Tales of the Republic (The Complete Novel) Page 5

  Felix nodded seriously. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re okay. Are your memories returning?”

  “Not at all. This all seems like some strange nightmare. What the hell is going on up there?”

  Felix pulled a chair from the desk and straddled it so his arms rested across the high wooden back, facing Ari. Now that he was closer, Ari could see some of the mud on his boots was too dark to be mud. And mud didn’t congeal like that.

  “Our country has always had its troubles. Born out of a revolution in China. Forged by the first wave of climate change refugees. And that was before the manmade disasters. Before your countrymen destroyed Slovakia. Now the natives of this country are outnumbered two-to-one. Can you imagine how scary that is for the people who have lived here their whole lives?”

  A cold hand gripped Ari’s heart. Slovakia. At least people in Enshi still had their country.

  “In a time like that, government corruption is hard to track. There’s a lot of money to be made greasing the gears. That’s no excuse, but I guess you could say the protests started as a way to speak out against government corruption. Peaceful protests, of course. But the food shortage came next, and then the rationing…let’s just say the rationing program quickly proved to be ineffective, and the government officials, especially in the poorest parts of the city, weren’t doing themselves any favors by skimming a little off the top for themselves.”

  “I bet that didn’t go over well,” Ari said. He knew his history. It had happened often enough to know what came next.

  “Peaceful protests don’t last long when hungry people believe their government is stealing the food they need to feed their families. Instead of listening to the protestors, the police were sent to scare us off. In a few short days, the protests gave way to riots and looting, and worse. In the end, the police couldn’t handle it all. They sent the army in. Enshi is a battleground now.”

  Ari shook his head in disbelief. “Do you know how I came to Enshi? Do you know anything about my family?”

  “Not much. You didn’t like to talk about your past. Maybe you came as a refugee? We can tell you’re not from here. But don’t feel bad about that. Nianzu isn’t, either.”

  The doctor nodded at Ari.

  “Why are you helping me? Why am I even here?”

  “We need supplies, and I believe that somewhere in your head is the location of a storehouse. Before you got hurt, you told me you had the location of a cache of supplies—medicine, rations, ammunition, that sort of thing.”

  “So we were working together,” Ari said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Against the army.”

  Felix shook his head. “For the people.”

  “That still makes you the rebels.” It wasn’t a big leap of logic, but Ari instantly saw the truth of his words in Felix’s expression. The tall man straightened in his chair, lifted his chin, and narrowed his eyes. Dr. Neru, who had been slouching in the corner of the room, also uncrossed his arms and took half a step forward.

  “Does that bother you?” Felix asked.

  “I have every reason to trust you,” Ari insisted. “You saved my life. I’m just trying to understand what’s going on. Maybe if I start learning about Enshi, or about how we know each other, other things will start coming back to me.”

  Felix leaned forward again. “Let me make it easy to understand. The doctor saved your life. He won’t be able to do the same for others if we don’t get those supplies. We need those supplies, Ari. Your memory could be the difference between life and death for countless people.”

  A wave of guilt swept over him. He had to try. Ari screwed his eyes shut and thought hard, trying to visualize the storehouse that Felix wanted…but he came up blank. His mind was an empty box, an abandoned warehouse, a desolate wasteland…Slovakia.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything.”

  Felix stared intently, then shoved himself to his feet and dropped the chair back in its place by the desk. At the door, he looked over his shoulder at Ari. “It’s in there somewhere.”

  CHAPTER 7

  CONVALESCENT

  The next few days passed slowly. Dr. Neru encouraged Ari to exercise, both physically and mentally. At first, just walking around the room exhausted him.

  “Focus,” Dr. Neru would say.

  He kept at it, as much to avoid the doctor’s admonishments as for his own desire to be fit enough to make a break for it when the opportunity arose. He incorporated a calisthenics routine that he’d learned in basic training, and was shocked at his own physical weakness. It seemed like just yesterday he had grunted his way up a rope in the gym at basic with barely a thought. Now he didn’t know if he could climb a ladder.

