THE FORGOTTEN

Chapter One

My breath tastes nasty.

It’s the first thing I notice. Mouth scuzzy and dry, I muster the will to lick my lips and run my tongue over my teeth. The second thing I notice is a dull throbbing at my forehead. The pain sharpens into brief agony as a piercing light warms the back of my eyelids. When the glare fades, I blink my eyes open and see a hazy blue and red swirl. Another blink, and another, and my vision clears to reveal a scantily clad superhero flying across the cover of a comic book. Huh?

I force my body to move, lifting my head up from where it had been resting on crossed arms over the comic. My muscles protest as I sit up in my chair and extend my arms overhead.

My eyes are inexorably drawn to the only source of light in this cavernous room, spotlights shining at the far end, illuminating a garishly large American flag, a wood lectern, and dozens, maybe hundreds of young people brushing the sleep from their eyes and looking in confusion at the comic books before them.

My arms plop down into my lap. I can’t make sense of what I see. Here—a young woman to my left sits up, red sleep mark on her cheek. There—the young man beyond her reaches a hand up to adjust mussed hair. Nothing striking about these images, but something is missing, something crucial, like a forgotten word I can just barely taste on the tip of my tongue.

Sudden hands claw at my arm, grabbing tight. The boy to my right holds on to me, but his eyes are on the lectern far ahead. Looking into his horrified, empty stare—his eyes so wide, so white, even in the darkness of the room—I realize what I’d forgotten.

I wrench my arm from his grasp and freeze, seeing snapshots that make my heart sink. Boys and girls whispering talking crying gasping repeating the only question worth asking:

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

I don’t know.

I recoil at the realization, jerking my chair back with a harsh screech. I close my eyes, but the buzzing, the chattering of the others rises like a whine, like a gnat, like a flat-lined heart. A deep cold seeps into my bones and I reach into my own mind, clawing and scratching away at the darkness, the cobwebbed corners for something, anything. Anything.

An opaque, unforgiving fog rises.

The dull thump of a heartbeat batters loud and insistent in my ears, and I open my eyes to see the superhero on the comic book grinning up at me underneath a bright red title: Matriarch’s Marvels.

I slam my hands down hard against it, and stand.

Chapter Two

Rising above the seated, squirming crowd is like breaking through the surface of the ocean. I drink in the cold air and shiver, and don’t stop shivering. My heart beats an erratic rhythm on my ribcage, my breath coming in fits and spurts. The quiet darkness at the edges of the room pulls at me and I’m halfway to the end of my row before I realize I’m even moving.

Then I see her.

Beyond the archway at the end of my row, there’s a woman. She watches me watch her, her eyes catching mine and holding as she speaks into something held up in a gloved hand. To her right, a metallic glint draws my eye as something else rises out of the shadows, the black-holed perfect circle of its tip catching me like gravity.

My mind catches up to my body and I freeze, mere feet away from the gun aimed at my chest. Fingers clench and twitch on a trigger.

I wonder how someone prepares for the end.

Then the woman takes a step forward and pushes the gun down, shooing the other guard back. Over the blood rushing in my ears, I can barely hear her say something about “trigger-happy incompetents.” I stare at her, my casual savior. Her dark eyes are like vacant holes, her thin face framed by blonde hair chopped severely at the chin.

I try to speak. Thank you, I might say. Or: Who are you? Or: Who am I, and why am I here? But I can’t get my throat to work. As I gape at her, she opens her dark jacket to reveal a holster at her hip. With a sardonic smile, she draws her gun and slings it around her finger. Then she points it at my chest and jerks it up. Bang, she mouths, before re-holstering it. I’m still frozen when she blows me a kiss in a pointed goodbye.

I take the hint. The sinking heaviness at my chest reminds me to breathe as I slowly back up, keeping my eyes on this woman, this loose cannon, who keeps her eyes on me. Then I trip over the leg of someone’s chair and stumble backward, crashing into my own table with a loud screech and I turn from the mocking, sneering woman, the Joker, and I see all the eyes on me, the people turned and facing and fuck do I really need to do this? But yes, they need to know and I’m the only one who can tell them.

Standing on my chair, stepping onto the table, kicking aside the comic books, I force words into my mouth and choke on them. Then I try again. “We’re surrounded. We’re not alone here. And they’re armed.”

The others, they just keep staring. Why do they just keep staring?

Their eyes weigh heavily on me and, suddenly angry, I shove off that weight and project my voice as far as I can. “I’m saying they’ve got guns. So just—calm down, okay? Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

My voice, it’s so small in this cavernous room. But the word spreads. I see eyes widening, darting toward the sides of the room, people leaning or half-standing to get a better look. Mouths open in shock, and I can see the horror emerge as a physical beast careening around the room. I see it in the heartbeat space between the silence and the screams and before it can take hold, I call out, “Wait!”

The others turn back to me at my shout.

“I said to calm down! Don’t—you know, don’t give them a reason to shoot us. Just—stay calm, and we’ll be fine.” I spit out the words. My voice, harsh and loud, cuts through their panic.

