False Hearts (22 page)

Expendable. Like Mia.

“They’re both as bad as each other in some ways, aren’t they?” I say, my stomach roiling. Am I really on the right side? Is there a right side in all of this?

“Be careful what you say,” Nazarin says, leaning close to me.

I rest my head in my hands. I want to leave all of this. I want to give up. Everything is too muddled, too confusing; but if I give up, then Tila goes into stasis.

“You ready?” he asks.

I nod, and he presses the button and the hologram pops up like a macabre children’s picture book.

It’s Mia, alone. She’s not connected to the machine, but she’s just come off it. The medical information scrolls to the right of her, listing all the physical ways the Zeal and Verve have messed her up. Malnutrition. Kidney disease. Skin abscesses near injection sites. Tooth decay. Jaundice. It’s reflected in the hologram—Mia is thin and unhealthy, just as she was the last time I saw her, strapped to the Chair, wires emerging from her arms as she dreamed her nightmares in the Zealot lounge of Mirage. But in this her eyes are open, moving from side to side as she staggers back to the hovel where she lives.

Lived.

I swallow, unable to look away. A dark, shadowy figure comes up behind her. A man, most likely, judging from his height. His face is covered in a dark fabric mask. He grabs Mia around the neck and pulls her to him, whispers something in her ear.

I pause it. “How do they know he whispered to her?” Mia’s face is also a lot more detailed and expressive than the re-creation of Tila murdering Vuk had been, and everything is shown from the same angle. I can answer my own question.

“It was caught on camera,” Nazarin says.

“Do you think it was the Ratel?”

“I honestly don’t know. I hope not. And this isn’t their usual MO. If they order a hit, they want you to know it.” His jaw works, and he must be thinking of his partner. He presses play again.

Mia’s eyes widen at whatever the masked man whispers. “Which lost soul are you?” she asks, loud enough to be heard by the camera.

He doesn’t respond except to grab her face in his hands.

“I wanted to try and be good again. I suppose it was always too late.” She closes her eyes. “I forgive you.”

He breaks her neck. She falls to the ground. The man is gone. Mia is also gone, even if her body remains.

The image goes dark and I turn away. A round, heavy weight of dread and grief sits in my stomach. I cross my arms over my torso and hunch forward.

“I don’t want to push you, after just seeing that,” Nazarin says, leaning on the counter next to me. He’s close, but not too close. Perfectly trained. “I think there’s something in here that can help us. What do you think she meant, when she mentioned ‘lost souls’ just now, and when Tila mentioned changing faces in Mia’s dream?”

I lean closer, lowering my voice to a whisper in his ear. I feel him shiver. “Are you sure the government didn’t do this?” I ask. “Catch her lucid dreaming because of us, and snuff her before the Ratel found her?” The government being behind this would be marginally better than the Ratel, though still terrifying, but the real question simmers behind those words: is it our fault?

He shakes his head. “No. I have access to those records. Whoever this was, it wasn’t one of us.”

Unless they were off the books and they don’t want him to know. That’s always a possibility.

I furrow my brow.
Changing faces
. Vuk’s autopsy said he’d had lots of plastic surgery. Even changed the shape of his ears. Had she known him, somehow?

Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.

A horrible theory blossoms in my head. “Fucking hell.”

“What?”

“Turn on the wallscreen.”

The blank wall home screen appears in front of us.

“Bring up the list of Vuk’s suspected surgeries.”

He does, and I stare at them. Sure enough …

“Bring up his face.”

A photograph of him appears. I look closely, but at first it still seems impossible. The face is totally different.

“Give me the tablet.”

He passes it to me and I take the little stylus from the side and start to sketch. I’m a passable artist at best, but I focus on the shape of the eyes, the nose, the wide mouth. I draw him almost smiling, as if we’ve just thrown a grape at him and missed. I project the drawing of Adam onto the wallscreen, right next to the picture of Vuk. Maybe, just maybe. The jawline is the same. The eyes are the same color—that warm hazel I remember. I close my eyes and imagine that face I’d just seen in the dream. I open my eyes and look at Vuk. Yes. Yes.

“The missing link,” I say.