  When he was alone, Ari pined for home. Even the familiar scent of motor oil would be like flowers to his nose, if only he could return. The sense of incompleteness lingered, like a forgotten word on the tip of his tongue.

  Dr. Neru stopped by several times a day to administer his medicine, which Ari grew not to mind. He didn’t know if it was actually helping him or not, but it didn’t make him feel worse. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner consisted of more of the bland protein bars, and sometimes a watery stew of chewy root vegetables. He slept a lot—more than seemed normal—but each time he woke Ari felt a little stronger, a little more steady on his feet.

  Though the cuffs had been removed, the door remained locked. Dr. Neru claimed it was for his safety, but Ari never bought that explanation. The question of whether or not he could trust these people and what they were truly after burned in his mind. Why would he know the location of any storehouse?

  Dr. Neru was always in a hurry. He brushed off Ari’s questions, staying just long enough to take his vitals, give Ari his medicine, and let him use the small, dirty toilet across the hall (while he waited outside).

  The shelling overhead grated constantly on his nerves. He wondered if the wounded in Dr. Neru’s infirmary had to recuperate in the same conditions, if they fared better than him. They at least had each other. Why hadn’t the doctor or Felix let him meet the others? Maybe a familiar face would spark a memory. The room quaked violently, the lights flashed on and off, and Ari covered his head, cringing away from the roof’s collapse. Once again, it held, and once again he made himself lower his arms from his head. Relax, he told himself. Just stay calm. Look for a way out of this mess.

  On the third or fourth day, Dr. Neru began to run a series of memory tests, asking Ari to do math problems, read aloud, or match index cards illustrated with designs of varying shape and color. Sometimes, Ari would screw up—he’d put the blue circle with the red square.

  Ari dropped the cards on the desk and squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “This is useless.”

  “It takes the time it takes. Don’t give up.”

  Ari stood, intertwined his fingers, and stretched his arms overhead. A cramp in his neck twinged when he arched back too far, reminding him how far he had yet to go. Ari dropped his hands with a frustrated snarl, swiping the flash cards off the desk. They floated down to the floor in a scattered mess.

  “How does that help?” Dr. Neru demanded.

  “It makes me feel better. You know what would help? If I wasn’t trapped in this damn isolation tank. Why won’t you let me talk to or see anyone else? Let me help!”

  “Felix thinks you’re safer in here.”

  “That doesn’t make sense! I can’t give him what he wants if I can’t remember, and I can’t remember if I’m trapped in this tiny prison.”

  “It’s not a prison,” Dr. Neru insisted.

  “Oh yeah? So I can leave?”

  The doctor stared at the floor.

  “That’s what I thought. Why do you do what he says, Nianzu? What has Felix Hull ever done for you?”

  Dr. Neru couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five, but when his face fell he seemed very old all of a sudden. Ari noticed the gray hairs at his temples, the deep lines in his forehead where his eyebrows s
crunched together as his eyes focused on something far away. He twisted a scratched gold band on his left ring finger.

  “Before the protests, I ran my own private practice. I was a pediatrician. I had a few nurses, and my wife, Leila—” He paused and took a shuddering breath. “She worked the front desk and managed the books. We were a great team, and I’m a good doctor.” He jabbed his finger at the desk with each word as he said “good doctor.”

  “You still are,” Ari said. He instantly regretted pushing the doctor to relive this experience. But he dare not interrupt him now.

  “We never had any kids of our own, but that was okay because we took care of kids for a living. Our patients were our kids. Our neighbors were our family.”

  The doctor kept his eyes on his hands while he spoke. Ari waited patiently.

  “When the protests began, my wife felt a civic duty to participate. I couldn’t let her go alone, so we went to the first protests together. As I said, our neighbors were our family, and a lot of them were hurting and angry. I saw more malnourished kids than you’d believe, so I understood why. It was real. Unfortunately, we kept going to the protests, Leila getting more and more involved and invested. We helped feed as many as we could, but even then we could only afford so much. We had the bad luck to be at the protest at Greyhare Market when the magistrate—that’s the local governor of a district of Enshi—was killed by the crowd. Leila and I got separated in the chaos after that, and the police ended up arresting her.”

