“If you believe this and you think I’m the one who can bring a lost soul out, how come you didn’t ask me to do this yourself?”
“I did,” he says. “You turned me down.”
I snort and sink into one of the nearby chairs. He’s right; he did contact me. I had forgotten it among his many summonses, all of which I ignored. But this one had been his last, a long plea explaining that he not only had a way into the Room of Lost Souls, he had a way to survive it.
“When I was a kid, you said you never wanted me to go back in there,” I say, no longer trying to be polite. “You discouraged me from even going near the place, remember?”
I had been fifteen and full of myself. I’d run away from my grandparents half a dozen times. They were in constant mourning for my mother, and believed I was no substitute. It was pretty clear that they blamed me for her loss.
The final time, my father came after me, and I told him I could get my mother. I was the only one who’d come out alive. He owed me the chance to try.
He had refused.
I left him—and my grandparents—and never contacted any of them again. Although he kept trying to reach me. And I kept glancing at, then refusing, his messages.
“I couldn’t risk letting you go in again,” he says. “We barely got you out that first time.”
“Yet you recommended me when Riya Trekov came to call. Because she has a way out or because you don’t care anymore?”
His cheeks flush. “You didn’t have to agree.”
The chair is softer than I expect. I relax into it. “I know,” I say, giving him that much. “Her plea interested me.”
“Because of your diving,” he says.
I shake my head. Because I have nothing left. But I don’t say that.
“I recommended you because you’re trained now,” he says. “Of everyone I know, you have a chance, not just to get out. But to get out with something. You’ve become an amazing woman.”
I no longer know him. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere or if he’s just trying to convince me.
He’s still a man obsessed. I wonder what he’ll do if he recovers the remnants of Mother. Her “soul” or her memory or even her self. He’s lived for decades without her. If she’s still alive, she’s spent double her initial lifespan inside a single Room.
I came here to find out one thing. So rather than debate the merits of my experience or the point of his obsession, I say, “Tell me what happened. How did we end up at the Room? How did we lose Mother?”
“You don’t remember?” he asks.
The lights, the voices. I remember. Just not in any detail.
“My memories are a child’s memories,” I say. “I want the real story. The adult story. Mistakes and all.”
We had no home. I didn’t remember that, just like I didn’t remember moving onto the ship six months before. My parents had sold our house and had put everything they had into his business, a fleet of cargo ships that ran all over the sector.
The business had become a success when my father stopped caring about the ethics of the cargo he carried. Sometimes he brought food or agricultural supplies to far-flung outposts. Sometimes he brought weapons to splinter groups rebelling against various governments.
He didn’t care, as long as he got his payment.
He made so much money, he no longer needed to run the fleet, but he did. Still, my mother begged him to buy land and he did that too. This land, kilometers and kilometers of it, the entire lake and the surrounding greenery.
He promised her they would retire here.
But they were still young, and he loved travel. He commanded the lead vessel because he owned it, not because he was good at piloting or even at leadership.
He tells me about the trips, about the deliveries, about the crew. The ship had a contingent of forty regular with two dozen others whom he hired for larger jobs. Sometimes they worked the cargo; sometimes they repaired the ship. Always they listened to him, whether he was right or not.
But he wasn’t the one who commanded them to the Room of Lost Souls. That was my mother. She had heard about it, studied it, thought about it.
She wanted to see it.
She didn’t believe a place that old could exist in this part of space.
“She was trying to be a tourist,” he says now. “Trying to make all this travel work.”
But I wonder. Just like I wondered about Trekov. If my mother had done all the studying, had she been planning a pilgrimage? Because of my father’s business or because of some problem all her own?
As I’m sitting there, I realize I know even less about her than I know about my father. I only know what I remember, what her parents told me in their grief, and what my father is telling me now.
“I took her there,” he says. “With no thought, no study. I thought it just an ancient relic, a place that we could see in half a day and be gone.”
“Half a day,” I mutter.
He looks at me, clearly startled that I spoke.
“So she planned to go to the Room?”
“That was the point of our visit,” he says.
“And she wanted to take me?” I can’t believe anyone who studied that place would bring a child to it.
“You suited up and followed her. You grabbed her hand as she went through that door. I think you were trying to keep her from going inside.”
But I wasn’t. I was entranced with the lights, as fascinated as she had been.
“I saw you go in,” he says. “I called to you both, but the door closed behind you.”
“And then?” I ask.
“And then I couldn’t get you out.”
Minutes became hours. Hours became a day. He tried everything short of going in himself. He smashed at the window, tried to dismantle the walls, sent in some kind of grappler to grab us. Nothing worked.
“Then, one day, the door opened.” His voice still holds a kind of awe. “And there you stood, your hands over your ears. I grabbed you and pulled you out, and held you, and the door closed again. Before I could go in. Before I could reach inside …”
His voice trails off, but I remember this part. I remember him clinging to me, his hands so firm that they bruise me. It feels like he holds me for days.
“You couldn’t tell us anything,” he says. “You didn’t think any time had gone by at all. You were tired and cranky and overwhelmed. And you never wanted to go in again.”
“You asked?”
He shakes his head. “You said. Without prompting. We stayed for a month. We never got her out.”
And then he ordered the ship to leave. Because he knew he could spend the rest of his life struggling against that place. And he had a child. A miracle child, who had escaped.
“I dropped you with your grandparents and came back. I figured I could go in and get her. But I couldn’t. Except for you, I didn’t know anyone who had gotten out.”
“Which is why you want me to go,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’ve found people willing to go inside. Nothing comes out.”
“I thought you said you went with Riya Trekov. That she has a way out.”
“She does. People go in. They come out. But they’re always alone.”
Now I ask him. “What’ll you do if you get her? She won’t be the same. You’re certainly not.”
“I know,” he says, and for a moment I think he’s going to leave it at that. Then he adds, “None of us are.”
We talk long into the night.
Or rather, I listen as he talks.
He tells me what he knows about the Room. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the place, combined with a series of theories, myths, and legends he has collected over the decades.