June drove faster than she’d ever driven in the Living World. Faster than she’d ever driven in the Memory Lands, and she could feel that the City was helping her. Lights flashed from red to green as she approached them.

“The City, it would appear, shares our desire,” Teacher said.

“I wonder why?”

“Because Darktown may be part of the City, but it is a corrosive part. The City represents the way memories can live in us, not become our prison.” Teacher paused. “Darktown is it’s opposite, for all that it could not exist without the City.”

“Huh,” June said. “It’s ghost cancer.”

“That is… an appropriate comparison.” They were whipping past buildings now, Roman thermopolia sitting next to British pubs and American fast-food restaurants, the crowds on the street a blur.

“You know, kidnapping someone off the street is probably going to bring the guards.”

“That will be my problem. Confine your worries to retrieving your mother.”

“Right.” Well, if anyone can handle a guard, it’s Teacher.

“So Sally and I have an idea,” Hank said, coming up on June’s left. “If anyone tries to get in your way, we handle them, until you take off and meet us at…”

“My apartment,” June said. “That’s where we’ll meet up.”

“Right.” Hank said. The wind rushing by them didn’t obscure his voice. Another benefit of being dead, June guessed. “June… what if this goes bad?”

“Bad?”

“Unless you’re willing to tie your mother up for the rest of eternity,” Sally said from where she was sitting behind Hank on his motorcycle, “you have to accept the chance that she may never change her mind. Some people exist in Darktown because they no longer can exist anywhere else.”

So will I let her go? Let her go to return to that… place? And it wasn’t just Darktown—but what had happened in that theater. The “angels” had once been people. But everything that made them who they were, every good and bad memory, had been stripped from them. They were easier to kill, because there just wasn’t anything left.

June bit her lip. Mom had been in that congregation. If she went back, one day she’d be called up before them and cast everything she was and could be into those cold flames and become…

A thing. Not a person, not anymore.

But I can’t just lock her up. That would just create a little slice of Darktown wherever she was and it would be a betrayal. Mom has…

June swallowed once, then again, her throat suddenly dry.

The right to make that decision. Even if it meant her going back to Darktown. Even if it meant her…

Ending.

“I’ll let her go.” June said. “But we’re not there yet.”

“No, we are not,” Teacher said. “But I believe we have arrived at your mother’s location.”

June looked up and nodded. There was a crowd in a little wooded park off to the side of the street, a Victorian mansion on one side, and a department store on the other side. The park was full of tall trees, their branches heavy with snow. The wind blowing from the park was chilly and crisp, reminding June of a cold winter’s day as she and Teacher got off her bike, June calling it back into the key.

I guess it was a favorite during winter, or a collection of all the good memories of wintertime, playing in the park. June didn’t know. California didn’t get much snow.

Some kids, or memories of kids, were having a snowball fight, ignoring the group that had gathered at the far end of the park, the torches they were holding burning with a bluish flame that seemed colder than all the heaped snowdrifts around them.

“My brethren, behold the false cheer of this world! Those looking upon us, how is this something bring you joy? Memories of the past, of a world you will never see again! Give up this vanity—”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Hank said. “Sounded like the Mayor back home when he was talking about us degenerates at the same time he was banging the head cheerleader.”

“Wait,” June said. “The Mayor—”

“Yeah, she was about 40 years younger than he was.”

“Ick.”

“Yep, but they’re all about telling everyone else what they should do. See your mom?”

“No… Not yet.” June frowned. The crowd shouldn’t be that big, but…

Right. Idiot. The City wants you to find her, but Darktown, or whatever else was in there, doesn’t.

June closed her eyes, holding onto the orb and focusing on the feeling she got from it. The knowledge…

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

There. June started walking forward, brushing past the hooded cultists and bystanders alike, heading for the far corner of the park. Her steps crunched through the snow as she walked forward, and an owl hooted from the depths of one of the trees. There was a small cluster of figures there, and June walked up to the nearest one, the figure holding a torch and cheering to every word from the leader.

“Hello,” June said. The figure turned to face her, and then recoiled as June reached up and pulled the hood back from her face. “Mom, we need to talk.”

June stared at her mother. The face was even worse than she had been the last time June had seen her. Skin pulled tight over her bones, looking like old parchment, her mother’s formerly attractive face reminding June of a concentration camp survivor.

Worst were the eyes. Even in their last argument, Mom had some of the passion that she displayed in life. Now they were…

If the eyes are windows to the soul, I don’t ever want to have a soul like that, June thought.

“You…” Mom’s voice was raspy. “You escaped? I felt you… deny the gift.”

“You mean throw my memories into… whatever that was?”

