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
The Mogadorian assault team kicks in the door and Hilde leaps into action. She dodges a Mog’s knife, and as the Mog spins around to recover his balance she crushes his windpipe with a single strike. As he collapses, she whirls to another Mog, swiftly snapping his neck.
I’m too paralyzed with fear to move. I know what’s coming. Hilde is about to die.
My heart screams. I love this woman with all of One’s love.
Another Mogadorian attacks. Hilde flips him onto his back.
But this Mog is quicker than the others. He unholsters his blaster and shoots Hilde right in her chest.
Everything goes red. All of One’s anger, shock, and rage at the loss of her Cepan—
And that’s when I feel it. Something ripping open inside of me, something so entirely new yet so strangely familiar that it’s almost funny I never noticed it before, that it took this crisis for me to notice it. The floors start to shake, a massive rumble coming from beneath my feet but also coming from inside me. And as my heart sings—
Shadows. Hands waving in front of my face, fluorescent light burning through the dark.
I am back in Zakos’s lab. He’s cursing, ripping electrodes from my head, adjusting the console I’m plugged into.
“What happened?” I ask.
I’m still buzzing from what I’ve just experienced. As chaotic as the memory transfer was, as turbulent as it felt, there was something I was on the verge of understanding inside it, a promise of something great.
But now that I’m back, it’s gone.
“Your vitals were spiking faster than I’d anticipated. If I’d kept going …” He lets out another string of curses.
I sit up in my chair.
He stares at me. “Are you able to recall anything? Do you have any usable intel I can send up the chain?”
I shake my head.
Of course I’m lying. Beyond what I just experienced, I already have an intimate knowledge of Loric psychology, the relationship between the Garde and their Cepan. I have the entirety of One’s history burned into my brain. I’ve had that ever since the first transfer.
He levels me with his stare. He’s evidently flustered, his hair damp with sweat, but that doesn’t make him any less scary.
“I know it’s in there,” he says.
I feel a chill at his words.
“You may not remember it consciously, but I know it’s in there, in your brain. And I know that I could get it,” he says.
The way he speaks, it’s like he’s talking to himself. “Our understanding of Mogadorian physiology is well beyond what we understand about Loric or mortals. With my neurological mapping techniques, I could do what Anu couldn’t. Run those currents three times as hard, and rip that intel straight from your brain and onto my hard drive.”
He stares at me. I feel weirdly exposed, objectified, like a slab of meat at a butcher shop.
“But for that,” he says, chuckling bitterly, “I’d need your father’s permission to kill you.”
CHAPTER 10
I’m dismissed to finish out my day at the surveillance facility. I have no fight left in me, and my rankings take a nosedive. Sixteen, eighteen, eighteen, twenty. Last place.
I know Dr. Zakos immediately reported the experiment’s failure to my father, but I doubt he took the risk of pitching his idea of mentally vivisecting me to the General. I have two more days left in the lab before my father decides if my results qualify me for survival. Either he will have me executed, or he will deem me an asset to the cause and allow me to continue working as a surveyor.
After the lab it’s another miserable dinner. The General is busy down in his briefing
