"What was that about?" he asked. His breath brushed against her cheek, sending shivers down her spine, even though it was warm.
"What?" she asked, opening her eyes wide.
"You want to see Caroline?"
"She's my sister." She shrugged.
"She's sick."
"Yeah, that's why I want to see her."
"There's nothing you can do to help."
"I just want to see if she's okay."
"Well, she's not. She's not okay. That's why we're running tests on her. We're trying to make her better."
"Are you?” She pulled free of his grip. “Or are you just trying to find out what went wrong with this batch of experiments?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
She turned to walk down the hall. "Nothing."
He grabbed her arm again. Gentler this time. Almost like a caress. The gesture felt disturbing with his sticky gloves.
She turned to look at him.
"You know I care about you, right?" Concern softened his features.
She nodded. Somehow, it didn't feel as comforting as it would have before, almost as though being back at the center had subtly shifted things between them. He felt more like a jailer than a friend or a guardian.
A new emotion tightened her stomach. Something she wasn’t sure she’d felt before.
Hatred, Maia supplied the word.
When did she start hating Spencer Evans?
"You're not just some experiment, you know?" he said.
"No?" Stephanie glanced around the hall. She felt like an experiment.
"You're more than that."
"What am I? Human?" She couldn't keep the sneer out of her voice. She felt like she’d only caught a glimpse of humanity in her brief time on Ecrune. She couldn’t say she liked it much.
"I don't understand where this anger is coming from."
"I don't understand why you don't want to talk about Caroline. She's sick so she suddenly doesn't exist? I'm sorry I can't edit my memory the way you can."
"Exactly. She's sick. Caroline is sick, Stephanie. And we're still not sure how this works but what if it's contagious somehow? Last time... It was like one bout of psychosis triggered it in everyone who came into contact with them."
"How is that even possible?"
"You read memories, don't you? Have you ever touched someone who was mentally unstable?"
She froze, mouth half open to argue. Had she?
Maia?
What?
Are you crazy? Is that why I've got your voice in my head.
Fuck you, Stephanie.
"Or maybe it's because you girls are carrying all these other memories inside of you, sometimes it's just too much. Maybe sharing any more just tips you over."
"Last time?"
"What?"
Stephanie frowned. "Were you here for the original experiments? Batch one? Did you see those girls go crazy?"
"I-"
"And you waited until it started happening to us before you mentioned anything?"
She thought he’d just been brought on recently, an extra doctor to help monitor them as they matured. She’d known him for five years and now she felt like she didn’t know him at all
“No. How old do you think I am? I mean, I read the reports but I didn’t think-”
"Whatever. I don't need you to walk me to medical. I know where it is."
"Stephanie-"
"Leave my bags in my room. I'll unpack later."
"Come on, I can-"
"No, you can't."
She walked away from him.
She didn't look back.
Chapter Ten
You have to promise to be really, really quiet while we're in there, Maia? If anyone finds out about you, we’ll both be in a lot of trouble.
Maia didn’t say anything.
Maia? Are you just practicing?
"Stephanie?" A doctor's assistant in a white uniform asked, a bright smile flashing at her. Like he didn’t have a file on her that included her image.
She stood up, straightening her shoulders.
The assistant led her down a corridor and Stephanie felt the muscles in her neck and shoulders tighten as she resisted the urge to peek into the rooms they passed. A muffled scream echoed down the hall, like something out of a retro horror film.
She shuddered.
Eventually, they came to a door, about halfway down, where they stopped. He tapped on the door. Someone on the other side grunted. The assistant took that as permission to enter and pushed the door open.
Stephanie stepped inside, hesitantly.
It felt weird to be in the medical center without Spencer Evans.
She didn't recognize the doctor. He was old and chubby, with a scraggly beard that covered half his face in ginger fuzz.
"Hello, come in, sit," he muttered, without looking at her.
The assistant led Stephanie to an armchair. His bright smile didn't budge as he started attaching sensors to her scalp, pulling her hair as he stuck them on.
She winced.
"Don't be nervous," the assistant said. "Everything is going to be just fine."
He jabbed a hypo-spray against Stephanie’s arm.
Something warm and light flooded her system, tinting the world with a golden glow. She relaxed back in the armchair. The leather upholstery was old and worn, soft and smooth. It felt like being hugged.
The doctor's assistant moved to stand in the corner.
The doctor continued to stare at his desk and it took Stephanie a moment to realize there was a screen there. He tapped his fingers against the screen a couple of times before glancing up.
