I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Search for Sam Read online

  “And, as a matter of fact, Anu’s experiment with you was an offshoot of that research. Unfortunately it failed, but I was intrigued. The procedure you are about to undergo represents a massive refinement of his work.”

  I can tell that Zakos thinks this little history lesson is complete, but I want to know more.

  “And you’ve kept these Greeters alive this whole time?”

  Zakos gives a breezy laugh. “Not exactly. We’ve raked their brains so thoroughly trying to extract information about the Garde that all but one of them have perished. Of course we’re keeping the others preserved, should our technology advance to the point—”

  “Who lived?” I ask, interrupting him, steering him back to information I know One will want, should both of us survive the procedure.

  Dr. Zakos looks at me silently for a moment. For a second, I worry that I’ve raised his suspicions.

  Instead, he impishly raises an eyebrow. “Want to see?”

  He dashes over to a panel next to another tile and opens the containment pod. After the mist clears, I crane my neck to get a better look.

  I see a handsome, solidly built middle-aged man. His skin is shockingly white from being in containment for so long: it’s practically the color of vatborn skin. But otherwise he looks healthy. His eyes are closed.

  “Just one moment,” Zakos says, pressing a few buttons inside the pod. Then Zakos leans over the man.

  “Malcolm Goode?” he says, addressing him gently, like a normal human doctor addressing a normal human patient. “How’s it going in there?”

  Malcolm Goode opens his eyes.

  I feel a chill, a wave of nauseating pity for this poor human, trapped in a cold box for years on end.

  “Hello,” he says, looking up at Dr. Zakos with an expression of utter guilelessness and trust. It’s like he has no idea how much time has passed, or what he’s been subjected to. “I seem to have forgotten where I am,” he says, smiling innocently. “Could you tell me where I am?”

  Dr. Zakos only chuckles in response. “Well,” he says, addressing me. “You get the idea.”

  And with that he reaches over to the panel, presses a few more buttons, and Malcolm is prompted—whether by wire or chemical—to return to sleep. But not before he fixes me with a haunted, quizzical look.

  I’m under. At first it’s just a void, a black so black I wonder for a moment if this is what One experiences when she disappears. Then come blasts of light and crackling static, as I find myself plunged into One’s memories.

  I look around, getting my bearings. I’m in a wooden shack, in bed, my head hanging over the side of the mattress. Through the cracks in the floorboards, I see rushing water: a river.

  The Rajang River.

  “They’re coming.”

  I turn to see Hilde, One’s Cêpan. She’s staring through a slat in the door, ready to fight. She rushes to me, shaking me, pulling me out of bed.

  That’s when I realize I’m not just a spectator to One’s final memories, as I was during most of my time in her consciousness. I’ve been plugged directly into her experience. Ghost-One is nowhere to be seen. I’m completely fused with her: every thought, every feeling. The humidity inside the shack. The sweat trickling down my back. I can feel Hilde’s eyes on me, inspecting my readiness for combat.

  I’m not ready, I think. I’m just scared.

  The Mogadorian assault team kicks in the door and Hilde leaps into action. She dodges a Mog’s knife, and as the Mog spins around to recover his balance she crushes his windpipe with a single strike. As he collapses, she whirls to another Mog, swiftly snapping his neck.

  I’m too paralyzed with fear to move. I know what’s coming. Hilde is about to die.

  My heart screams. I love this woman with all of One’s love.

  Another Mogadorian attacks. Hilde flips him onto his back.

  But this Mog is quicker than the others. He unholsters his blaster and shoots Hilde right in her chest.

  Everything goes red. All of One’s anger, shock, and rage at the loss of her Cêpan—my Cêpan—floods my system. No, she can’t, they couldn’t. It’s my fault, I failed, how could I? These are One’s thoughts but I feel them, hear them, as my own. I want her back. I want her back. No no no! Must pay, someone must pay, they must pay. Our combined fury rises. They will pay, yes they will pay, we will make them pay.

  And that’s when I feel it. Something ripping open inside of me, something so entirely new yet so strangely familiar that it’s almost funny I never noticed it before, that it took this crisis for me to notice it. The floors start to shake, a massive rumble coming from beneath my feet but also coming from inside me. And as my heart sings—yes, they will pay, they will pay—everything goes black and—

  Shadows. Hands waving in front of my face, fluorescent light burning through the dark.

  I am back in Zakos’s lab. He’s cursing, ripping electrodes from my head, adjusting the console I’m plugged into.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  I’m still buzzing from what I’ve just experienced. As chaotic as the memory transfer was, as turbulent as it felt, there was something I was on the verge of understanding inside it, a promise of something great.

  But now that I’m back, it’s gone.

  “Your vitals were spiking faster than I’d anticipated. If I’d kept going …” He lets out another string of curses.

  I sit up in my chair.

  He stares at me. “Are you able to recall anything? Do you have any usable intel I can send up the chain?”

  I shake my head.

  Of course I’m lying. Beyond what I just experienced, I already have an intimate knowledge of Loric psychology, the relationship between the Garde and their Cêpan. I have the entirety of One’s history burned into my brain. I’ve had that ever since the first transfer.

