“They were mass murderers.”

I feel the full weight of the words as they leave my lips. Said anywhere else, they’d earn me a death sentence, but here…

Here, hidden in a subnaut cruising hundreds of feet below the ocean surface, they just sound like the cold truth. The Founding Three didn’t save humanity. They slaughtered millions of innocent people.

Our world was built on a killing field.

“Now you know,” Thea says, setting down her coffee mug on the steel galley table where we’re now seated. We’ve moved here to continue our conversation without waking the others. “The Founding Three believed in genetic purity. They viewed the Cataclysm as a sign from the Divine Spirit. They called it the First Cleansing.”

I lean toward her, picturing the blinding fireball that cut through the orange sky. “The first vision, the one with the stampeding crowd…”

“That was the day of the Cataclysm,” she says. “It happened over three thousand years ago, when Allie was only five.”

“Allie?”

“Short for Aletheia. That’s what her mother called her.  Her father was a powerful politician at the time: the second in command of an Ancient nation called the United States. He knew when and where the comet would strike, and prepared a subterranean shelter for his followers.”

“The mountain in the dream,” I murmur.

Thea nods. “That’s where the Founding Three engineered our society. They hid in their underground bunker, waiting for the rest of humanity to die out in the famine that followed the Cataclysm.”

“The Second Cleansing,” I guess.

Thea nods again. “They waited a decade only to discover that there were still survivors on the surface, struggling to build a new world of their own.”

“The degenerates,” I say, repeating the ugly term I heard in my dream.

“That’s right.” Thea spits out the words in disgust. “Ten million survivors who had suffered through the Cataclysm and its hellish aftermath. Ten million people who banded together, struggling to rebuild civilization in the face of hardships we can’t possibly image. Ten million men, women and children who deserved to live in peace!” Her voice seethes with anger. “Sentenced to death by three monsters in a bunker who judged them to be genetically inferior.”

“The Third Cleansing,” I whisper. The Triple Plague.

I close my eyes and picture the Founding Three hunched over their conference table, calmly plotting mass murder. “It felt so real,” I say, shaking my head. “Like I was there watching them make the decision.”

“That’s because you were there, Wil. Part of Allie’s conscience now lives inside you.”

“But how is that possible?”

 She gives me a knowing look. “It’s possible because your mind works like mine.”

Wait. Did she just say…?  

I stare into her luminous eyes and suddenly I’m a child again, clinging to her hand as she whispers a secret into my ear. The same secret she’s whispering now:

“You’re like me, Wil. You’re a Gamma.”

“No.” I jump back from the table, like she’s just thrown scalding water at me. “No, that’s not possible! I’m an Alpha. Even Gant said –”

“Gant read my original report,” she says to cut me off. “The one I made eight years ago. I replaced your neural screening results with alpha tracings. I was afraid Gant would run his own scan when he detained you last month after the Washton attack, but we got lucky.”

“You…” My throat tightens as the full meaning of her words sinks in. “You let them strip my mind?”

A long silence. Then her eyes slowly lift to mine. “It was the only way to save you. I had no choice.”

“No choice? But I trusted you!” My voice is shaking now. “You were supposed to save me, not strip my mind to make room for someone else’s memories!”

I wait for her response, but she just sits there, eyes not leaving mine. She’s not even denying it. She isn’t sorry for what she’s done to me.

I slide onto the bench to confront her. “Did you watch the stripping process?”

She sighs softly, then nods. “Only the end.”

At least she’s finally being honest. The confession should fuel my anger, but all I feel is numb. “So you turned me over to have my memories wiped. My past. My identity… all gone.” I snap a finger above my head. “Just like that. You sat back and watched them delete my life.”

“No, Wil. That’s not what happened.” She reaches for my arm but I jerk away. “The stripping process… it’s different for us. We’re resistant. We hold onto the memories we want to keep. Those can never be erased.”

“What memories?” I snap. “All you left me were two bleeding fragments! One of you and one of Liv. Everything else is gone!”

Thea looks away. Takes a deep breath and massages her temples, like she’s preparing to break some really bad news.

“Just say it,” I mutter through gritted teeth.

She looks up at me, her eyes communicating both sympathy and sadness. “Do you remember our walk through the orchard?”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “That’s one of the only memories I kept, but the details…” I close my eyes again, seeing rows of stubby trees covered with apples.  I can smell the cloying sweetness. Feel the sponginess of the soil beneath my feet.

