Burn (16 page)

Ilyf's light was still on when she got home. Lona waited to hear a cry of relief, or a scream of anger. Some outburst over how sick to death worried Ilyf and Gamb had been. The stony glare Ilyf gave her when she opened the door to Ilyf's office was even worse.

“That was a crappy thing to do.” She folded her arms in front of her chest. “You were gone for hours.”

“I'm sorry. I got  …  distracted.”

“I got scared.”

“I should have called.”

The conversation was interrupted by a deep, pig-like snuffling. Gamb had fallen asleep, still in his clothes and shoes, sprawled across the futon along the wall of Ilyf's office.

“He came in to help me stay awake,” Ilyf explained. “He fell asleep in ten minutes.” Gamb snored again, and then, in his sleep, chortled loudly. “He's like a human sound machine. I don't know why I told him he could come with me.”

“With you?”

“To New York. Company headquarters – they want to actually meet me face to face and Gamb asked if he could take advantage of the free hotel room. Didn't I tell you this?”

She probably had, and Lona would have remembered if she hadn't been so absorbed in her own life. “You probably did.”

“Anyway. Gamb really wanted to go. Said he'd never been to New York. At least, not as himself, only as Julian. We're leaving tomorrow.”

“Fun.”

“If by fun you mean horrible,” Ilyf said, but she was looking affectionately in Gamb's direction. “What do you think he dreams about?”

“I don't know. Unicorns and whoopee cushions?”

“Probably. I don't dream at all.”

“Really?” Lona was surprised. She wished she could have Gamb's dreams instead of her own. But if the alternative was to go to sleep and see nothing but blackness, she wasn't sure which one she would choose.

“I haven't. Ever. I don't know if it's because my brain is too logical, that I like to solve problems, not invent false realities. Or if it's because of Julian. Maybe I would have dreamed if I'd had a different path.” She shrugged and gestured to her screen. “Maybe that's what this project is. Maybe it explains why some of us dream and some of us don't—” Gamb snored again. “And why some of us can finish all three boxes of cereal but instead of throwing them away, leave them on top of the refrigerator so the next person doesn't know we're out until they try to have breakfast.”

Lona smiled, but she was looking at the screen Ilyf had just gestured to. It didn't have the familiar coding that usually ran across Ilyf's monitor. It had the empty blinking box. Ilyf was looking at the Julian Compact again. Lona had forgotten about it until now, but Ilyf probably hadn't. Ilyf was so good at unlocking things. It had probably nagged at her for days that she couldn't unlock this file.

“No luck?”

“I think it's numeric. Only because the prompt asks for the eight security
digits
– and if it accepted letters too, then it would have asked for security
characters
instead. But beyond that, no. Usually I could run a program that would try out passwords automatically – go through numerical combinations starting with eight zeros and moving all the way up to eight nines. But this system only gives you ten tries before it locks you out for good.”

“How many have you tried so far?” Lona asked.

Ilyf looked embarrassed. “Six. I tried sequential numbers, then sequential numbers in reverse order, then the date of the Julian Path's founding. Then I thought that maybe it was a date, but a less obscure one. So I tried Christmas and Independence Day and – what was the other one? Anyway. I've tried six. I'm sorry for using so many up.”

Lona shrugged. “You don't have to apologize. This is your mystery, not mine.” She had enough mysteries already. She had a whole family of mysteries.
She had a whole family
. She thought about telling Ilyf everything that had happened that day. About Zinedine, who also went by Zinny, who also went by Ned. Who stabbed herself in the stomach when she was pregnant and who then disappeared. Ilyf would probably be better at coming up with a plan than Lona would on her own, with her orderly mind and obsessive work ethic.

But if she was going to tell anyone, she wanted it to be Fenn first. She always told Fenn first. She had for her entire life. She felt now for her phone in her pocket. While she was driving home from Maggie's, in a moment of either weakness or strength, she'd dialed his number. It had gone straight to voicemail, but that had been before midnight, when the library still would have been open. She bet that's where he was. It would be just like Fenn to cap off his first week of classes by studying at the library.

