Phoenix

Answers

Gigi was propped on her pillows, barely recognisable with her face covered in patches of gauze and salve. If it wasn't for the spindly index finger pointed her way, Ash would've thought she was still asleep.

"Come closer." Gigi's mouth barely moved against her dressings, causing her words to blur into a lethargic drawl.

Ash came to stand alongside the old woman's bed.

The spindly finger bent and flexed. "Closer."

Ash leant forward, gasping when Gigi snagged her neck and drew her in so that their faces were millimetres apart. Her touch was nothing like it had been in her memory. The gentle caress of her worn leather fingers was dry and prickly, her ringbarked eyes coated in a milky glaze. The woman in front of her was like the faded remains of a shell after being ground down and hollowed out by the tide.

Gigi was speaking again, and her words rose between groans and indecipherable murmurings like glimpses behind foggy glass. "I was right... " Gigi's chest rose and fell as though she was laughing. "And they say there's no such thing as fate."

"I'm getting Oroton," Ash said, straightening. She didn't know what the old woman was trying to say, and was worried she might be losing consciousness again.

"No." Gigi's head snapped up, and her eyes narrowed between the crack in the dressings. "Just us." Her head flopped back to resting position and she took a deep breath. "Just us..."

Ash waited for an exhaled explanation. None came. "What happened to you?" she whispered.

Gigi pointed to the ceiling. "I read the stars wrong. I floated for days."

"You got lost at sea?" Ash said.

Gigi's hand flopped to her side. "Lost? No. Never lost," her chest heaved again, although this time, Ash suspected it wasn't from laughter. "I read the stars. They led me to you." She sighed again. "I know who you are, Ashalia Haru."

Ash choked on her own breath. Despite the woman's slurred sentences, there was no denying she'd just said her first name. But Haru? That wasn't her last name. "My last name's Valesca," she whispered, glancing at the door to make sure Eli wouldn't hear. If he knew her last name, it wouldn't take her long to figure out Jai Valesca was her brother.

Gigi peered at her, eyes tightening into small marbles. "Valesca?" The name seemed to clear the fog from her eyes and the lagging of her tongue. "That must've been your father's last name. Your mother's maiden name was Haru."

Mother.The thought was foreign, as though conceptualised in another language. She shook her head. "You're dehydrated." And repeated. "I should get Oroton." Though this time, she made no move to leave.

Gigi continued as though she hadn't heard. "Akahana was taller than you. Fairer. You must've got your complexion from your father, the watchmaker."

Watchmaker? Ash thought. It sounded so familiar, and yet ...

She shivered. The dream. The wall of clocks. The old man with grey speckled hair. The watchmaker.

Gigi stroked the gold casing of the watch absentmindedly. "When Eli delivered you that day on his motorbike, I knew it was you. You were the adult-sized version of the baby I delivered eighteen years ago. I thought it must be impossible. Until I saw those posters." She licked her lips. "They got your name wrong, and yet, not your brother's. What happened to that poor dear boy? Why is he working for that horrible agency?"

There was a long minute of silence, where the only sound in the room was that of Gigi's rasping breaths. Ash wanted to shake her and scream, Why are you doing this to me? Why are you saying this?But she couldn't move, couldn't make a sound.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?" Gigi said, shifting between her blankets. "I thought your mother was crazy too. Never listened to her. Told her to stop hanging out with that watchmaker, Kaleb. He put strange thoughts into her head—conspiracies, told her of worlds that exist between the seconds, and other such nonsense. It was only after I met Oroton, years later, and saw the magic, that I thought maybe I was wrong. By then, it was too late.

"It's my fault. I never listened to her. I lost her because I never listened." Now, she was talking to herself, muttering while wringing her hands around the pocket watch. "She came back to me, you know. To give birth to you and Jai. I scolded her both times for being so stupid. For getting pregnant when she knew the consequences. But when I saw you," She smiled. "I've never heard a baby cry like you in my life. Never seen a child open their eyes straight away. Look and really see. She named you after the etching on the wall of my house—a Jay bird sitting on an Ash tree."

Ash remembered the etching on the wall in Gigi's house—the bird in the tree. It had been an Ash and a Jay. It was all so far-fetched and yet, stupidly, it made sense.

Gigi's smile faded. "And then, she left. My daughter, Akahana, left. Said she was going into hiding so she could raise you for as long as possible before the Establishment found out." She held out her hand. "Which brings me to this." The pocket watch dangled. "Take it." Her hand shook from the weight of the gold. "Take it. It's yours. It was delivered to me after your mother's death. K.V. It must've belonged to your father."

Ash reached out, more to steady Gigi's shaking hand than to take the pocket watch. When it dropped into her palm, the cool familiarity of it as like a jolt to the heart, a defibrillator fusing the flashes of dream memories to form a picture of her life before the electrocutions.

It all made sense. She knew it was true. Everything the old woman had said was true.

"Gigi..." she began. "What happened to..." My mother.Her mouth refused to form the word.

But the old woman had closed her eyes. Her lids bulged and flicked as her eyes dreamt behind them. Her breathing became slow and steady, the tense bunches around her lips smoothing like an iron pressed sheet.

"Gigi?" Helplessly, Ash watched the old woman's breathing deepen. If Gigi's daughter was her mother, then that would make Gigi... Her grandmother. The realisation struck her with the force of an anvil.

Her grandmother's breathing turned to soft snores.

Reconciling Gigi's damaged face with the one from her memory wasn't easy. She stayed for some time, just drawing the lines of the old woman's face and trying to picture it as it had been in her youth. If she squinted hard and turned her head to one side, she thought there might be a resemblance between them. Gigi had the same almond-shaped eyes, though they dragged at the edges with age. She had the same hands, small with long fingers, slightly knobbly about the knuckles.

She wondered what her mother looked like.

She strung the pocket watch around her neck by the chain and felt it tick against her heart. In all the confusion of learning of and remembering a long lost family, Gigi had reminded her of someone who hadn't yet been lost, of someone whose memory was as solid as the ground beneath her feet.

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