4.95: Recovered Memories

“So you’re allowed to talk to me, then?” I asked, scrambling over my bed and pulling the curtains shut. “Is something wrong? Should I wake Kylie?”

“I… wouldn’t do that,” Max said. “I get the impression that she doesn’t like me very much. And no, the others don’t know I’m here.”

“That’s not… she… seeing you was just a bit of a shock for her, I think. An adjustment.”

He shrugged dismissively, like he didn’t care one way or the other what Kylie thought of him.

“Are you going to get into trouble for this?” I asked.

“Not if they don’t find out. I believe that I’m a relatively safe point of contact, but it’s best that the others don’t learn about this.”

“They’ll stop you.”

“Yes, but more importantly, it puts them and the entire world in danger.”

“But you being here doesn’t put them in danger?”

He shook his head. “I spoke to some of the others. The ones who knew things about Maximillian Acanthos. I… believe that, should we be caught, I can shield the others from suspicion. See, the last step to creating a janitor is to magically wipe their minds.”

“Wait, I thought Malas only made janitors from people who were already… y’know.”

“There’s a lot of difference between a brain that is damaged enough to be functionally useless on its own, and a brain that contains no memories whatsoever. If a janitor had remaining pockets of random memories from a dead mage, they’d be… potentially unstable. But errors exist in any process. If we are caught, I’ll simply pretend to be corrupted by leftover memories, and acting alone.”

“Malas will kill you if you’re found out, won’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

Max gave me a bland, puzzled smile. “Kayden, do you understand just how thoroughly we will have lost before anyone even suspects janitors of being involved? If this comes up, my life will be the least of anyone’s concerns.”

“It concerns me.”

“You should be more focused on your own fate in such a situation. Or, preferably, in avoiding such a situation from occurring at all. I only came by to give you something I found in the vault.” He reached into his voluminous janitorial robes and pulled out what looked like two perspex rectangles. Tablets.

When he handed them over, I recognised them immediately. One had a long, faint scratch down one side; one had a chip in one corner. These were my and Kylie’s old tablets. The ones we’d brought down into the Labyrinth of Dreams.

“These are… wow!”

“Whatever you do, don’t turn them on within range of the school intranet. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone is watching, but if anyone does notice old files being uploaded onto your account, it’ll raise questions that you won’t be able to answer.”

“I’ll be careful. Thank you.”

He nodded. “I need to go.”

“Wait.”

“Yes.”

“How is… how is everything? Are you happy? What’s life like?”

“Very busy,” he said. “Be careful.”

And then he left.

I stared down at the tablets in my hands. Something that Fionnrath’s Destiny had said to me echoed in my mind – ‘there is more than one way to record a memory’. We’d gotten into the habit of recording anything that might be important. Prophecies, random conversations, strange new locations. There was absolutely no way that we didn’t take recordings of what we’d discovered in the centre of the Labyrinth. Recordings that would be on these tablets.

I wanted nothing more than to wake Kylie and run off to look through the tablets right then, but even I knew that that was a dumb idea. My eyes were blurry from exhaustion, and I’d spent all day learning and analysing significant information. It was going to have to wait.

How the hell am I supposed to sleep, though? I thought as I locked the tablets in my desk. These things have to have answers, an actual record of what happened to us down there, and I’m supposed to just drift off without going through it? Without even checking what’s on them? How am I supposed to manage that?!

I flopped onto my bed, and passed out immediately.

I awoke the next morning thinking of nothing but the tablets in my drawer. I needed to grab Kylie, head out beyond the school’s intranet, look through them. But I couldn’t right away, because Kylie was already off at some class, and I had a shift at the medical ward with Dae-hyun.

Under normal circumstances, few things are more boring than cataloguing syringes and making hospital beds. Know what makes them even more boring? When they’re keeping you from investigating potentially world-altering secret information.

After work and the fastest dinner in history, I carefully concealed the tablets in an oversized bag and pulled Kylie out of a study group. “Sorry guys, this is an emergency,” I apologised to her bewildered friends as I pulled her away. She caught the look in my eyes and didn’t protest as I led her to the Lake of Inquisition, out of range of the intranet, where nobody would be able to find us.

“What’s the emergency?” she asked.

“It’s not an emergency, per se, but trust me, you absolutely don’t want to wait for this any longer than necessary. I could barely wait through the day.”

“What’s going on?”

“Max came to visit me last night.”

“Don’t call him that.”

I waved a hand impatiently. This wasn’t the time for this argument. “He was going behind the janitors’ backs. He brought me something.” I pulled out her old tablet and handed it over.

Her eyes widened. “Kayden, this…”

“Yeah.”

“We definitely would have recorded – ”

“I know!”

“And this is… safe?”

“We just need to make sure they’re not switched on within range of the school intranet. So.” I pulled my own tablet out. “Yours or mine first?”

“Let’s start with yours.”

I unlocked the tablet with my palm. I kind of expected it to feel momentous, nostalgic, but it felt just like unlocking my current tablet. The files were mostly familiar, stuff I’d put on there before going into the Labyrinth of Dreams, that had been preserved on my account and put on my new tablet. But not all of them.

There were several video files I’d never seen before. I played the first one.

The screen showed a shaky view of Max crouching next to a drowsy-looking Kylie, offering her some water. Just seeing him brought tears to my eyes that I hurriedly wiped away. “Kayden, what are you doing?”

