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Rosemary Winters’ earliest memory is of her father. She doesn’t remember being a baby – not on her own, anyway – but she does remember finding him. She was four, she thinks. It’s hard to tell. She still had her little bed, the pink one Mom picked out for her, and she remembers waking up from a nightmare and hiding under the covers, crying, and going in. And there was somebody there to catch her, somebody with warm arms and a familiar smell of aftershave. (Mom kept a bottle of it by her bed; Rose had caught her crying over it more than once, over the years. Mom would put it on her pillowcase sometimes, and it would linger, and Rose knew the scent so well.)
“Rose,” he said. “Hey, Rosie. It’s okay.” And he hugged her. She remembers being so small, wrapping her little legs around his waist and her little arms around his neck and holding on as tight as she could, and he hugged her and hugged her and rocked back and forth. “I love you, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m here. It’s okay.”
That was it – that was the whole memory. But it was there, it was real, no matter how much Mom and Chris told her it wasn’t. Rose remembered him.
They’re all there, of course. Zoe and Eveline and Marguerite and Jack and Miranda and all the rest. Mom was there, and Dad, and even Rose herself, little baby Rose who still remembered being born, in her little baby way. They aren’t part of Rose, but they’re in her, like screws in her leg bones after a bad break or something. Not that they hold her together or anything – maybe it’s a bad analogy. But they’re in there, and she can get at them when she wants to. They don’t bother her, really. Jack and Marguerite and Zoe are nice; Lucas, she doesn’t talk to. Miranda and Eveline scared Rose so badly as a kid that she didn’t touch them for years and years after the first time. (She slept in Mom’s bed for a whole month after she found Miranda – Mom took her to a child psychologist, worried Rose was uncovering repressed memories or something, but then Rose found Eveline and Mom realized what was really going on.
“Oh my god. Eveline? Are you sure that was the name?” Mom had said. Rose had been seven – she remembered being able to see how scared Mom was, even then.
“Yeah,” she’d said. “She was scary.”
“Did she hurt you? Did she touch you? What happened?” Mom was visibly struggling to stay calm.
“No. She said mean things to me.”
“What did she say?”
It had gone on like that for awhile.)
After the psychologist came all the tests, and the doctors, and Chris. Chris had always been there, sort of a weird, gruff uncle who would turn up sometimes and try to be nice to her. He’d give her candy, but it was so obviously a calculated bribe that it never really won Rose over. She remembered him being there when they took blood, giving her a lollipop after and smiling like it kind of hurt his face to do it. She lost a tooth on it in the car on the ride home.
When the labs came back, Chris was there. Mom always seemed kind of pissed at him, but she also leaned on him for support. Rose hadn’t known what to make of that as a child. She understood the situation a little better now. Rose remembered hearing raised voices and sneaking to the banister, listening to them in the kitchen – Mom and Chris, arguing.
“She’s a bioweapon, Mia!” Chris said. Rose didn’t know what a ‘bioweapon’ was, but –
“Don’t you ever call my daughter that again,” Mom snarled – Rose guessed it was bad.
I’m bad, she thought. Chris thinks I’m bad. Is he right?
She asked Dad about it. He was always right there, in her head, whenever she wanted him.
“Daddy? What’s a bioweapon?” she said.
“Where did you hear that word?” Dad asked. Rose sat next to him in a blurry place – there was a couch for them to sit on, at least. The rest of the room didn’t matter.
She pulled her knees up and put her chin on them. “Chris says I’m one.”
“Chris can – ” Her dad broke off and sighed, running a hand over his mouth. He’d sounded so angry at first, but he was much calmer when he said, “Chris is wrong.”
“But what is it?” Rose asked.
“It’s what Chris calls people who are… different.”
“Different how?”
Dad sighed again. “Some people… they try to change other people, to make them stronger, or better at fighting. They call them ‘bioweapons’ if the changes work.”
