The details of my time in the village were already blurring around the edges but, starting at the top of the page, I recorded everything I could remember about the people I’d met there. I’d spoken to so many that their stories ran together. Three and four grown men to a bed. Pregnant with one whilst nursing two. Can’t remember my real name, but they call me Scamper. I don’t eat much, weren’t much to eat. Got erased twice that year, once more the next, for missing work. Had a good woman once, I believe, two Rebirths ago.

Tears coursed down my cheeks as I wrote their tragic stories and remembered their faces. As desperate as they’d been, sick and dying, they had found reasons to laugh with each other, tossing out their precious recollections like dice. They had rolled out the village fool for a laugh. He was so stupid, they said, he thought every day was Sunday. He would sleep in until seven, waiting for worship, then hop up and race to the field. At twenty he’d been erased so often, as punishment for being late, that he was no longer good for anything but shoveling manure. The Guard wouldn’t even have him. On and on—they’d laughed and hooted between coughs. Only I knew that such forgetfulness was a medical condition, most likely the result of a misfire.

I worked late into the night, hammering out a dozen stories. It wasn’t easy. After a lifetime of Rebirths, the workers recalled their lives in bits and pieces. So, the act of recording was patchwork. We collected segments, here and there, and we made sense of them. No one understood why some memories were scattered, some were repressed and others lost entirely, but the English were constantly searching for an answer. They issued new and improved formulas every few years, but the wipe was never clean.

The workers nurtured their own set of beliefs concerning this. To them, the pieces that remained at the end of a lifetime were sacred and indestructible—morsels of their soul. Consequently, a letter from Hasting was, to them, an invitation to heaven. A pass to eternity, made even more precious by the fragmented life they’d lived.

I closed the notebook and got into bed, the teeth of the matter still sunk in my throat. I fell into an exhausted sleep filled with dreams—pale hands, dark faces, and memories of my old nursery.

The Second Trip to the Village

THE SECOND TRIP TO THE VILLAGE

“Arika, come now,” a voice said.

I jerked awake. A hand covered my mouth.

“It is I, William,” he said. “Arika, come now.”

I couldn’t distinguish his face in the night, but his tone was unmistakable. Something was wrong.

I didn’t stop to ask how he’d gotten into my room. I pushed his hand aside and whispered, “Get my shoes.”