“…but what is it like, having a war criminal as your past life?”

Sadie Salazar, Licensed Life Speaker, should have been professionally above the prurient interest lighting her hazel eyes, and much too old for the giddy excitement that lifted the corners of her full lips. I hadn’t told anyone else about the memories haunting my dreams for fear of precisely this reaction, but now, faced with it, I felt relieved. Equanimity in the presence of the monster who rode my shoulders, tormenting my sleep, and—with increasing frequency—my waking hours was impossible; and I’d rather see Robert humiliated than treated with dignity and reserve.

“I was hoping he wasn’t real,” I said.

Sadie Salazar shrugged the padded shoulders of her paint-splattered magenta jumpsuit, a vintage relic of a century ago, and—I could only assume—expensive enough to mean something to someone else. “You know he’s real, Miz Barnes,” she said, her tongue pressing on the sibilants. “Life Speakers don’t take private clients without good reason. Certainly not contract laborers who still qualify for the base income allowance. Oh, don’t look at me like that—I’ve received your retainer and I work for all my clients equally no matter their means. That’s why I offer the youth discount, after all. Anyone under ninety is young in my line of work! And you’re the youngest case I’ve seen in my career.”

That “youth discount” was the only reason—after mortgaging my apartment—that I could afford her at all. My jaw was radiating pain down my neck and past my temples. I took my fingers to the tendons and salivary glands and pressed gently. “What does that matter?”

She raised her thick monobrow—another fashionable relic from the last century.

“Perhaps not much to my colleagues,” she said quietly. “But it matters to me. It’s not…easy, is it? To Awaken so early in life? And with someone so…”

It was the unfinished sentence that hooked me as her direct question had not. “He’s not nice. He’s violent and bigoted and cruel. But I thought, what else do you expect from a war criminal? I thought I could ignore him. But it’s not his crimes that get to me, now. It’s his…”

“Banality?” Sadie suggested, with just the hint of a sigh.

I shook my head. “It’s like this: He loved singing karaoke. His favorite songs were ‘It’s A Wonderful World’ and ‘Rock Lobster.’ He had a band until the war started and was always convinced they would have made it. He was queer but he was terrified of it. He loved—he loved—”

No, I couldn’t say it; not even to someone who would understand. Perhaps especially so. If the world remembered Robert Simpson among the thousand criminals tried after the war, it was only because he and the beloved resistance poet Tiaraq had spent a decade together as guard and prisoner, and then Tiaraq had died in mysterious circumstances just before Liberation.

One of Robert’s memories swam milkily to the front of my mind—a military pavilion strung with red, white, and blue lights, late at night, the moon long set, beer cans leaking on the ground and overturned on plastic tables, a prisoner in gray overalls, eyes closed, lips curved, singing a song in a language I didn’t know as though they were making love to it.

“Why are you here, Miz Barnes?”

Sadie Salazar’s voice brought me out again, blinking. I took a shuddering breath, and to my mortification two tears splashed onto my forearm. “To know…I’m not imagining it? I’m not like one of those mystics who claim they’re Cleopatra?”

Sadie laughed. “If you were going to imagine yourself a past life, why pick a dime-a-dozen prison guard? Why not be Tiaraq, if it came to that? The great poet of the resistance is a past life worth deluding yourself over—but one of their torturers? You don’t strike me as a masochist.”

My breath was burning in my chest. “Yesterday an egg fell from the tree…”

Sadie nodded. “Where I have been sitting / to think of you.”

The opening lines of Tiaraq’s “The Bluejay,” my favorite poem since I was twelve years old. And now I remembered that Robert had watched them write it.

“I’ve spent over a century investigating these cases, Miz Barnes. I’ve learned to trust my gut. So I’ll ask again. What do you want?”

The giddy interest had disappeared, replaced by a flinty implacability that made her seem not ageless, but—despite her firm and unlined skin—ancient. In that moment I’d have believed her if she told me she had lived three hundred years ago, during the world war. I was seventy-five, which would have been considered a venerable age once, but I felt callow and humiliated.

I gripped the armrests of her visitor’s chair. “I need him out.”

A flashing smile pushed a dimple into her right cheek. “How do you imagine I could get ‘him’—your own past life—out of you? We’re in the Liberated Territories, not a fly-by-night Free Trade Zone with experimental drugs and neurosurgeries.” She seemed genuinely curious.

I blushed so fiercely I knew it must be apparent on my darker skin. “He’s not me. I’m just carrying him.”

She drilled her nails on her glass desk and studied me. In other circumstances, those slate eyes in that lean brown face would have made me go cross-eyed with desire. But now I saw her doubled with Robert’s judgments: a Black woman, stuck-up, bougie, not really my type. Carrying a white man imperialist in my head was a parody of the double consciousness I’d had all my life as a Black woman. If only Sadie did have a way to get him out, instead of merely certifying his existence. But with her certification I could get a comfortable university sponsorship while making myself useful to scholars of the Third World War.

A sharp gesture with the knife-edge of her right hand cut the silence and she let out a rough yelp of a laugh. She felt real to me again, and I relaxed.

“Not many people will admit to the floating memory theory these days,” she said. “Even most FTZs accept the past life framework for posthumous memory syndrome. And of course I must, as a Life Speaker. But I will tell you a secret, Miz Barnes—I have a bit of sympathy for it myself. Why assume that recalled memories bear an intrinsic relationship to the living person who holds them?”

I could have cried. I had paid for help, but to have found someone who understood was enough to make me love her. “So you’ll certify him?”

That flash again, the giddy interest quickly repressed. “Not quite. You’ve convinced me, but the certification requires more proof than my gut. So I propose a trip.”

“A trip?”

“Let’s visit a ghost town.”

“Ghost town” was not precisely a pejorative term, but it was colloquial, and in the mouth of a Life Speaker it took on a shade of gleeful blasphemy. I was beginning to understand that Sadie Salazar’s position in the territory between the living, the legally dead, and the reincarnated was not so much a Virgil guiding Dante as a Hercules hog-tying Cerberus.

