Chapter Ten
Declan
Grandpa’s legal pad started filling itself while Avena stood three feet away pretending not to be frightened.
The pad lay open on the desk where it had been since the first time I woke in the cabin. I’d seen grocery lists on those yellow pages. Measurements for shelves that never ended up level. Names of fishing lures Grandpa intended to buy and probably did, despite Grandma’s opinion on the subject.
I had never seen words appear on their own, but now black letters formed across the top line in neat, even type.
MEMORY RECALL SAFEGUARDS
Avena went still beside me. Blue-white light sharpened beneath the skin at her temples.
“That is not possible,” she said.
“Apparently it is.” I shrugged. “And here I was worried things were getting normal.”
More words moved across the paper without a pen touching it.
Either participant may end an exercise at any time.
Memory exploration will stop at the first sign of disorientation.
The cabin and its familiar contents will be used for grounding.
Music will not be used as a memory trigger.
No second attempt will be made after either participant experiences distress.
The typing stopped. Nothing moved except the fire and the faint rise of Avena’s chest as her breathing increased.
I looked at her. “You recognize it?”
She kept her attention on the pad. “I created a preliminary outline after I woke.”
“Those exact rules?”
“In that exact sequence.”
I waited.
Her mouth tightened. “I sketched them on my tablet. The wording is cleaner here, but the structure and content are mine.”
“And now your notes are in Grandpa’s cabin.”
“But I erased them before Qelos could preserve the file.”
That gave me a new name and several questions. I chose the least dangerous one. “Qelos?”
“The AI system that manages my home.”
“Your house saves your homework?”
“It saves all authorized activity.”
“That sounds less like a helper and more like a very polite informant.”
She turned from the pad. “Your home does not retain information?”
“The refrigerator remembers when I need a new water filter. That’s about the limit.” I stopped. I wasn’t sure whether I had owned a refrigerator, but the knowledge felt ordinary enough to trust. “And Grandpa’s cabin remembered everything. Mostly because Grandpa never threw anything away.”
Avena looked at the shelves, the radio patched with tape, and the coffee tin old enough to qualify for government benefits. “That explanation is more plausible than some alternatives.”
“I’m not sure that was a compliment.”
“It was not intended as one. Just a fact.”
“Does Qelos keep deleted files?” Her eyes locked on the pad with a hint of fear in her lavender orbs.
“Not without authorization.”
“Does Qelos do things without authorization?”
“No.” Her answer came immediately. A fraction too immediately. She didn’t seem sure.
I set the pad down. “Do you?”
Gold flashed at her throat and vanished.
I had meant it as a joke. Mostly. But the flash had answered a question she hadn’t. I tucked that away to look at later.
“You did all this for me,” I said.
“Of course. The previous attempt was uncontrolled and needed to be corrected.”
“You could have decided not to come back.”
Her gaze lifted to mine. “I said I would return.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Avena seemed less prepared for that than for the impossible page. Her lips parted before she looked down.
“The safeguards remain incomplete,” she said.
“Of course they do.”
“You are agreeing too quickly.”
“I’m trying something new.”
Her lips pursed and her lights flickered. “I do not believe you.”
I grinned. “You’re getting better at this.”
Her eyes narrowed, but the color at her temples softened.
“If we are not examining your memory,” she said, “what do you propose we examine?”
I looked around the room. “The place that just stole your deleted notes.”
I found that unbearably attractive.
“We need a fixed reference point,” she said.
“The cabin.”
She shook her head. “A reference point smaller than the structure being evaluated.”
“The desk,” I offered.
“No, something smaller.”
I lifted Grandpa’s coffee mug. “Ugly fish.”
The mug had a painted trout on it with one eye larger than the other. Grandpa claimed the defect made it valuable. Grandma claimed it made the trout look drunk.
Avena studied it. “The image is poorly rendered.”
“Hey, be nice. That fish has feelings.”
“The fish is ceramic.”
“You say that because you haven’t heard his side.”
She took the mug from me, and I caught her in the beginnings of an eyeroll.
The sight of perfectly controlled Avena losing that stoicism, if only a tiny bit, made my smile grow wider.
Without touching my fingers, she placed the poorly rendered fish precisely at the front corner of the desk. “This will serve as the origin.”
We started with the cabin interior. Avena counted seven steps from the mug to the hearth.
