Breaking Sound (Chapter 5)

by Sarah Alsgaard

Chapter Five

Nilas
Search (Measure 1)

“There’s nothing left of him! So please, please, I must ask that you leave him be. What else could you do to him? What more could you want?”

The old man looked up at me with absolute desperation. His son had lost his mind right in front of him. It was hardly my fault. The son was now slumped on the ground, and I only had to take his hand into mine.

When I touched his wrist, I could feel the younger man’s thoughts crawl up my hand and dig into my skin. The thoughts were desperate to leave their previous keeper, as though they had sensed the man’s future. I closed my eyes briefly and sifted through the grains of memories I’d newly gained.

Where had the man buried the most precious memory within these thoughts?

“Please,” the old man pleaded. “Please, leave my son alone.”

“He is very much a hollowed man now, and I will be leaving very shortly,” I said while I continued looking. “Is not that leaving him alone?”

The son’s memories that I had taken began playing before my eyes again.

I could see the old man in one of his memories, smiling with his hands around a woman’s waist. The son, a boy in the memory, looked up at his father and started laughing.

“What did you do to him?” the old man cried, back in the present.

There would be one memory more carefully buried than the others. I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on one memory moving before me, trying to escape unnoticed. I felt the old mans dry hands feebly try to push and pull at me, a sad attempt to distract me from this single memory flashing before my eyes. I laughed and shoved him aside. I heard his head crack against the dresser, and felt content enough that I was on the right track with this memory.

The memory continued playing against the back of my eyelids. The old man in the memory suddenly seemed very grave when he and his son were playing on a swing set. The old man set his son on his knee, still swinging gently back and forth on the swing, and looked over at his wife nervously. She sat on a park bench leafing through a newspaper.

“We,” the man cleared his throat. “There’s a secret I must tell you now and you must swear never to repeat it to anyone.”

I could see through the boy’s eyes that the man was deeply afraid of uttering the secret even to his son. Memories from other psychics had revealed the same to me. All afraid of the truth they hid. The boy nodded his little head earnestly and grew still.

“There’s someone you must protect.”

“What’s the secret?” the boy asked.

“The fact that this one special psychic that you must protect even exists is the secret,” his father said. “Your mission is to guard a psychic who holds an even graver secret. There should be someone who comes along and tells you this later in life, but it always has passed through our family, this secret. So I wanted to tell you, myself.”

“When do I have to protect this person…this secret?” the boy asked.

“Soon,” the father said. “Whenever the archivist wishes.” Tears welled up in the man’s eyes. He patted the boy’s head. “Yes, your power is strong enough to protect her now. Yes….you will leave here tomorrow to go see the archivist.”

“But how will I find her? What’s an archivist?” the boy said. His father remained silent. In desperation, the son cried out, “I don’t even know her name! Who am I supposed to protect?”

The father looked around nervously. He nodded at his wife, who had looked up, and she returned to her papers. Finally, certain no one else could hear, he leaned down to the boy, unaware that one day he would be whispering it into my ear. “When you arrive at the airport tomorrow, there will be many people holding signs with names on them. You will know the archivist because he will be the one holding a sign with the name ‘Salezra’ on it. That is who you must protect.”

Perfect.

I opened my eyes and tucked the memories deep into the pockets of my mind. Thousands of memories from each psychic I had touched remained there, each neatly stored for access at any time.

The son, though I had now emptied his mind, reached out for his father and felt the blood running on the ground coming from the old man. He started to cry, though he had no reason to. I had taken every single one of his memories that would suggest he should be saddened by this. A strong psychic, I thought, to maintain some shred of himself after I had taken his memories. .

My cell phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and waited for the usual three- second pause.

“Are you finished?”

She always seemed so impatient to me.

“Yes, send him here for cleaning any time you want. These two will not be moving for a while.”

“You always have to think of the police,” she said.

“The entire Corporation could come knocking at the door and I wouldn’t feel bothered right now.”

“A good night, then,” she said, her voice lifting into careful optimism. “Good. Progress is good, isn’t it?”

“However slow,” I muttered.

“I’m sending him now,” she said. “Please feel at ease to move on to your next target.”

“Thank you,” I heard myself say, though I never knew exactly why. “Thank you,” I said again.

“Always,” she said and hung up.