Freeset, p.1
Freeset, page 1
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BOOKS BY SARINA DAHLAN
the four cities
Preset
Reset
Freeset
short story collections
Shadow Play
FREESET
SARINA DAHLAN
Copyright © 2024 by Sarina Dahlan
E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Alenka V. Linaschke / Series design by Kurt Jones
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-200-97869-4
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-200-97868-7
Fiction / Science Fiction / General
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
My eternal gratitude to allies
and those who serve as bridges
—for without you this world
would be a much darker place
On the edge of a cliff,
hidden by jagged peaks
and a northern forest of pine,
lives Old Mem.
Her face,
empty of lines,
holds secret lives within.
Her soul,
stolen in slumber,
awaits deliverance.
Look homeward, angel,
and breathe life everlasting.
—Anonymous
CONTENTS
1. Aris
2. Metis
3. Cass
4. Aris
5. Metis
6. Cass
7. Aris
8. Metis
9. Scylla
10. Aris
11. Metis
12. Aris
13. Cass
14. Scylla
15. Metis
16. Aris
17. Cass
18. Metis
19. Aris
20. Cass
21. Scylla
22. Aris
23. Metis
24. Scylla
25. Aris
26. Cass
27. Scylla
28. Aris
29. Metis
30. Cass
31. Aris
32. Scylla
33. Metis
34. Cass
35. Aris
36. Scylla
37. Metis
38. Aris
39. Scylla
40. Cass
41. Metis
42. Aris
43. Scylla
44. Cass
45. Metis
46. Aris
47. Scylla
48. Cass
49. Metis
50. Aris
51. Scylla
52. Cass
53. Scylla
54. Aris
55. Cass
56. Metis
57. Scylla
58. Aris
59. Metis
60. Scylla
61. Aris
62. Scylla
63. Aris
64. Eleanor
65. Scylla
66. Metis
67. Eli
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
ARIS
February 14, 2233
(34 days before Tabula Rasa)
Through a broken window of a broken building, Aris sees the night sky. Dots of stars sprinkle it like sugar on a cake—more stars than she’s ever seen, more than it would take her an entire lifetime to count. Her winter jacket is no match for the cold. There’s an edge of otherworldliness to the freezing desert air, making her wonder whether she is inside a dream. Maybe. She’s exhausted enough. It must be close to midnight by now. She leans against the body next to hers, his warmth trying and failing to replace the fire they could not start.
“We need to separate,” he says, his words puncturing both the darkness and her heart.
“Why?” She knows but asks anyway.
“You need to keep going north. I’ll lead the drones away. You heard them last night, didn’t you?”
For a month, to stay out of sight, they have been sleeping during the day and traveling under the cloak of darkness. The journey took them past weed-filled farmlands and broken-down gas stations, dead towns with characteristically American names and drained lakes that once fed thirsty coastal cities.
Now, with drones flying at random hours of the day, it is becoming nearly impossible to move. Elara is far behind them. Their destination is somewhere ahead. They are stuck in the middle of a treeless desert, danger circling closer and closer. Had they not found this long-abandoned building, it would have been the end.
“I don’t want you to,” she says.
“I know, love. I don’t want to either. But I have to so you can make it. What we’re doing is bigger than the both of us, you know that.”
That’s Metis—selfless to the end.
“We don’t even know where it really is,” she responds. “What if it’s not where we think it is?”
“Just follow the train tracks like we planned. They run north–south. The Four Cities are in the south—we’ve determined that. Which means something else is in the north.”
Something can mean anything. But they have been operating on the promise of “something” for so long the word has become the mantra of their survival.
I can see something glittery ahead—maybe it’s water.
There’s something over there! I think it’s shelter.
“Do you really believe our memories are there?” she asks.
“That’s what the legend says,” he replies.
On the edge of a cliff,
hidden by jagged peaks
and a northern forest of pine,
lives Old Mem.
The legend of Mem first came to them as a poem. The Crone believes that, like most myths and legends, it grew from humbler stories—stories told by past Resistance members who may have found Mem, ones that were told and retold thousands of times over the past two hundred years. Through time, past memory erasure.
