Seven returned cautiously to his own Domain, waiting at the entrance to see if the Cat or the Reaper were anywhere nearby. One shouldn’t think ill of one’s own commanding officers, but the two of them gave him a weird feeling. Whenever they were in his head, they felt scratchy and sticky, like cobwebs and brambles.
The Cat and the Reaper weren’t there, but the King had been returned to him. Seven could sense his presence, and he proceeded forward. The King in his present state was of no danger to anyone.
The man showed signs of having been subjected to Dream Dust, but he was still in a sleepy, hazy state. Seven thought the Cat might have been attempting to return the King’s memories in the same manner in which they’d been taken. Seven didn’t think it would work, but they must have at least wanted to try.
Either that or they’d been interrogating him. There was absolutely no use in doing that, as far as Seven was concerned. He’d seen the blank rooms in the King’s head for himself, and nothing they could do to him would make him give up information he just didn’t have.
Well, there was one way to find out.
The King was sitting on the same sofa as before, which he had claimed as his own in spite of it belonging to Seven’s domain. His pupils, hard to discern when his irises were of such dark colour, were wide enough to almost obscure the slightly lighter ring around them.
“Hello, King.” Seven crouched in front of his prisoner. “How are you today?”
To his utmost surprise, as soon as Seven was in the King’s field of vision, his form shimmered, and Seven was looking back into his own face. The King had made himself look like an agent.
“Who are you?” Seven asked curiously.
“I’m…” He paused and frowned, as if trying to remember. “I’m One-Twenty-Two.”
“That’s a number,” Seven reminded him in a whisper.
“Yes,” the King replied, nodding emphatically. “You’re a number as well.”
“I’m Seven.” He felt a chill run up the length of his spine. “But you’re not a number, you’re the King. I know, because I’ve met you, and I’ve seen all the things you’ve done. You just don’t have your memory right now.”
“I’m One-Twenty-Two.”
“What have they done to you?” Seven asked, a hollow feeling filling his chest.
The King didn’t resist as Seven placed his forehead against his. Seven tried to be gentle as they entered King’s domain, because he had no idea if they had caused him any more trauma than what was already apparent.
There were new memories, painfully easy to go through, because there were so few of them. The one in which King had first met Seven was already grainy and indistinct. At first, Seven thought it might be because of the damage erasing the memories, but as he moved on to the new ones, he understood.
The new memories had sharp edges and were almost too bright to look at.
The first one was filled with mirrors. They were everywhere, and from every angle imaginable, like a funhouse. It was too bright, and Seven’s eyes smarted, even looking at it second-hand. The Cat and the Reaper were there, following the King as he tried to find his way through.
It wouldn’t have been at all alarming except that the mirrors were reflecting the Cat and the Reaper normally, but every single reflection showed the King’s movements as belonging to an agent. The more the King saw his own reflection, the more his own features started blurring and reshaping, until finally, his self-projected image matched the false reflection.
The Reaper and the Cat had the King in an interrogation room, a tiny cell inside someone’s mind. It was dark, and King was restrained in a chair, manacled.
“Who do you think you are?”
“I don’t know. Seven says that I’m the King.”
The Reaper leaned into the King’s face. “We don’t listen to Seven, we listen to me. And what I’m saying is that you’re one of us.”
“I’m not an agent of Death,” the King said, looking at his hands.
“No, you’re like Seven. He works for the government. So do you.”
“I don’t remember working for the government.”
“There was an accident, and you have amnesia. You’re Agent One-Twenty-Two. Just like Seven, you do important things, but first, we have to remind you who you are.”
“I’m One-Twenty-Two.”
“Yes.”
They’d started him on agent training after that, and Seven remembered almost word-for-word the same thing from his own time learning what it meant to be a true MindHack. Watching it now, from the perspective of an outsider, there was an air of marked brutality with the way the King was handled.
King’s pain was nothing to them, and they urged him on, regardless of his suffering. They wanted him to get the training right immediately, and if he was too slow, he was rewarded with an even harsher punishment. Seven almost looked away, but he made himself watch it all unravel before him.
Was it different, because the King was actually the leader of the rebel group, or was that how they treated all their agents? Seven couldn’t quite remember. Surely his memory was being influenced by watching what was happening in King’s head.
