Deep magic second coll.., p.31
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 31
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
Kate struggles against me. I whisper her name softly, as I press my face against her hair, breathing her in. The stench of this place, full of smoke and death, clings to her, but her own scent is there too, and it fills me with a sense of relief that I haven’t felt since I lost her.
She looks up at me, and even though the light is dim, I can see that she’s barely holding it together. Her green eyes are unfocused, confused.
“Kiernan? But how—”
I hold my CHRONOS key against hers to transfer the stable point for the cabin, and then help her pull up the interface.
“Kate, please. You have to focus. I’ve pulled up a stable point, love. Just slide your fingers over it and go. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”
That promise is a lie in one sense, but hopefully, she’ll never know it. Six will be there.
It takes a second longer than usual, but Kate manages to lock in the location. And then she’s gone.
I slide down to the floor. The gauze and medical tape are a few feet away, but I don’t have the energy. And it’s pointless. Holmes is already trying the door. Whether he shoots me, or I bleed out, or I simply vanish, the end result is the same. My time’s up.
Still, I bring up the cabin on my key. Not to follow her. The fact that pulling up the stable point is a struggle tells me that’s not possible. I just need to see that Six made it back, that someone is there to help her. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he’s not, but I need to know.
Holmes twists the handle again, and then the door shakes. Once, twice, and then it flies open.
My eyes remain on the holographic display. Kate is in the cabin, crumpled on the floor. A moment later, I blink in—or rather, Six blinks in. He lifts Kate into his arms, and I pan the view around to follow them.
From the corner of my eye, I see Holmes. He scans the room for Kate, then raises the pistol in my direction.
Closing my eyes, I hold fast to that final image of Kate, safe in the cabin, and wait for the end.
Afterword
This short story originally appeared in CLONES: The Anthology, a collection of stories about—you guessed it—clones, edited by Daniel Smith. Time travel isn’t the most common method of producing clones in science fiction, and it’s certainly not the most technologically feasible. But clones of this sort exist in my series, The CHRONOS Files, created when a time traveler doubles back on his or her timeline and changes something. That action results in a splinter—a temporary duplicate of the time traveler. One copy or the other vanishes in ten minutes or so, and the timeline continues on its slightly altered way.
But . . . which copy vanishes? You or the new you? Does it even matter if they’re both you? What sort of challenges would you face working with multiple yous toward a common goal? These existential questions are touched on briefly in Time’s Divide, the final book in my series, but I wanted to explore them in a bit more detail. The events that happen to Kiernan after the end of Time’s Echo, when he’s forced to create multiple splinters in order to save Kate, seemed like a perfect opportunity to dig a bit deeper, so I was delighted to have the chance to explore this somewhat unusual method of cloning for the Clones anthology.
Thanks for reading “Splinter.” If you enjoyed this short story, you can find the entire CHRONOS series online at http://www.amazon.com/author/walker.
ABOUT RYSA WALKER
Rysa Walker is the author of the bestselling CHRONOS Files series. Timebound, the first book in the series, was the Young Adult and Grand Prize winner in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. The CHRONOS Files has sold nearly half a million copies since 2013 and has been translated into ten languages.
Rysa currently resides in North Carolina with her husband, two youngest sons, and a hyperactive golden retriever. When not working on the second book in The Delphi Trilogy, she watches shows where travelers boldly go to galaxies far away, or reads about magical creatures and superheroes from alternate timelines. She has neither the time nor the patience for reality TV.
For news and updates, subscribe to the newsletter at rysa.com/contact.
Website: www.rysa.com
Twitter: @rysawalker
SPRING 2018
MURMURS
By Micah Hyatt | 5,300 Words
MINUTES AFTER JEAN Dufranc was born, a very polite robotic messenger strolled into the birthing suite to ask his parents for permission to cut out his heart.
“To whom would the heart go?” Mr. Dufranc asked. This was not the question that he really wanted to ask; he viewed marriage as a sort of long-term treaty between two warring states, and his plan (built on the premise that his wife would be feeling emotional after the delivery) was to diplomatically ease the conversation in the direction of possible financial gains while ensuring his own indemnity.
He needn’t have bothered.
Mrs. Dufranc shifted the sleeping bundle in her arms and said, “How much will they give us?”
“The heart would go to a little girl born to the Sharik family down the hall,” the messenger said. “They would, of course, provide your son with a synthetic. Shall I forward the offer to your mobile?”
Mr. Dufranc’s mobile vibrated. He read the figure displayed on its screen aloud, and nearly swooned. Mrs. Dufranc, however, looked nonplussed.
“How many other potential donors are there?” she asked.
“None currently,” the messenger said.
The father and mother shared significant glances. “Then it’s a lowball,” Mrs. Dufranc said. “They’re desperate.”
And indeed, the parents of Illyia Sharik were desperate. Forty years prior, Ayatollah Uzma had declared synthetic organs to be haram. If the Shariks’ little girl was not given a real human heart, she would be denied entrance to the social network that controlled access to many respected schools, prominent shopping areas, vacation spots, mosques, and (some fundamentalists still claimed) heaven.
