Revive (16 page)

I shake my head. “I lost my memories. Things are starting to come back but…” I shrug. What's there to say?

Apparently a lot. The others speculate about what could have happened to cause this, who could have known how to do it, and why someone might have tried. Since I'm not cleared to tell them why I was at RTC, I can't explain how unlikely some of their guesses are. A listless mess of depression and nerves, I head to the bathroom.

Jordan follows. “You all right?”

I nod and grab a toothbrush. “This is mine, right?”

“Yup. So you haven't lost
all
your memories, I see.” She takes her own.

“Not all.”

Kyle. Audrey. My mission. Kyle.

“Tell me?” Jordan bats her eyes at me.

“Tell you what?”

“Why you got this wistful look on your face.”

I looked wistful? I glance in the mirror above the sink. My cheeks turned pink. Oh.

I spit out toothpaste, debating how much I should confide. At this point, nothing is the safest way to go. And yet, I'm tempted to share it all. I need a confidante, and Jordan is the person I always turned to. I know that too.

Before I can decide how to respond, however, Sky and Octavia enter the bathroom. I take that as a sign to keep my silence. For now anyway.

I'll sleep on it.

Chapter Fourteen

Sunday Morning: Present

I don't sleep. All the slimy, confused anxiety keeps me up all night. I toss and turn, alternately worried for and about Kyle, sick with feelings of failure over my mission, scared that my inadequacy is resulting in an innocent person's death, and depressed knowing that I'm disappointing everyone. And when my brain overloads with these heavy concerns, I worry about the little things. Like what's Audrey's going to do without me to tutor her in physics?

At last five a.m. comes around and the overhead lights blink on. Years of habit blink with them. With no conscious effort, I'm out of bed, grabbing clothes out of my trunk. Jordan and Summer flash me smiles as we get dressed, and I take this automatic response as a good sign.

In our jogging pants, sweatshirts and sneakers we march into the bathroom, brush our teeth and pull back our hair. Then we march some more into the communal area where we meet up with the guys.

Cole must have told the others about my return because their greetings lack surprise. Gabe gives me a brief hug, but everyone's subdued at this hour. I can't believe I'm as awake as I am, and I write it off to adrenaline. Every nerve in my body is on edge.

Cole takes the lead, and we head into the frigid morning air for our run. I fall into step with the others for the first half mile, but eventually my lack of regular training while at RTC catches up to me. The no-sleep thing probably doesn't help, either. Never the fastest, I lag more behind than usual. It takes all my energy to focus on the white puffs of breath coming out of my mouth. My legs move on their own, but my brain would be miles behind if I didn't focus.

No one talks. It's dark out, though it's clear others are stirring. Steam rises from the mess chimney, and I hear engines in the distance. The HY2s are up as well, but they're not as fast as us, and we leave them behind.

Cole usually sets the pace, but today he keeps glancing back at me. “Five, take over.”

I push my legs harder. How many ways can I fail?

As Five—whose chosen name I can't recall—takes the lead, Cole slows down until we meet. “Anything new this morning?”

“No.”

“You look tired.”

“Didn't sleep much.”

We finish our three miles in silence, but Cole stays at my side for the rest of it.

With every step, I hope more memories will be triggered. My body goes through all the right motions. I shower, change into the proper uniform pieces and am ready for breakfast with the others. But that's merely muscle memory. It's nothing helpful.

My stomach knots as we enter the mess, and the combined smells make me want to retch even though I'm hungry. Unlike at RTC, I have no choice about what to eat. Someone hands me a tray, and I take it to my unit's table.

Warily, I stick a spoon in the bowl of oatmeal. Did I used to eat this? It looks like vomit. When I let go of the spoon, it stands straight up. I decide to eat my eggs instead.

Gabe smirks at me. “You used to like oatmeal.”

“Are you screwing with me? Did One tell you about my memory issues?” I almost slip up and call him Cole. Must get it together. I can't do that in public.

“Doesn't matter,” Jordan says. “Every calorie and nutrient is accounted for. Eat up, or Fitzpatrick will be annoyed.”

Gabe pretends to fling oatmeal her way. “I swear, I'm going to start bribing those geeks in the labs to develop a pill so we can be done with this eating business. One pill, three times a day. That would be so much easier.”

“Taste better too,” Summer mutters.

Lev reaches across Gabe for the salt. “What are you going to bribe them with, huh?”