“Do you remember our conversation?”

I swallow. Squeeze my eyelids shut so tightly that they hurt. “You held my hand.”

“That’s right.”

“And whispered into my ear. You… you said I was special. That I didn’t belong in a place like Camp Wilmington. You promised to help me escape.”

When I open my eyes again, Thea greets me with a familiar smile. “Do you remember what I gave you?”

Her voice warms me like the sun, burning away the fog to reveal another lost memory. “You picked an apple from the tree and handed it to me. I… I said I wasn’t allowed. That we were only supposed to pick them, that if we ate one…”

I flinch and let out a gasp as a sharp pain rips down my back. It burns like fire. Like… the lash of a fire whip. In a daze, I reach back to pull up my shirt, then touch the two parallel scars that run between my shoulder blades. The ones from an early childhood accident I could never remember.

“Camp Wilmington…” I fight back a wave of nausea. “They used a fire whip to punish us whenever we did something wrong. Growing up there… it was like hell.”

When Thea reaches for me, I don’t pull away this time. Instead, I lean into her embrace, crying silent tears. She runs her fingertips through my hair, her touch soothing. Healing. “You still have the physical scars,” she whispers into my ear. “Those I couldn’t take away. But the memories…”

“I wanted them gone,” I say once she’s released me. “Erased.”

“That’s right. And when I told you about a brave girl named Aletheia, you said you wanted to help her. You volunteered to carry her memories. That was your choice, Wil. I never would have forced this responsibility on you.”

Another image flutters through my mind. I’m sitting on Thea’s lap, our backs to a tree, and she’s holding the apple. She halves it with one brisk slice of a pocket knife. Here, she says, picking a seed from the white flesh and handing it to me. We’ll plant it together.

“You buried the truth in my memories,” I say. “Like a seed.”

She nods and her smile widens, chocolate eyes drawing me in. “I planted Allie’s conscience in the safest place I could find. You’ve carried her with you for eight years. I’ve been waiting all that time for the right moment to show you our world as it was in the beginning… through her eyes.”

My thoughts return to the vision of the underground bunker. To the vial of plague clutched in the Wise One’s plump pink hand. “Did she…?” I swallow the knot that’s forming in my throat. I need to ask the question, even though I already know the answer. It’s written in our history. “Did she stop them?”

Thea’s eyes drift, fixing on some distant point behind me. “She tried. She stole Lindley’s files and as much of the vaccine as she could carry and then fled to the surface, but the survivors that she found… they didn’t have the technology to make more vaccine. In the end, she could only save a few thousand. Everyone else perished in the plague.”

I blink and see them in a lightning flash: a sea of corpses, all pale and bloated under a blood-red sun. When I suck in a deep breath, I swear I can smell their rotting flesh.

“And the survivors?” I ask.

“They fled to the Western Territory, where they built a colony on the coast. In time, it became a refuge for those who survived the plague. They named it after their leader.”

“Aletheia,” I say, and once again, Thea gives me a confirmatory nod.

“Three decades passed before the Great One finally tracked her down. His army slaughtered every settler they could find, then burned the colony to the ground. Then they scattered salt over its ashes so that nothing could ever grow there again. Only a handful of survivors escaped.”

“Was Allie one of them?” I ask, picturing the ghost-like reflection of the girl I glimpsed in the mirror. Tangled blonde hair. Fiery blue eyes. Ethereal beauty.

Thea sighs and lowers her head to take another sip of coffee. When she looks up, her eyes move past me again. “No. She refused to run. She chose to die with her people instead.”

“But then how did her memories survive?”

She gives me a knowing smile. “Through her children. And her children’s children, and their children after that. Her legacy has been passed down through generations of Gamma Sifters. I’m just one link in that chain and now…” She reaches for my hand. “So are you.”

“Don’t believe her, Wil. She’s lying.”

I jump at the sound of Astrid’s voice, which came from right behind me. When I spin around, she’s standing in the doorway, partially hidden by the bulkhead’s shadow. That’s why Thea was looking past me as she spoke. She’s been addressing both of us. But for how long?

When Astrid steps into the light, I get my answer. Her face looks pale, pupils swollen with fear.

She’s been here long enough to know everything.

***

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