Chapter Two

THE DAYBREAK EXPRESS

Perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself before we continue. I will not belabor a history of Alchemist Ortez, your honor, but let us briefly broach a subject I suspect many of you are already wondering about.

I speak of my childhood.

Imagine, if you will, a teenager standing in a living room full of strangers. The strangers are his parents, his sister, his friends and neighbors, the people he grew up with, the people who were the true texture of his immigrant neighborhood and the characters of its countless stories. A story in the alley outside. A story in the butcher shop. A story in every narrow brick home and on every face staring at him now. Imagine they had come together to watch him step through that front door with eager anticipation. For many of them, it has been two long years, and he looks different now, more man than boy, but they would never forget his face. Imagine all of this, for the teenager remembers nothing and no one, and he must imagine too.

Losing my memory did not sadden me in the sharp, injurious sense. It had been my choice, after all, and I could not mourn what I did not remember. But forgetting is uncomfortable. Ironically, this was truest in moments meant to comfort—a friend’s heartfelt recollection, the inspiring reassurances of a parent—for it was these cherished memories and wishes that left me hollow when I only wished to be sad. Sadness would have been understandable. Sadness would have been a healing scar. Sadness we could have worked with. But I had only my hollowness, leaving me adrift with nowhere to dock, with nothing to move past, with nothing to forgive. With nothing but nothing.

As the Daybreak Express chugged ever westward, a slightly older, more tired alchemist found himself falling in and out of sleep, glimpses of fast-moving farmland blurring into dreams of a rural life he never lived. We had a farm once, I hear, when my family first arrived on this continent. But I am not the teenage boy who might have remembered those days. I am an alchemist. I am a surface wiped clean.

* * *

I am also someone who does not sleep well in transit.

“Excuse me, sir.”

I heard his voice in the way one weakly perceives background noise, like the mechanical tempo of our train.

“Sir, may I sit here?” he asked again.

I opened my eyes after his second attempt, or maybe it was his third or fourth. He was a young man, which is to say a few years younger than me, with short blonde hair and a long scar over his left cheek. A rolled-up newspaper was tucked tightly under his arm. I took my foot off the fabric bench opposite mine.

“Apologies,” I said. “Please, sit.”

“Much appreciated.” He smiled a big, memorable smile as he plopped himself down. “Don’t sleep well on trains, I take it?”

“I will admit, I much prefer my bedroom to a sleeper car,” I said. “Not that I ever sleep particularly well, and yet somehow I forgot to pack a sleeping elixir.”

“A sleeping elixir?” He laughed. “What are you, an alchemist?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“No shit? Sorry, sir. I have a real mouth on me, as my pa would say.”

“Swear to your heart’s content, my friend.”

The young man leaned forward, pressing his fingers into a steeple. “So, you’re an actual alchemist?”

Wiping sleep from my eyes with one hand, I mimicked a showman’s flourish with the other. “Pinch me if it pleases you, for I am indeed a real alchemist, a potion master, an elixir wizard.”

“I’m Bien, by the way.” His enthusiastic handshake did most of the shaking.

“Ortez.”

“Alchemist Ortez,” he said dreamily.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Just Ortez is fine.”

“How long have you been an alchemist, Mr. Ortez?”

“I’ve been a practicing alchemist for seven years,” I said, “notwithstanding my formal education.”

“Did you go to Saint Adena?”

“It is the only alchemy school on the continent.”

“I saw the academy a couple months back,” he said. “It was beautiful. I’m on a bit of a trip, I guess you could say, trekking across the Tri-States, finding myself, that sort of thing.”

“And have you found yourself?” I asked.

“I think I found a few parts in New Shore and lost some others in Valemont.” Bien chuckled at something, left it there, and then said, “I’m actually heading home now, so I guess that’s that.”

“You’re from Indemere, then. Aurora?”

“Yes, sir. Born and raised in that big, bizarre city. You?”

“I live and work in Dellmere now,” I said, “but my parents came here from Gracia. I hear it’s quite lovely. I myself grew up in Liberty.” That is, until the summer I was accepted at the prestigious Saint Adena, much to my poor mother and father’s dismay.

“Liberty is something else,” Bien replied. “Bursting at the seams, but in a good way. I’ve never seen so many different types of people in one city. Not different different—just from different places, you know? As if all of civilization had coalesced in a few blocks. Do you go back often to see your folks?”

