Unforgotten (38 page)

But Kaelen is different, isn’t he? He’s changed. He’s proved that he’s changed. He’s proved that he no longer holds allegiance to Alixter. That he’s no longer being controlled by his programming. He’s broken free. And made his own choice.

Just as I have.

But a nagging thought creeps its way into the front of my mind.

What if it’s been an act?

The cure. The kiss. Kaelen’s seeming change of heart.

What if this whole thing has been one giant trap designed to take me back there? To get me to come willingly?

No,
I tell myself.

I refuse to believe that. I
know
Kaelen. We are one and the same. I can read him almost as well as I can read myself. We are linked somehow. We’ve both proved that already.

He wouldn’t deceive me. Not after everything that’s happened. Not after everything we’ve been through.

And even if it is a trap, even if he has been conning me this whole time, what other solution do I have? Rio knows where the last two doses of the repressor are. And that makes him the only option.

I look up, meeting his intense gaze, and whisper, “Yes,” with what little conviction I have left. “I’m ready.”

I close my eyes. Even though I’m not the one directing this transession. Even though my concentration is not needed. I can’t watch. I can’t look.

After everything Zen did to break me out, I’m about to step right back into the middle of my prison.

I’m about to
willingly
return to the one place I vowed I would never return to. Where I was created. Where I was manufactured. Where my life began.

I’m finally going home.

62

MESSY

The hospital room is white and sterile and filled with sleek, sophisticated machines unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. There are no wires anywhere. Every piece of equipment seems to be powered by an invisible source. The screens of the various computers and monitors are paper-thin, making me think they could be snapped in half with the slightest pressure.

When my vision focuses, I see the bed on the other side of the room. There are no legs or other support mechanisms holding it up. It simply hovers above the ground.

It isn’t until I see Rio’s face resting on the crisp white pillowcase that I know we’ve made it.

His rough red beard is fuller, scragglier. His hair is longer, falling into his eyes. And his skin is worn and tattered. Like it’s been left out in the rain one too many times.

But other than that, he looks the same.

Seeing him in this comatose state, his eyes open and unnervingly staring into space, I realize how robbed I feel. He was the closest thing I’ll ever have to a family and he’s gone. Our time together was too short. As soon as I realized how important he was, what he meant to me, it was over. Alixter turned him into
this
.

I will never have another conversation with him.

I will never be able to ask him questions about my past. Or his relationship with Maxxer.

I will never be able to see the gentleness—the life—in his soft green-gray eyes.

I have this irresistible urge to run to him, to place my palm against his cheek, to rest my head on his chest. But something stops me.

A noise.

A kind of grinding sound. And that’s when I see the woman. At least, from the waist up, she
looks
like a woman. But instead of legs, she has wheels attached to the bottom of her torso.

The sight of her makes me shriek. But Kaelen is one step ahead of me. His hand covers my mouth, muffling the sound, and he yanks me back. We scuttle under a table, scooting as far away as we can until we hit a wall.

“What is it?” I ask in that inaudible voice I know only he can hear.

“A med bot.”

“A what?”

But apparently I was a bit too loud because he presses his finger to his lips. “Robotic intelligence. They’re assigned to do various tasks around the compound.”

I watch the strange lifelike creature in wonderment as she wheels around the room, going about her duties, checking the machines and computers monitoring Rio.

“Does she know we’re here?” I ask in my hoarse whisper.

“If she did, we would know.”

She rolls over to the table that we’re hiding beneath and Kaelen and I both suck in a simultaneous breath, pushing ourselves as far back against the wall as we can. I watch her bottom half glide efficiently across the length of the table. The spherical wheels turning effortlessly front to back, side to side, even diagonally.

My heart is pounding so loud right now, I’m convinced that it will only be a matter of time before she hears it and sounds the alarm.

