“Can’t you tell me anything?”
Bernard rolled his eyes at his cousin, and continued eating his clam chowder.
The moment Mireia was gone, Jez had dragged Bernard to the nearest sandwich shop so she could get more information out of him. He’d told her very little, and she wouldn’t let up until she knew everything.
“So you just expect me to believe that you found some talking creat—”
“Jez,” he finally said, setting down his spoon so he could use both hands to stop her with a single open-palmed gesture, “One of the last things I heard him say was, ‘not everything in the galaxy is big enough to see.’ He said frustratingly little of use, for how much he speaks. I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know what I can tell you, except I think my dad might be involved. Mireia seems to have some kind of plan, so could you just wait?”
Her eyes widened, and she felt silent, glancing back her roast beef sandwich as though it might bite her back.
After lunch she went swimming, still silent while she dove the to the bottom of the pool. Then she lapped its length continuously as though she could swim her way out of everything that was happening, and everything that was coming.
If anything, the exercise seemed to be making her more angry.
Bernard read a book while she was in the water, but the lurid fantasy did little to distract him. In some ways, it made him feel worse. If Ruben’s abilities were even halfway real—if anything that had happened that morning was even slightly real—then he could no longer be sure of what wasn’t real. Truthfully, the only comfort he gained from the book was the subversive thrill of knowing he wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place.
Eventually Jez stopped, and pulled herself up onto the stairs at the other end of the pool. For several long minutes she remained there, contemplating the water’s surface before taking herself to the sauna. By the time she came back she seemed to have calmed down—her motions and posture were less rigid—but remained silent.
Once Mireia returned, they took a walk down Meeting Street, killing time until dinner with a stroll through White Point Gardens at the tip of the Peninsula, then eventually returned to North Market, arriving at the restaurant Bernard had suggested earlier. Jez remained mostly silent for the entire walk.
It was crowded, and a little noisy, but it had a comfortable surfside atmosphere, and a good seafood menu. They requested a corner or a booth, and they got lucky with a table in the back. It wasn’t a corner, but it was close enough.
They settled down and ordered drinks.
Bernard ordered a glass of Diet Coke, Mireia and Jez each got a glass of sweetened iced tea, and Mireia also ordered a glass of water. It was the little things that were starting to matter to him: the normal details, in contrast to the strange world they were setting foot into, where green, quill-tailed dinosaur ancestors came back from space, and crawled out of the ocean speaking his long-lost father’s name. The syrupy concoctions were familiar, and he was clinging to that for all it was worth. The cold plastic cups were wet, and real. He couldn’t stop running his fingers over the dripping condensate, reassuring himself of its physical presence.
“Let’s hear it,” Jez said, “What the fuck is going on?”
Bernard took a deep breath, about to explain, when Mireia held a hand up, “You don’t have any tact, Bern, and this invisible enemy thing has me scared out of my wits.”
He shrugged and leaned back with his drink, “Save me the trouble of sounding like a lunatic.”
Coke had never tasted so great.
Mireia did a terrible job of explaining it, in his opinion. Bernard had to remind her that she’d thought it was a fish at first, and he had to remind her what a Marasuchus was, and he had to stop her from digressing over her misadventure with the lost tourist before she came back to the beach.
“We all know what tourists sound like, ‘Rei.”
“Yeah?” she responded, “Well, it’s the only part of this story that makes any sense.”
They paused long enough to order appetizers of fried clams and calamari, and they were finished telling the tale by the time it arrived.
Jez stared off into space, considering her sweet tea while they piled seafood onto their plates.
Then Bernard told her what Loren had said about his father.
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to think,” he said, “We thought he’d left for another woman. I’d prefer to stick to that story, even though it sucks. This one’s too weird.”
Mireia laughed, “You know, if you’d been younger, you’d have been mad at him for not telling you the truth and taking you with him.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Bernard sighed, considering it, “Or I would have been mad at him for not telling us the truth and working from home. How cool would that be?”
A strange expression overcame her. Bernard and Jez both waited for a moment before Jez prompted gently, “You okay, Mir?”
Mireia shook her head, “No. No, no I’m not. We’re . . . how do I even explain this . . . y’all, some weird stuff happened on that boat.”
