And on and on. Adults and children. Her words make the rooms of my mind feel dirty. I read how her experiments showed that some humans were born immune to Forgetting, and could be exposed to the tree spores without losing their memories. How this immunity could be created with a very slight, very controlled and regular exposure, coupled with the injected cure. How immunity from Forgetting meant—
There are pages missing here, three ragged edges, roughly torn, like missing teeth. I run a finger over them inside my mind, and then a memory is tugging, drawing me down, urging me to another room. I don’t want to go. I want to read about chemistry. I stay where I am, reveling in the fact that I can do it. That I am in control.
And here is the detailed process for making Knowing, in both an injectable and digestible form, a chemical recipe that I don’t have to search my mind to recognize. Amrita. Knowing, the notes say, is most effective when injected once, at a young age, followed by a small booster drunk at regular intervals. Like four times a year, I think, at our Changing of the Seasons.
I set down the book of chemistry and it dissolves away, disappearing like sugar sap in my tea. I concentrate, find the place in my memory that is my bedchamber, and go there, remembering the feel of the soft gold coverlet, staring up at the painted stars, thinking about what I’ve read.
I was not born with memory. None of the Knowing were. Beckett was right. We have been made to be this way. By my mother and her NWSE, “the guardians of memory, the architects of Knowing,” watching us lift our glasses to the sun and moon. And then suffer. No one has ever had to be Knowing, and no one has ever had to Forget. All we’ve ever had to do was not drink the amrita, and once every twelve years, go underground.
It is so unfair to have all this Knowing after you’re dead.
I think about Adam, Forgetting when he shouldn’t have, not just because he shouldn’t have been Outside, but because being full of that concentrated “cure” should have meant the spores would not affect him. But the answer is simple. Adam must have stopped drinking the amrita. What did he Know? Read? See? And when? It obviously wasn’t enough. And how did he get away with it? I’ll probably never Know.
I miss my brother. I wish I could have Known him, as more than a child. I think he must have been worse even than me, and that makes me smile. And then my smile dies. Mother could have cured him. But she didn’t. She killed him instead.
And then I sit up, startled. I felt a prick in my arm. Sharp and stinging. But the pain dulls fast. Like a wellness injection. Or the memory of an injection.
I lay my head back down on the shimmering gold, alone in my Knowing. And my memories. And I wonder if this is what forever is like.
Nathan follows me down to the cliff edge. The moons are almost ready to crest the mountain peaks, and there’s a paleness to the dark, though it’s still black in the shadows. I drop my pack and get out the gear. This is the fourth time I’ve done this climb to meet with Reddix, and I am sick of this wall of rock. But if he’ll bring me news of Sam, I’m going down. Even if it’s lies.
I don’t trust Reddix Physicianson any farther than I could throw him.
Nathan jumps a little when I shoot the hook into the rock, anchoring the ropes for the descent, but he doesn’t say anything. It took less time than I thought for the family to get over the shock of me being from Earth. I had a long talk with Cyrus, then another with Cyrus and Annis, and then we had an understanding. And a plan.
But Nathan, I think, hasn’t forgiven me for where I come from. Though he’s definitely forgiven Jill. He seems to think she’s some kind of martyr in this situation. And since his reasoning probably comes straight from her, I really don’t know what else I could expect.
“We could’ve had everything,” Jill said to me, statue-still on the edge of the bed while the others were still at the table, trying to figure out how two Earthlings ended up in their resting room. I was pacing the room like a cat in a cage. “Money,” she went on, “house, your choice of the work you wanted, our names in the files. The two of us. And you threw it away, Beckett. Tossed it out like it was nothing … ”
I stopped pacing to look at her then. Really look at her. “You lied, Jill. Lied. To me. For years.”
She bit her lip. “I always thought, when the time came, that you’d … see reason … ”
“ ‘See reason’? You thought I’d agree to kidnapping an entire civilization? To flying back to Earth on a slave ship? What have I ever said, what part of me have you ever seen, that would make you think I would agree to that?”
“I thought you’d agree to saving the Earth, Beckett. And don’t pretend you haven’t been lying to me nonstop ever since you met her … ”
And that last part wasn’t an unfair point.
Nathan watches while I get the ropes ready. It’s the third time he’s made the trip with me, watching from the cliffs, so that if I don’t come back, someone will know what happened to me. It’s the option I would guess he’s hoping for.
But this time, when I’m done scanning the park, tucking the glasses back into my shirt, Nathan says, “What did you see?”
I step into the harness. “I looked at what I could without the darkness. Then I looked for sources of heat. Like a body. And there’s one standing over there, in the groves by the cliffs.” Right where he’s supposed to be.
“Can I see?” Nathan asks.
“Yes. I mean, I’d let you, but they’re set to only one person. So if you were touching them, looking through them, they wouldn’t work.”
Nathan thinks about this. “What if you held them, and I was only looking through, without touching?”
“I don’t know,” I say, cocking my head. “Here. Try it.”
I hold the glasses out to one side, keeping my skin touching, while Nathan leans forward, squinting his eyes. He leans back, looks over the lenses, and then back through them again.
“I can see light,” he says. “In the glass! But it’s blurry.”
“They adjust to your eyes when you have them on,” I say, tucking them back inside the shirt. He nods.
“I’m taking Jill up into the orchards. Just to walk.”
I pause, about to go over the edge of the cliff. “Is it safe?”
“Grandpapa thinks it can be.”
Cyrus thinks the Knowing are waiting, watching for the situation to unfold before they act. Like they usually do. The difference this time is that the Outside knows exactly how they’re doing the watching.
“She’s going crazy inside the house. And she wants to go. With me.”
Again I stop myself from going over the cliff. I’m in a hurry. Reddix has to be met within his window, and if I miss him, I miss hearing the time of the next meeting. “Are you asking my permission?”
“No. I’m asking if we have a problem.”
My problem is with Jill’s agenda at the moment, whatever it is.