Unforgotten(4)

I can’t forget.





2

FOREIGN



Living and working on a farm in the countryside of England is one of the many precautions we’ve taken to stay off Diotech’s radar. Zen thought it would be better if money never changed hands and no official transactions were recorded. So we work here in exchange for a place to live and food to eat.

I enjoy farm life. It’s not overly complicated. There is a set of tasks to undertake each day and I feel satisfaction in completing every one. Like hundreds of tiny victories. Plus it’s quiet here. Peaceful.

John Pattinson owns and runs the farm, while his wife, Elizabeth, tends to the maintenance of the home and their four children. Zen mostly works alongside Mr. Pattinson, helping with the sowing, plowing, reaping, and general upkeep of the crops. I help Mrs. Pattinson with the domestic chores and the care of the animals.

The problem is, Mrs. Pattinson doesn’t like me. Zen says I’m being paranoid but it’s something I just know. Sometimes I catch her watching me as I’m going about my work. She has a suspicious look in her eyes. Like she’s waiting for me to screw up. To show who I really am.

I think she can sense that I’m different. That I don’t fit in here.

I suppose neither does Zen. After all, he was born five hundred years in the future. And seventeenth-century farmwork is something we both had to learn very quickly. But somehow he’s been able to assimilate a lot easier than I have.

That’s one of the (many) downsides of being created by scientists in a lab. You simply stand out. Even if people don’t quite know why. They can perceive there’s something strange about you. Something unnatural about the way you were brought onto this earth.

That’s what Mrs. Pattinson senses. Whether she understands it or not is irrelevant. I understand it. Which is why I always feel like I have to tread carefully when she’s around.

I remember one of the first things she said to me when I arrived. She looked right at me, her gaze darting skeptically up and down my entire body before finally landing on my eyes.

“I’ve never seen purple eyes before,” she said, her tone brusque and accusing.

I swallowed hard and opened my mouth to speak. Even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would say or how I would recover.

Thankfully, Zen was prepared, as always. He stepped forward, put his hand gently on my arm, and replied, “Her great-grandmother was from the Orient. Lots of purple eyes out there.”

“It doesn’t matter that it’s not true,” Zen later explained to me. “It only matters that she believed it.”

But I wasn’t even sure about that. She may never have mentioned it again, but I see the doubt on her face every time she looks at me. I hear it in her gruff tone when she addresses me.

Her children don’t seem to like me either. They pretty much avoid me as much as they can.

The only person in the house who doesn’t seem bothered by my presence is Mr. Pattinson. But I don’t consider that any type of accomplishment. He’s a sweet-tempered, jovial man who appears to love everyone. If his wife has voiced any objections to us being here, he certainly hasn’t entertained them. It’s fairly clear that, in this time period, the man of the house makes all the decisions.

Because it was Mr. Pattinson who, six months ago on a chilly day in late March, agreed to let us work here in exchange for food and lodging. He was the one who welcomed an unknown eighteen-year-old boy and sixteen-year-old girl with open arms and offered to lend us some of his and his wife’s clothing. And he was the one who enthusiastically ate up Zen’s story about us being newlyweds who were both born and raised aboard merchant ships that have been sailing back and forth from the Far East for the majority of our lives, which accounts for our “funny accents.”

I was actually quite surprised to see how prepared Zen was when we arrived. Everything had been carefully thought-out ahead of time, even down to our fake period-appropriate names—Sarah and Ben. He told me that, in reality, the plan was as much mine as it was his. We’d been working on the details for months before we left the Diotech compound. Of course, I have no recollection of this.

But even if I had remembered planning our cover story, I was glad Zen was the one to deliver it. He’s a natural storyteller. When he speaks, his voice is so calming, his face so earnest, it’s hard not to invite him right into your home.

The boys, Thomas, James, and Myles, are enamored of him. They sit around the fireplace for hours every night after dinner, listening to Zen tell made-up stories about his life on the high seas with his father, the merchant trader. Sometimes I even find myself leaning forward in my seat with anticipation, waiting to hear what comes next, desperate to find out whether or not the crew really can fight off a Chinese giant squid and live to tell about it. I then have to remind myself, with sinking disappointment, that none of it actually happened.