MILA 2.0: Redemption (3 page)

With a silent prayer, I obeyed.

As I waited in the chair, back stiff, hands clutching the armrests, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. Maybe for random images to start flooding my mind, or possibly one continuous video file to start playing.

Instead, I got a whole lot of nothing.

Green code? Oh, sure. The program showered me with that. Numbers whipped through my head, illuminating a pathway toward an empty storage place for the missing data. I even felt the program dive into that void in my past, watched the shadows begin to shrink. But beyond that . . . nothing else happened.

After all that anticipation, my body wanted to sag into the chair, but I held myself rigid. Calm, I had to remain
calm. Once the program finished loading, that’s when I’d retrieve the lost memories. I was too impatient, that was all.

“See anything?” Lucas asked.

I gave a quick jerk of my head, not trusting my voice to remain steady.

The last bits of code whizzed into my mind.

Data recovery: Complete.

I waited one heartbeat, two. Then I issued the command:

Retrieve data.

A promising snap of response; a glimmer as the program opened.

Slam!

Program temporarily unavailable for use.

What?

I reissued the command, only to get the same response.

Program temporarily unavailable for use.

The
bam-bam
hammering in my temples grew louder. I tried again. This time, the response varied:

Program currently unsafe for use.

I slumped and relayed the information to Lucas.

He frowned and scooted to the edge of the bed, but didn’t look nearly as perturbed as I expected. Not based on the effort he’d put into this program so far. “I was hoping . . . but I sort of expected . . . hmmm.”

“Suspected what?” I said. Snappier than I intended, but his nonanswers were beginning to frustrate me.

“I’m sorry, I know this must be hard for you,” he said, instantly making me feel about two inches tall. “Okay, here goes. All three Milas were originally made with some organic material. So . . . I’d have to do a scan to make sure, but I think there might be a chance that the human side of your brain is blocking the program and preventing it from functioning.”

“Say what?”

Lucas’s lips twitched at the sight of my confusion. “Listen, I took a bunch of psychology classes in college—” When I tried to squelch a laugh, a full-on smile erupted on his face and he held up his hands. “I know, I know! Anyway, I did a lot of reading about people who experienced retrograde memory loss, which is similar to what happened to you. They often recovered their memories, but only when they were ready.”

“Ready?”

“You know. Emotionally prepared. It’s the mind’s way of protecting itself from further trauma.”

My body went limp once I digested the ramifications of what he’d just said.

Whatever happened after Quinn’s procedure was so awful that the human—no, the Sarah—side of my brain was protecting me. Trying to spare me.

His hand curled over mine, briefly. “It’s just a theory, Mila. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a glitch in the program that I can fix.”

I shook my head. “As much as I hate admitting this, you’re rarely ever wrong.”

Lucas studied me for a moment before reaching into his pocket. “I have something I think might cheer you up. Or . . . something that will distract you.”

I leaned forward, staring at his closed hand.

“I’ve been looking for more background information on your past, your parents . . . that sort of thing. Maybe that kind of information might trigger something in your, uh, Sarah’s, memory. It might calm you down and allow the program to work,” he said. “It’s taken a long time, because I couldn’t afford to leave a trace or alert anyone to my presence. But I did it. I finally hacked my way into an old government storage database, with defunct files on retired personnel and special projects.”

I knew that hacking of that kind involved serious risks. “You did all that for me?”

He opened his hand and then pressed the flash drive into my palm.

“This drive contains some emails between Nicole and Daniel. I only read enough to know that they’re from after the fire.”

Hard to believe I was holding conversations between my pseudoparents, after their daughter died. The daughter I’d thought I was, for a very brief time; the daughter in whose likeness I’d been crafted. Like some kind of living-yet-not-quite-alive monument.

All that packed into the tiny, lightweight rectangle nestled in my palm.

“It will hurt,” I whispered, almost to myself. “It always does.”

“Emotional pain isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” Lucas said. “It says that you care, and that you’re alive. In my book, those are both big pluses.”

“Psych class again, huh?”

