“Did you know,” he said, “that traces of old DNA still linger for a few minutes after a Chameleon injection? Not much, but enough for a DNA lock to read.”
The alarm cut off as the door clanged shut. Matthews strolled forward with a laugh, but it came out weak and breathy. Still not a hundred percent.
I aimed the gun at the SLS.
With more power than I’d thought he had, Matthews lunged for me. In seconds, he had his arm around me, my back to his chest, and the gun pressed to my temple.
He was going to shoot me. Shoot me through the brain, through the temporal lobe, plaster pieces of me on the wall. My body shivered with the cold of that tiny bit of metal on my skin. And I realized, remembered or forgotten, my life had still been real.
Blood rushed through my body. Tingling fingers and flushed cheeks and pounding heart. All of it one twitch of a finger from a standstill.
“Drake.” A weak voice warbled through the room. “Don’t, Drake. She’s Kierce’s daughter. Don’t.”
My eyes met Jackson’s—the eyes that weren’t his. He pulled himself to his feet, shaking. A single step was all he could manage before his knees gave out.
He couldn’t save me this time.
“I don’t care who she belongs to.” Matthews’ grip on me tightened.
His calm words echoed. Not in the room, but in my mind. He didn’t care. He might have once, when he started this. Now he only cared about himself.
My face burned with sudden heat, melting the ice of fear. You bested him in handcuffs, and this is how it ends?
The gun nudged my head, trembling in his hands. Hands that ripped as easily as paper. Praying he wouldn’t notice, I slipped my glove off. My fingers crooked like claws and I clenched my muscles. I swung my arm up and raked my nails over his hand.
He cried out and the gun clattered to the floor.
Twirling from his grip, I stamped down as hard as my ballet-strong legs could, right on his toes.
He howled, crunching forward in pain. The gun lay at his feet, inches from him. I sprang for it, half surprised when my hand closed around the metal. His fingers snatched my hair. With a cry, I jerked upright. I swung my arm out and cracked him across the head with the butt of the gun. His skin split. Spurting blood, he sank to the floor with a grunt.
I turned in time to see Jackson creeping toward me, leaning on the SLS for support. In a flash, I brought the gun up. My gaze followed the barrel straight to his chest.
Jackson froze, eyeing the gun. “We both know you’re not the kind of girl to shoot somebody.”
I glanced at Matthews, who wavered with dizziness as he tried to sit up.
“Maybe not. But I have no reservations about shooting this thing.” I stepped to the open panels in the center of the SLS, aiming the gun at the machine’s innards.
“No, wait!” Matthews raised a hand to his bleeding head. “Gena, the backups! That SLS is the only way they’re possible. I can use it to return your memories. Your family’s, too.”
The gun suddenly weighed down my arm. “You erased them. Faded them out of people’s Links and didn’t store them anywhere else.”
He put a hand in the air, palm out. “I know. But there’s that remnant left, that bit of emotional memory in your brain. We don’t understand it, not yet, but we’re using the SLS to strengthen it. Sync parts of other people’s memories with your emotional memory. That’s how the backups work. It triggers your brain to view shared events from your point of view. Make the memory your own again.”
If it was true. If it was possible. There was a chance I could live again, that I could have Kalan back, that my family could regain what they’d lost. A chance full of coulds and maybes. But still a chance.
“They’ll go crazy, Gena,” Matthews said. “The ones closest to you are the ones who lost the most. It doesn’t have to be like that. It’s why we created the machine in the first place. So we can be better than we are, so we can protect ourselves, save ourselves from tragedies like this.”
The gun felt cool in my hands. The SLS, the monster that had destroyed my life, could heal the very hurt it had caused. It was the memory security Mementi had hoped for since our very beginning. But it was also the method by which our memories could be stolen in secret.
Ren had said some risks were acceptable. Dad had insisted that memories shouldn’t be tampered with, and had proven it with his own tampering.