My shallow grin was a boat for awkward waters. “Not often, no. I suppose one might say alchemists tend to have a unique relationship with their family.”

He had to process that comment. I witnessed each step on his expressive face: the pensive scrunching of his forehead, those inquiring eyes expanding with realization, that quick gasp of embarrassment. “My apologies, Alchemist Ortez. I forgot about the whole—”

“It’s quite all right, Bien.” I stopped him. “It isn’t a sensitive topic. After the first year of school, every aspiring alchemist makes the same choice. If they wish to be a practicing alchemist, they must undergo a long-term memory wipe, erasing everything before their time at Saint Adena.”

“I’ve never quite understood that part,” he admitted.

I nodded with practiced empathy, for I had provided this explanation many times. “It’s not easy going into someone’s mind,” I said, “into their memories, their dreams. You must share their thoughts as if they were your own, which takes… space. Try it now if you like. Try creating empty space in your mind, space that someone else might occupy.” I invited him to give it a go before concluding, “It is difficult. And you must keep it empty—that is the most important part—for if your thoughts infiltrate theirs, well, that is why we must have our memories wiped.”

Bien was visibly engrossed in every detail. “What happens if you say no, if you decide to keep your memories?”

“Roughly half do,” I said. “They go on to become elixologists, crafting and selling elixirs. But only practicing alchemists are permitted to go”—I pointed to his head—“in there.”

He looked up with only his eyes, as if he might see his own mind beyond the tip of my finger. “Is it hard,” he asked, “letting most of your memories go?”

“It is a very hard decision to make and a very easy one to live with,” I told him. “It’s all very easy once you don’t remember. I suppose that is the intention.”

Bien shuddered at the prospect. “I don’t think I could do it. Forgetting my whole family. My ma, my pa, my sister, even Aunt Sella. No offense.”

“None taken.”

This time it was his awkward grin. I suspected he had more questions but that good manners compelled a ceasefire. I turned toward the window and he toward his newspaper.

The once endless-seeming stretch of farmland was behind us now, along with its quaint hamlets and patchy forests, and we had begun our ascent into the cloud-splitting mountains of Indemere. Flatlands fly by, but great mountains move stubbornly. I watched them for a while, inching in the distance, realizing a most obvious thing: that I had never seen mountains like these, mountains so mountainous.

I reached into the satchel by my feet and pulled out a small black notebook. There were as many sketches as there were notes on the pages I flipped through. Extracts from my life in Dellmere. Memories from my time in Tianma. The detailed face of a bonobus troglodyte I had drawn many times, his name scribbled below. Hanson. I turned to a fresh page and began outlining mountains.

Bien scoffed at something in his newspaper. “What a bastard,” he added as commentary, but I did not inquire as to the bastardly deed in question.

And then the train felt inexplicably quiet.

It was not a silence of absence. Nearly every seat on the carriage was taken. I peered over my notebook at the man with a bowler hat plopped over his face, snoring softly. At the woman in a puffy-shouldered salmon dress, staring longingly out her window. At Bien, whose faded waistcoat could not quite conceal the lived-in wrinkles lining his shirt, reading his newspaper.

Despite its immaculate construction and intricate detailing, the Daybreak Express was a train for everyone. While there were nicer sleeper cars for those who paid for it—or, in my case, were given it—the basic price of admission was accessible. The Day Company, I would later learn, was connecting a continent, and a continent is its people. They were all here, and yet so was this silence, growing, consuming me.

Not the lulling rhythm of a man’s soft snores, not the quiet promise of a woman’s distant daydream, not the unspoken words of a newspaper. No, this was a silence between two people. Between me and the man at the end of the aisle, whom I glimpsed only in flashes as our train wound through its mountain pass, as he leaned and turned just so.

Three times I had seen his pockmarked face in the last week. Once in the shadowy back corner of The Misty Harbor, a tavern in Dellmere I am known to frequent. Once as I strolled home at the end of a long and foggy evening. He ambled past me through the hazy glow of a gas lamp, rain pattering the shoulders of his baggy jacket. And once but a stone’s throw from my office as I gazed out its second-story window. We made eye contact for a fleeting second, before he vanished behind a rumbling caravan.

And now here he was again, barely a blur in the edges of my periphery.

It had taken me until now to realize. It had taken me until I could feel it first, that silence, our silence, the silence that exists between a hunter and his prey. But it was clear now, as clear as the uneasy reflection staring back from my window. The pockmarked man was following me.