Dal didn’t come to school on Monday, and Rena spent the day worrying about him. She’d never ditched him for someone else before, and though it hadn’t been intentional, she’d still crossed a line. She wanted to explain. To apologize. Wanted to tell him the whole thing was pointless anyway, because Lukas didn’t want anything to do with her. And she couldn’t even bear to look at him. But she couldn’t say any of that because Dal wasn’t there. Rena was trapped at school, suffering through each class period with nothing more than her nervous thoughts keeping her company. And Lukas’s evasive behavior only fueled those thoughts.
“You seem anxious.”
“What?”
“You seem anxious,” Dr. Mallory repeated. “Is everything alright?”
Rena was lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling panels with their indirect, soothing lighting. “It’s been a long day.”
“Would you like to talk about that instead? We don’t have to do this.”
“No,” Rena replied. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”
Dr. Mallory tilted her head to one side. “Alright. Then close your eyes. I want you to concentrate on the sound of my voice …”
But Rena was past that stage. They’d done this dozens of times. She knew the process. And she could already feel her body relaxing, sinking into the couch, her conscious mind releasing its grip.
The walls were different. Not smooth or white. They were bumpy. Brown with a hint of orange. It took Rena a moment to understand that they were made of logs stacked on one another. She was inside the cabin. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom. On the rough-hewn flooring in front of her were pinecones, twigs, and pine needles that had been stuck together in the shape of animals. They were her toys, and she was playing with them.
“Rena!”
It was her father’s voice from somewhere else in the cabin. He usually called her chipmunk, but not this time. He was using her real name, and his tone was different too. Something was wrong.
“Rena!”
Seconds later, the door to Rena’s bedroom burst open. Eldric stood in the doorway, breathing heavily as if he’d just been running.
“We have to go.”
“What’s wrong?” Rena asked. She’d never seen her father so upset, and she didn’t understand what was happening.
“Remember when I said that someday we might have to leave quickly?”
Rena nodded.
“Well, it’s come sooner than I expected. So do your list. We need to leave right now.” His voice was deep and calm. Not panicked, but there was urgency in his words.
Rena got up from the floor and went to her closet.
Eldric left the doorway and disappeared down the hall. Probably to do his own list.
Rena opened her closet door, pushed aside the hanging clothes and her tall boots, all made of leather, and grabbed the backpack sitting on the floor. Unlike everything else in her closet, the backpack was made of a smooth synthetic material that reflected the light. It looked like it was from another world.
She set it on the floor and unzipped it, removing a shirt, pants, a light jacket, a pair of socks, and shoes, all made from the same strange material. She quickly removed her leather clothing and dressed herself with the foreign articles. Then she zipped up the backpack. As she slung it over her shoulder, she thought through the list her father had made her memorize so long ago.
Backpack in closet.
Get dressed.
Bring the bag.
Get your number.
Wait at the door.
There were only two more tasks on her list. Rena raised her right hand and turned it so she was looking at the back of it. Then she spoke a phrase that didn’t make sense in her world of trees and mountains and animals. “Activate interminal.”
A three-digit number suddenly appeared, glowing blue beneath her skin. She didn’t know what it was or how it had gotten onto her hand, but she remembered her father saying that it would be needed. Then she left her room, walked down a short hallway, and stopped at the front door. As she waited for her father, she looked out the windows to the field of wild grass and the narrow dirt path she followed every day to the stream and then up into the mountains. She wished she could be out there, running away from whatever was making her father so upset.
“OK. I think that’s everything,” said Eldric, shutting the door to his room. He was dressed now in the same type of clothing as Rena. And he also had a number on the back of his hand. He stepped over to the front door and knelt down so he was looking straight into Rena’s eyes.
She felt scared, but as her father pulled her into a gentle embrace, she suddenly felt safe again. Her fears seemed to fly away like birds.
“I know you don’t understand what’s happening. But don’t panic. Just stay close to me and act like everything is normal. It’ll be like we’re going for a walk. When we get where we’re going, I’ll have time to explain everything. Alright?”
Rena nodded.
The cabin was gone. Rena was outside. But not the outside she knew. And she couldn’t remember how she had gotten here. There were no trees. Only tall cabins stuck together in a row, made of rectangular stones of orange and red. No fields of grass and dirt. Just smooth stone that went on forever in swaths of gray and black. Even the sky looked different. It wasn’t blue. It was gray. Millions of tiny triangles formed a ceiling above her.
