The fingers brush the hair from my forehead, and beneath my panic I am sorry. For Reddix and Beckett. And me. For all the Knowing.
“… and you went straight to the Cursed City. When they Knew what you’d written, Knew you were looking for the secret of Forgetting, and so close to where Earth must have landed. It wasn’t easy to make them believe you were innocent then. But I persuaded your mother that you needed rescuing, not punishing. That you’d helped end the life of the same rebel who was trying to corrupt you, who the NWSE had been trying to kill themselves. But you eluded them, and went to the Outside, took your Knowing back into the house of the very same rebels … ”
The one they had been trying to kill. The same rebels. They meant to kill Nita all along. Not me. Grandpapa, Annis, and Nathan really are rebels. And then I think of the cameras. They Knew I was sharing my food. They Knew what I wrote in my book. It was Nita that Marcus and Craddock were talking about in the ruined city. Nita who had been Judged at the wrong time. Because of my mother. Nita’s family that needed to be made an example of, not mine. My parents were pretending to be in seclusion, so the Knowing wouldn’t realize I was gone. Me, they were trying to rescue, with Thorne Councilman actually doing what he could to mitigate my mother’s lust for a bloody justice. I want to bang on the inside of my body like fists against a door. And I can do nothing.
“And what argument was going to save you then?” Reddix whispers. He strokes the other side of my face now, the corner of my mouth. “But I didn’t tell them about Earth. You wouldn’t have lived to Judgment if I had. Like your brother … ”
His breath tickles in my ear, and I can smell him now, clean, with a faint scent of moonflower.
“I Know what you see when you cry out in your sleep. When you writhe in pain on the floor. I Know why you were looking for the Forgetting. I, too, have seen the deaths they reserve for the condemned. And Forgetting would be peace, wouldn’t it? It’s not so wrong, is it? To want peace?”
Reddix lifts my hand, caressing it, holding it in his.
“But your mother has taken away even that. Do you Know what she has done to us? For twelve years, since her son caught the Forgetting, one harvested spore has been put into our blood. In our wellness injections. As the book said. She has made us immune to the Forgetting. And now, even the curse of oblivion is gone … ”
I can see that page in the Notebook of Janis Atan. Just before the torn ones. A created immunity, not a natural one, by small exposures plus the amrita. Reddix, I think. I want to shout the words. You don’t Know everything. We don’t have to Forget, because we can stop being Knowing. Just don’t drink the amrita. Don’t drink the amrita …
And now my memory is pulling, seizing me, wanting to tell me something. But I can’t go yet. I need to hear Reddix. He lifts my limp hand and puts it on his face, and I feel skin, a smooth-shaven cheek, the brush of long braids.
“And now I will remember that I love you, and you will remember that you love him, and he will fly back through the stars. It’s untenable, isn’t it? This life?” He rubs his cheek across my hand, and I Know pain when I hear it. “I don’t believe this new Earth the Knowing will build is all that superior,” he whispers. “I think it will be like the stories of hell.”
My mind is racing, and if Reddix is monitoring my heartbeat, then he’s feeling the spike in its speed. If we are immune, then why is Beckett throwing down Forgetting? Where did he even get it? From Reddix, of course. Reddix must have taken Forgetting from the labs. But why do it at all?
And the strings in my mind yank, painful, and this time I sink, away from the feel of Reddix’s face, down, down …
… to pages of a book that are turning, flipping, three jagged edges where some have been torn, and then the pages still, and say: Anna, Planter’s daughter … Forced immunity … Three sessions of injected exposure … memories intact. Air exposure resulting in extreme cranial and spinal pain before an immediate rise in blood pressure, leading to death …
And the book dissolves, parting like water as I fall through it, into …
… Uncle Towlend’s office, with my shoes tucked under my dress, while my uncle sews the map book. His voice is low and mellow, reciting, “ ‘… Nadia, Dyer’s daughter, is found to be naturally immune … Exposure was ten times average predicted dose for the Forgetting. Memories intact, severely ill … However, subject proved more tolerant than those with forced immunity, where exposure is fatal at half the predicted dose in one hundred percent of subjects tried … ’ ”
I rise back to the present, to my dark cage of a body, to Reddix’s lips on my forehead. And now I think I Know what papers my uncle found, what he recited to me when I was three. The three missing pages from the Notebook of Janis Atan, the book hidden behind my mother’s mirror. No wonder my memory kept tugging. The instructions for creating a forced immunity to the Forgetting were in the notebook, but not the results of Janis’s experiments. Forced immunity to the Forgetting does leave your memory intact, which is incredibly useless, since the spores just decide to kill you instead. But could Reddix Know this? Where did Uncle Towlend leave those papers?
I sift through my mind, fast, searching my memories of every visit to Uncle Towlend’s office. The yellow lamps flash, memory after memory. And then I take away the bright lights, and there is only one lantern, and it’s in my hand. And I have it. Those papers were lying on the dirty floor when I came back out of the Archives, after I read the book about Forgetting. Like they were rubbish. Like they were nothing. But I see them, illuminated in a dim flash of my lantern.
And Reddix said he’d been to my uncle’s office.
I feel a finger on my neck. Feeling my pulse, and Reddix whispers, “Don’t be frightened, Samara, when the time comes … ”
I am frightened. I have a right to be.
“It is a kindness. So much better than Judgment. And the pain will be gone. And you will see your lover once more, and then he will Forget that it ever happened … ”
He does Know. He Knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s doing it on purpose. He’s killing us all. With Forgetting.
And he’s getting Beckett to do it for him.
I’m sitting with Cyrus on a bench in the back of the workshop. It’s an hour or so before the waking bell, so technically we’re out during curfew, but the streets are so muddy from twenty-two straight days of rain that I doubt a supervisor is going to walk them. The clouds have gone now, three moons hanging low behind the mountains, the flower glow on the hillsides dimming. Sunrise is coming. A white sunrise. Not this waking, but the next. I’m going to Sam as soon as the streets fill, and this time of waiting feels like the long breath before a scream. I couldn’t sleep, and neither could Cyrus.