Chapter Eighteen
Declan
The clear vial appeared beside Avena’s white cup while I was trying to remember how to breathe without help.
One second, the counter held our two mugs and the yellow legal pad. The next, a narrow glass container stood between them, too smooth and perfectly shaped to belong in Grandpa’s kitchen.
I lost count at four seconds.
“Damn it.”
I moved my palm away from the cold window and looked at the notes I had made.
Cold curved surface.
Pulse every six seconds.
Pressure behind ribs.
Air forced into lungs.
White light through closed eyes.
No control of arms.
Everything else looked repaired. The window wasn’t cracked. The books had returned to their shelves. Snow lay neatly in a blanket beyond the porch beneath a pale sky. Even the fire had found its usual rhythm, burning without using enough wood to explain itself.
Avena was the only thing missing.
“You planning to explain this one?” I asked the cabin.
Only the fire popped.
“Helpful as always.”
Thin silver marks ran along one side of the vial. They might have been letters or measurements. I turned it twice, hoping some buried part of me would recognize them.
Nothing.
I carried it to the table and set it on the legal pad. The yellow paper darkened beneath its base. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then clean black letters appeared beneath my notes.
STANDARD STIMULANT BEVERAGE.
LOWEST APPROVED CONCENTRATION.
I read the words twice.
“Son of a bitch.”
The vial was empty because Avena had swallowed whatever had been inside it. The cabin had pulled the container from her waking life just like it had copied her cup, her fruit, and the safety plan she erased.
Only this time, the object carried an answer I didn’t want. Avena was keeping herself awake.
I sat down hard enough to make the chess pieces jump.
Maybe stimulant meant something different where she came from. Maybe it treated an injury or helped her recover from whatever the collapse had done. The legal pad had supplied exactly two lines, neither of them saying she took it to avoid me. But who was I kidding.
She’d taken something designed to keep her from sleeping. These facts were ugly enough without embellishing them. I picked up the pencil and wrote beneath the new text.
Avena is choosing not to return.
The sentence itself made my chest tighten. I crossed out choosing and replaced it with ‘preventing herself.’ That felt worse, so I crossed out the entire line.
“Fine,” I said to the room. “You don’t want to come back. I can work with that.”
The lie sounded pathetic without anyone here to challenge it.
Growling under my breath, I got up and returned to the window.
If Avena had information she couldn’t give me, I would find my own.
I had a body somewhere. That body had recognized the cold barrier, the pulse, and the machine forcing air into my lungs.
Memory had reached me before. I didn’t need her to carry it across whatever space was between us.
I pressed my right palm against the glass. Cold met my skin. But flat, not curved. Wood beneath my bare feet. Fire at my back. My arm belonged to me. It could move. I closed my eyes.
“Six seconds,” I said.
I counted.
Nothing. I breathed.
Again.
No pulse traveled through my spine. No pressure gathered behind my ribs. The window remained a window, and my lungs kept waiting for me to use them.
“Hard white lights,” I said. “Cold at the base of my skull. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk.”
Rain hammered thin material overhead. Mud dragged at my boots. A communications array glowed inside the dark while Keller watched an incoming pattern.
Link goes live in two.
Captain Shaw.
Kill the link.
The fragments lined up exactly where I had left them. Keller’s name had returned, but not her face or what happened to her. I could not see the people waiting outside or remember what I had promised them. The answering handshake remained an impression without a source.
I pushed harder against the window until pain moved through my wrist.
“What happened after I ordered the cutoff?”
The cabin said nothing.
“What happened to Keller?”
Nothing.
“Who was I trying to protect?”
I turned my palm toward my face. The old scar near my thumb was still there. I pressed it with my left hand and waited. Nothing.
The lake remained frozen beyond the fence. Snow brightened beneath the unchanged sky. No communications equipment appeared. No boots crossed mud outside a field shelter.
“Captain Shaw,” I said in the woman’s remembered voice.
The imitation was wrong. I tried again, lower this time.
“Link goes live in two.”
Still wrong.
I shut my eyes and listened to the water dripping from the eaves. It struck the porch at uneven intervals, too slow to become the hard rain from the fragment. I counted six seconds between each drop until I was forcing the rhythm onto sounds that had never possessed it.
The cabin gave me cold air, wet wood, and my own voice pretending to belong to someone else.
“Kill the link,” I said.
Nothing answered. I threw open the door hard enough for it to strike the interior wall. The noise cracked through the room. In the kitchen, a spoon rattled against Avena’s white cup.
My body reacted before thought. Shoulders tight. Breath stopped. Waiting for rain, soldiers, a voice through a communications channel. The moment passed without developing further. I crossed to the sink, picked up the spoon, and tapped it against Avena’s cup on purpose.
Nothing.
Again.
The sound was only metal touching ceramic. Whatever door it had opened before was gone, or I had worn out the key.
My jaw tightened. Trying to channel it, I grabbed the battered radio from the shelf and carried it to the table. The cracked brown case fit my hands with familiar weight. I turned the dial. Static filled the room.
It had worked before. Music had carried me toward a school dance and Grandpa’s patient feet. The wrong sound had brought rain and the field shelter. Maybe memory didn’t care whether I was ready. Maybe it only needed the right door.