“An offering! To free us! Free us from this delusion!”

June shook her head. Mom was shouting, but her voice seemed… oddly empty.

Like she’s parroting the words, but can’t feel the emotions, not any more.

“Mom, you need to come with me,” June said.

“No. She is with us.” June turned and stopped. There was another hooded cultist looking down at her, and others were gathering, forming a wide ring around her friends and Teacher. The kids had stopped their snowball game, running out of the park.

Smart kids. Most things couldn’t kill you, what with everything being dead, but there were ways…

And June had a feeling the cultists around her knew some of those ways, especially given how their torches were starting to blaze brighter, even as the fire sucked all the heat out of the air. The park no longer had the chill that reminded you of crisp mornings, and the day after a snowfall, now it was the cold sinking into the bones of a dying man, unable to move enough though salvation was just a few hundred yards away, taunting him with its proximity. The aura of cold and despair few stronger, frost collecting on June’s hair and clothes. She held her hand out.

Ashes. Not snow. Ashes from burned buildings and crematoria.

June stared up at the big guy. His face, shadowed under the hood, only showed a little bit of chin, skin missing here and there to show the jawbone. Maggots worked their way through the flesh, and his eyes were gleaming out from under the hood.

But like Mom, there was an absence to him. He was trying to be intimidating, but something was missing.

He threw that memory away because it probably brought him pleasure or pain. And when you got rid of those two things, what did you have left?

June held out her hand, and remembered, and then felt the weight of the spear as she called it to her. The copper tip gleamed in the light of an absent sun.

“Hank, don’t let her run away,” June told her friend. Then she turned to the cultist. “I’m a memory worker,” June said, and Teacher didn’t gainsay her. “I will return my mother, after I have spoken to her, if that is her will. But if you stand in my way, the consequences will be on your head.” She raised her head. “So make your decision.”

And seconds later, the entire crowd lunged for them.

----------------------------------------

June struck the man close to her. Not with her muscles but with memories. The spear remembered great beasts, June remembered her mother and how she was not going to let her go, and the blow sent the man flying across the park.

Others were coming, but then there was a roar as Teacher put his hand down to the ground, and a wall of fire surrounded them.

But not simply fire.

The mob shrieked in fury and horror as June felt the warmth of a comfortable living room on a cold winter’s day, curled up in a chair, a beloved family pet in your lap.

Not just physical warmth, but the warmth that also came from the heart. Just like the fire. The flames were roaring, but they weren’t the roar of a forest fire, come to destroy, but the fire you stared into as you sat down with friends and lovers.

To the mob, it might as well have been every nightmare to send someone flying to the light switch.

But then the speaker raised his hands and sent a wave of cold against them, freezing air smelling of rotting things, the sound of crying children and sick coughing filling the air, as it struck at the wall of fire, greedily sucking the heat and joy out of it.

Teacher did nothing for a moment, and then the fire roared up.

Not just Teacher. June clenched the spear and thrust its tip into the fire, the flames running up and down the shaft.

Remember how you protected the People. Remember the joy of every hunter, coming home with food for their loves… The fire around the spear tip blazed white, too bright to stare at, and then June walked through the wall of fire, the flames doing nothing more than warming her up.

“We’re done!” she shouted. “If she wants to come back, she can, but you have no hold on her!” With that, she snapped the spear down and struck the ground, and suddenly those white hot flames were roaring along the ground, taking dead plants and replacing them with blooming plants, winter and decay replaced by the rich scent of a garden in spring.

And then the fire reached the little podium and wreathed the robed figure in its fire. For a moment, frost and fire battled… And then with a shriek, the figure was fleeing the park, the rest of the congregation following him, the mouth of a dark alleyway opening up to accept them.

“Let me go! I must return!”

June turned around as the fire faded, leaving a nice spring park, complete with chirping birds. “Why?”

“You—you just don’t listen!” Mom said.

“I listen. But you don’t.” June sighed, staring at the way Hank was holding her mother, actually lifting her up off the ground.

I love her. And we were bound by that, bound by the way she bore me, all the days of hellos and goodbyes and now…

Shining chains wrapped around her mother. “There. Now come with us. If you truly want to go back… We’ll let you go back.”

Mom didn’t say anything, just glared at June, with that same odd lack of… force to her gaze.

How much of you is even left? June shook her head.

“That was well done.” Teacher had come up by her. “You are reaching a greater degree of understanding.”

“Does it normally happen this fast?” Not long ago, I was struggling with a pencil.

“Normally, no. But normally, my apprentices do not go haring off into Darktown. Come. Let us leave.”

And with that, the four and their prisoner left the park.