Chapter 9 Hazel #4
How heavy Lilith’s responsibility must have felt.
At least Hazel only has to do what she’s told; Lilith and Huxley had to figure out what to tell her.
She sinks deeper into the hammock, trying to decipher more.
A picture emerges of a brother and sister who shared a dormitory, read books together, and reminisced, but mostly because there was no one else.
During the day they separated, working on their own experiments and plotting their own paths forward.
Lilith claimed the territory of Tree, and Huxley claimed places whose names are lost. What was Lilith trying to communicate?
Why didn’t she rewrite the pages? Or did it all happen so close to the accident there wasn’t time?
Hazel’s eyes droop. She blinks, shaking herself awake, terrified what might happen if she drifts off. But it’s no use, she’ll have to sleep sometime. She tucks away the pages and curls around the book. Exhausted, the dreamscape easily reels her into its molten nest.
‘Hazel?’ Echo’s voice is stuffy like she’s been crying.
Hazel wants to reply, but her voice is so weak weak weakened and she can’t seem to overcome the paresis of the vocal cords even though Echo needs her. Echo, whose words have been in Hazel’s mind all this time, guiding her out of panic. In to four hold for my dead parents—
No. This is the dreamscape. She can access any time from here, any place, any state of voice. ‘I’m here.’
‘The usurpation’s tomorrow and I’m frighte—don’t want to be involve—not what I’m here to—too embroiled—’ Echo’s voice oscillates, alternately succumbing to and conquering the dreamscape’s ceaseless whisper, like tuning in to a radio during a thunderstorm.
‘Can’t you pretend to be sick or something?’ The dreamscape’s mould-and-fresh-rain odour thickens. ‘Echo?’
‘—Not how it works—feel trapped—’
Echo’s voice curdling with fright hits Hazel like a hammer, and she turns—finally—because even her subconscious understands that she must. After all these weeks, she takes Echo in, her tunic and short red hair weaving in the current.
Hazel sucks in a breath: she knows that tear-streaked face.
Hand clasped over a hospital sheet; a saucer of pain medication arranged like a flower; breathe in grief suits you—
Pain in the base of Hazel’s skull wakes her.
Her ears cram with rushing waterfalls and shushing leaves; her nose clogs with time’s copper-compost-sea-spray reek.
Raindrops on a windscreen; cheeks hurting with laughter— Stop it.
Breathe. Sweat drenches Hazel’s forehead.
Memories spark in her vision as she falls from the hammock.
Just build the catopthura and we’ll make it right—Stop, this isn’t the time.
The tug on the back of her neck increases, and she clings to a railing with bilious fear and blinding pain.
This is how we fix things; candles; are these your; weak weak; raindrops—
Real steel fingers touch her real flesh hand.
‘Robin?’
It puts its unharmed palm on the back of her neck and the pain ebbs.
The flood of memories recedes into the sea of amnesia. Weak weak—
‘What’s happening to me?’
Robin watches her, twitching its tail. In nearby cells, other Tinys’ lenses reflect the glow of her reading lamp. Whatever’s happening to her, it’s got the Tinys worried too.
‘It’s OK. I’ve got this.’ This time, she isn’t lying.
She’s going to fix that radio and talk to CHARL1E.
She stumbles to the broken circuit, Robin, Teaspoon, and Shiny keeping watch in case time grabs her again.
It does its best, pestering her with memories, like kids squealing in the back seat of a car.
‘Make noise!’ She instructs the Tinys.
Teaspoon hits the handrail uncertainly.
‘More, consistently! I need you to fill my head with so much sound my memories can’t get a look in.’
The Tinys nod and start kicking up a ruckus, weaving their tails to tell the others to join. Soon every Tiny in Tree is banging something, making a cacophony so brash Hazel can barely hear herself think. That’s the stuff. She gives them the thumbs-up and gets back to work.
The final element of the circuit to reconnect is the clumsily mended elpis device. She attaches the wires, trembling, fingers smudging the glass as she pulls away. She stands back, fingers crossed.
The Tinys fall silent, frozen in wait, but nothing happens. Hazel’s done it wrong. She’s too late, too weak weak—
Outside, Tree’s leaves sigh.
A sound grows that keeps Hazel holding her breath.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere, filling the tree trunk; a wordless song, one soprano voice cascading over half-familiar themes.
Tree’s producing oxygen again. She isn’t like the Tinys or CHARL1E, but something all her own, her song emerging from holes in the thin tubes outlining each of the Tinys’ cells, the whole hive becoming an enormous pipe organ.
This is the voice that sang briefly over the Tannoy when Hazel first entered the Hab Dome, before the cascade of faults from the Arch explosion cut it off.
There’s some justice after all in Hazel being the Tinys’ choice mechanic: Her arrival broke Tree, so she should be the one to fix her.
For the first time since looking into Lilith’s glazed eyes, Hazel feels as if she’s made a contribution.
She turns to the Tinys, but they’re not paying attention to her.
Lights are coming up, softer and warmer than Hazel expected, until from roots to crown the Tiny cells are dripping in honeyed luminescence.
Shiny and Teaspoon whisk in circles with their tails coiled and arms raised, and Hazel feels a little like dancing too.
Meanwhile Robin is on a mission of its own, whizzing to the Treehouse’s mechanical arms, which are coming alive, mending Tinys in rhythm with the music.
Reaching them, Robin holds out its broken hand and a mechanical arm extends to fix it.
Hazel grins, placing a palm on the wall. ‘Nice to meet you, Tree. Took us long enough.’
A speaker in the circuit crackles and Hazel snaps round to find a series of lights flashing from red to green. The radio’s working.
