Revive (15 page)

And Kyle… But I shake that off. I don't know why we were in South Station this morning, and thinking about it only worries me. I have to trust in the doctors and Malone and One. It will come back to me. It has to.

“Here.” One holds out an arm, and I stop. He shines the light ahead, showing a smooth, black surface.

We're on the edge of a lake. The water is still, and the area smells rich with rot and pine. My nose is cold, dulling the scent, but it's peaceful.

“You used to like this place,” One says. “Do you remember it?”

He hands me the light so I can look around, but it's not much use. I think some of the trees are familiar, but how could I know? “Maybe in the daylight.”

“It was dark the last time you were here too. We came out the morning you had to leave. The sun hadn't risen yet.”

There's something new in his voice. Hope—I place it at last. He wants me to remember this. It was clearly important. My face clenches with frustration because I'm letting him down.

After I go another minute without speaking, One correctly interprets my silence. “Don't worry about it. I just thought it might help. We can come back tomorrow.”

He sounds upbeat, forever positive, but I know I've disappointed him. “I'm sorry.”

“Hey, don't be.” He gives me a quick hug. “It's temporary. Let's go back to quarters. Maybe seeing the rest of the unit will be more helpful.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Somehow I doubt it. The memories are coming back as they feel like it. In fact, since I've gotten back, the process seems to have slowed down. Little things are returning, but nothing huge. Nothing as vivid as what happened earlier.

One's plan seems to be to keep me talking, as if my lips can jostle my brain. The entire hike toward our quarters, he hurls questions at me. He's trying to be useful, I know, but it's not helping.

“One, let it go.” I raise my hand to my forehead and press on my bandage. A bit dramatic, but it gets the point across. “I can't examine this from other angles because I don't have any other perspective yet.”

He swears sheepishly. “Sorry, you're right.”

A cluster of long, narrow buildings spread out before us. A couple of the nicer ones belong to the camp's staff, including their own mess hall. I've never been in any of those. The rest of us are split up by our unit and designation, and we have our own mess, joined to the staff mess by the kitchen.

The other buildings are our living quarters. HY1s and HY2s share a building. The HY3s and 4s are much younger and kept separate with greater supervision. The CYs have a similar arrangement, although there are no young CYs. And that's where my memories stop. From the outside, all our buildings appear identical. I let One lead the way because I don't know which flat, gray structure is ours.

As we pass beneath a light, I notice he's smiling. “What?”

One doesn't answer, but his eyes shift to the right, silently telling me what I need to know. A couple men hang out outside one of the buildings, smoking. I feel their gazes on me, but I ignore them.

We don't always get along with the pure humans. Click goes another memory. They look down on us as unnatural. We look down on them for being weak.

Along with the memory comes animosity. I understand why One doesn't want to speak in front of them, and I keep quiet.

He finally answers when we're well beyond the men. “You called me One a moment ago.”

“It's who you are. Would you rather I called you fearless leader?”

He chuckles. “Not necessary. You just hadn't done that in private in a long time.”

Of course not. As soon as he says it, I remember.

“Like Cole Howard.” One bounces off the chair, pitches an imaginary baseball, then imitates an umpire doing the strikeout signal.

Across the floor, Nine rolls her eyes. She thinks baseball is boring, which is too bad because it's one of the few things we're allowed to watch unsupervised on TV in the evenings. I don't mind so much, but watching sports is more boring than playing them would be. But we don't have time to play much.

One and Five are
very
into baseball and spend lots of time debating who the best players are. Since they can both recite an endless stream of stats, it can get annoying quickly.

“What kind of name is Coal anyway?” Three says. “Coal is stuff you burn.”

“It's also a name, stupid. C-O-L-E.” One's voice cracks as he plops back on the seat. He and Three are the oldest of the boys and the first to have their voices change. Whenever it happens I have to stifle my laughter. “So fine. What would you want to be your name?”

