Specimen(77)
“God, Galen,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry for everything I did! Maybe…maybe I should have just let you go in the beginning, but I couldn’t.”
Let me go. She means have me killed.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you were never a lab rat to me.” She strokes the side of my face. “I knew you were the specimen I wanted as soon as I saw you. The more time I spent with you, the more…attached I became.”
I think about how drawn I was to her from the beginning. As soon as I saw her, I wanted her, needed to be close to her. Is she saying she felt the same way?
“How much of that has to do with the drugs you take?” I ask.
“None,” she says. “That’s all a one-way street.”
“Maybe it was never the drugs,” I say, and Riley looks at me quizzically. I hold her to my chest and kiss the top of her head. “The word isn’t adequate, but I love you, too. It’s not the drugs or anything else. It’s just you. I love you.”
I want to hold her right here in my arms forever, but the clock inside my head is ticking. I break our embrace and look her in the eye.
“Are my implants really malfunctioning?”
“Yes.” Riley leads me back to the kitchen and clicks around on the computer screen. She frowns in frustration. “I can’t access that side of the network from here, but the diagnostics from the tech show that there is a fundamental flaw in the appliance.”
“The fence that holds back my memories.”
“Fence?”
“That’s how Errol Spat described it.”
“The techs didn’t say anything that specific,” Riley says. “Dr. McCall was trying to convince everyone that it had to do with my diversion from the originally prescribed treatment, but I don’t think that’s it. If there’s a problem with the memory block, and there obviously is, that was there from the beginning.”
“A technical flaw in the primary implant.”
“Exactly.”
“But if that part has failed, have other parts failed as well?”
“I’m not a tech,” she says. “There are a lot of things about the implants I don’t understand; it’s just not my part of the job.”
“Spat said something similar. He knows the tech, but isn’t a doctor. Do you think together you could fix it without me forgetting who I am?”
“I don’t know.” Riley furrows her brow. “There really isn’t a way to find out without returning to the medical center.”
“There might be.”
“What?”
“There’s more you should know.”
As quickly as I can, I tell her everything I left out of the debriefing. I tell her about Hal and about the details of my past divulged to me. I tell her about Errol Spat saying the implant barriers that were supposed to keep my memories out had failed and how everything about my past flooded my head at once. By the time I pause, Riley looks like her head is spinning, but there’s one last thing she needs to know.
“Riley, there’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“Something Anna Jarvis said to me.”
“What?”
“She said it wasn’t Peter Hudson who ordered your father killed.”
Riley’s eyes go wide. She takes a step back and drops onto one of the kitchen chairs, staring at me.
“Who was it?”
“I’m not sure she knows,” I say, “but she hinted that he was set up—killed by someone within the Mills Conglomerate. She thought it was done to turn him into a martyr and further the cause.”
Riley clasps her hands together and places them under her chin as she takes it all in. I wish I could give her all the time in the world to absorb this information, but we don’t have that luxury right now. We’ve been here too long already.
“I think I can get us out of Mills territory,” I tell her, “but once we’re out, what do we do?”
“Do you think you can find that group again?” she asks. “Can you find Errol Spat?”
“Possibly.”
“Then we leave,” Riley says. “We leave and go find them. I want answers, now more than ever, and I’m not going to get them from anyone at the Mills Conglomerate.”
Chapter 20
“How can there only be one parachute?” Inside my head, the clock ticks.
We had been in the air for seven minutes before I killed the pilot. It had taken us twenty-one minutes to get to the area where I landed the helicopter, six minutes to get to the cabin where we spent thirty-nine minutes going over security footage. One hour and thirteen minutes, plus the ten minutes it took us to get back to the helicopter only to find out there aren’t enough parachutes.