Chapter 22 Anna
Anna
‘Anna?’ Her hand on my shoulder is an anchor.
I look at my weird twin-parent. How can she have held my hand as we buried our parents, and also have been my mother? She lied to me. She always knew we wouldn’t get them back. Though, in a strange way, I guess I did—I have had a mother these last thirteen years. A good one too.
‘Is it you?’ she asks.
‘Not sure how to answer that.’
Her face stumbles through ten feelings at once, and I recognise all of them in myself. ‘How much do you remember?’ she asks.
‘Everything.’ I gaze around the kitchen, which I’ve hardly lived in and lived in all my life.
The windowpane’s cracked, wind whistling through it, and the kitchen tap has split in two.
Out in the hall, the mirror’s shattered, dusting the floor with shards.
Anything that held the image of the-face-that-isn’t-my-face—or, rather, is my face, but from a past I didn’t remember—has broken open, just like my Echo-Anna, sister-daughter mind.
‘Are you both in there?’
I look at her. What do I call her? ‘Kind of.’ I tap my forehead. ‘But it’s more like because we’re both in here, neither of us are. Like I’m something new.’
‘Still Anna though?’
‘Both Anna, so still Anna, yes.’ I pick up dropped grains of sugar on a finger.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Being two people and neither of them all at once?’ I lick the sugar. For one of me, it’s been so long since I had sugar. There’s a grain of salt mixed in with it. ‘Not physically.’
Her eyes fall away from mine for the first time since I—we—
She looks so crestfallen.
‘But it’s OK. I’ll be OK,’ I add, putting my small pudgy hand over hers.
She shakes her head, still unable to look at me. There’s a long, complicated road ahead, on which no one other than her will ever really know me again. I concentrate on just the next breath. ‘How did I happen?’
‘I used to ask you that when you were a baby. Stupid really, you couldn’t even talk.
’ She draws her hand out from under mine.
‘I think it had something to do with the memory seeds I planted. The forest that grew from them in the dreamscape caught you halfway between anamnesis and death, and cocooned you. I reckon the space-time continuum just tried to make sense of you the best way it could, and your baby self is what emerged from the chrysalis.’
I remember the vines’ tight embrace, the moist fungal bloom, the last-second keystone memory, simultaneously five minutes and thirteen years ago. ‘A forest on the edge of time. Hell of a cure for blood poisoning.’
She nods but doesn’t laugh. A car passes on the road outside. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she begins, but I cut her off.
‘Don’t. You don’t need to be.’
‘But if I’d let you perform anamnesis when you wanted—’
‘Look.’ I pause, planting my hands on the table and fixing her with my most serious glare. ‘I was there. I get it. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got stuff to work through, but it’s you and me. We’re all good.’
She cocks her head, as if trying to figure out which Anna the forgiveness comes from, still not understanding it’s both and neither of us. Then her face twists up like it doesn’t change her guilt either way. ‘I’ve been planning that speech your whole life, you know.’
‘Sorry to disappoint, but I think you’ll find it was about a third of my life, actually.’
The corner of her mouth twitches, and she’s momentarily just my sister. ‘Martyr.’
‘Drama queen,’ I reply, poking her with my foot under the table.
Her face twists up again, and I realise she’s two people now as well: Hazel and Mum.
‘Oh, Mum—I mean Hazel—I mean—’ I stumble to a halt, looking at her to tell me what she wants.
She just shakes her head. ‘I don’t know either. What were you going to say?’
‘Just that this must be super weird for you too.’
Hazel/Mum nods, shrugs, huffs a laugh. ‘Yeah. It’s pretty weird.’
I push my chair back. ‘Balcony?’ It’s where we always go when things are hard: her, Anna, and Anna; her, me, and me; her and them; her and us.
My legs shake as I follow her through the sitting room.
In here too glass has split and mirrors have cracked.
Seems like reclaiming my pre-Travel self from the dreamscape broke every reflective surface in the flat.
I hope it hasn’t affected the neighbours.
