Burn (22 page)

Zinedine ignored Lona's sarcasm. “I remember my work. Parts of it. I remember developing the Julian Path. I remember the fights we had. About dumb things. Things that seemed so important, like whether Julian should be seen cursing in the Path. I thought he should – that removing the curse words from the Path used up money and technology we could have better spent elsewhere. Warren said that the general public would find him more likable if he didn't.”

“Warren?” Lona started at the sound of his name being spoken with affection. “Were you friends with him?”

Zinedine didn't answer, so Lona talked louder. “Warren said you broke the rules.” That's what the hospital aide had written, in big, loopy print.
Ned Broke the Rules
. Warren's sad memory.

“I suppose I broke a lot of the rules.” She gestured to the room that surrounded them as if to say
I wouldn't be in here if I hadn't broken the rules.
“Trying to steal research that belonged to the Path – broken rule, even if it was my work to begin with. Destroying the evidence of that research – broken rule. Broken rules everywhere.

“In Warren's mind, the biggest broken rule was probably the fact that I stopped believing. That would have been more than a broken rule to him. That would have been a betrayal.”

“You stopped believing?” The phrasing irritated her. It sounded so reductive. Believing. That word was used with Santa Claus. With the Tooth Fairy. It was a fantasy word, but this wasn't a fantasy. “Believing in what? In the Path?” Zinedine nodded. “Why?”

“Because of you.”

Zinedine said the words so simply. An honesty that reminded Lona, in some intangible but real way, of the bare honesty with which Fenn spoke. “Because I wasn't supposed to get pregnant with you, and when I did, it wasn't supposed to change me. But it did. Because I couldn't imagine not having you. Because for all the ways I knew I would be a bad mother – that I was going to work too late and let you crawl around in an un-baby-proofed lab – I still wanted to be your mother. Once I believed that, I couldn't imagine taking away children from other people. Not the way we were going to. Not from the people who wanted to keep them.”

“I thought you didn't remember me,” Lona whispered. She was afraid to move. Zinedine was still, too.

“They let me touch you.” Zinedine's voice was barely above a murmur.

“When?”

“Before they took you from me. They let me touch your hair. It was so soft. I forgot about that. Until you were sick today and I was doing it again. It was
so soft
.”

Lona shook her head, blinking back the tears forming in her eyes. This was the tender memory she'd wanted from Zinedine. But to have it now, with everything that had happened in the past sixteen hours, was so complicated. She could see that Zinedine was hoping for something from her now. A hug? A smile? She couldn't make herself respond in that way yet, though. Not after their first meeting had been so strange. She needed to stay focused.

“Warren was mad because he thought you were going to recommend shutting down the Path,” she said firmly, keeping herself from too much emotion. “The program you designed.”

Zinedine opened and closed her mouth, swallowing whatever hurt she felt because of Lona's dismissal.

“He must have thought I betrayed him in so many ways,” she said finally. “Abandoned all of my scientific principles.”

“You sound like you're sorry. For what you did.”

“In some ways. As strange as it sounds. We were a small team back then. And Warren – his son had just died. He was – I can't even describe it. He was an entity of pain. It just – it just sort of emanated off him. I know you can't possibly understand. Not after the things he ended up doing. But I loved him, and in the beginning, at least, I would have done anything for him.”

Suddenly the words Zinedine was saying seemed to come out of her mouth in slow motion, landing heavily on Lona's ears. Her mother had loved Warren. Would have done anything for him. They were a small team. That's what Jeremy had said, too. That's why he'd always thought Lona's father was Zinedine's lab partner. Because Zinedine was always working. Except Zinedine hadn't mentioned Edward Lowell a single time.

“He was my father, wasn't he?”

Zinedine's face froze, a plaster mask. “What?” she asked, but Lona knew she'd understood every word.

“Warren. Is my father. He was married, but you had an affair.”

Zinedine had begun shaking her head back and forth midway through Lona's last sentence, and she was still shaking it now. “No no no no no,” she said.