“This doesn’t hurt.”
Seven’s mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood as he watched Eighty-Eight, who had been brought in sometime earlier as a training aid, shoot the King full in the chest. He definitely remembered this part, and wondered if Eighty-Eight did, too.
The King hadn’t yet managed to handle his mind in a way that he could resist the instinctive pain, or its reactions. He was coughing wetly and sinking to his knees, hand pressed to a wound pumping out blood in copious volumes.
Seven hundred and forty times. That was how many times Seven had been shot before he’d managed to convince his mind the wound wasn’t real, and it didn’t really hurt.
It still always hurt for a split second, because the mind was powerful enough that it always interpreted the sight of self-injury as pain.
“You’re obviously not grasping the concept,” the Cat admonished. “We’ll get Eighty-Eight to demonstrate for us.”
They heaved the King to his feet and shoved the pistol into his hand.
“Shoot him.”
“I can’t,” the King had said, shaking his head.
“It doesn’t matter where, just shoot him. It won’t hurt him.”
“It hurt me.”
“Yes, because you still haven’t learned that it doesn’t actually hurt you. Now shoot him.”
The King’s fingers stuttered around the trigger. The shot went wide and disappeared. The Cat said nothing, waiting for the King to do as he’d asked. The King steadied his hand, aimed, and took another shot.
Eighty-Eight let out a slightly sharper breath, but otherwise showed no sign, not even a wound.
“See? It isn’t real. It’s all in your head, the injury and the pain. Switch places.”
Seven stopped watching and brought King back to his own domain. He knew how this went, after all. The King didn’t seem at all disturbed by their foray into his head, simply settling to his place on the sofa, with the difference that he now appeared identical to Seven.
“How do we tell each other apart?” the King asked.
Seven tilted his head to the side as he considered the question. He’d never really thought of that before, because to him it was blatantly obvious who was who. It had never occurred to him that because they all looked virtually identical, he shouldn’t have been able to tell them apart, not when they had no ID markers.
“You just know,” he said, though baffled. Logically, it was impossible.
“You’re right,” the King nodded in satisfaction. “Before, I knew it wasn’t you helping with training, and I knew it was you returning and not the other agent. Who was that?”
“Eighty-Eight.”
“Okay.”
Seven hadn’t realized before, but now that he looked around his own domain, there wasn’t a single mirror. He wondered if the other agents shared his apparent subconscious aversion to them.
He created one now, and it showed him the face of one of the agents. If they could make him want to see his face a certain way, it stood to reason he could also make himself look differently if he so chose.
The Fox had even changed shape entirely, he recalled. It couldn’t be so difficult.
Agents had black hair in a military-style cut, even and regular features, and brown eyes. He moved aside his goggles and tried to imagine himself with a different face.
Absolutely nothing happened.
He’d seen other faces. He could copy one of them. Fox’s face was easy enough to imagine, even if he did have ridiculous hair.
Nothing.
Seven tried until his head started to ache, but nothing he did, no mind-trick or psychology, could change his features.
They’d trained him too well, and if it took a long time to complete training in the first place, it would likely take time to undo it. The problem was, even thinking of undoing something he’d learned, felt alarming and wrong.
The others would see him anyway, and they’d know he was corrupted.
He was corrupted now, wasn’t he? He’d seen something, and it was changing the way he thought, had made him process data differently. Now he could see there was something not right. Or maybe the fault was with him, but he couldn’t unsee it. If he changed his appearance now, everyone would notice, and then they’d do something to him to fix it.
He didn’t think he wanted this particular problem fixed.
“I have a name,” he whispered.
Realizing what he’d just said, he looked around to see if anyone had heard him. He had a name, even if he didn’t know what it was. If they could make the King think he was a number, then obviously they could do it to anyone. The King didn’t remember now, but he had a name, and he had a real life, somewhere outside the Cerebrum.
Seven had known that about himself in an abstract sort of way, that he had a body. But now, he knew.
He looked in the mirror one last time, and finally, he made a change.
His irises had turned blue. He snugly settled his goggles over his face. They covered his change, so no one else would know he’d made them blue. But Seven would know, and that was good enough for now.
There was a knock on his front door.
