In The Afterlight

“No, it made me feel sick.”

He nodded, taking that in. “Maybe that was the point. That’s the only way she knows how to keep Oranges out.”

“That was my thought, too.”

“It makes sense. If you knew you had a son capable of coming in and making a mess of everything inside of your skull, wouldn’t you try to teach yourself a few ways to block him out—protect yourself?”

Someone intelligent and determined enough to come up with a cure for this sickness would have taken every precaution against it.

“So her memories are in there, and they’re not damaged...” Chubs trailed off, running his finger down the side of one of the open textbooks.

“Where did you get these?” I asked, picking up the nearest brick-like book.

“A bookstore,” he said, then added quickly, “after hours. Vida took them for me since I was too chickenshit to get out of the car.”

“I’m glad you stopped,” I said, flipping through its pages. Most of them were on anatomy, but several, including the one he was looking through now, were neuro-this and neuro-that, all with pictures of the human mind on the cover.

He looked up, an unreadable expression on his face. “Clancy can...he can break into a person’s mind, right? What can he do once he’s inside?”

I thought about it. “Influence their feelings, keep them frozen so they can’t move, and...project images into their head so they’re seeing something that’s not there.”

Another voice chimed in. “He can also—” Chubs and I pivoted toward Nico, who looked like he wanted nothing more than to dive back behind the wide computer monitor. “It’s not just...it’s not just that he can make them freeze up. He can move people around. Like they’re toys. I saw him do it to the researchers at Thurmond a few times. He’d jump into their minds mid- conversation to listen to what others were saying. It was really hard for him to keep up. The last time he tried it, he slept a full day to recover. He would get terrible migraines so he had to stop.”

Chubs gave me a look I read perfectly. Migraines, not human decency.

“Can he affect someone’s memories?” Chubs asked. “Can he erase them...actually, I don’t think you’re erasing them, so much as suppressing them. But can he manipulate someone’s memories?”

“He’s can see someone’s memories—” I caught myself, half-stunned by the realization that slammed into me. “He only ever saw my memories when I let him in. I don’t think he could do it on his own. The real reason he tried teaching me control at East River was because he wanted to figure out how I was doing it.”

“That other Orange kid you knew—what could he do?”

Martin. My skin crawled at the thought of him. “He manipulated people’s feelings.”

Chubs looked intrigued, flipping back through the book to a diagram each section of the brain. “That’s fascinating...you’re all using different parts of a person’s mind against them. Er, sorry, that came out the wrong way.”

I held up a hand. “It’s fine.”

“This is complicated to explain, but even though the mind has many different structures within it, they all work together in different ways. So it’s not really that you’re accessing different sections of the brain, but different systems within it. Like the frontal lobe plays a part in making and retaining memories, but so does the medial temporal lobe. Does that make sense?”

“Sort of. So you think I’m somehow interrupting different parts of that process depending on what I’m doing?”

“Right,” he said. “My understanding is that ‘memory’ is many different systems, all of which function in slightly different ways—creation, for instance, or bringing one to mind, even storing.” He picked up the book in front of him. “The memory of what this object is, how to lift it, how to read the pages, how I feel about it...all different systems. My best guess is that when you ‘remove’ someone’s memories, you’re not removing them at all, just disrupting a few of these key systems and rerouting the real memories to imagined ones...or disrupting the encoding process before the memory can take shape and the neurotransmitters work, so the person can’t—”

“Okay, but how do you jump between different systems? Control other functions?”

“I don’t know,” Chubs said, “how did you do it to Clancy?”

That brought me up short.

“You froze him the same way he froze Liam and Vi. What did you do differently?”

“It was...the intent, I guess? I went completely still and wanted him to do the same—” The words choked off.

Mirror minds.

That’s what he had told me, when I couldn’t figure out how to get back out of the darkness there, sever the thread between us. Once I brought up a memory, my grip on his mind shifted back to his memories. When I went still and wanted him to do the same, he did.

I explained the theory to Chubs, who nodded. “It sort of makes sense. When you intentionally go into a person’s memories, you’re using the memory of how to do it rather than a memory itself. Wow, that sounded less confusing inside my head. Anyway—it involves being vulnerable to the other person having access to your memories, some sort of natural empathy on your end. I can’t imagine him being willing to run the risk of releasing any part of the control he has over his mind, or that he possesses a shred of empathy. Do you want to experiment with this? Maybe we can see if you can get me to move my hand—”