Unremembered (Unremembered #1)(32)

Cody is in his room. I hear the soft patter of his fingertips. I believe he’s playing another game on his cellphone. Heather and Scott are having a heated conversation in their bedroom one floor below.

And I lie on my bed . . . listening.

I can tell by their hushed whispers that they don’t want anyone to overhear their discussion. But I don’t seem to have a problem. I hear it as easily as if they were standing at the foot of my bed.

Heather is really upset about the car-door incident. She hasn’t said as much to me but I can tell. She acts differently around me now. Almost skittish. And as soon as Scott returned home from the drugstore, she ushered him into their bedroom and closed the door. I haven’t seen either of them since.

Even if I couldn’t hear them right now, it wouldn’t be difficult to surmise that they’re talking about me.

But fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) I can.

‘You should have seen it, Scott,’ Heather is saying. ‘One minute the door was there. The next it was lying on the ground. She kicked the whole thing off like it was made of tinfoil. Don’t you find that just a little bit odd?’

‘I think you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion,’ Scott tells her. ‘There’s obviously an explanation for it. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the door was already loose? That something was wrong with the hinge and it just happened to fall off at the same time that she opened it.’

I don’t believe this explanation and I don’t expect Heather to either.

I close my eyes and imagine Heather shaking her head. ‘No. There was nothing wrong with the door, Scott. Car doors don’t fall off for no reason. I’m starting to think there’s something strange about that girl.’

‘Yes,’ Scott says gently. ‘She lost all her memories in a plane crash. She’s not going to act like you and me.’

‘A plane crash she mysteriously survived!’ Heather’s voice rises and Scott immediately shushes her. When she speaks again, she’s back to an intense whisper. ‘When no one else survived. I can’t put my finger on it but something is not right.’

Cody’s laptop is still sitting on my bed. I eye it hesitantly and then finally pull myself up and turn it on. Once it has fully booted up, I follow Cody’s instructions until I find myself staring at a little white search box.

A short vertical black line blinks expectantly at me. It’s waiting for me to point it in a direction.

I sigh and start to poke at the keys with my index finger, one letter at a time, until a word forms:

Diotech.

The company Zen told me about. The people he claimed are looking for me.

I stare down at the razor-thin black tattoo on my wrist, trying to imagine how this tiny mark could possibly be used to track me.

I click Search.

The page reloads but the results are extremely disappointing. Nothing seems to be even remotely related to the company Zen described.

And apparently even Google is discouraged with the outcome of the search because it asks me if I really meant to search Biotech instead of Diotech, clearly assuming that I must have made a mistake since there’s so little information to be found.

If this is such a massive and powerful corporation, why is there absolutely no mention of it on the Web? Cody said the Internet is where you go to find everything. But there’s not even a single reference to a technology conglomerate called Diotech.

More proof that the boy was lying.

I grunt and lean against the headrest, glaring at the unhelpful screen. I think back to the conversation I had in the dressing room. With the boy who calls himself Zen.

‘When I first met you, you were living in a lab . . . On a compound for a company called Diotech. They’re a massive technology conglomerate. You were involved in one of their research projects.’

I screw my mouth to the side and then slowly sit up straight again. I pull the laptop towards me and enter a new search. This time I throw in every halfway-relevant word I can think of:

Diotech + compound + technology conglomerate + research project

And then, as a final afterthought, I quickly add:

Seraphina + Zen

I’m highly doubtful that anything will result, but I click Search anyway, and wait.

The screen refreshes, revealing one result.

I hurriedly click on it and am sent to a website called Beyond Top Secret: A Common Ground for Conspiracy Theorists.

It appears the search has brought me to something called a message board. In the centre of the page is a grey box with white text. It reads:



The rise of Diotech will be the fall of humankind. This massive corporation will fascinate some and infuriate many. Citizens will willingly fall prey to its allure. Governments will crumble under the weight of its sovereignty. In only a few short years, Diotech will change the world as it is known. We will never be the same.





My hopes crash to the ground as I frown at the screen. What does that even mean?

I scan further down the page and find that the post was submitted by someone who calls himself Maxxer. Next to his name is a photograph of a man with a long face and silky snow-white hair that falls to his shoulders. One of his eyes is dark brown while the other appears to be made out of blue glass.

The image unnerves me.

Just underneath the post is a line that says Tags. I flinch when I read it: