Nine

by Rachelle Dekker

  “What other terrible things is she going to remember?”

  “I want there to be another way too, Zoe.”

  She huffed in disbelief and shook her head.

  “Those terrible memories are worth her life,” Seeley said. “Because trust me, it’s her memories or her life. The men capable of nearly drowning a little girl over and over are looking for her. What do you think they’ll be willing to do to get what they want from her now?”

  Zoe felt a rush of emotion wash over her. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she didn’t fight them. “I don’t know how to protect her.”

  Seeley’s face softened, and he walked across the space that separated them. He placed his hand on her shoulder, and his touch quickened her pulse and drew heat back to her chest.

  “All any of us can do is our best,” he said.

  Zoe sniffed her tears back and drew her shoulder out from under his hand. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the way his closeness made her skin tingle, so she deflected.

  “Where did you get that, a fortune cookie?” she mocked.

  He cleared his throat. “I was just trying to offer . . .” He shook his head and chuckled. “I’m not great at pep talks.”

  “Phrases like ‘all any of us can do is our best’ aren’t making you any better,” Zoe said.

  “Noted.” He smiled, and she returned the gesture.

  Immediately she wished she hadn’t. They were connecting and sparking something neither of them had time for. Zoe yanked her eyes away from his and walked past him without looking back. She still didn’t trust him. He was still the enemy.

  Wasn’t he?

  I OPENED MY eyes, and once more I was sitting on a bench between the sweet neighborhood to my right and the bustling downtown to my left. The thoughts I’d recovered earlier crashed into my brain, and their rumbling fears with them. My heart rate spiked. I could feel beads of sweat collecting at my hairline.

  I had to control this. Deep breaths. Internalize the fear. See it, switch it off, stomp it out. I’d been trained to do so. Wasn’t that what Dr. Loveless had said?

  “You came back,” the small voice beside me said.

  I turned and saw the high ponytail and unicorn shirt. “You lied to me.”

  The girl’s face went sour. “Did not.”

  “You said you would show me the game.”

  “I did. It’s not my fault you lost.”

  Lucy, remember, this is your mind. You are safe.

  Dr. Loveless’s voice echoed like a whisper in my ears. I had to keep my brain trained on the truth of her words.

  “Are there more games like that one?” I asked the child.

  “Oh yeah, lots,” she said, her eyes widening.

  “Can you show me?”

  “Not until you win the first one.”

  Fear beat against my heart. I didn’t want to go back into the box.

  She turned to look me right in the eye. “Leveling up doesn’t come for free.”

  I swallowed hard, and the little girl must have seen the terror cascading down my face.

  “You scared?”

  I nodded.

  The girl slid off the bench and stood at attention before me, eyes serious, jaw set. “Toughen up, buttercup. Level one is easy mode. If you can’t beat this, you might as well not come back.”

  I felt smacked, her words punchy and brutal. Then her face softened, and her lips opened to reveal her gap-toothed grin. A giggle escaped her lips, one that sounded both innocent and maddening. I wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or threatened. Without another sound she was off again, racing toward the bustle of bodies, and I knew what following her would mean.

  But I couldn’t not. I physically couldn’t stay seated. My mind and heart needed to know, so they carried my limbs without my permission. I was met with meatsuits, same as before. I was crashing through people, desperate to keep up, hoping for a different outcome.

  I should have slowed my pace since I knew what waited, but I didn’t and again smacked the hard glass at a dangerous pace. The time before it had all seemed to happen in slow motion as reality crashed in. This time I knew what was coming, and it happened faster than I anticipated. No matter what I tried, the water rose and the fear grew. I couldn’t hear Dr. Loveless’s voice. I lost my grasp on what I knew was true.

  This was my mind.

  I was safe.

  But all I could feel was the desperate need to escape the glass prison as the faceless coats watched me begin to drown. All I could see were the painful flashes of reliving this moment as a child, over and over. My own voice screamed for help, begging for them not to put me back in. My own body tugged against their restraints, bruising under their vicious holds. My mind scratched at the inside of my skull for freedom.

