Anyway, at night Clete and I did laundry in the huge industrial machines.
When we were all together, Clete faded into the background, but when it was just me and him, he never shut up.
“I’m really close, Hawk,” he said happily, enjoying our time together, as usual.
“Oh yeah?” I said automatically, dumping bins of laundry into a wheeled cart. Most of the laundry was from the prison, and most nights we saw bloody sheets, jumpsuits, towels. Everything in this city has blood on it, from the sidewalks to the washrags.
“Yeah,” Clete said. “I had to install some updates at the offices and it was takin’ forever so I was workin’ on my own stuff an’ I mean, Hawk, I swear I’m close.”
“Close to what?” I could work without thinking. I could usually talk to Clete without thinking, because he didn’t require a lot of interaction. I’d heard it all a million times before: He was close to a breakthrough. He was about to change the world, and no matter how many times he failed, he kept trying. I kept listening because I thought he really might change the world. Someday.
“It’ll be an app,” Clete said, lowering his voice. “If I install it on the office computers, it’ll start replicating and infiltrating other computers. Hawk—it’ll change everything.”
I gave him an absent smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah! It’ll totally change the balance of power, for one thing,” he said. “Everyone could have power, not just McCallum. I hate McCallum and his Voxvoce. It’s awful. It hurts my ears.”
“I know, bud,” I said, adding extra bleach to this load. This was his biggest idea yet, and while I loved hearing about it, it felt like a daydream. Kind of like mine, about my parents coming back to my corner to get me. It’s hard to get excited about something you know is never gonna happen.
“Yeah. I’m close.”
The other workers, mostly Opes hired by the day, shuffled in and started mechanically picking up mops and brooms, then shuffled out again as if they hadn’t seen us. That made sense, since we weren’t two giant bags of dope.
“Another thing,” Clete said later. We stood opposite each other at one of the large folding tables, each with baskets full of towels. Usually we raced to see who could get them all folded fastest, just about the only entertainment around here that didn’t involve something illegal or somebody getting hurt.
“Okay, go!” I said, and we started folding.
“I heard about these really cool experiments, over in the Labs,” Clete said, expertly folding towels in seconds like a machine.
“Really?” I said, looking at him. This was different. Anytime I heard the word experiment, my ears perked right up.
“They’re messing with memories,” he said. “Like, memories are stored in your DNA, right? It depends on how the chemicals are laid down, first you got the glutamate activating the neurotransmitters—”
“Cut to the chase,” I said gently.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, so they’re taking murderers and trying to erase the memories of the bad things they’ve done, to help them rehabilitate. If they wipe out just those memories—”
“Is it working?” I asked, eyeing his pile of towels. Clete was getting involved in his story, and if I could keep him talking, I might win our little competition.
He shrugged. “It might, someday. Right now it’s hard for them to just choose a few memories to erase. A couple lifers got wiped completely.”
I slammed my hand down on the empty table. “Done!”
Clete’s face fell a little bit, but he perked right back up. “Count!” He demanded. “I know I did more than you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine,” I said, as I touch-counted my towels. “What do you mean, wiped completely?”
“Like they don’t know their own names, completely,” Clete said, his own fingers flying through his pile. “Seventy-eight!”
I was still counting. “Oh, my god—seventy-seven!” I hated to admit it, but Clete beamed. He didn’t win often. Suddenly his smile disappeared and he clapped his hands over his ears, sinking to the ground. The Voxvoce had started, was filling this room, this building, this city with unbearable, painful, eardrum-breaking noise. I went away inside myself till it was over, a pleasant daydream like Clete’s, where he saves the world with his app. I guess I’m selfish, but I don’t want to save the world. All I want is my parents back.
If they could erase memories, could they also uncover memories? It killed me that out of all the stupid info my brain had chosen to squirrel carefully away, it had somehow let all the memories of my parents slip through its coils. When my parents had left me I’d been old enough to understand instructions. Understand promises. Old enough to understand that Ridley was a friend, not a pet. But I couldn’t remember anything before the day they’d stood me on that street corner. Couldn’t remember their faces. Their names. What they’d smelled like.
Clete stood, shaking his head, which told me the Voxvoce was over. “God!” he said, massaging his ears. “It’s so horrible! McCallum is such an asshole! My program is gonna change all that.”
“Change McCallum?” I asked. “No one’s ever seen him. For all we know he’s a hand puppet. There’s no way to get close to him.”
We pushed through the doors and started heading back to the Children’s Home. This was the creepiest part—this long, poorly lit hallway back home. It was late now—I was beat and it was hard to stay alert. This hallway ran along the back of prisoner cells, and every once in a while, one of them would tap on the high, narrow windows and startle the crap out of me. Usually this was followed by a laugh, or suggestions that made my ears burn.
Suddenly I heard the whoosh of—wings? I spun around, but Ridley wasn’t inside, wasn’t in this hall. I walked faster.
“The way to get closer to McCallum is through… computer lines,” Clete said serenely.
But I was hardly listening. What if… what if they’d already experimented with erasing memories? What if they’d experimented on me?
CHAPTER 10
We all slept jumbled together in what had once been a large closet. Over the years I’d collected sleeping bags, blankets, tablecloths, pillows, you name it. If it was relatively soft, it was in this closet, and we slept in and around and on it, our body heat pooling together to keep us warm, breath mixing as we slept in a pile, like a litter of puppies.
Our common room, where we did everything else, was basically a big, depressing space with a couple tables, a bunch of chairs, and some broken furniture that the orderlies had stashed here. The walls had once been white, probably, but now were tinged with yellow and almost gray with years of dirt and dust. There were splashes of dark brown that might have once been red, but I tried not to think about that.
That night, my dreams were horrible. I was fighting my way through the clouds over the City of the Dead, voices filling my ears. Unseen hands grabbed at me, snatching feathers from my wings.
I bolted upright, damp with sweat, still twitching from my nightmares. A thin, pale strip of light at the bottom of the door showed me the sun was up, so I extricated myself from various lab rats, easing my arm out from Calypso and untangling my legs from Clete’s, and tiptoed out. In the common room the sun looked like it was leaking through the dirty windows. I remembered last night, standing there, watching the new prisoner. The worst of the worst. Feeling like he’d been trying to pry into my brain.