Someone knocked at the door. I opened it and saw Hyden and Avery standing there.
“We heard you talking,” Hyden said.
“Is he okay?” Avery asked.
They stepped into the room, their voices hushed, as if they were visiting a patient in the hospital.
“He looks pretty good,” Hyden said.
“Very good.” Avery nodded.
“This is Avery,” I said to Michael.
“And who’s he?” Michael asked, staring at Hyden inside Jeremy’s body.
“His name is Hyden,” I said. I decided it was easier not to explain that he was not in his own body.
Avery took Michael’s temperature with a forehead monitor. He looked at me with raised brows and a smile.
“How do you feel?” she asked Michael.
Michael rubbed his head. “This is a killer headache.”
“I’ll get some ibuprofen. And something to eat.” Avery hurried off.
“Callie said you had something important to tell us. Something about a memory?” Hyden prompted.
Michael stared off, not looking at any of us. “The strangest thing happened to me at the mountain house. I was outside, watching Tyler fishing in the lake, when I got this flash in front of my face like an Xperience. Like I was right there in the theater. It was like I was watching a movie where I was the star—no, the camera, really. It was my point of view as I walked through the body bank. I had just come out of the restroom and couldn’t remember my way out. I went down the wrong hallway and turned a corner and saw a thin body on a gurney, completely covered with a sheet. It looked like a woman, a dead woman. The gurney was being backed out an exit door and the person pulling it was outside already. The sheet slipped, revealing the face. It was an Ender. Now here’s the weird part. In the memory, I didn’t recognize her. But as me, watching this memory, I knew who it was.”
He looked at me. “It was Helena.”
I think I had guessed it, but it was hard to hear. “Helena,” I repeated.
Michael nodded. “I recognized her from all the pictures in the mansion. But anyway, in the memory, I looked up and saw that it was Trax pulling the gurney.”
“Trax? Glasses Trax?” I pictured his thick black rims. “The Ender geek who handled my rentals at Prime?”
“Transpositions. Call them transpositions,” Hyden said in a monotone. He seemed a bit shaken.
Michael looked from him to me, as confused as I was over Hyden’s reaction. “Yeah, that guy with the glasses. Anyway, I pulled back before he could see me. That was it.”
Hyden now looked pale. Sick, even. He stood and walked slowly out of the room.
“What’s it mean?” Michael asked.
“The memory belongs to your renter.” I rubbed my arms. “So this must be what he saw.”
“But why would I remember it?”
“It’s been happening to all of us. Your renter must have just gotten your body. Then he stumbled onto this.” I paced the room. “I heard Helena die in my head. Trax killed her.”
“You don’t know. I mean, it could have been someone else. He could have just been doing the cleanup.”
“He was hiding the body,” I said. “At minimum, he’s involved.”
Michael looked at me with pleading eyes, as if I had all the answers. I wish.
“Why do we have their memories?” he asked. “Isn’t it enough that we gave them our bodies to use?”
I could only close my eyes and nod.
CHAPTER TEN
Hyden drove me to downtown L.A., still in Jeremy’s body. Michael wanted to come, but Hyden insisted only the minimum number of Metals could risk getting scanned by being outside. I stared out the window at the grayness and graffiti.
“You sure you want to do this?” Hyden asked.
“I have to try,” I said.
“My father has the technology to re-create anyone’s voice,” he said. “He can access old phone records, any recordings left on the Pages, and extrapolate to create new sentences. You can’t trust what you hear, you’ve seen that now.”
I’d told him about my dad accessing me. How he knew about the birthday present. Hyden told me that it was just wishful thinking—that it was his father, not mine, in my head. I leaned my forehead against my hands, searching myself for some way to make him see. Feeling empty was worse when no one understood.
“I can’t help it.” I pulled my hands away. “If you were me and you loved your father and heard his voice in your head, alive, you’d want to investigate, wouldn’t you?”
“You lost me at the ‘loved your father’ part.”
A sigh escaped my lips. “He asked about Tyler.”