“I made a promise to your grandfather that I wouldn’t tell you,” I said. “He wants to protect you, but you have to know now. That building that we watched being destroyed in Beverly Hills, Prime Destinations?”
He nodded slowly.
“You were kidnapped and brought there. They implanted a chip in your head. Your body was used—inhabited—by the head of Prime. It’s called transposition. That’s why you have no memory of that picture. It wasn’t you then.”
“Where was I?”
“It’s like your brain was asleep.” I waved my hand as if to dismiss that. “The important thing is, you want to keep away from him—he’s called the Old Man. You’ll know him because he has an electronic mask for a face and he’s got this creepy artificial voice. He had a plan to make thousands of Starters permanents—so we’d never wake up. But we stopped it.”
Blake let out a sound that was half laugh, half huff. “This is crazy.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s real. I have the chip too.” I touched the back of my head.
He rubbed his temples, as if it hurt to think about all this craziness. My phone flashed a Zing from Senator Bohn’s office.
Obtained the search warrant. Call me.
“That’s him. I have to go,” I said.
“Already?” He slumped. “But I’ve got a million questions.”
“I’m sorry, but we have to stop him. Ask your grandfather. Just do me a favor and don’t say I told you.”
I hated leaving him there after giving him the mind-boggling news. But they were waiting for me.
“Don’t talk to anybody until you talk to your grandfather,” I said.
As I rushed off, I felt an aching pain in my chest, as if my heart had been ripped out. I couldn’t lie to myself—I missed Blake.
Just not this Blake.
But that meant I missed … No. What that meant, I didn’t want to think about. It was too horrible. Disgusting. I needed to push that out of my mind and focus on how we were going to stop him.
I sat in the back of the limo with the senator’s chief of staff and Lauren. Before the bombing, Senator Bohn had been heading up a Congressional investigation of Prime Destinations, but it had run dry. The computers that had been confiscated from Prime had been wiped clean, so there was nothing to learn from them. The team was hitting dead ends.
But the bombing had reenergized our drive to find the Old Man. With the search warrant the senator obtained for us, we headed off to the one place we knew had done business with him. The only snag was that because this was done so quickly, our search warrant was conditional: for inspection only. When we reached our destination, we could only examine their files and computers, not copy anything. That made my role all the more essential, as I was the only one of the three of us who had spent time there.
“Horrid about Reece,” Lauren said. “I feel terribly responsible.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Reece chose to be a donor before you came to rent her.” Then I wondered, why did the Old Man do this? Was it a coincidence that he picked my guardian’s donor body to sacrifice? I kept this to myself, not wanting to make Lauren feel any worse.
“You said she was acting strangely?” Lauren asked.
“I think she was being controlled. But they weren’t doing a very good job. Her expressions and movements were jerky. She looked unnatural.”
Lauren shivered.
“And then there was this Ender,” I continued, “this man she spoke to, right before the explosion.”
“What man?” the chief of staff asked.
“A tall Ender, fit, maybe a hundred,” I said. “With a leopard tattoo on his neck. He was following her through the mall right before it happened.”
“How long did they talk?” he asked.
“A few seconds.” I swallowed. “It happened in a mall, of all places,” I said. “With little kids.”
“He wanted to show that we could shut down Prime,” the chief of staff said, “but we couldn’t stop him.”
So it wasn’t Lauren’s fault, it was mine. The Old Man targeted the mall I would be going to, used my guardian’s donor body, the Starter I knew, and showed me he was still capable of hurting us. It was my fault those people were injured and Reece was killed.
I closed my eyes a moment.
The driver pulled over. We’d arrived. I didn’t move.
“You don’t have to come in,” Lauren said.
“I do. It’s why I’m here,” I said. “I know him better than any of you. There might be a clue, something that relates to something he said to me. You can’t copy anything, so you need my eyes.”