"Yeah," he said.
"You know that ... creatures evolve. You know that there were once homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a humanlike species that lived beside early man for hundreds of thousands of years? Fossil records show that they lived in caves together, hunted together, and lived as friends. They stalked woolly rhinos, traded beads made from shells, buried their dead beneath blankets of flowers. But they were different from each other, two different species. They couldn't interbreed."
Bron wondered where she could possibly be going with this. What did it have to do with the boy who was killed?
"Recently, a new species has been discovered, which lived at the same time as them, in the same area of Asia, near Kazakhstan. Did you know that? There were three distinct species of early humans in Eurasia, and there was another in Indonesia."
Bron felt confused. "What are you trying to say?"
She said bluntly, "Bron, I'm not human. Neither are you."
Bron studied her face for a long moment. He broke out in a long laugh. "That has got to be the greatest joke ever!"
Olivia's face betrayed no hint of mirth. Her mouth was straight, and worry lines creased her eyes. He wondered if she might be crazy, or on drugs.
"I know that this sounds hard to believe. Let me show you something." She held out both hands. "Look at my fingers."
She had dainty hands, a musician's fingers, toughened and wizened. He'd seen her guitar calluses before.
"Watch carefully...." she warned as she raised her palms toward him. He saw muscles flex inside her wrists. Suddenly on each thumb and fingertip, a single oval suction-cup sprang up.
"Ah!" Bron shouted, and instinctively leapt away from Olivia. He grasped blindly for the door handle, and nearly fell from the car before he realized that she had suction cups on her fingers. Just like his.
He demanded, "What are those?"
Olivia held her hands up so that he could see. "I won't hurt you, Bron. I'll never hurt you, but I had to show you this. These are called sizraels. They're... a mutation, an advantage that our species has over normal humans. You have them, too. There is no sense in pretending otherwise."
He stopped, stared at his own hands for a long moment, trying to let this sink in. He couldn't deny it, so he asked guiltily, "What... what are we supposed to do with them? Do you use them to, like, climb walls?"
She grinned. "We're not flies, Bron. We can't climb walls, or crawl around on the ceiling like Spider Man. Our sizraels are far more... dangerous than that."
She relaxed her wrist, and the sizraels vanished. "You see?" she said. "They're like the claws on a cat. We can make them appear, and disappear. Mostly, we keep them sheathed."
Bron began breathing hard, taking great gulps of air. It felt as if the hair began to stand up on his head. He shivered.
"Take it easy," Olivia said. "I won't hurt you."
"Yeah, but—"
"I won't hurt you." Her tone was convincing enough, and he calmed a bit, but he was still scrunched against the far door.
"Just my luck," he whispered. "I finally get a cool mom, and you're not even human." Olivia didn't smile at the compliment. This wasn't an occasion for humor.
"So what do you do with them?" he asked.
"That's kind of hard to explain," Olivia said. "You're familiar with mythology, right?"
"I'm taking a class this semester," he admitted.
She struggled to elucidate. "You've heard about creatures like me," she suggested. "For thousands of years, humans have been aware of us. We call ourselves masaaks, to differentiate ourselves from humans. I use my sizraels to ... help draw memories from other people, or to insert new memories into them."
Bron didn't know what to say to that. The situation sounded more and more insane, but she went on. "Bron, among my people, I'm what you would call an at-tujjaarah a'zakira, a memory merchant. I can borrow memories from others, or steal them completely, but I can also give you memories. Would you like to see how it works?"
Bron nodded slightly, yet shrank away. He didn't really want to see how it worked. The very notion that it could work terrified him, but he didn't want her to know how frightened he was.
"Come closer," she said. "I need to touch you, on the head."
Bron drew closer, and Olivia leaned forward and grasped him by the forehead, her sizraels locking onto him. She placed her thumbs on his supra-orbital ridges, just above each eye. Then her fingers splayed out, her forefingers on his brow, and her little fingers resting on the very back of his skull. Her fingers felt cool, and suddenly there was a tingling sensation as electricity arced between them.
Olivia held him for a moment, but nothing had changed. The cab of the Corolla was just as bright as it had been. The air carried that slightly new car scent.
"So what is my name?" she asked.
"Olivia. Olivia Hernandez."
"And what is your name?"
Bron opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He felt as if it was just on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't quite get it. "I... I can't—"
"I'm sure you can remember your own name," Olivia said. "You've heard it a hundred times per day, for your whole life. What was it again? Carl? Sanjay? Bron? Miguel?"
He shook his head. None of those names sounded familiar to him, or at least none sounded right. His mouth opened in astonishment, and he peered about, as if he might find a clue just floating in the air. "Give me a minute," he said. "I'll remember."
"A minute?" Olivia said. "A minute wouldn't help. A year wouldn't help. You see, it's not up there anymore. I have it now. I own your name. I'm storing it right here." Olivia grasped his hands and raised them up, put them on her skull, way back up about four inches past her jaw.
"Can you feel this bump here, on the back of my skull?" She held his hands there. "Those are called the secondary lobes," she said. "Humans have only two lobes to their brains, masaaks have four. Ages ago, when humans first evolved, that new brain of theirs, with its two lobes, was a huge evolutionary leap. It doubled their capacity to learn. Our brains, with their four lobes, are the next step.
"You must never let a doctor give you a brain scan. They'd be baffled by what they'd find."
He touched her lobes gingerly, but there wasn't much to feel. He had the same odd bumps, he knew. He might have thought that Olivia only imagined a physical difference, but he couldn't remember his own name, and he felt bewildered by that, shocked and confused.
"Is this... some hypnotist's trick?" he wondered.
He squinted and struggled to remember. Nothing would come.
"Now," Olivia said, "I'm going to remind you of your name."
She touched his head again in her way, and held him for an instant. Though her mouth did not move, she whispered his name into his mind, so that it exploded as if spoken by ten thousand voices. His name roared in his ears, and even his bones shivered.
"Bron!" he shouted.
Olivia smiled.
A moment ago, he'd been struggling. Now the memory burst upon him so clearly, so naturally and profoundly that Bron felt elation. Tears came to his eyes. He sat blinking stupidly, mouth open, at the revelation of his own name.
"You see," Olivia said. "I can take your memories from you, and I can return them. Or I can just sit and sort through them if I like, looking for information—even your deepest, darkest secrets. That's how I know what is happening to you. I know how your sizraels unsheathed yesterday, when you were talking to Galadriel. Anything that you know, any skill that you have, I can take it away from you. Anything that I know, I can share with you—within some limits."
Bron's mouth had gone dry, and he licked his lips, took a deep breath. "What limits?"