The ghost town—technically “Superannuated Life-Retirement Community”—she had chosen for our trip wasn’t one of the most famous enclaves, but I had heard of it. Wide River, the only habitation allowed within the West Texas floodplain nature reserve, was known for its collection of half-forgotten post-war artists and cultural influencers. However, typical of ghost towns, most of its residents weren’t noteworthy, merely wealthy or connected. Sadie had other work to do there, she told me, and so would only charge my account for half a day. I supposed this was fair, but in the silence of our hours-long train ride down, I wondered who in Wide River held memories that could help my certification.

The first cases of posthumous memory syndrome had appeared a hundred and fifty years after the war, but only in people over a century old. As longevity treatments got better, cases increased. Apparently, doubling and then tripling our natural lifespans did strange things to our brains. For those of certain religious inclinations, the interpretation was obvious: They’d always known we carried the souls of the dead within us like an endless string of pearls. After the initial shock, most of the world settled upon the reincarnation framework; it was as good an explanation as any for a phenomenon that no one could quite explain. The very old remembered the dead. This seemed appropriate, since the New Life Accords mandated that the superannuated—people older than the “standard annum” of one hundred and fifty—give up their property, financial interests, and legal standing. Thus, the legally dead were the only ones who remembered the physically dead—as many as five percent of the residents of any given ghost town. Posthumous memory syndrome was a blessing for the superannuated. After all, it was one thing to condemn the rich and long-living, but after the conflagration of the last world war and the loss of two thirds of earth’s population, who could deny the dead?

Sadie and I shared a private compartment on the train, a luxury that made the humble contract worker in me uncomfortable and jittery. She was working on a tablet, ignoring me and not even raising her eyes to the window and its spectacular views. We would be arriving soon. I could just make out the town’s farming pods in the distance, floating above the waterline on maglev pylons, just like the train.

“Who are you taking me to see?” I asked at last.

Sadie kept her gaze on her work. “I can’t tell you.”

“Is it someone who knew Robert in a past life?” I tried to imagine who it might be. His mother? A bandmate? Not Tiaraq—their reincarnation would be international news. Robert swam up again, a bare fragment of memory: a naked neck, a thickened voice, my mouth swollen from bites and kisses, someone else’s hopeful laughter.

I started trembling. I shouted at him from inside my mind—Stop! Leave them alone, you bastard!—which felt as futile as prayer. Like my parents’ god, he wasn’t listening.

“Deep breaths,” Sadie’s voice—patient, resigned—pulled me back like a fishing line. The smooth curve of a paper cup slipped into my hand, and I drank without thinking. My panic receded. Sadie waited a beat. “More?”

I nodded. I wasn’t really thirsty, but the tenderness in her gaze made me feel like a seeker in the desert. She stood and filled the cup again from a dispenser by the door.

“They’re stronger when they’re guilty,” she said conversationally. “More corrosive to the natural barriers between death and life. But take heart.”

She was looking past me—through me—as though she saw someone else.

“Why?” I asked.

A whistle blew. She took the cup and smiled without warmth. “We’re here.”

We spent fifteen minutes in immigration while a nervous officer scanned our passports and gave us a pair of injections to help protect the residents’ fragile superannuated bodies. We followed the signs over a covered walkway to the guest dormitory, where we’d pass our twelve-hour quarantine.

The dormitory consisted of an empty lounge, a dining hall, and an open-air loggia with six rooms. Ours was at the end. Sadie took the bed closest to the window and I took the one by the door.

“Are there usually so few visitors to ghost towns?” I asked.

She was unpacking her bag, bringing out an injectable case with four different pens in different metallic colors. Injectables even on this short trip? Well, that explained her remarkable skin tone.

“The Accords make it harder for ordinary people to visit. The Liberated Territories don’t want life-retirement communities to become tourist attractions, after all.”

I nodded slowly. “If most people can’t hope to join one, why visit? And the superannuated aren’t allowed much contact with the living, right?”

For some reason, Sadie grimaced. “Imagine paying a fortune for the best longevity treatments and you’re still condemned to spend the next hundred years with the same ten thousand people.”

She took her time in the bathroom while I curled, wakeful, on the bed. Did the residents of well-funded ghost towns like Wide River resent the restrictions imposed upon them by the New Life Accords? Some of the rich defected to lawless places like the FTZs or the Emirates that flaunted their gerontocracies, but in general, most of those wealthy or well-connected enough to reach their standard annum elected to spend their ghost years in these comfortable oases separate from the living.

Now that I would soon be certified, I would be able to afford more than the government-standard longevity treatments. I would be able to easily reach my standard annum and probably live another seventy years beyond that in a ghost town. The idea of a retreat from the larger world struck me as restful, not a punishment. But I wanted that after-life as I had been, not as I was now. I had barely survived a year with the memories of Tiaraq’s jailer. I did not know if I could bear another decade, let alone another century.

Wide River was self-consciously bucolic, with cobbled walks and gabled bridges arcing over the canals of protected floodplains. The entire town had been built right on the water, with only a tiny strip directly connected to land. The rest was elevated off of the wetland by maglev. Everyone we passed was on foot, lev-chair (mag lanes discreetly marked), or bicycle, and almost comically hearty. These people didn’t look young, they looked as though they’d been carved out of marble. White marble, most of them. Their calves were firm, their guns delineated, and their smiles wide enough to dimple the skin by their eyes. A few greeted Sadie by name. The government-minimum longevity treatments had hardly touched the cellular aging of my skin; I felt like an old woman trapped in a wax museum. We met with the mayor for half an hour over milkshakes, then french fries on the boardwalk with two Asphodel University delegates who were also here on business, then oysters and drinks with three honey-gold immortals whose relationship with Sadie I couldn’t quite decipher, and then, at last, we took a lev-car to a house on the far edge of town.

“Who is it this time?”

Sadie smiled. “Tired already, Miz Barnes?”

“I can’t afford the good drugs, Miz Salazar.”