“Hey, don’t make fun,” he chided. “Besides, we both know I’m stubborn and nerdy enough to debate your flawed definition of ‘alive’ for days.”

At that, I smiled. “Now there’s an uncontestable fact.”

“I’m not going to ask which statement you’re talking about. Nerdy or stubborn.”

“Wise choice.”

He crossed his arms and frowned in mock disapproval. “You know, you really should be nicer to me. I could always sneak up while you’re in resting mode and reprogram your wise-ass responses to ‘Lucas knows all.’”

A strange, bittersweet pang filled my heart. Not very long ago, I’d had silly exchanges like this with Hunter. For a moment, an echo of his laugh rang in my ears and I imagined his smile, but something forced my mind to stay in the here and now, to focus on Lucas.

Perhaps that was the human side of my brain, trying to protect me.

“No. No, you’d never do anything like that,” I finally replied. “It’s not in your makeup.”

His grin faded, and his expression turned serious. “No. It’s not.”

As his words dissolved between us, a tiny weight released from my chest. Nudged free by trust.

My expression must have been all sappy and intense, because Lucas cleared his throat and stepped back.

“So, want to check out those files?”

Right. The emails.

Like a pro, I folded back my ear again.

“Lucas! You in there?”

Tim’s voice outside the door startled me. Inexcusable. Our time out here in the mountains was apparently dulling my sense of danger. My sensors had picked up Tim’s approach, but I hadn’t bothered to process the information.

Complacency was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Not if I wanted to stay out of Holland’s clutches.

Lucas jerked his head toward the memory stick.
“Hide it,”
he mouthed. There couldn’t be any trace of what we were really doing here.

I snatched the metal piece away from my neck and concealed it within my fist just as Tim pushed the door open.

His gaze flickered from me, to Lucas, and back again. My android heart reacted to the heightened stress by upping its staccato beat, but he just stood there, frowning. Pink
streaks marred the whites of his eyes, and his hair looked matted, as if by sweat. His jaw hadn’t seen a razor in several days, and he reeked of wood smoke.

Finally, he grunted. “If you two want to get it on, let me know. I’ll vacate the premises for a few minutes. That’s all you’ll need, right, Luke?”

Then he turned and stomped back toward the living area of the cabin. Lucas’s face went fire-engine red and I forced an embarrassed laugh.

“Looks like he’s got the wrong idea about us,” I said.

“He has the wrong idea about everything.” Lucas blew out a long, exasperated breath.

Suddenly, Lucas’s room felt a little too intimate.

“Let’s go for a walk, okay?” he said.

I practically leapt for the door. As usual, he and I were on the same page. Even though we weren’t up to what Tim had so crudely implied, we couldn’t risk him figuring out the truth. Tim thought he’d put Holland behind him, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In the main room, we passed Tim slumped in a chair, one arm covering his eyes and the other hand gripping an old bottle of whiskey.

“We’re going out to check the snares,” Lucas said.

Tim made an inarticulate noise, so we grabbed our jackets off the hooks and headed for the door.

“Got the gun?” Tim called out. Lucas sighed.

“It’s daylight, and no one is around for miles. We’ll only be gone an hour or so.”

“Always plan like you’ll be out after nightfall. Truth is, you never know when you’ll be back. Or if.”

“Cheerful. Thanks for that.” But I noticed that Lucas grabbed a gun from the rack and stuck it inside the red backpack that took up permanent residence by the front door. He rummaged around inside. “All right, I see trail mix, jerky, water, matches, thermal blanket . . . We okay to go now, Survivor Man?”

“Funny thing, survival. Even when you think you’re prepared, it only takes one mistake for everything to get completely FUBARed,” Tim said through a hiccup. His arm rolled down and flopped to his side, then he opened his eyes and smiled. “Happy snaring.”

We exited the house, still shrugging into our jackets. “That wasn’t creepy at all,” I said.

“Not at all. Sunshine and unicorns, that’s what he’s made of,” Lucas said as he shouldered the pack.

“But he makes a good point,” I said. Begrudgingly.

“Perhaps.”

We trudged forward in silence, listening to the
caw caw
of snarky jays and the rustle-whisper of the wind through bare branches. “Do you ever wonder what made him so . . . bitter?”