“Tell the Sharik family that we are not averse to the trade, but that the price is not acceptable,” said Mr. Dufranc.
“Tell them to add another zero, or they can give their daughter a pig’s heart,” said Mrs. Dufranc.
The messenger bowed, cheerfully oblivious to the insult it was about to convey, and hurried away.
“Let me hold the boy,” said Mr. Dufranc.
Mrs. Dufranc eyed her husband dubiously, for he had once dropped a semivaluable antique clock (the Dufrancs being in the somewhat lucrative antiquity business), and this was the type of thing that she never forgot. But the thought of money had put her in high spirits, and she relented.
“Big boy,” Mr. Dufranc said, cradling the child. A grin broke out on his face as he watched baby Jean suckle the air in his sleep. He marveled that his son’s entire torso could fit in the palm of his hand. “It won’t hurt,” he whispered. “They make sure of that. And they say a synthetic is better than the real thing. Never gets tired. Easy to replace when it wears out.”
Of all these statements, the most true was that the heart was easy to replace, and indeed, to install, provided the right instruments were at hand.
The doctor who performed baby Jean’s surgery did so via his mobile from a pub in Soho, sipping Guinness and occasionally glancing away from the cricket match to observe a video stream of a faraway operating table where a tiny body was sliced open by robotic implements that carefully exposed a tiny red heart. Sometimes a prompt appeared on the phone screen to ask the doctor if he would like to proceed, and the doctor would say yes, loudly, much to the annoyance of the other bar patrons.
Automated surgical instruments cut away connective tissue and sucked away excess fluids, and a gleaming metal claw descended to pluck the still-palpitating mass away as easily as an apple from a basket. The claw returned a moment later clutching what looked like a very unfair trade.
It was a drab gray deflated-looking thing, but it fit, once it was twisted down a few times, and there was something to be said for the synthetic heart when it was seen in motion. After all the important pipes were connected, it began to beat with an unnaturally rhythmic perfection.
On a massage parlor table in another part of Soho, a woman was in the process of having the muscles in her back kneaded by a muscular Swedish man when her mobile began to vibrate. She was asked whether she would like to proceed with the operation that would put the freshly removed heart of Jean Dufranc into the thoracic cavity of another child, Illyia Sharik. The woman said yes loudly, several times, which caused the Swedish man to knead her more vigorously under the erroneous assumption that he was about to earn a rather large tip.
* * *
The least true statement that Jean’s father made on the day of his birth was that it would not hurt. The pain did not accompany the surgery, this was true, and it was not entirely physical. But it was with Jean always as he grew older. Sometimes it was a scarcely noticeable twinge, but sometimes it was so intense he could hardly bear it.
The pain could be summed up as this: someone had taken something from Jean, and his body wanted it back.
This pain, the doctor said, once Jean was old enough to report it, was called a murmur, and it was entirely in his head. The good news was that the condition was easily treated with medication. The bad news was that the condition was fictional and entirely based on an acronym the doctor had made up just then, in a curry shop, talking to Jean’s parents on his mobile while trying to see how many pieces of naan he could balance on his head. It was not a very clever acronym to anyone but the doctor, but he would tell the story to his colleagues in Soho more than four times that day. It stood for Mentally UnReasonable, Medically UnRepairable.
Drugs were prescribed. Jean took them with him to school every day in a happy little dispenser that was shaped like a pelican. Every six hours or so, a cheery little tune would play, reminding Jean to press the button on the pelican’s feet to receive a painless injection of powerful mood enhancers. Jean tended to smile a lot, sometimes for no particular reason at all, and while common wisdom says that the more you smile, the more people will like you, this sadly does not hold true when your classmates routinely find you standing in the hallway all alone, grinning at a water fountain. And so Jean’s life at school was a lonely existence.
Illyia Sharik, the girl who had Jean’s heart thumping inside her chest, had exactly the opposite problem—she made too many friends. The reason for this was that she had a murmur of her own. She was convinced that she had stolen something that belonged to someone else, and so she constantly tried to give it away. It did not matter what it was. If her teachers gave her a piece of candy for doing particularly well (which she often did, being so eager to give answers away), the reward vanished not into her mouth, but into the mouths of the friends eagerly crowding behind her like sharks in the wake of a chum-spilling fishing boat.
If Illyia had one thing in common with Jean (not counting his heart), it was that, despite all her friends, she felt alone. Cyanosis, the blueness she had been born with, was far more extensive than a mere pigment shift caused by poorly oxygenated blood. A perpetual gloom hung over her, and it continuously escaped her parents’ notice. She had so many friends that she was almost never alone, and those friends were always so cheery and loud and full of candy that her parents, for all they loved her, would scarce have noticed had Illyia been screaming for help at the top of her lungs.
There were other signs. Any toys bought for Illyia would mysteriously and immediately disappear. Lost, Illyia would say, knowing very well that they were hidden in her knapsack, waiting to be dispensed beneath the tree at recess the next day. And the family dog got fatter and fatter, no matter how restrictive his diet became, and he would salivate profusely whenever Illyia was near.