Maybe there was a balance. A way to straddle the line.
“Please, Gena.” Jackson inched toward me, hunched like an old man. “It just has to go into the right hands.”
The gun dropped several inches. Maybe Jackson had the right idea after all.
“I panicked,” Matthews said from the opposite end of the SLS. He pulled himself up, hanging on the SLS touchscreen. “I shouldn’t have done what I did to you, to the Link theft victims. There are people out there, our people, who could gain so much from the SLS. I just wanted to help people. Let me help fix this.”
My eyes flickered to him, and I saw the lie. He had injected emotion into his voice like he’d injected Liza’s DNA into his skin. Memories flashed in my mind of all the people he didn’t care about. Cora’s exhausted eyes. Miranda’s wails over a daughter she didn’t know she had. Kalan’s anguished face.
My family. Years of their lives removed in chunks, leaving them wounded and waiting for the infection of untethered emotions. If I destroyed the SLS, they’d lose any possibility, no matter how remote, of being whole again. But whole for how long? Until someone tapped in and stole something else?
A hand reached into the corner of my vision. Matthews, going for the gun. I threw my elbow out, catching him in the nose. He reared back with a cry of pain.
Sometimes there’s only one right thing to do. Even if it required a sacrifice I shouldn’t have the power to make.
I swung the gun back to the SLS and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked back and the shot exploded in my ears. Through the ringing that followed, Jackson moaned and slid to the floor.
Matthews fell across the SLS, scrambling for the quartz port. If he touched it long enough, he could transfer the data I was trying to destroy into his Links. His palm flattened over the quartz.
No way, Mr. Mad Scientist.
I fired at the machine again. Ren’s face, empty of recognition, passed through my mind. Another shot. Dad’s confused smile when I told him I was his daughter. I squeezed again. Mom curled into bed, a Link bud dangling from her ear.
I blew holes into the enormous SLS. Hole after hole into the justifications people would create to use it. Hole after hole into the possible restoration of my life and other people’s sanity. Fireworks burst from the machine, parts flying with each gun blast. Sparks arced through the SLS, electrifying its metal casing. Matthews was zapped away from the quartz port.
Clickclickclick. The gun was empty.
Hands grabbed my knees, clutching at my jeans. “You didn’t. You didn’t,” Jackson gasped.
I twisted away from him, my ears still ringing.
Matthews lay crumpled next to the SLS, his hand out like it was reaching for the data I’d destroyed. Blood streamed from his head wound. He didn’t move. Not a twitch. For a horrible moment I wondered if that spark of electricity had killed him.
A guttural groan rose from him. He looked around him in confusion and tried to speak.
“Mmmuuuuunng.”
His arms thrashed, uncontrolled and wild. He let out a shriek of terror, and I scrambled back. Had he cracked for real now?
“Uhhhhh.” His mouth worked frantically, but he only made disjointed sounds.
“What the devil just happened?” I said.
Jackson sat up, rolling slowly upward. Matthews jerked his head back, staring at Jackson. His eyes were blank. Unrecognizing. Then I noticed his white bone Links, shattered and smoking, scattered around him.
His memories had been destroyed.
Jackson’s eyes went to the smoking SLS. “It must have been the power surge. He
was touching the metal and the shock destroyed his memories.”
Matthews moaned again. His legs kicked and jerked, as uncoordinated as a newborn.
“His procedural memories,” Jackson said softly. “I think the shock destroyed them, too.”
His memories of how to walk. Talk. Ride a bike. Swing a baseball bat. They were still stored in our brains, but even that hadn’t escaped the destruction of the SLS.
I wasn’t sure if I should feel as satisfied about that as I did.
Jackson’s hand nudged an electronic part sizzling on the floor. He sagged. “The backups. The memory merges. The data on them. You destroyed it all.”
“It could have destroyed all of us,” I shot back. But I couldn’t help the tendrils of remorse I felt for him. For all of us. “The city will know, Jackson. They’ll know what you did to create this thing.”
