Vicious Memories

Chapter 39

Lukas refused to speak again.

If I didn't get answers soon I felt like I would be torn apart. Tomorrow there would be nothing left of me but bits of flesh and bone, maybe a pair of eyes still staring up at passerby, demanding ever more answers.

Frustration made me lash out in the worst way possible.

My footsteps wore a path through the thick green grass of the village, my mind beginning to burn as anger simmered in my chest. Clouds skimmed across the sky, never breaking up for any meaningful amount of time, washing everything I could see into a muddy pall. I watched them through narrowed eyes and empathized with the sun, stymied and useless as it currently was.

I made my way over to the creek as afternoon turned to evening. Walking down the embankment, eyes downcast, I nearly ran straight into Arun.

"Watch where you're going," he said, spitting on the ground as he walked around me.

It would have been too easy to simply feint for his face and land a kick right on top of a vulnerable kneecap. "Fuck you," I said instead.

Down on the muddy shore, the creek did its best to calm me down. Water ran soft and clear, splitting around larger rocks and bubbling over smaller ones, tinkling merrily, beautiful in its consistency and indifference.

Enough time passed that the occluded sun dipped past the treetops, sinking toward its nightly slumber. Shadows stretched, then vanished. The air thinned and cooled. I breathed deeply, trying to satisfy an odd sense of emptiness in my chest. I only succeeded in making myself yawn.

Today had already frayed the edges of my sanity, bringing me to the brink of unraveling, by the time I bumped into Mads and Shana. They came down the slope together, ready to prepare dinner.

"Hello, Ollie."

"Hi, Mads."

"You want to help with dinner?" It came out as 'dee-ner'.

"No, sorry," I said, shaking my head. "I don't really have the time."

"Oh, s'il vous plaît. You look upset. It will help you relax."

In hindsight I should have just said yes. It was obvious that Mads was only trying to help. But dark images kept popping up behind my eyes: midnight hair pooling like a lake, Sirus's slashed neck, Jessica's smile. And here in front of me was a woman who had seen something, who by all means should have answers about who took her, where she had been. Answers that could help us solve all our other problems and maybe, just maybe, lead to us getting our memories back.

"No," I snapped. "I don't have time to just relax. There's a murderer out there who needs to be caught."

Mads widened her pretty blue eyes in surprise. One hand went up to the red kerchief tied around her hair.

"I only meant..."

"I know what you meant." This fast-moving train-wreck rolled on recklessly, because she had to know something. Somebody had to know something. Was everybody just going to keep walking around like two people hadn't been murdered right under our noses? Like we weren't all stuck on an island with no memory of our lives and a group of savages trying to kill us?"

"Tell me," I said, "have you still not managed to remember anything from your time in the jungle?"

No wind disturbed the evening air now, and everything hung stiff and still. Not a single blade of grass moved; no insects buzzed around my head; no twig or branch fell from the nearby trees.

Shana took a step closer to Mads and shot me a warning look.

"Ollie," she said quietly.

Mads stood frozen on the spot.

"I'm just wondering," I said loudly, "how someone can spend several days out in the jungle and not remember anything. I find it hard to believe that someone can happen to lose just a few specific days in time."

"What are you saying?" Shana asked. "That she lost her memory on purpose?"

"I don't know," I shouted. I wasn't sure when I'd raised my voice. "All I'm saying is that something is going on here, and nobody is talking about it as much as they should be. How do you get taken into the jungle and remember nothing? How do two people get murdered while nobody sees a thing? How do—"

"What the hell is going on here?"

Finn appeared over the crest of the hill. His hair bounced behind him joyfully, his face clouded with anger. Alice followed right behind him.

I blinked.

In a second Mads had tears spilling down her cheeks and Shana put a comforting arm around her, throwing dirty glances in my direction. Finn stood between us, his cheeks purple, hurling words in my direction. All the sounds and images combined with the suddenly too-loud sound of my own beating heart, a cacophony that had me reeling. I felt like I'd just finished running a marathon.

"Ollie."

One voice, tentative, cut through it all.

"Ollie."

I looked up. Alice had a hand wrapped gently around my arm.

"What's going on?" she asked, concerned.

I didn't know what to say.

"Come on."

She said something to Finn and Shana that I didn't catch and led me upstream, moving us halfway up the grassy embankment. We reached a clear spot thirty yards away and I sat down heavily. The rough and familiar feeling of grass under my palms comforted me.

Alice looked down at me from where she stood. Her eyes held such a keen sense of understanding that for a moment I felt as if she could see right through me.

"You lost it," she said bluntly.

I took a moment to put my thoughts together. One of my hands waved back and forth in the grass, focusing on the prickling feeling of the blades against my skin. Time sped by, as it had since the second I'd woken up; I wondered when, if ever, it would slow down again, or if it would just keep speeding up, faster and faster, until I either died or woke up from this nightmare.

"I didn't mean to," I said finally. "I don't know what happened. I just..."

"You let the search for answers consume you," Alice said. She sighed and sat down next to me. Close, but not too close. "I know what it's like." She paused to watch the creek flow relentlessly by. "It's part of the reason I've never been, or at least never felt, fully connected to the rest of the group. I need to find answers about my past, too."

A minute passed. Then another.

I looked down at the ground between my knees. My hands were trembling. I thought about how Mads must be feeling after what I'd just done, and they trembled even worse. Balling them into fists didn't make it stop.