Undiscovered: An Unremembered Novella (The Unremembered Trilogy) (2 page)

Rio shook his head, looking saddened. “Believe it or not, your mother cares about you.”

I twisted my mouth to the side, pretending to contemplate. “Hmm. I’ll take not.”

“Try to stay out of trouble, Lyzender. You’re treading on dangerous ground. You don’t want to upset the wrong people around here.”

I offered him a one-finger salute. “Will do, sir.”

As he turned to leave, he didn’t notice when I slipped the microcapsule into the pocket of his lab coat.

3: Next

“And then the hovercopter blasted into the sky, like a meteor! I thought it was going to suck me up in one of its MagnoBeams! Four agents—huge guys with razor-sharp teeth—came barreling out of the back, lasers at the ready. One tried to spazz me off my feet, but I ducked and rolled just in time. And then a booming voice echoed across the desert—”

A loud throat clear interrupted my narrative and I looked up to see Mrs. Gleist looming above me, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her foot tapping.

“Yes?” I prompted her, causing the twelve children gathered at my feet in the commissary to giggle into their hands.

“Are you poisoning my students’ minds with your lies again, Mr. Luman?”

“No,” I replied with a straight face, turning to wink at the kids. “I’m poisoning their minds with the truth.”

Another round of snickers. Mrs. Gleist clearly did not appreciate my comeback (few authority figures do around this place). She shot me a venomous look and turned to the children. “Students! Lunchtime is over. Back to the classroom.”

There was a cacophony of groans and gripes as the dozen primary school kids rose to their feet and followed begrudgingly behind their teacher. I turned and started walking over to the table where my friends had gathered, but stopped when I felt a small tug on my pant leg.

I peered down into the face of a five-year-old girl, her blue eyes wide and curious. I crouched to bring my ear close to her mouth. “What did the loud booming voice say?” she asked me, glancing nervously at her disappearing class.

I smiled. “That’s for you to figure out. Tomorrow I want you to come back here and tell me what you think happened next.”

She bit her lip pensively and then, without another word, scurried after her classmates.

“New Freedom Fighters mission,” Klo said as soon as I slid into the seat across from him. I eyed the pile of food on his plate, enough to feed ten of Raze’s agents. I didn’t know where he put it all. The guy barely weighed a hundred pounds.

“My dad said they’re working on developing insect bots in the Aggie Sector. They serve the same purpose as natural insects but without the annoying bug bites and stuff.”

I yawned, pretending to be bored. “Sure. And maybe I could ask one of those primary schoolers back there to help me break in.”

He frowned, looking disappointed.

“I don’t give a flux about insect bots. I’m tired of going after C3s. They’re not even a challenge anymore.”

“My mom has C9 clearance in the memory labs,” Xaria put in, scooting way too close to me on the bench. I wanted to ask her to move over so I could wield my fork and knife without knocking into her. But I also didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Rustin claimed she was into me. And maybe he was right. But I had bigger things to deal with right now.

“What are we going to set free?” I asked rhetorically. “A bunch of memories?”

I pulled my DigiSlate from my bag, unrolled it, and laid it on the table.

“Here’s where we’re going next,” I asserted, swiping across the screen until I reached the map of the compound. A small green dot blinked rapidly toward the bottom left side of the diagram.

“What’s that?” Rustin asked.

Xaria scooted in and tilted her head toward me. She was so close now, I could feel her dark black curls tickling the sides of my face. I leaned back to steer clear of them.

“That’s Dr. Havin Rio,” I explained, pointing at the blinking indicator. It was in the middle of a massive black sea of open space, far away from the rest of the compound buildings. “I slipped a tracking capsule into his lab coat this morning.”

“Where
is
he?” Klo asked, taking a giant bite out of his burger. I could never get used to the taste of the synthetic meat on the compound. Which was why I usually stuck to vegetables and rice.

“It looks like he’s outside the compound gates,” Xaria put in. I could feel her bare leg brush against mine and I recoiled. The injury on her face made me instantly feel guilty. Maybe I should just kiss her and get it over with. If I did it really badly—like sloppy with a lot of tongue—she might lose interest.

