(no subject)
Laura loved pearls, smooth and cool. She said she felt that they were the most elegant, the most subtle. Jack was used to their flash at her throat, the glimmer around her wrist, pearl-drops in her ears. He brought her back pearls from his travels- seed-pearl hair clips from Prague, a triple-strand bracelet from Bangkok, a pearl ring from Brasilia, earrings from Thailand, a necklace with pearls the size of marbles, an extravagant anniversary present from London.
They are Sydney's, now, the box of jewelry Laura wasn't wearing, the pearls nestled in velvet pouches to protect them from the gaudy diamonds and obnoxious rubies. Laura didn't have a will. He remembers going through them all, Sydney is sleeping down the hall, having exhausted herself from crying.
He was going to give Sydney the anniversary necklace as a wedding gift; he brought it to a jewelry store to be restrung and polished after Sydney informed him that Danny had indeed proposed. When Danny died, Jack wondered once idly if they were perhaps cursed.
When Sydney proves herself to be the miracle Laura had always claimed she was, Jack invites her to his apartment to show her one of the few things of Laura's he had kept.
She examines it, still reverent, Irina's face when she discovered the Rambaldi manuscript, perfectly pasted onto Sydney's. "I remember these," she says softly, "They were Mom's."
And Jack wonders if Irina knows that her greatest legacy is her daughter's love.
I love it best when she's slow.
Most of the time Sydney does everything involving sleep quickly: dropping off in a second and waking up in an instant, which, she says, are left-overs from her training when she was nineteen. The moments when Sydney takes her time are moments to savor.
Like when I took her to a fair on some boardwalk, and we rode rickety ferris wheels and roller coasters that creaked as salty air blew in our faces, and Sydney ate a whole bag of pink cotton candy and still begged for an ice cream cone, and held my hand like we were teenagers out on a school night. We drove home late, and Sydney closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest, fluttering her eyes open every so often to watch me, and then sliding them down again. She murmured when I woke her up to walk inside, and afterwards, when we were in bed and in the dark, Sydney kept herself awake to talk about her favorite rides, her words slow and blurry until they stopped altogether.
Once, on a cargo plane home, Sydney laid her head on my shoulder and took my hand and asked me to talk to her, and I obliged, telling her everything and nothing. Every so often she would demand clarification- the weather, the time of day, the sounds, the lightning- all with a mild curiosity unlike her. As I told her noncommital, something about frosty glasses of Orangina in France with my cousins, I remembered the mild difficulty of the mission, and trailed off to ask her if it has anything to do with it. She moved her head in closer, her forehead against my neck, and told me solemnly that my voice was the safest thing she knew. The even breathing that followed signified that she was asleep.
In the morning, when the light in her new bedroom is caramel instead of honey, Sydney once took a deep slow breath before opening her eyes slowly. She laid there watching me forever, her eyes sweeping over me without moving. I finally asked her what she was doing in hoarse, rough morning tones, and she replied in a voice like old-fashioned cough syrup (honey and jack daniels) that she was memorizing me, and the morning, and the moment, in coffee-colored sheets instead of yellow, in shady sunlight instead of brilliant. Sepia because we're older, she said, and then she was still, watching me again before getting up to start her day.
Or, once time, I came out of the shower to find Sydney napping on her couch, a pillow clutched to her chest, and I had never seen her do it, and, startled, shook her awake. She blinked awake at me, and then let a smile spread across her face, and held her arms out to me.
Irina had studied mythology once, very long ago, and in passing; it helped her understand literature better. Her focus had been on the Greek and Roman deities, their lovers and children, their creation and their demise. She can still recall most of the legends- but the only one she knows by heart is the legend of Persephone.
She supposes it is because it was about a daughter lost to hell, a story of blackmail and love and misery and a cold, barren expanse of time.
The difference between herself and Demeter is that Demeter always knew where her daughter was.
Camp 47 will never be investigated.
There will never be trials for the crimes committed against humanity there, nor will these atrocities be remembered. Those who were responsible will find new subjects, new grounds to test on, and their work will go on. The few survivors will live quietly, gratefully and say nothing. This is how it always has been, and this is how it always will be.
The liberation of Camp 47 occurred without gunfire or triumphant rescues. There was infiltration, obvious enough to be seen by the Shepherds, who began the protocol to be followed when the Camp was deemed a failure by their superiors. All four hundred and seventy of the girls were given small, slick red pills that the Shepherds said would make their eyes brighter. The few who hesitated were the same who always hesitated.
When the liberators reached the living quarters of the Agnelli, they found four hundred and sixty-six girls in their beds, their eyes bright and unseeing and their lips and tongues cherry-red. The podere was empty, harddrives wiped clean and no evidence of who had been there or where they would go.