“There’s more to this?” Bernard asked, stunned.
“I was on that boat for close to forty-five minutes, Bern,” she said, “Things happened on that boat.”
“Like what? How much weirder is this going to get?”
“I don’t know!” she said, struggling to keep her tone down, “At this point, how in the world should I have any idea how strange this is going to get? Talking dinosaurs and shapeshifters? That’s your territory, Bern. You’re the one with all the fantasy books and art stuff, and the video games and RPGs. I’m the normal one, remember?”
“Thanks!” Jez exclaimed.
“I’ve never tried to kill anyone with a hockey stick!” Mireia shot back.
“For the last time, I wasn’t trying to kill that girl!”
“You fractured her knee!”
“I didn’t mean to!”
“It sure looked like you meant it!”
Bernard piled some more appetizer onto his plate. “This is great calamari. Be a shame if it got cold.”
Mireia moved her drink out of his way, still arguing with Jez about a hockey match two years ago—the breaking point that had caused her parents to pull her from team sports until they could sort out her anger issues. It was better than the previous conversation, so he left them to it.
All too soon, however, the waitress returned, with a new problem in tow.
A hefty young man followed her, barely older than themselves. Dressed in a Hawaiian-styled shirt and khaki slacks, he had pale skin, round blue eyes, and blond hair, parted on the left and neatly combed.
Thanking their waitress, he helped himself to a spot at their table.
He seemed friendly, but Bernard and Jez shifted uneasily in their seats, sharing glances that bore the same question: What the hell? But Mireia’s expression was different: distinctly ruffled in a way that Bernard could not readily parse in the few seconds he had before his questions were answered.
“This is a nice choice,” the stranger observed of the restaurant.
“You didn’t,” Mireia said, “You did not just track us down.”
“Of course,” he said, “I tried to tell you this ain’t over.”
“I told you we didn’t want any part of it!”
“I don’t want it, either, but we gotta work with what we’ve been handed.”
Bernard felt his skin crawl. The toady rasp was gone, but the attitude and the accent were the same.
Jez interrupted them, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe we’ve met. You are . . . ?”
The man cleared his throat and extended a hand, “Loren Sanchez. I gave a different name earlier, but it’s better if I don’t say it again. As far as anyone knows, we’ve been very lucky so far.”
There’s no way, Bernard thought, No way that’s Lasoren.
But Mireia had said something about shapeshifters, and the only reason he or Jez had let it go had been because of his cousin’s urgent need to defend the time she put another girl in the hospital—the nearest thing to they’d had to normal conversation since they sat down.
Jez shook his hand slowly, uncertainly, “Jesebelle Blackwood.”
“Jezebel?” he asked.
“With an ‘S’ two ‘L’s’ and an ‘E’, ‘cause my parents were high or something,” Jez managed nervously, “Or just call me Jez.”
He smiled, “I knew how it was spelled. I just kept hearing a ‘Z’ all morning and realized I must have read it wrong, so I had to be sure.”
She nodded, visibly suppressing a rising tidal wave, “They were high.”
The moment Loren looked away from her, however, she shot Bernard a look that was pure venom, as though somehow this were all his fault.
Mireia smiled with a forced pleasantry, “Bernard, you remember Loren? From the beach?”
“Yeah,” Bernard made himself answer, shaking Loren’s hand, “Yeah, this morning.”
Loren passed her a bill, folded in such a way that he didn’t flash it, but Bernard caught sight of a “50” on the corner. “From Dr. Maesera. In exchange for feeding me, because turning into this person takes a lot of energy, and I’m starving. If you think you’re having a bad day, just picture your whole body splitting apart and reforming, and forcibly expelling sand and salt water after almost drowning and waking up with your lungs on fire.”
“That was before you woke up,” Bernard told him, finally taking in Loren’s identity.
“It was? Well, I did it again while I was healing. Lotta fun. Like puking up sandpaper,” he glanced around surreptitiously and dropped his voice, “Seriously, this was a great choice. I don’t think anyone heard a word of that, and the waitress cain’t come from b’hind me. We have seriously weird business to discuss, even by my standards, and I’m willin’ to bet Ms. Mireia ain’t told you what we told her, yet.”
