Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) (25 page)

Hours, days, centuries later, the door opens again. A man enters. American embassy staff. Says his name is Logan and hands her a plastic cup of water. Felicia gulps it down,
rivulets running down her face. She’s in a lot of trouble. They’ve contacted her father. Her mother. They know about her dead friend. They’re arranging transport back to Frankfurt.

Dad arrives. He’s frantic with worry. He scoops her up in his arms and holds her so tight, she can’t breathe. But when he lets go of her, she shivers. His face is twisted in disappointment and confusion. He begs her to tell him what the hell she was thinking coming here without telling anyone. Why didn’t she call the police when she found Autumn? Doesn’t she know running makes her look guilty? Doesn’t she realize that misusing her diplomatic passport can get her mother in trouble with the Foreign Service? And how did she pay for her plane ticket? But Felicia finds she can’t speak. Can’t find the words to fix what she’s done, to erase the last twenty-four hours and return to a world where her dad has never looked at her this way. Where he is still proud to call her his daughter.

A wave of regret washes over Felicia, over me, her shadow self. It is so powerful that for an agonizing moment I am reunited with her, with my body. And I feel the full weight of the hopelessness of my situation.

CHAPTER 19

I AM FORCIBLY RIPPED AWAY
from the memory chamber by an ice-cold hand around my throat. I come face-to-face with a host of beings so terrifyingly beautiful, so infused with otherworldly light, I’m struck dumb. The Morati. “Felicia,” they hiss. “We have been looking for you.”

They suspend my body in midair, and my eyes dart back and forth through the crumbling hive, searching for Julian. For an escape. The Morati’s alabaster skin shines so brightly, they blur around the edges, making it hard for me to look directly at them.

“Wondering where Julian is?” the Morati taunt. They speak together, one voice but delivered from each and every
terrible mouth. Its booming is loud but intimate at the same time. “He is on our side. He called us here.”

No, it can’t be. The Morati are lying, attempting to confuse me. Julian may be far from perfect, but he’d never give me over to them. I examine them in short bursts, looking for weaknesses. They have willowy yet muscular builds, and each is six feet tall at least, some taller, with gleaming silver hair that falls to the shoulders, and large silvery wings. Androgynous in their simple white tunics and pants, they are so scarily alike, they bleed into one another. I concentrate on the hand holding me up, and imagine it opening and dropping me. It works. As soon as I fall, I push against my jailers with my mind, trying to clear a path.

But there are too many of them. For every individual Morati that I repel, another five sink their icy fingers through my clothes, straight into my flesh, burning me.

“Silly girl,” they hiss, like a thousand snakes coiled for attack. And then they suck in a powerful breath and exhale a dustlike cloud that fills up every molecule of the hive. It’s like being plunged into an ocean and getting ensnared and entangled by seaweed. My mind can no longer hold out.

I am dimly aware of being lifted by a group of hands and passed on, like the crowd surf after a stage dive, but the fight has been leeched out of me. It’s so much easier to let go. I fall into a memory chamber pod, and the Morati fit my hands into the grooves and close a glass lid over me. As
seven of them, like pallbearers, carry the pod through the hive door, I float into a memory.

Ward, Felicia. Memory #32777

Tags: Ohio, Neil, Confession

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Careful not to wake Neil, I slowly untangle my arms and legs from his embrace and lift my head from the pillow to check the time. The neon numbers of his bedside alarm clock glow 4:30 p.m., meaning his parents won’t be home for at least another two hours. Neil fell asleep straightaway when we got here after school, but I’ve just been lying here, my head against his chest listening to the steady beating of his heart, and his deep, measured breathing.

Usually, if I can’t sleep, it’s because of the multitude of thoughts racing through my mind. But not today. Because today my mind is at peace, a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. After wrestling with myself for weeks, I’ve decided I’m going to confess my sins to Neil. To lay bare my soul so he can see everything, and judge the dark with the light. Because I want a future with him, and that future has to start with a clean slate. No secrets between us.

A rush of affection for Neil bubbles up inside me, for this boy who fought to save me when everyone else abandoned
me. He deserves the best I can give him. And I deserve the chance to give him my best.