Once Aris and Metis knew what to look for, they kept seeing clues everywhere. In notes written on the margins of old books. In songs and words hidden in paintings found in museums. All of them pointed in one direction: north. Despite the clues, she knows this is still the wildest of guesses. But it’s what they have.
“You will find it,” Metis says. “I have faith.”
“But what good will finding it be if you’re arrested? They’re going to erase your dreams.”
She shudders at the thought of the Interpreter’s icy blue eyes. Absinthe had reminded her what the woman is—a murderer of dreams.
“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Remember what the Crone said? Since the Planner values my ability to create, he won’t let the Interpreter erase my dreams. That’s why I get to keep my name and our house every cycle. I’m protected by my music.”
Metis is just trying to make her feel better, she knows, though there is truth in it. The Crone reasoned the System gives him only one name to track his body of work through all the cycles, but the house is more likely for practical reasons. Being a pianist, he needs a piano in his house, and there aren’t that many in the Four Cities. Moving it from home to home isn’t easy. Metis doesn’t need to move, he just needs to think he did.
“How am I supposed to be okay with letting you go?” Aris asks.
“There’s no letting go. We’re forever.”
He leans in and kisses her, his mouth hot against her cold lips.
Forever. She hates the word. Hates it for all its failed promises. Hates it for how much she loves hearing it from him.
He trails his lips across her cheek to her ear. She presses her body against his. She wants—needs—to brand this moment into her memory. Her hand digs into her pocket and pulls out a glass vial. Seeing what she’s doing, Metis reaches into his jacket and does the same. The green liquid gleams in the moonlight.
Her eyes drink in all of him, memorizing every detail. He does the same. He mouths “I love you.” She returns the words, fragile as a butterfly, in a whisper. They open the vial tops and flick the green liquid down their throats.
It feels like a ball of air exploding inside, followed by a tingling sensation traveling throughout her body. His lips are on hers at once. She tastes the green herbal tang of hypnos with the sting of alcohol.
His fingers move to her coat, and she hears it unzipping. Cold air seeps in through the opening, and she shivers from it and desire.
“Don’t let me go,” she says.
“I couldn’t even if I tried,” he replies.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Hope—whatever is left of it—flutters inside her chest.
CHAPTER 2
METIS
February 19, 2233
(29 days before Tabula Rasa)
Metis wipes his face with the only clean part of his sleeve and crawls from under the rock overh
But she’s not alone. The Crone is with her.
“She’s safe and on her way to Mem,” he whispers to himself. She has to be.
His plan is working. He has been leaving a trail of dying campfires as he zigzags his way south, and the drone has been following. As long as it is following him, it’s not following her.
Crying doesn’t help his thirst. The last creek he saw was a day ago. There’s only enough water in his bottle for one more drink. All morning, he has been talking himself out of draining it. Every hour becomes every half hour. Every half hour becomes every fifteen minutes. If he was not thinking of Aris, he was thinking of drinking that damn water.
The sun is finally making its way toward the west. It’s time for him to move. The last campfire he left was hours east of here to misdirect the drone from his destination—Elara. With luck, he will get to it before nightfall. There, he can disappear with the help of his network of Dreamers and wait for Aris’s return.
She will come back.
He looks up. There’s no trace of clouds in the cerulean sky and no sign of drones as far as he can see. Perhaps they’ve moved east as he had hoped. These pesky fliers used to patrol only city blocks late at night. Must be because of all the disappearances. He and Aris are not the first to vanish from the Four Cities, and he doubts they will be the last. More and more have left.
Most of them he learned of through whispered rumors. Many were Dreamers, but not all. He doesn’t know where they went, or if they were ever found. The System has done its best to keep it a secret. Only the disappearance of a well-known citizen would need explanation. He wonders what the System is telling people about him.
Metis, celebrated pianist, has been undergoing treatments at a Callisto hospital since the new year. All future concerts are canceled until further notice.
Piano virtuoso Metis retires from music after series of mental breakdowns.
Would they have realized by now that he’s a Sandman? A missing pianist isn’t as great a threat as the missing leader of the Dreamers. He pushes the worry from his mind. There’s nothing he can do about it, and he needs the space for what he can actually control.