After what feels like hours, I watch her wheel up to the wall opposite us and swipe her eerily humanlike hand across a clear panel. A door appears where there once was just a seamless white wall, and it slides open. She exits and the door closes behind her, blending back into the façade as though it never existed in the first place.

Kaelen moves fast. Crawling out from under the table and then reaching down to help me. “We have to be quick. She’s probably on a rotation.”

“How long?” I ask.

“Twenty minutes,” he guesses. “Maybe less.”

I check that the receptors are still securely attached to my head and hurry toward Rio’s bedside. On a nearby table is a thin plastic screen. Information is flying across it at dizzying speed. Lines and lines of what appears to be code.

“What is that?” I ask.

“Looks like a search,” Kaelen responds, picking up the screen and studying the data. “It’s probably connected to his brain. Alixter is looking for something.”

“What?” I ask, feeling nauseated.

He squints, absorbing the numbers as they soar past. “I can’t tell,” he says. “The search is encoded.”

“Can you link me to his brain?”

Kaelen nods, tapping the piece of plastic. “Initiating link,” he reports back. “You’ll be connected in five, four, three, two…”

SCREECH!

I’m suddenly bombarded by a swirling, dizzying array of images and rapidly moving scenes. None of them are complete or clear. They’re all choppy and faded, some even distorted, like they’ve been wrung out by extremely strong hands, causing the picture to look twisted and alien and terrifying.

They spin frantically. But there’s no order to any of them. I’m getting woozy from the influx of data.

And the noise. It’s the loudest, most distressing sound I’ve ever heard. Like a million people screaming into my ear at the same time. Demanding to be heard.

I press my hand to my head, trying to steady myself. Trying to block out the sound and concentrate on just one picture. One face. One voice. But it’s impossible. There is no logic. No sense. No way to sort through anything.

“I can’t,” I whisper hoarsely, trying not to throw up from the dizziness. “I can’t do it.”

And suddenly I understand what Alixter meant when he said
scramble
. Kaelen warned me his mind would be incomprehensible but I never expected this. It’s pure chaos. I’ll never be able to find anything in here. And certainly not before our tracking devices grow back, or the med bot returns.

“Sera,” Kaelen urges. “You have to try.”

I cringe and dive back into the disorder, allowing myself to be swept up in the churning of faces and landscapes and mathematical equations. As the imagery whirls by, I try to catch a single memory and hold on to it long enough to see it and possibly classify it.

But no matter how hard I try, nothing works.

I glance down at my wrist. The bleeding has stopped. A thin scab has already started to form.

I want to cry in frustration. I have to find it! I have to figure out what Rio did with those other two doses.

But that’s like trying to find one droplet of water in a stormy ocean. I’m sorting through a lifetime of memories here. Memories that have been completely muddled by Alixter’s Modifier.

I reach out and grab Rio’s hand, holding it tightly. “Rio,” I plead. “Can you hear me? Does any part of you know that I’m even here? It’s me, Sera. Please. I need your help. I need to find the two doses of the repressor that Maxxer left you. You have to remember what you did with them.”

I stare at his lifeless face, frozen in time. His unblinking eyes. His slightly agape mouth.

I get no response.

I think back to the memory of the night Rio gave me the transession gene. The night I asked him to erase all my memories and give me a fresh start.

I remember the way he looked at me. With such sadness in his eyes. Such remorse.

“I’m sorry about everything. Everything I did to you,”
he said to me.

And then I called him something. Something I’ve never been able to call anyone. And I never will.

“Dad,” I whisper aloud now, tears streaming down my cheeks. “He’s going to die. I can’t let that happen. I love him. Please help me.”

Something happens then. For just a moment, the briefest flit of a moment, the disorderly bustle of memories slows to a stop. As though someone turned off the power that was fueling them. The earsplitting noise mutes into a hushed garble.

“Look!” Kaelen whispers.

I lift my gaze to see Rio’s eyes flutter closed and then open again. Just once.

