HAPTER TWO
“Well! I believe that’s the twitchiest I’ve ever seen that man’s mouth. Normally, he wears an expression closer to a stern, serious scowl. Hardly ever even shows the tiniest hint of a smile.”
Irene’s own mouth was more than a bit twitchy as she looked at me, awaiting my response to what she’d said.
Face still hot and mind still going in a few different directions, I just shrugged, trying to play it cool. “Well... well, that’s...”
I had no idea what it was.
“That’s fine, I guess.”
Irene chuckled. “Warm body, full belly high wear off already? Getting a little flustered has a funny way of doing that, but you shouldn’t feel bad at all. It’s a well-known fact that Commander Wallace has quite a flustering effect on most women. Even some of us older gals can feel a little thrown off-balance by him sometimes.”
She chuckled, and I tried to politely join in, though I had difficulty mustering much more than a feeble ha ha. Suddenly, I was tired. Profoundly, bone-weary tired. So tired that the act of blinking now felt like a grueling chore. Considering how cold I’d been, and then how hungry, I wasn’t surprised in the least by the extreme in feeling.
Irene immediately seemed to notice my flagging energy, got up, and extended a hand. “Come on. I’ll help you back to your room. An hour or two awake at a time is all most young women are able to handle for a few days after thawing.”
Far too tired to ask precisely what she meant by “thawing,” I took her hand, stifling a yawn. “Just a catnap. That’s all I need.”
My “catnap” ended up lasting seven-and-a-half hours. But unlike the last time I’d slept, or had been unconscious or whatever, this time the experience wasn’t like floating through a void of blackness or nothingness. This time, I dreamed. I dreamed of slowly descending through the air, two twin lakes of dark blue water beneath me. But when I neared the lakes, they began shrinking, becoming Commander Wallace’s black-lashed, midnight blue eyes. I dreamed some variation of this strange dream several times.
When I awoke, it was just after nine in the evening, and Irene asked if I was hungry. I asked if there was any soup left, and when she responded in the affirmative, I said that just a single bowlful this time would be perfectly fine.
“I’m a little hungry, but my half-a-cow hunger seems to have been a one-time thing, fortunately.”
Also fortunately, my stomach had seemed to flatten itself right out while I’d been sleeping. Or, at least as flat as it normally was, which was flattish, with a small, soft curve. It struck me as funny that I could remember the usual state of my stomach but not my own name. While she marked a page in a book she’d been reading at my bedside, I told Irene this, running a hand over my more or less flat stomach.
She got up from her chair, setting her book on a tray table. “You’re still drawing a blank on your name?”
“Yes. I really don’t have a clue. And shouldn’t I have a clue by now? I’ve been awake for a full day now, so it seems like if I’m really going to regain my memory, something should be happening by now.”
Earlier in the day when I’d been in the bathroom, I’d taken a good, long look at my face in the mirror, and despite it being completely familiar, despite me knowing that it was my face, it still hadn’t led to any revelations about myself. Which had felt indescribably odd, not to mention frustrating.
Irene said that a full day wasn’t nearly a long enough length of time to have had any major recollections. “Not to mention that you’ve been fast asleep for most of the day.”
“Well, I wish I could at least remember my name.”
“Well, tell you what. How about you stay here and continue resting and thinking while I head down to the lounge and heat up our soup and maybe some chicken for our dinner? If, by the time I come back to get you, you still haven’t been able to recall your name, how about I just tell it to you?”
I gasped, stunned. “You mean you know it? You’ve known it all this time?”
Irene fought a grin. “Yep.”
“Well, why haven’t you told it to me?”
“Well, Dr. Moore thinks it’s best if a patient recalls her name herself, or at least gives it a bit of time before giving up and being told. Something about the recollection of the name giving the patient ‘subconscious confidence’ in trying to recall other personal details going forward. But me, personally, I don’t think it makes too awful much difference. So, if you want to keep it as our little secret, I’ll tell you when I come back to get you, if you still can’t remember it by then.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Irene left, and I began wracking my brain, but when she returned maybe fifteen minutes later, I was still clueless, and I told her so.
“I just still can’t remember.”
“Well, dear, do you even have any ideas?”
“Well...”