She laughed. “Then you’ll be happy to know our next visit should help change that.”

Jean Blackwell was expecting us, though she seemed oddly nervous when she opened the door. Her house was a one-room bungalow with a back porch that opened onto the salt marsh. As soon as we sat down on her couch, she brought out a plate of mini-quiches and cured meats that might have actually come from a living pig, and not a vat-grown cell array. Like the rest of the food in Wide River, it was comically old-fashioned, but then, how did you relate to a changing world when you had lived for over two centuries?

“Are you sure you just want water, Miz Barnes?” she asked. “I could make you some tea?”

I agreed that I would like some, after all. As she busied herself in the kitchen, I wondered how this woman would help to certify my case. She was the first person I’d seen in Wide River who actually looked old. She was, of course, like everyone else. But her sagging skin, white hair, and feathering neck made her look as out-of-place in this town as the crone at the princess’s baptism.

“I haven’t been here for very long,” she said, pouring me tea from a pot. “I was surprised you’d heard of me already!”

“I make it my business to know all of Wide River’s most interesting residents,” Sadie said, smiling. “And you’re already a star!”

I had studied Sadie carefully enough by now to know that she was holding herself back. The calm, easy friendliness she beamed at Jean was, in fact, both deliberate and costly.

Jean gave a nervous laugh and set the teapot on the table. “I wouldn’t go that far. It’s a bit embarrassing, really, to be here among so many luminaries…looking like this.”

She gestured with a helpless flutter to the ruin of her face. I hardly looked any better but having spent the last half day in Wide River, I felt unexpected empathy.

Sadie shook her head. “How can you say that? You’re one of the ten oldest people in the world! Even the Free Trade Zones haven’t managed to get anyone past the two-fifty threshold. And here you are, two hundred and fifty-four, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you made it another decade. Wide River is lucky to have you.”

Jean blushed. “Oh, it’s got nothing to do with me, really. I just…got lucky. This Okinawan pharmaceutical company sponsored me when I started declining a few years ago. Whatever they gave me, it perked me right back up! Anyway, I thought you were here about Yuri?”

“Yuri?” I repeated. Had Robert known anyone with that name?

“Oh!” Jean’s teacup rattled in its plate. “That isn’t why you’re here?”

Sadie patted Jean’s bony shoulder. “Renée, I should have told you that Miz Blackwell Awakened very late in life. Just a few years ago, in fact.” She turned back to Jean. “That must have been quite the shock!”

“I’ve lived a long time. I didn’t expect it, but how could I begrudge Yuri his…space in my head?”

She stared past us, apparently out the picture window to the floodplain, but I knew she was really looking through time. Her shoulders jerked and she shook her head.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” I said impulsively. “It’s not just the memories. It’s…the background noise. They’re not even thoughts, just the hum of everything they wanted or knew or loved or hated. You feel like another person at the same time you don’t understand them at all.”

Jean really looked at me for the first time since we sat down. “You’ve also Awakened?”

Sadie’s laugh was intrusive, chiding. “Renée doesn’t agree with that term. She prefers to think of herself as a carrier of memories she plucked from the ether that have nothing to do with any real past life. I suspect that if she could get rid of those memories she’d jump at the chance.”

Jean looked appalled, surprised into a genuine emotion for the first time since we arrived. “But Miz Barnes, pre-war memories are a priceless resource!”

I took a sip of tea to avoid meeting her eyes. “Valuable, sure. But there’s nearly ten thousand Awakened these days.”

Jean shook her head earnestly. “I was born right after the war. You can’t imagine what it was like. All the dead…”

I winced. A line from “The Bluejay” ran through my head. Nothing…would make me show it / to its mother.

The problem was, I didn’t have to imagine. I remembered.

Tamura Yuri, a copywriter for a Japanese tourist agency, had died at fifty-four after a dirty bomb went off in Yokohama harbor. He had two children but they both died later in the war, and not even distant descendants remained. The only reason a Life Speaker had been able to confirm his existence was because of Japan’s unusually well-protected data centers, which provided more than half of our extant wartime archives. He had not been notable in life, but in death he could claim a certain novelty.

Jean Blackwell, born two hundred and fifty-four years ago in a refugee camp outside of Detroit, German Jewish on her mother’s side and unsullied WASP on her father’s, had no Japanese ancestry. Neither she nor anyone in her family had ever visited Japan or had any ties to anyone in the greater Pacific. Her memories of Yuri, therefore, represented the only confirmed posthumous memory held by someone with no geographical, familial, or cultural relationship with the deceased.

I wished I could claim the same, but although Robert and I shared no cultural heritage, we were connected by geography. A child of New Orleans refugees, I was born a few hundred meters from the former Two Forks detention center, the facility where Tiaraq found the blue jay’s egg, where they spent the last ten years of their life, and where someone—perhaps Robert Simpson—put a bullet through the side of their head.

I refused to own any connection between myself and the criminal some people would call my past life. That I, of all the billion people on the planet, would be the one chosen to hold his memories was hell enough. When I contemplated him being “me” in any ontological sense, I felt a slide of acid in the mouth of my stomach and beneath my sternum. Impossible. Impossible that I could be the same person who had imprisoned and tortured the voice of conscience, the poet of the wave, the Inuit rebel who only acknowledged their chosen name and who had written: You should never commit violence for the sake of others, only for your own. They had consistently refused hostage deals that would have secured their release in exchange for publicly renouncing the rebels. They had lived in an unspeakable age and had suffered and died just as this new one came into being. I had cried over Tiaraq as an adolescent. I’d had a poster above my bed with a photo of them in the Two Forks detention center, smiling at the mystery photographer.

I now knew, because of the memories decanting within me like corked wine, that the photographer had been Robert. He had printed the photo and kept it in his locker, which is how it survived the chaos of liberation. Most Tiaraq scholars assumed, even now, that the photo had been taken by one of Tiaraq’s rare civilian visitors and fallen at some point into Robert’s possession. Most Tiaraq scholars did not single out Robert Simpson as special among the rotating cast of sadistic prison guards at Two Forks. If they noted his attachment to Tiaraq, they chalked it up to the lure of fame, even in that bleak setting. On another wall of my childhood bedroom, I had posted reproductions of Tiaraq’s journal with “The Bluejay” in draft form, and then cleanly copied in their spiky handwriting:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

—Tiaraq, June 24, 2054

“What was he like?” I asked Jean.