Eldric was hunched over by the door, using his finger to press numbered buttons beside the door.
Rena wondered what he was doing, but before she knew it, her father was walking down the steps. She hurried to catch up to him.
“This is concrete,” he explained. “And that is a street. It was made for vehicles to travel on, but only the taxis use them now.”
Rena didn’t know what any of it meant.
“Most people just walk to the nearest transit …” he said, trailing off. Then he came to a stop.
Rena stopped beside her father and looked up at his face. Something was wrong. He was staring. She followed his gaze across the street and saw another man walking in their direction. He was dressed in clothes like the ones Rena and her father were wearing.
Eldric turned and looked the other direction.
There was another man walking toward them on their side of the street.
Rena thought she and her father were going to walk that way, but Eldric stayed where he was.
“They’ve already come.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Uh … OK. Here … give me your hand.”
Rena reached out and took his hand. It was large and warm. He started walking along the street, pulling Rena as he went. She jogged to keep pace with him, looking up at his face to figure out what was wrong.
He turned suddenly, heading down another street that was narrower and went between the stone cabins.
“Daddy, where are we going?”
Eldric ignored the question. “We’re gonna run, OK?”
Rena looked back over her shoulder. The first man she’d seen was crossing the street and pulling something dark out of his clothing.
“Run!” Eldric said.
Rena did as she was told, but her legs wouldn’t move fast enough. Her father was in front, pulling her to keep up. She ran harder, feeling her heart thudding in her chest. She sucked in air in gulps, but she couldn’t get enough. And her hand was slipping out of her father’s grasp.
“Daddy!”
Eldric slowed just long enough to scoop Rena up from the ground. She threw her arms around his neck and held tight, bouncing and jostling with each step. Over his shoulder, she watched the stone cabins pass by. Her father turned again and again. One street after another. Wide, then narrow. Then wide again. The color of the cabins changed. Their shapes changed. Then there weren’t rows of them, but individual cabins with fences around them.
Her father kept running and turning, but Rena watched over his shoulder as the two men from earlier came into view around a corner. They were running too, and catching up.
“Daddy! Why are they following us?”
Eldric turned again, and the men disappeared from view. But then his running steps faltered, and he came to a stop.
“Daddy, they’re going to catch us!”
Her father set her down, and now Rena could see that something was blocking their path. It was like the nets they used for catching fish, but it was gray, stretching all the way from one cabin to the next and so high that there wasn’t enough time to climb it.
“Rena!”
Rena was staring at the net, wishing she could fly over it like a bird.
“Chipmunk!”
Rena turned to her father.
“I’m going to hide you in this dumpster. You need to stay quiet, alright?”
Before she could answer, he picked her up, kissed her on the forehead, and set her inside a big, metal box that smelled worse than the rotting leaves by the river.
“Daddy!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, before holding his finger up to his mouth.
Then the lid of the box was closing, and everything became dark. Rena wanted to scream, but her father had told her to be quiet. So she crouched down, kept still, and put her hands over her mouth. Tears began streaming down her face, but she refused to make a sound. The only thing she could hear was her own breathing, which now seemed so loud that she was sure the men would hear it and find her. She had to stay hidden from them. So she took a deep breath and held it.
“Down on the ground!” someone yelled. It sounded far away.
“Where’s the girl?”
There was no reply.
“Get down!”
“Please,” her father said. His voice was shaky.
“Get down and put your hands on your head!”
“Please, you don’t understand. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
There was a loud smack, and Rena heard her father grunt. They were hurting him. She knew it, even though she couldn’t see it. And the thought of someone hurting her father made her stomach go cold.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he pleaded, but there was something wrong with his mouth. His words sounded strange.
“Chipmunk!”
Rena held her hands tight against her mouth.
“Chipmunk!”
“Shut up, old man!”
Rena bit her finger to keep from making any noise.
“Chipmunk, look at me!”
Rena realized her father was trying to get her attention. She stood up and moved to the edge of the box. Then she pushed up on the lid. It opened a few centimeters. Light streamed in, blinding her. She blinked away the tears and tried to find her father through the crack of light. He was there, in the middle of the street, lying on his stomach. One of the men was on top of him. The other was standing and pointing something at him.