“So I’m strong and good at fighting?” said Rose. That sounded pretty cool, actually. “Mommy acted like it was bad.”
“What did she say?” said Dad.
“She told Chris to never call me a bioweapon again. She was really mad.”
“Good,” Dad said. “He shouldn’t call you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not a weapon, honey. You’re a person. People call other people ‘bioweapons’ so they can treat them like things, but you’re not a thing. You’re a human being, and people should treat you like one.”
“Oh,” Rose said.
Dad frowned at her, concerned. “What else did Chris say?” he asked.
“I didn’t understand most of it. He was talking about BSAs and training and muta – muta – ” She couldn’t remember the word.
“Mutamycetes?” Dad asked.
“Yeah! That. Is that a kind of mouse?”
Dad laughed a little. “No, honey. It’s a special kind of mushroom.”
“Like to eat?”
“No, not to eat. It’s very dangerous. It can grow very big, and it’s alive – or it was. It’s dead now, I think.”
“What does it do?” Rose said.
“It changes people,” Dad said grimly.
“Does it change them into bioweapons?” Rose asked.
Dad looked at her sharply. “Sometimes,” he said.
“Did it change me?” she asked.
Dad gave her a look Rose couldn’t interpret – his eyes seemed to go a million miles deep, and his mouth drew in a little, and he took a slow breath and let it out. “I don’t know,” he said.
Rose discovered she didn’t have to talk to the people in her head – she could sort through their memories, their knowledge. It was sort of like digging through the card catalog at the library – she could find what she needed and reach the relevant memory, and it got easier with practice. Miranda helped her ace bio her freshman year of high school, and then chem the year after. Dad could help a little with physics, and he knew a lot about computers. He also taught her how to use a gun. His memories were scary, a lot of them; Rose still had nightmares sometimes about the lycans in the village where he died, and about the dolls, and Mother Miranda. (The Louisiana memories, she was smart enough to leave alone.) She would dream about running and running and looking for her Dad everywhere, and knowing, knowing he was dead, but still trying desperately to find him. If she could just find him, she would be safe and he would be alive, but if she couldn’t find him then he would be dead – dream logic. She’d wake up and go in and find him for a hug.
“You’re getting so big, Rosemary,” he’d say, and wrap his arms around her.
Mom and Chris and the doctors explained to her about the imprints, in simple terms when she was younger, and then in more detail when she got older and could understand the science behind it.
“They’re not real people, sweetie,” Mom said. “Do they bother you? Do they talk to you? We could try to find out a way to get rid of them.” She was always worried about Eveline.
“No!” Rose clutched at the chest of her jacket, holding it closed as though that could somehow protect her. “They don’t bother me. Really! They don’t! They never talk to me unless I talk to them first!” She was nine, then.
“Do you talk to Eveline?” Mom asked, her eyes sharp.
“Never,” Rose lied.
“Are you telling me the truth, honey?” Mom’s eyes were so sharp.
Rose looked her in the eye and scowled defiantly. “Yeah.”
Mom sighed. “Okay,” she said.
Chris started taking Rose to the shooting range as soon as she was old enough. Mom didn’t like it, but – “She’s gonna need this, Mia,” Chris had said, all steely-eyed the way he got when he knew he was right, and Mom had given in. After a lecture in the car on the way over – trigger discipline, muzzle discipline, and Chris’s general opinions on gun safety; he’d given Dad the same lecture, about seventeen years ago – he was shocked when she nailed a bullseye on the target on her very first try. Rose was surprised by the kick of the gun – Dad’s hands were stronger, she guessed, so he didn’t feel it as much – but she felt his memories like they were her own.
“Try again,” Chris said, pretending not to be impressed.
So Rose obeyed, and nailed another bullseye, and Chris looked at her sidelong the way that meant most people would have been goggling at her, and so Rose popped the bullet out of the chamber and unloaded the magazine all in a few quick motions, then set the gun down on the railing.
“Who taught you how to do that?” Chris demanded.