  Freedom.

  Freedom.

  Freedom.

  Until I wasn’t breathing, and the shocks against my chest and to my nervous system were the only thing that could bring me back to the reality of lying on the cold table in the barn, sweat-drenched, DOT attached to my head, Zoe and the others surrounding me.

  I sprang up from where I was seated, gasping. Oxygen forced its way into my lungs, its reentry painful. My head was pounding, and I felt like I was still soaked from icy waters, even though that had just been happening in my mind.

  Tears warmed my cheeks. I wasn’t weeping, but I could feel the urge to collapse into Zoe’s arms. She was close, her hand on my shoulder. I glanced up at her worried face as the noise of the room finally broke past the barrier built in my subconscious.

  “Deep breaths,” Dr. Loveless was saying as she carefully disconnected DOT. Unhooking me because I had failed. Again.

  “Talk to me, Lucy,” I heard Zoe say.

  “Stop,” I whispered.

  “It can’t be safe for her heart rate to spike that high,” Zoe said.

  I reached up and pushed Dr. Loveless’s hands away from the connecting tubes on the DOT cap. “Stop,” I said louder.

  “Lucy,” Zoe said.

  “I need to go again.”

  “No. She can’t, she needs a break,” she said to the others.

  “You don’t speak for me,” I snapped. I could feel something forming inside me. An old sensation of determination that was stronger than anything I’d ever felt. My words were harsher than they needed to be, but I only slightly cared. Something else was happening that was greater than how Zoe felt.

  She dropped her hand from my shoulder and inched back. I’d hurt her. I should care. I did, but not enough to stop.

  I turned back to Dr. Loveless, who was still on the other side of me. “Can I go again?”

  She glanced at Zoe and then Seeley, who was standing near the end of the table. Then back to me. “Your pulse is still unstable. It might be better to take a small break.”

  I heard it then, the uneven beeping that represented my heart rate. I zeroed in on the sound, blocking out the rest of the room. I followed it to the sound of my actual pulse, saw it skyrocketing under my skin. With a long exhale, I slowed it. Brought it back into a perfectly normal rhythm. Then returned my focus to the room.

  Dr. Loveless and Zoe were watching me in fascination.

  “I need to go again,” I said.

  “Can I speak with you two alone?” Zoe demanded rather than asked.

  The three left the curtained square. They moved out of sight, and I zeroed in on the motion of their footsteps. Four yards across the barn floor. The creaking of wood and metal signaled they were stepping outside. I didn’t need to strain to hear their words. I just tapped into their sound waves. Like a radio. Easy enough.

  Zoe: “You can’t seriously be thinking about letting her do this.”

  Dr. Loveless: “She seems pretty determined.”

  Zoe: “She’s already had two doses of amobarbital, and you want to give her another?”

  Seeley: “How much can the body withstand?”

  Zoe: “Not this much!”

  Dr. Loveless: “I wasn�
��t aware you had medical experience, Miss Johnson.”

  Seeley: “Can Lucy handle another dose?”

  A beat of silence passed.

  Dr. Loveless: “I could cut it in half. I believe she’ll be able to journey with less now that’s she been before. Her determination will carry her farther than most drugs could. It’s all a mind game at this point.”

  Zoe: “A mind game that could kill her.”

  Seeley: “In my experience, that is the only kind.”

  More silence.

  Dr. Loveless: “Are we finished then?” She didn’t wait for a response. Her feet were already moving back toward me. She stepped through the thick white sheet and strode toward me, Seeley a few steps behind her.

  Zoe stepped into view but stayed back, her face darkened by worry. Don’t give up on me, I wanted to say, but instead I just held her eyes and hoped her face would soften. It didn’t. I swallowed my own fear as I listened to her heart pounding inside her chest. I could stop, I thought, heed her warning.