He picked up the tiny piece of hot metal, his back to me. “Not all of them will condemn me.”
Which was terrible, and probably true.
I wrenched open the door, welcoming the cooling sprinkler water and deafening alarm. Had Kalan gotten out and shared my memories with the city?
I ran. Through the raining hallways and out a side door. Around the building, toward the front of Happenings. I staggered to a stop on the grass, halted by the scene in front of me.
Smoke bloomed into the night-dimmed sky. Firemen sprayed torrents of water into the building, quenching the few flames that still fought. Above me, a National Guard helicopter whooped through the air, spotlights sweeping the ground. Flakes of ash drifted like snow.
It was too silent for the size of the mob on the huge lawn. Some stared at the charred Happenings wallscreen. A news report played the recording of my memory through a film of smoke and water.
Several people had fallen to their knees. At the fringes of the crowd, others still fought, but most stood still. Shocked.
I trudged toward the parking garage where Kalan should have come out. A flurry of activity, including several ambulances, filled the area. The test subjects in the basement—Jackson had helped save them. Did that make him the good guy or the bad guy?
Even good people could do bad things. Even people like me. When my choice came out—when people learned I had sacrificed a potential cure to kill the disease—would they see me as the good guy or the bad guy? At the moment, I didn’t know how I saw myself. No one ever told me that right choices could have consequences too.
Faces from the crowd stood out to me. The ache of loneliness crept in. Mrs. Harward stared at the ash gathering on her shoes, like she wanted it to pile up and cover her. Only a few days since I’d last seen her, but the ten years her Chameleon treatment had removed had come back quickly. I shouldn’t talk to her. It would only prove how alone I was.
Hope makes us do terrible things.
“Mrs. Harward?” I asked. “Are you alright?”
Her head rose as slowly as the sun. She stared at me without recognition, then shuffled away.
Others followed her, leaving the Happenings grounds. Face after face. Keilani Wellington, sophomore class vice president. Len Nori, star tennis player at Havendale U. Magdalena Sanchez, three-time winner of the annual yard beautification award. Other faces came to mind, ones that thankfully weren’t here. Zahra and Cora and Ren and Mom and Dad.
None of them knew me anymore. And in the end, that was partially by my own hand.
I’d won today and still lost everything. The unfairness scraped at my insides until I wanted to run through the crowd, begging someone to tell me my name. People poured past me. No one asked if I was alright. No one said they’d help me home. In the middle of this crowd, I had never been more alone.
“Gena.”
Kalan strode through falling ash, his curls matted with water and soot. He knew me, but that thought didn’t bring me much hope. I ached with that peculiar homesickness, missing him though he stood right in front of me. Despite the new memories we’d made, the hours of struggle and trust we’d gone through, he was a stranger.
He reached out to take my hand, but I kept my arms at my sides. Touching him felt like lying. Like I was pretending something I had dreamed of but didn’t exist.
“The Memo,” I said. “You did it.”
“So did you.”
Sirens wailed and helicopters chopped the air. “It didn’t fix everything.”
“I didn’t think it would.” He dropped his hand. “I wish there was a way to make everything how it was.”
The next thing that came out of my mouth was not what I meant to say.
“I’m alone, Kalan.”
People pushed past us to go home and deal with what they’d done. Kalan stepped closer.
“But you’re still strong,” he said.
I wasn’t strong. I was cracked, broken.
“You don’t have to be strong alone.” His eyes pleaded with me through his damp, tangled curls.
“I don’t know you.” The words came out harsh.
“But you can know me.”
My lips parted and I took in the smoky air. Hope lifted me like a life preserver. I had already started building new memories with him. I could do the same with my family. The past was gone, but there was still the future.