  Dr. Neru paused for a long minute. Ari pursed his lips and clenched his hands in front of him and waited.

  “I went to the police station every day for a week, filing paperwork and pleading with them to release her. They’ll never admit it, but they tortured her. They did something to my wonderful, passionate wife behind those walls that I can’t even imagine. When she came out, I could see that they had broken something inside of her. Her face was blank. She wouldn’t talk to me anymore. She laid in bed for months afterward. I couldn’t run the practice on my own anymore. I was forced to close the doors. In February, I found her in the tub, the water stained red with her blood.”

  “Jesus,” Ari said. He got up and moved to sit on the desk next to the doctor. “I’m so sorry, Nianzu. I didn’t mean—”

  “She didn’t leave me a note or anything. You know what she did leave me? Her ration vouchers, sitting next to a packet of razors on the bathroom sink.”

  Ari said nothing. What could he say? Ari’s pain was mostly physical. The hurt that this man endured went far deeper.

  “So you want to know what Felix has done for me? He risks his life, every day, for the people this country has abandoned and destroyed. People like those malnourished children. People like Leila. That’s why I trust him. That’s why I’m here. It’s why I brought you back to life when I shouldn’t have.”

  Dr. Neru pushed his chair back, sniffed, and wiped a hand across his face. When he looked up, Ari saw the unguarded anguish in his eyes, the place from which the doctor drew his resolve.

  “What do you mean, you shouldn’t have?”

  The doctor exhaled loudly. “Meditech is dangerous. Felix never should have tried to revive you. The risks are too great. Why do you think I’ve been watching you so closely? It’s truly a miracle you’re alive, let alone conscious and coherent.” He shook his head. “I have to get back to the infirmary. I’ll check on you in a few hours.”

  Ari nodded numbly. The familiar click of the lock turning into place on the door sent him shuffling back to his bed.

  He lay there feeling like a hollow shell of a man. Hardly a man at all. His whole spirit chafed against captivity, but he didn’t know the city or anyone in it except these hard, hurt men, his captors. Even with the knowledge of Dr. Neru’s painful past, Ari couldn’t picture himself rallying to their cause. This wasn’t his war to fight.

  Or was it?

  CHAPTER 8

  FIGHTING FIT

  Ari heard shouting. The door slammed open. Fluorescent bulbs burst to life.

  Felix strode into the room, his eyes wide and shot with red, his shirt torn and ripped along his chest and shoulders. Wet and dirty boot prints trailed in his wake.

  “Felix?” Ari said, squinting.

  He crossed the room and pulled Ari up to a sitting position by the shoulders. “We lost three more people tonight! You better not be lying to me.”

  “What?”

  “I said you better not be lying to me!” Felix shouted.

  Ari wrinkled his nose. Felix smelled like a sewer. “No. I mean, I swear, Felix. You’ve gotta believe me.”

  Felix’s fingers dug into Ari’s biceps. “I brought you back to life. If you’re lying to me, I swear I’ll kill you again. Where’s the fucking storehouse, Ari?”

  Ari tensed and his neck muscles cramped with the shooting pain that had subsided over the past few days. “I don’t know.” He bit off each word as his anger consumed his pain. The rest and food and medicine had returned some of strength. Ari dropped his bare feet to the cold floor, and met Felix at eye level.

  Dr. Neru rushed into the room. “Felix, I told you, he doesn’t remember yet. Be careful!”

  “Shut up, Nianzu,” Felix said without breaking eye contact with Ari. “This is none of your business.”

  “He’s my patient! If you want him to remember anything, you need to give him time to recover.”

  “We don’t have time!” Felix shouted at the doctor as he began to shake Ari, who twisted to get away from the violence of his grip.

