolk. You were made so that I can live. You’re my only hope. Come and merge with me now so we can be as we were meant to be.”
I thought she was a monster because of the way she looks, but her evil goes far beyond appearances. She wants to make me vanish. She wants it to be like I never existed at all, and she’s trying to make that sound like it is a beautiful thing.
I shake my head. “I refuse.”
The colors in her eyes darken, spin faster.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “You’re not old enough to understand. I am your progenitor and you are my receptacle—you can’t make your own decisions!”
Maybe she knows more than I do, more than I could ever learn, but she doesn’t know me.
“You’re wrong, Matilda. I’ve been making decisions since the moment I woke up. And I’ll keep making them. I think I get it now—the longer I live, the better the chance that you’ll die. And you should have died a long time ago.”
She is so angry she shakes. I see a bit of fluid leak down the left side of her face, a thin rivulet that gathers in one wrinkle before overflowing it, oozing down to the next.
“What about the ones we don’t need?” she asks, obviously fighting to control her rage. “Don’t you want them to survive, little leader? Their progenitors are already dead, so they can’t be overwritten. Come to me willingly, and they will live. If I have to hunt you down, I will kill them all, each and every one. I will torture them first, tell them that their agony is because of your selfishness. I will—”
“You will never get me.” The words come out like grinding glass. Matilda had her life, and she can keep it—my life is mine. “You won’t get me. You won’t get any of us.”
She leans forward until her furious red eyes fill the air above the pedestal.
“I’ll find you. Brewer held you hostage, but that is over. Come to the orchards, girl. You will come or I swear by Tlaloc that all of your friends will suffer.”