Undiscovered (Unremembered #1.5)(20)

“Let me see your wrist.”

Hesitantly, she proffered her right arm. But I shook my head. “The other one.”

She swapped them out. I shuddered upon seeing the mark—the tracking device, as Rio had explained. I pulled the laser knife I’d swiped from the kitchen out of my pocket. My hands trembled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice scratchy with trepidation. “But this is going to hurt.”

She was deathly quiet and still. I knew, having gone through this process so many times, exactly what stage she was in: shock.

Shock from my being here, from my knowing so much about her, and from the conflicting emotions that were raging inside of her.

“Please know,” I begged her, “that I’m not doing this to cause you pain. I’m doing this to help you.”

She nodded. Her eyes told me that she believed me. That she trusted me. There was so much I could discern from those vibrant purple eyes. And the longer I knew her, the more times I was forced to remind her of what we were, the easier it became to read them.

I flicked on the laser. It hummed to life, causing her to startle slightly.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s going to be okay.”

I forced my hands to stay steady, even though my insides were a writhing mess. The last thing I needed to do was accidently cut her hand off.

I sucked in a lungful of oxygenated courage and cringed as I brought the laser to her skin. She gasped slightly at the sensation, but thankfully didn’t cry out. Her bravery made my heart twist with longing. She was so strong. In so many ways. Any other human being on this compound—on this earth—would be wailing in agony right now.

Carefully, I wielded the laser in a straight line around the thin black line on her wrist, singeing the skin, tearing at her flesh. She didn’t flinch. She stayed perfectly still.

I didn’t go deep. I only cut the surface. The first layer of skin. When I was done, the black line was gone. All that was left in its place was a sickening red wound. It bled a little, but I was ready. I removed a white bandage from my pocket and pressed it firmly against the gash.

“Do you trust me?” I asked her, gazing into her eyes and trying to relay months of connection in a single glance.

She nodded dazedly. “Yes.”

“Then I need you to come with me.” I pointed toward the high concrete wall that surrounded her little cottage. “We’re going to climb over that wall and then we’re going to run. Do you understand me?”

She nodded again. “Run.”

I pressed down on her bandage. “Hold that there. Keep applying pressure.”

“Keep applying pressure,” she repeated. They must have really done a number on her brain last night. She was back to sounding like the inflectionless robot I’d met the first day.

“Okay,” I said, “on the count of three we go.”

I turned toward the wall, my heart pounding in my chest. “One. Two—”

“Wait,” she interrupted, and I spun back around, jarred from the halted adrenaline. “Look.” She peeled back the bandage, and the world imploded around me.

My whole body wilted. I felt my legs give out. I felt myself start to sink. Down, down, down I fell. Until I was kneeling at her feet. I took her delicate, perfect wrist in my hand and swept my fingertip across the skin. The perfect, flawless, healing skin.

Her flesh was actually growing back right before my eyes. Like some sort of time-lapse photography. I watched in wonderment as her wound began to heal. As the thin black line began to reappear.

What would have taken a normal human being’s body days—even weeks to accomplish, hers was accomplishing in minutes.

“What does it mean?” she asked me, her eyes wide and searching, drilling into mine, asking me all of the questions in the world, all at the same time.

I kissed her healed wrist, letting my lips linger on her warm, perfumed flesh.

“It means,” I breathed into her skin, “I need another plan.”





15: Help


Coded into her DNA. That was the only plausible explanation. They hadn’t simply tattooed her with a tracking device, they had created her with a tracking device. No matter what happened, it would always grow back. It would always be a part of her.

She would always be permanently marked by Diotech.

The thought infuriated me. Could I never win? Would I never be able to defeat them? It was certainly seeming that way.

The next day at school, I was in a stupor. I couldn’t focus on any of the lessons on my slate. I walked around like a zombie. One who had lost the will to eat.

“Okay,” Klo finally said at lunchtime after twenty minutes of watching me stare at my plate. “What’s going on with you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“It’s clearly not nothing,” he argued. “You’ve been in a daze all day.”

“He looks like he’s been wiped,” Xaria put in, popping a turnip fry into her mouth.

“Wiped?” Rustin asked.

“Yeah, all the people who leave the memory labs after a restoration look like that.” She waved a hand in front of my face. “Helloooo. What did you see? What did they take from you?”

“That’s so messed up,” Rustin told Xaria. “I can’t believe your mom actually erases people’s brains.”