Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files (41 page)

“Oh yeah,” says Serkova, managing to smirk at me without looking up from his monitor.
“I forgot to mention. We get ranked hourly.”

Our individual results are tabulated at the end of every hour and broadcast to all
the terminals. Number of Discards, number of Investigates, as well as a provisional
computer-graded percentage score for accuracy.

There I am, all the way at the bottom, in last place: twenty-seven Discards, six Investigates,
and a provisional accuracy ranking of 71 percent. I scan up the list to see Serkova
in second place, with a whopping eighty-two discards, thirteen Investigates, and a
provisional accuracy ranking of 91 percent. I’m going to have to go
a lot
faster.

“What was that you were telling your father?” Serkova cracks.

I’m too distracted to respond. I need to improve my score, and I resent Serkova’s
ability to work and needle me at the same time.

“Something ’bout what a great tracker you are, how much better you’ll be at surveying
than we are?”

Ugh. Not only has the General given me an impossible task, in which failure will result
in my
death
, he’s also poisoned the well with my new coworkers by reporting what I said about
my superior tracking skills.

But I don’t bother to respond: I don’t have time.

I get back to work, fighting against my own dismay. One reason I manipulated the General
into placing me in the Media and Surveillance facility was because I thought I might
have enough downtime to use my console to hack into the servers of the adjacent laboratories,
do some digging into Dr. Zakos’s research. I know that One’s only hope lies in those
files. But if I don’t pull my ranking up soon, my father could justifiably terminate
our agreement: I’d be killed before I even got a chance to help One.

I need to improve my score.

I manage to go faster. The trick, I learn, is not to process any of the information
I encounter. Instead I let my consciousness skim just above the text or video, then
let my judgment occur without thought or reasoning. Basically the trick is to accept
that I am just a cog in a data-combing machine.

Finally, I feel myself getting into a groove. In the next hourly ranking, I’ve climbed
two positions. In the one after that, I’m position thirteen out of twenty.

“Luck.” Serkova sniffs.

I glare at him. I know I’m not here to compete with this jerk, but I can’t help it:
wanting to knock him down a peg drives me on. By late afternoon, I’ve climbed up to
position eleven.

I figure I’ve bought myself enough of a cushion to give myself five minutes of snoop
time. I quickly page away from the hyperlinks and try to access the hub’s central
servers.

But doing research with a ticking clock hanging over my head proves disastrous. I
enter in searches for phrases like “mind transfer,” “Dr. Anu,” and “Dr. Zakos,” but
they all lead me to restricted areas on the server, and I don’t have time to hack
into them. I try to be more general. Remembering what Arsis said about humans in the
lab, I do a search for “human captives.” Instead of directing me to anything about
Anu or Zakos’s research subjects, I’m led to some internal, hub-wide memo about a
broad new policy regarding human captives. “Whenever possible, humans suspected of
aiding and abetting the Garde shall henceforth be held at the government base in Dulce,
New Mexico.”

A government base? Why would the U.S. government have anything to do with the Mogadorians?

I put it aside for now. It’s an interesting—and unsettling—tidbit, but it’s not going
to help me save One. Before I even have a chance to enter a new search, my five minutes
is up.

I turn back to my work. Predictably, that short diversion cost me, and my hourly rank
plummets. Regretfully, I accept that I can’t afford any more “independent research”
today.

We finish at seven p.m., replaced by the night shift, who we’ll relieve at seven tomorrow
morning. My body aches from remaining hunched and sedentary, and my eyes feel like
they’ve been blasted with sand. I’ve finished the day back in the middle, at position
eleven.

“Not bad,” admits Serkova, getting up from his chair. “But hardly what you promised
the General.”

He’s right. Landing right in the middle of a group of twenty can hardly qualify me
as a master tracker. I can only hope my ranking is enough to let me live another day.

I walk the tunnel alone, heading back to the hub.

I’m too tired to even consider sneaking off and snooping around the other tunnels:
I’d definitely blow my cover.

“Arsis, you flaming moron!”

Arsis! The idiot assistant technician in the labs
. Advancing my secret agenda was the last thing on my mind until I heard that name.

“Sorry, Doctor.”

I round the corner to see an open doorway leading into one of the laboratories. Inside
the gleaming white lab, an incredibly tall and spindly doctor has a young guard backed
up against a wall, prodding him with an angry index finger.

“These samples were supposed to be refrigerated at
subzero
temperatures. You put them in the regular freezer.”

“Sorry, sir.” The boy is docile, subservient, nothing like the sullen brat I’d imagined
from his IM transcripts.

The doctor commands him sternly. “Revial the samples from our remaining cultures,
and get it right this time. You asked to be trusted with more important work; now
show that you can do it properly.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Arsis scrambles off to redo his work.

I stand gaping at Dr. Zakos, at his massive laboratory. This is the man who might
be able to save my only friend.

He catches me looking.

Shit
.

He glares at me. I either have to turn around and walk away, or think of something
fast.

“Doctor Zakos?” I say, deciding to wing it.

“Yes?” He looks puzzled.

I step forward into the lab.

“I’m Adamus Sutekh. Son of General Sutekh.”

He looks at me, evidently suspicious.

“I wanted to meet you,” I go on, “because my father has spoken so highly of your work.”

My ruse pays off: I watch Dr. Zakos flush with pride. Even Mogadorians have their
vanity. An exploitable weakness.

“I’m glad the General is satisfied,” says the doctor, giving a little involuntary
bow.

