Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,39
from his breath, and saw the face beyond it, a scared young man, his nose broken, humiliated by a man who looked at least four times his age. An easy mark. The old man smiled. Not so easy. Not such a mark. Never have been. He started the car, fumbling the key slightly in the ignition, and reached into the old, faux leather armrest. He pulled out a new cell phone, a disposable one that he’d bought in a chain store only a few days earlier, then pulled a small 3 x 5 index card out along with it, and dialed a number. This time, I remember.
The female voice answered at the other end of the line, peppy for it being so early in the morning there. “This is Portal, extension 4736, please.” He waited a moment before the connection was made, and the voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy. “Bjorn has been taken. Stanchion moves to phase two.” He paused, waiting for a response. “No, I was supposed to get extension 4763...well, just forget what I said, will you? Connect me to the operator.”
He sighed as he heard the familiar ring again, of the call being connected. “Let’s try this again,” he said as the female voice picked up. “Message for extension 4763...Stanchion proceeds to phase two. Will advise. Janus out.”
He pressed the end key and replayed his words again. “Dammit! I meant Portal. Portal out.” He shook his head, teeth clenched. “Shit.”
10.
Sienna
“Her memory seems to be...selectively gone,” I told Old Man Winter and Ariadne, standing in his office before the massive stone desk. The smell of the plaster and dust that coated me was still there, now evident to my nose because of the thoughts my brain was fixed on, of what had happened in Iowa, of how we had failed. Of how I had failed. “You told me once before that when she heals someone too much, she loses memory...”
“Yes,” Old Man Winter said in his rumbling tone. He stirred against the black background of the windows behind him; the lights that lit the Directorate campus were dimmed at this time of night, and stars were visible on the horizon behind him, a thousand points of light over the trees in the distance. “So far as I know, her memories, once gone...remain gone forever. This has, of course, happened to her before, which is why she remembers her name as Katrina Forrest rather than Klementina Gavrikov a.”
“I get that,” I said, and ran a hand over my forehead, stirring a small cloud in front of my face. “But there must be something that we can do. He’s her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even remember who he is. We had her look at him and it was a blank stare, nothing, no recognition, as if they’d never met before in their lives. But she remembers me,” I shook my head, “hell, she even remembers Reed. It’s like her memory about him just...vanished.”
Old Man Winter templed his hands in front of his face. “For a Persephone-type, the first memories to go are those most crucial—the core memories, if you will. The best of times, the most intimate of companions, these are bundled together in some sort of way that makes them closest to the edge. What remains, even after a fully draining event, is ancillary things, the trivial and unimportant. The rest is just fragments.”
“There must be...” I sighed. “There has to be something we can do.”
“She’ll receive our full attention,” Ariadne said from her place next to Old Man Winter. “We’ll have Perugini and Sessions working every angle they can to try and restore her memory, but this is...not something we’ve ever dealt with before, nor is it something where there’s an overabundance of information waiting out there to steer us in the right direction. It’s doubtful we’ll be able to do anything for her, because as with everything else, our experimentation with meta abilities tends to leave us with more questions than answers, more knowledge of the results than what causes them.”
“She saved him, his life,” I said, quiet. “She must have known she was close to the edge of losing memories, because she’d already healed me, Reed, Clary—she knew, and I think she did it anyway, and she ended up passing out on him.” I felt my jaw tighten before I loosened it to speak. “She saved his life, and she can’t even remember his name because of it.”