“He’s not outside the compound,” I told them with authority.

They looked at me, and I indicated the map. I zoomed in and scrolled down. “See?” I pointed at a thin marker on the bottom of the screen. “That’s the southeast gate. He’s still
inside
the walls.”

“That gate is out of commission,” Xaria said.

I smiled. “Exactly.”

Klo went back to his burger, looking disinterested. “So it’s probably where they test the bioweaps. So what?”

“So, I didn’t know people could just walk around where they’re testing biological weapons.”

“Maybe he’s wearing a bio-haz suit,” Rustin said.

“Maybe there’s something there they don’t want us to know about.”

They all turned to look at me. Xaria’s face was inches from mine, making me antsy.

“What are you getting at?” Rustin’s forehead was lined with worry.

“I’m saying, I want to go.”

Rustin instantly shook his head. “Did you get spazzed last night by those Mutie Lasers? If they
are
testing bio-weaps there, I’m not going anywhere near it. I don’t need to grow a third arm.”

“A second member might be useful,” Klo said thoughtfully, gesturing crudely to his crotch.

“Ugh.” Xaria scowled, letting out a grunt as she stood up. “I don’t know why I hang out with you guys. You’re so disgusting.” She picked up her tray and took off in a huff. “I’ll see you back in class.”

I was somewhat grateful for her departure. At least I had space to move my arms now. I looked to Klo. “What about you? Are you in?”

He popped the last quarter of his burger into his mouth and chomped ferociously on it. “Sorry. Count me out this time. Rustin’s right. If they put it that far away from everything else, it’s probably dangerous.”

I shrugged and took a bite of my vegetables. “Fine. But I’m going. Right after school lets out.”

Rustin eyed me warily. “Jeez, do you have a death wish or something? Or do you just really need to get glitched?”

4: Girl

I walked for nearly a half an hour through nothing but barren desert landscape before I came to the first security checkpoint. It was a VersaScreen. You don’t see many of these in the Residential Sector of the compound where we live and go to school. Except the one behind the Owner’s Estate so Dr. Alixter doesn’t have to look at the ugly hangars of the Transportation Sector from his bedroom window. Most of the screens I’d encountered were those that surrounded the compound perimeter.

Any layperson probably would have run right into it, leaving a painful welt on their forehead. The synthetic glass is thicker and stronger than most natural metals and can project any holographic illusion you want. This one was programmed to resemble more of the same sparse empty field I’d been walking in, as though it went on for miles and miles.

SynthoGlass is a highly unforgiving substance that feels like a sledgehammer if you crunch into it. Something I learned in my younger years of exploration.

Now I knew the trick to spotting the screens. If you look up at the right angle, you can just spot the rounded top as it curves to complete the illusion. And every one hundred feet there’s a square shape located about shoulder-level that looks like fogged-up glass. That’s where the fingerprint scanner is.

I secured the ultrathin NanoStrip with my mother’s fingerprint stored in it against my fingertip, feeling a tingle as it fused to my skin like a suction cup, and held it up to the scanner. A green light illuminated and a small screen flashed the words
Secondary retina scan required
.

Annoyed, I dug a small case out of my pocket, removing a second NanoStrip. This one I’d fashioned into the shape of a domed disc resembling a DigiLens. I spit into it, getting it wet, then, blinking to moisten my eyes, I pried my lid open and placed the strip against my eyeball. It stuck and I blinked it into place, feeling my eyes water.

It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but it worked.

Cringing at the sting, I looked into the scanner and watched the small red laser flash across my eye. The panel illuminated green again, and a doorway appeared in the glass, outlined in electric blue. I stepped through, watching the screen seal closed behind me.

As soon as I was on the other side, I tore the strip from my eye and returned it to the case in my pocket.

I checked the diagram of the compound on my DigiSlate. Dr. Rio’s dot hadn’t moved yet, which made me think he was in some kind of laboratory, as opposed to just wandering around the desert. I had to disable my own tracker in my slate to avoid detection, so I had no idea how close I was to the destination. But my calculations told me it wasn’t far now.