“He liked oysters. He loved his children.”

I blinked. It all seemed so benign. “But how do you understand his memories? Can you speak Japanese now?”

At this, Jean looked away and reached for a quiche. “It’s not like I…become him, you know that. I understand the things that he understood in the memories. But if they’re speaking…well, I’m learning!”

“Cross-linguistic memories are such an important area of study!” Sadie put in, with more of that bright, apparently genuine enthusiasm. A salmon blush painted Jean’s sunken cheeks, which wrinkled further with her hesitant smile.

Vertigo hit me like a bat to the back of the head. My last sip of tea came back up with a chaser of bile. I swallowed it and coughed. Sadie slapped me on the back, but I didn’t even register her touch. Why would I? Robert didn’t care about Sadie, and it was Robert who held me now:

A cute girl in a new business suit, awkward in her heels, blonde and brown-eyed, pretty enough, with a wanting-to-please smile that told me she’d let me do what I wanted. I’d give her a story for her girlfriends: I fucked the war criminal. Well, why the hell not? I’d put it in my memoirs: I fucked the court stenographer.

I—Renée Barnes, I, daughter of Hortense and Nelson Barnes—gripped the edge of the coffee table and focused my white-hazed vision on the glass of water Jean held out to me, so cold it was sweating. I drank it slowly, focusing on every micro detail of its passage from tongue to throat to stomach until I was myself again and not a man filled with poison.

“I’m fine,” I said hoarsely when Jean offered more water. I caught her gaze. “How’d you become a court stenographer?”

She jerked. The glass fell from her hands and bounced off the couch, splashing both of us.

“Really? That’s why you came here? Isn’t Yuri more interesting? I told Wide River that I didn’t want to be in the database for post-war histories. I was so young! And I was in the stenographer’s pool at the Hague for, what, six months? The AI did the whole job, we were just there to double-check for hallucinations. I met no one, did nothing. I became a dentist. I had two children. My life was entirely ordinary and I’m sorry to disappoint you if you came all the way here looking for war stories.”

It was strange. The speech seemed at once rehearsed and wild, as though she’d imagined it but never believed she’d actually have to say it out loud.

“You must have crossed paths with Robert,” I said. Sadie was giving me an odd look—hungry, almost giddy.

“Robert…who?”

I laughed. “Were there so many? One of Tiaraq’s prison guards.”

Jean sank down on the wet couch beside me. “I…I had his case for a few weeks. There were a few reporters in the audience because of the poet, but it wasn’t interesting. They just went through his paperwork. It was thirty years after the war! He’d been in custody for decades. They were going to decide whether to pursue the death penalty, but he had a heart attack before the ruling. Why…why are you asking me about this?” Her racing pulse made the loose skin around her neck tremble.

“Did you fuck the other war criminals?” I asked, feeling so distant from myself I could have been a satellite. “Or just that one?”

She gasped. “Shit,” she said, at last. “Shit. Who are you? Leila from translation? My boss?”

Sadie looked bemused. “Jean Blackwell, past life Tamura Yuri, meet Renée Barnes, past life Robert Simpson.”

We ate dinner in the dormitory dining hall. We shared the long table with a young university researcher doing her thesis on the social hierarchies of ghost towns, which she told us about with great enthusiasm through three courses.

“Did you know that cases of past life fraud have doubled over the last ten years in life-retirement communities? It’s gotten to the point that Life Speakers are contemplating penalties. My grandmother—” At this she blushed, but apparently the novelty of an attentive audience was enough to push her on. “Well, she went into a ghost town a few years ago and claimed she was recovering the memories of Mary Magdalene.”

Sadie’s eyes went wide. “Oh no.”

The student took a sip of sparkling lemonade and laughed. “The biggest cliché, right? Even before past life recall was scientifically documented, it was always—you know the quote—”

“Mary Magdalene, Princess Diana, and Helen of Troy,” Sadie said, laughing.

She was putting on the charm again. I scowled into my hot chocolate. It was thick and sweet, probably a thousand calories. Did all ghosts eat like this, or just ones in elite towns like Wide River?

“Right,” the student said, dazzled, because Sadie was dazzling her. “Well, obviously her case was rejected but when I visited her I realized that ghost towns lack status based on all the normal markers in the living world: wealth, acclaim, followers, political clout. They’re completely cut off—even from one another. Ghost towns can’t communicate. All they have is their local community and limited contact with the living like us who take an interest. And why do we take an interest? To some extent, who they are. So ghost towns like Roswell—you know that one?—can get lots of sponsorship from universities because they invite top scientists to join. But otherwise? If you weren’t that special in this life, then maybe you’ve got a past life somewhere inside of you that someone will care about. That’s what happened to Jean Blackwell. You went to see her today, didn’t you? She’s one of my case studies. Classic trajectory—upward mobility in ghost hierarchies through past life recall.”

“Or because she’s older than these floodplains.” I said this repressively, but the student merely laughed.

“You’d be surprised how little the superannuated like to be reminded of their age. Jean has a harder time than you’d imagine. Wide River would never have taken her if she hadn’t Awakened.”

“And why exactly does it matter so much to them? Among the living it’s hardly something to brag about.”

I took a sip of my cooling chocolate, which squirmed down my throat like a greased worm.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you—never mind, none of my business. There are a few Awakened among the living, but I haven’t studied it socially. Among the superannuated, getting posthumous memories is one of the few things they can give to the living world. The recall rate is rising, of course, as the superannuated population grows. There will probably be a point in the next few decades when the social value of remembering just anyone starts to diminish, but so far…” She waved her arms at the deserted dining hall and the remains of our gourmet meal. You’d never know that a third of North America was a fallout zone and another third wildly vacillating between drought and flooding. Wide River had access to the kind of wealth that the New Life Accords had been meant to limit. And they had it because of posthumous memory syndrome.