  Dr. Loveless held out a single blue pill, and I leaned back against the table. “Anchor yourself here,” she said. “The key is to remember what is real and what isn’t. You are in control.”

  I nodded at the doctor, then stole a final glance at Zoe. She was scratching her arms, a tic I’d noticed her doing when she was afraid or nervous. I could stop, I thought again as I took the blue pill.

  But not yet.

  TWENTY

  “THE PRESIDENT IS getting antsy,” Hammon said.

  Seeley exhaled and watched his breath smoke from his lips into the freezing winter air. The world was dark in the early morning hours, the house behind him deep in slumber.

  “We need more time, sir,” he said into the phone. “She’s close to a breakthrough.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Nothing about this is sure.”

  “That isn’t good enough, Agent. The commander in chief and the army’s chief of staff are breathing down my neck. They want to pull the girl in.”

  “If they do that, we lose all hope of recovering her memories, sir.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. Gina herself said memory recovery is unpredictable. Maybe being here will remind the girl of who she was created to be, and she’ll do as told.”

  “It’s too risky,” Seeley said.

  “Your concern is noted, but I’m afraid this call outranks you.”

  “I just need a couple more days. Please, sir, we’re close.”

  “Based on what evidence?”

  Seeley said nothing. It was more a feeling than anything, but he couldn’t say that. Hammon sighed, and Seeley let the silence stand as he waited for the director to consider.

  “I’ll see how long I can hold them off, but I’m promising nothing,” Hammon finally replied.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me, Seeley, just get it done.”

  The line went dead, and Seeley tapped the phone off. He glanced back toward the house and cursed. The battle that had started waging in his chest returned. One side demanded he continue forward cold, the other reminded him of the Lucy he knew and how Zoe warmed him more each time they interacted. The division was building.

  He knew how this would end if they were successful. What it would mean for Zoe, and he struggled to swallow it. And watching Lucy remember the tiny pieces of what they had done to her was only strengthening his conflicting emotions.

  He needed to get control of himself. Do what needed to be done. And fast, or he’d lose all control of this situation. What he was doing to them was cruel, but it was nothing compared to what the army would do. He was protecting them from that, he told himself as he walked back to the house, trying to leave his mounting guilt out in the cold.

  ZOE FOLLOWED LUCY as she stormed out of the barn. Seeley moved to follow, and Zoe raised her hands, signaling for him to stay. It would be better if she went after Lucy alone.

  The sun was setting on another day, and warm pinks with brushes of orange filled the sky above the mountains. It had been two days since they’d journeyed to the farm. Two days of Lucy subjecting her mind to torture and her body to danger. She couldn’t get out of the box. No matter what she tried, she got stuck, drowning behind thick glass, a victim to the pain of the same group of memories she couldn’t free herself from.

  A dozen times she tried, and each time the results ended the same way. With each failed attempt Lucy sank deeper into herself. Determined to beat the first level. But something was holding her back, something she couldn’t identify or conquer.

  She was hardly sleeping, though she needed the rest in order to recover. Both nights her cries had woken them all, as her memories found her dreams and turned them to nightmares. Zoe wasn’t sleeping either. Lucy wouldn’t talk to her anymore. She wouldn’t talk to any of them. Some instinctual lever had been pulled, and the sweet, naïve girl was being replaced with someone else.

  Maybe someone she had always been.

  “Lucy,” Zoe said as the girl strode away from the barn and another failed attempt. Zoe had to push her legs hard to keep up. “Lucy, please stop.”

  Lucy whirled around, her face shadowed in frustration. “I’m so weak,” she hissed. “I should be able to do this. To get out of that box!”

  “Should? You say that like it’s a normal skill.”

  “I’m not normal,” Lucy bit back.

  Zoe held her tongue. No, she wasn’t.

  Lucy growled and grasped the sides of her head. “I need to be better.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do, otherwise I’ll never remember.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to remember.”