I lifted a gloved hand to touch his cheek. He placed his hand over mine. He was filthy, sweat and water dripping through soot streaks on his forehead, the left side of his face mangled from our rush toward Ascalon. But for a moment, I saw through that and glimpsed who he really was. A boy who had stayed with me. Fought with me. Reminded me again and again who I was. He deserved more than harsh words. He deserved another chance.
He held out the Memo to me, the one with his private memories of us. I pushed it back to him.
“Will you hang onto this for me?”
The barest hint of sadness flickered in his face, but he took it. “Too much right now?”
“It’s more than that. I don’t want to start something based on memories that aren’t mine. I want whatever I create with you to come from me.”
I pulled off my one remaining glove and dropped it. I took his hand, skin-to-skin, unafraid. His fingers wrapped around mine.
It was more real than anything I’d ever known. I felt the callouses and creases in his palm, the heat and pressure of pulsing life. It flushed through me, setting my nerve endings tingling, convincing my brain to believe my heart. It was power. It was trust. It was a moment I never wanted to forget.
“Don’t lose that.” I nodded to the Memo in his other hand. “I still want to know how we started, once we’ve had time to start again.”
“That sounds like a fantastic idea, Genesis Lee.”
He leaned his head toward mine. His lips brushed mine, softly, and my hands curled around his neck. Arms encircled me. His kiss reminded me I was alive. The warmth of him overwhelmed me until the darkness inside me burst with stars, and I was no longer in the shadows alone.
We pulled apart, still breathing the same air.
“There’s something else I have to do now,” I said.
He smiled, the kind that said he knew me and knew what I had to do. I smiled back, then slipped my hand from his neck and ran through the crowd.
33
O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood . . .
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam LIV
I knocked on Ren’s door for the sixth time, but she didn’t answer. I’d heard the TV on when I’d first knocked, blaring words from my memory as Matthews declared his treachery. She’d shut it off, though. I couldn’t blame her for not opening the door. With a sigh, I reached into the dirt of a potted cactus for her hidden key.
“Ren,” I called. “I’m not going to hurt you, I swear.”
I pushed the door open and switched on the light. She crouched behind the kitchen table wearing frog pajama pants and holding a pot, re
ady to swing.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said again.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
I smiled a little. Same Ren. Same greeting she’d have given even if she remembered me.
“My name is Genesis Lee. I’m your sister.”
The pot clanged to the ground.
“You have something I need to return to a friend.”
* * *
By the time I got to Cora’s, distant sirens and the sounds of fighting still rang out occasionally. But for the most part, Havendale was quiet. Contemplating its disaster.
Ren hadn’t remembered being the Link thief. Matthews’ commands to forget the other Link victims had wiped her own actions from her mind. When I’d searched her desk and found the Links, she’d rushed to the bathroom and hidden for a full five minutes.
I held Cora’s single Link in a gloved hand. After Ren had promised to take the other Links to the hospital, she’d given me a clean pair of gloves. I didn’t want to touch Cora’s Link with my skin. These were her memories. As I walked, I studied the bead in the light of burning buildings. It was red, its glitter deepened in the orangey firelight.
This Link held memories of me. For two years, at least, Cora would remember me. I closed my fist around it. Returning the memories wouldn’t cure her like I’d hoped. Not with more memories missing. But I would be beside her. I would help her heal, help my family heal, the way Kalan had helped me.
It was near midnight when I knocked. She probably wouldn’t answer. A shuffle sounded behind the door, and my heart leaped. I held the Link up to the peep hole.
The door flung open. Cora looked clean and frightened. She hadn’t been fighting in the streets tonight.
“I think this is yours.” I held out the Link.
Cora gasped, reaching for it. I dropped it into her hands. She moved to take off her gloves, but her fingers froze. Afraid. Of the memories on the Links? Of what would happen if they all came rushing back at once? She closed a gloved hand around the bead.
It was better that she waited, no matter what I’d wanted. Better that she not have the confusion of remembering me while I stood in front of her.
The Unhappening of Genesis Lee Page 29