Three debates this, running his fingers through the blond peach fuzz on his head. This morning was haircuts, and he's been grumbling all day over the loss of his curls. We go through the same routine every couple months, and every haircut day Three's vanity takes a beating.

“I'd go with Gabriel,” he says.

Although I'm the one who instigated this discussion about names, I'm only half paying attention because I need to finish an assignment. Twelve broke my wrist during our hand-to-hand training this morning, so I missed class while the doctor set it. “Why Gabriel?”

“He's one of the most important archangels, and angels are bad-ass. They're like holy hit men. That's what I'm going to be. If you see me coming, you're already dead.” Three shoots One a superior look, something Three is very good at. “That's way cooler than a stupid baseball player.”

One flips him off. “Just remember who's got the power to make you do extra laps tomorrow, angel boy.”

We go around the room, and everyone picks a name for themselves. Nine wants to be called Jordan because we watched a news conference this week, and a Jordanian princess was on it. She didn't like the princess's name, but she liked Jordan. Six chooses Summer after her favorite season. Eight picks Octavia, saying she prefers to keep things simple. So does Eleven, who goes with Lev, which is what most of us call him anyway.

They're no fun.

We file these names away, one more secret we can't share. Fitzpatrick would be furious and the punishments severe. We found that out two years ago when Four and Eight invented a private code for us to use. After Fitzpatrick discovered we were sending encoded messages to each other, we each spent a week in solitary. It didn't matter that we were only sending silly messages. They told us we were being subversive and disrespectful.

What really mattered was that the adults couldn't crack the code on their own. Even I could tell that.

They came down the harshest on One because he was supposed to be responsible. It wasn't fair, but it's true that he didn't tell us to stop.

He's not telling us now, either. I'm surprised. Sometimes One is just like the rest of us, but sometimes he remembers he's been told to set an example. I can never tell which way he'll act, and I'm pretty sure I spend too much time trying to guess.

I turn back to my computer. The script I'm writing is supposed to crack an encrypted file. Typing is a pain because my fingers don't move as fast as my brain, and it's even worse since I'm temporarily one-handed. I wish I could plug directly into the computer because it makes everything so much easier, but that's not the point of the exercise.

Meanwhile the discussion about names goes on. It merely amuses me, but Nine and Three—Jordan and Gabe—seem to savor the taste of the syllables in their mouth each time they're spoken. They're always searching for small ways to rebel, and One is always warning them to stop before they bring down real trouble. Trouble not of the solitary kind, but of the Malone kind.

“What about you, Sev?” Gabe says. “You started it, and you haven't picked yet.”

Done at last, I shut down the computer. “I want to be Sophia because the name's root comes from knowledge.”

Cole gives me a thoughtful look. “That fits since you're the smartest.”

“Yeah, right.” I laugh, but secretly I'm pleased Cole thinks I'm smart. He's the smartest of all of us, in truth. He's not the fastest or the strongest, though he comes close at both, but he is the best strategist. And in the end, that's what matters most. You don't need speed or strength if you have brains and plans.

That's why our brains are special, so we're told. Our implants make them superior to normal brains. But it's hard to feel special when we have to name ourselves in secret.

“Cole after Cole Howard,” I say. I don't think he's watched baseball in over a year. Our schedules have gotten more intense. The TV we watch is assigned for specific purposes.

Cole-One, I'm not sure how to think of him anymore, opens a door to one of the buildings. “It's coming back. What did I tell you?”

Coming back for sure. I step inside and am assaulted by a thousand disconnected memory fragments. All those times I entered this place—tired, jubilant, hungry, bloody, broken, proud and anxious—they're all here. Useless in their current form, but here and accounted for.

The anxiety is the strongest. That memory the most recent. It's the night before I left when I stood outside the girls' quarters with Cole. The first time I dared acknowledge there might be more between us than just sibling-like affection.