Sadie stood up abruptly, pushing back the heavy chair with a scrape. “Well, I’m beat,” she said, with a smile so insincere it felt like a rebuke. “I’ll leave you both to it.”

I was angry with Sadie, but even so, I wished she’d stay. The student looked at Sadie’s retreating figure and then back at me. “Did I get in the middle of something?”

I sighed. “She just verified my…the person I’m carrying.” With dreadful efficiency. Cold recognition of someone your past life knew was the gold standard of posthumous memory verification.

The student’s mouth dropped open. “Was that…I mean, I knew she came here sometimes, but—you’re here with Sadie Salazar?”

I raised my eyebrows. “The one and only. Why?”

“She’s legendary. Ghost towns, universities, corporations, the Liberated Territories, the FTZs, hell, even the Emirates—Sadie knows everyone.”

That didn’t surprise me, after what I’d seen here. Ghost towns were a world of their own, one that Sadie might know better than anyone living. I just hoped that Life Speakers like her and researchers like this student would make sure that the life-retired would keep to themselves and that ghost towns, no matter how lavishly appointed, would be prisons and levees, keeping the present safe from the flood of the past.

Sadie had already changed into rose silk pajamas when I got back to the room. She was replacing an injectable pen—sleek, metallic rose gold with a holographic turtle on the bottom—back in its case. I wondered who sponsored Sadie Salazar to keep her looking a firm thirty-five for a little over a century.

“Is it normal for drug companies to sponsor people like Jean?” I asked her, though it was clear she didn’t want to talk.

She pursed her lips. “It can be. In Jean’s case, though, it was the pharmaceutical arm of an FTZ.”

“Damn. She didn’t mention that. Aren’t they barred from doing business here?”

Sadie shrugged and pulled down the covers. “There are ways around the rules in ghost towns.” She lay down and adjusted her sleeping mask.

I studied what I could see of her face for a moment, then I went to the bathroom and then went to bed.

I had been taking pills to knock me out so deeply that I couldn’t dream, but by the time I remembered them I was too tired to get out of bed again. And perhaps I was just a little tired of avoiding him. Fine, Robert. It’s your turn. Tell me what you want.

We were in the prison camp. It was winter, bare branches coated in ice like plastic wrap, the ground crunchy beneath our boots. Inmates in gray jumpsuits with regulation brown jackets too thin for the weather were playing a half-hearted game of basketball. A few others huddled against the perimeter wall, smoking and talking. One inmate sat cross-legged on the frozen ground, a hand-knit beanie smashed down over their ears—elfin, protruding, and normally red on a morning like this. They were writing something in a black and white composition book, one of dozens over the years.

A surge of anger rose within us, as predictable and intolerable as the urge to take a dump. We hated that book and what it never said about us, but there had been a campaign and lawsuits—to the extent those mattered any longer—and the higher-ups had made it clear that this wasn’t worth the fight. Tiaraq kept the notebook.

But that didn’t mean we couldn’t get them in other ways.

We walked over and snatched the beanie from their head. They flinched but didn’t look up. Their ears were fire red. Not from cold, not yet. From what, then? Fear?

“Whatcha writing in there?” Our voice was thick with power. It ought to have been enough, but it never was.

Tiaraq’s pen trembled over the page, half-filled with the tiny spikes of their handwriting, like the EKG of a hummingbird. We were sure they wrote that way to confound us. To hide what they really felt. The pressure of our rage grew tighter, hotter.

“I’m writing about peace,” they said.

We could feel it in our jaw, in the tendons of our neck. “If you believed in peace you’d be helping us, not on your ass with the other traitors.” We spat onto the beanie and were gratified by their flinch.

They closed their eyes. “That was a gift. But I suppose you’re taking it now, Robert.”

We stood there, open-mouthed, all of our incipient pleasure evaporated. Every time they called us by our first name we remembered the karaoke night on July fourth, three years ago. We remembered those drunken kisses in the dark.

And they fucking knew it.

We pushed them—hard—into the dirt and twisted our boot over the open pages. The sound of ripping paper was satisfying, but not as satisfying as their cries would be. They made no sound, of course. The cameras were watching—we couldn’t do any more. The brass wouldn’t like it, not with the coalition fracturing. Bunch of pussies, all of them.

“Why don’t you write about that,” we said, and laughed, though we didn’t feel like laughing.

Slowly, Tiaraq lifted themself off the ground. They picked up the book and then their pen. They looked us in the eyes.

“I’m sure I will, Robert.”

I was quiet on the trip out. I remembered those trees, that winter, that red and white knitted cap. Robert Simpson had been captured with it in his possession ten years later. I’m writing about peace. That voice, those eyes, their sheer presence. Video footage hadn’t lied but it hadn’t fully captured them, either. I loathed Robert, but his memories were as much a gift as a curse.

The floodplain stretched infinite outside the window, cerulean blue studded with deep aquamarine and brown. This had all once been inhabited—strip malls and highways and whatever other pre-war horrors that had been commonplace to both Robert and Tiaraq. Living with him in my head was like becoming a stranger in my own home, a traveler in my own time.

Sadie looked up from the tablet where she’d been working. “Let me ask you a question.” She seemed tense but beyond that I couldn’t interpret her expression or the ceramic smoothness of her voice.

“Go ahead?”

“I’ll have your paperwork in to the past life office tomorrow,” she said. “But I have been wondering what you would think of…other options.”

I squinted at her, but even light didn’t seem to escape those flat eyes, that firm mouth. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Remember what you said to me in my office? That you wanted Robert ‘out’ of you? What if that were possible?”

My heart started pounding. “You said it’s not possible.”

Now she smiled. “I said that we were in the Liberated Territories. But you’ve seen enough to realize that there are ways around certain restrictions.”

“And you…broker those ways?”