  Lucy sighed, and a bit of light chased out the darkness in her eyes. Tears started to collect there, and Zoe’s heart broke.

  “But Agent Seeley said—”

  “Forget Seeley,” Zoe said. “We can leave right now if you want. Grab our stuff and go. We can head back to Tomac’s, he can get us new identities, and we’ll go wherever you want.”

  “They’ll come for us,” Lucy whispered. Her tears dotted her cheeks, and the hardness of failure eased as the sweet girl Zoe knew began to return.

  “I’ve been running most of my life,” Zoe said. “And you’re really fast.”

  Lucy gave a soft chuckle and sniffed back her tears.

  “Just you and me,” Zoe continued, “and we’ll leave all of this behind us.”

  “I would like that.”

  “Me too.”

  Lucy’s small smile faded, and she shook her head. Zoe already knew what the girl was going to say.

  “But you can’t,” Zoe said.

  “I just want the truth.” Lucy grunted at the sky. “But this isn’t working.”

  Zoe knew from her own experience with RMT that it wasn’t a sure science. So many factors influenced the outcome. It had been used on her as a way to recall her fractured childhood after she and Stephen had been taken from their mother. After the authorities decided their stories about what had happened in the mountain community where they’d been raised weren’t true. That their minds had fabricated an elaborate story to cope with their trauma.

  Dr. Holbert had been convinced that if he could take Zoe back through her memories, she’d remember what had really happened and be able to deal with it. He’d done the same with Stephen.

  That’s when his nightmares had started. That had been the start of it all.

  Zoe shook off the dark memories and focused on what she had learned about the way the process worked. There was something Dr. Holbert had said that was ringing in her ears now. “Trust is essential, Evelyn. Do you trust me?”

  “Everything okay over here?” Seeley said, joining them and yanking Zoe from her mind.

  “I have an idea.” She looked to Lucy. “You trust me, right?”

  “Of course,” Lucy said.

  Zoe turned to look at Seeley. “I need you to back me up.”

  “With what?” he asked.
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  Zoe started back toward the barn, and the other two followed. She stepped inside, Lucy directly behind her, and Gina looked up to meet them.

  “This isn’t working,” Zoe said.

  “RMT takes time—” Gina started.

  “Yes, but she doesn’t trust you. So if Lucy tries again, I’m going with her.”

  “What?” Lucy exclaimed.

  “That’s not possible,” Gina said.

  “Not physically, but with my voice. I’ll guide her through. She trusts me,” Zoe said.

  “You have no experience—”

  “I have some,” Zoe pushed back. “And I know Lucy, who she is now. I’ll guide her or she doesn’t go back in.” She turned to make sure she had Lucy’s approval. The girl nodded, and Zoe felt her confidence grow.

  “This is ridiculous,” Gina said.

  “This is the plan,” Seeley cut in.

  Zoe glanced back at him.

  “They do this together,” he continued, “or not at all.”

  Zoe couldn’t help but give him a small grin. He nodded to her, and a small chip of her distrust fell away. In that moment she was glad he was there.

  The three of them looked at Gina. And after a moment of staring at them in disbelief, she shook her head and conceded. “Fine. But if things go awry, I’m taking over.”

  Lucy wrapped her hand in Zoe’s and smiled. “Ready?” Lucy asked her.

  “Ready.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I WAS SITTING on the bench between two worlds. But it felt different—the air, the wind that brushed over my shoulders. I wasn’t sure if the change was real or just in my mind. I was struck by the absurdity of my own thought and laughed out loud. Everything was in my mind.

  “What’s so funny?” came the all-too-familiar voice.

  I turned my eyes, and like every time before, she was there. The little girl in the unicorn T-shirt.

  Lucy, can you hear me? Remember you aren’t alone.

  Zoe’s voice filled me with warmth. Small and inside my brain like Dr. Loveless’s had always been, but more connected. Like her voice was a part of me.

  “Yes,” I answered, “I can hear you.”