Slowly, he looked out the peephole. The Cat and the Reaper had returned. He couldn’t refuse them entrance, so he opened the door.
“Yes?” he asked, tilting his head to the side to observe them more closely.
“We bring news you must hear, Seven.”
Seven let them in, but they didn’t seem to notice his reluctance or the change of his eye colour. It was paranoid of him to think they’d be able to see the change, but the worry gnawed at him while in their presence. They, on the other hand, were much more preoccupied by the King’s appearance.
“We’ve done a good job,” the Cat said in satisfaction, looking at the King.
“Yes, he doesn’t even recall he once had a different face.”
Seven didn’t mention that when he’d come in, the King had reverted back to his original state and only the visual reminder had instigated the change. He’d let them think they were clever for now.
“Never mind that. Seven, we have new orders for you.”
Seven had been able to find neither hide nor hair of the slippery Fox, and so had nothing to report on that front, so the new orders were welcome. He nodded, waiting for the Cat to relay them.
“Our inside contact has told us the latest mechanizations of the rebel group, and by all accounts, restoring this man’s memories is possible. If that is the case, then we still have a chance of getting that information after all.”
Seven lifted his head in interest. Fascinating. “So what are my orders?”
“We want you to harass the members of the rebel group as they try and recover those memories, but I don’t want you to stop them. They must not suspect that we want them to recover them. We’re going to take the memories once they’ve finished.”
“So you’re going to capture them all?”
“It should be easy. Our contact will keep us updated on their success and then he’ll turn them over to us so we can harvest the memories as planned.”
“If they know what we were doing, then why would they restore the memories if we still have his body?” Seven asked.
“They think they can recover his body. Pure folly, of course. They will never be able to find where we’ve put it. They don’t even know what country it’s in. Don’t worry, Seven, all is back on track and going according to plan.”
“So you don’t want me to capture them right now,” Seven said, just to be clear.
“No, just appear now and then to keep up the appearance of trying to stop them. We’ll capture them after they have what we need. We can even give you the last known coordinates of the Fox and the Maid, so you can start your harassment right away.”
Seven nodded.
The Reaper added in a tone of disappointment, “It’s too bad, but we won’t be able to keep carrying out our experiments on unfortunate agent One-Twenty-Two.”
The Cat sighed, but dipped his head in acknowledgement. “That is very true, Reaper, my friend. We can’t risk corrupting his mind to the point that the memories can’t be restored.”
Seven drew back his head in alarm. “That can happen?”
“Oh, yes,” Reaper said, with a laugh, although whether he was pleased at Seven’s alarm or the information itself, Seven couldn’t tell. “We’ve done extensive tests on the subject. It is fully possible that with too much manipulation, a mind will no longer be able to retain the memories implanted. We tried it on several subjects, tried to give them other people’s memories. We thought of it like a computer program, installing and then erasing, but it turns out that eventually it erodes the ability to even retain memory, rendering the subject useless.”
“Useless. So they were terminated,” Seven said, feeling slightly sick.
“Of course. What do you think happened to Agents One through Six?”
The Reaper and the Cat left, leaving him and the King alone, not seeming to notice or care about the impact their words had had on Seven. They considered him to be so much in their power that telling him government secrets didn’t raise any worry.
Seven headed into the Cerebrum, looking around at the secure government domain as he left it behind and wondering how people could inflict such miseries on others, and how it had taken him so long to notice what was going on underneath his very nose.
He was not only going to find the Fox, but he was also going to find out what else he’d been missing.
* * * *
“You look tired.”
Fox heaved a sigh and glanced at Joanne, busy flicking through the archives, trying to find something that she hadn’t yet mentioned to him.
“Jet lag,” he replied. “I had to take two planes to get where I am, and it is very cold and the roads—if you can even call them roads—are so covered in ice that their ground vehicles have to use metal studs and chains to go anywhere. Also, it’s already dark and it’s only four in the afternoon.”
“They still use ground vehicles? What kind of country are you even in?”
“According to them, it’s too windy to use a hover jet, the ice has caused all our navigation equipment to go haywire, and this entire place is so flat and empty that it all looks the same, so going by sight would leave us lost and stranded in the middle of nowhere.”
“Like I said, what kind of country are you in?”
