The Search for Sam (6 page)

I force my face deep into my pillow and try to sleep.

I arrive at my console the next morning groggy and bleary-eyed, dreading the next
twelve hours. I take my seat next to Serkova and dive into the data stream.

Despite my fuzzy head, I pull a decent rank after my first hour. But with exhaustion
creeping up on me, I can feel my productivity beginning to slip. By the fifteen-minute
mark of the next hour, I know I’m headed back to the bottom of the pack.

So I come up with a little trick.

For every five or so sources I legitimately review, I automatically throw another
one in the Discard directory. I know my provisional accuracy percentage will take
a hit, but from what I can tell it carries a relatively low weight on overall ranking
compared to Discard and Investigate totals.

Using this technique I’ve climbed all the way to number six by the next hourly rankings,
with seventy-three Discards and seventeen Investigates. My provisional accuracy is
73 percent, lower than the hour before but not bad enough to raise any red flags.

I can feel Serkova sneering at me. I don’t bother to hide my smile.

I pass the day like this, racing against Serkova. Giving up on finding time for research,
I use the task in front of me to distract myself from everything: from One’s perilous
condition, from Zakos’s strange work in the lab, from my hateful father, from what
the work I’m doing even means. My only goal is to get ahead of Serkova in at least
one hourly ranking.

My last rank of the day is number two. Right ahead of Serkova at three.

“Better luck tomorrow, Serkova,” I say, wearing a bright, fake-friendly smile.

He curses me and heads out of the lab.

After work, I head upstairs to my room to wash up before dinner. My mother told me
Kelly’s skipping dinner again for her afterschool program in the Nursery. Yeah, right.
I know the real reason: she doesn’t want to share a table with me.

But not even that can get me down: beating Serkova, even just the once, was too big
a victory. I find myself racing up the stairs to my room, three steps at a time.

I open the door to my room, hoping to find One. I can’t wait to crow to her about
kicking Serkova’s ass. When I enter, I see her feet peeking out from behind the corner
of the bed.

“One?”

I step closer.

She’s flat on her back on the carpet. Mouth and eyes open. She looks glazed, and her
skin is doing that milky flickering thing that it did back under the baobab tree.
Only much, much worse.

“What happened?” I crouch beside her on the floor. She’s silent. “One?”

After a moment’s silence, she speaks. “Nothing.” Her lips barely move and her voice
is raspy. “It’s just that each time it’s darker than the last time. It hurts more,
it’s more … obliterating.” Her eyes swim around in her head, searching for me.

Her gaze finally finds mine. “It’s like, what’s blacker than black, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say.

But I
don’t
know. She’s going through something I have no experience with. She’s going through
the End.

I hear my mother call me for dinner.

I turn back to One. “I’m going to stay with you.”

She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly.

“No,” she says. “You should go.” Her eyes drift back to the ceiling as she lies there,
flickering in and out of view.

Heartbroken, I leave.

My father joins my mother and me for dinner. He barely speaks, except to ask my mother
for seconds—he has a true warrior’s appetite—and to give us an update on Ivan. “His
superior officer says Ivan is doing excellent work. Says he has the makings of a general,
himself.”

“That’s wonderful,” says my mother, beaming approvingly. “Does he know the good news
about Adamus?”

My father and I exchange a quick, uneasy glance.

The General wipes his mouth with a napkin. “No.”

“Why not?” she says, looking back and forth between the two of us. “I think he’d be
happy to hear his brother is alive.”

“Adamus is
not
Ivanick’s brother,” my father says, silencing her.

Technically that’s true—I’m their biological son and Ivanick was adopted, raised by
my parents—but I catch the General’s subtext. Saying I am not Ivanick’s brother is
my father’s way of saying that I am unworthy of being honored that way, that I am
less their son than even Ivan. My father steps into the kitchen, leaving me and my
mother alone in awkward silence.

The truth is, I’m too upset about One’s worsening fades to even care about the hateful
soap opera of my family life.

“You’ve barely touched your plate, Adamus.” My mother looks at me with concern. “Is
something upsetting you?”

The question is so ridiculous, given the circumstances, I almost laugh. I almost say,
“Yes, Mother. Everything is upsetting me.” But I bite my tongue.

I hear One’s voice from last night. “
We need to get back in that lab
.”

She’s right. She’s fading so fast I need to convince Dr. Zakos to try the procedure
again if she’s going to have any hope of living. But how can I convince my father
to let me go, to grant me leave of my temporary position in the surveillance facility?

“Adamus?”

“I’m just afraid,” I say. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I see it, the
dim outline of a new card to play.

“Afraid?” my mother asks. “Afraid of what?”

“Of Father. I’m afraid he’ll make me …” My voice trails off dramatically. I force
myself to look as stricken, as ghostly with fear, as I can.

“What are you saying—”

And then I blurt it out. I explain to my mother that I ran into Dr. Anu’s replacement
in the Northwest tunnel the other day and he said that he could do the mind-transfer
procedure again.

“He says it’ll work this time. That they can’t do it to just anyone, it has to be
me. And I’m afraid, I don’t want to go back into the labs and be hooked up to machines.
I’m afraid I’ll go into another coma or—or … worse!” I will tears to my eyes. “He
says he can dig up real information about the Garde if they do it, and I think the
General will make me …”

“Oh Adamus, I doubt that—”

I interrupt her, louder than before. “But he will! If the General finds out, I’m sure
he will!”

Then I hear his low deep voice, coming from behind me.

“If he finds out what, exactly?”

It’s the General. Taking my bait.

“Have a seat, get comfortable.” Dr. Zakos has positioned a large curved chair in the
center of the room and gestures for me to get in. Nervously I take a seat.