“Why do you think it's locked, though?” Ilyf was still staring at the screen, moving her cursor back and forth in the empty space, as if she could will the right digits into existence. “The other programs are all kinds of weird things. But none of them are locked up.”

“Maybe that's just where they keep all of the proprietary technology or something boring like that,” Lona said. She was having a hard time focusing on the conversation. She really was desperate to call Fenn. Now it was after midnight; the library would be closing and his phone would be turned back on. She could picture him walking back to his dorm, his curly hair wild, the way it got when he'd been studying and running his fingers through it. She could picture him opening the door to the boys' dorm they'd toured, and then – and then she didn't know. She had no idea what his room looked like, whether he'd hung anything on the walls, if he had a view of the green or the pond or the street. She had no idea what the campus tasted like to him today. The realization suddenly filled her with emptiness. She pulled her phone out again. Zero missed calls.

“Ilyf, why didn't you try my phone if you were worried? I'm not showing any missed calls.”

Ilyf looked embarrassed. She slid her hands under her legs and sat on them. “I promised Fenn I wouldn't.”

“You promised – what?” Ilyf had talked to Fenn? About her? “When did he call?”

“Tonight.” Ilyf still looked uncomfortable. “A couple hours before you got home. We didn't only talk about you. But since we were already on the phone, I told him we were taking care of you – that we were making sure you were eating and stuff. And I mentioned that you'd been out for a really long time, and I was starting to get worried, and I was going to call you if you were too much later. And he told me not to.”

“He told you not to?”

“Not to call, and not to worry. He said you'd made it clear what you wanted.”

“Oh.”

This is what she'd asked for. This was Fenn giving her everything she wanted. But she couldn't help but feel stunned. She could have been in danger, and he'd told Ilyf not to worry about her. He didn't even worry himself. “What else did you talk about?” She tried to sound neutral. “Did he sound okay?”

“He did, actually.” Ilyf wrinkled her nose. “Are you sure you want to hear about this?”

“Of course I do. We're still friends.”

“Okay. He sounded good. He was with, um, people. They were out getting pizza. We didn't talk long – the restaurant was loud.”

Lona knew exactly what pizza place it would have been. She and Fenn had passed it on their way to campus. It had scuffed wooden tables and a mural on the wall. Students had been inside, laughing; Fenn had reached out and taken her hand.

She still needed to call him, though. Despite what Ilyf had just told her, she couldn't believe that he wouldn't want to know what had happened to her today. This was bigger than their argument – this was what could end their argument.

“I'm going to – I'll just be—”

“Go.” Ilyf waved her out of the room and immediately turned back to her computer.

In the kitchen, she dialed his number again. The phone rang this time; he'd turned it back on. She held her breath – three rings, and then a click. He'd picked up.

“Fenn?” she said, before he could say anything. “Fenn, are you there?”

“It's Lona,” she heard him say. What was he talking about? Of course it was her. But why was he saying it like that, in the third person?

“Fenn?” she said again. The connection must be bad. He didn't respond to his name.

“Hello?” he said. And then, “I can't hear her – all I can hear is static.”

She could hear him fine, though. He must have left the restaurant. There was none of the background noise Ilyf had described. There was only one other voice. A girl's, a familiar one.

“Can we go home now, Fenn?” the girl asked. “It's late. We've been driving around for hours.”

“Okay. Just let me call her back once. It's probably better if I don't tell her what we're doing, though. Can you stay quiet? I'm glad you're here with me tonight. I needed—”

The phone went staticky on Lona's end too, his words dissolving into crackles. The girl's voice. It had been Jessa's, Lona was almost sure of it.

She leaned against the doorframe, trying to keep from throwing up. Apple-cheeked Jessa, pinchable Jessa, the tour guide, who arranged New Year's Eve lunches and who was so very helpful to Fenn. Who was cute and friendly and deliciously normal. What were they doing that required driving alone, and why was it better for Lona not to know about it?