“You can tell me,” Lona said. “What does it matter – you don't have to protect him anymore. He's in a coma and he'll probably never wake up and realize that I'm his daughter.”

“I'm sorry, Lona, I thought you knew already,” Zinedine said. “Warren isn't your father. Your father is Julian.”

Lona tried to lean back in the chair, but the rungs didn't seem to be quite where they were supposed to be. Everything was off. Everything in the world had shifted just a few inches to the left.

“Julian,” she said, and the name came out like it was a nonsense word. “Julian is my father. That was the real rule you broke, wasn't it?”

“The first rule of any scientist. Don't get emotionally involved with your experiments.”

“Julian is my father?” The more times she said it, the more ridiculous it seemed.

“He didn't know,” Zinedine said quickly. “He knew I was pregnant, obviously, but he couldn't know that it turned out to be you. He wanted to get married – it was a very Midwestern chivalrous idea of what should happen when a girl got pregnant – but I wasn't interested. I told him I would leave if that's what it took to make him not feel like he had to commit to something out of guilt. And that's what he thought had happened, I'm sure. I left, to protect him.”

Zinedine was the person Julian referred to before he left at Christmas. That was his last relationship, almost twenty years ago. “But … ” Her words came out sluggishly, as they waited for her brain to process the information. “Julian? You were in love with Julian?”

Zinedine lifted her palms into scales, trying to weigh the truth of the statement. “In love? Not in love, though I probably thought so at the time. But I was spending twelve hours a day with him, and he was the only person close to my age.” She must have seen Lona's dismayed expression, because she amended her explanation. “He was kind, and he was easygoing, and unlike my colleagues, he didn't take himself too seriously, which was refreshing. And he liked me, and it happened, and I didn't regret it for a second. But, Lona – we never would have gotten married – even if nothing had happened to me. It wouldn't have been a neat little fairy tale.”

Of course it wouldn't have. Lona never got the neat little fairy tale. She only got the messy complexities.

Every day of her life, for sixteen years, was spent learning about her father. She knew his friends, and his school, and his teachers, because they were her friends, too. She remembered how he'd rearranged his room when he was nine, moving the bed to cover the crack where Nick had thrown a baseball. And the way, when his parents had discovered it, his dad laughed and showed him that the den sofa was covering up a rug stain from where a pen had exploded.

She knew everything about her father's life, because she had lived it.

“Are you okay?” Zinedine asked. She hadn't tried to touch Lona again, but she sounded worried.

“Did everyone know? All your coworkers?” How thorough had the betrayal been? When Warren had taken Lona away from her mother, did he know he was taking her away from her father, too? Warren and Julian were supposed to be friends. They were all supposed to be friends.

“I didn't tell anybody, but I feel like Warren suspected something. My parents knew I was seeing somebody, obviously, but they didn't know who. If they'd known what happened, they would have taken care of the baby.” She corrected herself. “They would have taken care of you.”

That's why the Architect had sent her to the Path center. All evidence of Zinedine's rule-breaking had to disappear. Putting Lona in the Julian Path was the only way to hide her. To replace her identity with a randomly issued set of letters. To ensure that nobody would find her because nobody would come looking. It was icy and calculating.

But it was also, perversely, kind. The Architect believed that the Path really did represent the perfect childhood experience. He'd placed Lona there, thinking that she would be cared for. He'd placed her there and she'd been with her father.

“Are you okay?” Zinedine asked again.

“I don't know.”

“That makes sense. I don't know if I'm okay either.” She smiled, nervously, and extended her hand toward Lona. She looked so hopeful. Lona reached out and took it, and Zinedine's eyes filled with tears.

“It was my hair?” Lona's own voice was shaking. “That's what helped you remember? It was really just touching my hair?”

Zinedine flushed red, looking embarrassed. “And one other thing, which sounds ridiculous, when I say it out loud. Superstitious and unbelievable.”

“Doesn't all of this sound unbelievable?”

“I remembered saying a name. I had a visceral memory of saying a name. When I was touching your hair, I wanted to say it again.”

