Undiscovered: An Unremembered Novella (The Unremembered Trilogy) (7 page)

BOOK: Undiscovered: An Unremembered Novella (The Unremembered Trilogy)
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“Well, well,” he said coldly, “going for a little joy ride, are we?”

I did the first thing that came to mind. I jumped toward him, throwing the full weight of my body into his chest. He grunted and fell back against the hard concrete of the road.

“RUN!” I screamed to Sera, and like a beam of light, she burst out of the truck.

But she didn’t get far.

The sizzle of a Mutation Laser made my stomach roll as I watched her body wilt to the ground. A wide-eyed, dark-haired agent caught her just before she hit. He looked veritably surprised by the entire exchange, staring bewilderedly at her for a long moment.

“No!” I screamed, struggling to jump to my feet. I ran toward the agent, but I was intercepted by a wall of muscle. Three large men stepped into my path, blocking me. These were not agents-in-training. These were the real deal.

The dark-haired agent scooped Sera into his arms and turned, walking back to a waiting hovercopter that was parked nearby.

I writhed and kicked and screamed against my guards. “Let go of me!”

I heard a voice behind me. “Get back here, you punk!” It was Director Raze. He had recovered from my attack and was marching toward me. “I swear I will end you. I will take every precious memory from your brain, every useful function. I will leave you nothing more than a glitching vegetable.”

Raze was angry. As he should be. I’d been wreaking havoc on his compound for a long time. And I’m sure he was sick to death of me.

Well, the feeling was mutual.

He continued to stalk toward me. The three guards held me in place. I braced myself for the inevitable blow.

But it never came.

“Director Raze!” shouted another voice. I turned to see Dr. Havin Rio approaching from the hovercopter. My eyes narrowed in accusation.

What the glitch was he doing here?

He also looked pissed off. But he seemed to be doing a better job hiding it than Raze. “Stand down, right now,” Rio commanded. “That’s an order. I will handle the boy.”

“Wipe him!” Raze yelled. “Wipe his puny, spastic brain!”

“I said stand down, Director,” Rio thundered. “Transport the girl back to the lab. I will take care of Lyzender.”

Raze exhaled like a bull. “Protocol?” he asked, his jaw rigid.

“Full restoration,” Rio replied. “I don’t want her to remember any of this.”

“No!” I cried out, whipping my head toward Sera, who was being lowered into the backseat of the hovercopter. Again, I tried in vain to get past the guards. “Don’t you touch her!”

I saw her body flinching. Like tiny spasms. She was starting to wake up from the effects of the Mutie Laser.

Her eyes opened and her head lolled to the side. When she saw Dr. Rio, her entire face shifted. Like someone had erased a shadow that had been cast over her exquisite features. “Dad,” she said dreamily. “I’m sorry. I…”

Dad?

This was the man she called her father?

This was the person who worked late nights and took her on fake trips to the beach and brainwashed her?

Rio’s face softened upon hearing her voice. He turned and went to her, pushing her hair away from her face. Seeing him touch her made me want to throw up.

“It’s okay,” he told her, his voice more soothing and human than I’d ever heard it. “It’s going to be fine. Take her back to the cottage. I’ll be there in a moment.”

“You son of a bitch!” I shouted at him, thrashing against my captors. “I should have known you were behind this. I should have
known
. You are diabolical. You deserve to rot in hell!”

Rio walked calmly toward me, his shiny shoes clacking on the pavement. “Lyzender.”

I wet my tongue and spat into his face. I wished I had more than just saliva to spew at him. I wished I could spit rocks. Boulders. Fire.

He closed his eyes for a brief moment before wiping it away. “Why don’t you come with me? I think we have a lot to talk about.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” I shot back.

“Well, I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?” He jerked his head toward one of the guards detaining me. I felt the cold prick of metal against the base of my skull, stealing away my will to fight.

13: Capabilities

I woke up strapped to a large chair. My arms and legs were restrained. I struggled, but it was no use. I glanced around at the digital projection of a peaceful ocean sunset. So real, I could almost smell the sea breeze. But, of course, I knew it was fake.

Something beautiful to hide the ugliness.

That’s what Diotech is all about.

