Memorymakers by Brian Herbert, Marie Landis

do? She remembered Mrs. Belfer’s warnings about strange men in strange places who did strange things. She thought about school and how the eighth grade girls discussed s-e-x with one another and giggled over its knowns and unknowns. Some of the more knowledgeable girls, the ones who watched soap operas and read romance novels and had dates, were more specific about the details.
    Emily had but one experience, during the previous summer vacation. It was a story she’d never related to any of the other girls, fearing their derision. She’d always had trouble forming friendships because of her shyness. She was smaller than the other girls in her class, too, and this bothered her.
    Her experience, if she could call it that, concerned an older boy who had taken her sailing. He was the son of a bank executive and his parents belonged to the tennis club, so Victoria gave immediate permission for the date. At the first opportunity when they were on the water, the boy tried to pull Emily’s blouse off. She kicked him hard in the groin, dove overboard and swam to shore. Not much chance for that sort of escape now, and she had Thomas to worry about as well.
    Squick turned on the light. “Welcome to our game room.”
    The room was filled with gadgets, games and dolls. A puppet theater dominated one corner, with red velvet curtains across a gilt-edged stage. Two exquisitely fabricated puppets dangled from the curtain rod. Their tiny wooden hands clung to the strings that held them, each finger a perfect replica of a human’s.
    One of the puppets, with glitter-green eyes, looked a bit like Thomas.
    “Have fun,” Squick said. “I’ll be back for you.” He stepped through the door, closed it.
    Emily heard the click of a lock.

Chapter 8

    I wonder what it’s like undergoing an embidium extraction. Has it ever been attempted on a Ch’Var?
    From an anonymous letter to the Director

    It was a golden train, an engine and five passenger cars, on a golden track in a golden room, and Squick paused momentarily in the doorway to watch the boy roll tile train back and forth.
    The boy looked up and smiled quizzically.
    “Hello, Tom-Tom,” Squick said.
    “It doesn’t have a motor. I looked.”
    “That doesn’t mean one isn’t there.” Squick approached, sizing up his prey, this remarkable child. The Harvey boy seemed alert and unchanged despite the extraction, and he had a trusting openness about him. It almost seemed too easy, as if a trap had been set for Squick.
    But what sort of trap could this be? From children? Squick recalled his childhood ethics classes and a folktale, “Rescue of the Gweens,” about an evil Ch’Var who preyed upon Gweenchildren and abused them sexually. In the story Lordmother intervened, and the Ch’Var, having lost face, committed ritual shittah.
    Squick placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, felt the delicate child bones beneath the fabric of Thomas’s shirt. Bones fragile enough to snap.
    Thomas pulled away and lowered his face to the level of the train’s engine car, peering through openings in the side of the toy. He lifted it from the track, unhitched the coupling that held it to the string of cars and let the cars back down on the track.
    “There’s no motor in there!” Thomas insisted.
    “I didn’t say where it was.”
    “You’re teasing!”
    “Do you like this game?”
    “Where’s the motor? In one of the other cars?”
    “Look in the mirror.”
    “What mirror? What do you mean? Oh, you mean ’m . ..?”
    Squick nodded. “You’re the motor, whenever you push it. The thing’s made of gold. Every item in this room is, with varying alloys. Maybe a golden engine wasn’t practical.”
    Gold, gold, Squick thought. Are you the goose with golden eggs? Lay me another embidium, goose!
    In one of Squick’s hands appeared an array of nearly flat candy bars in varying fruit and chocolate flavors, held like playing cards. “Pick a candy, any candy,” he said.
    Thomas held back, then