Yet I made decisions about you that didn’t make sense. I should never have taken you from the holding ponds, never been involved. I should have left you to your fate, whatever that might be. It bothered me that I went through these motions of being a person, of letting you into my life. Only now, I had to cut you from my life if I was to give you what you wanted. You would have no memory of me, or anything in the city. For so many reasons, I told you I wouldn’t do it.
Still you persisted—clung to this idea like it was the only thing that could save you, and I think you were wanting to punish yourself. I think you believed you deserved punishment—for being powerless. But you were also traumatized and hurt and lonely and confused. To have gone from the life you were living with your parents to being without them and in this place …
So, eventually, I did what you asked … or most of it. I took your memories of the city, your parents’ death, the time right before. I took all of that away, but I left everything else.
I don’t know if it will be harder for you, the Rachel now, to understand why you asked for that obliteration or to understand why I couldn’t give you everything you asked for. You hadn’t asked me to kill you; you had asked, instead, to become a different person, to be allowed to create a different life, from the ground up. And if I respected you—surely if I loved you—I should have done as you asked.
But the idea of making you less than a person, a cipher, was not possible for me. You could not know that, but it was the thing least possible for me. Nor could I imagine, except as atrocity, filling you back up with someone else’s memories without your knowledge. So I told myself I would make it up to you, I would find a way, but, really, what I found was a selfishness: a way to still know you even though you no longer knew me.
After, I set you loose again, to be on your own again. Because what did I know about living with a person, being with a person, taking care of a person? Nothing.
When you woke, I had made sure it would be near the poisoned river, beneath the Balcony Cliffs, so I could watch you through my binoculars, make sure you regained consciousness and were still safe. I watched you get up, I watched you walk away.
And I thought that was it—that was the end of it.
But I kept thinking about you, what you were doing, if you felt better now. If what I had done was a good thing or a bad thing, or neither.
I could not help myself. I started to seek you in the city, and when I finally found you, for a time I just observed, thought that might be enough. But then, one day, the meeting you remember: back down by the river, where I sought you out and I lied to you. I pretended I didn’t know you, offered you what I could offer.
I asked if you wanted memories of a better time. I could provide those. It’s what I did. You said no. If you had said yes, I had resolved to do it, and then walk away and never seek you out again. In a way, you would have gotten what you wanted before.
I could never tell you what I had done. I was too afraid, and then, eventually, too much time had passed. I was living in the center of a lie. Even if, before, we had known each other such a short time, I felt ashamed of using what I knew of you to my advantage. Despite a terrible, unworthy elation beneath: that second chance, that moment, when you had stayed, and then we were partners, fortifying the Balcony Cliffs. Living there.
The Rachel without the Company, without her parents’ death, was confused, yes, sad, yes. But you were also more sure of yourself, and you had lost that desperation, that agitation to the eyes that had told me of some deep wound. I began to wonder if I might be capable of being a person after all—there, at the moment of my greatest betrayal.
That is the most ironic thing; that I thought betraying you was a form of being trustworthy, as if the world were upside down.
But that is not the only thing I had done. Before we met again, before you began living again at the Balcony Cliffs, there was something else I never told you.
You wanted oblivion. You wanted not to exist. But there was a price for that. I sold your memories to the Magician. That was my price, the price you agreed to without knowing. The memories from inside the Company. The memories of me. Of your parents’ death. How you had gotten to the access point.
The Magician had taken an interest in me, as she did in all creatures of the Company, especially people she had known in the Company. People she thought knew more than she did about the Company. She asked questions. She infiltrated. She discovered the survival of the fish project because I went to the holding ponds and she saw me there.
She used that information to figure out even more.
*
You must understand: I did not really care about you when I first saw you. I did not care about you except as salvage. I did not care about anyone. Caring came later. And I didn’t see the harm. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. I thought the Magician would fade. That she would be one of those who got killed or was never heard from again. Nothing at that time except a certain ruthlessness, a coldness around the eyes, could have told anyone she would rise so far. Not given her opposition to the Company.
But the Magician knew about Mord from her other sources, and she was already using that to blackmail me, to extract. I gave her what I thought compromised me least, and in return she stayed silent and sold me the supplies I needed.
Because, it’s true, what she found out: I helped create Mord. The Company used what we had learned from the fish project to build Mord. But the Company wasn’t building him from scratch. Not putting a human face on an animal, as happened with the fish. No, they wanted to create an animal around a human being.
Maybe I didn’t realize what the Company planned to do to him, but that is no excuse. I should have found a way out, or found a way to get Mord out. Except there was no choice. Not really. I was the one who did that, as the fish project wound down. I made the transition for him when asked to; I held his hand as it began, before he no longer really recognized me. At the start, I don’t think he understood what was going to happen.
And then I was gone, discarded by the Company, and I could do nothing for Mord, not even comfort him.
*
I could not even save the fish—all I could do was put it out of its misery after it languished for a few months in the holding ponds. The only good thing it seemed that I’d done was salvaging you. I knew what you had really asked for, and what I had done, but I thought it would all go away, become nothing, not even history, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. It only lay submerged for a while.
The Magician had not just the knowledge of my role in creating Mord but then, when I brought you back into the Balcony Cliffs, that further knowledge of your history whenever she needed something. Until she asked for the Balcony Cliffs, and that was too much.