The thing Karen used to call my gift was gone, and I knew it would never come back again. I’d never have to see another vision. I’d never sense anybody’s consciousness or be able to change it. That thing that had haunted me my whole life …it was finally over. This was just a regular, run-of-the-mill dream.
Karen smiled and looked out over the field.
“We should probably get going,” she said. “It will be dark soon.”
“Just a little longer.”
We watched the sky turn dark blue, then shift to a mixture of orange and pink.
“Will it be okay?” she asked. “Being like the rest of us?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
I felt like losing that part of me should scare me, but it didn’t—it felt like a terrible weight was lifted. The knowing had been awful, but trying to change those things had been much worse. I didn’t want to know those things anymore. They had never once helped me. The money and the power—none of it made anything any better. It was all gone now, but I think it was the first time I’d ever really known peace.
“Better than okay.”
“Good,” she said. “It’s all over, then.”
A nagging doubt crept in when she said that. I couldn’t know, not like I used to, but I did remember certain things from before.
“One thing still kind of bothers me,” I told her.
“What?”
“A woman used to come to me in my visions,” I said. “I only met her twice in real life.”
“So?”
“She said we’d meet three times.”
Karen shrugged in the growing dark. I scratched the side of my neck.
“Maybe she was wrong.”
“Maybe.”
I scratched the side of my neck again, and felt a ringshaped scar there. That’s where that woman, Flax, bit me. I could remember her lips on my neck, then terrible, blinding pain. I’d fallen as hot blood pumped out of the wound. It spread out across the floor, and I’d lain there in it as the puddle grew. She’d walked off and left me, and as she turned the corner the world faded to black.
“She was a carrier,” I said.
Karen raised her eyebrows. “A what?”
“She bit me,” I said, half to myself. “She was a carrier.”
Karen didn’t answer. When I turned to look at her, she was gone and I was alone. The wind picked up and blew across the field, making the grass and flowers ripple, almost like water.
“Karen?”
The words appeared in the dark. I rubbed my eyes, but they didn’t go away. They floated in front of me for a minute and then they faded away.
“Karen?”
“What?”
The air flickered in front of me and the field warped. The air turned cold for a second, and I felt it rush over bare skin.
I opened my eyes. The field disappeared. I was staring down at my flat, bare chest, and my legs dangled beneath me. Wires or tubes were draped down the front and back of me, and I could feel other bodies close to mine. A large man’s hand with a vein that bulged across the back hung next to mine. Our fingers were touching.
I looked around to see who was sending the messages. I was hanging from somewhere near the ceiling of a large room, surrounded by other hanging bodies. Clusters of wires ran from the backs of their heads and down their spines. Many pairs of eyes stared into the darkness that surrounded us, casting a soft glow that created shadows. There must have been hundreds of us there. The wires trailed down like vines or webbing to the floor down below, which was covered with black splotches.
I looked between two of the hanging bodies and saw a nude woman maybe ten feet in front of me. Her body was scarred, and I could see the dark veins beneath her pale skin. Her hair and eyebrows were gone, and wires sprouted from her skull and spine, like the rest. Behind her, and between the bodies to her left, I could make out a sign mounted on the far wall:
SEMANTIC/EPISODIC MEMORY RECLAMATION FACILITY
The dead woman’s eyes stared back at me. I knew her face. I’d seen it years ago, down in the old storage facility where Nico had brought me. Years later, I shot her in an alley and hoped that she was gone for good. But now I was no longer afraid. I didn’t feel any fear or jealousy or hatred.
As I watched them, I sensed another light. It was like a little star, or an ember that floated up from the dark. Below it was something like a field of lights, pinpricks in the dark that hung over a void. Instinctively, I knew they were my memories and that beneath them waited oblivion. It wasn’t like my visions. This was something different.
I focused on that single glowing ember, and when I did, it opened, like a portal. It showed me a memory, as crisp and clear as if it were on TV. Not a dream; not a vision. Just a memory.
I was sitting in a warm car with Nico. Snow was drifting down past the windshield outside. He was smiling at me from the driver’s seat, and the way he looked at me made me feel good. It seemed impossible that we were sitting there and he wanted to be there. He looked at me like I really was someone, not a weird curiosity or a joke. When he watched me, those pretty, iridescent lights shone from behind his eyes, like he was something out of one of my dreams.
And when he said the words, they had made me cry. But not anymore.
The dead woman continued to stare at me, and I felt a connection form between us. An energy, almost, began to flow back and forth, and the scene in front of me blurred as my eyes began to move in time with hers.
I remembered her words, and as I began to feel a strange sense of calm, the other shoe dropped.
My time had come. The end was here. I watched her through the maze of wires, and felt those embers of
