“I was just thinking that,” said the young man in front of him who wore a chain from his nose to his ear. His head was shaven clean, his skin a pale sort of cream, along with the two boys who flanked him on either side. “I was thinking that if you gave me your car keys and your wallet, you could just keep walking.” Tattoos on their necks caught the old man’s interest and he cocked his head at an angle to look closer.
“You are bold,” the old man said, keeping his hands folded one over the other in front of him, “with the police in force just around the corner.”
“They’ll never get here in time.” There was almost a sneer in the young man’s face. “Even if they heard you.” Behind the bravado, the sneer, the old man could sense the faintest hesitation. A broken nose, then .
The young fellow at the front turned to say something to his comrades. The old man smiled, and was already moving as the head began to swivel back at the sight of motion. The impact sent the young tough to the ground, hands slapping the pavement, catching him. His mouth was open, a thick stream of blood already coating his upper lip, dribbling down his face as he looked up at his attacker. “As you said,” the old man repeated, “they’ll never get here in time.”
The two youths that were still standing began to move, but they were too slow; the older man’s methodical motions were gone now, replaced with a fluid grace as he spun into a low kick that swept the legs of the thug on the right, sending his head cracking against the asphalt and followed that with a punch that fractured the skull of the one on the left. The older man returned to his position, leaning against the car, taking a deep breath of the night air, feeling the vigor return to his joints in a way that the walk hadn’t been able to restore.
“Let me tell you something,” the old man said to the young leader, the only one of the three still conscious, “because I like to aid people in their transitions. Your life, short and pitiful as it is, will be even shorter and more pitiful should you keep walking the route you are. It’s a path fraught with peril, not to be trod lightly upon, and even less so by one as mortal as you.” The old man looked down, and saw a quivering lip, the young man watching him frozen, as though the cold had claimed him. “If I were you—which I am not, and never would wish to be—I would go a different way, because a short life is much less preferable to a long one, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Y-yes.” The reply was mumbled and stuttered, some rare combination of nerves and pain.
“Good, I’m glad we sorted that out.” The old man leaned down. “I look at you and I see someone who could still live long, at least for your people, should you cease this pointless, circuitous route of jail and robberies and beatings and eventually murder. That would be a shame, even for one with as little potential as you.” The old man stood, and felt for his keys again, his hand sliding against the fleece of his old coat, the skin feeling thin as paper against the wind. “Good luck in your transition, should you choose to make it. I can show you the door, but you must walk through it yourself.”
With that, the older man unlocked the car and eased in, shutting the door behind him. He looked out the window, saw the little cloud of fog gather on the glass from his breath, and saw the face beyond it, a scared young man, his nose broken, humiliated by a man who looked at least four times his age. An easy mark . The old man smiled. Not so easy. Not such a mark. Never have been . He started the car, fumbling the key slightly in the ignition, and reached into the old, faux leather armrest. He pulled out a new cell phone, a disposable one that he’d bought in a chain store only a few days earlier, then pulled a small 3 x 5 index card out along with it, and dialed a number. This time, I remember .
The female voice answered at the other end of the line, peppy for it being so early in the morning there. “This is Portal, extension 4736, please.” He waited a moment before the connection was made, and the voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy. “Bjorn has been taken. Stanchion moves to phase two.” He paused, waiting for a response. “No, I was supposed to get extension 4763…well, just forget what I said, will you? Connect me to the operator.”
He sighed as he heard the familiar ring again, of the call being connected. “Let’s try this again,” he said as the female voice picked up. “Message for extension 4763…Stanchion proceeds to phase two. Will advise. Janus out.”
He pressed the end key and replayed his words again. “Dammit! I meant Portal. Portal out.” He shook his head, teeth clenched. “Shit.”
10.
“Her memory seems to be…selectively gone,” I told Old Man Winter and Ariadne, standing in his office before the massive stone desk. The smell of the plaster and dust that coated me was still there, now evident to my nose because of the thoughts my brain was fixed on, of what had happened in Iowa, of how we had failed. Of how I had failed. “You told me once before that when she heals someone too much, she loses memory…”
“Yes,” Old Man Winter said in his rumbling tone. He stirred against the black background of the windows behind him; the lights that lit the Directorate campus were dimmed at this time of night, and stars were visible on the horizon behind him, a thousand points of light over the trees in the distance. “So far as I know, her memories, once gone…remain gone forever. This has, of course, happened to her before, which is why she remembers her name as Katrina Forrest rather than Klementina Gavrikov a.”
“I get that,” I said, and ran a hand over my forehead, stirring a small cloud in front of my face. “But there must be something that we can do. He’s her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even remember who he is. We had her look at him and it was a blank stare, nothing, no recognition, as if they’d never met before in their lives. But she remembers me,” I shook my head, “hell, she even remembers Reed. It’s like her memory about him just…vanished.”
Old Man Winter templed his hands in front of his face. “For a Persephone-type, the first memories to go are those most crucial—the core memories, if you will. The best of times, the most intimate of companions, these are bundled together in some sort of way that makes them closest to the edge. What remains, even after a fully draining event, is ancillary things, the trivial and unimportant. The rest is just fragments.”
“There must be…” I sighed. “There has to be something we can do.”
“She’ll receive our full attention,” Ariadne said from her place next to Old Man Winter. “We’ll have Perugini and Sessions working every angle they can to try and restore her memory, but this is…not something we’ve ever dealt with before, nor is it something where there’s an overabundance of information waiting out there to steer us in the right direction. It’s doubtful we’ll be able to do anything for her, because as with everything else, our experimentation with meta abilities tends to leave us with more questions than answers, more knowledge of the results than what causes them.”
“She saved him, his life,” I said, quiet. “She must have known she was close to the edge of losing memories, because she’d already healed me, Reed, Clary—she knew, and I think she did it anyway, and she ended up passing out on him.” I felt my jaw tighten before I loosened it to speak. “She saved his life, and she can’t even remember his name because of it.”