“What was it?”

“The one I gave you. After my grandmother. Jane.”

Jane.
A four-letter response to Lona's deepest wishes. Her identity, given to her by the first person who ever touched her or loved her.

“Do you like it?”

Lona tried to speak, but couldn't for the lump in her throat. She nodded instead, leaning in closer to Zinedine, who wrapped her in her arms. She still smelled like verbena flowers, and the faint memory of home.

There was a strange rhythm to the next days. Zinedine spent them in a lab downstairs – it was a room that Lona hadn't seen, the one behind the white room where the experiment on the girl Katie had taken place. Buying their freedom, one molecule at a time. But it was hard for her – like dragging memories through mud, she said one evening when she returned, exhausted, at the end of a day of research. She might have been the one who designed the Julian Compact, but that was seventeen years and several lifetimes ago for her. She didn't remember doing it and she'd destroyed her own research notes. Now she was trying to replicate what she'd so carefully destroyed, for a cause she didn't believe in, for a daughter she'd just met.

“And it doesn't help that the only diluents I've been able to find that work with the active materials are dangerous, and flammable as hell,” she'd complained last night. “Even if I can get volunteers to retain their injected memories, what's the point if, while you're preparing for the injection, the syringe bursts into flames?”

Was it strange for Lona to feel happy, during this time? Not completely happy, of course. Still, during these short conversations with Zinedine, she couldn't help but marvel at the wonderful mundanity of being able to talk with her mother. About her work. About anything. About peanut butter and banana toast, which Lona loved and everyone else always thought was gross. Zinedine said it had been her favorite snack growing up.

But Lona's days were more nebulous than Zinedine's. She wasn't trying to design an injection, or minimize the fire risks of a liquid. Her only use was collateral use, a catalyst to Zinedine's productivity. She spent time reading, and pacing from one end of the apartment to the other. And most of all – though she was angry with him, though she didn't trust him, though she was afraid of him – she spent time with Harm.

He'd opened up the whole apartment for Lona and Zinedine, not just the bedroom Zinedine had been sleeping in. Now Lona had a living room, and a kitchen with chipped countertops, and a guard posted outside. Harm would come to visit and stay for hours, sometimes leaving when Zinedine came back upstairs at the end of the day, sometimes staying for a twisted tableau of family dinners.

The first time, he'd knocked on the door and handed her a bouquet of flowers. Carnations, red, something that you would buy in a hospital with a get-well-soon teddy bear.

“Did your etiquette book say flowers were a nice way to apologize for something?” Lona had asked. “Did it bother to mention that not imprisoning someone was also good etiquette?”

“I'm trying, Lona,” he said.

“You're always trying,” she spat back, but she let him in anyway, because it seemed better to have him here, in the apartment, than it did to have him alone doing things she couldn't see.

He wanted to impress her. It was the strangest thing, but she could tell, from the way he made a show of telling her things he'd read, or the way he liked to talk about how he was in charge of the work on the Compact. He brought her things, too. Not just flowers, but music or movies or, like today, a board game, one where the object was to travel around the board collecting various colored cards, all the while trying to send your opponent back to the beginning.

“Gray card.” She held her hand out. “I landed on ‘Color of your choice'.”

He searched the stack for a slate-colored square. “You're going to win this round.”

“It's mostly luck. Your turn now.”

He rolled the dice for longer than he needed to. “Zinedine calls you Jane sometimes.” The dice clattered on the board; one rolled onto the floor and Lona picked it up.

She tried to keep her voice even. “I guess she does.”

“Why?”

Because that's my real name.
Jane. She had whispered it to herself, practiced saying it as if it were an introduction.
Hello, it's nice to meet you. My name is Jane.
“Because it's what she would have called me. If she'd kept me. If I hadn't been in the Julian Path.”

“I know.” He landed on a square that required him to go back three spaces, but gave him an extra turn. “But it's not your name
now
.”