I moved through the frequencies slowly. Static rose and fell. A thin whistle passed through, followed by a low hum and a burst that almost sounded like distant speech. My body tightened. I held the dial still.
“Say it again.”
The radio hissed.
“Link goes live in two,” I whispered.
No woman answered.
I turned the dial harder. The whistle became a shriek. Pain flickered at the base of my skull. I froze. The sound vanished beneath the sudden pounding of my heart.
For one breath, I waited for white light to burn through my eyelids. I waited for my body to disappear and the cold to enter my spine. Nothing followed.
The pain had been ordinary. Tight muscles. Too much noise. A man trying to break into his own head with a broken radio. My knees weakened all at once.
I switched the radio off.
Silence rushed back into the room, and I leaned both hands against the table until the weakness passed. I should have been disappointed.
I was disappointed.
I had failed to recover a single new fact. Avena knew something about my body that I couldn’t reach from inside my own mind. Whatever held me had taken my name, my history, my people, and even the right to understand the machinery breathing for me.
“Coward,” I said.
The word belonged to me, which made it harder to ignore.
I searched the cabin anyway. The photographs on the mantel gave me Grandpa in his wool hat, myself holding a fish with both hands, and people whose faces stayed familiar without offering names.
The folding knife still carried R.S. on the handle.
The chessboard preserved a game we had never finished.
Every object knew how to lead me backward into the part of my life the cabin had been built from.
But none of them led me forward.
There was no uniform in the closet. No rank insignia in the drawers.
No photograph of a unit, no weapon, no field kit, no letter addressed to Captain Shaw.
The cabin held the boy Grandpa raised and the man who returned to remember him.
The years between them had been cut away so cleanly I could not find the scar.
Maybe the system had removed everything useful. Maybe I had done it to myself before the link went white. Three explanations but not one of them with any evidence.
I closed the closet.
If remembering hurt, then fear was reasonable. Grandpa would have said only an idiot put his hand back on a hot stove to prove the first burn counted. He also would have said a man who refused to look at a fire because it might burn him shouldn’t be surprised when the house went up.
The old man had been irritatingly flexible with his wisdom.
I sat and pulled the legal pad closer. The safeguards Avena wrote remained on the earlier page. Stop at pain. Stop at disorientation. Stop at involuntary memory. Stop at waking sensory intrusion. We had built them because neither of us understood the cost.
I had stopped. That should have felt like discipline. Instead, it felt suspiciously like relief trying to pretend it was brave. I turned to a clean page and drew a line down the middle.
On the left, I wrote WHAT I KNOW.
On the right, WHAT I THINK.
The first column filled slowly.
My name is Declan Shaw.
I was a captain.
I worked with neural communications.
An incoming pattern answered deliberately.
The cutoff failed.
My body is alive somewhere outside this cabin.
A machine controls at least some of my breathing.
Avena observed evidence connected to that body.
She recognized the sensations when I felt them.
She took a stimulant after leaving.
I moved to the second column.
Avena saw me.
The clinical room is near her waking life.
She knows who is holding me.
She helped put me there.
The pencil stopped. I stared at the last line until the words blurred. There was no evidence for it. Fear had written the sentence before I had thought it through.
I crossed it out.
Real fear didn’t make her innocent. It also didn’t make her guilty of every answer I could imagine. I hated the space between those two truths.
I added another line to the first column.
She lied to me.
Below it, I wrote:
She came back anyway.
Both were facts. Neither canceled the other out.
The empty vial caught the firelight. I picked it up and rolled it between my palms. Avena had taken something to stay awake because returning frightened her more than whatever the drug would do to her body or her carefully ordered life.
That thought worried me. It also made me furious.
She was somewhere I couldn’t reach, making decisions that affected both of us and calling her silence protection. Maybe she had good reasons. Maybe every one of them would make sense when I knew the truth. I was still angry. I set the vial down harder than necessary.
“You don’t get to disappear until I’m too worried to ask questions,” I told the place where she usually appeared. “That’s not how this works.”
The empty air offered no argument. I tried to imagine what I would say if she appeared now.
Where am I?
What did you see?
Who are you afraid of?
Why couldn’t you look at me?
Did you know before?
Did you have anything to do with this?
I started with I’m fine.
The pencil hovered over the words.
“Nope.”
I crossed them out. I tried I understand why you left and crossed that out too. I understood fear. I did not understand her choice.
The third attempt was You don’t have to tell me anything.
That lie lasted less than a second. I tore the page free, crumpled it, and threw it toward the fire. The paper vanished before it reached the flames.
“Show-off,” I muttered.
I’m angry.
I’m scared.
I’m still here.
The three lines looked smaller than they had felt inside me. I added one more.
Come back when you can tell me something true.
I read the message aloud. My voice stayed steady until the last word.
I left the page open anyway.
The vial went over the top corner so it couldn’t close. Her white cup stood beside it. I turned the ugly-fish mug until the trout faced the place where she appeared, because he had already proven better at welcoming her than I was likely to be.
Then I moved the chair so it faced the empty side of the fireplace.
I had failed. Failed to remember. Failed to reach her.
The failures should have left me with nothing to do. Instead, I sat facing the place where Avena usually appeared. I wasn’t ready to forgive her, but I was too worried about her to stop waiting.