Nazarin catches on right away, which I appreciate. I can’t quite articulate my thoughts anyway.

“It’d be difficult, but with enough surgery, Vuk could be this boy, Adam.”

I shake my head. I’ve made the connection, but it still doesn’t seem possible. He’d had his left arm reconstructed. Underneath the synthetic skin, it had been as metal as my mechanical heart. “The boy I know was a fetal amputee. His arm ended at the elbow. But Adam
died
.”

“Did you ever see the body?”

“N … no.” There were no funerals in the Hearth.

What did they do with the bodies?

Adam was in the Wellness Cabin that first day, and he seemed ill, but not on the brink of death. And the next day he was gone. “Did he escape, like we did?”

“It’s possible.” He taps his fingers on the countertop. I think back. Escape for us was hard. Escape for us meant planning. Adam didn’t escape. I meet Nazarin’s eyes, knowing what he’ll say next.

“Or Mana-ma sold him to the Ratel,” Nazarin says.

Which lost soul are you?
Mia asked.

Did that mean there’s more than one? Who else did we lose in the Hearth? Who else might be here?

“In the year before I left, at least three teenagers died. A cut that went septic. A flu that wouldn’t stop. And then they’d be gone. They were all men.” My stomach hurts.

“So you think your Mana-ma might have … sold Adam and others to the Ratel?”

“She might. She just might have. It’d mean money to keep us afloat and keep the Hearth solvent. We weren’t self-sufficient from trading our makeshift items and selling produce. A lot of us were raised to be pliant, to listen to those in charge. Despite that, though, I can’t picture Adam turning into a hitman. And why would she do it? It’d be against the morals she taught us, to sell Hearth folk to the Impure.”

Nazarin exhales. “Brainwashing can be very persuasive, if it’s done over years. The Ratel might have been able to break him, psychologically. And I don’t know. Maybe your Mana-ma wasn’t as holy as she led you to believe. In any case, this is circumstantial evidence on top of more circumstantial evidence.”

“Stop calling her
my
Mana-ma. She’s no such thing.” Not anymore. How could I ever have believed in her?

“Sorry. You’re right. I’ll send the sketch back to the station, see if they can make any matches.”

“My drawing might not be good enough. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs.”

“We’ll see what they say in any case. The drawing’s good.”

I feel a strange little rush of pleasure at that. “So, if this is all true, then there could be a link between the Hearth and the Ratel. Maybe Tila found that out. And that’s why she went after them.”

I fight down a rush of nausea. Even if this is why she did it, why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she ask me to help? And if Vuk was actually Adam, why the hell would she kill him? She loved him just as much as I did. Wouldn’t she try to help him instead?

Tila was stupid, brash, and left me behind. She never used to leave me in the dust … but then, she never used to have a choice in the matter.

I look back at the autopsy and the police report to distract myself from the racing, circular thoughts I have no answer to. As I make sense of the words, I gasp. “Did you see this?” I ask.

Nazarin leans over my shoulder.

It’s a report from one of Mia’s neighbors, saying she was acting strangely yesterday and this morning.

“Like a totally different person,” the woman said. She didn’t give her name to the police. “She’d been singing really old songs from the 1960s, said she was giving up Zeal, moving away. She seemed happy, but also sort of manic? I thought she might have still been high, her eyes were so glazed.”

“She wanted to quit? This makes things so much sadder,” I say, nearly choking with grief.

Nazarin frowns. “Something’s weird about it, though. We saw her physical stats. She was really far gone, to change so suddenly.”

“Maybe I got through to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the dreamscape, just before we left, I told her she could be better if she wanted to be. Remember? I told her to try and be good again.”

Nazarin’s face goes still.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” He gets up and leaves me, confused, at the kitchen table. I can hear him hitting the punching bag in the gym.

About an hour later, he asks if I want to go for a walk, for some fresh air. His eyes dart imperceptibly to the wallscreens.

I agree, put on my coat, and we head out into the night. Nazarin turns on a White Noise, a tiny device the size of a fingernail, which will distort any nearby cameras trying to record our conversation. I wish we could use it in the safe house to speak freely, but the SFPD would wonder at the scrambled readings. We walk along the darkened streets, leaning close. Nazarin has his hand in his pocket, and I know it’s curled around a gun.