I recognized this chair. It was the one they secured people in right before they recoded their memories. Panicked, I tried to remember how I got there.

We ran away. We tried to escape. We failed.

I breathed out a sigh of relief. At least they hadn’t taken
that
memory.

Not yet, anyway.

I fought again, quickly realizing it was pointless. The restraints were too strong.

“What do you want?” I screamed into the serene sunset. If I was here, in this chair, that meant there was someone on the other side of this illusion, watching me through the one-sided screen. “Get in here and face me, you glitching cowards!”

In an instant the landscape around me vanished, flickering into the dull black hue of the powered-down screen. A door opened to my left and Dr. Rio sauntered in, pulling a chair behind him. He placed it directly across from me and sat down.

My whole body tensed at the sight of him.

He was the one.

The one behind Sera’s project. The one who had been keeping her locked up in that house like an animal. I wanted to leap out of the chair and tear his skin off with my teeth. But I forced myself to remain very still, watching him with distrustful eyes.

“I’m sure you have a lot of questions, Lyzender,” he said. “I’ll do my best to answer them as completely as I can. But you must understand that most of what you’ll want to know is light-years beyond your clearance level.”

“I don’t have a clearance level,” I muttered.

“Exactly.”

“How did you find us?”

“It’s not a scar from when she was a baby,” Rio said, referencing the mark on Sera’s wrist and the fabricated story she had told me. Obviously he’d seen the memory of that day.

“What is it then?”

“It’s a satellite tracking device. It can be scanned from anywhere on the planet.”

The realization made my stomach sour. Of course they would build something like that into her. Of course they would never take the chance of letting her escape. I immediately felt foolish for even trying. How could I have thought I could outsmart Diotech?

Just because I’d broken in to a few C3 labs and stolen a handful of genetically modified rabbits?

I was an amateur.

I was nothing.

I’d never be able to save her.

“I have to admit, Lyzender,” Rio said, clearly reading my distress, “your plan was admirable. Everyone is impressed.”

I wanted to spit in his face again. He was patronizing me. I couldn’t care less what these people thought of my plan.

“But we’ve been tracking your movements for a long time,” he admitted. “We were prepared for something like this. You could even say we were expecting it. Especially given the way you look at her.”

I thought about the memories they’d stolen. All the times she’d looked into my eyes and felt something. Each one of those moments was now stored in an encrypted pod in a server room somewhere.

The idea made nauseated me.

“You knew I was going to see her,” I said. “For months. Why didn’t you ever tell me to stop? Why did you keep erasing her memories of it?”

Rio nodded. “At first that option was discussed. As was altering
your
memories. But we eventually decided to let it play its course. It was an interesting turn of events. One that made for a nice addition to the data we were collecting for this project.”

His answer made my blood boil. The fact that I was just another pawn in their game. Another variable in their equation.

“What
is
the project?” I growled. “What
is
she?”

“She’s a synthetically engineered human being, with the most advanced genetic code in history. A scientific miracle.”

I was actually surprised by how candid he was. If that was even the truth. “What do you plan to do with her?”

Dr. Rio smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t divulge that.”

So much for candidness.

“She’s not like us,” I stated somberly.

“No,” Dr. Rio confirmed. “She’s not. She’s everything we
want
to be. Fast. Strong. Smart. Beautiful. Healthy.”

“And you created her?”

He almost looked proud at the question. It made me want to punch the smirk right off his stupid smug face. “I did. After many failed attempts.”

“So, what?” I asked. “You’re going to tell me the truth about all of this and then wipe it from my memory? Just like you did with her countless times? That’s why I’m in here, isn’t it?”

“You’re in here because it’s protocol. You saw something you weren’t supposed to see. But I’ve already dismissed the Memory Coder on staff tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought I would try to talk to you, Lyzender,” Rio said, growing impatient. “You’re a scientist, like me.”

“I’m
nothing
like you.”

His lips pursed as though he were about to argue, but instead he continued where he left off. “I’ve seen what you can do. Your little inventions are extraordinary. You have your mother’s brain. I’d rather
not
tamper with it by coding in a new set of memories. I’d rather we try to come to an agreement.”

I scoffed at this. “An agreement that involves me never speaking to her again?”