Nothing was open now. The pizza place would have been closed. There was no reason for Fenn to be out driving around with a strange girl.
Not strange to him
, she reminded herself, forcing the words like vinegar in a wound.
Not strange to him anymore
.

Her hand vibrated. She looked down. Fenn was calling her back. She could pick it up and yell at him. She could pick it up and cry. Or ask him what Jessa's hair smelled like, or whether she knew the taste game, or if she had seen his dorm room. Before she could figure out what to say, her phone went to voicemail.

“Lona, it's Fenn.” She winced at the familiarity of his voice in the message. As if she would ever need him to identify himself by name. “I saw that you called, and—”

She pressed the delete key. It was painful enough to hear him. She didn't need to subject herself to hearing him lie.

“Do you think I'm a bad person?”

The flamehaired boy spoke so softly she wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly at first. They were back in the room. He'd taken her there as soon as she'd asked, and he'd remembered to bring the ginger ale, and he'd sat it carefully on the desk. He looked away from her when he said it, which was unusual. He never looked away. He always looked too close, if anything. His looks usually felt too much like peering.

She didn't know how to answer his question. The smart thing to do was to tell him no. Of course he was a good person, of course he was. He was a good person, and he probably knew that the right thing to do was let her go.

Hypothesis:
He didn't want to hear the smart thing. He wanted to hear the truth.

“I woke up in this room weeks ago for reasons I didn't understand, and you kept me here without explaining anything. That doesn't seem like something a good person would do,” she said flatly. “And you scare me. And that doesn't seem like an emotion a good person would make me feel. But those are both circumstantial fragments of evidence. I'm a scientist. We don't deal with circumstantial evidence. I don't have any proof either way.”

He nodded morosely. For once he looked exactly as young as he was. Like a dejected teenager. Like he could have been upset about a rejection from the basketball team, or a homecoming date. Like she should pat him on the shoulder. Not quite that. But almost.

“I'm more interested in why you asked me that question,” she said carefully. The question felt like playing therapist. She was nobody's therapist.

“Downstairs,” he said. “Downstairs you remembered something you did and it made you feel bad.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Because the thing that I did was a bad thing. So it made me feel bad.” When a response didn't come, she pressed on. “Are you saying that you don't feel bad when you do bad things? Do you  …  feel good?”

He sighed, and briefly rested his head in his hands, his palms flat on his forehead. “I don't feel good,” he said. “But I don't feel bad, either. Sometimes it's hard for me to feel at all. Sometimes I think that's why I do the things that I do. Because I want to see how they make other people feel. Because I hope they'll help me feel something, too.”

“I remember that my mother used to knit.” She didn't know why she was telling him this.

The boy cocked his head to the side. “Pardon?”

“Badly. Not for long. She was going to make scarves one Christmas. She ran out of patience and ended up buying everyone scarves instead, then she got annoyed that the knitting needles and supplies and everything cost more than the finished ones from the department store.”

She shook her head in frustration. “Why do I remember that? Why do I remember all the normal things about my childhood? Soccer, and my father, and my mother – and remember so little about where I was before I was in this room?”

“When we were downstairs, it sounded like you thought you were starting to remember.”

She had been enclosed by panic downstairs. Panic, and guilt and revulsion. At what she was seeing, and at herself, for doing something bad. That particular cocktail of emotions. That's what had felt familiar, what had led her to remember something. That emotion was her last memory, before her world went soupy for years and years, before she woke up in a room with a boy whose hair looked like fire.

“I think I was remembering a feeling,” she said. “I was remembering being a part of this. Not exactly what you showed me downstairs. But like you said. Another project. I remembered very small fragments of that other project.”

Another memory. It ripped through her suddenly, viscerally. A very tactile memory. She remembered opening her mouth. Forming her lips to say something deeply personal and strangely joyous, in the middle of all of the chaos. “And most of all,” she said. “I remember a name.”