Unremembered (Unremembered #1)(47)

Rio.

The redheaded man.

The mention of him sparks something in my subconscious.

I sneak a glimpse at the silver cube on the table. It’s still on. I’m still connected to it. I wonder if there’s anything stored in there that can tell me more about him. About the man who paid for my meal at the diner. Who released me from the chains in the barn. Who Zen tried to kill only a few hours ago.

But nothing comes.

‘Are you all right?’ Zen asks, studying my face. ‘Maybe we should take a break.’

‘No,’ I reply in haste. ‘There’s still so much I want to know.’

Zen grins. ‘OK. Like what?’

‘Like . . .’ I pause, scrambling to arrange the multitude of questions swimming around in my head into some kind of prioritized list. ‘What happened that day we met? After you saw me behind the pillar. Did I sound the alarm on you?’

‘No. Thankfully.’ His smile grows. ‘We sat on the lawn and talked. For a while actually. You were very wary of me at first. You sat like ten feet away.’ He chuckles heartily at the memory. ‘It was obvious you didn’t trust me. But slowly, little by little, you started to open up. You inched closer. It was adorable.’

‘What did we talk about?’

He shrugs. ‘Lots of things. Although truthfully, I did the majority of the talking. I was nervous. I just couldn’t get over how beautiful you were. And you were talking to me. That was the most unbelievable part of it.’

I think about what Cody said on the bus. About girls refusing to talk to him.

‘Are you bitter at pretty girls?’ I ask.

He breaks into laughter. ‘What? No. I . . . Well, I’d never met someone as pretty as you, let’s just say that. You were so –’ his voice suddenly gets very quiet – ‘different.’

I watch his expression shift. The change is perceptible. And I know right away that the darkness has returned.

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

He shakes his head, as though he’s trying to loosen a thought that’s gripping his brain. ‘There was just something so unusual about you. I saw it right away.’

‘Unusual how?’

‘Mostly it was your speech. It was kind of stilted. As though no one had ever taught you to use inflections when you spoke. It was evident you were tremendously intelligent but there was so much you didn’t know. Everyday words and phrases and pop-culture references.’

So I’ve always been like that.

The thought comforts and unsettles me at the same time.

‘Then there was that weird mark on your wrist. You told me it was a scar from when you were a baby. But I knew that couldn’t be true. No scar looks like that. But I didn’t press it. I assumed you just didn’t want to tell me. It wasn’t until later that I realized you were regurgitating what they had told you. You didn’t know what it was either.’

I touch the thin black line on my wrist, shuddering as I remember what it felt like when it vibrated and gave away my location.

‘But the biggest reason I knew there was something unusual about you,’ Zen continues, ‘was the fact that I’d never seen you before. You see, all the kids who live on the compound go to the same school. There are only about a hundred of us. You come to know people really well. Like in a small town. So seeing you hiding way back there in that restricted section and knowing that you didn’t hang out with the rest of us was pretty strange.’

‘Restricted section?’ I repeat.

He nods. ‘It’s in the far back corner of the property. No one is allowed in without proper clearance.’

‘So how did you get in?’ There’s more than a little teasing in my tone.

He chuckles, letting a little bit of the lightness back in, and waves away my question as though the answer was trivial. ‘Oh, I made a duplicate of my father’s fingerprint years ago. Growing up on a technological research compound gives you access to a lot of really cool gadgets. Life is pretty boring there. You find ways to entertain yourself.’

‘Like climbing concrete walls?’ I ask with a smirk.

‘Exactly.’

I eye the small silver box that strangely houses the contents of my life. Or at least some of them. I find myself hoping that something in that little device will reveal why I feel so peculiar around Zen. Why my lips felt drawn to his like a magnet. What a soulmate really is. ‘So what happened after that?’ I ask. ‘After we talked.’

Once again, I watch his demeanour shift. The light in his eyes dims. ‘You asked if I would come back to see you and I said yes.’ He averts his gaze and picks up the hard drive again, cradling it in his hands. ‘Then I left and you forgot all about me.’

I blink in surprise. ‘That’s impossible. I would never—’

But before I can finish the sentence, I’m blasted by a barrage of images. A thousand pictures spinning chaotically, mixed with flashes of milky white.

I know it can only be one thing: the pieces of another memory.

I allow my eyes to close as I watch the scene unfold before me. As I witness it first-hand.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Panic tightens my chest. My blood runs cold.

No one ever knocks on the door. My father always uses his fingerprint to enter.

Another knock. Then . . .