I open the interior door and step into the dark, wind-blasted expanse of office space. Papers flutter around like leaves. Chairs roll back and forth. Inspirational animal posters flap against the wall—wolves eating deer and worms eating wolves, all with the same caption: WIN.
There is so much I don’t understand about this thing I helped build. My grandfather was greedy and cruel and nearly every other pejorative, but he wasn’t quite insane. I’m unable to imagine us designing this building. This city. These experiments with death and these grinning automatons. Where did all this come from? What created this fevered exaggeration of the world we envisioned? We may have drawn the outline, but something else filled it in.
I hear someone calling my name—the one that I’ve earned and lived in and cared for, not the one pinned to me at birth and stained beyond recognition—but it’s far away. Each step I take into the office is a step down a staircase. I descend to my basement. I begin searching the musty boxes.
Where is it? I ask the dirt-smeared derelict chained to the stairs.
Where’s what? he snickers.
What I need to get out of here. Show me.
Why should I?
Because you’re selfish. You look out for you. And as much as I hate to say it, I’m you.
He considers this. Fair enough.
He kicks over a box.
“Excuse me,” I say, touching Tomsen’s shoulder. She is staring at the keypad and rubbing her fingers through her hair and she jumps at my touch. She looks at me, sees something in my eyes, steps aside.
“What were you doing in there?” Julie says to me, straining to push the office door shut. The stairwell has filled with windblown debris.
I look at the keypad. I look over my grandfather’s shoulder as he shows me our private family code, which I’m to pass on to my children and grandchildren and—
“R, don’t!”
Atvist enters his code.
The door clicks open.
“Mother . . . fucker,” Nora says. “I knew it.” She glances at Julie and M. “I mean, we all knew it, right? His clothes? All those freak-outs?”
Julie is staring at me, not exactly shocked, but shaken. She’s waiting for me to say something, and I sense that the right words right now could fix all this, bridge our chasm of secrets and finally bring her back to me. And the words she’s expecting are easy: I remember my old life. I was an Axiom employee, just like M and Abram, a deluded cog in an evil machine, and now I’m not.
If that were the truth, I would blurt it out and be done with it. But the truth is a much longer confession, and it allows no simple handwashing. It invites no sympathy or supportive back-patting, no assurances that I’m among friends and safe from judgment. It’s too big for that. It’s not a few regrettable mistakes; it’s a life, a person, woven inextricably into the person I am today.
My secret is myself. How can I confess that?
I step through the door and descend the staircase. Freedom Tower sways beneath my feet like a woozy dream.
WE
WE ARE RELUCTANT to watch the school. The things that occur there penetrate veils and creep uncomfortably close to us, scrawling fragments of sentences into disparate books on Higher shelves and Lower shelves and strange hidden nooks never meant to be found. Such intrusions have not been possible for many centuries, since before the world became solid, and now that it has softened again—or perhaps cracked open—we are no longer sure what can happen.
So we watch with caution, but we can’t look away. The boy, hovering over the chasm, is our closest link to the living, and more and more with each revolution of this burning, melting sphere, we feel a desire to be known.
The boy retreats into us for shelter as the sensory assault continues. He roams our dim halls, climbs up and down our living ladder, perusing other lives and other ages while the noise beats against the walls. He wishes he could bring his friends here. Joan and Alex are outside in the storm, grimacing as these unfathomable lessons attempt to rewrite their souls.
Then the lessons stop. The silence is so abrupt that some of the students shudder like an organ has been ripped out of them. A man in a beige jacket bursts into the room and converses with the two lecturers, but the boy does not listen to their words. He looks through the open door out into the hallway, where a group of children wait in a line. At the front of the line is a girl. She is about the age the boy was when his life was halted. The boy sees her black hair, her tawny skin, her single dark eye, then he blinks and sees her cells, her genes, intricate collages of fathers and mothers throughout history, endlessly combined and reconfigured. Then he blinks again and sees beyond cells. Beyond molecules. Roaring yellow light.
“Hi,” he says.
He is standing in the hall in front of the girl, his IV dangling from his arm.
“Hi,” the girl says. “I’m Sprout.”
We recognize her. We have felt her presence in our halls. Our familiarity leaks into the boy and he smiles.
“I’m . . . ,” he says, then his smile fades into astonishment. I’m who? I’m what? It’s the first time he has asked these questions.
“Your eyes are pretty,” the girl says.