His eyes were bright blue, like sunlight on water, and they sent a spike of ice cold fear through her, even through the drug-fueled haze of warmth.
"Please state your name."
"Stephanie."
"Company ID?"
"SCGE-B2-N037."
He nodded.
"Age?"
"Eighteen."
"Where are you from, Stephanie?"
"The city of Oleander on Ecrune."
The doctor swiped something on his screen.
The assistant's smile turned to wood.
"That was our story during placement," Stephanie clarified.
The doctor nodded. "Where are you really from?"
"Here," She shrugged, the cables pulling at her hair.
"And how does that make you feel?"
Angry, she thought. Like something's been stolen from me. "Okay, I guess."
"Just okay?"
"I don't have much to compare it too."
"Don't you?"
"Other people grew up differently. But I'm not like other people."
"What are you like?"
"The doctors call us a succubus class, like we're some old myth brought to life in a lab... But I can't help thinking we're something brand new. Something no one's ever seen before. No wonder we're going crazy."
"Are you going crazy?"
"My batch sisters are. The first group did - what would we call them? Cousins, maybe? I guess cousins would be right, wouldn't it? Like how people and apes are cousins? But would that make you and I cousins?"
Her thoughts were getting all tangled together. She pictured them in her head, like golden twine in a cloud of fog. And there was Maia, a streak of pale blue knotted together in the corner. She couldn't tell them about Maia.
She shook her head.
Took a deep breath, trying to gain control over the drugs in her system. It was like trying to catch hold of the ocean.
"Impossible and futile," she muttered. "You can only hold a little in your hands."
"A little of what?" The doctor asked. He tapped at his screen.
"The ocean. It washes over you and you can hold on to a little bit and there's no way to fight it. What did you give me?"
"Just something to help you relax, nothing to be alarmed over."
"How could I be alarmed if I'm relaxed?" she asked.
<
br /> She squirmed in her chair. The warm leather sucked at her skin. Sticky. It suddenly felt a lot less like she was being hugged and more like she was being restrained.
There was something wrong. Anxiety crawled up her chest, making her skin itch. She scratched at her collar bone.
"You were telling me about the ocean... What else makes you feel that way? Like you can't fight? Like you can only hold on to a piece at a time?"
"The ocean doesn't come in pieces," she corrected him. "You can't walk down the beach and say, oh, that's a nice piece of the ocean right there, I think I'm going to put that in my pocket and take it home."
She laughed.
She couldn't seem to stop talking. Every random thought that passed through her head came straight out of her mouth.
Don’t think about Maia.
"I can't think about-" She bit her lip, forcing her mouth closed. Go back to the ocean.
"Can't think about what?"
"Memory. Memory is like the ocean. Other people's memories, not mine, I mean. They wash over you - shoosh, whoosh - how do you make that wavy sound? Kind of like a hissing white noise? It doesn't matter."
She kept scratching at her neck. Her arms and chest were beginning to itch too.
Her leg began to bounce up and down, keeping time with her words. She tried to make it still but it just bounced faster. Her words tumbled out of her mouth faster, keeping time with her leg.
"It's actually really easy to let someone's whole life go flooding through - you almost want them to wash you away because, no offense, it hasn't been a picnic here but picnics are nice, aren't they? Have you ever been on a picnic before? Caroline and I used to pretend we were having picnics in our room and we'd sit on the floor and drink tea and eat tiny sandwiches and pretend we were watching the sunset. Have you read the Little Prince? You know where he watches the sunset that day over and over again because he's so very sad-"
The doctor was talking over her.
Stephanie felt vaguely annoyed that he wasn’t listening to her. "When he tamed the fox and I thought that was the saddest part of the whole story because the fox could never be happy again because you can't go back once you're changed because that's the thing about time and the way it keeps moving forward-"
The doctor’s assistant had pushed away from the wall and was searching through a drawer in the side cabinet. He came up with several different vials.
Stephanie stood up. The nodes attached to her scalp ripped tiny chunks of hair out as she scrambled over the back of the armchair. She tilted the chair back, using the legs to keep them away from her.
"Stay back, lions. What are lions doing with medicine? You don’t know what you’re doing at all. I don’t feel relaxed drifting on a sea of calm and - what did you give me? I can't stop. Why is it so itchy? Are you hot? I'm hot. I can't breathe. Is the ventilation broken?"
Her words ran together and her voice came out between wheezing hitches of breath. She doubled over behind the armchair, clutching at her chest.
The doctor's assistant slotted a vial into the hypo-spray.
She tried to swat him away but he pushed her hands back and pressed the jet injector to the side of her neck.