“Getting some video record of this place,” my voice said from the tablet. “I’m surprised we didn’t think of it before. Now we have nothing but memories of that weird tooth castle; might as well have digital memories of whatever fucked up thing we encounter next.”

“Fair enough. How are you feeling, by the way?”

“I’m still feeling fine. Incredibly weird, but fine. Kylie’s spell isn’t eating me alive.”

“Good. We’ll get that link broken as soon as we get out of here, okay? I’m sorry about this.”

“What are you sorry about? It was my idea. Are you alright, Kylie?”

She nodded groggily. The tablet panned to slowly take in more of the cave. Kylie and Max, now out of view, continued to talk.

“So,” Kylie said, “we’ve all had some sleep. Any ideas on getting out of here yet?”

“I’m… not sure,” Max said. “This doesn’t make sense. All of my research said there’d be more here. I don’t understand what this is.”

The tablet camera stopped at the strange, ornate pillar in the middle of the room, slowly tilting up and down. “This thing looks familiar to you guys, too, right?” I asked. “I’m not crazy?”

“It looks like some kind of giant abstract sculpture to me,” Kylie said. “Maybe in the early days of Refujeyo, they had a crazy arts budget?”

At the sound of Max practically jumping to his feet, the camera swung over to get his reaction. He stared at the pillar, lips moving silently, face a mask of focus. He circled partway around the pillar to see it from a different angle. He held up a hand to block part of it from view.

Then he swore in Ido, stumbling back a couple of steps.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“You’re damned right it’s familiar,” he said. “I didn’t recognise it, because I’m not used to seeing it from low down like this, and a chunk of one side is missing. But that’s Power in Layers of Pearl!”

“I… know that phrase,” Kylie said.

“As you should! It’s a famous sculpture. Only a little one, about so high,” he said, indicating about thirty centimetres with his hands, “and Magista knows the person who owns it and gets her to bring it for display to every single party. You’ve definitely seen it.”

“So what’s a giant version with a piece missing doing down here?” I asked.

“That’s the real question, isn’t it?” Max grinned. “Power In Layers Of Pearl is a bit of a mystery in itself. It was carved by a famous artist long ago without any kind of explanation, being completely different to his usual style, and it’s rumoured to be a key.”

“A… key?”

“A key to the great treasure of a mythical figure. Tarada, the hero of a thousand spells. But the most interesting part is that there’s supposed to be another protruding bit, up there.” He pointed. “Help me get up.”

The tablet was put down, showing nothing but the slightly glowing fleshy roof of the cavern for several minutes while it sounded like Max consistently failed to make any progress up the pillar. Eventually, I said impatiently, “Let me do it,” and the tablet was picked up by Kylie to show a younger me, robes torn and arm bandaged, scramble efficiently up the structure. I paused about halfway up to inspect something not visible from the ground.

“What do you see?” Max called.

“There’s an indent here,” I called back. “More a hole, really. Like a pole’s meant to be inserted or something.”

“Presumably, the idea is to bring the missing piece of the sculpture and complete it.”

“Did we bring that?”

“No. When planning for this trip, I didn’t go scouting for oversized pieces of famous sculptures to bring along just in case.”

I adjusted my footing and grip. It was hard to be sure from the camera angle, but I seemed to be sticking my arm in something.

“Be careful,” Max called.

“It’s fine. I just… I don’t think this key mechanism is very sophisticated. It looks like there’s just a few buttons in here that the insert is supposed to hold down. I don’t think we need the shape to be too specific.”

“So you’re saying…?”

“How easy do you think it would be to get an arm or a leg or something off that skeleton?”

Max gasped. "You can’t use the skeleton arm with that!”

“I’m not happy with the idea of disturbing that very definitely haunted skeleton either, but I like the idea of slowly starving to death in here even less, and unless you fancy our chances of being able to swim up through the lake above us then the way forward looks like the only way out.”

On video, Max and Kylie got to deconstructing the rune-covered skeleton. In the real world, Kylie and I looked away from the feed. It didn’t take long; the fragments of connective tissue holding the bones together were dry and fragile. In fact, when the pair leveraged a leg off, it immediately fell apart at the knee. Max swore.

“Just give me the bits,” I called. “I’ll make it work.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay? With the familiar thing?” Kylie asked.

“Fine. Are you?”

“Fine. It’s just, you were a lot less gung-ho about interfering with human bones yesterday.”

“I just want to get out of here and cancel this link as soon as possible. It feels weird.”

“Ha. Yeah, it does feel weird.”

“What does it feel like?” Max asked Kylie, academic curiosity taking over as I fiddled with the lock mechanism out of sight. “Could you describe the sensation?”

“This really isn’t the time,” Kylie said.

“Right, right. Of course.”

“I just want to get out of here and go to sleep.”

“I’m done up here!” I called from off camera. “Coming down!”

“But nothing’s happ – whoah!”

The view swung to show the entire pillar shuddering. I fell the last few feet, stumbled, and leapt back as the floor itself collapsed. No, not collapsed. Retracted. I didn’t recall seeing any seams in the floor when we were down there, but in the video, a couple of metres of floor around the pillar pulled back to reveal a spiral staircase, leading down.

“Well,” Max said. “I guess that’s our path.”