Looking at Hazel/Mum’s archaeological drawings behind their splintered glass, I realise they’re not from a fictional ‘Dad,’ but mostly mine, from my pre-Travel studies.
Even so, Hazel/Mum bought a couple in my post-Travel childhood.
One is of a gravestone, plain except for the epitaph in Ancient Greek.
I translate easily, even though Little Anna’s never read Ancient Greek before: Here lies Amel-Nabu, who gave the world more balance, and left it aged seventy-one.
Here also lies No One, a true Athenian, who loved and followed him.
They are missed by their students and friends, who continue the work of—Then there’s a word I can’t translate.
I swallow hard, imagining Kosmos and Nabu in the school’s courtyard, grey streaking Nabu’s mane and crow’s feet blooming around Kosmos’s eyes.
Their hands calloused, soles hardened, livers scarred, brains slowly atrophying even as they try to stuff in more knowledge. They made it.
‘Nabu kept his promise,’ I say.
‘He did,’ Hazel/Mum replies. ‘We completed the Deed, and you’ll see in time, things are a little better than they were.’
‘Only a little?’ I look away from the troubling word I can’t translate. Through the window, pigeons wheel against the rosy dawn.
‘Project Kairos issued hundreds of Excursions,’ she says. ‘No single one could change everything, they were always supposed to work together. Ours was just a small step in a long hike.’
I think it through, the word I can’t translate on the gravestone sketch still bothering me. ‘But the Arch broke, so we were the last Excursion. If we didn’t tie all those Deeds together, then the Project failed, right?’
Hazel folds her arms. ‘Not necessarily. CHARL1E might’ve fixed the Arch, and we could be getting overwritten by glitches and mends we can’t feel all the time.’
I shudder, thinking of the automaton on the cusp of time, meddling with its fraying edge, always observing and calculating.
‘Sometimes I’ve had dreams or déjà vu,’ Hazel/Mum continues, things spilling out of her that she’s been holding back for years.
‘And I look up because it feels like he and Tree and the Tinys are watching me, and I wonder what timeline just passed by. Once, I thought I was walking in acid rain under a glass umbrella, but when I looked up it was just black cloth over my head. I stretched out a hand to catch the raindrops and was genuinely surprised my skin didn’t burn.
Another time, when you were still little, we were in the park and you were playing in the long grass and it was so unfamiliar, as if I’d never seen grass, as if it had just never existed before.
I ran my hands through it, and I swear, it was brand-new. ’
I try to be her sister for a moment, not her daughter. ‘Do you think it could be PTSD?’
‘No.’ She’s got Mum-level confidence about this, giving me the same tone she once used for staying away from hot stoves.
‘I truly believe CHARL1E could be capable of that sort of thing. There was so much about him that even he didn’t know.
You remember that prophecy I found in his code?
It was in first person. My theory is that at some point in time, a future version of him wrote it, and then put it inside a past version of himself.
Besides, I spent so long in the dreamscape, it probably gave me temporal oddities too.
I think it sensitised me to glitches and mends. ’
The sitting room is close with my uncertainty.
It’s going to be another hot day. I look at my plump hands, which should be dry and creased like Hazel/Mum’s.
A whole kid’s lifetime passed—my lifetime—and we just took baby steps when we should’ve been sprinting.
I am angry, but not the way Hazel/Mum thinks.
‘There’s so much left to do,’ I say, turning to her. ‘When we travelled, we affected the past and the future, but the past and future also affected us. We could bring change to the present as well—so why haven’t you done something? All these years and you’ve never even raised a placard!’
She smiles and I raise an eyebrow.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s just that you really sounded like Little Anna then.’
I fold my arms, but Hazel/Mum places her hands on my shoulders turns me back to the grave sketch.
‘Know what this means?’ She asks, pointing at the word I’ve been struggling with.
‘No. The word’s stupidly long, and I’m a bit rusty, or I guess, still confused.’
‘It’s two words, shoddy inscription,’ she says. ‘The first word, “parakinduneusis” means “desperate venture.”’
