Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) (6 page)

“No time for questions. We need your help.” He offers his hand to help me out of my chamber, but I slap it away and climb out.

“Why do you think I’d ever want to help you out?” I challenge.

“Because,” he says with an infuriating grin, “I know where you can find Neil.”

CHAPTER 5

HE KNOWS WHERE NEIL IS?
My desire to see Neil again wells up inside me, a deep ache that breaks through the fog. At this point I’d do almost anything to find him, to find out if he survived, even hang out with Julian. But—

“Wait. How do you know about Neil? I didn’t even meet him until I moved to Ohio.” Every part of my brain is on alert. “Did you follow me back to the States, hoping you could get me into even more trouble?”

Julian laughs. “You think I’m a stalker now?”

“Let’s just say it wouldn’t surprise me.”

He narrows his eyes. “When I was on the mainframe, I looked up what you have been accessing.”

“But how—”

“You’re not the only hacker in the universe, you know. You’ve been viewing lots of memories of Neil. And not so many memories of me.” He clicks his tongue with disapproval. “Should I be jealous?”

“Ugh, why would I want to revisit the worst parts of my whole life?” I scowl at him. Jerk.

He grabs my wrist, a little too hard. His touch jolts me, sending shock waves down my spine. How can I be feeling something from someone’s touch? Are the rules changing?

“Listen. We don’t have much time. If they’ve taken your friend, then they’re onto us. You’re no longer safe here. We need to go. Now.” He pulls me down the stairs and toward the door.

I pull back. “Since when do you care about my safety?”

He grimaces but still doesn’t let go of my arm. His touch is starting to make me feel light-headed, drunk, pliable. “I know you’re angry. You have every right to be after what happened.” His voice softens, making him sound almost vulnerable. Almost. “I know I may not have been that trustworthy in the past. But I need you to trust me now. We have to go.”

A loud blast knocks me to the floor, facedown, taking Julian down with me.

“Felicia!” Julian swears and immediately goes into action mode, jumping up, flipping me over, hooking his arms under my armpits, and pulling me toward the wall. As he drags me, I am horrified to see that the blast targeted my memory chamber. Its once smooth planes are ragged, flames licking at what was my refuge for so long.

Julian taps out a series of knocks against the wall with his foot, like Morse code, and a door appears and slides open. As he swings me clear of the door, I see the drones streaming from their chambers and into the common area.

“Felicia!” It’s Virginia, and she’s sprinting, knocking over any drone that gets in her way. But before she can make the door, it slides closed, and the last thing I see is her anguished face.

“Virginia!” I choke out a sob, and kick at the door with the side of my leg.

Julian slaps my face. It stings. “Can you walk?”

“Open the door back up,” I plead, my face throbbing. “We need to get Virginia! We can’t leave her in there.”

Julian’s face looms large above mine. His golden hair frames his forehead and cheekbones like a halo, but his expression is anything but angelic. “Can. You. Walk.” He enunciates every word. It’s not a request. It’s an order.

I’m dumbfounded, but I nod. Julian grunts and hoists me to a standing position. I fall against his chest, and he puts his hands on my arms to steady me. Warmth spreads through my veins, and my skin tingles. It’s the same sensation I get from my chamber, only amplified. It’s so out of place, and yet, I’m euphoric, so dizzy with feeling that I want to cry out. I hate my body for responding to Julian when my soul wants only Neil. I close my eyes, and with all my strength I back away, breaking off the contact. The effect is like being thrown into a cold pool of water and all too quickly going numb. I want to reach for him again. But I don’t. I won’t.

When I open my eyes, Julian is looking at me curiously, and his expression has softened. “No need to worry about your friends. The guardians of this place aren’t after them. They’ll simply extinguish the fire and pump in their doping gas, and no one in there will even remember it happened.”

“Guardians? Doping gas?” I ask dumbly. I feel like a computer whose circuits have overloaded.

“Unless you want to end up as charred as your chamber, I don’t have time to explain.” He reaches for me, but I step away from his grasp. I’m not letting him touch me again.

“I see you’re fit.” He barks out a laugh. “Let’s go.”

