As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott Page B

you figured out how to get here or anything, I swear. And you know I should ask you that. I should tell the SAT you figured it out. Or go to the head of security for the PDM.”
    “I don’t care what you swear or what you want—I want to know why you did it.”
    “You know why,” Clementine says. “It’s my job. I take care of problems. And more than that, I would do anything—”
    “Send her back.”
    “She has a life here,” Clementine says. “She doesn’t know you.”
    “She does.”
    “No,” Clementine says, her voice weary-sounding. “She doesn’t. Go home, Morgan. Go before it’s too late.”
    I hear the sounds of someone walking away, and push myself deeper into the ditch, half expecting to see Clementine peering into it any second.
    “You can come out now,” Morgan says, and I look up.
    The smile on his face makes something deep inside me, something beyond memory, ache.
    “You knew I was here?” I say, sitting up, and he nods.
    Morgan does look strange, his skin so pale it’s almost transparent in the sunlight. But his eyes, when they meet mine, are as dark as memories I didn’t think were real until now.
    But they were. They are.
    I remember another place because that’s where I was. Where I’m from.
    I remember Morgan because I—the Ava I really am—knows him.
    “I—here, I can feel everything you do,” he says. “It’s how I found you. And I know—I know you’re in there, Ava, and I know this—” He points at Jane’s house, at the road he’s standing on. “I know this doesn’t feel right to you.”
    “No,” I say, and it comes out easily, so easily.
    So true.
    “I knew you’d remember me,” Morgan says, and reaches one hand up slowly, carefully, and cups my face, fingers rubbing gently over my jaw. “Clementine thought she’d make you forget but she doesn’t know you. You’re so strong. So—”
    “Morgan,” I say, the memories—and they are memories, moments so real I can almost feel them right now, my skin and blood singing so loudly I’m surprised it can’t be heard.
    He kisses me then and I know him. I would know him anywhere. In a thousand different worlds, as a thousand different Avas, he would always call to my heart.
    He pulls away, head tilted as if he is thinking, and without closing my eyes, without doing anything, we aren’t standing by Jane’s house anymore. We are in a dark bar and he’s looking at me the same way, watching me as I cup my hands around a drink.
    “Come away with me,” he says, his voice so soft I can barely hear it over the quiet, desperate sadness of the bar and everyone sitting in it, holding their own cups and hoping to forget the world for a little while.
    “I can’t,” I say. “If I leave my job, the city, I—they won’t kill me if they catch me. They’ll take me to the crèche and make me an example. Make me . . . I would wish for death long before it ever came.”
    “They won’t catch us.”
    “I—this is everything I’ve worked for. My whole life, this is all I ever wanted.”
    “And now?”
    I circle my hands around my cup tighter. This life was all I ever wanted until now. Until him.
    “All right,” he says, after a long moment, a moment where I haven’t said a word, where I have sat on the screaming want inside me and forced it down. Forced it silent. “I—I should go. I should stop reading books that get people like you sent to watch me. I should go and finish school and be assigned a job and meet a partner the government wants for me and never see you again. I should go and forget you but I can’t. I don’t want to.”
    He stands up, sliding on his coat. “I would rather have memories of you than anything else. You—what I feel when I look at you is the most real thing I have ever known.”
    He walks out. He does not look back. I finish my drink, and then order another one. When I’m done, when I walk outside, I start walking, then turn back around, avoiding the well-lit sidewalk and turning