“I have my ways,” Gabe says. “So, Sev, what do you remember?”

Cole sits down next to me. “Nothing she can discuss with you.”

“Oh, come on. I don't care about the mission.” Gabe dumps milk into his oatmeal. “I just want to hear about life on the outside. None of us have lived out there for so long before.”

Gabe's not the only one interested. The whole table watches me. Pressured to say something, I offer up the most relevant thing I can think of. “I remember the food was better.”

That seems safe enough, but even it leads to more questions as people make jokes. Before I can respond, someone kicks me under the table.

A tall woman with obviously bleached blonde hair, an overly tanned face and squinty gray eyes glares down at us like a god fuming over the arrangement of his chess pieces. She crosses her arms, and her icy disapproval searches me out. Peon chess piece that I am, I go cold.

“Seven.” Her voice is deeper and scratchier than I remember. “With me. Now.”

Of all the reasons to be a mess of nerves, Bitchpatrick's fury hadn't ranked high on my list. I guess it should have.

Memories of her charming personality overtake my mind as I get up.

Through the dark, murky water, I see Three raise his head into the air. Fear courses through me. He's going to do it. I want to scream at him to stop, but my teeth chatter too hard.

I'm not cold. I'm not cold. I'm not cold.

I can—and have—turned off my awareness of the pain, but my muscles are almost useless. Hypothermia has set in. My body's probably beyond the stage where it feels the cold, but I'm not about to let myself find out. I haven't eaten or slept in three days. And now this.

They won't let me die. I'm too valuable. Too special.

But with every passing second in the frigid lake, it becomes harder to believe that.

Willpower, One would tell me. We have to have willpower. The body is a machine. The brain can control it.

Whatever.

It takes major effort seeing as my limbs don't want to obey my brain's commands, but I raise my face to skim the water's surface.

“Three,” Fitzpatrick yells. “Head back under or you will do this again and again until we freeze the weakness out of you.”

The surface ripples gently. Three's gone back under. Thankfully.

Closing my eyes, I finish counting down the seconds. Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen. Fitzpatrick blows her whistle when I'm only on fourteen. Crap. The cold must be interfering with my processing for me to have lost track like that.

“Out!” she yells at us.

With more effort, I uncurl from the ball I've made of myself and push my badly functioning limbs to take me toward the bank. I shudder over and over again as I emerge from the water. My body is like rubber. My fingers are blue.

I'm not cold. I'm not cold. I'm not cold.

And I'm not, even though I'm allowing myself to feel again. This should be worrying, except I'm beyond worrying about much. My brain is frozen too.

Only a few feet onto dry land and my legs give out.

“Get up,” Fitzpatrick says. “You can walk your way over here.”

Easy for her to say. She's dry and wearing a jacket. But I can't walk, and I'm not the only one. Nine is also on her knees, and Three, and Eight. Of my unit members whom I can see, only One staggers forward on his feet.

“Two and Ten, out of the water!”

I cringe, wondering if they're too far gone to swim to shore, and keep crawling. A line of medics stand ten feet away. Some carry blankets and hot compresses, but under Fitzpatrick's orders, they make no move toward us.

I hate Fitzpatrick. I hate Fitzpatrick. I hate Fitzpatrick.

The thought fuels me relentlessly forward. One finally makes it over to her and promptly collapses to the dirt. She clucks her tongue in disgust and lets a medic tend to him. They take notes on his vitals and steal a blood sample before peeling off his wet uniform.

By the time I worm my way over to them, I'm coated in mud. And when a medic bends down to check my pulse, the world goes black.

I'm not out for long, but Fitzpatrick notices and it goes down in her report about me. That night at dinner, we're given double portions, but it barely eases the pain. I'm too exhausted to even be happy this particular training round is over, and I hope Two and Ten—who are stuck in the infirmary—recover.

They won't kill me,
I tell myself.
Not on purpose.

We have an easy time of it that evening. We're ordered to rest, like we could do anything else. Nine and Six retreat to our quarters to play chess. After hanging out in the communal area for a while, One decides he's going to start his new Hungarian books before language lab tomorrow.

I love language lab and am relieved to be returning to normal classes. Taking my cue from One, I head to the girls' quarters to read Russian, which I was recently approved for. Memorizing the language rules and vocabulary is easy, but I suspect lab, which is where we focus on pronunciation, will be challenging since this is my first Slavic language.