She snorted ruefully, “I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell people something like that, and I personally think you people are full of it, right now, so you know what? I told them we could eat first, so if you don’t mind, we’d like our dinner.”
The waitress came back, and he ordered a garden salad. The choice surprised Bernard, who hadn’t pictured him enjoying any sort of vegetable matter.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he said after she left, “I’m just doing my job—“
“What?” Mireia asked, “Hijacking our lives and our dinner plans?”
Bernard glanced between them, feeling like he wanted to disappear, and Jez seemed equally uncomfortable with this turn of conversation.
Loren seemed just as irritated, “Look: I’m sorry that things haven’t gone as planned. I really am. Honestly, this is the strangest assignment I’ve ever heard of, and I’ll be the first to admit it hasn’t been going well. For God’s sake, I technically died last night, and I still don’t know when or how. I’m sorry I haven’t met you all under better circumstances, but I’m trying my best with what I’ve got, here. It’s just going to keep getting stranger and stranger, the more I tell you, so—“
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Can you not wait until we eat?” she snapped.
“Wait,” Jez said, “I want to know one thing—“
“No you don’t,” Mireia promised her.
“I just want to know who he is,” she said, “I’ve heard everything you know about him, but I don’t know him from Adam’s fuckin’ housecat. If I’m gonna have my dinner hijacked by some stranger claiming to be a—a whatever Bernard called him—”
“Marasuchus,” Bernard obliged.
“A whatever,” Jez said, “I’d at least like to know who he is, if we’re not going to talk about why.”
Mireia sighed deeply, caving as she gestured for him to go on.
Loren explained, “I work for a refugee and immigration support agency. Their Terran division’s focus, however, lies mainly in planetary protection. When I get a call from headquarters, it’s usually for something like a rogue, missing person, or job switch—cover work, that is. I used to be a landscaper, and then they took me off that and made me an exterminator, and then I was an aviator, and then a landscaper again—that’s how things are supposed to go. I take a normal job, and I’m on call to do investigative work within in my region, which covers all of Dixie and stretches as far south as the Caribbean Islands. I’m not alone, but I’m the most readily mobile person they’ve got. What I’m doing right now is well outside of my usual line of work.”
“So you’re kind of like the C.I.A. or something, I guess?” Jez asked.
“Sort of, I suppose,” he rubbed his hands as the waitress brought him a plate and silverware, along with his salad, “Let’s just say, I’m about to blow your mind.”
“Y’all are really serious, aren’t you?” she groaned, sinking in her seat.
“Yeah,” Mireia said, “Apparently, we knew these people as kids, but don’t remember them, and they want us to come back and, I dunno, I guess work for them. Well, mostly they just want you, Bern. I can’t even tell you the rest, because supposedly they’re being watched.”
“Bern told me that part,” Jez said, “I’ve spent all afternoon trying to get my head around that idea.”
“Well,” Loren said, “We’re not exactly being watched that we know of, but there’s too much risk that we could be. So caution is a good thing to have, but there’s no need to be paranoid.”
“Why me?” Bernard asked, dumbfounded. “To what do I owe the honor?”
After a long minute, Loren finally said, “I’ll get to that. . . . What she said is true. You were all involved with our company a long time ago, and right now, we need all the help we can get. We’re recalling as many of our people as we can, even if they’ve been deported or fired for misconduct, depending on the case. Customarily, we would hold off until you graduate high school at the very least, but we can’t wait that long,” he took a breath, and said with some effort, “Normally, we wouldn’t even have approached the three of you at all. It’s illegal to bring back humans, once you’ve been removed from service. Especially not you three, or any other Terran who was involved with Nightmare.”
That chill shot up Bernard’s spine, again.
“Once you’re out and your memories are gone, that’s it,” Loren said. “You can’t come back.”
“Wait,” Jez said, “You tryna tell me our memories have been altered?”
“Yup,” Mireia said, taking a nice long drink of her tea, while Bernard and Jez just stared at the two of them, at a complete loss for words.
