“A fail-safe?” Aris asks, “What does that mean?”
“It means that if the Planner was successful, Tabula Rasa cannot be stopped.”
“Is there anything in there to confirm whether or not he was successful?” she asks.
Metis looks through the rest of the journal and shakes this head. He pulls out another from the shelf and scans through it.
“I found something!” Metis says.
She gets up from the floor and walks to him. His hand holds a page open. On it is a design similar to that on their rings. A mandala of interwoven lines. Underneath it is a word. Resistance.
Aris feels like her head is spinning. Thoughts fight each other for attention. But she is too exhausted to think. She puts the journal in her hand down on the side table and picks up the backpack by Metis’s feet. She walks back to the locker and begins emptying the bag. The task of putting supplies into the locker calms her.
Metis comes to stand next to her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He reaches for her hand. She pulls back. She did not mean to do it, but it is too late. A flash of sadness touches his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Silence follows.
“You know I saw Benja the week before he died. It was at his apartment,” Metis says.
She pauses, wondering what he is getting at.
“Why were you there?” she asks.
“To find out what happened to him,” he says.
“And what did you find?”
“The effects of the Dreamcatcher. He didn’t remember me. I looked familiar to him, but he couldn’t place where he had met me. That’s what the Dreamcatcher does to a person.”
“It didn’t just take his memories,” Aris says, “it drained him of hope.”
“He was in the middle of making you the origami cranes. Pieces of blue paper were everywhere. It reminded me of my own house when I had to make all those cranes for the Dreamers.”
“You were the one who folded the cranes for each meeting?”
“Every single one.”
“You know the first crane Benja got wasn’t given to him,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Someone had left it for me. Except I didn’t know what it meant. Benja did. I didn’t believe that dreams were portals to the past. He did.”
“It was lucky we met at all,” Metis says.
“Did you know that Benja wouldn’t see me the last week before he killed himself?” she asks.
“He didn’t want to hurt you. He thought he wasn’t good for you.”
Aris feels tears streaming down her face. Too much has happened the past few days, it’s hard to believe the Ceremony of the Dead was just last week. She has not fully healed from her friend’s death.
She wipes her tears. “Why did he think that?”
“He knew that, for you, attachment would only bring pain. He said you feel and care too much for your own good,” Metis says.
Aris feels suffocated. She needs fresh air.
Metis takes her hand in his. “Like Benja, I don’t think I’m good for you. For that, I’m sorry. It’s my fault we ended up here. You were content in your life, and I dragged you back into the past.”
“I think your memory fails you. It was I who told you about my dream on the beach. You chose the present.”
“I chose you. Wherever you decide to be.”
She looks at him. “Let’s just stay here and wait out Tabula Rasa. There’s food and water. We can learn to forage.”
“We can’t know what will happen after Tabula Rasa. We could wake up with no memories the day after. We won’t have our AI to guide us this time.” he says.
Aris revisits the thought she had while swimming in the pool at the Hotel of the Desert.
“We have the helmet,” she says, “I still have the vial of Absinthe Benja gave me. Maybe you can figure out how to distill more if we can find hypnos. We can write instructions for when we wake up next cycle. A whole map for our future selves to follow. We have almost a month to figure it all out.”
The more she talks, the more she feels excited about the possibilities of preserving their memories of each other. From a look, she knows Metis feels the same. She scans around for her backpack, the one with the helmet and the computer. She realizes she left it at the front of the cave.
“I’ll be right back,” she says and walks off.
She squeezes through the passageway, away from the brightly lit room and toward the darkness of the cave entrance. The rough wall scratches her elbows, but she does not mind. For the first time, she feels like she has a semblance of ownership over her memory.
Each day inside the cave moves slowly, like dripping liquid amber. The only way Aris tracks the movement of time is through the waxing of the moon. It’s nearly full. When they first arrived, the moon was but a sliver. It must be March, though she is not certain of the exact date. The Crone was right—time isn’t the most relevant aspect of their existence. Being in the moment is.
Aris and Metis spend their hours making love, talking, and reading. The Crone’s journals paint for them a life in the early days of the Four Cities. They learn of the struggles between the Resistance and the system—one side refusing to subject themselves to memory wipe, the other dedicated to preserving peace through Tabula Rasa.
They discover that the Crone rarely ventured outside the cave. The majority of her time was spent making and testing batch after batch of the memory potion. Her journals were filled with chemical and mathematical formulas. Results were written with meticulousness and insight. Each failure propelled her to work harder and longer. Aris wishes she could have experienced the Crone and the Planner together. She imagines it a magnificent partnership. After all, they had created the Four Cities.
One day, after a short walk