I’m ready. I untangle Sugar from the crook of Neil’s leg, and she mews in protest. Petting her, I carry her to the hallway and shut her out. I sit down on the edge of the bed and slip out of my clothes, kicking them to the floor before I chicken out. My skin prickles, and despite the warm air of Neil’s bedroom, goose bumps run rampant across my body.

I take a deep breath and lie on my side in front of Neil. He still hasn’t stirred. My hand shaking, I lift my index finger to Neil’s lips and trace them lightly. Without opening his eyes, he groggily pulls me into a hug, his hands sliding over my shoulders and back. The sensation of skin on skin feels so right, I forget myself. Desperate for more contact, I push up his T-shirt and help him pull it over his head. We press together, his lips finding mine. If he asked, I would give him everything.

While we kiss I let my fingers trail across his smooth chest, down his sides, over his flat stomach. The way his body trembles at my touch makes me dizzy. My heart races faster than it ever has before in my life, and I slip my hand under the waistband of his jeans.

Neil tenses up, as if finally realizing he’s not dreaming. His eyes pop open and he scrambles away from me, throwing his T-shirt at me in a frantic attempt to cover me up. “What . . . what are you doing?” he chokes out, his eyes wild from not knowing where to look.

His reaction is so not what I expected; I start to have
second thoughts. Maybe this isn’t the best way to go about my confession. But I press on. “I’m ready. I want to tell you what happened to me, because I want you to see me. All of me.”

“But you don’t have to be naked for that!” He closes his eyes tightly, scrunching up his face in the process.

I feel like I’ve been slapped. Why is Neil so freaked out by seeing me naked? “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disgust you.” I am deeply ashamed. But also so deeply horrified, I can’t bring myself to retrieve my clothes.

He opens his eyes and looks at me, searching my face, seeing the pain of his rejection etched there. “Oh, God, no. . . . How can you say that?” he asks, risking a tentative once-over of my body, drinking me in. “You’re beautiful.”

“Then what is it?” I ask, confused.

He takes a deep breath. “It’s just . . . and don’t take this the wrong way . . . but I don’t want you to think you need to get, you know . . . physically intimate . . . in order to get emotionally intimate.” He sounds disturbingly like Pastor Joe, and at first I want to call him on it, but then he laughs. “And honestly, if you don’t cover up, I promise I won’t hear a word you say anyway.”

Blushing but relieved, I laugh too. “I’ll put my clothes back on.” I whip his shirt at his chest, and as he puts it back on, he rolls over to give me privacy. I get dressed quickly.

I sit cross-legged on his bed, facing him, and he mirrors my posture. He takes my hands in his and squeezes them encouragingly. It’s as if the highly embarrassing scene before never took place. “Tell me.”

And so I do. It comes out in a rush. The nightmares, the sneaking around with Julian, the confrontation with Autumn, my overwhelming feelings of guilt, and all the events of the horrible day when Autumn died and I fled. He doesn’t interrupt me, doesn’t look away in condemnation. He takes it all in, and as I confess each and every misdeed, I feel cleaner—as if with its telling, each black spot unsticks itself from my soul and flutters away.

I tell him about the aftermath, how the military police in Frankfurt interrogated me about Autumn’s death, how reproachful eyes followed me wherever I went. Because I left her there, and didn’t call the police or them, Autumn’s parents refused to talk to me, and broke off their long-standing friendship with my family. I was cleared of wrongdoing but reprimanded for fleeing the scene. They couldn’t say for certain if it was suicide or murder, but they couldn’t pin her death on me because my alibi was rock solid. I was miles away in class at the official time of death. The case is still open as far as I know.

As for the hacked plane ticket, the airline settled with us out of court, and just like that, my family’s modest savings disappeared. Even worse, my parents were forced to take out a loan to cover the rest. The State Department revoked my diplomatic passport, and Mother had to make a choice between her job and me. And my father had to choose between his wife and his daughter. I can’t blame either for their decisions.

Having told him everything, I fall silent. Neil pulls me up off the bed and into a hug. “I’m glad you finally decided to trust me,” he says.

