In The Afterlight

“The cure is not a punishment if it saves the lives of the kids born after us. They should never have to experience what we went through. Did you ever stop and think about them before you tried to burn the research?”

“Of course I did! But this cure you keep talking about? It’s not a cure—it’s a painful, invasive procedure that only helps the kids who have gone through the change. It doesn’t do a damn thing for the others who were never going to survive.”

“Try again,” I said. “I’ve gotten much better at detecting your bullshit.”

He ran an angry hand back through his dark hair in frustration. “You need to be focusing your energy on finding out the cause—it isn’t a virus, that much Leda figured out. It has to be something in the environment, something that was tainted...”

Whether or not he realized it now, he’d walked right into the trap I’d hoped he would. I needed him to be talking and thinking about the cure. It would naturally lead to thoughts of his mother—what he had done to her, where we could find her.

“Now isn’t the time to change yourself to fit into the world,” Clancy said, his voice raw with whatever thoughts were storming beneath his skin. “You should be changing the world to accept you. To let you exist as you are, without being cut open and damaged.”

This was it—I felt the opening in the conversation as though the air had parted around us. He’d always been able to get what he wanted out of me by plucking and plucking and plucking at painful memories until I was too distraught or emotional to ward his advances off. I knew he was capable of losing his temper—I’d seen it too many times to think it was a rare occurrence—but I didn’t want anger. I wanted anguish, the kind I had seen on Nico’s face the instant he opened the photo of his younger self. When he reconnected with what they had done to him, Clancy would be as malleable as wet sand in my hands.

“If everything you say is true—that the cure is cruel and will change us—prove it.”

That brought him up short. “How?”

“Show me. Prove it to me that it’s as terrible as you say. I have absolutely zero reason to take your word for it, considering your stellar record of telling the truth.”

The look of hope on his face turned sour. “Years of research and information isn’t enough for you? I already gave you everything I had.”

“Yes, on Thurmond. On the Leda research program. Not about this.”

“Ah.” Clancy began to pace, running his fingers along the glass wall separating us. “So you want to see for yourself? If you can’t take my word, how can you trust my memory? Even those can be faked, as you yourself know.”

“I can tell the difference,” I said, realizing with a shock of awareness that I actually could.

The memory from the other day. The one he’d used to show me how to log into his server and pull all of those files. It had felt different because it was different. It was pure imagination on his part. That was why I’d been able to step into it, interact as myself with what was happening rather than reenact what had happened as the person I was reading. There’d been a different texture to the whole experience.

“You did figure it out. Well done.” Clancy sounded pleased. “Memory and imagination are two different beasts, processed and handled in different ways by the mind. All of those times you replaced someone’s memories, planted an idea in their head—you didn’t realize you were doing several different things at once, did you?”

Was I? Until now, I’d taken everything I could do in stride, done what had felt natural. Maybe it was pointless because hopefully I’d one day be rid of them and the terror they held for me, but...shouldn’t I at least make more of an effort to understand exactly what I was doing and how?

“You’re stalling,” I reminded him.

“No, just waiting for you,” he said quietly. “If you want to see it, if this is the only way to prove it to you, then...it’s fine.”

I tested his defenses with a brush of my mind against his. But he was waiting, and the moment I closed my eyes and tried to touch his mind with mine, it was like he’d reached out a hand to guide me in. I was pulled through the gauzy layers of stained memories, catching a face here, a sound there. Clancy possessed a highly organized mind. It was like running down a winding hallway of windows, each offering a tantalizing look inside. Or walking down the aisle of a library, searching for the right book, and only glimpsing the other titles as you quickly passed.

The images began to smear, dripping down like ink on a wet page. The colors morphed and merged and then, with the force of a blow to the chest, settled. I was thrown into a memory so solid I could feel the cold, metal table biting at my already stiff skin. Blinking several times to clear the halo of light around my vision, I felt myself try to strain up, only to be jerked back down by the black straps pinning my wrists and ankles. There were no layers of fabric covering me, not even a blanket—only wires and electrodes, exploding out of my head and chest like a bursting cocoon.

The men and women in white coats swarmed the table I’d been laid out on, their voices buzzing around my head. They pulled wires off my skull, replaced them with new ones, touched everywhere—everywhere—forced my eyelids open roughly to shine a blinding light there. I could hear their quiet jokes and murmurs, see the outlines of their smiles behind their paper masks.

He had shown me a memory like this once, back when we were at East River. It had been horrifying to watch, even more so to realize that it was taking place in a part of the Infirmary I recognized by sight. But the simple truth was, the stronger the memory—the stronger the feelings associated with it—the clearer everything became. I knew now that when I heard something, smelled something, felt something in a memory, it was because it had been burnt so deeply into that person’s mind, it had left a scar.