Vicious Memories

Chapter 104

"It's too late. You gave me your only weapon. You were going to abandon the rest of them just to get your memories back."

"Was I, though?" I asked, mimicking Bev's earlier question. I looked at Alice with nothing but gratitude, then broadened my gaze to encompass the rest of my friends. "There are a lot of people here who taught me what it means to live life well. Fixating on the past and letting it control your future isn't part of the equation. I would never come back to your side, not after what you've done, no matter what this past version of me did or didn't do."

"But you did come back to my side. There's no denying it. Miller, get over here," Bev said. "Give me the—"

She broke off in another fit of coughing and I cocked my head in concern. "Are you okay, Bev?"

The guard she had summoned appeared at her side, waiting. Bev eyed me suspiciously, her face going slack as the wheels turned in her head and she looked down at the palm of her hand.

"Really," I said, "I'm worried. Are you sure you're okay? That cough sounds nasty."

My words hung in the air for several seconds, projecting across the village. The passing storm had left a remarkably cool night in its wake, and the lack of humidity felt like a weight off of all our backs.

In the confused moments that followed, I could hear the popping of joints and the stretching of tendons as people shuffled around, air whooshing softly as it moved in and out of their lungs at an ever-quickening pace. Nerves seeped toward me from every direction like sour spices. Behind the villagers, the Strangers continued watching everything, newly forged interest sparking to life on their faces.

I saw then that Bev knew what was happening. Somehow, she knew, and I was willing to bet that she was familiar with everything in the manilla envelope with my name on it. She knew exactly what I was capable of.

"What have you done?" she asked, reaching up to massage her throat with her delicate white fingers.

As I watched most of the color drain from her face I felt an ugly surge of pride and satisfaction. It was wrong, I knew, and I wished I was a better person so I wouldn't have to weigh whether or not it brought me down to her level, but the fact of the matter was that I reveled in her distress, in the way her pallid skin stretched over her cheeks and no longer sparkled as beautifully as it once had.

Then I snapped back to myself and felt a flush creep up my neck. I'd done this to save my friends, not to punish Bev.

"I never trusted you," I said. "How could I, standing up on the cliffs and knowing everything you'd done? You claim to have known the past me, so I don't know how you could think I would listen to you admit that you'd lied to your friends and family on this island for two straight years, and then take you at your word.

"I knew you'd go back on your deal in some way, though I never foresaw that you'd be petty enough to sentence the rest of the village to death just because they proved harder to manipulate than you thought they would. So I told you I'd take your deal. When someone has all the power, you don't fight them on their terms. You find a way to gather power of your own first. Which is what I did."

I looked across the night air at Alice again, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw her smiling. A shot of adrenaline and euphoria rushed to my brain, and it felt better than any high ever could. Always sharply intelligent, she looked between me and Bev, putting the pieces together.

"Eva. What's going on. Are you okay?" The man Bev had called Liam tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him off furiously. My ear quirked at hearing her real name.

"Don't touch me." It came out of her mouth as a hiss. "I'm fine. Let me think." She looked me up and down slowly, appraising. "How?"

"Like I said. I needed to take some of your control back, so I did what I'm best at. I took your deal so I could get close to you, then I just had to hope enough time would pass for it to work."

"The mud on my neck," she said in a flat voice.

"That's right. A fun compound I like to call Yellow Slumber, though you won't find that in any database, it's just a nickname I made up."

I heard twin gasps from the direction of the villagers, and was gratified to see Alice and Neema share a knowing glance. They both turned approving gazes toward me. It looked like Alice wanted to jump and cheer.

"It only takes a minute to seep through the skin on your neck," I continued. "Long enough for me to wipe it off the thick skin of my hands. Short enough that it's too late for you now. I let the storm wash away the rest, so there won't be any samples for you to gather and analyze. Spotty blood from you lungs is the first sign. Hemoptysis. The poison mimics rapid onset COPD at first. That part is treatable, so if you're quick enough you can avoid suffocating on your own blood. But that won't help you once it reaches your heart, gives you arrhythmia, and causes irreversible cardiac arrest."

As they had a few times before, the words tumbled from my mouth of their own accord, knowledge hidden deep in the part of my mind I could barely access. Once they reached the open air they rang with a truth that nobody listening could deny.

"If you know me like you said you do," I finished, "you'll know that I'm not lying about this. Apparently poison is a specialty of mine."

Bev did know me, and she waved Liam away. The ocean blue of her eyes wavered, disturbed by trembling currents that carried uncertainty and fear to the fore.

"You did this before you knew for sure that I would go back on my word," she said. "You extinguished any chance you had of getting your memories back, all the way back at the cliffs. If I had turned around and done as I said I would, the poison would still have been inside me already, and I would have known that you were the one who put it there. Do you honestly think you've moved past wanting your memories back? Do you no longer care about why you killed the woman from your memory? Don't you need to understand what's going on here, how and why you were involved in the first place?"

"No." I shook off the men holding my arms, and this time they complied, releasing me. My hands were still bound behind me back, but I straightened. "Looking back at the expense of moving forward only causes pain. I killed that woman, and no matter the reasons for it I'll have to live with that. It's better to bear the burden than look for a reason to pass it on to someone else." I took a breath, and looked over at the villagers. "I won't jeopardize my future, or the future of my friends, because I can't let go of something. It may be painful, we may have to carry it with us and learn from it when we can, but eventually there comes a time when we have to move forward and make decisions based on what is right in the present. It's time to move on, Bev."

As the rest of my friends looked on with the growing realization that I hadn't betrayed them after all, I saw Bev struggling with some internal conflict. Here, at this last and most egregious loss of control, it seemed like a tiny piece of her soul fled her body. I was forced to consider that not only was it a horrible loss, but that it was a loss delivered by a person about whom she had clearly once cared deeply, and whatever else I felt for her, I felt bad about that.

Her demeanor changed in an instant, becoming more solid, wet concrete finally settling after a week spent lying under the hot sun. For all her backstabbing and conniving, I could see how it important it had been to her that I'd abandoned our project. Spending these last two weeks had turned her into white hot steel, ready to be bent in another direction by the metal clamps of logic and emotion, the only time steel could ever be changed without shattering. But now the matter was closed, and I had chosen my side. The wrong side. The steel plunged into a trough of ice cold water and Bev cooled and hardened, not transformed by the experience in any way, simply a more adamantine piece of the same metal.

"Let everyone go," I said. "Let them return to the real world and start their new lives. If you do, I'll give you the composition of the antidote. If you don't, you'll be dead in twenty-four hours."