“Chipmunk,” he said again, quieter this time. He had blood all over his face, and some of it was on the street in front of him.
Rena thought of the deer she had killed and all of the blood that had come out as they had field-dressed it. Was that what they were doing to her daddy?
Eldric’s mouth was moving. He was saying something, but Rena couldn’t stop looking at the blood. Then her father’s head fell against the street and his body went limp. Rena stared at his open eyes, but they were different now. Something had changed.
Her father was dead.
Rena felt weak, and her legs began to wobble. Her head felt heavy. The metal box around her began to move. She fell, unable to control herself. Then everything was quiet again. And dark. Except for the strange, blue light coming from the back of her hand. Then the lid moved.
Gray light spilled in, hurting her eyes.
Rena screamed at the top of her lungs.
Arms reached down for her.
Grasping.
Taking hold of her hand.
A face stared at her from the blinding gray.
It was the man who had killed her father.
Rena screamed as loud as she could.
Her fear retreated.
The harder she screamed, the faster it went away. Until her sadness was swallowed up too. There was something else in that moment, taking their place. Something more powerful.
The man was saying something to her, but the only thing Rena could detect was her own anger. She wanted to kill him.
His mouth was still moving.
And now she could hear him.
But it wasn’t his voice.
It sounded like a woman.
“And now … you’re back with me,” he said.
The man’s face distorted, losing color and flattening until it became a grid of white rectangles.
Dr. Mallory’s soothing lights.
“You’re back with me. You’re safe now. Nothing to be afraid of,” she said in a calm voice.
Rena reached up and covered her face with both hands. She inhaled as much air as her lungs would hold, and when she let it out, her body began shaking uncontrollably. She was sobbing so hard that she couldn’t even make a sound.
“Oh, Rena,” said Dr. Mallory, moving over to the couch. Stroking her hair. “It’s alright. It was just a delusion. A dream. That’s all.”
Rena didn’t reply. She just let her body shake. Then the sound of her sobbing came out. She cried and cried until there was nothing left in her. No emotion. Only a numb void where her feelings used to be. How long it took to reach that point, she had no idea. But when the thought occurred to her, Dr. Mallory was already back in her own chair and Rena was sitting upright on the couch.
“Are you ready to talk about it, or would you like some more time?”
Rena almost laughed. “Well … Lynn, I think I’ve had all the counseling I can take for one night.”
Dr. Mallory tilted her head and smiled. “I understand. You’ve done outstanding work today. You’ve been through a lot. How about we take tomorrow off?”
Rena was too exhausted to even nod her agreement.
“I’ll ‘verse your mom and let her know.”
Rena didn’t reply.
“And if you feel like you need to stay home from school tomorrow, you can do that too. In fact, I think it would be a good idea.”
“Thanks.”
Dr. Mallory smiled again, obviously encouraged that Rena was now willing to respond. “You have a lot to think about tomorrow. A lot to process. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to say something that may help with assimilating these delusions.”
Rena shrugged. She’d just witnessed her father’s murder. What damage could a few more words do?
“In the past few weeks, you’ve described many scenarios to me. In some of them, you’ve been quite young. So it feels as though these experiences took place over the course of years. But when the police found you in that dumpster, you were only seven years old. And when they scanned your implant, they discovered you’d only been missing from the orphanage for a few months.”
Rena nodded.
“So it wasn’t years. It was months. But I think that’s significant. To a seven-year-old living alone on the streets … a few months would feel like years.”
Rena wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“It’s a wonder you survived at all.”
Rena didn’t have the strength for this. She just wanted the session to be over. And Dr. Mallory must have picked up on that.
“I’ll get to the point. This man you described … he wasn’t your father. But he may have been real. Perhaps someone you saw or even met while living on the streets. There are documented cases where people have experienced emotional or physical trauma, and a certain piece of that trauma has become imprinted on many other parts of their lives afterward. A sight. A sound. Even a smell. They keep experiencing it over and over again in different forms. Perhaps you actually witnessed this man being hurt or robbed. It’s hard to say. But I think we’re getting closer to understanding what it was you endured while living on the streets. What you experienced tonight was a breakthrough. You should be proud of yourself.”
Rena didn’t know what to say.
“Take some time to think about it. And when you’re ready, let’s talk.”