“Eight,” I said.
She stopped. “Seven.”
“Pretty sure it was eight.”
“Your second step did not exceed half the length of your foot.”
“I have an injury.”
“I see no injuries.”
“It’s an old war wound.”
“You have not remembered a war wound.”
“It’s a very old war wound and only shows up occasionally.”
She stared at me until I laughed. Then she returned to the mug and began again.
On the fourth step, I said, “Nineteen.”
“You are attempting to disrupt the count.”
“I’m testing the integrity of the process.”
“You are testing my patience.”
“Still part of the process, Tinkerbell.”
Her brows pulled together at the name. “That is not my name. Why would you address me so? Is it your injury? Are you falling into a memory without our process?”
Her lights flickered a darker blue I read as distress. I held out my hand in surrender. “It is only a nickname. Tinkerbell is a helpful fairy from a children’s story. She lights up and has opinions.”
“If you are not in distress, let us continue then,” she finally said, returning to her interrupted task.
“One. Two. Three—”
“Seventeen,” she said.
“You did that on purpose.”
“I was testing the integrity of the process.”
“Now we have to start over,” I said.
“Then you should maintain better concentration.”
“You’re a bad influence.”
“That conclusion is unsupported.”
“I have evidence.”
“You have an inaccurate count.”
“So the close stuff is solid,” I said.
“Consistent,” Avena corrected. “We do not know whether anything here is solid.”
“You take all the fun out of simple words.”
“Precision is not the enemy of enjoyment.”
“I didn’t say enemy.”
“You implied opposition.”
She was already walking toward the lake by then, carrying the pad against her side. I followed, captivated as she placed her boots neatly inside the trail we had made during earlier visits. Halfway down the slope, she deliberately stepped into untouched snow.
“You may laugh,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You laughed when I fell during the snow engagement.”
“You were throwing ammunition at me then. Different rules apply during battles.”
She pulled her leg free and nearly lost her balance again. I moved closer without touching her. Close enough to help if she asked. Far enough, I hoped, to keep the world intact.
“Humans walk through this voluntarily?” she asked.
“Some of us strap boards to our feet and throw ourselves down mountains.”
She stared at me, aghast. “Why?”
“Gravity gets bored.”
“Gravity does not experience boredom.”
“That’s what it wants you to think.”
I had.
Every detail arrived before I saw it. After the cedar, that stopped.
The path continued. Trees stood on both sides. Snow covered the ground. Nothing looked wrong until Avena halted beside a spruce and pressed her fingertips to the bark.
“This pattern repeats,” she said.
I moved beside her. The trunk held three dark knots in a diagonal line. The next spruce had the same three. So did the one beyond it.
“Hmmm. Lazy construction?” I wondered aloud.
“Or insufficient source detail.”
I breathed in. The cold reached my lungs, but the smell of pine had disappeared. A branch shifted above us. I watched needles stir in the wind but felt nothing against my face.
The hair along my arms rose anyway.
“There aren’t any tracks,” I said.
Avena crouched and touched the ground. “The temperature is unchanged.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“The snow is not colder than the air. The exposed stone is not warmer. There is no variation.”
I looked through the identical trees. “Like wallpaper.”
“Explain.”
“It looks like a forest until you get close enough to see it’s only a picture pretending to be one.”
She stood. “That sounds like a proper analogy. We should continue until the picture ends.”
“You really don’t know when to leave a question alone, do you?”
“You asked for my help because of that quality.”
“I know.” I looked at her profile, at the concentration in her eyes and the light moving steadily beneath her skin. “I’m starting to appreciate it.”
Her gaze shifted to me. Something passed through her expression, quick and unguarded. “Starting?”
“Don’t get arrogant.”
“Confidence based on repeated success is not arrogance.”
“That sounds like you’ve said it before.”
“It has been necessary before.”
I stopped.
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“You have used that phrase several times since meeting me.”
“It keeps being true.”
“We found the wall,” I said.
“There is no wall.”
“That’s what makes it clever.”
She walked around the cedar and stopped at the edge of the hollow. The legal pad hung loosely from her hand. “Does knowing this alter the cabin for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Much of what surrounds it has no independent detail. The distance is constructed to prevent us from recognizing a limit.”
“The distance is fake, then?”
