Page 66 of Coldwire
They ignore her. I count the clump of kids stretching their small arms: one, two, three, four, five—my goodness.
I swing my feet off the chair and stamp them down on the floor. The sound ricochets like a gunshot, and the children scream, freezing mid-motion.
The nanny’s gaze whips toward me, her eyes wide. Thankfully, she recovers before the children do, and she hurries to yank the toy away, putting it in her pocket.
“All right!” she bellows. “Home time!”
I turn around. Blare has gone back to looking at their handheld. Since they’re not using the fork they were given with the meal’s plastic utensil pack, I steal it, intent on scraping the mud off my shoes.
We sit in silence for a beat. My left boot is particularly gross, so I rest it against my other knee, nudging the flimsy plastic prongs at the sole. The nanny is having trouble getting a long leash on to all the children. I keep watch out of the corner of my eye.
“You really don’t remember anything about Kunlun?”
Now Blare’s question comes out of nowhere. I swap the fork for the plastic knife when I come across a particularly stubborn lump.
“You’ve read my file, haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” Blare replies. “But NileCorp exaggerates all the time. Is it really a complete void, or do you have… I don’t know… impressions?”
“It’s a complete absence.” Flakes of mud fall to the floor. It’s barely noticeable among the other food scraps and litter left under the table.
“But it wasKunlun,” Blare says. “How can you not remember?”
“What do you want me to say?” I counter. “Maybe NileCorp took my memories. You’ve heard of Indisposition. Now”—I drop the knife and wave my fingers around, imitating a storybook monster—“get ready for Ignorance. They go in with a malware….”
“Don’t be glib,” Blare huffs. “It’s rude.”
Itisunmannerly of me to tease a kid.
“In any case,” I say, “I’m sorry to say the specialness of the place doesn’t stop a seizure from eating up my memory. What’s it to you? You’d think you were there or something.”
Silence. I look up, and Blare has turned entirely pale, their handheld lowered. All my attention shifts away from my muddy shoes.
“Wereyou?”
Blare splutters, “No. No, I wasn’t.”
“Blare.” I put both my feet flat on the floor. “Nik and Miz aren’t here right now, so you can’t get in trouble for saying anything to me. What do you know?”
“Nothing!”
I must be freaking them out. I press on.
“Look me in the eye,” I command. “I have no memory of my final examination, from the moment my school transferred me in as an avatar to the moment I woke up downcountry. Anything could have happened in those ten weeks, so I really need you to answer a simple question:Have we met before?”
Their mouth opens and closes. Then, quietly, so much so that I have to strain to hear them, Blare says, “It could harm you to find out anything now.”
What?
Their handheld starts to ring. Blare is saved from my scrutiny and dives for the opportunity to escape the interrogation. I am at a complete loss, so I don’t push it further. At the other end of the food court, a maintenance technician is telling someone that the elevators aren’t working, and customers will either have to wait or take the stairs.
The nanny has finally ushered her kids into a line. When she passes in front of us, my eyes almost glance away. Blare is nodding vigorously—I can parse Nik’s voice coming through the line, even if his words aren’t audible to me. I am still looking, but Blare is not, when the screen on the nanny’s bag flickers and replaces the ad for a local casino with plain white text on a black background:
GET TO OFFRON WITHIN THREE DAYS.
It’s gone in a heartbeat. The screen on the bag turns to a Buy One, Get One Free code for pickleball paddles. I might have thought I imagined it entirely if it had played any faster.
Blare sets their handheld down. “Nik says they’re ready. He wants us to bring some food.”