Chewing my lip, I turned my gaze to the front of the room, thinking hard. A TV hung in one corner, and on the front of it, the name Belvedere, presumably the manufacturer’s name, was printed in small silver lettering. Beneath the TV sat a white hamper marked laundry in what appeared to be black magic marker. On the wall behind it, a gold thumbtack held a shiny laminated sign that read House rule for all patients: If your nurse has asked you to remain in bed, please remain in bed!
In a sort of a daze, I stared at these items. I was still drowsy and just generally feeling kind of out of it, and it was as if my brain just did not want to work, no matter how hard I tried to force it to do so. And the more I did, the more kind of out of it I felt.
After a few long moments, I turned back to Irene, still drawing a blank. “Is my name... is it... Belvedere... laundry house... en? Belvedere Laundryhousen?
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I realized how absolutely ridiculous they sounded.
Throwing her head back, Irene howled with laughter, not stopping until she’d had several good howls, and only then to wipe her eyes. “No. No, my dear, your name is actually not Belvedere Laundryhousen.”
She began laughing again, holding her sides.
I shrugged, glad at least Commander Wallace wasn’t around to hear my terrible guess. “Just a wild stab. Just grasping at straws, I guess.”
Just then, Irene’s cellphone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket, still chuckling, and answered it.
After listening for a few moments, she began speaking. “Oh, she’s doing just fine. Cracking me up, actually. Thinks her name might be ‘Belvedere Laundryhousen.’”
Somehow, I just knew who she was talking to, and I just knew it wasn’t Dr. Moore.
While Irene chuckled, I got out of bed, jammed my feet into some slippers, and threw my pale pink bathrobe on before stalking over to the doorway, face flaming. “Thank you ever so much for that, Irene. I’ll be in the lounge.”
By the time I’d stomped down there, I was no longer irritated, just tired again. I fell asleep with my head on the table before Irene even joined me. I awoke long enough to have a few bites of a baked chicken breast, a bite of a roll, and a spoonful of soup before shuffling back down to my room with her.
Once there, despite my lethargy, I realized I felt grungy and went into the bathroom for a shower. When I emerged, I was having a hard time just keeping my eyes open. However, I perked up a bit when Irene, who was standing at the window with the blinds pulled up, motioned for me to come over.
“Do you want to see where you are? Now that it’s dark out, I don’t think it’ll hurt your eyes to look.”
Curious, I padded over, looked out, and saw a sea of glittering white lights all around us and beneath us. I couldn’t tell what floor we were on exactly, but we were somewhere pretty high up.
Beside me, Irene spoke while also gazing out the window. “This is Draconia City, our capitol. We call it DC for short, though not to be confused with the Washington, D.C., that I’m sure you’re familiar with, and that I myself have read about in the old history books. This DC actually used to be NYC, which is to say, New York City before the Great Dragon War. That was when New York City was virtually razed to the ground by all the fighting. We basically had to rebuild everything from scratch. All roads, buildings, everything. Even the big landmarks like the Statue of Liberty were destroyed.”
Literally too perplexed and disconcerted for words, I continued looking out the window mutely, noticing that to our left and upward, some of the bright white lights seemed to form a sort of a curve or some other shape that I couldn’t quite make out. Or maybe it was multiple buildings connected somehow. I couldn’t really tell if the building we were in was one of them.
Irene seemed to notice my noticing, and gestured to the massive curved structure, whatever it was, in the distance. “We’re in the UFS Arch right now, also known as just The Arch. Stone and steel exterior, seventy stories on each side that meet in a curve in the middle; all floors are thousands of square feet of usable space because gradations in the floor levels offset the curve on the highest levels... it’s a miracle of engineering and architecture. Maybe even one to rival the architectural marvels folks had pre-Great War.
It’s also the tallest building in DC, and that’s because of what it is. It not only houses Commander Wallace’s residence, his ‘White House,’ so to speak; it also houses his entire staff, all his top men and their families, UFS General Hospital where we are here on the twentieth floor, and the ten floors below us. There’s also Commander Wallace’s cabinet room, and his ‘war room,’ and restaurants, and shopping, and several indoor parks, and... oh, just about anything else you might imagine inside a big city.
It’s a big city within a big city, actually... DC is the largest in the CFS now, with a population of a million people. Though, I bet that’s nowhere near the size of big cities as you remember them. But it’s big for us, considering there are only several million people who live in the CFS.”