I kept walking, keeping my eyes peeled for security droids and patrolling HoverCams. They were normally pretty silent, but if you listened carefully enough, you could hear their faint buzzing sound cutting through the air before you saw them—or, more important, before they saw
you
. But something told me that the usual security protocols didn’t exist out here. Which eased my mind slightly and, at the same time, terrified me.

Panting in the desert heat, I reached the top of a large hill and dropped to my belly when I saw what was on the other side. It took my brain a moment to process the large structure standing fifty feet in front of me. It looked so out of place on the Diotech compound. VersaScreens made of synthetically engineered glass, roving robotic droids that hovered six feet above the earth, those were things I was used to. Things I could handle.

But this…

This was a wall.

A plain cement wall that rose ten feet in the air.

At first I thought it might be another screen. But when I threw a small pebble at it, it made a low
thunk
sound, not the usual high
plink
that would have indicated SynthoGlass.

And if the wall weren’t spastic enough, just beyond the top of it, I could make out the roof of what looked to be a simple one-story, cottage-style house.

Confused, I scanned the length of the concrete barrier, noticing an unpatrolled solid metal gate on the east side, leading to a long road that disappeared over another hill. I could make out an additional identity scanner on the wall next to the gate, but my instinct was telling me not to use it.

No doubt my mother’s ID was already showing up on someone’s slate somewhere, alerting them to her presence in this sector. But it was a big sector; she could be anywhere. This wall only enclosed a small area, about three thousand square feet. On the off chance she was not supposed to be here, I didn’t need anyone pinpointing my exact location.

Which meant there was only one way in.

The concrete took off layers of skin from several parts of my body, favoring my knees and palms. I felt ridiculous. After everything I’d done to get here. After every forbidden device I’d invented, every system I’d hacked, and every fingerprint I’d lifted, I was climbing a glitching wall.

The idea felt so old-fashioned and archaic, I would have laughed had I not been trying to keep my intrusion quiet.

But eventually, after much effort, I made it to the other side. And if I had known what was waiting for me, I would have gotten there much sooner.

I would have run.

I would have leaped over that wall in a single bound.

I would have found a way to
fly
.

To say it was a girl would be like saying the earth orbited around a lightbulb and the Milky Way was nothing but a tangled string of Christmas lights.

She was hiding behind a pillar of a white wraparound porch, her face barely visible. But when she braved a glance in my direction and our eyes met, I swear the planet tilted on its axis.

It wasn’t just her eyes—a vibrant, sparkling shade of purple. It wasn’t just her skin—hands down the most beautiful, flawless maple-colored skin I’d ever seen. It was the way the air seemed to bend around her, the ground seemed to slope toward her, as though she created her own gravity.

Like the universe itself was pointing a giant flashing arrow at this exquisite girl locked away behind a wall.

A
real
wall.

It was something out of a fairy tale.

A very deranged, glitched-up fairy tale.

The kind of fairy tale that only a place like Diotech could write.

She was dressed in gray. An uninspiring shirt/pants combination that reminded me of pajamas.

But her face.

Holy flux, her face.

She looked like she was pulled straight from an advertisement on one of the DigiBoards you see alongside the highway, a few miles away from the compound. She was more breathtaking than even the computer-generated models gracing the covers of the beauty feeds that the girls at school pored over on their slates every morning.

I took a step toward her, my whole body entranced. I opened my mouth to speak, unsure if words would come out. A safer bet would have been indecipherable, nonsensical babble.

But luck and syllables were on my side that day, and I managed to form a full thought. A coherent question.

“Who are you?”

Her spellbindingly perfect pink lips parted and, in a stilted, almost robotic voice, she answered, “My name is Seraphina.”

Seraphina.

The name echoed for eternity in my mind. Like a shooting star caught in a jar.

I suddenly knew how Galileo felt when he discovered that the Earth rotated around the sun, how Newton felt when he discovered gravity, and how Handler felt when he discovered the first signs of life in the Andromeda galaxy three years ago.