“Possibly.” She looked toward the roof beyond the trees. “Does that make the cabin less real?”
“A place doesn’t stop being real because it has walls,” I said.
“Even if you cannot see them?”
“Most walls are like that until you hit one.”
She looked down at the pad. “And if learning what this place is destroys it?”
“Someone said something to you,” I said.
Avena’s fingers tightened around the cardboard edge. “Someone asked whether I had accepted an explanation for something I had never observed.”
“Did you?”
“I gave the explanation I had been taught.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Apparently, I’m not the first person to say that to you either,” I said.
“No.”
“Do I like this person?”
“You do not know him.”
“He sounds annoying. We’d probably get along.”
“The explanation may be accurate,” she said. “I have no evidence that it is not.”
“Then looking shouldn’t hurt it.”
“Knowledge can interfere with necessary function.”
“Sometimes.” I leaned against the cedar. “Sometimes people say that because the function depends on nobody asking what it costs.”
Blue light gathered beneath her wrists. She looked away.
“Trust doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to look,” I supplied quietly. “If questions are forbidden, that’s obedience, not trust.”
“You know nothing about the situation.”
“You’re right.”
That brought her attention back to me.
“I can still know the difference between trust and being afraid of the consequences.”
“I did not say I was afraid.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Gold flashed along her throat. “You are drawing conclusions from incomplete information.”
“I do that. You correct me. It’s one of our best things.”
I stepped back instead.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
The light at her throat faded slowly. “Why did you stop?”
“Because you wanted me to.”
“I did not tell you that.”
“You shouldn’t always have to.”
“You make room for answers you may not receive,” she said.
“I’m not famous for patience.”
“You are patient with me.”
The plainness of it took the joke out of my mouth.
“You’re worth being patient with,” I said.
Her light brightened beneath her cheeks. She turned toward the lake, but not before I saw it.
I pushed away from the cedar. “If the truth destroys the cabin, I still want it.”
“Even after what happened when you remembered?”
“Especially after that,” I said. “But I don’t want to lose this place.”
Avena looked back at me.
“And I don’t want to lose you,” I added. There was no way to soften it, so I didn’t try. “If the walls come down, I want you beside me when they do.”
“You trust me,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. I answered anyway.
“Yes.”
“You should not.”
I took the pad gently from her hand and held up the first page between us. “You made rules to protect me when you were alone. You erased them because they could cost you something, yet you came back anyway.”
“That does not establish trustworthiness.”
“It’s enough to start.”
“You do not know me.”
“I know you hate badly measured rooms. I know you’ll step into deep snow to test an idea. I know you keep promises even when they scare you.” I lowered the pad. “I know you’re funnier than you were when I met you, which might be my fault. I’ll apologize later.”
Her lips pressed together, but the smile escaped anyway.
“Your influence remains unproven,” she said.
“There she is.”
The cabin shuddered in the distance.
The repeated branches around us blurred, their edges running together like wet paint. Avena looked toward the roof.
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
We headed back around the fallen cedar. Avena stepped over the split trunk first, misjudged the drop on the other side, and caught herself with one hand against the bark.
I held mine out automatically again. She looked at my palm. Neither of us moved.
“It’s customary where I come from,” I said. “Helping somebody over an obstacle.”
“I have successfully crossed the obstacle.”
“You nearly introduced your face to the ground.”
“Nearly is not an outcome.”
“Now that sounded rehearsed.”
“Thank you for offering,” she said quietly.
I lowered my hand. “Anytime.”
The world shuddered again. Light passed through her hair and turned it almost transparent.
“I will return,” she said.
“I trust you.”
Fear crossed her face again, but something else moved with it now. Something warmer. Something that did not retreat under her normally placid expression.
Then she was gone.
I walked back alone. The false forest gave way to remembered pine, and scent returned before the cabin came into view. Our footprints remained in the snow. Inside, the ugly fish mug waited exactly where Avena had placed it. Grandpa’s legal pad lay on the desk.
The safeguards still filled the first page in clean black type. The cabin had taken something from Avena’s other life—something she had erased—and kept it.
We had found the edge of the dream. Whatever connected us reached beyond it. That should have been the most frightening thing I learned.
It wasn’t.
The dream had walls. Avena had a life beyond them. And I was beginning to care more about the woman outside this place than the answers waiting inside it.