“My dad,” Rose said.
“Your dad – shit. Damn imprints,” Chris muttered.
Rose smiled at him, and batted her eyelashes a little. Chris just scowled and made her reload her gun.
Everybody looked at her different, after that. Even Mom. It wasn’t quite the same, though – Chris looked at her a little askance, like he didn’t like not knowing what Rose knew. Chris’s minions looked at her with more respect; she wasn’t just some cute kid to them anymore. But Mom looked at her with something like longing.
“You really have your dad in there, don’t you?” she asked one day.
“I used to tell you what he said when I was a kid,” Rose pointed out. “This isn’t news, Mom.”
“I know, but… I thought he was just an imaginary friend, back then.”
Rose scoffed. “An imaginary Dad?”
“I knew about – about Evie – but I never really thought…” Mom sighed.
“Do you want me to tell him something for you?” Rose asked.
“No, honey. That wouldn’t be right. He’s dead, and what you have of him is just a memory. I’ve said my goodbyes. I’m just glad he could still be here for you, somehow.”
“I know he loved you,” Rose offered.
“I know that too, sweetie,” Mom said.
“Mom misses you,” Rose told him.
“I miss her too,” Dad said.
“You can’t hang out with her? She’s in here with you,” Rose said. Mom was in there, from back in Louisiana, and she mostly stayed out of those memories – it didn’t feel right to go digging, somehow.
“No, honey,” Dad said.
“What’s it like for you when I’m not around?” she asked.
“It’s not,” he said.
The thing about the other ones was, they didn’t remember. Jack and Marguerite never knew her, no matter how many times Rose talked to them. Miranda was sure Rose was still a baby; Mom was too scared and confused to understand who she was at all. But Dad, he remembered. He remembered hugging her after that nightmare when she was four, and he talked about it – he’d ask her how school was going, if there was anyone she liked, or anyone she like liked, and then he’d ask again later; he followed her crush on Alex McCall like it was the World fucking Series. It wouldn’t have been the same, if he hadn’t remembered, if she’d had to explain who she was every time she saw him. But Dad always knew her, even when she was four and too young to understand what she was doing when she went to him, too young to explain any of it. He was just there, and he just knew.
“Hey Dad.” She liked to go to his grave, even though she had him in her head. It made her feel closer to him, somehow. Rose wanted nothing so much as a real hug from her father, not just an imaginary one. She’d spray a little of his aftershave onto the collar of his jacket sometimes, and then wear it and wrap her arms around herself and shut her eyes and just pretend.
“Hey, Rosie,” he said.
“I miss you today.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
Rose lay down on his grave, pillowing her head on her arm. “Can you give me a hug?” she asked.
“Course I can.” And he wrapped his arms around her so tight she squeaked, and lifted her feet off the floor with the strength of it. “I love you,” he said, his voice a little tight with effort.
Tears burned behind her eyelids. “I want a real hug, Daddy.”
“Oh, Rose. Rosie, I’m sorry.”
Rose sniffed. “I know,” she said.
What does it mean for something to be real? Does it have to be something you can touch? The wind is real, but you can’t hold it in your hand. Light is real, but you can’t pick it up. Dead people are real, but you can’t hug them. Everybody says Dad is just an imprint. Rose isn’t so sure.
“What about this training Chris has you doing? Is it safe? Does he want to put you in actual combat?”
“I don’t know, Dad.” Rose rolled her eyes.
“Well, I want to know. You tell Chris he has enough soldiers – he doesn’t need you too.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’ll go over great,” she said.
Dad was pacing, running a hand through his hair. “You’re only sixteen, for Christ’s sake!” he said.
“And in two years I’ll be eighteen and I can join the Army, so what’s the big deal? It’s not like I don’t already have a head start from the imprints, anyway,” Rose pointed out.
“You should get to be a normal kid, not a child soldier. You deserve a normal life. Don’t you want that?” Dad said.
