Eli clears his throat. “Come on, Evelyn. We should get started as quickly as we can.”
I follow him, though I keep glancing back at the photos until I get into the room. It too is purple with the wood wainscoting. The pictures in this room are all of flowers. Disappointment pricks at me. The answer to where I’ve seen that girl before had been just at the edge of my memory.
“Lay here.” Eli gestures to the bed. “I’ll be right back. I need to get some things. I hadn’t been expecting to do this.”
He starts to walk past me, but I place a hand on his arm as the question I should have asked first finally comes to mind. “How did you know we were here?”
“The nanite substrate.”
“Excuse me?”
“The nanite substrate. The green substance? It moves. I’m sure you noticed.” He lifts his eyebrows. “Mother has me studying it. I told you. And we’ve been trying to figure out what it is. We’ve figured out it has something to do with the nanites of the deceased bodies, but we’re not sure exactly how they went from”—he glances at me—“human bodies to that substance. We’ll figure it out eventually. Anyway, it sets off the alarms in the Sector. As you can imagine, Mother hated that the alarms were going off every time the stuff migrated.” He shrugs when Gavin scoffs. “So I rerouted them to send an alert to my slate. That included all the alarms for the Sector. Including when the sub docked, and the alarms for the Tube station. I knew the minute you came back.” He glances at Gavin. “You weren’t as secretive as you thought you were.”
“I wasn’t trying to be secretive. Just stay alive,” Gavin mutters.
“Anyway, as soon as I realized you were back and got over the initial shock of that,” he smiles at me, “I made sure I’d be able to get you into Sector Two and up here without setting off the other alarms. Then I went to find you and ensure you made it to safety without causing the uproar you caused before.”
“And the Enforcers? What about them?” Gavin asks. His arms are crossed over his chest.
“That, young man, is the exact reason we can’t be sitting here talking.” He focuses back on me. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Before we can ask any more questions, he rushes out the door and the four of us—Asher, Gavin, Evangeline, and I—sit there in an uncomfortable silence. Gavin is studying her. She’s studying me.
I nudge Gavin—hard—with my elbow and give him my “stop staring” look. He gives me a “what?” look in return. Evangeline grins at me.
I shift my gaze to my hands while Gavin sits next to me, still watching Evangeline while trying to look like he’s not. Asher walks around the room, picking up picture frames and putting them back down before moving on to the next one.
After a few minutes, he says, “So? Evangeline? How are you involved in all this?”
Before she can answer, Eli bursts through the door. “I’ve got everything here to help you.” He swallows and I see how nervous he is. “But there’s a problem.”
“What? What’s the problem? I thought you said you could fix this,” Gavin demands, his voice and movements panicky as he jumps from the bed.
“I can,” Eli says. “But she…” He focuses back on me. “You’ll have to be awake for the procedure. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the equipment I need to put you to sleep. I’m sorry,” he finishes weakly.
“Mother,” Mom says, and presses her hands to her mouth. “There’s nothing you can do?”
“I’m going to give her a sedative, but there’s no guarantee she’ll stay asleep during … everything.” He looks over at Gavin. “You need to keep her still. Can you do that? If not, I’ll have to tie her down. It’s bad enough that I have to gag her; I don’t want to do that, too.”
Gavin blanches. “Why does she need to be held down? What exactly are you going to do to her?” His voice has a hint of panic in it, which makes me feel a little panicky.
Eli sighs as if he really doesn’t want to spare the time telling us, but he says, “I’m re-injecting her with working nanites, or nanobots. They’ll go in and they’ll repair the bots that aren’t working and hopefully restore the parts of her neuro-network that have been destroyed to access those memories again—”
“Hopefully?” Gavin interrupts, disbelief tainting his voice. “You’ve said repeatedly you could fix her and we’re actually working with a hopefully?”
Eli glares at him. “I’ve never promised anything. I’ve promised to do the best I can, and I’m fairly confident this will work, but there’s never any guarantee. We’re working with human biology here, not machines.”
“Well, actually we are,” Asher says. “Aren’t nanobots tiny robots?”
“Yes.” Eli sounds exasperated. “But the main part we’re actually restoring is her neuronetwork inside her brain. So yes, we’re working with machines, but the machines are working on the biology. Now are we going to sit here discussing what we’re going to do or are we going to do it before Evie has another hallucination that could kill her?”
I finally pipe up. Ultimately I don’t really care what’s going to happen as long as I get my memories back. “Let’s get moving.”
Eli gives me a grim smile, then turns his attention to Gavin. “Can you hold her down? Or not?”
“I can.”
“Are you sure? I can’t—”
“I said I could do it,” Gavin says between clenched teeth.
“Me, too,” Asher says, swallowing hard.
Eli nods and turns back to me. “I’m going to give you a shot. Okay? It’s going to sting, but it should make you sleepy after that. It should … help.”
I’m about to nod when Asher says, “Uh … maybe we should hold her down for this? She kind of took out like six full-grown men at the hospital back home when they tried taking her blood.”
“What?” Gavin demands. “Really?”
Eli’s eyes grow wide, but there’s something in them that makes me think he’s happy to hear this. “There’s no need. It’s not a real needle. Just a pressure syringe. She won’t feel it.”
I look away anyway. I really don’t want to hurt the people in this room. But Eli was right. I don’t feel it. I don’t even know he’s done it, until he says, “Done.”
Eli disappears and comes back again with an armful of supplies. He lays them all out on the dresser next to the bed. It’s a handful of syringes that make my mouth dry. I recognize those syringes for some reason and they terrify me, but the shot he gave me already is masking it and I watch with an increasing amount of numbness as he lays out different machines, vials with a silvery liquid in them, and other things that I don’t recognize. Then he removes his jacket and rolls his sleeves up past his elbows, before turning to me with a piece of cloth all twisted together. “I’m sorry, Evelyn, but this has to go in your mouth. If anyone hears … anything, we’ll be in trouble. Okay?”
I know I should feel something. Panic. Fear. Anxiety. Something. But all I feel is an odd floating sensation, and so I do as he asks and open my mouth without even so much as a question.
He places the cloth in my mouth and ties it behind my head, then disappears from view again while the pungent smell of rubbing alcohol scents the air. When he returns, he peers down at me. “Scream all you want. Okay?” he says, and looks away.
My eyes widen. Something in his tone makes panic tingle in my veins for the first time.
I shake my head rapidly back and forth. But they all ignore it and it’s only moments before a sharp pain tears through me. My chest, lungs, shoulder, leg. They’re all on fire. I jerk, trying to scream, but the gag prevents it. There are voices in the background, but it’s hard to understand over the screaming inside my head.