I bite my lip, overcome with those daring feelings until a voice in my head whispers Kyle's name. Shaking the memories off, I take a good look around. Nothing has changed since the night we chose our names. Our little communal area is comfortingly familiar.

Cole squeezes my arm. “You should go to bed. Fitzpatrick's going to grill you tomorrow.”

Fitzpatrick. Bitchpatrick. She's the voice I sometimes hear. The one I heard back in South Station. She won't be happy with my failure, but neither am I.

“Yeah, I'm sure.” I rub my eyes, feeling my stomach twist in frustration. “That night before I left. I was so worried I'd fail, and I have. I'm missing something important. I know it. I need to get these memories back.”

“You will. I believed in you then, and I still do. You didn't fail. Not every mission goes perfectly.”

“But that's what we're here for, isn't? To be perfect?”

“Yeah, but…” He leans in close, and his breath tickles my ear. “Even when we make a mistake, we're a hell of a lot closer to perfect than anyone else around this place. Never forget that.”

His lips brush my ear, purposely I think, and I don't move. I'm frozen with confusion as tingles spread down the side of my head. Then Cole steps away like nothing happened, although the intensity in his expression screams otherwise. “Night, Sev.”

“Night.”

He opens a door directly across from us and disappears. For a second I'm lost. Then I take a deep breath and my feet spring into action. My body knows where to go and what to do when my brain doesn't. I open another door and pass through a short corridor. On the left is a new door, but not the one I need. That one is at the end of the hall, and voices seep through it.

My unit. Or half of it.

As I reach for the handle, the door swings open. A dark-skinned girl in a gray tank top gapes at me for a moment then screams.

“You're back!” She pulls me into a hug, half dragging me into the room behind her as she does. “Look, Seven's back.”

Relying on my few memories, I assign a name to her face. “I missed you too.”

Nine-Jordan releases me, and I'm enveloped in more hugs. The five girls circle around me, a hundred unasked questions hanging in the air. I take the moment to assign names to the rest of them.

Six-Summer is blonde and blue-eyed. Besides Jordan, she's the only one whose name comes easily. My memory of her at my pre-mission party is so vivid.

Next to her stands Twelve-Eva, her reddish-brown hair cascading over her shoulders in waves I'd kill for. Then comes Eight-Octavia, whose hair is as black and dead straight as my own. And finally, there's Two-Sky, also black-haired but with Eva's waves and killer lashes.

Our skin-deep diversity is no accident. Every bit of our lives has been planned right down to our genes. With the appropriate clothing and hairstyle, one of us could be dropped off in almost any part of the world and we'd blend in. Maybe the only thing our creators couldn't account for was our birth order.

And my memory loss.

“No one told us you were back,” Summer says. “Spill everything.”

I wander over to my bed, unsure how I know it's mine other than by the fact that it's the only one that appears lonely and unused. “No one told you? I've been here for a few hours, and with Cole the past couple.”

“We thought something might be up when Malone called Cole out of dinner.” Sky sits across from me. “But no one would say.”

Jordan clears her throat. “So get on with it. What happened?”

“Or aren't you allowed to tell us?” Octavia says. “Cole's the only one who was briefed on the purpose of your mission.”

Jordan waves off these details. “Screw the mission. She can at least tell us about Boston. We know you went there.”

I rest my head in my hands as Octavia and Eva question whether I should talk about anything since my mission was classified. If only I had that dilemma. “I haven't been officially debriefed yet. I don't know what I can share, and honestly, it's not an issue anyway.”

“What's wrong?” Jordan rests a hand on my back. “Didn't it go well?”

Five pairs of eyes watch me, but it's the disappointment in Cole's hazel ones and suspicion in Kyle's black ones that I see in my mind. I want to curl into a ball and make it all go away.

“Something happened.” I can't bring myself to look at them, so I play with the fabric on my pants. “I don't know what, but I got hurt. That's why I'm back. That's why I haven't had an official debriefing yet. I don't have anything to tell.”

“Nothing?” Summer says.