My only real choice is to follow Julian. Even if I could somehow get back into my hive, my memory chamber is ruined. And I have no idea how to navigate the outside on my own. “You really know where Neil is?” I ask him, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Yes.”

“Then lead the way.”

His lips twist into a satisfied smirk. Not his best look. “Stay close behind me, and let me know when you start to feel woozy. We’ll stop and find a place for you to plug in.”

He takes off running the corridor at a brisk pace, and I run after him, my bare feet slapping on the polished pathway. I make sure to leave a few strides between us.

Pushing down my fear and confusion, I register the grand scale of our surroundings for the first time. On either side of us are seemingly never-ending rows of identical hives. Each individual hive is shaped like a traditional
English skep, the kind beekeepers used to weave from straw to house their bee colonies. Taken together, the hives look like mountains of neatly arranged plastic eggs pressed up against one another, half buried. The ceiling, if there is one, is high enough that I can’t see it. Just as inside the hive, every surface, including the pathway beneath us, is a blinding, pristine white. If anything, it’s even brighter out here—so bright that everything blurs around the edges. I’m struck by the utterly eerie foreignness of it all. I almost feel like I’m a lab rat in some futuristic sci-fi maze.

It’s strange to run in the afterlife. Because I breathe only out of habit and not out of necessity, I don’t have to worry about what lying around so much has done to my conditioning. It’s liberating. Like the first turn on the track, when you still feel invincible.

“What did you mean when you said I should tell you when I feel woozy?” I call out to Julian.

He slows enough so we can run side by side. “You’re an addict. And you don’t want to go cold turkey with this drug. We will have to wean you off it little by little. Put your hacking skills to good use.”

So we are being drugged. That explains why we’re all so lethargic. “Who is drugging us? And why?” Though I’m less than thrilled it’s Julian, it’s nice to finally be around someone who might have some answers about this place. He must have some good connections if he knows so much.

Julian shoots me a sidelong glance as if contemplating how much he should tell me. “It’s a long story, and we
shouldn’t be talking out in the open like this. We don’t want to attract unwanted attention.”

As if to prove his point, a low buzzing sound comes up behind us, rapidly getting louder, like a plane coming in for a landing. Julian shoves me into the V-shaped recess between two hives. He clamps his hand over my mouth and whispers into my ear. “Scanner drone.”

I wrestle away from his hand but stay in the shadows with him. I’m grateful for his protection, but he still has a long way to go before he’ll have my trust. We stand there as a bee roughly the size of my head lazily zigzags down the corridor, about six feet above us. Every few yards it emits a quick scan of yellowish light from its undersides, a jarring splash of color in such a white environment.

After a few minutes Julian decides it is all clear, and we set off again. We don’t talk, though I really have to bite my tongue to keep from asking him a million questions, including what the heck that yellow light is for. The scenery is monotonous, but I start to detect a pattern. The corridor we’re in is about the width of two lanes on the highway, and at regular intervals we cross over intersections with corridors of similar width that run perpendicular to ours. I count as we go along and discover that each block is made up of one hundred hives. The counting keeps my mind occupied, but soon enough I lose focus and my legs sputter like a car running out of gas.

Julian notices I’ve dropped off, and he stops, glancing around as if to get his bearings. I don’t know how he can tell where we are, if he can. Everything looks
exactly the same to me. “We’ll stop here,” he says.

He motions for me to follow him to the nearest hive, and he does his little tapping trick again, only this time with his fist. A door slides open, and we hop in before it slides closed again. The interior of this hive is like mine, only this one is half-empty.

“We’re in luck,” Julian says. “It’s much less hassle when you don’t have to deal with all the addicts.”

“It’s not our fault.” I bristle. “Can you please stop calling us addicts?”

“Whatever.” Julian rolls his eyes. “Pick out your suite,
tout de suite
.” He chuckles at his lame joke, and it’s my turn to employ the eye roll.

“Too bad you died before you could have kids, Julian. You have great dad jokes.” I pause, and despite the smog clogging my entire being, a vivid picture of twisted steel and shattered glass flashes uncomfortably through my mind. “How did you die anyway?”