Those nearest me pause. Then they turn to their neighbors with hurried whispers. The news again spreads, and silence creeps over the room, shooting my headache into sharp relief.

Faces, lined with tension but mercifully quiet, turn toward me again. But I have no answers for the questions that they hold. Feeling faint, I accept the hand offered by the boy next to me and climb down to the floor, sinking into my chair and burying my face in my hands with a shudder.

Eyes closed and breath shaky, I run my hands up and over my scalp, feeling the silky soft fuzz barely covering the fragile skull beneath. Then I move my hands down my neck, my chest—it turns out I’m female—and my thighs, touching every part of this body that I do not remember having, that was almost just taken from me. Tears come, but I blink them away.

A scratching at my wrist—pale, slight—alerts me to a plastic bracelet peeking from the sleeve of an olive green jacket. With a barcode and string of numbers underneath, it looks like what you’d get at a hospital. A plain silver band circles the middle finger on my right hand. As I gaze around the room, I twirl it around with my thumb, then bring it up to my lips, its cool smoothness somehow pleasing.

A quick look confirms that all of the people near me have one of these—the medical bracelet, not the ring. These people—some glower at the tables, others cry silently, still others sit numbly with their heads in their hands. Everyone here appears to be young—mid to late teens, I’d guess. Looking down at myself, I imagine that I must be the same. Though something within me—my heart, maybe?—feels much, much older.

A hand, flung out wildly, almost hits me in the face. Its owner, my neighbor, has recovered from his earlier panic. He gestures with great excitement, his eyes gleaming and face flushed as he talks at the girl on his other side.

“…extraterrestrial experimentation and stuff!” The boy’s voice cracks, his thick glasses teetering on the tip of his nose. The girl, milky-pale and swollen-eyed, gazes at him in silence. He puffs his chest out.

Though the thought of talking makes me tired, I decide to try on confidence for size, see if it fits. “So you have a theory then? For why we’re here?” I twist to stare at him.

He startles as if I had fired a warning shot. Then, after a short pause to consider me, the boy says in a low and gleeful voice, “Check it out. We’ve been brain-wiped. We’re in some Great Hall meets 4th of July crossover.” He points toward the gaudy American flag at the front, then toward the pillars and shadows at the periphery of the room. “Not to mention the guards. And these!” He lifts up one of the comic books from the table triumphantly. “Old-fashioned superhero comic books—a totally random and strange thing to hand out in a situation like this. But I’ve figured it all out.”

“And your theory?”

“Aliens!” He rolls his eyes like I’m an idiot for not catching on sooner. “We’ve been forcefully taken from our home planet. Or perhaps even offered as sacrifices, delivered by the United States government to appease the alien’s demands for virgin flesh. They asked for the best the U.S. has to offer!”

I stare at him blankly, struck dumb in the wake of his energy.

The Nut? I wonder. No. Henceforth, he’ll be the Fool.

By now, the Fool’s caught the attention of the people in the row ahead of us, who turn around to watch with mixed expressions of curiosity, worry, and fear.

“I was thinking sex trafficking myself,” a timid female voice offers.

“Or maybe we’re being held hostage as part of some political take-over?” a boy from the row ahead suggests.

Seeing the tide of public opinion turning against him, the Fool looks at me with wide eyes and asks, “What do you—?”

Sudden shouting pierces the air.

I crane my neck, trying to locate the interruption. A young woman sitting toward the front raises her arm and stares transfixed at the medical bracelet circling her wrist. She holds her wrist as far from her body as possible, then in a violent rush starts pulling, ripping, scratching in vain as the plastic resists her efforts. She stands now, and even from this distance I can see tears flood her eyes.

What does she know? What am I missing? I look down at my own medical bracelet, but the barcode and the numbers don’t mean anything to me. I’m about to ask the Fool about it when one of the doors at the front of the room opens wide.

I cringe at the sharp, unpleasant screech. Three people in neatly pressed white nurse uniforms walk briskly through, shadowed by a fourth person who pauses by the door. The three in scrubs walk straight to the young woman in distress with precise, economic movement.

I bring my right hand to my mouth, press the silver ring against my lips. Nerves spasm in my belly. Looking to my right, I seek the eyes of the female guard, the Joker. She’s watching me. Hand held up to her ear, she grins at me as she listens to her walkie-talkie, then says a few words in response. She nods her head toward the front of the room, bidding me to witness. Her gun is safely in its holster.

But she’s crazy, and she can’t hold back all of the guards here. “Shut up,” I mutter, hoping stupidly that the girl will get my message and stop calling attention to herself. But the nurses come for her regardless.

It’s still now in the room, people quieting down to watch what is happening, and I can’t breathe from a sinking feeling of dread.

At this distance, I can’t hear anything of the exchange. But the nurses are smiling at the girl. They’re placing comforting hands on her arms and shoulders. They’re leading her to the front of the room.

