Unforgotten(108)

When my vision focuses, I see the bed on the other side of the room. There are no legs or other support mechanisms holding it up. It simply hovers above the ground.

It isn’t until I see Rio’s face resting on the crisp white pillowcase that I know we’ve made it.

His rough red beard is fuller, scragglier. His hair is longer, falling into his eyes. And his skin is worn and tattered. Like it’s been left out in the rain one too many times.

But other than that, he looks the same.

Seeing him in this comatose state, his eyes open and unnervingly staring into space, I realize how robbed I feel. He was the closest thing I’ll ever have to a family and he’s gone. Our time together was too short. As soon as I realized how important he was, what he meant to me, it was over. Alixter turned him into this.

I will never have another conversation with him.

I will never be able to ask him questions about my past. Or his relationship with Maxxer.

I will never be able to see the gentleness—the life—in his soft green-gray eyes.

I have this irresistible urge to run to him, to place my palm against his cheek, to rest my head on his chest. But something stops me.

A noise.

A kind of grinding sound. And that’s when I see the woman. At least, from the waist up, she looks like a woman. But instead of legs, she has wheels attached to the bottom of her torso.

The sight of her makes me shriek. But Kaelen is one step ahead of me. His hand covers my mouth, muffling the sound, and he yanks me back. We scuttle under a table, scooting as far away as we can until we hit a wall.

“What is it?” I ask in that inaudible voice I know only he can hear.

“A med bot.”

“A what?”

But apparently I was a bit too loud because he presses his finger to his lips. “Robotic intelligence. They’re assigned to do various tasks around the compound.”

I watch the strange lifelike creature in wonderment as she wheels around the room, going about her duties, checking the machines and computers monitoring Rio.

“Does she know we’re here?” I ask in my hoarse whisper.

“If she did, we would know.”

She rolls over to the table that we’re hiding beneath and Kaelen and I both suck in a simultaneous breath, pushing ourselves as far back against the wall as we can. I watch her bottom half glide efficiently across the length of the table. The spherical wheels turning effortlessly front to back, side to side, even diagonally.

My heart is pounding so loud right now, I’m convinced that it will only be a matter of time before she hears it and sounds the alarm.

After what feels like hours, I watch her wheel up to the wall opposite us and swipe her eerily humanlike hand across a clear panel. A door appears where there once was just a seamless white wall, and it slides open. She exits and the door closes behind her, blending back into the façade as though it never existed in the first place.

Kaelen moves fast. Crawling out from under the table and then reaching down to help me. “We have to be quick. She’s probably on a rotation.”

“How long?” I ask.

“Twenty minutes,” he guesses. “Maybe less.”

I check that the receptors are still securely attached to my head and hurry toward Rio’s bedside. On a nearby table is a thin plastic screen. Information is flying across it at dizzying speed. Lines and lines of what appears to be code.

“What is that?” I ask.

“Looks like a search,” Kaelen responds, picking up the screen and studying the data. “It’s probably connected to his brain. Alixter is looking for something.”

“What?” I ask, feeling nauseated.

He squints, absorbing the numbers as they soar past. “I can’t tell,” he says. “The search is encoded.”

“Can you link me to his brain?”

Kaelen nods, tapping the piece of plastic. “Initiating link,” he reports back. “You’ll be connected in five, four, three, two…”

SCREECH!

I’m suddenly bombarded by a swirling, dizzying array of images and rapidly moving scenes. None of them are complete or clear. They’re all choppy and faded, some even distorted, like they’ve been wrung out by extremely strong hands, causing the picture to look twisted and alien and terrifying.

They spin frantically. But there’s no order to any of them. I’m getting woozy from the influx of data.

And the noise. It’s the loudest, most distressing sound I’ve ever heard. Like a million people screaming into my ear at the same time. Demanding to be heard.

I press my hand to my head, trying to steady myself. Trying to block out the sound and concentrate on just one picture. One face. One voice. But it’s impossible. There is no logic. No sense. No way to sort through anything.