There was a knock on the door and everybody froze for a moment before Sandy ventured, "Come in?"
The door opened and a girl stood framed in the entrance. She seemed about Jonathan's age with dark hair pulled back tightly into a braid down the back of her head and startlingly blue eyes. She wore that white uniform with a silver insignia on the collar.
She was hauntingly, achingly familiar. This was no half-felt suggestion of recognition that Jonathan had felt looking at Nigs. This was solid, clear, immutable. He knew this girl.
"Sir," she saluted him, nodded to the others. "I am to show you to your cells."
"Cells?" Carmen said, sharply. "We're being locked up?"
The girl blinked. "Sleeping cells. The rooms...where you sleep...you know?"
"Who are you?" Jonathan demanded.
She looked at him slowly. "My name is Natalia Armstrong. You left the command of the youth corps to me when you went to sleep."
Jonathan felt as though his ears were ringing. Natalia...was this the Natalia he had meant?
"Yes, of course," he took a deep breath. "Lead on, please."
Natalia led the way silently, guiding them down identical white-painted corridors studded with unlabelled doors. They passed nobody else on the way.
"It's the middle of the night," Natalia explained. "Everyone is sleeping."
They said nothing else. Jonathan could feel his own heartbeat pounding as he made his way through this alien place, following a girl who made no sense to him.
"Here," she stopped, gesturing down a corridor to the right. "The rooms along here are yours. Your names are on the doors."
"Our old names," Nigs growled.
The girl said nothing for a second and then, "Sir, your room is this way."
"I'm not near them?" Jonathan worried. "Why not?"
"Because you are a commander," Natalia said, patiently. "You sleep elsewhere. Follow me, please?"
Casting a backwards glance to the other five, Jonathan followed Natalia away from them and down another corridor, already hopelessly lost.
"Do you remember me?" she asked, once they were out of earshot.
Jonathan didn't know how to answer. "I think I knew you once."
She laughed a little. "You don't sound certain."
"I'm not certain of anything anymore."
They stepped out into a large room filled with shiny, hard tables and shiny, hard chairs all in neat rows.
"What is this stuff?" Jonathan asked, rapping his knuckles on the nearest table.
"Plastic," Natalia looked amused. "You don't remember plastic?"
Jonathan shook his head. "I told you. I don't remember anything."
Natalia sighed and turned to face him. "John...look at me. Do you remember me at all?"
Jonathan studied her face. She was pretty in an angular way with a defined jawline and straight nose. Her eyes truly were mesmerising and her cheeks were flushing pink under his stare. He was seized by an unexpected desire to reach out and touch her there, on her cheekbone, just beneath her eyes.
But he didn't, because that was silly.
"I know that I knew you," he decided. "I wasn't sure about anyone else but I'm sure that I knew you."
Natalia looked away. "Sir, can I speak plainly?"
Jonathan shifted his feet. "I expect so. And you don't have to call me sir."
Natalia looked back up at him again and Jonathan nearly stepped back from the force of her gaze. "You more than knew me, John."
Jonathan was conscious of everything about her in a way that made him deeply uneasy. He coughed and took a step back.
"Did I?"
Natalia's cheeks flamed again. "Yes. I...yes. John...I...nothing."
An idea occurred to Jonathan that he hadn't previously thought of. He reached into his pocket and drew out the rose quartz stone that he had found under his pillow.
"Do you recognise this?" he asked.
Natalia's eyes lit up. "Yes! I left it there for you. I couldn't bear to think of you all alone...waking up with nothing..."
Jonathan rubbed his thumb over the polished surface. "It means something?"
Natalia gave a strange half-sob. "Yes."
Jonathan looked at her and felt...something. A flash of something, maybe a flicker, just a suggestion. He remembered the way she had looked two years ago, with a rounder face and younger eyes. He started, staring at her again.
"Natalia..."
"Come on," she said, her tone clipped. "You need to sleep."
"I've slept for two years," Jonathan protested.
"Nevertheless."
