aggressive.”
No! I want to shout. You’ve got it all wrong. I wasn’t trying to escape. I was looking for the placard. Trying to figure out where my sister will be killed. That’s all.
But I don’t know how to explain without revealing my memory.
“This is our compromise,” the Chairwoman says when I remain silent. “While we have changed the course of the future by arresting you, we will endeavor to make pieces of your memory come true. Where’s the black chip, October Twenty-eight?”
I lick my lips. I really don’t think knowing the color of my shirt or getting my sister’s hair style right will make a difference in anyone’s life. “I must’ve dropped it in the woods, before the officers arrested me.”
She arches her eyebrows. They’re dyed silver, to match her hair. “We searched the grounds and didn’t come up with anything.”
“I don’t have it.” With any luck, it was smashed between the river boulders or washed downriver and lost forever. “Why don’t I tell you what happened? I’ll be happy to go over every detail until you’re satisfied.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she says, baiting me, waiting for me to say the wrong thing. “We already have William’s account. From you, we need a more precise picture of the future, so we must resort to…other methods of getting the information.”
My mouth goes dry. “What other methods?”
She doesn’t respond. She just raises her eyebrows as if to say, “What do you think?”
Torture. They’re going to torture the information out of me.
My teeth knock against each other, so hard they might chip. As if the whippings weren’t enough. I don’t know if I can handle any more. Razor blades carving into my cheek. Drowning in a bucket of water. My fingers broken one by one.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I have to be brave. But I’m not brave. Not really. I’m not anything. I’m just a girl. Only a girl. Nothing but a girl.
No, that’s not true. I’m a girl who will kill my sister in the future.
My teeth stop clicking, and I take a deep breath. That’s right. I’m going to kill my sister. The worst is already going to happen. There’s nothing they can do that will hurt me more. If anything, I deserve their torture.
I open my eyes. Chairwoman Dresden watches me the way one might look at a line of ants carrying away bits of food ten times their body weight—curious, but ultimately unconcerned if she squashes me beneath her platform stilts.
Without taking her eyes off me, she raises her hand and snaps. A moment later, the guard comes to the door.
“Please escort October Twenty-eight down the hall,” she says. “Dr. Bellows is waiting to examine her.”
I find my tongue again. FuMA already has the hourglass insignia. So which agency has the snail scrolls? “Where are we?”
The Chairwoman smiles. “The science labs, of course.”
A cold dread seeps into my stomach. I knew it. TechRA. I’ve spent the last six years protecting my sister from these people, doing everything I can to make sure they don’t treat her brain like a science experiment.
I never worried about myself. But maybe I should’ve. Because I’m about to suffer the exact same fate I tried so hard to prevent for Jessa.
8
A hard, plastic chair sits in the middle of the room, reclined so far it is almost horizontal. Sort of like a dentist’s chair, but worse, because a thousand different wires poke out from the armrests, winding around the nearby machines like coils of snakes. At the dentist’s, only my teeth are at risk. Here, those little wires could slither right into the deepest regions of my brain.
A man, presumably Dr. Bellows, sits at a desk next to the chair, his hands a blur of motion as they move around a spherical keyboard. His hair and beard are black, like sticky asphalt before it hardens, and a small yellow stub is tucked behind his ear.
A pencil. Nobody uses pencils anymore. I probably wouldn’t have even recognized it if my father hadn’t done the very same thing.
The memory hits me right in the stomach.
I’m climbing on my father’s lap. The smell of rubbing alcohol surrounds me, and his sandpaper beard brushes against my cheek. Quick like a hummingbird, I dart in and snatch the prize from behind my father’s ear.
“What is it?” I turn the yellow cylinder over in my hands.
“A pencil. A tool our ancestors used for record keeping.” My father wraps his large hand around mine and shows me how to scratch