Lucas curled a gloved hand around a strap and continued
forward. “Every day,” he said, honestly. “Though ‘made’ is a little bit of a fallacy.”

We picked our way to the first trap, due east, carefully snaking around a craggy jut of stone. Jagged lines marked most of the glacier-cut rocks that towered above the tree line. “Why do you say that?”

“Because everyone is responsible for their own moods. I mean, unless you’re suffering from a medical condition,” he said, adding, “Psych 101 for the win.”

We rounded a copse of trees to where the first snare was hidden. Nothing there. I pretended not to notice the relieved slump of Lucas’s shoulders when he saw the trap was empty. I liked that he valued life the way he did.

“But you just told me yesterday about your dad. . . .”

Another brisk wind kicked up, and he slid the fleece-lined hood onto his head before turning to me. “Right. And that’s all true. I’m not saying his reactions aren’t understandable, because they absolutely are. I’m just saying that everyone is responsible for their own reactions. If you run around blaming the world for all your problems, you’ll be a victim forever.”

I digested that as we headed north, toward the next snare. Was I guilty of that? Of blaming others for my problems? I had to admit, there were times when I’d felt like a victim . . . of Holland, of the military, of Quinn. Even times when I’d felt like a victim of the woman I’d known as Mom. But
wasn’t that understandable, given the fact that ever since I’d been on the run, virtually everyone I’d known had either taken advantage of me, lied to me, or tried to turn me into some kind of top secret weapon?

There were two exceptions: two boys who hadn’t done anything except offer me help and friendship.

One boy had even offered me his heart.

When I studied Lucas’s face, I noticed that his cheeks had turned a deeper pink than I’d attribute to wind chafing. “Don’t mind me. Everyone says I’m too introspective.”

I patted his arm and smiled. “It’s okay. That’s what I like about you. One of many things.”

He turned away and looked off into the distance, but not before I’d noted that his cheeks had taken on an even brighter hue.

“Mind if I go off on my own for a little while?” I asked him, changing the subject. The memory stick practically burned a hole in my pocket. I was incredibly curious about the past, and about the younger versions of Daniel and Nicole. Maybe Lucas was right. Maybe these emails would help unlock the part of Sarah’s brain that stopped the data-restoring program from running. Maybe all I had to do was read, and I’d be whole again. Or whole enough, at least, to face something really hard.

If what I remembered didn’t tear me apart.

“Of course. Stay close, though.”

I nodded before loping off into the trees. I found a fallen log and perched. One finger gently traced the fine line behind my ear, where the secret port resided. While cocooned in a haven of trees and snow and solitude, I pushed the drive into the slot and felt a
click!
as the metal snapped into place.

I braced myself for pain, but as Lucas promised, there was none. Just a warm tingling that grew into a steady surge of power. A heady rush as the neural pathways in my body—both human and robotic—prepared for the inward flow of information.

A flow that I controlled. I’d almost forgotten what it was like, this exhilarating feeling that I was useful and capable. Like I was built for some purpose. Only I still didn’t know what it was.

The files blinked into my mind, green and glowing. I no longer needed hand motions to manipulate them, as I had when I’d first discovered my true identity. That way had been clunky and slow, relying on physical movement when my brain processed things so much faster.

Now, I could whip through the files in seconds. I prepared to do just that, when the first couple of salutations registered.

Hey Nicole—

Dear Daniel—

Reality crashed over me, and I froze. These weren’t just
files, to be analyzed and discarded at will. These were remnants of my past—or the closest thing to a past I had.

The emails were dated, so I started with the oldest. It was from Daniel, and the moment I recognized his name, an image of the man I’d thought of as my father materialized in my head. Dark hair, stocky but fit build. Penetrating eyes that peered right into you. Expression lines, carved into weathered skin. A man who had lived . . . and lost.

The image changed.
For a fleeting second, I saw him tied to a chair, his eyes urging me to . . . what, exactly? My empty hand twitched around an unknown object.
An iron curtain sliced through my mind and just like that, the memory vanished.