Enders (4 page)

“You won’t have to worry about that,” he said close to my ear.

I turned to look at him. “Thank you.” I rubbed his back, gave Tyler a kiss on the cheek, and then let them go.

As they left, I sighed, grateful to have Michael to watch over my brother. Then I took out my phone and stared at the Zings from Blake.

As I drove over to meet Blake, my vision started to get hazy. I knew what was next because this had happened before, recently. I pulled over to the curb.

I was reliving a memory of Helena’s, as if it were my own.
This was some aftereffect of the transposition—the mind-body transfer process.

It played in my mind the way one of my own memories would. I could see it happening, and I could feel Helena’s feelings. She walks into Prime for the first time. Everyone smiles at her: the receptionists, Mr. Tinnenbaum, and then the Old Man. Her thoughts become mine, but it is not like I hear her voice; no, I actually feel her desperation.
How these people stole Emma from me, ripped her away and lasered her and cut into her flesh and changed her. How, because of them, she’s lost. Gone. Disappeared. And probably dead
.

I felt Helena’s emptiness. How deeply lonely she was. Like most memories, it was short and then it was gone. But it passed through me like an emotional wave, and the sadness lasted for most of the drive. Why was this happening? And was I the only donor experiencing these strange souvenirs of our mind-body transfers?

I’d picked Beverly Glen Park to meet Blake. When I saw him waiting for me, sitting on top of a picnic table, my heart skipped a beat.

Seeing him with the setting sun backlighting his hair, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the time we had met there before. Only then, it was really the Old Man inside Blake’s body. I’d picked this place because it was close by and there was a private guard to protect us. But maybe there was another, subconscious reason I’d picked the same park.

I continued walking, watching him all the way. He leaned his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped, just like I remembered. But I had to remind myself this wasn’t the person I’d been with then. This was the real Blake, Senator Harrison’s
grandson, who thought he had been sick, who knew nothing of the body bank, whose only clue that we once had a relationship was a photo on his phone of us together.

He held out his hand to help me onto the tabletop.

“Glad you came,” he said.

“I’m really sorry, but I don’t have long.”

“Why not?”

“I’m waiting for an important Zing.” I knew that sounded lame. “But I came because there’s something I have to tell you.”

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. You know everything about us. I know zip.”

“That’s not important now.”

“It’s important to me.” He pulled out his phone. “So what about this picture of us?”

He showed me the happy image of the two of us, arms around each other. But it was a lie. It was really the Old Man.

It hurt to look at it.

“What were we doing?” he asked. “I mean, that day?”

“Riding horses.”

“At my grandfather’s ranch?”

“Yes.” I hated thinking back on that day. At the time, I’d thought it was one of the best days of my life.

“Looks like we had a pretty good time.”

I sighed. “We did.”

His eyes met mine. “What else did we do?”

“We went to the music center and to a drive-in restaurant. We watched the sunset.”

I didn’t fill in the details that I saw in my mind’s eye: How we’d watched the sun set over the mountains, our horses side by side, shuffling their hooves. How he’d handed me
that spotted orchid, the first flower any boy had ever given me. Reliving those memories hurt. Not because they were gone, but because they never really existed. Not with him, anyway.

“No, I mean, did we do anything else?” He stretched his neck as if his collar was too tight. “Anything … more?”

“No. We just kissed.”

At the time, it wasn’t “just” a kiss to me. But he didn’t need to know that.

“I wish I could remember that,” he said.

“I wish you could too.”

He hesitated for a moment, as if he was trying to see if I meant what I’d said. Then he leaned forward, tentatively, his eyes searching for clues every step of the way.

I leaned closer until our faces were almost touching. He smelled wonderfully woodsy and grassy, same as before.

We kissed. It was … not like before.

It started out the same, the smoothness of his lips, the smell of his skin. But the spark I had once felt, that sweet electricity, was gone. It was only in my memory. I tried again. Maybe it was there, and I just wasn’t being sensitive enough. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was nervous.

Relax. Find it.

But I stopped. Pulled back.

No.

It wasn’t.

He pulled away too and looked off in the distance. We sat back, side by side, not touching each other. He ran his hand through his hair. I looked at my phone. No Zing yet.

“You seem eager to go,” he said, looking resigned.

“No, sorry, it’s really important.” I put the phone down.

“So what did you want to tell me?” he asked.

I turned to him. Finally, I could do what I came to do. “You’re in danger. We both are.”

“What?” He looked at me as if I’d said the world was flat.

I needed to start with something he already knew. “You’ve heard the news about the bombing at the mall?”

He frowned. “Bombing? They just said it was an explosion on the news. A gas leak.”

“It was a bombing. And it could have been you or me who got killed.”

He leaned away from me. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince him.

“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.”

I didn’t really want to go inside, but I had to. I got out of the car and looked up at Institution 37. The massive gray walls made my heart feel heavy. The complex looked like the prison that it really was, with heavy iron gates and a security booth. The walls mocked and challenged, daring me to return. Was I an idiot to come back? The last time I had, I’d lost my best friend on those walls.

Lauren stood beside me. She smiled, and gentle wrinkles formed around her eyes.

“It’s okay, Callie. We’ll be right beside you.”

The driver stayed with the car while the three of us walked toward the gate. I was safe, wasn’t I? We had the power and the money, much more than these horrible people in this place. Much more than that vile head of security, my old prison guard—Beatty.

So why were my hands shaking?

Lauren noticed and touched my shoulder.

“Don’t worry. You’re not going to see her. We’re only going to speak to the headmaster.”

I nodded. Even though Beatty haunted my memories, odds were we wouldn’t run into her there. She was probably off in that dungeon of a confinement cell, torturing some poor Starter.

The gates opened with their awful grinding noise that made my jaw clench. I looked down and noticed that my hands had stopped shaking.

Soon we were in the main office, waiting for the headmaster’s arrival. The chief of staff and Lauren sat in old leather chairs. I was too fidgety to sit. I paced the room. There wasn’t a bit of color in it. On the wall hung a faded painting of an English hunting scene. One hunter proudly held up a dead fox. Fitting, I thought.

On the desk, a glint drew my attention. It came from a stiletto letter opener with a handle shaped like a snake and emerald-green stones for eyes. Next to it, the airscreen’s screensaver was not the usual waterfalls and wildlife but a screenshot from
Huntdown
, a first-person shooter game where unclaimed Starters were hunted. I knew better than anyone how brutal this place could be, but that shocked even me.