“Me too.” And I do. I feel like an entire new world has opened up before me. So maybe I’ll never live up to my mother’s once high expectations, but there’s so much else I can do. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I could have a future. And Neil will be beside me. Maybe forever. Maybe only for a while. But I’m no longer scared to live my life and find out.

Boom!
The memory
chamber pod the Morati plugged me into thuds to the floor, pulling me out of my memory and thrusting me back into my terrifying new reality. The Morati bore their oily eyes into me, and my whole body spasms uncontrollably. What will they do with me? Lock me in the isolation plains? Infect me with their rage virus? Torture me until my mind is a barren wasteland like Beckah’s?

But when they push forward to help me from the travel pod, they are surprisingly gentle. “You wonder about our plans for you.”

I can only stare. We’re in a cavernous round room with walls as blindingly white as the rest of the Morati’s dominion. Narrow passageways lead off in every direction, and the high domed ceiling is decorated with flecks of silver and gold. Is this their palace?

“We must plug you into our mainframe.” There are so many of them now, their voices sound like a deep hum when they speak.

The mainframe? “But why?”

“Because,” their voices pulsate, “your energy is the essential element in our plan.”

CHAPTER 20

WHY IS MY ENERGY
specifically so important to them? I stare in confusion until it dawns on me their words make a strange sort of sense. If my energy is essential, then that’s probably why the hives have been deteriorating. Because I’ve spent less time plugged in. What was once a symbiotic relationship—I needed the drugs the net gave me, and the net needed my energy to function properly—became increasingly one-sided as I conquered my addiction and started reserving my energy for myself.

“So only my energy will do?”

One of the Morati steps forward and raises an arm in the air, as if it is about to conduct an orchestra. The others fall back against the far wall, leaving us alone, relatively
speaking. As they retreat, the radiance of the leader’s skin dims. I can see now he’s a young man, with features as chiseled and cold as a marble statue of a Greek god.

“Do you remember the day before your thirteenth birthday?” he asks, his voice now singular but no less intimidating. He doesn’t wait for my reply. He knows my answer is yes.

“It was the day we first attempted to leave this dimension. We caused a fissure to open up between here and Earth, and coincidentally at the exact same moment, your soul was straining to leave your body. But you didn’t cross over, not fully. Your energy mingled with ours; our destinies fused together. We appropriated your technology, your understanding of the world, to create the net architecture we hope will propel us on to the next level. We reached within you and saw everything you were, and everything you’d become. When the fissure closed, leaving nothing but a window that followed your every move, we were disappointed we had not yet been able to travel. You returned to your body. Only, you were racked with visions of us, weren’t you?”

My eyes widen in shock. “But in those visions, those nightmares . . . I saw Julian.”

“Did you never suspect Julian’s true nature?” The Morati leader emits a mirthless and hollow sound that might be his version of a laugh. “Julian is one of us. An angel. A Morati. We exploited your special bond. Once we had set up the net and siphoned enough power from humans, we sent him to Earth to bring you to us—so we could one day take advantage of the
full range of your energy to break into heaven. In exchange we granted him his dearest wish. To live on Earth like a human.”

What he is saying is too unbelievable to be true. Julian an angel? Julian a traitor? “That’s impossible!”

He steps back. “You will see for yourself soon enough.” The other Morati surge forward again to join their ambassador, and they surround me, picking me up as a group and carrying me through one of the narrow passageways into a great rectangular room. They set me in front of a mainframe computer so large, it takes up a wall the length of a city block.

In front of me is a sector that is flat except for a human-size indentation. It looks a bit like a giant-size muffin pan turned up on its end. When they press me into the indentation, I fit perfectly, like it was molded just for me. And I suppose it was.

I struggle against my captors, but it’s no use. “Why didn’t you shove me in here from the beginning?” I ask as they fit my hands into the master grooves.

“Too high profile.” Their voices reverberate through the great hall. “Too easy for dissenters to find you before we were ready to use you.” They fiddle with some buttons above my head, and a hologram screen lights up. “Quiet now.”