The sound of the humvee's engine came back to her, and for a moment she could almost feel the stiffness of the seat on which she sat. She felt the resistance of the divider as she punched her hand through the useless barrier and smiled inwardly at the satisfying 'snap' of the guard's neck and the 'thump' of the driver's head as it bounced off the window. Leaning over, she took control of the now driverless vehicle and slowed it to a stop.
"I knew you couldn't be one of them," came a familiar voice from the back seat.
"Shut up," she heard herself reply as she pulled the gun from the driver's holster and fired it, point blank, into her sister's face . . .
She awoke from the nightmare in a cold sweat, just as she always did, her heart pounding and her fists clenched helplessly on the pillow beneath her head. For a moment, the image of her sister's face, a face shining with hope, clouded her senses, and she struggled to regain a grip on the here and now. As her heart slowed to its normal pace, she watched in bewilderment as neon lights flashed across the water-stained ceiling above her head, and her eyes traced them back to where they emerged from between the dented panels of an old set of blinds. Where in the hell am I? she thought. Turning her head slightly, her eyes darted wildly about in the darkness as she tried desperately to make sense of what was happening.
The room was sparsely furnished. All she could see, aside from the bed in which she lay, was an old armchair with badly patched upholstery, a scuffed nightstand, and a small television perched atop an ancient dresser. Both the nightstand and the dresser were missing several knobs, and upon closer inspection, she noted that one had a cherry finish, while the other had been coated in a messy layer of maple stain. Pushing herself up carefully on the thin mattress, she gazed over the body beside her and into a darkened doorway which led to what she assumed was a bath.
Reality finally set in, and for a moment, she closed her eyes against it and tried desperately to will it away, but when she opened them again, she found that she was still stuck in some sleazy motel room, that her clothes were still littered about the threadbare carpet, and that there was still a man in the bed beside of her. Frowning a moment, she tried to remember his name. What had he said it was when he had introduced himself earlier this evening at the bar? John? Joe? Jim? She didn't have a clue.
Batting back a tear, she rose slowly, being careful not to jar the mattress enough to awaken her companion. She didn't want to face him, especially not now when she had awoken from one nightmare to find herself caught in the midst of another. Taking a step towards the window, her foot caught on something softer than the pair of jeans she had worn into the room this night, something warmer than the old t-shirt which had been tossed on the floor as the room door had slammed shut behind them, and she looked down to find a blanket from the bed lying on the carpet at her feet. She shuddered at the memory of how it had lost its place on the bed and ended up down here. Swallowing back a wave of shame, she reached down to wrap it about her naked shoulders.
Padding over to the window, she parted the blinds to look out at a sign reading "Cheap Rates Daily and Weekly." Above it a neon sign read, "Budg ost" in large, red letters. Budget Host, she corrected herself, as she filled in the blank spaces where the sign had burned out.
Another heat cycle, another cheap motel.
Her eyes swept downward, focusing on a woman in a skimpy red dress and skyscraper heels as she lounged against a light pole on the dirty street below. At least she gets paid for a night's work, she thought with self-disgust, but then her eyes caught on the dress, and she pulled the blanket more firmly around her bare shoulders to ward away a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. Red, she thought as she shuddered once more, the exact same shade of red that her last victim had worn atop his graying head, the exact same shade of red that she had focused on through the sight of her gun just a second before she had pulled the trigger.
X5-734 wasn't there the night that Manticore had burned to the ground. She had been off in Italy, assassinating some wayward cardinal that her commanding officers had feared would ascend to the papacy since the last pope had been removed from office by a fellow X5 assassin. She had been on a deep cover op, no contact with base until she returned to the U.S. and the cold stone barracks at Manticore that she called home, but there had been no special security detail waiting to whisk her away from the plane and out of the airport when she arrived. She had mentally checked her orders, verifying the date, arrival location, and flight number, but she had found no error in her actions. It was as if Manticore had forgotten her, and so she had snuck through security to avoid detection of the rifle in her suitcase. Since there had been no escort to take her home, she had been forced to "commandeer" a "civilian vehicle" in order to return to base, but all she had found there was a pile of ashes and several hundred curious reporters. She had surveyed the area, seeking some explanation for what had happened, but come up empty-handed, and after following the regroup signal for half of an hour, she had watched as the signal turned to orders to scatter and go to ground. Like the good soldier she was, X5-734 had done as ordered.
She'd spent a month as a homeless woman on the streets of Seattle. At first she'd slept during the day, staying awake at night to scan the dark and polluted sky for further orders from base, but there had been nothing, and eventually she had spent less of her time gazing upward and more of it just trying to fit in, to blend into the shadows in a way that so many of Seattle's homeless had mastered.
That was when the dreams had begun.
The memories came back to her slowly, always when she slept, when her mind was unguarded and she was unable to push them aside as she could in wakefulness. The ingrained workout schedules and training techniques that had formed the basis of 734's existence gave way to memories of bussing tables in a restaurant in St. Louis and of Dolly, the kindly old woman who washed the dishes there. For several nights in a row, she had awoken to the memory of a strange yet pleasing taste in her mouth, something completely unlike the rations she had eaten at Manticore. It had taken a week to remember that that taste was licorice, a particular favorite of hers.
At first, she had hated the dreams. Hadn't Manticore purged those thoughts from her head? Hadn't they let her forget those things which no longer mattered and helped her to remember who she truly was? They were lies, she told herself, deceptions and half-truths meant only to trick and to confuse her, but as the weeks rolled by, she had come to look forward to them, to look forward to the opportunity to slip back to a time when she had been happy, even in a dirty world filled with hunger and disease.