  He levels me with his stare. He’s evidently flustered, his hair damp with sweat, but that doesn’t make him any less scary.

  “I know it’s in there,” he says.

  I feel a chill at his words.

  “You may not remember it consciously, but I know it’s in there, in your brain. And I know that I could get it,” he says.

  The way he speaks, it’s like he’s talking to himself. “Our understanding of Mogadorian physiology is well beyond what we understand about Loric or mortals. With my neurological mapping techniques, I could do what Anu couldn’t. Run those currents three times as hard, and rip that intel straight from your brain and onto my hard drive.”

  He stares at me. I feel weirdly exposed, objectified, like a slab of meat at a butcher shop.

  “But for that,” he says, chuckling bitterly, “I’d need your father’s permission to kill you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I’m dismissed to finish out my day at the surveillance facility. I have no fight left in me, and my rankings take a nosedive. Sixteen, eighteen, eighteen, twenty. Last place.

  I know Dr. Zakos immediately reported the experiment’s failure to my father, but I doubt he took the risk of pitching his idea of mentally vivisecting me to the General. I have two more days left in the lab before my father decides if my results qualify me for survival. Either he will have me executed, or he will deem me an asset to the cause and allow me to continue working as a surveyor. Oh joy.

  After the lab it’s another miserable dinner. The General is busy down in his briefing room, so it’s just my mother and Kelly. Kelly refuses to even look at me. When my mother goes to the kitchen, I turn to her, try to start a conversation. We haven’t been close since before the mind transfer, almost five years ago. I wonder if she can even remember back then, when she hated Ivan for teasing her and roughhousing with her, and seemed to adore me, her gentle older brother.

  “Haven’t seen you in the tunnels,” I say. “How are things going in the Nursery?”

  She is silent, slowly chewing her food and staring straight ahead. It’s hard to believe a fourteen-year-old girl could be so full of such a steely hatred. />
  “Kelly, I’m sorry if it’s embarrassing that I survived, that you have to explain that your loser brother has come back—”

  “Ivanick told me,” she says, hissing at me suddenly. “He told me the truth about you. I know what Mom doesn’t. You’re a traitor.”

  My stomach does a somersault. I feel like I could throw up my entire dinner.

  “So you can pretty much stop trying to make up with me. It’s not going to happen.” She gets up from the table.

  “I wish you were dead,” she says, before running up the stairs to her room and slamming the door shut.

  “Good night to you too,” I say, laughing miserably to myself.

  After dinner I go up to my room. One isn’t there. I haven’t seen her since last night.

  Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me. The mind transfer was so fast, and so quickly aborted that I doubt it did much to reestablish her foothold in my consciousness. Perhaps that’s the thing I felt like I was on the verge of understanding—how to keep her alive inside of me.

  It’s funny to think Zakos thought he was covering his ass with the General by protecting my life. If Zakos had killed me, my father probably would’ve given him a medal.

  I have nothing to stay up for. I go to bed early.

  Sleepless in bed, I consider the pitiful irony of my current situation. I came back here to rescue my one and only friend in the world, yet I fail to save her, just as I failed to save Hannu. If she isn’t gone for good, she will be soon enough. And now I’m stuck here, trapped.

  Alone.

  A desultory day at work. I’m pulling in rankings in the thirten-to-fifteen range. Pathetic.

  I’ve scaled back on my “Discard” trick. Why bother trying to impress anyone with my rankings, anyway? So I actually investigate each link that’s fed to my monitor, even though it damages my productivity. At least it’s more interesting than mindlessly shuttling the leads into one folder or another.

  I click on a link.

  This one leads to a forum dedicated to readers of some publication called “They Walk Among Us.” The Mogadorian mainframe has isolated a thread titled “NEXT ISSUE?” posted by a user TWAUFAN182. A threaded dialogue unfolds when I click on it.

  Please I’ve read TWAU no. 3 so many times. Please tell me when next ish will come out? Thanks! ☺—TWAUFAN182

  Sorry TWAUFAN. No plans for issue #4 yet, but be assured we have plenty material for one. Thanks for reading.—admin

  What? What material? U can’t leave us hanging like that! Spill it!—TWAUFAN182

  Come on man, give us a hint!!!—TWAUFAN182

  It’s been weeks with no updates. This forum is dead, RIP. LOL.—TWAUFAN182

  That exchange was dated a year ago. Then, this morning …

  Sorry. Been busy. We’ve made contact, definitely extraterrestrial. True MOG in captivity.—admin

  I almost gasp. There are humans out there who have captured a Mogadorian? Or who at least think they’ve captured a Mogadorian?

  I know at once that this is the first link that’s passed through my monitor that’s truly worthy of an “EHP” ranking. I click on the hyperlink and drag it over to the “Investigate” directory … but then I stop.

  Why would I alert the Mogadorians to the location of these humans? Humans the Mogs will undoubtedly capture and kill? I might get in trouble if I discard the link—surely there are failsafes built into the system for erroneous Discards—but why should I make it easier for these Mogadorian bastards? By discarding this link, I will save a human life … or at least slow down the Mogadorian hunting machine for a few minutes.

