Kei

  The paramedics and police are kind, and search for my name, my family, my home. They find nothing.

  Even more surprising, she doesn’t find me either, or does not come when she does. Despite a weariness which seeps from my bones, I spend hours awake each night, waiting for fire and wind and desperate flight. For the closing net she brings with her.

  Wondering when the good people around me will die.

  But she does not come.

  I try to feel more, but since reaching the sea I am hollow. The doctors say I am in shock, and first one psychologist and then another tries to get me to talk. But almost everything is lost. Fire, fear and my father. And the woman in the night. Always her.

  I know there is something more to it than terror or trauma. Whatever burned through me when I ran turned my soul to ash. There are seeds beneath the firebreak hiding me from the truth, and I think they may sprout in time.

  And now, I have nothing but time.

  The doctors finally estimate my age to be about seventeen, maybe eighteen. They say I am tall, an early bloomer, and once they can test me, incredibly precocious. But the biomarkers they have never lie.

  I glimpse my charts, and realize, without knowing why, that they always lie.

  But it’s fine. After a few weeks, I am physically fine. My feet were torn up when they found me, but healed fast, and completely. My leg is mangled, if still attached. Yet it goes from survivable, to salvageable, to walkable, to a miracle, all in a few weeks.

  I know the wounds should have been far worse, but accept the strangeness of it all. Everything about me is strange, after all.

  Still, my feet ache now and then for no reason. Something psychological, Doctor Bethany says. Probably when I’m reminded of what happened before. She says it may come back to me in time.

  Ironically, in less than a month, my thigh doesn’t so much as twinge. I remember the shark, and he still made less of an impression.

  I spend a great deal of time staring out the window in their rehab gym, whether exercising or just sitting, watching the sea. Some part of me wonders if there’s a way back to that day, some way to unwind part of what has happened, reclaim some piece of what I’ve lost. But the sea leaves no footprints.

  Still, the other children play in here, and being around them makes me feel like something more than a shell. Even if I have nothing to say. With time, I’ve learned to nod and sometimes, to smile.

  “Kei,” Doctor Bethany says from the door. “Could we talk?”

  Bethany has become my primary counsellor. I suppose she finds my silence easier to bear than the others, but I can tell she cares.

  I nod to her as I stand, and say nothing. I can speak, but feel little need to fill the silence.

  “There’s a school for the gifted nearby, Waycross Academy. I showed them your scores and your partial transcript, and they’re willing to take you on temporarily, at least until the end of the Fall term. Debra from Social Services is working on your case, and may have a family who can take you in. Their kids are twins about your age, and go to Waycross already.”

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  I nod. “Thank you,” I add, since it seems appropriate. My mind is running through calculations, but for now, I see no way out, save the futile hope my pursuer will never come. Now I am inside a hospital in a city. That might make an attack difficult or dangerous, but it also means I am surrounded by the innocent and the ill, most of them children, if she ever comes.

  But the way to slip away may be an innocent school and family. No one deserves what follows me. But for now, I have no ideas, and no way to explain my fears.

  ***

  I ready myself the next morning. I am in a small dressing room, and as I prepare to change into the schoolgirl’s uniform provided by the school – a blessing, since all my clothes now are rags in a landfill or secondhand donations to the hospital – I realize there is a full-length mirror in the room.

  The bathroom in the recovery room where they’ve been keeping me lacked one, and before that I was either using the sink in my ICU chamber or being tended to by a nurse as I drifted in and out of consciousness. And it occurs to me that while I can remember my father’s face, I can not remember my own.

  I walk in front of the mirror, facing perpendicular to it, and then suddenly turn to all of myself at once.

  My fists are in a guard position and my feet in a fighting stance before I can blink, while cold fire flows through my heart. Cold fire, and fear.

  The face in front of me fills me with dread, anger and then sorrow. And finally, some distant, uncomfortable feeling of pity.

  I have no idea what to think, but my body is clearly ready to fight.

  I slow my racing heart, and concentrate on my features.

  I do not look “natural.” My eyes are luminous, and my irises a brilliant purple. My glossy black hair is also tinged with purple. Since the nurses haven’t been dyeing it while I was dying and I have no roots, that’s apparently its natural color. Or unnatural.

  My face is what I can only describe as “too pretty.” My build is much the same, like a junior version of an athletic model, already a bit curvy and far too toned. I’ve spent time in their gym, sure, but I’ve spent far more time in my bed, making ample use of their IVs and oxygen. No one should look like this after weeks running back and forth from limp, bedbound incoherence to unconsciousness to a virtual healing coma.

  But here I am.

  I try hard to concentrate on the oddity of my physical state, because the mystery of why my own face frightens me is something I don’t want to contemplate. I can tell it’s important, but I can also tell I’m not ready to, well, face it.

  I swap t-shirt and jeans for skirt and blazer, and one life for the next.

  Hopefully this school will at least occupy my mind. I could use a different set of anxieties.

  Five years on the run, and I have no past, no future. With my memories gone, I have only the eternal now.

  I wonder what my life will become when time passes again.

  ***

  In my dream I am a child, perhaps six, all alone in a vast hall filled with great stone pillars and echoing emptiness.

  No, not alone. At its center a dark boy no older than myself stands, staring down at a chessboard. After a moment he reaches down and moves a white knight to threaten a black queen.

  I stand opposite him almost before I realize it, and he glances up with a shy smile. The dark corners of the halls seem to light up at his expression. Shimmering words made of light dart between the pillars in the corners of my vision. Words in a language I don’t understand, but sense is beautiful. An alphabet for angels.

  Somewhere just beyond these walls, I can hear a harp playing. For us, and only us.

  “Who are you playing?” I ask, blinking as the strange writing fades. We are alone, as I so often am in this place, though always with a sense that eyes are watching, measuring.

  His smile broadens. “Everybody.” He waves around at the chamber. Empty, but for the two of us and the game.

  “Everybody?” The word echoes its loneliness across the great hall.

  “Anybody who walks by can make a move. Then you leave the game for the next person.” He gives me a knowing look, one slightly older kid confiding to another.

  I blink again, confused. “Why?” This is a lot of words for someone our age, but I find I can follow.

  “Uncle K says it’s teaching us about life.” He straightens up, squares his shoulders, and speaks in the deepest voice his six-year-old body could manage. “‘You don’t know who you’re playing – for or against. You don’t know when they move or how. But you all share the same chessboard. So think it through, and make your moves when you can.’”

  “How do you do that?” I ask. I tilt my head at him. Six-year-olds don’t talk like this, I’m sure. Not even here.

  He grins again. “You’re here, aren’t you? Make a move. Find out.” He folds his arms across his chest, and stares back in challenge.

  I look him in the eye, and then move a black pawn he never noticed. And she becomes a queen.

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