“I think he can hear you!” Kaelen adds.

A single moving picture rises to the surface. Floats upward, through the chaos, through the wreckage of his mind, and lingers in front of me.

It’s a picture of a girl. A young girl. She looks to be about the same age as Jane. Maybe five or six.

She jumps up and down giddily on a springy bed. Laughing and kicking the air between each bounce.

A deep voice booms out, frightening her. I recognize it immediately as Rio’s. “I hope you’re not jumping on the bed again,” it warns.

The little girl immediately falls to her knees and clambers under the covers. Giggling quietly to herself. She looks innocently at the open doorway. At Rio. Her big brown eyes shining.

“No more monkeys jumping on the bed.” She sings the familiar tune. The one he taught her. It’s her favorite.

His heart melts. And despite his earlier warning tone, he can’t stay mad.

“It’s way past your bedtime,” Rio says. Softly. Tenderly.

“One story,” the girl bargains.

Rio relents with a sigh. He can’t say no to her. He never could.

“Fine,” he says. “Which one?”

She flashes him a look that he knows all too well. He translates it as
Don’t be silly.

“Of course,” he answers, and he pulls a worn, tattered green book from a table near the bed.

As he brings it over to her, the title flashes into view.

The Giving Tree.

He sits down on the bed and the little girl snuggles up close to him, entwining her little body in his arm. He flips open the book and begins to read aloud.

“Once there was a tree…” He turns the page.

“Can I turn?” she asks hopefully.

“Okay,” he allows. “But remember, you have to be very careful. This book is older than I am.”

“That’s old,” she says wisely.

He tickles her, pretending to be angry.

Her giggles echo around the pink bedroom, louder than they should. Until everything fades into white and her joyful high-pitched laughter is all I can hear.

The raucous, deafening noise returns an instant later, banging into my head. Followed quickly by the chaotic swirl of images.

I open my eyes and stare at Rio, wondering who that girl was. Wondering how much about this man I don’t know. Probably everything.

There’s a tugging familiarity about her.

Not as though I knew her, but as though I knew
of
her. One level removed from my recognition. Like a memory of a memory. A dream of a dream.

“What?” Kaelen asks, breaking into my thoughts. “What did you see?”

But his voice is muffled through all the noise in my head. I pull my gaze away from Rio and look at Kaelen. His face is swimming. I can’t seem to focus on it. I blink again and again but reality is no match for the anarchy that’s playing in my mind, echoing off Rio’s ruined brain.

“Disconnect me,” I tell him, cringing against the bombardment.

“But…” he argues.

“Just do it,” I tell him.

Reluctantly he taps the plastic screen and gradually the noise fades into nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief, relishing the silence. It takes me a moment to steady myself. I feel like I’ve been rotating in circles at two hundred miles per hour.

I hold my head in my hands and take deep breaths. When the room finally stops spinning and my surroundings start to make sense, I release my hands and look up again. Kaelen’s bright aquamarine eyes settle into focus.

“I know,” I tell him quietly.

“You know what?”

I rise to my feet. “I know where he hid the last two doses.”

63

HOME

The house feels different in person. In the memories that Zen stole for me, it felt larger somehow. More spacious. It’s actually quite small and somewhat cramped.

It has a warm energy about it, though.

Somehow I always thought that it would feel cold and isolated. Like the prison cell where I spent too many long nights in 1609. As prison cells go, I suppose this one isn’t terrible.

I appreciate that Rio attempted to make it nice for me. Homey.

I guess he felt it was the least he could do.

I know we’re running out of time. The scab on my arm is already healing. I stare down at a small speck of black peeking through the corner of the wound. My skin is growing back. My DNA is doing its job. Re-creating the tracking device.

In a matter of minutes, the satellites will scan me.

An
alert
message will appear on someone’s screen. In someone’s head. On someone’s radar. And it will all be over. Alixter will know that I’m here.

But I need to do this.