Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

and what he said.” She narrowed her eyes. “They didn’t seem happy with him.”

Her words reminded me that the events of the future might appear separate but were really interconnected, like cells in a body or a line of dominoes ready to collapse. One thing affected another and another. My brother, sending a letter to the Office of the Future. My brother, predicted to lose his life.

Deirdre glanced behind her. “Sometimes I worry they’re following me.”

“Who’s following you, Deirdre?”

She was sweating. “What?” Her eyes shifted back and forth. “I don’t know.”

When I placed my hands on Deirdre’s shoulders, I could feel her trembling.

“You’re fine,” I said. “No one is following you.”

“They’re not?”

“No. Come on, I’ll help you to your car. You should go home and rest.”

Deirdre leaned against me, promising she could make the drive back home, while I told myself I was nothing like her. I was determined, smart, stubborn. The same person I always was. I’d make my way out of this without falling apart like Deirdre.

At her car, Deirdre stopped and reached into her back pocket.

“I brought you something,” she said.

She was holding a plastic bag that contained a bloodflower pill. A single spot of red as shiny and appealing as a berry fresh off the bush. She rattled the bag as if to entice me.

“Take it,” she said. “It will make you remember, but in a way that dulls the edges. No one wants to remember, not really, but you have to. In order to move on.”

I hesitated only a moment before accepting the bag and slipping it under my sleeve.

“It wasn’t easy coming back to this neighborhood,” Deirdre added as she climbed into the driver’s seat. “It reminds me too much of life before I changed, when I still had my whole future ahead of me.” She paused to buckle her seat belt. She moved like a much older person, like everything hurt.

Deirdre put the key in the ignition and looked me right in the eye. For the first time, her expression was sharp.

“That’s my only advice for you, Celeste,” she said. “Leave. If you stay here, you’ll drown.”

*   *   *

Once Deirdre was gone, I took the bloodflower up to my room and shut the door. I felt so shattered by what had happened with my friends that I was glad to have the bloodflower to distract me. I held the pill up to the light and turned it from side to side, marveling that it had come from nature.

Bloodflower grew wild all over in the warmest weeks of the year. It grew tall, a scraggly plant full of thistles and thorns. Only in the last days of its short life did the red bloodflower itself bloom, half hidden in the twisting stems. The flower opened, released its potent nectar, and then folded over itself and died. It took a significant effort to combat those thistles, to harvest the nectar at just the right stage, to boil and process it, to dry it into a powder and turn it into a pill. Every bloodflower pill was born of sunshine and heat and determination. Every pill had surely, at some stage, drawn blood.

I slid the pill from the bag. I knew what bloodflower could do, how it could make me remember. If I remembered, then I might have something to share with the police. But I was scared. To remember would be to experience horror, to see something I couldn’t ever take back. Bloodflower could be dangerous, too. Addictive, unpredictable. I didn’t want to lose myself to it.

And yet there I stood, pill in hand. The air in the room felt heavy, my senses battering against the decision I’d already made. I could do this. I could be strong.

I placed the pill on the center of my tongue. At once, the taste of pine and snowy woods filled my mouth. I was so surprised that I closed my mouth and swallowed.

My body tingled with light, with euphoria. I was energy itself, alive and singing.

All at once, the aftertaste in my mouth changed. Instead of snow and pine needles, I tasted burning. The coals at a bottom of a grill. The ash from a campfire. The dank sharpness of singed hair. I gagged and coughed, but it was too late. The bloodflower had dissolved, leaving a lick of fire to drift through my veins.

And I started to remember.

Strategies for Reintegration: A 7-Stage Guide for Recovery and Rehabilitation

Stage 5: Grappling with Memory. Now that you’ve graduated from the reintegration program, you may find yourself distracted by the question of what happened during your trauma event. While many patients are tempted to unearth their memories, this is an ill-advised strategy. Such memory mining results in pain and nothing more. Patients are advised to let the past go and to focus their energies on recovery and rebuilding their futures. Leave the darkness behind.

18

Those missing weeks shot past me in slips and flits, little pieces of memory as rough and sharp as the very pill I had swallowed.

First I saw the shadows of the underground hiding spot I’d been led to, followed by a glimpse of the two men who had brought me into the basement. They pulled away quickly, leaving me standing alone in a cavernous space. I moved forward in a slow, floating gait. Before long, I found a doorway with a strip of light showing at the bottom. I drifted in that direction and pushed open the door soundlessly.

Inside, I found a room with threadbare carpeting and wood-paneled walls. No furniture except a narrow bed pushed against the far corner. A young girl lay on that bed. She was thin and pale, her eyes hollow, but the rest of her glowed.

I stepped forward. I was thinking back to that day Cassandra had changed, how much I’d wanted to touch her. I came closer, then closer, until I was nearly at the bed. The girl sat up to face me. Her hair was