Whatever he’s about to tell me, he doesn’t want his employers to know, either.

“I’ve been developing a theory, over the last few months. I’ve been trying to find more definitive proof before I go to the SFPD.”

“About what?”

“I think Verve does more than simply giving people access to dreams.”

I focus on him. The light from the streetlamps plays across his face, casting dark shadows.

“I think,” he says, each word heavy and deliberate, “that some lucid dreamers can influence the Vervescapes and change personalities. I think … you might have done that to Mia. And I think the government realized that and they killed her, not the Ratel.”

I take a few steps, trying to process the information. It doesn’t want to process. “Fuck.”

“It makes sense. I’ve seen other Knights or Pawns in the Ratel suddenly change personality completely. They wouldn’t seem to know me, even if we’d spoken the day before. Think how dangerous that makes this drug.”

“Whether it’s in the hands of the Ratel or the government.”

“Exactly.”

“So you think … the Ratel overwrote Adam’s personality, and made him Vuk?”

“Yes. I do.”

“What does this mean for us?”

“It means we stick to our original plan for the SFPD. It’s all we can do.”

“If we take the Ratel down, though, then the government will have Verve.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t look happy about it.

“There is no good and evil in this scenario, is there? There’s only bad and worse.”

We keep walking through the streets for hours. At some point, Nazarin’s warm and callused hand takes my own. I don’t pull away.

FIFTEEN

TILA

I feel sorry for those still left in the Hearth.

I’ve tried to put the Hearth behind me and to forget as much as possible. But I don’t think I can ever forget. Not completely. All those people, following Mana-ma’s rules set out in the Good Book, listening to her sermons, their voices rising up in song. Did they really think that by following those rules they’d achieve salvation, and have their pick of next lives in the Cycle?

I never knew how many people were actually happy there, and how many people were just pretending. How many knew the truth of Mana-ma?

Mardel discovered it, in the end. True enough, he stopped drinking alcohol. The problem was, he also stopped drinking everything else.

No one noticed right away. I heard my father comment that Mardel looked weak and wasn’t able to pull his weight in the fields, but he put it down to alcohol withdrawal. By the third day, Mardel was badly dehydrated. They tried to make him drink water, but he’d start shaking and spit it out. They managed to force some down him. We tried another Meditation, urging him to drink water rather than alcohol. It didn’t quite take, not like the first time. Perhaps our fear lowered efficacy. He lingered a few more days. Then he died.

Mana-ma found a way to spin it. God had simply called him home. I saw it for what it was: a failed experiment. Would she try to change us again in Meditation, and if so, who would she choose next? Would it go wrong?

I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

My parents were from San Francisco. They’d joined as idealistic teens and I think, somewhere over the next twenty-odd years, they realized they had made a mistake.

Our mom helped run the accounts and our dad was in some ways Mana-ma’s muscle, along with Uncle Tau (not our uncle by blood). They didn’t often have to be muscle, thankfully, but if people weren’t pulling their weight they’d have a quiet word with them. But they weren’t Mana-ma’s right-hand men; her most trusted advisors were Kieran, Niran and Daniel.

When we were sixteen, Kieran, Niran and Daniel were aged about twenty-seven to thirty. They’re probably still her main muscle. She’d groomed them for the role since they were little. Loyal as watchdogs, and just as scary.

After our heart attack, everyone in the Hearth was very nice to us. We didn’t have to do our chores (we couldn’t really, anyway, we were so weak). Our friends came by the house a lot and we played cards. Taema and I played on the same team because otherwise it’d be too easy to cheat. Our friends were shy around us, not wanting to meet our eyes. They knew we were probably dying, and it embarrassed them. Made me want to force them to look at us, right in the eyes; but if I’d done that, they probably wouldn’t have come back and played cards again.

We’d ask Mom and Dad how much time we had left, but they didn’t want to answer. We heard them murmuring at night in the other room, but even though we pressed our ears to the doorjamb, we couldn’t hear anything. We knew they were talking about us, though, from the tone. Hushed, worried. Nervous.