“But I’m not normal. I’ve never been normal. Because I have you in my head, and everybody else, and I know all these things I shouldn’t know and I’ve seen all these things I shouldn’t have seen, and everybody’s always telling me you’re not even real, but I tell you what, Dad, I promise if I get shot you’ll be right here to put an invisible band-aid on it the way you used to when I skinned my knee, okay?”
“Rosie…” He looked so sad, but Rose had worked up too much of a head of steam to stop now.
“I saw those monsters you fought in Louisiana! I saw the ones you fought in Europe! I saw the ones that killed you! And I’m not supposed to be allowed to learn how to handle a knife and a gun? I’m not supposed to get the training that you got to keep you safe that let you save me when I’m the one who was in danger in the first place? That’s not fair! At least this way I get to learn how to defend myself, for the next time a bunch of horrible monsters threaten this family. Maybe if Chris trains me well enough, I won’t get fucking killed fighting them!”
And Dad looked at her with all the hurt in the world in his eyes, and Rose lifted her chin and tried to tell herself she didn’t feel bad about it at all.
She wakes up from his nightmares, sometimes. The more Chris trained her, the more Rose started to dig into the bad memories – Louisiana, the village – she wanted to learn how to fight, how to run, how to hide, how to hurt. She learned more than she bargained for. Fighting black mold monsters in dark basements, shooting Mom in the face and watching her get back up again, the swarms of lycans, Lady Dimitrescu and her horrible claws, losing her hand again and again and again – and now, Rose dreams about the time with the hatchet. She dreams about the screwdriver and the chainsaw. She dreams about knives, about death, about the tang of blood and gunpowder on the air.
Louisiana is worse. It was the first time. She dreams about Dad dying, about the first death, the false death. Nobody else knows about that, she thinks – nobody else knows what he was, what he is. If imprints aren’t real, then how was she conceived? If imprints aren’t real, then why is Dad always there to comfort her when she wakes up gasping in the night, the dolls’ blades inches from her throat?
“Does it bother you, living in my head?” she asks him one night, leaning her cheek on his shoulder as they sit together, drinking imaginary hot cocoa after a particularly bad nightmare.
“No,” Dad says. “It means I get to see you. I get to be with you. I get to know you, Rosie. I should be dead. Do you know how much of a privilege it is, just to be here?”
“Quit talking like you’re giving an acceptance speech.”
“I love you, sweetheart. I’m just happy I got to be your dad, in some capacity. You know?”
“I’m happy you got to be my dad too,” she says.
His jacket hangs in her closet. Rose remembers the day she spilled paint on it at school and came home crying; she still doesn’t know how Mom got the stain out. She stole a few of his shirts out of the box Mom keeps under the bed – she wears them sometimes, for pajamas or over a tank top. A dead dad can have a presence in her closet, but a real dad would be in her head too. A real dad makes memories with her, late nights drinking hot chocolate and hugs for a crying four-year-old. A real dad has a jacket she can swipe, has aftershave she can spray on the collar. A real dad still loves her.
What is the difference between a man and a memory, if the memory still moves? What does it mean to be real?
Chris sends her on missions and Dad hates it. He chafes, he yells, he complains, and he can’t do shit, because he’s stuck in her head. Rose doesn’t mind the first one. It’s scary, but not as bad as Louisiana. The second one is interesting. The third one is a pain in the ass. The fourth one hurts, hurts bad, and Dad tries to make her swear off doing any more of them after seeing her injuries, and Rose almost agrees with him. Mom agrees with him too, which isn’t that surprising, but Chris is adamant.
“Don’t you get a say in this?” Dad demands.
“I’m a bioweapon,” Rose says.
“Don’t call yourself that! You’re a person, dammit!”
“Chris knows that. But he also knows what I’m good for.”
“You are worth so much more than your military value, sweetheart,” he says fiercely.
Rose shrugs her good shoulder. “Thanks,” she says.
