Page 12 of Jarran

The second came while he was watering the back rows. A sound. A boy’s voice, laughing, echoing off stone. Close, then far, then gone.

And now the blade.

He wiped his hands on his pants and stood. His body felt tense, coiled, his muscles holding a readiness that didn’t match the quiet of the agricultural bay. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck and tried to shake the feeling of being someone else. The implant hummed again, softer this time, and the readiness faded.

He heard the bay doors open. Evie’s footsteps, quick and light, coming down the central aisle. He turned and saw her, and the tight feeling in his chest loosened.

She was carrying the blanket. His blanket, folded over one arm. In her other hand she had her equipment bag, and she was chewing on her lower lip, which he noticed she did sometimes when she was thinking. She stopped a few feet from him and tilted her head.

“You look upset.”

He probably did. He could feel the scowl on his face, the tension in his jaw. He sat down on the edge of the planting bed and rubbed his hands together. Dirt ground between his palms.

“Memories,” he said, waving a hand. “Fragments. Coming fast today.”

She set her bag down and sat beside him. Close, but not touching. “Tell me.”

“A blade. Black, curved. Spinning.” He mimed the catch, his hand snapping out and closing. “Caught it. My hand knew how.”

She pulled the tablet from her bag and opened the scanner. “Can I record while we talk?”

He nodded. She activated the device and set it on the planting bed between them, angled toward him.

“When did this happen?”

“Just now. Few minutes ago.” He flexed his fingers. “Also this morning. A sky. Orange, yellow. Purple clouds. Hot. Sand.” He touched his chest. “Felt heavy here.”

“The desert sky.” She made a note. “You’ve responded to an image with a similar scene before, in our sessions. Was this the same feeling?”

“Stronger. Not just feeling. I was there. Could feel the heat.” He rubbed the back of his neck, where the implant sat. “Implant activated after the blade. Calmed things down.”

“Good. That’s what it’s there for.” She made another note. “Anything else? Memories? Dreams?”

He shrugged. “A dream last night. It woke me up.”

She lowered the tablet. “Tell me about the dream.”

He took a breath. The dream was hard to talk about because it was partly images and partly feeling, and the words for it were hard to find. “A boy, not small, but not grown. In a tunnel, underground. Stone walls. He’s throwing knives at the wall. Over and over. He’s practiced. Good at it.”

“What else?”

“He’s hungry. And he’s waiting for someone. Someone who was supposed to come get him.” Jarran’s throat tightened. “No one comes.”

Evie was quiet for a moment. She didn’t push. She didn’t ask him to try harder or dig deeper. She just sat with him and he couldn’t explain how grateful he was for that.

“Have you had this dream before?” she asked.

“No.” He closed his eyes briefly. “I never used to dream.”

“Jarran.” She said the name as if trying it out to see how it sounded. It was a familiar name. A name he identified with, but it was jarring to hear himself called it after being referred to as Patient Nine for so long. Evie went on, maybe to not make a big deal out of it. “I think the boy in the dream might be you.”

He’d thought so too. He just hadn’t wanted to say it. “Why would I be in a tunnel?”

“Well, according to what I’ve been told about you, you were abducted by raiders when you were in your teenage years. That tells me this might be an autobiographical memory. The hunger, the waiting, the knives. These feel like things that happened to you.”

“Happened to me.” He turned his hands over and looked at his palms. The calluses from the planting beds, the dirt in the creases. These hands had caught a blade from the air without thinking. These same hands planted seedlings and picked fruit. “I was…abducted?”

“Yes. Your family could not find you,” she explained in a soft voice. “They feared you were dead.”