“In a manner of speaking,” Loren said, “As it was explained to me, your memories are still mostly real, just with a lot of substitutions and omissions. Unlike most cases, it doesn’t appear to be permanent. Just being around us seems to trigger flashbacks. That’s why it’s doubly important that you not tell anyone about this. They don’t remember it any better than you do, and it’s absolutely got to stay that way.”
“You’ve got to be joking me,” Bernard moaned, massaging his temples.
“Nope,” Mireia said.
“That’s insane!” Jez cried, “Why the hell should we believe him?”
Bernard glanced down at Mireia’s plate, which she hadn’t touched. “You gonna eat that?”
She lifted her plate without a word and slid her appetizer onto his.
“At least eat something,” Loren said, “Trust me, this won’t be any easier with an empty stomach and a light head. This is freaky, even by my standards, and I’ve grown up listening to some mind-blowing stories that even my people have a hard time believing.”
Bernard found that not only was Loren right, but the presence of food kept him grounded in reality, and he felt a little less like he might be hallucinating. It brought back the small comfort of familiarity.
The waitress brought Loren’s salad. Bernard ordered the shrimp po’ boy sandwich he’d been dreaming of all afternoon. Mireia followed with seafood pasta, Jez with grilled dolphin fish, and Loren with the largest platter of grilled seafood they had to offer, an extra appetizer, and an extra side of fries.
Loren prodded at the salad after she left, finally muttering, “I don’t even particularly like salad.”
Mireia set her fork down, frustrated, “Then why on Earth did you order it?”
“. . . It made sense at the time,” he said quietly, “Guess my body needs it or somethin’.”
Jez buried her face in her hands, groaning, “I’m supposed to believe my memory was altered, according to some guy who orders food he doesn’t like without knowing why.”
“Well, that doesn’t really have anything to do with my memory,” Loren said, now staring very deliberately at his salad, “Doc called it a ‘hopefully temporary circumstance of cognitive malfunction.’ ”
She lowered her fingers, looking as though she wanted to break his face.
Loren took a breath, and after a pause he finally began to speak even more softly than before, “So the story goes like this: Years ago, before I worked for the company, we had a nasty security breach on our hands. Can everyone hear me?”
They nodded, though they had to lean in to catch every word.
His voice rose just a little, “Good. So, years back we had a bad case out in Nebraska. According to our records, you were all born there, and my understanding is that you moved to Charleston around ten years ago.”
Jez and Bernard stared in surprise, and she was now eyeing him suspiciously.
“Bernard and his mother originally lived next door to one of our field operatives, and she was reportedly good friends with his wife, Sam Lurizek, whom Mireia met earlier. From here out, I’ll be reporting to her husband, Daniel. The general consensus has been that their friendship with Rhonna and Terry Zháo is where the problem started, and our company has watched our actions a lot more closely ever since.”
Bernard shook his head, “No, no, that can’t be right. My mother didn’t know our neighbors,” but he knew something about what Loren was saying was true. He just really didn’t want to believe in it.
Loren’s lips tightened in a grim smile, “It’s The Plains, son. Of course you knew your neighbors, whether you wanted to or not.”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember them at all. We can’t have been close.”
“Are you sure? Because where I come from everyone knows that Terry Zháo’s closest friend is his former neighbor, Daniel Kago Lurizek. They’re so close that there’s even a running joke in the company that the only way to call your father is to call Danny, because Terry very rarely answers his phone. You father is popular, but as far as I know he’s a bit of an enigma, even to the people who are close to him, so that’s saying a lot about their relationship.”
Jez put her head down, mumbling something about wanting Loren to go away.
He didn’t respond to her, but carried on.
“Our problems began around 1983. Our host planet is famous for its genetics labs, but they’re usually very closely monitored. The Agency knew that an illegal lab had lost a pair of creatures, but no one thought the problem would extend beyond planetary boundaries, much less that they would ever reach Earth. The escapees set out to take advantage of this planet, however, and the Agency had to respond. Nightmare, as we’ve come to know him, was what you might call draconic. He’s described in the case file as a ‘large, scaly vertebrate biped with flight-capable wings.’ He and his lab brother, known as Dark, were a violent, dangerous pair—and before you ask me, we still aren’t sure what Dark was.