Freedom. The word called out to her through her dreams until one morning she awoke to find that she didn't want to be X5-734 anymore, and she began to think of herself as Brin again.
But her happiness was short-lived. Before her mind could fathom just what was happening, dreams of Dolly working in the kitchen, her sweet Cajun voice singing about saints marching in, gave way to the feel of cold metal beneath her hands as over and over again she pulled the trigger and murdered a man whose only crime had been his belief in God and in justice. Memories of friends she had left behind were suddenly gone, replaced by memories of fighting Max on the rooftop of Tinga's apartment building, of watching Tinga tell her family goodbye and turning her over to Manticore, of Renfro's news that her sister was dead. She didn't know how Tinga had died, but she did know, without a doubt, that Renfro had killed her. And she knew that she had helped Renfro, had listened to her lies and believed them. In the end, she had helped to murder her own sister.
Ever since that first horrid nightmare all those months ago, three or four times a week she was plagued by some new and terrible end for her sister. Sometimes she fell from the top of a tall building, her arms and legs flailing helplessly in freefall. Sometimes she was shot, her blood running in tiny rivers across the pavement on which she had fallen. Once, her neck had even been broken, but in every dream, those same words echoed in her head:
"I knew you couldn't be one of them."
"Shut up."
And in every dream, Brin was her sister's murderer.
Taking a quivering breath, she closed her eyes against the neon lights, the streetwalker, and the world in general, but she was too late to stop the tear from sliding down her cheek.
The world, it seemed, was much emptier than it had once been. Blinking her eyes against another tear, she let herself wonder where the others were, and just as it had every night for over a decade, her mind drifted back to childhood, to the faces of her siblings. To sneaking out of bed at night to crawl onto one of her sisters' beds and sharing whispered tales of the day's adventures. To the night they named each other. To the nights they snuck out of the window and shimmied up the drainpipe. To Ben's stories . . .
But Ben was gone. Manticore had told her so, and she had taken the news without shedding a tear. She made up for those missing tears now. What was Jondy doing? And what about Zane? Syl and Krit had snuck into Manticore that night, but where where they now? And Zack? Had he made it out? She prayed that he had. She couldn't bear knowing that she'd played a part in killing yet another of her siblings. Hadn't she already done enough damage?
Batting away tears, she thought of Max. There, at least, was something to be glad of. Max had gotten away. She was alive and well, and though she would never know it, Brin had followed her to work for an entire week. Oh, how she had ached to talk to her, to hug her sister and tell her she was sorry and beg her forgiveness, but she had stayed in the shadows, her nightmares playing over and over in her mind as she tried to work up the nerve to approach her. Instead, she had followed her home from that messenger service called Jam Pony or over to her boyfriend's apartment, and she had sat on the rooftop of the building across the street, watching them through the wide glass windows, her loneliness eating an ever larger hole into her chest until finally she had forced herself to face the truths she dreamed every night. After what she had done, Max would never forgive her. None of them would.
Did any of them ever think of her, she wondered for the hundredth time, as she opened her eyes to gaze back out into the darkness? Since that fateful day, had any of them wondered about her, worried about her, or stopped to ask themselves if she'd made it out alive? Or was she just a skeleton in the family closet, someone who was ignored because of the things she had done? Someone they didn't want to remember. Someone who had been forgotten.
And so she had given up and gotten a job doing laundry at some upscale hotel and tried to forget it all, but the nightmares hadn't left her alone. She'd seen Max on the news as she watched the television while changing sheets in one of the guest rooms. She'd watched live coverage of the stand-off at Jam Pony. She knew about the transgenics boxed up in Terminal City, and she'd even gone so far as to wander by there one day to gaze in through the chain link fence. Part of her had cried, had screamed in silence for someone to look out that window, for someone to see her, to remember her and forgive her and love her again, but as the rain had fallen on her tattered raincoat, there had been no sign from within, and she had turned and walked back to the old apartment building where she lived. Alone.
Shaking herself from her thoughts, she watched as a car pulled up along the street corner, and after a moment, the woman in red opened the passenger's side door and got in. Maybe it's best that I stay forgotten, she told herself as she watched the car drive away. If no one remembers me, then maybe I can't mess things up anymore. Maybe then I won't be able to hurt anyone else. Maybe then, I'll get to sleep at night. Lifting a hand to clear the tears from her eyes, she turned from the window and reached for her clothes. She didn't want to be here when the man in the bed awoke. Her life was complicated enough as it was.
She didn't make a sound as she pulled on her coat, and as she reached up to unlock the door, she paused for a moment to glance back at the man still asleep on the bed. How many times had she done this before Manticore had taken her life back from her? How many times had she awoken in bed with a stranger, the fading hormones of her heat cycle still pounding in her veins? Well, she thought cynically, swallowing back tears, at least some things never change.
Turning the lock quietly, she opened the door and pulled her gaze away from the man she had come here with, a man whose name she couldn't even remember. She knew he'd be fine. She'd known when she'd met him that he knew how the game was played. In the morning, he would awaken to find her gone, and he would get up, put on his clothes, and go home, and within a few days, she would once again be forgotten.
And as she closed the room door behind her, she wished for the millionth time that it was as easy for her to forget as it was for her to be forgotten.