“I know for a fact this country has nice places, so I’m not sure why I’m in this frost-bitten nightmare place,” Fox complained, feeling slightly better having vented his problems. “At least it has good Cerebrum link-ins.”
“A place in the middle of frost-bitten nowhere has Cerebrum link-ins?”
“You know, now that you mention it, that is a bit weird.”
“A problem for another day, my friend. We have some serious digging to do.”
Fox sighed again, because far from looking alarmed by the prospect of digging through mounds of data that was likely all useless to their cause, Joanne looked excited. “Any particular reason we’re looking at medieval France?” he asked. “I’m not much of a history person, so I’m not sure how it’s relevant.”
“I think the battlemaiden in King’s clue refers to Joan of Arc,” Joanne replied, shifting to another article. “See?” She pulled up a painting depicting a young woman in metal armour holding aloft a sword. Joanne looked extremely pleased with her find, staring at it in admiration.
“Okay, so she’s obviously a battlemaiden,” Fox said, squinting at the old painting. “How is she the one that’s in King’s clue? It could be any battlemaiden. There are lots of them floating around in history—I could name several off the top of my head.”
“Yes, but read the rest of the clue. A warrior that wields both sword and cross.” Joanne bounced with nervous energy, watching him eagerly, as if he would understand what she meant through some sort of telepathic bond.
The girl in the picture definitely had a big sword, one that she probably wouldn’t be able to hold that way in real life, but there was no cross in sight. He said as much.
Joanne glared at him, as if he’d purposefully ruined her breakthrough with his logic. “Do you know anything at all about Joan of Arc?” she asked.
“Is she French?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, definitely not.”
Joanne punched him in the arm.
Fox winced and danced back from her. “That was completely uncalled-for.”
“Right, well, let me give you a quick run-down. Joan of Arc was a peasant girl in fifteenth-century France during the Hundred Years’ War with England.”
“I’m not sure I like how this story is starting.”
Joanne shot him a severe look. “She heard the voices of Saints, telling her that she had to support the king and free France from under the domination of the English.”
“Definitely don’t like how this story is starting.”
“So she led the army to victory after victory, which led to the crowning of the French king. However, she was captured and then burned at the stake for heresy,” Joanne said, gesturing emphatically with one hand.
“Are you sure it’s her?” Fox made a face. “That’s kind of gruesome, yeah?”
“But then, there was a retrial and she was declared a martyr. Now she is one of the patron Saints of France.” Joanne gave him an exasperated look.
“Okay, fine, I guess the cross bit makes sense,” Fox said, ironically crossing his arms. “And the king-crowning part, too.”
“Don’t forget, Fox, King wanted us to be able to figure it out. He’d choose things that were clear to us, but wouldn’t be very helpful to any enemies should they find the clue. He must have known I took a minor study in French history.”
“Right, so we have part of the clue figured out, but we still have no idea where he put the memories or how we’re supposed to retrieve them.”
“That’s why we’re doing research, silly.”
Fox sighed again, but took out an article to read. It was long and involved, not at all something he was used to reading. He tried to remember going to university, and how he was supposed to do something to figure out impact and cause and effect, but those memories wouldn’t come to him. “This can’t be accomplishing anything,” he eventually complained, bored of reading the same information over and over again.
Joanne almost didn’t pay him any attention, utterly absorbed in whatever article she had in front of her. “What can’t?” she asked, voice distracted.
“King can’t have wanted us to go through so much data like this. You’re right, it should be obvious to us what he meant by the clue. We’re wasting time poring over all this endless information. It’s not a very effective method.”
Joanne glared at him again, having been effectively dragged from her article. “Do you have a better idea?”
Fox didn’t, so he went back to reading. He skimmed the page, barely absorbing it, when two words suddenly jumped out at him. He stopped and reread the entire paragraph, just to be sure. He might be on to something after all.
“Joanne, it says that Joan of Arc was also known as—”
“Found you.”
Joanne attacked.
Fox didn’t have time to realize there was an agent behind them before Joanne had dropped everything and launched herself at the intruder. She didn’t need weapons; her bare hands could do enough damage by themselves.
The agent didn’t try to attack them, however, simply dodged Joanne’s blows. He didn’t even move, his limbs simply blurred and shifted just enough that she never laid a hand on him.