It was then that Jonathan saw what should have been obvious, for it dominated the whole room. He had been looking so intently at Natalia that he hadn't even noticed.
"What is that?" Jonathan asked, awed.
A photograph printed on canvas covered the entire wall, depicting a vast rising cloud of smoke, shaped like an umbrella pine. It spread and spread against the sky, the colour of fire, the colour of passion. It was inspiringly, mesmerizingly beautiful.
"August, 1945 O.T," Natalia swallowed hard. "That was the beginning of the world we know now, though they didn't know it then."
"But what is it?" Jonathan insisted.
"There used to be a place called America. And a place called Japan. They were at war, not like we are at war but differently. It was...closer. Are you sure you don't remember any of this?"
"Not yet. Go on."
"Well," Natalia hesitated. "They developed these weapons. You dropped them and...that. Millions died, incinerated. People now seem to think it was meaningless, unnecessary. It was all flames and smoke and death. Everyone. Innocent or guilty. It was the first step towards the society we have now."
"It's so..." Jonathan struggled for words.
Natalia nodded. "That's why they keep the picture here. 1945. The year the world discovered that evil could be beautiful."
Jonathan swallowed hard. "You say we're at war?"
"I think we are," Natalia hesitated. "We're...we're not meant to talk about it, actually. We're at war but there's not been any actual conflict in years. Sometimes...well..."
"What?" Jonathan pressed.
"You once told me that you thought it wasn't real," Natalia caved. "That they were only pretending we were still at war so that we'd all still be soldiers."
Jonathan's jaw dropped. "I said that?"
Natalia nodded. Jonathan tried to picture those words coming out of the mouth of that naïve uniformed boy he had seen earlier and couldn't do it. The two images seemed entirely at odds with each other.
"Did I often say things like that?"
Natalia looked at him as though he'd lost his mind. "You were the great hope, John, the future of the high command. Of course you didn't say them often. Or loudly."
"But to you?"
"Yes."
"Did I love you?" Jonathan asked, bluntly.
Natalia looked him straight in the eye. "Yes. And I loved you back."
"Well," Jonathan took a deep breath, "it was a while ago, wasn't it?"
Natalia sighed deeply. "Yes. It was that too."
Jonathan lay on the narrow bed and stared up at the ceiling above him. The paint was smooth, matt. There were no lines, no patterns to be seen, nothing to distract him from his own thoughts and send him off to sleep.
In truth, he was afraid to sleep. Sleeping seemed like the most threatening thing he had ever done, now that everything was a dream.
His mind churned and swirled, trying to make sense of everything that had happened in the past hour or so since he had woken up and found out that he had lived a lie. There seemed to be little he could hold on to, little he could trust. He wasn't even sure he could trust himself.
He wanted to trust the others who had been in that room, who had slept like him. They were going through the same ordeal, after all. But could he? Was that wise? Carmen, with her bitter temper, Miriam, who seemed so unstable, Ebb, who was entirely unreadable...were these people he wanted to rely on?
He wanted to trust Natalia too. He liked her. He liked how capable she seemed to be, and how self-assured. He liked the fact that she could answer a straight question with a straight answer. She was the most familiar thing in all of this, an anchor to cling to.
But, then again, she made him uneasy. He didn't like the way she looked at him, like she knew him better than he knew himself. He didn't like her smile, which he couldn't read at all, or the way she glanced at him as if waiting for something. She made him nervous.
He'd been in love with her. It didn't occur to him that she might have been lying. She had seemed certain, and something in him knew that it made sense. He could see how it would have happened, too. Perhaps, if not for Lucia, it could have happened again.
But there was Lucia and Natalia was nothing to her, nothing at all. Jonathan wanted, in a strange way, to be the person Natalia wanted him to be, to be John, the hero of the hour, but he couldn't. Because he wasn't. He was a resistance fighter, an orphan, a friend of renegades and thieves. He was no clean-cut military boy. He would not be.
He tossed and turned until his limbs, tired out by all this action after so long stationary, forced him to lie still again. At some point, he must have slept because he remembered nothing else.