This is good, right? This is normal? Nurses taking care of distraught patients? But what about when the patients don’t remember why they are there? Is that normal, too? Without realizing it, I’ve drawn my knees up to my chest, holding them tight as I balance on my chair.

Only the girl’s sniffling and choked breathing can be heard now. That and the screech of the doors that fall shut behind her and the three nurses.

The following silence makes me feel crazy.

“Retrograde amnesia, affecting episodic rather than semantic memory?” the girl at the next table over says under her breath. I could hug her for saying something. “So I can remember the American flag, remember these terms, but not my own name?” With a regal stillness, she reclines like a bronze queen on a cast-iron throne, surveying the scene with alert eyes. Long dark hair twisted in a knot, she wears a single stone earring, striking with its layers of gold and brown. “But how would she be triggered then? Does the body remember things the mind can’t?”

I stare at her, at this island of calm reason in a sea of emotional cacophony. I can breathe more easily just from watching her.

What should I call her? The Brain? The Queen?

The girl glances my way and suddenly I’m paralyzed, stunned by the power of her penetrating hawk-eyes. “That was brave, what you did earlier,” she says, her voice carrying the trace of an accent. “You might have saved some lives stepping up like that. Not that they’ll all listen, of course.”

“Uh-huh,” I manage.

She finally looks away and I can move again. She’ll be the Queen. Definitely the Queen.

As the room begins to stir with the buzz of murmured conversations, I look down at myself, at how I’m all curled up in a ball, my knees bouncing uncontrollably.

God, the Queen probably thinks I’m a psycho.

Frowning in concentration, I sit up straight, place my feet on the ground, and strive for stillness. Maybe I can be a Queen too. Then my hand flies up to run across my scalp and the bouncing starts up again and I give poise up as a lost cause. At least I’m calmer now.

Brave, she said. Is that true? Who am I? Who was I?

The Queen turns now to the comic books on her table. Dark head in a still, graceful arch over the comics, she presses her finger to the page, following along, holding her place here while she compares it with that comic there. Now and then, she nods to herself.

My gaze slides beyond her to a white boy cradling his chin in his hands, looking bored. Long dark trench coat over a dress shirt, dog tags dangling from his neck, roguish hair—he’ll be the Pirate. When our gaze meets, he starts visibly, eyes clearing like a camera zooming suddenly into focus. The Pirate stares at me, then with the slightest shake of his head, looks away. He doesn’t turn my way again, no matter how long I watch.

A Joker, a Queen, a Pirate, and a Fool. But who am I?

I look down at the comic books on my own table. With much skepticism, I riffle through those near me. The paper feels reassuringly solid, the contents delightfully innocent. Brightly colored images, speech bubbles, people in dramatic action poses. Skimming over one of the stories—in which Seismo shoots Murk into the side of an abandoned warehouse, while Galacton lifts the burning car off of the terrified hostages—I realize none of the superheroes are characters that I recognize, not that that means much, given the circumstances. I toss the comic back onto the table. I’ve got nothing against superhero stories, as far as I know, but they’re not particularly helpful right now.

Maybe I’m the Hero.

Yeah, as if.

On a whim, I glance toward the Joker. She’s already looking my way, the heat of her glare shocking. I tense, but no, she’s not reaching for her gun. Just bristling. Just as I muster the nerve to shrug my shoulders in question, she starts, turning toward the front of the room. A second later, I hear it myself—the click-clack of smart shoes on hard flooring.

The forgotten fourth person, the man who came in with the nurses, walks slowly to the raised lectern at the front. The walk from the door to the podium can’t be that far, but it seems to take forever. He’s in no hurry, this man, and we—we are transfixed.

Everyone turns to stare, hushed and subdued. Tears stop falling. Sniffling ceases.

The precise footsteps echo slightly, articulated. He gives us plenty of time to take him in: neatly styled hair, sharp three-piece suit in a flattering dark gray. Standing now behind the lectern, he gently taps the microphone and the muffled thwup thwup thwup reverberates. He clears his throat, though of course he already has everyone’s attention. Pausing, his gaze slowly caressing the crowded room, he smiles. His vogue glasses glint in the light. I can’t see his eyes.

My chest starts hurting, and I take in a deep, quiet inhale. When he looks in my direction— even though there’s no way he’d be able to see me, anonymous in the darkness at such a distance—I slide down in my seat, exhaling only when his gaze moves on.

He finally speaks.

Chapter Three

“Welcome.” Even with the microphone, his voice is uncannily quiet.

I have to lean forward, straining, to hear him.

“I am Mr. Jenson,” he says in cool, clipped, calm tones. “You must be confused, perhaps even alarmed. All of this is very understandable.”

Each slow syllable is precise, controlled, articulated. It makes me itch, makes me want to scream.

“Allow me to reassure you there is nothing to worry about. Everything is fine.” He adjusts his eyeglasses and the effect of bright light on glass is briefly blinding. “You have simply been gathered to undergo a series of harmless tests. I am sure the memory loss must be startling, but trust me when I say that it was necessary to induce amnesia to ensure the validity of the tests.”

The room stirs.