Everything went black.
Chapter Eleven
Her mouth tasted like asparagus.
She blinked her eyes open, Bright fluorescent lights glared down at her. She was on her back, staring up at the ceiling.
She cleared her throat.
She heard movement off to the side. Fabric rustled. A quick step. She tried turning her head to see but it was hard to move.
Dr. Evans appeared over her.
"How do you feel?" he asked. He sounded strained. Is he worried about me?
"Water?" She croaked.
He helped her sit up and handed her a small, disposable cup. She sipped slowly.
"What happened?"
She couldn't remember how she’d gotten there.
Stephanie glanced around the room, trying to figure it out. She was still in the medical ward, that much was obvious from the thin blue sheets and antiseptic smell. But it wasn't the same part of the medical ward she'd been in before...
She suddenly remembered where she’d seen the room. It was where they were taken if they had an accident. She’d been there to see Adrienne after she’d fallen in dance class and her foot had turned purple and swollen. She'd broken three bones, snapping them in sequence as she rolled over the side of her foot.
"Am I sick?" she asked
"No, you'll be fine. You just had an allergic reaction to the medicine they gave you during your test."
"Medicine?"
"To relax you."
Stephanie frowned. That’s what the doctor had said.
Why didn’t they just call it a sedative?
The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced it hadn’t been a sedative. They were lying. They’d given her something that was designed to make her blurt out every thought that entered her head. Some kind of truth serum... She tried to remember if she'd said anything about Maia.
"I got itchy and couldn't stop talking."
Dr. Evans nodded. "And then you had trouble breathing. You're lucky the assistant realized what was happening fast enough. Another couple of minutes and you could have died."
I could have died? She stared at Dr. Evans blankly. It didn't make any sense.
"After all the effort it took to make me... accidentally killing me seems like a waste." She muttered.
She wasn’t sure he’d heard her. He didn’t say anything, but when she looked up, he was standing there - completely still - as though he’d been shot with some kind of freeze ray. He was staring at her, mouth halfway open.
He'd heard her, she was sure of it. He just didn't know how to react. He shook his head.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
She sighed. "What does that even mean, anymore?"
"We've been so busy worrying about this psychosis business, it didn't even occur to me you might be feeling depressed."
"I'm not depressed." Am I?
The voice of Maia remained silent.
Maia? Are you there?
Nothing.
Tears stung at her eyes. Had they done something? When they were looking for Maia, had they found a way to remove her?
Did I get her killed all over again?
"I'll see what I can do.” Spencer said. “About Caroline. Maybe you can see her for a little while so that you know she's okay."
She nodded. "I'd like that."
He left and Stephanie leaned back against the hard pillows.
It's okay to come out now.
She searched for Maia in the back of her mind but she was gone.... Stephanie couldn't find her.
She'd never felt more alone.
* * *
A nurse came for her later. She had thin soup and a change of clothes.
Stephanie drank the soup slowly. She felt like she was floating in a cloud and it was making her motion sick.
She couldn't move properly. The nurse helped her get dressed.
"Do you need help getting back to your room?" she asked, frowning.
Stephanie got the impression she was supposed to be recovering faster than she was. The nurse double checked her chart, shined a light in her eyes, and checked her heart rate.
"You just need to rest for a while... and I'm sure you'll be more comfortable in your own room."
"Yeah." Stephanie agreed, even though the thought of going back to the room she'd shared with Caroline filled her with dread.
The nurse signed her out and walked her to the end of the medical ward. Stephanie stumbled into the elevator and pressed the button for her floor. There was a thin, rubbery band around her wrist. Just above the place where the external part of her coms met the implant. It was hot pink and she couldn't make out a clasp on it. She turned her wrist over seeing her ID code printed across the band.
The fact that she was wearing it again meant they must have clea
red her, she thought. She wasn't going to quarantine. She had her band back. The band. It monitored everything, her schedule, health, calories, heartbeat, location. Her hot pink manacle.
Maia? She tried again.
She didn't say anything. Not even an ‘I told you so’.
Stephanie felt tears sting at her eyes. The camera in the corner of the elevator stared down at her.
Stephanie glanced at her reflection in the silvered doors of the elevator. She had dark circles under her eyes and her eyelids were puffy and red.
She had to calm down.
My name is Stephanie. She thought to herself. I'm a succubus class genetic experiment. Designed to spy. I have no family, except for a batch sister I can't see. I'm a prisoner of the corporation that made me.
That made five true things, but they didn't make her feel any calmer. Or any more in control of herself.
Rogue Memory Page 5
