Plunging the knife into grass reminded him of the days at school with his old friends. You shove it in, dig into dirt until you have shoveled up a good pile, gather it and push it to the edge so that it doesn’t fall back. Then you turn the knife inside, shake it a bit to widen the fissure, go on digging and bending it around. Both hands on the knife, Jokori went on like that until the two parts he’d bored met into a circle, then leaped up, his knees creaking.

Travel back to time and tell me I would be here today, doing this dirty shit, and I’d ward you off. No way I’d believe a single word.

And yet there he was, snatching up his bucket and dunking it into the forest-green lake. The plashing of absinthe at the shore, the fall gurgling and spitting out tempting drops.

Bucket filled, he strode back to his circle. Jokori laid it down and poured in the absinthe, watched the circle brim with it and licked his lips, smell of anise tickling his nostrils.

He kicked the bucket away. The moment of truth. He thought again about Shirigofi and his mad ideas. He wasn’t the traitor there, the Chief was. The Chief and his fucked-up belief that keeping traumatic memories could help Boqiyasha. Look at what state she was in!

But that wouldn’t last long. Lucky that there was him to save the day.

He poked his fingertip with the tip of his knife and blood dripped into the circle, a stain of crimson that spread like milk in coffee.

‟Show yourself to me, Memter.”

Rustle of leaves, trees shaking like hit by a storm. Twigs swayed and squeaked. Cracks, thuds. Jokori had to sink his feet into the soil, hair ruffled up, arms raised to form a big X, to thwart the gust that whistled past him.

Hell if it was worth it, though. A smile started to stretch on his face at the first knot growing in the grass. It was like a piercing, one of the circular ones you wear on your nose and that always made him think of mooing bulls that pawed the ground and lifted dust as they charged at you. Time that the piercing had fattened and doubled, tripled around, and had he looked at himself in a mirror he would have seen a crazy grimace of victory.

He’d never felt so alive in his life. Forget the classmates that had failed their tests and had been tossed away into that very fall, memories steeped into absinthe and swept out like with an eraser. Forget his role as Deputy Chief—the Chief had the last word on everything, and maybe even the first word and all those in the middle. Tied to find a reason he was alive, he wouldn’t hesitate to point at this.

Fix the mistakes of his Chief.

The piercings clacked open like bike locks and jumped off. Rocks rattled and dived into the absinthe lake like frogmen in search of an ancient treasure buried under the wreck of a pirate ship. Jokori strived to keep balance as the earth quaked, and he couldn’t but wonder how they would interpret this in the city. From here, the best he could see was the top of the obelisks doodling geometric shapes in the sky as if on a messed-up acid trip.

The first fang jabbed the ground and rose like a spike, followed by another pair, taller than their buddy, that doubled Jokori’s height. Rivulets of absinthe slid down and clouds of smoke brushed the air as the radioactive-green muzzle split dirt and grass, scales as large as smartphones and probably much harder jabbing that rough skin that seemed made of rotten malachite, if minerals could rot. Tainted with bark-brown shades, the three eyes shot out sparks through the dark shroud that was spreading across the land.

The creature grunted, reek of cockroach-infested dead corpses and mummies crawling with maggots, and Jokori held his nose, coughing, eyes stinging. ‟Why do you summon me inside these walls?”

Jokori felt his cheeks dampening, his face burning like he’d put his head into a heated oven to make some pizza. ‟Straight to the point, I want to make a pact with you. There are tons of memories for you to eat. The condition is that you eat only what I tell you to.”

A flash tore through dust and smoke, but this time Jokori didn’t see the scars gouged into the creature’s snout, and neither the blue and yellow speckles around it. No, this time there was Shirigofi with his beret, squatted on the chair before his desk, the breast-shaped windows giving onto the long drawers slipping out the hexagonal cells of the Archive. The Chief was scribbling something on the piles of paper Jokori had collected in the last year, then flicking them away with a jerk of his hand. ‟Stop wasting your time, Jokori.” The words rang through his ears even today. ‟I already told you that those memories cannot be erased just because they’re dreadful and problematic. There are too many links.” He was looking down on him, a serious gaze on that clown face of his, pointy ears and warty conk. ‟They need to be worked through. Analyzed. Understood. Then they can be tattered by the Memters in our zoo. But removing them like you crave would just leave unresolved issues that would never find a source.” And so the evidence he’d gathered shredded into the air, catching fire and crepitating till it was no more than ashes.

‟So?” the Memter asked, and wind pushed Jokori back.

‟Eat the traumatic memories, and the traumatic memories alone. You’ll recognize them from the stink.”

The tail wagged and swept down, rippling the lake and bringing a drizzle of absinthe at Jokori’s feet. ‟I don’t need instructions to identify them.”

Jokori swallowed. ‟Then go.” And do your job, so I’ll show Shirigori how wrong he is. Chop off the bad memories, and everything will be back to normal. Poor Boqiyasha won’t suffer any longer.

The Memter flapped its massive wings, two shining, copper-looking plates that may have held three or four airliners each. The fall of absinthe trembled like a jet of piss from a dude who can’t aim it, trees kowtowed and Jokori didn’t miss to hear some cracks, though he didn’t dare check.

When the creature was a spaceship up in the sky, Jokori shot a last glance at the fall, the green liquor gradually calming down and returning to its placid stillness.

A moment later he was scouring the area for the cameras.