‘You don’t get over things like that,’ Ellie says to Madison, shaking her head, then turns to me. ‘Her daughter went missing. No one knows what happened to her. I think Stella is afraid of something happening to one of us; she is just looking out for us all.’
Late that night there is a faint knock on my door, and it opens. I sit up, heart pounding.
Hall light frames round her: Stella.
She looks different, hair down, a long flannel robe wrapped tight around her; more soft and uncertain. Pounce pushes past her, runs across the room and jumps up on my bed.
Stella pulls the chair next to the bed and sits in it. She grips my hand so tight it starts to hurt.
‘Lucy? Is it really you?’ she whispers. She reaches out her other hand, shaking, to my hair. ‘What has happened to your beautiful hair?’
‘It’s changed, permanently: IMET.’
‘We could dye it, I suppose.’
‘No. I’m trying to not be recognised.’
‘Oh. Of course.’ She sighs. ‘I can always stop dyeing mine.’
‘Why? Do we need to match?’
She starts, pulls her hand away. ‘Not exactly. It’s just that I didn’t know you when you came in. I didn’t know my own daughter. You didn’t know me either, did you?’
I hesitate, shake my head. She looks hurt. ‘I’m sorry. You know I was Slated, don’t you?’
She nods. ‘She told me.’
‘Who?’
She looks away. ‘I don’t know. Whoever it was who told me you were finally coming home.’
Someone in MIA?
‘Tell me your story, Lucy. Tell me everything you can about where you’ve been these seven years.’
I hold still a moment. I came here because I wanted to find out about my missing past, my years here: of course she wants the same in return, to know about the parts of my life she has missed since then. A fair exchange? But much of what has been my life these last years I don’t want to say out loud. Some demons are best kept locked up, hidden away.
‘Lucy?’
‘Could you not call me Lucy? It’s just that it is dangerous. No one can know who I really am.’
‘No one can hear us now.’
‘But you might slip up when other people are around.’
She half smiles. ‘I’ll try, Lu—’ She jumps, guiltily. ‘—Riley,’ she says. ‘What should you call me?’ Her eyes hunger, and I know what she wants to hear, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
‘I should call you what all the girls do, for the same reason: Stella.’
She frowns, and sighs. ‘Oh, all right. Tell me about your life, Riley.’
And I stare back at her. Should I tell her everything, no matter whether I want to or not? Is it dangerous to know? ‘I don’t know everything. A lot of my memories are gone.’
‘What you do know, then.’
‘I think I was kidnapped when I was ten. I didn’t understand why for a long time.’
Her lip curls. ‘The AGT.’
My eyes widen. She knows, or guesses? ‘Yes, it was them. They had some sort of plan, to fracture my personality. So that when I was Slated some memories would survive.’
Stella’s face wars between sadness and horror. ‘You must have been so scared.’
So little memory of that time remains, but what does isn’t good: late at night hearing a doctor’s voice saying over and over again, you have no family; they didn’t want you; they gave you to us. My eyes start to sting, and I blink. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ I ask. ‘Everything? It isn’t easy to talk about. It might be harder to hear.’
Stella hesitates. ‘Yes. Tell me,’ she says, and slips an arm across my shoulders, hesitant, and some of the resistance inside melts enough for me to lean into her a moment, and tell her the blackest early memory from then.
I hold my left hand up. ‘They made me – as Lucy – be right-handed. Broke my left fingers so I had no choice.’ She cradles my hand in hers, staying silent. Nods once to say go on, but doesn’t press. But I can’t bring myself to tell her the thing that happened that finally cemented the personality split: that Dad snatched me back from the AGT, that we nearly got away. But Nico caught us. The gun in Nico’s hand. Does she know how Dad – her husband – died?
I straighten up. ‘Later on, they succeeded: I had a split personality. When I was left-handed, I trained with the AGT as one of them; now and then I was right-handed, and I was Lucy. When the Lorders caught and Slated me, the other part of me hid away and Lucy was dominant, so I was Slated as right-handed, and it was Lucy’s memories that were Slated. The later memories I had with the AGT survived. Lucy’s early life is gone.’
‘Why would they do such a thing?’
‘As far as I understand it was all part of a scheme, to show the Lorders that Slating could fail: that any Slated criminal could be violent, even though that was supposed to be impossible. That none were safe.’ I don’t spell out what the consequences of Nico’s plans would have been: with no way to tell which Slated might turn, what would the Lorders do to all the Slateds? I shudder inside.
‘But if you were Slated, why haven’t you got a Levo?’
This is venturing into no-go territory: it would be dangerous for her to know how I was caught between the violent plans of Nico’s AGT and Lorder blackmail. How they tracked me to the AGT, and I thought Agent Coulson was going to kill me, but Katran – terrorist, yes, but an old friend who really cared about me – raced to my rescue, and Coulson shot Katran point blank in front of me. How holding Katran as he died made me finally remember my dad’s death. Because of Dr Lysander, the Lorders thought I’d done as they wanted; they let me go, removed my Levo.
‘Lucy? Sorry, Riley, I mean. What happened to your Levo?’ Stella prompts, and I wonder how long I’ve been staring into space.
‘It was cut off,’ I say. A small lie. The Lorder method of removal was gentle: a few buttons pushed on a machine, and it painlessly sprang away.