She wasn't sure how to answer. Harm could still be unpredictable and she didn't feel like arguing about something he couldn't possibly understand. “Is it raining outside? It sounds like water on the windows.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

She picked up the dice to hand them to Harm. “I'm changing the subject. There was probably something about that in your conversation book. How to gracefully change the subject when someone brings up something you don't want to talk about. Your turn.”

“You don't belong with Fenn.”

She froze, with the cool white cubes in her palm. “What did you say?”

“You said it was my turn. I was trying to change the subject.”

“I meant it was your turn in the game.”

“You and Fenn don't belong together. I could tell that when we were at Julian's house.” His glacier eyes were staring at her steadily.

“How would you know that?” Harm didn't know her – he'd spent a few weeks with her six months ago. She'd tried so hard not to mention Fenn here, not to give Harm any reason to know where she was weak.

“I know that because you're here. And Fenn isn't. Fenn is too afraid. He's boring.”

Lona stared down at the board, as if she were trying to plot her next move. Really, she was trying to take in what Harm had said.
Fenn is too afraid
. It was almost what she'd told him when they broke up – that he wanted normalcy too much. But Harm's interpretation was a perversion. She'd never thought of Fenn as afraid. He was brave in a different way – braver than her, even, for the way he was vulnerable, for the way his emotions were kept at the surface. And not boring. Simple isn't boring. Making a book of childhood photographs wasn't boring. Knowing when the night air tasted like peppermint and when it tasted like cloves wasn't boring.

For the first time since she'd become Harm's hostage, she allowed herself to think about Fenn, and when she thought about him, she missed him, and when she missed him, the feeling cut through to her tendons, to the bone. She should have listened to him that New Year's Eve on the porch, when he tried to tell her they were just having a fight, one that might look better in the morning. She should have listened to Gamb when he told her she was daring Fenn to leave. She should have given him the patience that he'd given her, instead of acting like the only way to pursue her mission was full speed.

“That made you upset, didn't it?” Harm had cocked his head to the side, a curious puppy. She didn't have the energy to explain human emotions to him, to watch him collect her feelings like specimens in a glass display box.

“No,” she lied. “But this game is too easy, and it's late. Can we go check on Zinedine?”

Katie was in the chair when they got downstairs, after working their way through the maze-like basement. Her head drooped forward, her eyes were closed, the bangs of her hair were drenched with sweat. A wave of nausea rolled through Lona's belly. She and Harm had arrived just in time to watch the last thing she wanted to see: another trial.

But no, now Katie's eyes were opening and Zinedine was kneeling next to her, talking softly, taking notes. The trial must have just ended. Zinedine handed Katie a glass of juice, patting her arm and then leading her over to a cot in the corner of the room. The lab had grown more cluttered the more time Zinedine had spent working in it. Over to the side, lined along the wall, were bins and containers of whatever materials she was working with – jars of a clear, kerosene-smelling liquid that must be the flammable diluent Zinedine talked about.

When it appeared that Katie was sleeping, Zinedine looked up and saw Lona. Her face broke out into a tired smile. “Jane! Am I late? I don't even know what time it is.” She had bags under her eyes, which were run through with red.

“It's after eleven. I asked if we could come down and check on you.”

Zinedine put her arm around Lona, a distracted half-embrace, and somehow the casualness of the gesture was more intimate than if it had been intentional. “Thank you. I don't know how I'm still standing.”

“How did today go?” Harm interjected.

Zinedine's smile faltered a little as she turned to Harm. “Fine. Good, even. She remembered a crumbling wall and someone screaming.”

Someone screaming
. Lona didn't know what her mother was putting into Katie's head – she'd never watched the Paths herself. The descriptions sounded like things you work to forget, not to remember.

“Did she remember who was screaming? What about the alley?”

“No, but it's progress.”

“How much of the wall did she remember? Did she know where she was? I need to know exactly what I can tell my contacts about how the experiment is going.”

“She's doing the best she can, Harm.” Zinedine gave Lona's arms a final squeeze and began pulling on a set of gloves she'd removed when talking to Katie, ready to head back into the lab. “So am I.”