  Dr. Neru rushed forward. Felix blocked him with his body. Dr. Neru reached around, took two of Felix’s fingers in a fist, and pulled back to pry them open. A sound of bestial warning emanated from Felix’s throat. With frightening swiftness, he slammed his elbow back into the doctor’s grimacing face.

  Blood gushed from the doctor’s nose. Ari took the opportunity to twist away, and broke the grip that Felix’s other hand had on his bicep.

  Felix’s free hand came back around in a wide haymaker at Ari’s blindside. Ari raised his arms just in time to block the first punch. But there was no comparison. Felix was fighting fit. He came with speed, striking out with fist after frantic fist. When Ari lost feeling in his bruised arms, they fell without his consent, and Felix connected two blows like sledgehammers to his cheek.

  Ari didn’t feel the blows—not exactly. Felix’s knuckles struck the synthetic, and sent tremors through his whole body.

  His stomach dropped, his knees buckled, and he fell to the floor, where his body began to convulse. He was vaguely aware that Felix watched him while Dr. Neru, blood dripping through his fingers as he held one hand on his nose, knelt by his side, clearing the space around him.

  Ari’s head rocked back. Every muscle in his body went rigid. His body arched while his skull and his heels pressed into the floor.

  For a brief moment, Ari’s heart was filled with an incongruous sense of existential sadness—alone and afflicted as only a man in the ruthless grip of death can be, he would have welcomed the freedom of the final departure. Yet, logically, the feeling was odd, for there, on the ground, while he swallowed great gulps of stale sewer-scented air, Ari peered beneath the desk and saw the key to his escape—the corner of a grate covering a large air vent.

  The seizure passed. He didn’t have long to consider the vent. He began convulsing again, and lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER 9

  RESISTANCE

  From his dream, an image resurfaced. Luscious, round green hills climbing halfway to the sky. Two lanes of smooth, dark asphalt carved a valley down its center beside the shallow gash of a river. Ari felt his hands on the leather steering wheel of some kind of luxury car, gliding nearly silently along the road. He felt happy and in control, and this feeling was a rare gem, something to appreciate. Control over his life was hard to come by since he left Slovakia.

  Another fragment—the round, worry-lined face of a Chinese man in the rearview mirror. When Ari caught his eyes, the
man smiled wearily, his eyes wrinkling at the corners before he caught sight of something out the window and turned to stare. In contrast to his own happiness, Ari carried a gut full of concern for this strange man, whose name he did not know.

  The memories dissolved as Ari woke slowly, rising through the fog of sleep. He lay in bed and smiled as much as his swollen, bruised cheeks would allow. The new memories, however incomplete, meant that Dr. Neru had been right. Of course Ari couldn’t go home. He left Brestov many years ago. Enshi was his home now.

  Knowing that something came after his memories of Slovakia completed a circuit for Ari. For the first time since he returned to the land of the living in Felix Hull’s fluorescent underworld, the sense of incompleteness that lingered in his chest began to fade away.

  But his relief didn’t last long. Ari felt his swollen jaw, and winced. He recalled with trepidation Felix’s wide, frantic eyes upon storming into the room the night before. How would the rebel leader react to this new memory, if Ari chose to share it? The man was already violent and desperate. To what lengths would he go to retrieve the buried knowledge he was so certain Ari was concealing?

  “Move on,” Dr. Neru had said. “It’ll make the rest easier.”

  The doctor was right. It was time to move on. But not in the way he meant.

  Ignoring the aches and pains in his body, Ari jumped out of bed, climbed into his clothes and the single pair of worn boots—his only possessions—and made his way over to the desk. Metal legs squealed against the floor as he pulled one side out. Ari caught his breath and glanced at the door. He waited and listened, praying that no one had heard the noise.

  The door to his room remained closed, but he cocked his head. Something else seemed off. It took him a moment to realize that the shelling overhead had also stopped. The room was truly silent. Perhaps that also had something to do with how well he’d slept.