and reveal the slot. Without giving myself a chance to back down, I plugged the device in.
Hot electricity rushed and crackled from my neck all the way to my brain.
Program LuRecoverM 587$ detected. Run program?
“Go ahead and run the program when you detect it,” Lucas said.
With a silent prayer, I obeyed.
As I waited in the chair, back stiff, hands clutching the armrests, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. Maybe for random images to start flooding my mind, or possibly one continuous video file to start playing.
Instead, I got a whole lot of nothing.
Green code? Oh, sure. The program showered me with that. Numbers whipped through my head, illuminating a pathway toward an empty storage place for the missing data. I even felt the program dive into that void in my past, watched the shadows begin to shrink. But beyond that . . . nothing else happened.
After all that anticipation, my body wanted to sag into the chair, but I held myself rigid. Calm, I had to remain calm. Once the program finished loading, that’s when I’d retrieve the lost memories. I was too impatient, that was all.
“See anything?” Lucas asked.
I gave a quick jerk of my head, not trusting my voice to remain steady.
The last bits of code whizzed into my mind.
Data recovery: Complete.
I waited one heartbeat, two. Then I issued the command:
Retrieve data.
A promising snap of response; a glimmer as the program opened.
Slam!
Program temporarily unavailable for use.
What?
I reissued the command, only to get the same response.
Program temporarily unavailable for use.
The bam-bam hammering in my temples grew louder. I tried again. This time, the response varied:
Program currently unsafe for use.
I slumped and relayed the information to Lucas.
He frowned and scooted to the edge of the bed, but didn’t look nearly as perturbed as I expected. Not based on the effort he’d put into this program so far. “I was hoping . . . but I sort of expected . . . hmmm.”
“Suspected what?” I said. Snappier than I intended, but his nonanswers were beginning to frustrate me.
“I’m sorry, I know this must be hard for you,” he said, instantly making me feel about two inches tall. “Okay, here goes. All three Milas were originally made with some organic material. So . . . I’d have to do a scan to make sure, but I think there might be a chance that the human side of your brain is blocking the program and preventing it from functioning.”
“Say what?”
Lucas’s lips twitched at the sight of my confusion. “Listen, I took a bunch of psychology classes in college—” When I tried to squelch a laugh, a full-on smile erupted on his face and he held up his hands. “I know, I know! Anyway, I did a lot of reading about people who experienced retrograde memory loss, which is similar to what happened to you. They often recovered their memories, but only when they were ready.”
“Ready?”
“You know. Emotionally prepared. It’s the mind’s way of protecting itself from further trauma.”
My body went limp once I digested the ramifications of what he’d just said.
Whatever happened after Quinn’s procedure was so awful that the human—no, the Sarah—side of my brain was protecting me. Trying to spare me.
His hand curled over mine, briefly. “It’s just a theory, Mila. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a glitch in the program that I can fix.”
I shook my head. “As much as I hate admitting this, you’re rarely ever wrong.”
Lucas studied me for a moment before reaching into his pocket. “I have something I think might cheer you up. Or . . . something that will distract you.”
I leaned forward, staring at his closed hand.
“I’ve been looking for more background information on your past, your parents . . . that sort of thing. Maybe that kind of information might trigger something in your, uh, Sarah’s, memory. It might calm you down and allow the program to work,” he said. “It’s taken a long time, because I couldn’t afford to leave a trace or alert anyone to my presence. But I did it. I finally hacked my way into an old government storage database, with defunct files on retired personnel and special projects.”
I knew that hacking of that kind involved serious risks. “You did all that for me?”
He opened his hand and then pressed the flash drive into my palm.
“This drive contains some emails between Nicole and Daniel. I only read enough to know that they’re from after the fire.”
Hard to believe I was holding conversations between my pseudoparents, after their