After a while, he comes upon a cluster of tall cacti with red fruits. His heart leaps. He runs toward it. He breaks off a stick from a scrub oak and sharpens it with a knife the way Aris taught him. He pierces the point into the middle of a ripe fruit before cutting it off the plant, avoiding the spines. They hurt for days if they get in his fingers. Slowly he peels off the thick skin with the knife, exposing the fruit’s white flesh and tiny black seeds. He takes a bite off the stick. It tastes to him like a mix between watermelon and kiwi.
The land here is less desolate and inhospitable than that up north. He gave Aris most of their food. That should just last her a few more weeks. Once she’s in the mountains, she should find wild edibles in the forest of pines.
Please make it to Mem.
There, the legend says, she’ll find the erased memories of every citizen of the Four Cities.
“How do you think they’re keeping our old memories?” Aris asked.
Her hands were busy folding and refolding clothes and stuffing them into her backpack. They had decided on two of each—underwear, shirt, pants, socks—one to wear and one to wash. The rest of the space was needed for food and water bottles.
“I don’t know. It can be anything,” he said.
“Maybe a big machine we can walk into and come out the other side of with all our old memories?”
“Like a digital version of the spring of Mnemosyne?”
A corner of her lips turned up. Just as quickly, her smile faded. “Do you really think there’s something in the north?”
She had been asking this same question over and over the closer they were to leaving—so often that it was becoming a tic of sorts. But it was her way of processing fear, and so he always answered.
“There’s something in the north. I’m sure of it.”
“Do you think we’ll have enough food?” she asked.
“Yeah. I think we’re as prepared as we’ll ever be.”
Their strategy was to bring packets of camping food—bought over months to not draw attention from the System—and supplement it with whatever safe plants they could harvest using Aris’s field guide. For water, he knew from having to get it fresh for Absinthe, that there’d be enough snowmelt this time of year in the desert.
He reached over and touched her hand. It was cold. “I know you’re afraid.”
She pulled away. “I’m not afraid. I’m just worried. There’s a difference.”
“It’s okay to be afraid. We’re leaving our home. We’ll be traveling in the wilderness with not much food.”
For the first time, they’d know what true hunger felt like.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re doing a great job selling this trip.”
“I don’t want to sell you a fairy tale. This is going to be really hard—probably the hardest thing we both will ever do.”
Her eyes flashed. “I know that. And I know what I’m doing it for.”
Tabula Rasa was coming, and they needed to find a permanent solution to their problem—one that did not involve drinking poison or jumping off a cliff like many had done before them.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed gently. “We’ll be okay.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we want to be. Because we have to be.”
There was no other choice.
Hours pass, and the sun is finally making its way to the horizon, bleeding yellow into blue. The thirst inside reignites, and this time he gives in to the fire. He uncaps the top of his bottle and drinks deeply. The water is cool and tastes almost sweet, unlike the slightly salty taste of the water in the Four Cities. He laps up the last drop, lowers the bottle from his lips, and exhales. There is another creek near the tunnel to Elara. He just has to make it there.
His stomach growls, reawakened by the water. He finds a spot under a scrub oak with a rock flat enough to sit on. His backpack is nearly empty of food. He pulls out a pouch of premade camping meal and eats directly from it. It feels like sand down his throat. The little bit of liquid in it is not enough to quench his thirst, but it will have to do for now. Once he’s done, he cleans up and continues trekking.
What he worries about is the growing cramp in his left calf. He doesn’t want to sleep outside for another night if he doesn’t have to. He pats the last vial of Absinthe in his pocket—a talisman to ward off hopelessness—and continues forward.
The land begins to transform, scrub and cacti giving way to leafier plants. Ahead, he sees a line of small trees—a sign of water. That could be the creek near the tunnel to Elara. His heart leaps.
He increases his gait, dragging his crampy left leg behind him. He is going to make it. He’ll refill his bottles at the creek and will make camp inside the tunnel tonight. Then it’s just twenty more miles to downtown Elara. He can do that in just five hours.