‘I didn’t think that was possible,’ she says.
‘It is,’ I say, and this I say with truth. I cut Ben’s Levo off with a grinder, didn’t I? He survived. Barely, but he did: then the Lorders took him away.
‘There is something I don’t understand. If you were Slated as right-handed, how can your years here be gone? You were left-handed until you were ten. You must remember!’ She says the words like if she wants it enough, it will be so.
‘I don’t understand all the neurology of it. It’s like what hand was dominant was plastic; it could be bent and changed. I think doing that was part of how my personality was fractured.’
‘So young.’ She shakes her head. ‘But some memories stayed with you after you were Slated?’
‘Not exactly. To begin with, I was just like any other Slated. I had this new family, and—’
‘Were they nice?’
‘Mostly. Mum and my sister were, though Mum was difficult to work out at first.’
She holds still. ‘You called this other woman Mum.’
‘I was Slated. They told us to do that.’
‘Sorry. It doesn’t matter. And then?’
‘I started to get memories back.’ I hold back how. She doesn’t need to know that I was attacked, that fear and rage crashed through the boundaries and made Rain emerge: the half of me that was pure AGT, pure terrorist, under Nico’s spell, and ready to do whatever he asked.
‘So what do you remember?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m sorry. The memories I have are from after I left here. With the AGT. Before then is the half that was Slated.’
She looks back, eyes desperate and pleading. ‘But do you remember anything about me? Do you remember anything from here, before, at all?’
Something, I don’t know what, makes me say no. Even though there are some little snippets that have come back: this cat, now curled up between us. Playing chess with Dad, and the rook. Is it because, as she said, I was left-handed when I was little? If that is true, then more may come back. Or is it because these are things that Rain knew? The worst memory of all – Dad’s death – was suppressed, buried so deep it didn’t come back until Katran died.
‘Lucy? Riley, I mean. What is it?’
I shake my head. Does she know how he died? Does she know it is my fault? I can’t say it out loud. Not tonight.
I look past her, at the bedroom we’re in. ‘Was this my room?’ I ask.
She shakes her head no, and I’m relieved. It seemed so not my room. I had that right at least. ‘I put you in here as it is away from the other girls. Easier for me to visit.’ She hesitates. ‘It used to be my room. A long time ago.’
‘Tell me everything I can’t remember,’ I say. ‘Please. I want to know it all.’
She seems to hesitate, then holds out her hand again. A small thing, yet somehow it is so hard for me to reach out and take hers, to hold a stranger’s hand, when her eyes are so full of desperate want. I do, and she grips mine tight once again. She smiles. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything, from the beginning. Tell me about when I was born. Where was I born? Was…’ And I hesitate. I’ve been so reluctant to mention him that it is just penetrating now that Stella hasn’t, either. ‘Was my father there?’
She shakes her head, lips in a thin line. ‘He wasn’t there. He rarely was for the hard bits.’
My eyes widen, a retort working its way up, but I bite it back.
‘But you, Lucy, were the most beautiful baby that ever drew breath.’ She smiles. ‘I’ll show you.’ She gets up and takes out keys from her robe pocket. She goes to one of the locked wardrobes. ‘I put albums in here for you: photos, all sorts of things you can look through from before. There are eleven albums, one for each year. We’ll start making another one now, won’t we?’
She extracts an album and brings it over, places it in my hands, and I eagerly turn the pages. Well, okay: I was a pretty cute baby. There is shot after shot of my general chubby, baby cuteness: in a cot holding out hands and laughing; giggling in the bath; covered in mushy food. Always smiling. Didn’t I ever howl? A few have Stella in, also: hair dark then, smiling in a way that goes into her eyes. And there are empty spaces now and then: someone is missing. Removed? ‘Why aren’t there any photos of my dad?’
She snaps the album shut. ‘That’s enough for tonight. You need to get some sleep. You have an early start tomorrow, don’t you?’ She slips the album back in the wardrobe, locks it again.
‘Can I have a key?’
She hesitates, then shakes her head. ‘No. You need your rest. We’ll look at them together, all right? Goodnight, Lucy.’
She goes out the door.
Well.
Waterfall Weirdo: I hear Madison’s words echo in my head, then feel bad. That’s not fair. She’s had a terrible hand dealt to her, hasn’t she? Having her only child vanish when she was ten, then back seven years later, Slated, with no memory of her. She obviously had issues with Dad, also. I need to work out what that is about, what I should or shouldn’t tell her about him. I sigh. Inside I’m gripped by a need to know all I can of him, all I’ve forgotten, and more. I wonder if there are photos of him anywhere?
I slip Pounce off my knees, walk across the room to the wardrobe with the albums in, and assess the lock. A few twists with a hairpin, and the lock clicks: open sesame! A skill learned from Nico.
Inside, the wardrobe has clothes hanging on one side – summer dresses, put away for the winter? And the other side is shelves. The first few have albums numbered one to eleven as she said. But if she took Dad out of album number one, chances are the same is true of them all. The shelves below contain things wrapped in tissue paper. Curious, I draw out one bundle, take it to the bed, and open the paper carefully. Inside are neatly folded children’s clothes. A girl’s. Mine?