“I want you off Chris’s squad,” Mom says.
“Tell him that,” says Rose.
“I did!”
“And what did he say?”
“He told me to fuck off.”
“Really?” Rose chortles.
“Not in so many words, but yeah,” says Mom.
“What did he actually say, though?”
“He said he’d only hear it from you. But you won’t tell him, will you?”
Rose shrugs.
“Do you want off the squad, sweetie? You got hurt so badly last time.” Worry is alive and well in Mom’s eyes. “What does your dad say?”
“Oh, he hates that I got hurt. He wants me off the squad too.”
“I guess Chris is outvoted, then,” Mom says.
“Everybody is trying to tell me what to fucking do. You want me off the squad, Chris wants me on the squad. Doesn’t anybody care what I want?” Rose demands.
“What do you want, then?” Mom asks.
And Rose doesn’t know how to answer.
What does she like? What does she hate? She knows what she’s good at because of the imprints – biology, chemistry, computers, electronics, cars – Jack Baker was a fucking plumber and now she knows how to do that – plus the fighting, the killing – what she’s good at because of the mutamycete – what she’s good at because of her dad. Does she want to keep doing what she’s good at? Rose is made up of so many people. What does that make her?
“Dad, who am I?” Rose asks one night.
“You’re Rosie,” he says simply.
“But who am I? I don’t know what I am. Where do I stop and you begin? Where’s the fucking line?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“All these imprints in my head, I never got to find out what I’m good at, what I like, what I want. Chris and the squad and you and Mom… Everybody wants something from me.”
“Just because you can give it doesn’t mean you should,” Dad says.
“Does that mean I should stay on the squad, or leave?” Rose asks.
“You want my advice?”
“I know, you want me off the squad.”
“No – listen. Take a hiatus from the squad. Go to college. Figure out what you want. Don’t major in bio or chem just because of Miranda – just take a bunch of classes. You have the grades to go anywhere you like – so do it. You took a few gap years, and that’s fine. Maybe you’ll figure out that you hate academics and you just want to stab shit, I don’t know. But it’s a chance to do something just for you. Screw Chris and Mom and me and what we want. You don’t know what you want? Neither does anybody when they’re twenty. So go find out,” Dad says.
“But what if Chris needs me?” Rose says.
“Chris is a big boy. He’ll live.”
“I need to think about it.”
“Good idea,” Dad says. “Don’t listen to me, I’m just some old fart.”
“You’re like seven years older than me,” Rose says.
Dad puts a hand to his chest. “Ten,” he says snootily.
Rose giggles and shoves him. “Shut up.” And he grins at her.
“Fine,” Chris says.
“Fine?” Rose goggles at him.
“Fine. Go to college. Just remember – you can quit this squad, but you can’t quit being what you are, Rose.”
“A bioweapon?” she says.
“I thought you didn’t like it when people called you that.”
“I don’t. Well, Dad doesn’t.”
Chris’s eyes sharpen. “How is your dad these days?”
“He said I should go to college, and I think he’s got a point,” says Rose.
“Did he now.”
“Yeah. He did.”
Chris sighs, dropping his pen on his desk with the air of a defeated man. “Okay. Go on, then. What are you still sitting here for? Go to fucking college already, Jesus.”
Rose gets up. “Fine,” she says.
“Hey, Rose – ”
She pauses in the doorway of his office.
“I only ever wanted what was best for you,” Chris says. “You tell your dad that for me.”
What makes a person a person? Is it their body? Their mind? Their soul? Do they have to walk and talk and live and breathe? Rose thinks maybe it’s the way they grow, they way they change, the way they learn and remember. She wraps her dad’s jacket tighter around herself as she walks from Chris’s office to the bus stop, looking inward; her feet know the way well enough that she doesn’t have to pay attention to anything else.
“Hey Dad,” she says. “Guess what?”
He slings an arm around her shoulders. “What’s up, Rosie?” he says.