My memory tingles, returning to a library I haven’t been in since before I was born. ‘But you could also translate it as “project,”’ I whisper, realising what the second word is.
They are missed by their students and friends, who continue the work of Project Kairos.
I gasp.
‘Right?’ Hazel/Mum says, definitely inhabiting Mum-mode.
‘Sometimes there’s genuinely nothing going on, and you should get angry about that.
Hopping, blazing, blow-it-up crazy. But this isn’t one of those times.
You’ve known me thirteen— Thirty-nine—Urgh.
You know me. Do you really think I’d travel through time, lose my sister—as far as I knew forever—and come back and do nothing? ’
I frown, trying to figure her out. The sun cusps the flats opposite, shining gold on her hoodie. On the breast, a logo is picked out in white thread, a clock face running backwards. Underneath, in crisp serifs: PROJECT KAIROS. I stare at Hazel-Mum.
Her smile deepens. ‘Like CHARL1E said, trying is imperative.’
‘But it’s hundreds of years before they even start coding him.’
‘You’re the one who said we should change things.’
I think of her cluttered, cramped study. ‘You mean, he’s just sitting there on your laptop?’
‘Well, not all of him,’ she admits. ‘But enough to chat with.’
It’s so easy to picture CHARL1E and the Tinys under the boughs of Tree, listening to the votives tinkling in a fresh breeze made from real trees with real leaves, while agapanthus and poppies and cornflowers sprout from the rubble against a sparkling sea.
In that world, perhaps Tree would start singing recognisable things—the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, Bach, Nina Simone, Faithless—and humanity wouldn’t be over, but reawakening, Deed by Deed.
I won’t live long enough to find out whether that world comes true, but I can work towards it.
Even so, it’s one thing saying that and another doing it. Post-travel Anna’s only thirteen and she’s already exhausted. Part of me wants to just sit down and scream, “It’s too late!”
The difficulty isn’t the vision, it’s the journey.
A chasm in my chest opens, and I’m thirteen and thirty-nine and just as lost at both ages. I look up at Hazel/Mum and she sees it on my face.
‘How about that fresh air?’
I nod and she guides me to the door, sunlight piercing the frosted glass as she unlocks it. She freezes partway through stepping out.
‘What’s wrong?’ I say, craning to get a look.
She lets the door swing open and stands back, pointing at the balcony with her mouth ajar.
Outside, the pigeon-deflecting mirrors have shattered, dusting the pots of half-grown mint and parched geraniums—but the mint and geraniums are gone.
In their place, strange plants spring from every bare centimetre of potted earth.
Vines bearing sky-blue, egg-shaped fruit twine the rusted iron railings.
Mosses in every shade of green with tiny rainbow blooms drip from the pot edges and fill the cracks in the concrete.
Leaves and flowers in shapes and colours I’ve never seen spill across the floor and clamber up the walls, shrouding the deckchairs and coffee table.
Everywhere I look, there are extraordinary things.
A mug left out yesterday is coated in fractals of vibrant teal mould.
The half-built pigeon nest in the corner has sprouted into a shrub, bearing flowers the size of my hand.
Hazel/Mum ventures out, stroking one of the petals. ‘These plants are from the dreamscape,’ she says. ‘I grew them myself from the memory seeds.’
I join her outside, the morning sun brushing my skin. ‘Looks like I wasn’t the only thing we brought back.’
In wonder, Hazel/Mum starts laughing, and the sound is so familiar that it makes me laugh too.
All my post-Travel life, Hazel/Mum’s been making the journey, executing her own Deeds and forming her own Excursions.
Her laughter subsides as she breathes in the sunlight and honey-scented dreamscape flowers. ‘I wonder what happens now.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘I think it’s high time you introduced me to CHARL1E.’
‘Alright,’ she says, ‘but don’t be disappointed, he’s not quantum yet or anything.’
‘Give it time.’ I look over the allotments, wondering how many dreamscape seeds and spores are already drifting on the wind, already affecting the microbiome in my lungs. I clasp my hands together, half in wonder, half in expectation. ‘So? Let’s begin.’