Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,61

oppressive suddenly, and my palms are slick with sweat. I'm having all the symptoms of claustrophobia, which I know isn't the case. Arcadians don't get claustrophobic. But it's a feeling of being hemmed in, of being constricted and bound.

I remember white feathers. I remember the rush of wind on my face. The rocky ground rushing past. The spray of water as waves leap up, trying to catch me.

I hate falling.

What's down there? What am I afraid of finding?

Also, lying there, I realize there's something else too. What am I not supposed to remember? If I'm not hiding it from myself, then it was taken from me. Why would Mother do that?

TWENTY-ONE

Mere finds me lying on the grate, staring up at the stairs above my head. “There's nothing on the laptop,” she says. “Just an unlocked guest account that was set to load when I brought it out of sleep mode. There's no sign it's ever been on a network or the Internet. The hardware isn't that new, so it looks like it was wiped and reformatted a couple of days ago, the video was loaded—probably from a CD or USB device—and then it was configured to surprise us. That's it.”

Her words stir something in my head, and I try to grab it, but it remains elusive.

“What is it?” she asks, sensing my aggravation.

“I've been down there—” I indicate the open space beneath the grate. “But I can't remember when or why. We forget things after a while. It's too much to hang on to, all that history, and the brain starts to jettison bits and pieces of it after… Anyway, there are some practices we've adopted that ease the discomfort of memory loss, but it doesn't clean up everything. There are little shards that remain, tiny chips of history that lodge themselves in the brain. They're disassociated from the core memory that binds them together, and the brain struggles to keep itself ordered. These little pieces end up in strange spots and, as the brain folds them in, they become disconcerting breaks in your mental history.”

“That sounds confusing.”

“You get used to it. After a while.”

I don't tell her how Mother helps us when we go into her embrace. She won't understand. She hasn't lived as long as I have.

“Is there any reason to stay here then?” she asks. “Is it going to get better?”

“No,” I sigh. “Probably not.” I look wistfully at the spikes in the wall once more. Would getting the grate removed help? Would I actually understand what I found down below? Our would it be something that I felt like I should remember, but couldn't?

Would that be worse?

“Come on,” she says, offering me her hand. “I want to find the server room. Let's see if it is in that first subbasement. Maybe there's something left there.”

Using her hand, I pull myself up. She doesn't let go and I end up standing close to her. She leans toward me for a second, squeezing my hand. “I'm sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For what happened to Nigel.”

Why? is the first word that had popped into my head. He was a bastard. I shudder slightly and, feeling the tremor in my body, she squeezes harder.

“Thanks,” I say, even though she's misreading my reaction.

I don't feel any sadness at Nigel's death. I should, but I don't. He wasn't family. Not in the truest sense. Not even in the slightest sense.

I miss Mere's hand touching mine more than I miss Nigel.

* * *

The lab server room is more of a closet, and the narrow space contains two racks of computer gear. It's a bunch of black boxes with a tangled mess of wires coming in and out of everything in an incomprehensible maze, but Mere looks at it like she understands what she's seeing. “Patch panel,” she says to herself as she starts inventorying the boxes, “Router. One—no, two—switches. Four servers, and… shit.”

“What?”

“See these lights?” She pops off a plastic panel and shows me a row of red lights next to empty slots. “The drives have all been pulled. Each of these slots should be filled with a hard drive, but they're all empty.” She checks each one of the boxes that she counted as a server, and they're all the same.

“They really wanted to make sure we couldn't get any data off these. Probably put them all in a bag and tossed it into the ocean. That'd be the quickest way to ruin the data. Damnit. There's nothing here. Nothing at all.” She