“Don’t make me shoot you again.”
“He shot you?” Fox asked in alarm, looking at her as if he could tell by sight where she’d been injured.
“It must be the same one. I can’t tell them apart.”
“Surely you know me?” The agent smiled, a sharp-angled thing filled with dark amusement. “Then again, you have all the sand in Egypt for company, so what need have you to remember me?”
“What do you mean by that?” Fox demanded, watching as Joanne made a fresh attempt to put her foot through his face.
“Still in denial, I see. That was an Egypt reference again, in case you missed it,” the agent sang, easily avoiding Joanne’s attacks.
What was with this man’s preoccupation with Egypt? He wasn’t making any sense at all.
“I’d say something about locating your pyramids, but I’m not sure you’d like that at all.”
Oh. Oh.
“You!” Fox hissed before leaping at him, shifting into a fox mid-jump.
“Oh, you do remember me,” the agent said, sounding delighted. “But maybe next time you could take me to Paris instead. I’ve heard the view’s lovely from the top of the Eiffel Tower at night.”
“Fox, is this guy flirting with you?”
“Not a word, Joanne. Nothing about him touching my Eiffel Tower or anything of the sort!”
“You said it so much better than I ever could.”
“You shut up, too, crazy government guy!”
“Seven.”
“What?” Fox stopped trying to claw his face off.
“I’m Seven. That’s what I’m called, just so you know. I’m a different one than all the others.”
“That doesn’t matter when I can’t tell you lot apart from each other,” Fox said.
Joanne and the agent had stopped attacking and dodging in turn, cautiously eyeing one another instead.
“You know, your friend King can tell us apart.”
Fox was struck speechless with indignation. How dare he mention King so casually, when Fox and Joanne and everyone were all scared of what had happened to him once in the government’s clutches!
While Fox was distracted with rage, Seven got close enough to get his gloved hands around Fox’s middle. Fox froze in surprise before automatically becoming human again. This time, though, that psychological trick didn’t work.
Suddenly, Fox’s face was close enough that he could see the man’s eyes through the tinted lenses of his goggles. Even the agent seemed surprised, and in his periphery, Joanne stared in shock, motionless.
“So, you’ve got me. Now what?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Seven said.
“Your hands are—”
“On your pyramids.”
They stared at one another, and Fox thought that if he really wanted to, he could probably put an elbow in Seven’s throat, or a knee in his groin. That was what Joanne would do, if she were in this situation. Or he could try and get into the agent’s head. From this close, the required touching of foreheads was a matter of a few inches. Less than that even.
“My eyes are blue,” the agent said, his voice vibrating in Fox’s chest.
“I’ve not really been in a position to check the colour of an agent’s eyes,” Fox said, holding still and wondering why Joanne hadn’t tried to kill the agent, Fox’s proximity be damned.
“Not an agent’s eyes. My eyes,” Seven said, then slowly raised a hand to pull back his goggles. “Shhh. It’s a secret.”
“Why is it a secret?” It was a strange secret, if that was really what it was.
“It’s how you can tell I’m me.”
Before Fox could ask anything else, Seven disappeared into the Cerebrum, leaving Fox to blink dazedly at the empty place.
“What the hell was that?” Joanne asked, one hand on her cocked hip.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Fox said, confused. “Scratch that, I haven’t a bloody idea. Should we go after him?”
It was far too late for that anyway; the trail was gone already. The two of them puzzled over this for several minutes before Fox remembered.
“Joanne! The clue! That git distracted me, but I know what the clue is referencing. Come on, we have to go to a private domain.”
“What, right now?”
“And it should be your domain, to make things easier.”
“All right, link-in.”
Joanne’s domain was almost always a library when Fox visited. It wasn’t always the same library, and this time it looked a bit more like a tiny book shop, cosily disorganized and with an attached café.
Fox took a seat in a puffy armchair.
“So what do you mean you know what the clue references?” Joanne asked, sounding slightly put out that she hadn’t been the one to solve the riddle.
“I suddenly noticed that Joan of Arc has more than one alias, and one of those is—”
“The Maid.”
“Yes, the same as yours.”
“I know. I chose my alias based on her name,” Joanne said, as if it were obvious.