“A year after they disappeared, reports started coming in of strange disturbances around St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha—roughly the south-central region of the continent, and mostly quiet enough to avoid too many prying eyes. They reportedly had cloaking abilities, among other talents, and were difficult to detect. A few weeks later Danny found himself being followed by something he couldn’t identify. Unfortunately, by the time he recognized it, it was too late. Nightmare and Dark had staked out the town of Lincoln, and were moving in on the house. Over the next two years, they began following, and finally harassing Bernard. They would enter his home, day or night, conduct experiments, and in several cases carried him off in broad daylight, each time further from home than the last. In 1986, Danny put a gun in Bernard’s hands and showed him how to use it. Much to your mother’s well-documented chagrin.”
“I’m sure she was thrilled,” Bernard muttered. He was also sure he must be hallucinating, right now. Everyone else at the table was probably talking about how he was sitting there losing his marbles.
Loren went on, “Around that point, you girls joined him, so eventually you all had to be trained, in part by Danny, and in part by a . . . what you would call a . . . well, later. I’ll tell you later. Our people know her as Silvia, and Silvia’s people know her as male under a similar name that I can’t remember. Sh—He’s sort of one of my own kind, what we’ll call Saurians, for the moment. I’m told he’s a real weirdo—takes a lot of issues with our social structures—but it sounds like he fit in reasonably well on Earth, at the time.”
Jez held up a hand to stop him, “Just lemme get this straight: You’re telling me we did this . . . when I was five?”
Loren nodded, “That’s right. Children are flexible and impressionable, so for a while our company thought it would work to your advantage, but it had long-term drawbacks, as I’m sure you can imagine—but it wasn’t all bad. Some really incredible stuff happened in that time period, and y’all got a lot of help with everything—some of the same help you’re going to have with our current problem—but it didn’t change the fact that Nightmare’s attacks grew steadily worse. I had the exclusive pleasure of reading the full case report. Every incident. Every occurrence and occasion. The damn thing is over an inch thick on paper, and I’m told that’s the condensed version. I could have done without any of it.”
Their food arrived, and they were all glad for the brief reprieve from Loren’s tale. He asked the waitress to wait awhile before she came back, so they could talk business.
“I love this town,” he said, turning back to his plate as though it were suddenly the only thing in the world that mattered, “I know, I need to finish my story, but just thinking about those case files is going to keep me up at night for a long time. I’m glad we’re doing this in Charleston. I always did like seafood, and it’s always best fresh from the sea . . . even though I work hard to stay away from large bodies of water, if I can help it. Hard to beat a pot of New Orleans gumbo, or good barbeque, and a few of our kind have a special fondness for Southern get-togethers involving whole roasted hogs—and I’ve tasted nothin’ like it since—but Charleston seafood sure runs a close race for damn fine fare, ‘long as it ain’t so smothered in grease that you cain’t taste the ocean. Though, what do I know, I cain’t cook. I got better luck hunting roaches, and that ain’t easy to—oh! Sorry about that!”
All three of them had nearly choked on their meals when he said it.
“I normally go for lizards, actually, but they’re harder to find and catch in this body. None of the things my parents ate really exist anymore—or not in the same quantity. About the closest thing I’ve ever had is rabbit. I always wanted to try rat. Both are hard to come by, but I can get crickets by the can.”
“I trap and shoot rabbits for my snake,” Bernard said, “It’s not hard. You can have one of the traps.”
“Don’t offer to help him!” Mireia snapped, “We’re not going along with to this, Maxwell Bernard!”
“No,” Jez agreed, “We’re not.”
Loren bit his lip briefly and said, “You probably shouldn’t be feeding wild rabbits to your snake, son, they’ve got parasites. But I sure wouldn’t mind a few. That’d make my day.”
Mireia looked dead at him, “I’m not driving you to the vet if you have worms. I’m not boarding that ship again, either—you can forget it.”
“I don’t do boats,” Loren said, “So there won’t be a problem. I can tell you’re out of patience, but I’m almost done, I promise, because you see we had, and have to this day, some problems on our end.”
Bernard almost asked him to go back to talking about his dietary habits, but held his tongue and listened.