She nodded. The private room swayed around me. I thought for a moment one of Robert’s memories was taking hold, but it was my own overtaxed limbic system bowing under the shock.

“Nothing to say? I’m surprised, Renée. Weren’t you desperate to get rid of Robert?”

I swayed forward.

“What do you want? You make so much money as a Life Speaker…what do you gain from working with…fuck, the Emirates? A bunch of hyper-capitalist monsters in a Free Trade Zone?”

To my shock, she took my hand and pressed her nails hard into my palm.

“Do you really want to know?” She seemed intrigued. I nodded, tongue-stuck and dry with terror. Robert had felt like this around Tiaraq.

“What I gain,” she said, smiling, digging, “is my mother’s life.”

“My mother was part of the first wave of Awakened. But she was young, a little younger than you are now, in fact. The memories hit her hard. I’ve noticed that it’s always harder for the younger Awakened, but the content of the memories matters as well—you understand that better than most. She didn’t remember anyone quite as notorious as Robert Simpson, but her past life was—”

I pulled my hand out of her grip. “Was your mother very old when she had you?” The first wave of posthumous memory syndrome had been a standard annum ago.

Sadie gave me a small smile, different from her others—tight and angry and self-deflecting. I flinched back. She said, mildly, “You’ll let me finish, won’t you? I don’t tell this story often, so you’ll have to let me tell it in my own way.”

I nodded. Some part of me wanted to flee the private compartment, but Robert and I had this, at least, in common: We clung to what frightened us most.

“So, my mother had the misfortune to recall, at seventy-years-old, the life of her own grandfather. Inter-family recall makes up about twenty percent of cases, but they’re usually separated by at least three generations. She recovered memories of this man abusing her mother, and many other young girls in the evangelical church where he was a pastor. He died during the war. My mother had never known this family secret. Her mother had never breathed a word. When my mother Awakened…her suffering was unimaginable. She told her mother—my grandmother—who refused to speak to her ever again. My mother and I had been…lightly estranged. By the time she told me, her mental health was unraveling. I was forty—yes, I can see you doing the math. This was one hundred and fifty-one years ago. I was a historian, much like our young friend in the dining hall last night. I had been overjoyed at the possibilities of past life recall in the abstract, but to have it crash through my family in that way…” She laughed humorlessly. “It changed my perspective. Memories visited my mom every night. She couldn’t sleep. She became suicidal. She became convinced that she deserved to die, that she was responsible for what her past life had done.”

“But maybe it wasn’t a past life at all.” My voice was quiet. She clearly didn’t want interruptions of whatever this was—a confession? A baring of the soul? The last thing she said before she murdered me?

Sadie gave me a sharp nod. “You understand. Most people don’t. You don’t have to be a person to remember them. But my mother didn’t believe that. So I put her into cryosleep until I could find a way to save her.”

My knuckles ached like I had punched something, but I was only gripping the foam edge of my seat. “Cryosleep is illegal.”

“So is being a hundred and ninety-one outside of a ghost town.”

I swallowed. “Everyone in cryosleep comes out with brain damage.”

Something in her expression shifted, became hard and wary. “I went with Galapagos for a reason. It’s the most technologically advanced Free Trade Zone. Her brain function passes every test. And when my drug is ready, she’ll have her life back.”

“Your drug? Galapagos?” My voice shook. I didn’t want to believe her, but this story felt true in the same way that Robert’s memories did: like broken bones and spilled blood. But that meant that Sadie Salazar was at least forty years past her standard annum. They called it “life theft” when the superannuated passed as younger. There had been a famous execution of a life thief in Appalachia a few decades back, a case determined by DNA evidence. But life theft was notoriously difficult to accomplish. The only birth certificate forgeries likely to fool the governments of the Liberated Territories would have to come from one of the Free Trade Zones, and the FTZs were modern mafia states. My armpits itched from a sudden burst of perspiration.

“Sadie—whatever your name is—what the hell are you?”

“It’s Sadie,” she said. “For Sandra. Salazar was my grandmother’s maiden name. And I told you, I’m an intermediary.”

“You’re a spy.”

“I’m an experimentalist. The ghost towns of the Liberated Territories have the best test populations, but their governments won’t let Galapagos experiment openly. Hence my position.”

Galapagos. The holographic turtle at the tip of her luxury injectable. But drug companies were one of the major sponsors of ghost towns. Most of the residents got access to the newest anti-aging treatments in exchange for participating in clinical trials—that’s what happened to Jean. Sadie herself had told me that Jean’s sponsor was an FTZ subsidiary. The idea that our governments wouldn’t allow Galapagos to run trials here when its subsidiary companies already did was a risible argument. So she was implying something else.

“Oh,” I said, blinking against sudden vertigo. “You’re testing drugs that contravene the Accords.”

Sadie shrugged. “What my patrons want is to get past the two hundred and fifty age plateau. They need to try different ideas and lab mice ain’t cutting it.”

“What about Jean? She’s four years past.”

“Well, she’s one of our success stories, isn’t she? In more ways than one. I don’t give her more than six months, to be honest—my superiors have already pivoted away from the experimental treatment that stopped her decline a few years ago. Not enough life extension, too many side effects.”

I shook my head but she remained stubbornly real before me. The other Sadie—professional, warm—had been the mirage. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want to help you. I test Galapagos drugs on the superannuated, but my personal line of research is what’s important now.”

I was beginning to see it, at last. “Your drug,” I said. “To suppress your mother’s memories.”

The wariness had left her, replaced by a fervor that made me flinch. “Yes, you understand. A de-Awakening. Put your past life back to sleep inside of you—or released back into the ether.”

What should you do when a terrible person offers you your deepest desire? I wanted to be someone who would refuse on principle, who would walk out and call the authorities. But instead, I thought: Robert gone. Tiaraq’s torturer flung back into the abyss where he belonged.

I met her fevered eyes. “Have you done it?”

“Ask Jean in about a week.”

My breath caught. Jean and her FTZ sponsorship. Jean and her new life in Wide River. “Does she know?”