“But Joanne, the clue King left us wasn’t talking about Joan of Arc at all. He was talking about you.” Fox could see her adding it all up in her head.
“That’s why you wanted to come to my domain. You think the memory is somewhere in here.”
“Yes, and you know where it is. The clue has to tell us something.”
“There’s nothing else to go on.”
“Well, what do you do when you have to figure something out and you’re stuck? Surely you scholarly types have a way with words, and King knew it. He wouldn’t have made it impossible for you to deduce. What does he know about you that he could use?”
Joanne looked around, then lowered her voice, although there was no one else I the room but him. “I’m a professor of literature. That’s what King knew about me.”
“Right. So what do literary professors do when they’re stuck?”
“We ask our colleagues for help. We write it down on a big board so we can all see the problem, and maybe there’s something there that we missed.”
“Let’s write it down, then.”
Joanne’s writing was elegant and looping as she wrote the clue on a board that suddenly appeared. She wasn’t writing it down the same way in which Fox would have, and it gave him pause.
He stopped her. “Why are you writing it down like that?”
A Battlemaiden
Hands to wield both sword and cross
Fit to crown a King
Joanne looked at it. “It’s the logical way to write it. It’s how the words flow. How else would you write it without it looking strange or interrupting the cadence?”
“It’s just that…the structure looks familiar. Not like a clue at all, but it looks like—”
“A poem!” Joanne finished triumphantly, eyes gleaming. “Fox, you’re brilliant! It does look like a stanza of some sort.” She started mouthing the words and counting on her fingers. Was she looking for rhyme schemes or something? “It’s a haiku,” she said finally. “And that means—”
“Japan.”
They looked at each other and grinned.
“I’ve been to Japan only once,” she said. “It was on a business trip back when I was first being considered for a position with…a certain prestigious university.” The little book store flickered around them and disappeared. “I was there with my mentor, and he didn’t want me to accept a position there.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story.” She smiled a bit wistfully. “There was rivalry and betrayal and all sorts of things happening at the time. And this university is in France, so let’s not forget love.”
Suddenly, they stood on a balcony overlooking a vast city, and Fox could see flashing signs written in foreign characters far below and floating lanterns all around them. There was a second woman on the balcony, and a man behind her, carrying a glass of red wine.
“That’s me,” Joanne whispered.
“So you’ll accept the position, then?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Past-Joanne said. “If they offer it to me.”
“You’re willing to give up all we have together just to work with him?”
“You’re the one who has a problem with him. I have nothing to do with that. You’re the one who wants to give up everything in the face of your rivalry. Do not expect me to sacrifice my career for your ego.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“No. What you’re doing, forcing me to choose between myself and you, is what’s not fair. I should have realized how selfish you were before all this started.”
“I should have known you’d put your work first,” the man shot back. “You’ll be alone the rest of your life, but that’s your cross to bear—”
“I’d forgotten he said that,” Joanne whispered, and a bright beam of light, more intense than all the surrounding lanterns, erupted in front of them.
“Is that light the memories?” Fox asked in a low voice, watching as it bobbed in front of them.
“I guess so,” Joanne said, reaching out to touch it, then drawing back her hand. “What do I do with it?”
The memory swirled softly, but otherwise did nothing. To Fox, it looked like a mass of feathers, or something with soft edges, twirling in around itself.
“I think if you leave it here, you can probably come back and get it whenever you like, now that you know where it is,” Fox suggested. “We still don’t know how to give them back to King. For that matter, I’m not sure how he got them there in the first place.”
“Should there be another clue here somewhere?” Joanne asked.
Fox looked around and found that Past-Joanne was holding something. He leaned over her shoulder, and Joanne, seeing his movement, followed. It was a piece of paper, and upon closer examination, looked more like old, yellowing parchment than a new sheet.
“This one is obviously a poem,” Joanne said, looking it over. “Why couldn’t this one have been first, so that mine would have been more obvious?”
“King wanted solvable, not necessarily easy,” Fox replied with a smile. “We’ve found the first set of memories. This isn’t as hopeless as we thought.”
“We still have to find King’s physical body.”
“On that note, we should hold another meeting, and tell everyone our news. Then we can see if they’ve made any headway on that front.”
For the first time, Fox thought they might actually have a chance.