‘Tree? Is it really you?’ It’s CHARL1E’s voice, clouded by static but unmistakably his. Hazel’s heart jumps.
Across the Treehouse, the automated arms freeze, but Robin’s is hand half rebuilt and the robot tugs on the mechanism that was tending it, trying to get Tree to continue. Near Hazel, Shiny and Teaspoon stop dancing, tails ticking like metronomes.
‘It is you,’ CHARL1E says. ‘I missed you. Where have you been? What happened?’
Tree’s song turns from baroque to jazz, syncopating and trilling.
The mechanical arms restart, but they miss connection points, and nuts and bolts tinkle from the Treehouse to the faraway floor.
Two of Robin’s fingers fall to the walkway, and it scoops them up, clutching them to its chest. Its lenses flick between each of Tree’s malfunctioning arms, while Shiny and Teaspoon stare at the speaker in the circuit, balling their hands into fists.
Is it possible that Tree can only talk to the Tinys or CHARL1E, not both at once?
Has Hazel mended Tree but made things worse at the same time?
This is how we fix things; weakened weak—
Stop. She can’t let time catch her. Gathering her courage, Hazel approaches the radio, looking for a mic to respond with, but perhaps if CHARL1E’s picking up Tree, there isn’t one. ‘CHARL1E?’ Hazel calls to the air. ‘Can you hear me?’
For a heartbeat she thinks he won’t reply. Then: ‘Hazel Brandt.’
‘Yes. It’s me.’
‘So, this is where you have been hiding.’ She waits for him to fly off the handle again, but apparently he too has had time to think. ‘I miscalculated.’
The dam of memories builds, threatening to burst. ‘We need to talk.’
‘Affirmative. Return to the Habitation Dome, we will talk here.’
She fiddles with the soldering iron, twisting it on the table like a compass.
They need to speak, but she hadn’t thought about returning immediately and just because Tree’s producing oxygen again doesn’t mean Hazel can refill her tanks here.
‘I don’t know. You could have hurt me when you tried to stop me leaving.
You said I was destructive, suspicious, dangerously arrogant … I’m not sure I want to come back.’
The speaker crackles. ‘There are occasions where those things are true. But I am sorry that I threatened you. I was not operating at optimal functionality. I was not myself, as you would say.’
‘Actually, CHARL1E, I think you were. That’s the point, isn’t it? That you’re not yourself with me?’
‘I—’ CHARL1E breaks off mid-sentence and Tree’s song becomes a low bass hum.
When he next speaks, CHARL1E’s voice is less precise, still a thousand tones in unison, but ragged at the edges as if each one is having to think about coming together.
He still has his particular vocabulary, but the ebb and flow of his tone is far closer to human.
‘Very well. I will endeavour to be more “myself” with you in future, if that will help you feel safe. Will you return now?’
Hazel’s memories crowd her thoughts, but she’s still frightened. ‘What about the dead body in that dome beyond the Arch?’
‘I do not know how you are aware of the Experimentation Dome, but I can assure you there is no corpse inside of it.’
‘Don’t start lying again, CHARL1E. There’s a corpse in there, I saw it.’
‘I cannot compute that.’ There’s a long pause, then: ‘Oh. Ha ha. This is amusing. We are engaged in a misunderstanding. Affirmative, Hazel, you observed a body, but it is not a corpse. A corpse is the remainder of a thing that was once alive. That body is not and has never been alive. Though, in a sense, its potential has departed, so it might be interpreted as corpse-adjacent.’
She spins the soldering iron again. ‘So, you didn’t kill it?’
‘Negative, I did not kill the corpse-adjacent object.’
Hazel wants to believe him, to go back to her real bed in the Hab Dome and a long hot shower, but her fear keeps stirring. ‘You’ve still been lying to me.’
‘Affirmative. I have been withholding certain elements of the truth from you and circumstances beyond my control require that I continue to do so.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Further explanation would be inappropriate at this juncture.’
‘Then how can you expect me to trust you?’
‘When you trust someone, you trust what they choose to keep hidden as well as what they show. No human that has ever lived has been an open book: Trust the pages you cannot see as well as the ones you can.’
She puts a hand on the soldering iron, stopping it spinning, and turns to the circuit. ‘Alright. I’ll come back.’
‘I am very glad,’ CHARL1E says, and he does actually sound relieved. ‘Because I have grave news: Something has gone wrong within the timeline.’
Hazel’s stomach twists. ‘I’m afraid I might have worse news.’
‘That is improbable, a glitch is careening down the timeline towards us, there can be no worse news.’
‘Improbable but true. The thing is I keep … I don’t know how to explain it … nearly getting caught by time.’
‘Remarkably, your statement was accurate. I can infer your meaning, and that is alarming information.’
‘I’m not done.’ Hazel takes a deep breath, the past’s fingertips clawing her. ‘In the dreamscape, I finally managed to move—which should be a good thing. Except that I looked at Echo and I recognised her.’
‘You did?’
The past wraps its arms around her, gripping the back of her neck, pulling. Weaken—
‘Of course, CHARL1E. How could I not? She looks exactly like me.’
Time smiles, and inundates Hazel with memories. Her vision washes dreamscape red, but over the current rushing in her ears, she can just hear CHARL1E.
‘Hazel Brandt, listen to me: Concentrate. Do not give in to the memories. Can you hear me? You must not give in, you must stay here with me. Are we not drawn on ere divided? Hazel!’
Hazel searches for the response, but the pain in her neck is overwhelming and she can’t tell where in time she’s speaking to. Weak—