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“Please, Riley.” I can’t let this happen again. I can’t, but there’s nothing I can do except obey her commands.
“What?”
“Please, don’t do it. I don’t want to forget.”
“I’m not going to,” she says quietly. Her eyes shift. Everything about her posture and her expression is wrong. She’s lying—I know she is.
“I can’t stop you,” I say as I tighten my grip. “You know I can’t, but I don’t want to forget. If I forget, I’ll forget everything—not just about my past but about how I feel about you, Riley. I don’t want to forget that.”
Her face tightens as if she’s fighting to keep words inside her. She presses her lips together tightly as she squeezes my hand.
“It’s not what you think.” Riley runs her thumb over the inside of my arm.
Now that I understand exactly what she’s doing—technologically placating me—the fear I feel changes to anger. I pull my hand away from her, immediately longing for the contact with her skin.
“I don’t want this!” I raise my voice, but I can’t move against her.
“Hush!” She glances at a blinking camera in the corner of the room. “I’m going to get the scanner set up. Once it’s in place, we’ll talk.”
“Talk?”
“I’m not going to perform the scan, Sten. I’m not going to take your memories away, I swear. I just want to talk to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s no audio monitoring in this room,” Riley says. “Just lie down and relax.”
Confused, but forced into action by her command, I get on the table and lie on my back. Riley starts to maneuver the scanner over my head and leans close to me. She speaks softly.
“The first Project Mindstorm trials used prisoners,” she tells me. “I wasn’t a part of it at that time. The original trials were dismal failures, and some believed it was because of the use of violent criminals. Their brain chemistry was different from other people’s. They didn’t react well to the treatments.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were completely uncontrollable,” Riley says. “They all had to be…voided.”
“Killed.”
“Yes.”
Is that why she’s brought me here? Am I to be destroyed?
“Are you going to kill me now?”
“God, Sten! No! Just let me finish.”
I interpret her words as a command and stay silent while she finishes setting up the equipment around my head. When she’s done, she leans in close and
lays her hand on the side of my head.
“I found it,” Riley says quietly.
“Found what?”
“The loyalty oath,” she says. “I found a document that had been signed by Galen Braggs. That type of sworn statement was reserved for those caught up in the early takeover of farming communities.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you aren’t who they told me you are.” Her eyes darken as she clenches her jaw.