Six is in the middle of talking when I open the door, and she stops abruptly as I enter. She and Nine are sprawled on Six's bed, and there's no chess board in sight.

“Anyone else coming?” Nine asks.

“Don't think so.” I grab my e-sheet and realize she's staring at me. “What?”

Six shrugs, so Nine takes up the explanation. “We're plotting ways to kill Fitzpatrick.”

“You're what?” I laugh once, then realize neither of them seem to be joking.

“One day,” Nine says. “One day I'm getting out of here. I'm going to run and run and never stop running.”

I pull my knees to my chest, wishing I could unhear Nine's words. “You'll have to. They'll come after you.”

“Not if we take them down first,” says Six.

“Damn right,” Nine says. “Teach me how to survive and teach me how to kill, and one day I'm going to put those skills to use.”

Absently, I turn on the e-sheet, but I've lost all interest in Russian. I need to talk Six and Nine out of this mutiny before it gets them in serious trouble. “I know what we went through was hard, but Fitzpatrick has to be tough on us. It's to make us ready.”

“Make us ready for what?” Six says.

Before I can answer, Nine cuts me off. “To keep being their slaves. Come on, Sev. That's what we are. They'll do whatever they want to us, and we can't do anything about it.”

“That's not true.”

“How is it not true?”

I scroll through the books on my e-sheet, as if searching for a good answer. “We want to be here. They're giving us better lives, making us into better people. And one day, we're going to make the world a better place.”

Nine snorts. “Yeah, that's what they tell us. But did you choose to be here? 'Cause I didn't. They're not making us into anything. They made us. End of. That means they own us. And they'll do whatever they want to us. You know it too.”

“I don't.” My earlier anger at Fitzpatrick resurfaces, this time directed at Nine. It's partly because I'm scared, and partly because there's truth in what she says and I'm not ready to face it.

But what she says is also selfish, and I'm disappointed in her. That's the only part I can deal with. “You have shelter, food, a purpose, and you're being taught all kinds of things. Yeah, they made us, but they made us to be better than most people. There are millions of people out there who'd give anything for what we have.”

Six hangs her head, but Nine still looks like she wants to beat somebody up. “Millions of others have something we don't have too.”

“What?”

“A family. Somebody who cares about them.”

I slide off the bed and hug her. “I care about you. You are my family.”

She hugs me back, and we pull Six in with us.

“Sev's right,” Six whispers. “We've got to stick together. Maybe Fitzpatrick's trying to help. Maybe not. But even One says it—we've got to have each other's backs because no one else will. Someday we'll be bigger and stronger than Fitzpatrick, and then we'll see where things are. But our unit always comes first. Swear it.”

So we do.

Six years later, I'm not bigger than Fitzpatrick, but I am stronger. I'm damn sure I'm smarter too. Yet she still makes me feel like that hungry, exhausted thirteen-year-old freezing in the camp lake as I follow her out of the mess. I won't bring dishonor to my unit by glancing at them for support, so I hold my shoulders back and my head high.

The sun stretches over the mountains, as weary as I am. Clouds rolled in during the night, and the sky is flat and gray to the west. The dullness is spreading, and I detect moisture in the air. Snow is coming.

Fitzpatrick doesn't say a word. She just leads me two buildings down into a tiny room that smells faintly musty. It must be her office because a large photo sits on the desk. In the picture, Fitzpatrick poses on a porch with fifteen others, many of whom share similar features. They range in age from probably about eight to eighty, and they're all wearing camo and carrying rifles. The youngest girl's rifle is pink. The children must be her nieces and nephews, I decide, because I can't imagine Fitzpatrick having any of her own.

While I'm pondering the horror of mini-Fitzpatricks, the original one shuts the door and points to a chair. “Sit.”

I obey without thinking, like I was trained to do.

Fitzpatrick sits across from me and stares at me for a solid minute. Is she waiting for me to say something? If so, she's out of luck. The memory of how I'm supposed to behave is missing.

I use the time, instead, to study her face. She's aged a lot since that memory of her lording over us while we froze in the lake. This close, her skin is leather and heavily lined. But the one thing that hasn't changed is her eyes. They're as cold as the sky outside and just as gray.

I hate Bitchpatrick. There was no conviction in thirteen-year-old me's defense of her.

The silence persists for five more seconds. I'm better at staring. Fitzpatrick blinks.

“Malone briefed me last night,” she says. “You failed your mission. You're an embarrassment to this unit.”