Staring out and up at the twinkling lights of The Arch, I felt like I was possibly on some weird drug trip, even though I had a vague sense that I’d never actually done drugs before and therefore, really didn’t know what they felt like. But I felt more than a little drugged-out nonetheless.
I just couldn’t wrap my brain around any of the strange things Irene was saying, and my extreme tiredness wasn’t helping, either. I certainly felt like I was missing something, something big and profound, something that would make it all make sense. I needed answers of some sort, obviously, so I knew I’d better start asking questions.
After a few more seconds staring at the lights, thinking, I turned my gaze to Irene. “What is the CFS you’ve spoken about? And what is the USF?”
“The CFS stands for the Confederation of Free States. That’s what our nation is called now, not America or the United States. And who we’re free from is the Gorgolians. They are who we fought against in the Great War hundreds of years ago, and who we’ve been pretty much constantly fighting ever since.
You see, they ripped our nation apart… and really, they ripped the whole world apart in a way. The whole world is now, essentially, what used to be called North America. It’s the only place on earth where there were survivors after whatever nuclear event happened that killed billions of people across the globe. It created the dragons, and then caused the Great Dragon War, which was for territory.
The Gorgolians, who, for the most part, are dragons with dark hearts and evil ways, settled in what used to be Canada, but is now just called GL, or Gorgolian Land or territory. That wasn’t enough for them, though, and the Great War began. They took the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and a big chunk of New York State before we were finally able to hold them off at length and finally keep them from gaining any more new territory.
That’s why we have so much trouble here in DC, fending off new attacks. We’re kind of on the ‘divider line’ of the United Free States and Gorgolian territory. I do love our city, but sometimes it’s a dangerous place to be. Don’t worry, though... you’re safe here in The Arch.”
I stood there, mind-blown. There was no other way to describe it. With every single thing Irene said, I felt like I understood more and more, yet somehow less and less. For some reason, maybe my extreme tiredness, the surreal feeling I was experiencing just seemed to grow stronger and stronger.
After a brief pause to study my face in the dim light coming in through the window, Irene continued. “Anyway... you also asked about the UFS. That stands for the United Federation of Shifters. It’s kind of like our army, with Commander Wallace at the helm. He’s commander and chief of the ‘army’ and our entire nation, the CFS.
Which, by the way, we still call all the different states we still have control over by their old names. The Gorgolians don’t. They renamed all the states they claimed and all the Canadian provinces they took over. And they renamed them awful, ugly names—typical of them. That’s just the kind of shifters they are, though. Awful and ugly.”
“What are shifters?”
“Oh, I haven’t explained that yet, have I? Shifters are men who have the ability to turn into dragons at will. It’s kind of like what in your time was probably called magic. Now it’s just so commonplace to us to look out the window and see a man shift right into a huge dragon. They don’t even have to remove their clothes to do it. Their clothes just magically shift with them. Maybe you’ll be able to look out the window and see it tomorrow if Commander Wallace and his men take to the skies.”
“You mean...? Wait. Commander Wallace is a... you mean, he’s a...?”
Irene smiled. “Yes. He’s a dragon shifter. As are all his men. There are several thousand shifters in the UFS, and several thousand more Gorgolian shifters. Their shifters actually outnumber ours, unfortunately. And that’s on account of the fact that they’re immortal, or, sort of immortal, anyway. The Gorgolian shifters don’t die of old age or disease like our men do. They can only be killed in battle. As best we can figure, whatever nuclear reaction created shifters in the first place, it just affected them differently.
“Oh, and I should probably tell you that as well, if you didn’t pick it up before, that’s how shifters were created. By the nuclear blast, apparently. No one now really knows specifically how or why, if anyone ever did. All we know is that the nuclear event that happened hundreds of years ago somehow created shifters. Their sons become shifters, too, at about age sixteen, and every once in a very, very blue moon, a boy born by a woman having relations with a non-shifter father turns out to be a shifter—probably some latent mutation in normal human DNA.
That’s what happened to Commander Wallace. A DNA test confirmed that he was indeed the child of the man his mother said was his father—and that man was definitely not a shifter—but somehow, Commander Wallace got the latent gene.”
Suddenly, the surreality was too much for me. Listening to Irene talk about shifters had become literally dizzying.
Head spinning, I grabbed the windowsill, trying not to look out at the glimmering lights beyond, knowing that would probably make my dizziness worse. “Sorry. Just feeling a little off-balance here.”
