Alex nodded, put in his mouthpiece, strapped on his headgear, and clambered through the ropes, thinking all the while that Michael could have been talking about a lot more than just his reach.
15
Alice was in her diary room, printing the day’s events in laborious capital letters into a red leather book with cream-colored paper, a cup of coffee she had forgotten about an hour ago sitting, ice-cold, next to her elbow. All around her on the old writing desk, similar red and black leather-bound volumes lay in haphazard stacks and piles; the left side for the ones she had been reading, the right side for the ones she had completed in recent years. Behind her, the walls of the room were nothing but inset bookshelves, unstained brown wood and row after row of leather and cloth bound diaries, hundreds of them, in varying states of repair. She didn’t know how old she was, but the other day; she’d gone looking for the oldest diary in the room. The best she’d been able to do was one from 1922. She’d been freaked out by that, but she hadn’t said anything to Rebecca or Alistair when they came around regularly to pester her.
She’d probably spent too much time up here recently, though she knew from her diaries that she’d always preferred to retreat here. Alistair’s download had restored the framework of her memories, recent events and happenings, the names of the people around her and some of her past with them, but none of the context had come with it, and her own mind felt alien to her, like someone had replaced the furniture in her bedroom while she was out with things that were nice, but not quite the same. Still, it worked well enough that she could manage, and every day she remembered other bits and pieces, not memories exactly, but feelings and preferences, foods and people she liked and disliked, things that she knew how to do, books she’d read and movies she’d seen. She’d put a Darkthrone album on the stereo the other day, ‘ Panzerfaust ’, the same one that was playing softly on her laptop right now, and was fairly certain they were her favorite band. Stuff like that had been happening all day, and trying to remember it all and write it all down gave her a headache.
When she wasn’t trying to preserve what was left of her, she read the diaries. It was fascinating, some of the time, like reading a series of fantasy novels populated entirely with people she knew but remembered only vaguely. At random, she’d pulled a volume that was more than a decade old, and found herself reading a detailed description of a night that she’d spent with Michael, the scratches her nails had left across his broad, muscular back. She blushed to think that she had considering flirting with the handsome black man the night before at dinner. Four hours later, reading another diary, she’d discovered why they no longer spoke, and did some more blushing.
Alice read the most about the people around her, what she thought of them, what they had done together. Rebecca was interesting, because she was one of the only people that Alice really remembered of her own accord, along with Xia, who she’d remembered not to hug when she’d seen him, because he was pathological about disease, and lived in a sealed clean room in the Science building at the Academy. Something about Rebecca, just thinking about her, made Alice feel a little safer, a little better, and she knew that she trusted her, as far as she was willing to trust anyone. Alistair, on the other hand…
He had come to see her several times since that day, treating her, helping her reconstruct her memories into some sort of order, and he was unfailingly polite. She respect him as a boss, it was obvious, and the diaries were replete with stories of his prowess and brilliant improvisations in the field, but she didn’t like having him in her head. Actually, she had to take a long, hot shower after every one of his visits. Her diaries had made this relationship all the more problematic.
Many of her diaries had asides, notes written directly to herself, on the assumption that she would forget eventually. Most of them were not particularly significant, though a few of them had been helpful. The one that concerned her was brief, but it had been underlined several times for emphasis.
‘Something is wrong with Alistair,’ it read, her normally neat block letters slanted with agitation.
There was nothing else in the diary that helped her understand the note, but it fed her own growing distrust of her supervisor, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d have been able to hide that from a telepath of Alistair’s ability, during their little reconstruction sessions. She didn’t know why she wasn’t supposed to trust him. She wasn’t even sure how much she trusted the diaries, or the woman who’d written them. However, she had to lean on something, and the disjointed, verbose diaries seemed like the most solid thing available to her.
The first weeks had been the worst, when she felt the entire time as if she was trying to scramble up a gravelly hill, sliding backwards further with every step she took forward. She could see pity in the eyes of everyone she met, when she couldn’t remember their names or who they were, and more often than not, she protected herself by responding with hostility and the cruel smile that her face settled in almost automatically. That, at least, she felt comfortable with; that she knew was her own. Lately it was a little better. It had been days since she had met someone and not known who they were, or made a colossal misstep in conversation. She’d been reluctant, when Gaul had approached her and offered her a temporary teaching position, running the Program, because she thought she didn’t remember how to do it. But when she’d actually gone out there, to the shooting range and the cavernous room with the tile floor dotted with tiny, irreversible bloodstains and the rough painted circle, it all came flooding back, and she’d thrown herself into the work. It helped her to center herself, and she knew instinctively that she had looked to violence for that in the past as well.
It didn’t hurt that Alex Warner turned out to be almost as fun to pick on as Mitsuru was.
Alice wrote until her hand cramped up, until she was certain that she’d written down everything important, all of her conclusions and suspicions, the whole of the day’s events in as concise a manner as possible. Then she went back to reading, one of the diaries she’d pulled from the wall earlier, a recent one. The things she’d been doing right before she disappeared.
She was so engrossed in the diary, and the knock at the door was so quiet, that at first Alice wasn’t sure that she had heard it. She crept up to the door out of habit, light on the balls of her feet, then remembered that there was no peephole, and reluctantly opened it a crack instead. She looked outside, sighed for effect, and then opened the door to let Rebecca in.
“Finally. I could feel you standing on the other side of the door, you know. What a fucking day, let me tell you,” Rebecca said, breezing past her, her brown hair tied back in a bun with something that looked like a chopstick sticking through it. She wore a tight blue t-shirt with the UCLA logo and worn, comfortable-looking jeans, a lit cigarette in her right hand. “I swear these kids spend their free time plotting ways to make my life miserable. When Gaul pulled me from the field I thought I was getting a reward. A vacation, or at least a desk job with weekends off. I thought that life would get easier when no one was shooting at me.”
Rebecca glanced around the room, then perched herself precariously on the corner of Alice’s desk, nudging the trashcan with toe of her shoe, so she could knock the ash from her cigarette into it. Alice barely managed to avoid laughing aloud. She’d already known Rebecca would refuse any chair in the room — without needing her diary to remind her, she knew that.
“Since when did you ever give anyone the chance to shoot at you?” Alice asked fondly, sitting back down in front of her desk, and closing the diary she had been reading.
Rebecca winked at her with a wry grin.