There were four survivors, the girls who were able to reclaim their names and lives. They keep in touch, barely noting the names they write on envelopes, relying on the names they used before, on the ties that kept them alive.
There are the four: Liberty, Verdad, Quill and Starbuck.
Their letters start the same, always, do you remember?
And no one does.
~*~
When the girl awoke for the first time, there was an unfamiliar face bent towards her, holding her hand.
“My name is Quill,” the woman said when she saw her eyes. “Don’t tell me yours.” Quill helped eased her up and gave her a glass of water to sip at.
“My sister,” she said first, not raising her eyes from the glass, “I was… taken with my sister-”
Quill took the glass from her hand and said briskly, “You won’t see her again. No one ever does.”
The girl toyed with the ends of her hair and looked up. “Why are you Quill?”
“I wrote, once,” she said without passion. “‘Quill’ was a romantic way of remembering.”
“And no one uses their real names?”
“The ones who use their names, they break first.”
“Where are we?”
“Barrack Nineteen.”
The girl shook her head. “I mean location.”
Quill shrugged. “Camp 47.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “You don’t know where it is, do you?” She waited for an answer, but Quill was quiet.
“Someone will come looking for us,” the girl said with a great certainty. “My sister and me. They’ll find this place.”
Quill laughed sympathetically. “If you only knew how many said that.”
The girl lifted her chin. “Liberty. I choose Liberty.”
“A brave name to pick. You won’t even remember what it means, soon.”
Liberty takes this as a challenge. “I will,” she says defiantly, “Because I’m getting out of here.”
Quill looks at her appraisingly. “You’ll survive. You just won’t want to.”
~*~
They took Liberty out soon and she returned like every other girl there. Without hair, her eyes were almost too large, and she blinked too quickly. She would still nervously tucked phantom strands behind her ears.
She was spared the first operation, because she already had the halfmoon under her right hipbone. The second left her with a bruise on the inside of her elbow the size of a grapefruit; the third made her unable to eat for three meals.
After these operations, Quill would watch after her as she slept fitfully and talked in her sleep. Quill tried, unsuccessfully, to break her of this habit.
“You say names,” she said after she had shaken her awake, “You know you can’t say them.”
Liberty took pride in being strong, but her desire to hear names broke her. “Tell me, tell me what I said,” she all but begged, “Please, Quill.”
“A name, you said it often. I will not say it. You mustn’t say it.”
She swallowed sharply. “That’s all?”
“Occasionally phrases. Sometimes you ask for your father.”
Liberty looked at Quill miserably. “What do you miss the most?”
Quill felt badly for Liberty, because Liberty still remembered her life before. “I don’t miss anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t remember. You won’t either, soon.”
Quill went back to her own bed after that promise of sweet dreams.
~*~
Most of the girls there refused to form attachments. Making friends gave them a weakness, because nothing would stop the Shepherds from performing their experiments and nothing would stop death. There were always exactly four-hundred and seventy girls there, and girls died weekly, being replaced as their bodies are burnt. No one knew what those girls died of- chemicals, they guessed, either shot into the veins, or dripped into the water or sprinkled onto the food, or in the variety of brightly colored pills that had been shoved down their throats by the placid Shepherds and their security.
Liberty attempted to make friends, and found that those willing were few and far between. Most girls wanted talking companions and nothing more, and were resentful at the kinder women who would hold them as they jerked in spasms or became feverish. Quill was one of those- ready to comfort, but not to risk herself.
Quill composed letters in her head to no one in particular, cataloguing events and practices because she felt that no one would remember the atrocities committed there if she didn’t. Quill remembers stories of women long dead, with exotic names of things they cherished: Saffron, Phalarope, Halcyon, Camellia, Cerastes, all gone.
When they went to meals, all four hundred and seventy crammed into a cafeteria, Liberty peered over heads and into faces, searching, as was her habit, for her sister. Quill told her every time to stop, but Liberty refused to accept that she was alone. When they went outside to work the fields, or to get their exercise, or a breath of fresh air, she would look up as if she expected rescue planes to appear the minute she stepped out. “They’ll come,” she said resolutely when Quill looked at her.
Liberty had been in Camp 47 for three months before Verdad arrived in their barracks after a transfer- Columbia for Verdad, and Liberty had been lying on her back, facing away, when Verdad had opened her mouth to introduce herself.
Liberty had sat up very straight, a spine of iron, and turned to face her. “Sister,” she had mouthed, knowing what a danger it would be for them to know, and Verdad’s face as she had exhaled was pure light. The two had leapt at one another, eager to explain their absence from the other, and they reaffirmed their beliefs that help would soon come. When next to one another, Liberty and Verdad looked somewhat similar.