Irene immediately hooked an arm around my shoulders and began leading me over to the bed. “Time for you to get some sleep. You’ve done amazingly well today, and there will be plenty of time later for more questions and explanations.”
Once in bed, my eyes closed right away, seemingly of their own accord. I heard Irene click off the soft light above the head of the bed, and then I heard her voice in a near-whisper.
“Goodnight, Vivian Jane Mason. That’s your name. Remembering the rest is going to be up to you, because that’s all the information you young women come with—just a name. Sweet dreams, my dear.”
I’d forgotten all about Irene’s promise to tell me my name. Now I turned it over in my mind, wondering how I could have ever forgotten it. It felt as familiar and as comfortable as a well-worn pair of jeans. My name was Vivian. Of course. I fell asleep smiling a little.
***
The next day, after breakfast, followed by an immediate lengthy nap, and then lunch, followed by an immediate lengthy nap, Irene came into my room and asked if I was up for a visitor. Right away, my stomach seemed to start churning, even while at the same time, it did some sort of a funny little flip. In my sleepy stupor, I’d forgotten all about Commander Wallace coming to see me.
With my mouth suddenly a bit dry, I mechanically moved my head in a nod. “I guess I’m up for a visitor. I guess that’s fine.”
Irene gave me a little smile. “Good. I’ll go tell him.”
The moment she left the room, I began smoothing my hair with my hands, despite the fact that I’d already thoroughly brushed it while standing in front of the bathroom mirror just a few minutes earlier, when I’d awoken to find that my long hair had become almost impossibly tangled during my nap.
Commander Wallace just seemed to be that kind of man—the kind who could make a woman reach to smooth her hair even though she’d just recently brushed it. I’d just finished making sure every strand was in place when he walked through the doorway, again in his black boots and black military uniform like he’d been wearing the day before.
There was something about this uniform, and the long, hard body beneath it, combined with his impossibly handsome face, that nearly left me breathless at first glance. The funny churning-flipping feeling in my stomach instantly became a feeling of dozens of butterflies rapidly flapping their wings. Trying to ignore this sensation, I made myself offer Commander Wallace what I hoped was a completely cool, calm, and collected-looking smile.
He returned the small, polite smile and took a seat in a metal folding chair by my bedside. “I just wanted to say hello and check in. How are you feeling?”
His voice was rich and deep, and it only intensified my butterflies. I tried not to let it show when I answered, in what I hoped was a normal-sounding, measured voice.
“Oh, I’m fine. Still a little tired, but well otherwise.”
“Good.”
His eyes were the deepest, darkest shade of navy blue I’d ever seen. I couldn’t remember anything else about my past, but somehow, I knew that for certain. I’d never seen eyes like his before. While I looked into them, feeling as if I was almost falling into them, like I’d done in my dreams, and while he looked into my own eyes, a long moment of silence ticked by. It was a moment just a hair too long. It made me feel the need to say something. Anything.
“I’m sorry about my... my distended stomach yesterday.”
I could have banged my head against the tray table at the foot of my bed for blurting that out. Even though I was kind of sorry that Commander Wallace had to see me in the state I’d been in. He didn’t appear horrified by what I’d just blurted, though. Like they had then in the staff lounge the day before, his full lips twitched with just a hint of amusement.
“A woman should never apologize for enjoying a good meal. Especially a woman who’d been so long without one.”
For some reason, the butterflies in my stomach began flapping their wings even harder. It was what he’d said, and how he was now sitting that had seemed to do it. He was sitting forward, elbows on knees, which made his broad shoulders appear even broader. It was also the way this manner of sitting was causing him to look up into my eyes, since I was sitting on the bed.
However, I forced myself to try to disregard this new wave of butterflies. And that was because what he’d said had made me think of something.
“Yeah... about that. About me apparently not having had a meal in a really long time. I don’t know how else to say this, but... do you mind telling me exactly what happened to me? It seems I have amnesia, and it seems that I’ve been... I don’t know, hurt or sick for a very long time or something. And although Irene’s told me some things about this place... about where I am in the world, and what this world apparently is... I still don’t know how I got here. I still don’t know anything about how that happened, or who I am, or who I was, or...or anything. So, do you know anything about that? Do you know what happened to me?”
With his expression now completely sober, Commander Wallace sat up straight. “Well... yes. Yes, I do. And I’ll tell you everything right now.”