This Sadie looked more complacent than the other one ever had. “Yes and no. She consented to the Galapagos drugs that gave her the last six years of her life. And at the same time I ran that trial, I gave the participants a second drug from my own line of research. It turns out that suppressing memories is closely tied to awakening them. None of the superannuated in the study began with posthumous memory syndrome. Of the forty who survived, twenty-six developed posthumous memories within two years.”

“You turned on her posthumous memories?”

“That’s what it seems like. It was a crucial finding for my current formula.”

“So first you turned her memories on without her consent and now you’re just going to…shut them off? You heard her—she loves Yuri.”

Sadie leaned back in her seat, all the looseness in her posture and all the hardness in her eyes. “You’re the only reason I picked her at all. It was a happy coincidence that she’d met Robert Simpson as a young woman. I decided to kill…a few birds with one stone.”

Blaming me was a cheap move, but I still wanted to vomit. How much guilt could I hold? “Will they even let her stay at Wide River with Yuri gone?”

But she just waved Jean’s fate away. “Like I said, she’ll be dead in a few months. She’s the last of the study cohort. What do you say, Renée? Will you do it? I’m telling you the truth, and I don’t often do that. But you remind me of my mother. If all goes well with Jean, will you take the drug? Will you help me save my mother’s life?”

Her mother was probably braindead after a standard annum in cryosleep. But clearly Sadie refused to acknowledge realities she didn’t agree with. “There was nothing it had,” I heard myself quoting Tiaraq, “that I could not find elsewhere. And yet you’ve picked me.”

“You contacted me, Miz Barnes.”

I sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

The corner of her mouth turned up. “Of course you do. I just know what you’ll choose.”

I received a message ten days later. I had done nothing in the interval but work and sleep, and—mostly unsuccessfully—drug myself out of dreaming. Robert came roaring back every night. He was elbowing his way in with increasing regularity during my days. I comforted myself with Tiaraq’s poetry and almost relished those moments I knocked myself into a memory of them.

I worked in logistics for a maritime shipping company, a tedious job done remotely late at night to match mainland Chinese time. Even before Robert’s invasion, I had been feeling increasingly despairing at the thought of continuing this solitary existence for the remainder of my standard annum. I had dreamed of after-life in a ghost town, but even saving every renminbi I earned for the next seventy-five years, it was unlikely for a contract worker like me.

And now I’d spent all of those savings on a consultation with Sadie Salazar.

I opened the message.

Trial successful. It might give you a bit of diarrhea—nothing to worry about. Meet me here this Wednesday at seven. Tiaraq’s jailer can go where he belongs.

Embedded within the message was a geolocation and a return address from an anonymous account verified by an FTZ-affiliated certification agency. My own servers had flagged its content as questionable. I agreed with them.

It was late Sunday night. I set my away messages and told my bosses that I’d had a family emergency. I packed an overnight bag and left for the train station.

I arrived at Wide River Monday afternoon. I had wondered how I’d manage immigration, but the officer remembered me and seemed to assume I had legitimate business there.

“Is the mayor expecting you?” she asked, uncertainly. “But she’s in meetings until five.”

“I’m here to see Jean Blackwell, actually.”

Something flashed across her features—a wince, perhaps?—quickly hidden. “Of course. I think she’ll be glad to have one last visitor from outside before she goes.”

Jean and I sat on her back porch, watching the sunset-pink clouds reflected on the floodplains and the long rows of farming pods stretching into the distance. I liked it back here a lot more than in her living room, which was being packed up as we spoke.

“I’m donating everything. Wide River works with a housing charity for the living. It’s been seamless.”

It wasn’t always easy to tell the superannuated apart from the living, but that word made her seem like a character from a period drama, a pre-war infinite growth capitalist with a Botox smile and a match in hand. I shook my head and the image cleared.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked. “You seemed so happy about your new situation.”

Her eyes met mine and then slid away. “You know how it is. It’s hard carrying two lives inside of you. And my life has gone on too long.”

According to Sadie, Jean didn’t have many months to live, in any case. But taking Yuri from her still felt like a theft. “And Yuri?”

Jean’s eyes widened and then, without her even blinking, a pair of tears slid into the soft folds of skin beneath her eyes. “I’ve told my university sponsors everything I can. I think Yuri understands.”

Her grief resonated with mine like a tuning fork, though I didn’t understand it. I hugged my knees to my chest. I thought of what we must look like from the outside: two old women on a Texan porch, admiring the sunset. But really, we were time travelers. We were thieves. We were chimeras with souls not our own.

I did not tell Jean what Sadie had done. She was scheduled to drink her fatal cocktail two days from now and any revelations I made would only make it harder for her. That was what I told myself but that was not my real reason. My real reason was selfish: I was afraid Sadie wouldn’t give me the drug if I interfered. The fact that it worked—that Jean undeniably had lost access to her Awakened posthumous memories—was both a miracle and a tragedy.

But I had also understood something even stranger while we spoke: Yuri might have been hidden from her, but he was still there.

The fact that I could not remove this baseless conviction from my circling thoughts disturbed me. What was it? The grief in Jean’s eyes? Or even worse—the feeling of her soul? If I took Sadie’s drug would Robert be gone, or simply reburied under the mountain of my subconscious? Ever since posthumous memories had become documented fact, mystics and gurus had made fortunes claiming to recognize the past lives of those too young to remember them. If their identifications proved wrong in the occasional case, it didn’t seem to harm their business. After all, even among the superannuated, only five percent Awakened. If ten thousand ordinary people had past lives, logic suggested everybody did, but only a few remembered them. For the first time in a year, I seriously contemplated the possibility that I was Robert in a way that transcended semantics. That a kernel of what had made him evil had made me…entirely unremarkable. It did not seem so far-fetched, now that I forced myself to face it.

I had always felt as though I had been born loving Tiaraq.

And perhaps I had.

Tuesday night, Robert came back for one last dream. As though he knew what I was thinking of doing. As though he knew he couldn’t waste this chance.