“Political problems, you might say, that would have been really quite serious if we didn’t think of a solution, and fast. As I was told, Ms. Rhonna—who, I believe remarried in ’86?”
“Moore,” Bernard said.
“Okay—funny, our people still think of her as Sparker—anyway, as we know the story, she was the one who moved first—to Charleston, at Mrs. Durant’s suggestion—I cain’t remember the name, sorry. Ellen?”
“Helen . . . ,” Mireia said dully.
“Right, right, Helen. Sorry about that.” There was little Bernard heard from there. Loren was comparing stories with Mireia and Jez on who moved when and why: something about the company making the decision to move them, versus their recollection of their parents’ decisions to cheerfully follow each other halfway across the country. Both stories concurred on Mireia’s mother wanting to live closer to her parents on James Island.
Bernard found himself wondering more and more if he might not really just be sitting here imagining things . . . so he focused on eating. That way, if he were actually going mad, at least he would look like he might still be sane.
The shrimp was perfectly breaded and fried. The bread was warm and fresh. There were hints of spice in the sauce. The experience was at once crispy and creamy, melting together amidst a substrate of tomato and shredded lettuce. It was everything he’d wanted out of the sandwich. Nothing else fucking mattered.
“Whatever the case,” Loren finally concluded, “It didn’t solve the remaining problems after the case was finally closed. Trauma, PSTD, and the glaring security issue of a whole family of humans who knew about us. To deal with that, my company employed a number of powerful individuals who,” his voice dropped a little lower, “petitioned a higher being to help solve the problem. One well-known to us by the name of Gai’en—a name I don’t like speaking aloud, but I was told it’s safe to do so.”
Jez spat her tea out, coughing and sputtering, and reaching for a napkin to clean up the undignified mess she’d made.
Bernard half-choked on his sandwich, unable to believe his own ears. Gai’en? Did I hear that right?
Loren nodded, “Gets weirder and weirder, doesn’t it? Don’t hurt yourself, please . . . ,” he waited for the girls to clean up the mess and make sure Bernard didn’t need medical help before he asked, “Are you okay . . . ? Do you need me to repeat that?”
“No, please don’t,” they begged him, almost in unison, “We’re fine.”
“If you say so. I needed to hear it about five times before it sank in. Everyone knows that your memories were altered, just as you all initially suspected, but no one knows how they did it. This sort of thing just . . . isn’t possible. We’re talking about more than seven whole years. Your memories of everything that happened. Your mother’s memories of Sam and Danny, dating back before any of you were born. The memories of people around you who were exposed, even a little, to what was going on. You see what I mean? This was a miracle, and you must realize that due to the nature of the thing, it cain’t be done again. Whatever happens from here out, we’re stuck with it.”
Mireia interrupted him, “Bernie, do you remember the trip to Arizona?”
Bernard gazed at her, blank for a moment. Her eyes were expectant, with that look she had whenever there was a particularly juicy piece of gossip to share.
“Yeah,” he finally said, “The fire. Why the hell would I want to remember the fire? Where are you going with this?”
“Do you remember getting lost in the desert?”
Jez laughed, “Of course not. We went to the Grand Canyon without him because he was in the hospital. Because of the fire.”
“Did we?” Mireia asked, “If the cabin burned down, then where did we stay?”
“We—in a hotel, of course,” she laughed, but then the laughter faded, “Didn’t we?”
“What if I told you there was no cabin, no fire, Bernie was never with us, and we stayed the whole trip in someone’s house?”
Bernard felt his skin prickling. He remembered burning. He remembered heat, but no fire. Being trapped, but not indoors. There was no smoke. Most severe fire-related injuries were from smoke inhalation. He shivered, rubbing his arms.
“She’s right. Jez . . . that trip never happened. I . . . don’t remember you at all. I never stayed in a house.” He remembered starving. Outside. Alone. There was no vacation.
And Gai’en was real.
Jez didn’t respond. Instead, she excused herself to go to the bathroom, and was gone for half an hour. By the time she returned, she looked unusually pale, and remained unresponsive.
In the meantime, Loren ordered a daquiri and 4 rounds of peach cobbler, and consumed the full spread without a hitch.
Mireia paid the bill, and Jez got up to leave without waiting for them.