“Naturally.”

“Forget it,” I spat.

“You love her.” Rio’s voice had dropped to a near whisper. It took me aback. Not only the tone, but the words themselves. And how easily they flowed from his lips. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact. A universal truth.

He was right. I did love her. But I remained stoically silent.

“It’s an illusion,” he remarked. “You only
think
you love her. She’s designed that way. To make people fall in love with her. It’s like these wall screens. We can program them to look beautiful and serene. We can make you feel something when you look at them. But it’s not real.”

“It’s real,” I grumbled, and immediately regretted it. There was no use arguing with Dr. Rio. He would never understand what Seraphina and I had. And he wasn’t worth the effort of trying to explain it.

But I was too emotional to keep quiet.

“I don’t love her because she’s beautiful.”

Rio looked interested. He tilted his head to the side, as if encouraging me to continue.

“I love her because she’s her.”

“Strong and intelligent and flawless?” he ventured with a smirk.

I shook my head. “No. I mean, yes, she’s all those things. But she’s also vulnerable and naïve and tragically flawed. She’s the ultimate contradiction. You think you made someone perfect, but in doing that, you made someone so, so imperfect.”

The smirk instantly vanished from Dr. Rio’s face. I’d insulted him. His creation. His life’s work.

I felt a small surge of victory in my chest.

He stood up, clearly irritated. “Look, Lyzender. One transmission and I can get the Memory Coder back in here. Is that what you want?”

I glared up at him, my eyes challenging his. “What does it matter what I want? You’re just going to do what
you
want anyway.”

“I want you to stop.” Rio’s voice was back to its stern, even tone. “Stop seeing her. Stop filling her mind with thoughts and ideas. You’d be better off forgetting about her.”

“Not gonna happen,” I vowed. “Unless you or Dr. Alixter get in there and scrape the memories out of my mind, I won’t be able to forget her. And even then, I’m not sure it would work.”

Suddenly the chair Rio was sitting in went flying across the room, startling me. I hadn’t even realized he’d kicked it until it was smashing against the wall screen. “Don’t you get it?” he bellowed. “This goes beyond me! Beyond Alixter! You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, Lyzender. She’s not one of your little freedom missions! She’s a trillion-dollar investment. I should erase your memories just to
protect
you from the consequences of getting in the way.”

“Then do it!” I yelled back at him, my eyes and throat and chest on fire. “Do it already. Take everything! Stop threatening me and just glitching take it all.”

Rio lowered his head, defeated. “I can’t.”

“You can’t?” I repeated in disbelief. I’d never heard a Diotech scientist ever use those words before. That was
not
the mantra of this compound.

He struggled for words, looking distraught. “Your mother. She asked me to look out for you before she left. She would be livid.” He took a deep breath, seemingly lost in thought. “After the last time…” His voice trailed off and I could tell he’d spoken more than he’d intended.

My eyes narrowed. “The last time?”

He offered me a smile that was faker than the scenery these walls projected. “I need you to forget Seraphina. I may not be able to erase her from your mind, but I can beseech you to trust me.”

I snorted at this. “You’ve got a lot of nerve asking for trust.”

I studied Rio’s reaction carefully. A flash of something that could almost be described as pain flickered on his face, disappearing a nanosecond later. “If you can’t trust me, then I can’t protect you.”

“Maybe I don’t need your protection.”

Rio moved toward the exit, slowly shaking his head. “You have no idea what you need, Lyzender.”

As soon as the door sealed shut behind him, the screens flickered back to life, filling the room once again with a warm sunset.

I didn’t know what was going to happen next. He said he wouldn’t—or, rather
couldn’t
—recode my memories, but he also hadn’t bothered to release me.

So what was I still doing here?

A moment later, I felt the sharp prick of a needle stab into the back of my neck. As my eyelids started to droop and I slipped into the looming darkness, I focused on the sunset that surrounded me. A picturesque view of somewhere far, far away. Somewhere without Diotech. Without Memory Coders. Without compound walls. I tried to imagine a life inside that illusion. A peaceful, serene world where a sunset like this was the only miracle to be found.

BOOK: Undiscovered: An Unremembered Novella (The Unremembered Trilogy)
2.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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