  It’s worth it.

  I don’t care if I live or die. If One is gone and I’m stuck in this vile society, why should I fight to live? The pleasure of outperforming Serkova has faded; besides, with rankings like my current ones, that ship has sailed.

  I click Discard.

  They’ll come for you.

  In my bones, I know I’m going to reap hell for what I’ve done. And I don’t care.

  Fuck the Mogadorians.

  I start dumping every link on my monitor into the Discard directory, as fast as I can. There’s no upper limit on the number of links that can get routed to a single monitor—the more links you process, the more get routed your way—so before I know it I’ve chucked upwards of three hundred links into the Discard directory.

  I’m making a spectacular mess of their system. The clock counts down to the end of the hour. How many unevaluated Discards can I cram into the directory before my fellow surveyors catch on? For that matter, how long until my treasonous evidence-burying gets discovered?

  I’m exhilarated.

  The hourly rankings come in. I’ve discarded 611 links. Investigated 0. My provisional accuracy ranking is a hilarious 11 percent. Better yet, as if to make a mockery of their entire ranking algorithm, I come in first place.

  “What the hell, Adamus!” Serkova snarls at me. The others turn around to face me, all the work in the surveyor facility grinding to a halt. No one knows how to react to my total breakdown. “Are you fricking nuts?”

  I smile at Serkova, dizzy from my own outlandish behavior. “Yeah, I think I might be.”

  Then an alarm goes off.

  I hear the heavy march of footsteps coming down the hall: soldiers dispatched from HQ.

  “You deserve whatever you get,” says Serkova, spitting at me.

  I run.

  I dodge out into the Northwest tunnel to see the soldiers coming, fronted by the General. They look pissed.

  If I’m going out, I’m going out with a bang. I run towards the marching guards … then pull to a stop in front of Zakos’s lab.

  “Hey Pops,” I say, taunting the General. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You know what you’ve done,” he sneers at me. He gestures to the guards to seize me.

  I resist, swinging my arms wildly, shouting as loud as I can. The Mogadorians hardly know how to react to such an undignified resistance. I can feel my father cringing in embarrassment.

  The guards manage to subdue me, but the ruckus has attracted Dr. Zakos’s attention. He steps out into the hall, as the guards begin dragging me away, probably to feed me to some hungry piken.

  For a moment I worry my plan has failed, but then I hear Zakos’s voice, calling from down the hall.

  “General! Wait!”

  My father halts our progress to listen to what Zakos has to say.

  “If I may be so bold … I may be able to put your son’s life to some use.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I’m back in the chair.

  Zakos has convinced my father to allow him to perform an accelerated mind transfer between me and One. The process will be so intense it will kill me, literally frying my brain. But Zakos has guaranteed the General that he will be able to download the contents of One’s transferred memories from my brain after my death. “If your son has been such a disappointment in life, at least allow him to be of service in death.”

  Zakos assured the General that even if the intelligence he extracts from my brain is of little consequence, the results of the experiment will represent a tremendous leap forward for Mogadorian technology.

  “You don’t need to make a hard sell, Zakos,” I said, still trapped in the guards’ grip. I turned to my father, an impudent smile on my lips. “Isn’t that right, Pops? He had you on board at ‘Kill Adamus,’ didn’t he?”

  The General didn’t even look at me. He nodded at his guards, who released me, then turned to the doctor. “Have the results on my desk by tomorrow morning,” he said.

  I’ve been in the lab since.

  Guards monitor the door, but I’m not bound or watched by anyone but Zakos. Where am I going to go? How can I possibly escape? As my little demonstration in the hallway proved, I’m no match against Mogadorian soldiers.

  Neither my father nor my sister has seen fit to visit me in my final hours. But my mother ventured down to deliver me a last meal. She entered the
lab a few hours ago, carrying a couple slices of fresh-baked bread wrapped in a napkin and a plastic container filled with soup. She hesitated for a moment, looking for a suitable place to lay the meal. Then, realizing there was no good place for it, she wordlessly put the bread and soup on a laboratory counter. Then she turned her back to me, her hand on the door.

  “Is it true?” she asked.

  “Is what true?” I asked, a bit spitefully. I wanted to make her spell it out.

  “That you’ve betrayed the Mogadorian cause.”

  I guess my father figured we were past sugarcoating things and had told her everything.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Without another word, she left.

  Moments later, as I held the still-warm bread in my hand, I realized that final home-cooked meal would be the last kind and motherly thing she would ever do for me.

  I threw it in the trash.

  Now Zakos is prepping me for the procedure. He’s filled a syringe with some kind of anesthetic, explaining that this time he will render me unconscious before the procedure begins, which should give him greater precision over the neurological mapping. Soon I will be put under, then I will join One in her memories, and then I will be dead.

  Zakos opens One’s pod, to make a couple of adjustments before the procedure begins. I think of One and all the Greeters in their pods.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask.

  “Excuse me?” He’s absorbed in his preparations.

  “What you did to all the Greeters, keeping them alive, raking their brains for intel all those years.”