Julian draws back, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. Then can you tell me what that yellow light was? Coming from the scanner drone?”

“I could,” he says in an exaggerated way that implies he won’t.

“Julian . . .” I’d like to slap him, but it’d mean touching him.

“Chill.” Julian tilts back his head and gives me a lazy smile. My insides flip-flop despite my anger. “If you get caught in that yellow light, you’ll get picked up by the
guardians. They don’t exactly like people running around outside the hives.”

“I won’t get caught, then,” I mumble. What else did I want to ask him? Questions pop into my head, but as soon as I almost have my tongue around one, another question crowds it out. The drugs make my thoughts as slippery as stones in a river.

I plop myself into the nearest empty chamber and fit my hands into the grooves. At first nothing happens, but I wiggle my fingers and concentrate on imagining my files and folders. The screen chugs slowly to life, loading strange code and symbols. Then I feel it, the delicious tingles and the sweet clarity of mind that comes when I plug in. Everything is there, exactly the way I left it. The error message on the cat memory I shared with Beckah pops up again.

“Did it work?” Julian pokes his head in.

I nod, and Julian reaches in and laces his fingers through mine. I try to jerk my hand away, but he’s superstrong. “Enjoy the memory” is the last thing I hear him say.

Ward, Felicia. Memory #31233

Tags: Germany, Julian, AFN, Rainy day

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I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room, sipping coffee I poached from Dad’s luxury stash, flipping through the American Forces Network programming. I could watch
something on German TV, but I don’t make a habit of taxing my brain when I have a welcome break from Mother. Besides, I find the public service announcements, which AFN broadcasts in lieu of commercials, strangely entertaining. The bulk of subscribers to AFN are military abroad, so there are spots on being suspicious of strangers, keeping your uniform spiffy, and picking up toys left on your stairs so your family doesn’t trip and die.

Rain is coming down outside in sheets, pattering so hard against the windows that they rattle. I used to revel in weather like this. But in Frankfurt it seems like most days are overcast with intermittent showers, as opposed to our last assignment in Nairobi, Kenya, where sunny skies were the norm.

Sun wasn’t the only advantage of being stationed in Africa. In Kenya we lived in a mansion with help (cook, maid, driver, and two very necessary security guards). Here we live in a three-bedroom apartment in a claustrophobic community populated solely by other consulate staff and the hordes of diseased bunnies that pollute our lawns, so separate from the rest of the city that we might as well be in America.

But Frankfurt beats Nairobi for safety. Nairobi is called “Nairobbery” by the expats who live there, and I experienced the high crime rate firsthand on the eve of my thirteenth birthday when I made the mistake of running into a dark alley by myself. I’ve had nightmares ever since. The nightmares were so bad in those early days, I awoke
screaming, blubbering incoherently about some man who was coming to take me away. Dad was always the one who’d come in and try to soothe me back to sleep with his gentle tenor. Because Mother, of course, needed to be well rested for her long days at the office serving our country.

Now that Mother has been promoted to American Citizens Services chief, she’s working even longer hours and traveling more. She may not be interested in my maintaining my sanity, but she’s religious about my maintaining my 4.0 GPA and padding my applications with extracurriculars so I can get into an Ivy League. If I don’t have homework, piano practice, or one of my other activities, Mother gives me Foreign Service practice tests to improve my general knowledge. It’s exhausting. Fortunately, Mother will not be back until late tonight, thanks to some embassy function in Berlin. Unfortunately, Dad has been in Papua New Guinea for weeks now researching a tribe that makes music with conch shells. I wish he were here. He’d know what to do about my nightmares getting worse again lately.

I’m contemplating whipping up a prepackaged mashed potatoes snack, when the doorbell rings. I spring off the sofa and hurry to the entryway, where I press the buzzer and check my reflection in the mirror. I open the door. It’s Julian, drenched, teeth chattering.

“Can I come in?”

I’m not supposed to let boys into the apartment when Mother and Dad are away, but Julian looks so pitiful, I usher him in. “How’d you know where I live?”