The only thing Illyia could do to silence the murmur was give something away. But there were only so many toys she could fit into her knapsack, and only so many answers she could give her teachers, and her lunch could be gobbled up by a single hungry boy in seconds. The murmur told her that if she could only give away enough of herself, she would be happy. But there was never enough of herself to give, and so Illyia was never ever happy.
As Illyia grew older, she became very pretty like her mother, and the boys in her class began to realize that they were boys, and that there were also girls, and that of all the girls Illyia was the prettiest. This was when her real problems began.
Jean’s problems began when he was ten and he lost his pelican-shaped happiness dispenser. His parents were always arguing about money in front of him (due to a downturn in the formerly somewhat lucrative antique business), and he didn’t dare tell them.
But the loss of the pelican wasn’t entirely negative. Jean no longer occasionally drooled from the corner of his mouth, and he was able to listen to his teachers for whole minutes at a time without his mind skipping off through fields of crystalline butterflies. But the murmur, the feeling that someone had taken something that belonged to him, came back with a vengeance. Without his happiness dispenser, Jean coped the only way he knew how: he took things from other people.
At first Jean only took small, meaningless things that no one would miss—old wads of gum from the undersides of other students’ desks, fragments of forgotten blackboard chalk. But these small things only silenced the murmur for a short while, and before Jean had graduated from sixth grade, he had graduated to stealing lunch boxes, small change, and the answers to important tests. He was usually careful enough that his victims never even saw him.
But one day Jean was caught in the act, and he was chased, and it was during this chase that Jean discovered something he did not know about himself—he could run.
When the other kids fell behind wheezing, Jean was just getting started. His synthetic heart might take a moment to get going, but once up to speed, it propelled freshly oxygenated blood through his cardiovascular system with an explosively powerful two stroke. Jean found he could sprint the length of a soccer field without the slightest effort. He started getting careless when he stole things, not because he was lazy, but because he liked being chased.
It was during one of these chases that Jean, sprinting across the school soccer field with three older boys in pursuit (having stolen from them a magazine of questionable content), caught the eye of the school’s sports faculty. Jean was subdued only by the concerted efforts of the entire high school soccer team and their overweight coach who, clutching his hairpiece against the wind, tore after Jean on his Segway.
A disciplinary hearing was held. The soccer coach argued on Jean’s behalf in vivid Quebecois French, and Jean was acquitted on the condition that he go out for sports. All the sports.
And so Jean, who had once been so small and so frail, whose torso had fit in the palm of his father’s hand, grew into a broad-shouldered athlete over six feet tall. And though he took too much after his father to be called handsome, there was something to be said for him when he was seen in motion.
* * *
Petechiae are small red blemishes on the skin produced by minor hemorrhages of capillary blood vessels. There are many innocent reasons a person might develop petechiae, such as excessive crying, thrombocytopenia, and hard coughing. But there are few innocent reasons an entire freshman class of healthy boys might suddenly develop petechiae all at once, along with vomiting, swollen lymph nodes, and fevers.
The reason was that Illyia had discovered kissing.
Illyia had learned that she could temporarily silence her murmur by giving boys what would make them happy, which at this point in their burgeoning sexual development was thankfully little more than some fleeting contact with her lips and sometimes her tongue. In the process of giving them kisses, Ilyia had inadvertently given them another gift, which was the gift of EBV infectious mononucleosis.
There was no hiding from the school faculty that Illyia was the Typhoid Mary of this outbreak, she being the sole female infected. Illyia’s parents were promptly notified, and they sat down with their daughter and had “the talk,” and the talk ended with them very worried and willing to spend an extraordinary amount of money for their daughter to have regular sessions with one of the best therapists in the world.
He was called one of the best therapists in the world because he charged an amount that would have been absolutely preposterous had he not been. His name was Frank. Frank had been lucky early on in his career. His first few clients had been a pair of very rich celebrities. When Frank did not accidentally convince them to kill themselves or that they were really the reincarnations of notable historical figures, those celebrity clients had told their close, very rich friends that they had on retainer one of the best therapists in the world. And so more rich people went to see Frank, and Frank was able to increase his hourly rates even higher, and this cycle persisted until Frank was one of the only therapists in the world who charged enough that rich people thought it was worth their time to see him.
Illyia didn’t mind going to see Frank because he kept a boa constrictor in a glass tank in his office, and in another tank he kept live guinea pigs. Frank told her that the guinea pigs were hers and that she could give as many of the poor creatures to the snake as she wanted. He was a good listener, and when Illyia explained the murmur, the persistent feeling that she had taken something that belonged to someone else, he did not laugh at her or balance pieces of naan on his head or make up silly acronyms.
Frank told Illyia that the mind was very strange, and despite all the progress science had made, there was very little anyone actually knew about it. He said that most doctors could only give the mind medicine that confused it until it forgot what its problem was or that made it even sicker so that it puked up all the thoughts that were making it ill. In Illyia’s case, Frank suggested that rather than confuse her mind or make it sicker, they should give her mind what it wanted in small, controlled doses. Together they made a list of the things that were ok for her to give away and not ok to give away. The only mistake Frank made was to tell Illyia that whenever she became very sad and depressed and unsure of what to do, she could never go wrong if she listened to her heart.