We were in Two Forks again. Alone in the guard booth by the back gate.

We put the gun to the back of their head. Our hand was shaking so badly we were as likely to hit their ear as their skull. We thought about missing on purpose. We thought about what our life would be like without them.

“Do it, Robert.” Their voice trembled like a birdcall. “It will only get harder if you wait.”

We clicked off the safety. Our erection throbbed crosswise against the zipper of our pants. The taste of our self-hatred was slick as semen and cloying as attar of roses. How did we become this? How did we get here—a shaky pistol at dawn against the shaved head of the love of our life?

“Why aren’t you trying to talk me out of it?”

Their laugh was another birdcall, slightly deeper. “I’m done pretending there’s someone better deep inside you. You’re going to kill me because no matter what you feel, you’re terrified of what I might tell the world about you if I live. You’re a scared man, Robert. You always have been. So kill—”

They had turned halfway toward us to speak, and so the bullet ripped through their temple before we registered having pulled the trigger. Tiaraq slumped forward, hands folded in prayer. We came right there, gun in hand, ears like a subway tunnel, and nothing else to do but what we’d always done—run.

Sadie’s geolocation pinpointed a spot inside an old World War III memorial park, a sculpture garden that remained a minor tourist attraction an hour train ride from the city.

I spotted her on a bench beside an oak tree halfheartedly turning its leaves a dingy orange in honor of what passed for autumn. A bronze Tiaraq with idealized features and shoulder-length hair knelt beneath it. They gazed upward, but where the blue jay nest should be there was only a shadow.

“Interesting choice for a meeting place,” I said, once I was fairly sure I could control my voice.

Sadie wore a wide-brimmed straw hat as crude—though likely effective—camouflage. An eye studied me from its shadows. “It seemed appropriate. And we could hardly discuss this in my office. I heard you visited Jean before she passed. Was it helpful?”

“Do you really have no remorse?”

She seemed incredulous. “About the Jeans of this world? No, I lost those qualms long ago. She was a two-hundred-and-fifty-four-year-old parasite.”

I grit my teeth. “And you?”

Sadie laughed, but it was different when she wasn’t trying to make me like her. “I’m a hundred-ninety-one-year-old parasite. But I’m clear about my goals. As soon as I have a working suppression drug, I’ll wake up my mother and let her live the life these memories took from her. Everything I have will be hers. That’s enough atonement for me.”

The clothes the statue of Tiaraq wore were wrong as well. Too neat. Their body filled them out as though they’d just come into the camp. Even their pen was wrong—the standard length, not chewed at the end from anxious habit. No, this wasn’t Tiaraq at all, and yet I still fought the urge to fall to my knees and beg their forgiveness. You’re terrified of what I might tell the world about you. I closed my eyes and took a deep, sharp breath of right now: the must of wet leaves, the desultory chill of mid-November autumn, Sadie’s discreet floral perfume. Attar of roses—the taste of Robert Simpson’s self-hatred. I sat down beside her.

“We were wrong,” I said. “The memories are us in some deep way. They’re not just a weight we carry or a metaphysical disease. Robert isn’t apart from me.” I stopped and tried to slow my breathing. The pain of it! I understood Sadie’s mom. I even—though I wished I didn’t—understood Sadie.

Sadie took my hand in a parody of gentleness, then dug her nails in with a sharp sting. “It can be apart from you, honey,” she said. “With just one injection.”

I let my hand linger one last time. “That’s the trouble, Sadie. You can suppress the memories, sure—but that doesn’t stop him from being here. That doesn’t stop his guilt from being something I carry.

“I’ve been thinking about why we’ve only had posthumous memories since the war and longevity therapy. I think it’s because it takes a lot for memories to get out. The walls get thinner as we age so of course we’re seeing it more and more. But what happened to your mother and me—that’s different, isn’t it? I think our memories got out because they were beating down the door. I think they had something they needed to say. Only Robert really knows how Tiaraq died. He killed them, you know. He loved them and he killed them, point blank, because he was terrified. He won’t find peace—we won’t find peace—until we tell the world. Your mother—”

Her voice was bitter. “Don’t tell me that she’s responsible for the sins of that monster!”

“Of course not. But if she makes it out of cryosleep—”

“Her brain function is—”

I put up a hand. “The memories are still part of her. You can suppress them, but she’ll still know he’s there. She’ll still know what he’s done. Maybe there’s no version of her who wants to live with that.”

Sadie was silent for a minute, then two. A few bullfrogs started to croak nearby.

“It’s too late,” Sadie said at last, making me jump. I’d been staring at Tiaraq again. “I injected you as soon as you sat down.”

The sting of her nails. I started laughing. “Didn’t you say you knew what I’d choose?”

“I prefer not to take chances.”

The more it hurt, the more I laughed. “Neither do I.” I rubbed my hand, waiting out a few stray giggles. “I’ve already sent testimony with all of my awakened memories to Asphodel University, alongside your certification. I wish they could get more, but…”

I looked back at the tree. How had the artist done that—created a shadow instead of a nest, instead of a blue jay mother, instead of a broken egg? “This egg was nothing special,” I recited softly.

Sadie took a deep breath, the first sign she’d given of being under any strain at all. A begrudging admiration was all that remained of my infatuation. “Well,” she said, standing up. “I believe that’s it for our business here. If you experience any side effects, call the number embedded in my last message. I have also refunded you my fee.”

“That’s generous of you.”

She chose to ignore my sarcasm. “I do try to play fair. Good luck, Miz Barnes.”

“Good luck, Sadie,” I said softly.

She turned away and headed to the footpath. I did not call her back. Robert was already fading inside of me like an unmoored boat slowly going out with the tide. I did not call him back either.

The half-moon eyelid, Tiaraq had written three hundred years ago, Beneath.

I knelt beside the bronze Tiaraq, as different from the flesh as memory is from life, and wept over nothing.

(Editors’ Note: “The Shadow on the Nest” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 66B.)

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© 2025 Alaya Dawn Johnson

Award Honors: Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award Finalist