“I was delighted to hear from your father last night,” he says, flitting around the
laboratory, putting monitors in place, booting up scary-looking medical equipment.
“But with the short notice, it might take me a while to get this equipment up and
running.”

I can tell he’s ecstatic to use the equipment on me. Adamus, the Mogadorian lab rat.

I sink into the chair, trying to get comfortable while Zakos sets up. I should be
happy: my ruse worked. I deliberately let my father overhear that I didn’t want to
be used in Zakos’s mind-transfer experiments, and he had Zakos on the phone within
minutes, giving him the go ahead to plug my brain into One’s corpse.

The General still hates me, and seeing me weak and afraid, as I’d pretended to be
at the dinner table, gave his meager conscience whatever license it needed to risk
my life again in the lab.

The General is free to hate me. I hate him too. And now that I’ve succeeded in tricking
him again, my hatred has a new depth, a new dimension: contempt. I fooled him.

The machines begin to whir.

I’m afraid of what will happen while I’m under, but push that aside. More than anything
else, I’m relieved to know that One may have a chance of survival. If the technology
has improved, maybe I can get through the procedure unharmed, rescuing One in the
process.

“The transfer rig will take about twenty minutes to warm up,” Zakos announces.

I nod as I watch the doctor approach the steel console beside the tile containing
One’s body. He presses a few buttons and the slab comes out with the same hydraulic
whoosh as before.

From where I’m sitting I can’t see One’s body. Zakos presses a few buttons on the
edge of One’s slab, then presses the console again. The slab whooshes shut.

“You don’t need …” I start, then catch myself before I call her One. “You don’t need
to connect the body to me?”

“No,” he says, with professional pride. “All of the containment pods are linked to
this mainframe terminal,” he says, pointing at the largest monitor. “Everything besides
the pods’ hydraulics are controlled through here: brain scans, vitals, preservation
protocols …”

“Do you have other bodies in there?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “Quite a few. Some of them are unaffiliated mortals I’ve used for
experimentation. The rest of them are Greeters.”

Zakos, oblivious to the fact that I’m a traitor to the Mogadorian cause, explains
to me that when the Loric were first scouting for a planet where they could hide from
the Mogadorians, they made contact with a few scattered mortals. The Mogadorians captured
these humans almost ten years ago and subjected them to a series of interrogations.
However, Mogadorians knew next to nothing about earthling psychology or behavior back
then, and at that point our interrogation techniques were quite crude. Some of these
“Greeters” caved to Mogadorian interrogation, but it was quickly discovered the intel
they gave—about the Loric’s locations, what they told the Greeters upon contact—was
often faulty. Because of this, my people began an ongoing research endeavor that used
complex brain-mapping technology to find a more accurate means of extracting information.
In other words, rather than asking for it, we tried to find a way to take it.

“And, as a matter of fact, Anu’s experiment with you was an offshoot of that research.
Unfortunately it failed, but I was intrigued. The procedure you are about to undergo
represents a massive refinement of his work.”

I can tell that Zakos thinks this little history lesson is complete, but I want to
know more.

“And you’ve kept these Greeters alive this whole time?”

Zakos gives a breezy laugh. “Not exactly. We’ve raked their brains so thoroughly trying
to extract information about the Garde that all but one of them have perished. Of
course we’re keeping the others preserved, should our technology advance to the point—”

“Who lived?” I ask, interrupting him, steering him back to information I know One
will want, should both of us survive the procedure.

Dr. Zakos looks at me silently for a moment. For a second, I worry that I’ve raised
his suspicions.

Instead, he impishly raises an eyebrow. “Want to see?”

He dashes over to a panel next to another tile and opens the containment pod. After
the mist clears, I crane my neck to get a better look.

I see a handsome, solidly built middle-aged man. His skin is shockingly white from
being in containment for so long: it’s practically the color of vatborn skin. But
otherwise he looks healthy. His eyes are closed.

“Just one moment,” Zakos says, pressing a few buttons inside the pod. Then Zakos leans
over the man.

“Malcolm Goode?” he says, addressing him gently, like a normal human doctor addressing
a normal human patient. “How’s it going in there?”

Malcolm Goode opens his eyes.

I feel a chill, a wave of nauseating pity for this poor human, trapped in a cold box
for years on end.

“Hello,” he says, looking up at Dr. Zakos with an expression of utter guilelessness
and trust. It’s like he has no idea how much time has passed, or what he’s been subjected
to. “I seem to have forgotten where I am,” he says, smiling innocently. “Could you
tell me where I am?”

Dr. Zakos only chuckles in response. “Well,” he says, addressing me. “You get the
idea.”

And with that he reaches over to the panel, presses a few more buttons, and Malcolm
is prompted—whether by wire or chemical—to return to sleep. But not before he fixes
me with a haunted, quizzical look.

I’m under. At first it’s just a void, a black so black I wonder for a moment if this
is what One experiences when she disappears. Then come blasts of light and crackling
static, as I find myself plunged into One’s memories.

I look around, getting my bearings. I’m in a wooden shack, in bed, my head hanging
over the side of the mattress. Through the cracks in the floorboards, I see rushing
water: a river.

The Rajang River.

“They’re coming.”

I turn to see Hilde, One’s Cêpan. She’s staring through a slat in the door, ready
to fight. She rushes to me, shaking me, pulling me out of bed.

That’s when I realize I’m not just a spectator to One’s final memories, as I was during
most of my time in her consciousness. I’ve been plugged
directly
into her experience. Ghost-One is nowhere to be seen. I’m completely fused with her:
every thought, every feeling. The humidity inside the shack. The sweat trickling down
my back. I can feel Hilde’s eyes on me, inspecting my readiness for combat.