“I was actually a subject in your predecessor’s experiments,” I continue. “The work
he did with the first fallen member of the Garde … the memory transfer …”

“Ah, of course.” He shakes his head. “Dr. Anu’s work was a deplorable failure. I’m
certain the mind-transfer technology I have been developing since is much improved,
if I could ever get clearance to actually use it.”

I’m confused. Zakos keeps talking, looking at me with much more interest now. I struggle
to maintain a neutral expression. “You’re saying the procedure could be done more
successfully now?”

He nods. “That’s my theory.”

“How is that possible? I thought the procedure needed to be done soon after a subject’s
death.”

He cocks his head curiously and ignores my question. “Where have you been since the
experiment?”

“In Africa,” I tell him. I don’t want to get into too much detail about my activities
since I was last with the Mogadorians. But the doctor seems to accept my answer without
question.

“And did you suffer any … side effects due to the procedure you underwent?”

I’m tempted to be sarcastic.
Only that little coma
. But I hold back. “Nothing other than those that you already know about.”

The wheels seem to be turning in his head as he looks me up and down.

“It’s a possibility,” he muses, almost as if to himself. “The neural pathways of the
Garde have been dormant far too long to attempt the transfer again with a new host.
But with the original subject, from the original experiment—”

I can’t help interjecting. “What are you talking about? What Garde? You can’t mean
her
.”

Dr. Zakos just grins and struts over to the laboratory’s wall, which is covered with
ten or so off-white square tiles. He places his hand over a small steel control panel
next to the wall and performs an elegant sequence of hand gestures across the panel’s
surface. With a sudden and jarring hydraulic whoosh, one of the tiles slides out of
the wall, opening like a drawer, spewing cryogenic vapors.

It’s like a mortuary slab.

He stares down proudly at what’s lying on it.

“Have a look,” he says.

I step deeper into the lab, peering over the edge of the tile.

“Perfectly preserved.”

I can’t believe my eyes. She doesn’t even look dead: she looks like she’s sleeping.

My best friend in the world.

One.

One keeps me up half the night, bombarding me with questions I can’t answer: about
Doctor Zakos’s experiments, about what he meant when he said he could successfully
download the entirety of One’s memories, about what it meant that her body had been
so thoroughly well preserved.

“Well, you’re still dead,” I say.

“Uh? A little tact, please,” she says, laughing.

I’m in bed. She’s sitting on the floor in the corner of my bedroom.

“Sorry,” I say. I’m a bit rattled. Seeing her in the flesh like that, a corpse on
a cold steel slab, has upset me more than I’d like her to know. She’s been my constant
companion for years now, but the sight of her body brought home to me how tenuous
her current existence is.

“Did you notice?” asks One, jumping right back into her excited speculation. “There
were at least ten tiles on that wall. Remember what that Arsis kid said in those chats?
About humans being dredged for intel? You think they’re being kept preserved on those
slabs too?”

I marvel at One’s mind. She wasn’t even present until I finished reading Arsis’s IM
transcripts, and she was definitely gone when I was in Zakos’s lab.

She clocks my amazed look. “What?” she says. “You already know your mind’s an open
book to me. Just because I’m gone when stuff happens doesn’t mean I can’t see it once
I come back.”

And without skipping a beat, she returns to her obsession. “Anyhow, if I’ve been so
well preserved, that means we can probably jack into each other again somehow and
kick-start my memories inside you. I mean, I know I’m pretty, but I don’t think Dr.
Zakos has been preserving me for my
looks
. He must’ve been doing it to keep the stuff inside my brain, like, fresh.” She nods,
pleased with her reasoning. “We need to get back into that lab.”

I look away from her. “One, what I need is to get some sleep.” It’s the middle of
the night, and I have to be at the media facility in four hours.

One is silent.

“If I screw up at work, I’m as good as dead. And if I’m dead, you’re dead, and this
whole lab plan will be moot anyway. Okay?”

I turn back to One. But she’s gone.

It occurs to me that I’ll never know when one of her disappearances is her last. One
day she’ll blink out, just like this, and I’ll wait for her to reappear … but she
won’t.

For all I know I just saw her for the last time.

I force my face deep into my pillow and try to sleep.

I arrive at my console the next morning groggy and bleary-eyed, dreading the next
twelve hours. I take my seat next to Serkova and dive into the data stream.

Despite my fuzzy head, I pull a decent rank after my first hour. But with exhaustion
creeping up on me, I can feel my productivity beginning to slip. By the fifteen-minute
mark of the next hour, I know I’m headed back to the bottom of the pack.

So I come up with a little trick.

For every five or so sources I legitimately review, I automatically throw another
one in the Discard directory. I know my provisional accuracy percentage will take
a hit, but from what I can tell it carries a relatively low weight on overall ranking
compared to Discard and Investigate totals.

Using this technique I’ve climbed all the way to number six by the next hourly rankings,
with seventy-three Discards and seventeen Investigates. My provisional accuracy is
73 percent, lower than the hour before but not bad enough to raise any red flags.

I can feel Serkova sneering at me. I don’t bother to hide my smile.

I pass the day like this, racing against Serkova. Giving up on finding time for research,
I use the task in front of me to distract myself from everything: from One’s perilous
condition, from Zakos’s strange work in the lab, from my hateful father, from what
the work I’m doing even means. My only goal is to get ahead of Serkova in at least
one hourly ranking.

My last rank of the day is number two. Right ahead of Serkova at three.

“Better luck tomorrow, Serkova,” I say, wearing a bright, fake-friendly smile.

He curses me and heads out of the lab.