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When the server room rematerializes around me, my heart pounds against my binary necklace. The image of Bash, hooked up to machines, stays etched in my mind like a picture burned onto the TV screen. There’s heaviness behind my eyes. I test out the words on my tongue. “He’s dying.” Does him dying have anything to do with his memory loss?

With mine?

My body begins to shake, my skin going cold.

I trace my hand over the spot where the faint puffy scar marks my wrist. When I piece back the conversation Bash and I had in the correct order, it makes more sense:

“I’m dying.”

“No, you’re not. We’re going to fix this.” Then I cut my arm to force my way into the closed-to-visitors ER wing. I ditched the wheelchair escort and found Bash’s room, where I crawled onto his bed and asked him, “How long?”

“Six months.”

“Then we’ll have to work faster.”

Six months. If he only had six months to live … How much of that sentence is left? Oh God. Thanksgiving decorations littered the hospital walls in the memory. November was five months ago. I shake my head, refusing to believe he only has one month left.

The piece of paper I found in my pocket swims through the fog in my brain. If I don’t figure out what my damn project is, someone will die, followed by thousands of people. Maybe I’m reading it all wrong. It’s not that someone will die. It’s that my project will save them. Maybe our project could somehow save Sebastian?

The lump in my throat expands and I swallow past it. I will not get upset, not yet, because if my hypothesis is true, then I had a plan to fix it once. I just need to figure out what the plan was so I can save the guy I’m falling for all over again.

Voices from outside the server-room door sound so foreign to me now, with this knowledge swirling inside me. He’s dying, but I don’t want him to go.

My head spins. Is this what I meant about not wanting to lose him during the memory of us kissing in his bed?

The server-room door wrenches open, and my pulse slams into my skull. I slink down, huddling as small as possible. If the Ethics Committee finds me in here, I’m as good as expelled.

Someone comes inside, sneakers squeaking, and when he turns partially, a crack in the shelves lets me see Brandon. He braces his hands against one of the shelves and drops his head to his chest. His elbows tremble and he sucks down desperate breaths.

My heart aches at the sight of him looking so broken.

A vibration buzzes from my phone, and my teeth snap together, startled. I’m in such a daze that fumbling for the betraying device to silence it becomes an enormous effort. But it’s too late. Brandon’s head perks up. He squints in the distance before taking tentative steps toward me, running his hand over the short stubble of his jaw.

There’s nowhere to hide, no way to run without alerting him. So I scramble to my feet and shuffle as far away from the SSD still planted in the computer as possible. Brandon’s eyes widen when he sees me, his mouth set in a thin, grave line. “Arden?” He frantically swipes at a stray tear sliding down his red-tinged cheeks. “You—you tricked us!”

I wince, momentarily caught off guard by the statement that’s so far out of the realm of what I thought he was going to ask: What are you doing down here? My voice cracks when I try to speak. “You guys needed to talk.”

“He stormed off.” A breath rattles from Brandon’s throat. “As soon as he realized I hadn’t invited him.”

Guilt ties a knot deep in my gut. “He wanted to talk.” I risk a step toward my brother’s ex. “He only left when he realized—”

“Why?” The force of Brandon’s question sends me stumbling backward a step. “Why did—Wait.” His eyes fly over the laptop propped in my arm. “Arden, if someone finds you down here—oh my God, we’re both going to be in hell.” He straightens, the urgency evident in his flexed muscles. “Come on, you have to get out of here.”

His panic jolts my own. I step toward him, mumbling a silent prayer under my breath that my SSD stays hidden. Stays connected. I shove my laptop into my messenger bag and follow after Brandon. “He still loves you,” I whisper.

Brandon pauses for a moment, the muscles in his back tightening, before he pushes open the door into the hallway. “He shouldn’t.”

Our footsteps mask the heavy breaths pumping in our lungs. We round the corner—

—and run smack into my mother.

She brushes herself off. “Arden? How did you get in down here?” Her face falls and her gaze shifts to Brandon and then back to me.

Cold panic sluices through my body. The illegal eye weighs heavy in my bag. My brain’s still stuck on Bash dying. “I—um.”

“I let her in,” Brandon says fast. “Her laptop wasn’t working and—”

“I thought you were just going to the bathroom!” There’s a hard set to Mom’s chin. She turns from Brandon to me. “You know we’re under very strict protocols right now with the security breaches going on.” Mom switches gears to me again. “Did you fill out a helpdesk ticket?”

I bite my lip. “Yes?” I can always create one later and backdate it.

Mom lets out an exasperated sigh. “Brandon, please go back to the IT room, where you’re supposed to be.”

Brandon ducks his head and scurries to the room he never should have left in the first place. The room he wouldn’t have left except I lured him away. My chest squeezes. Blood whooshes in my ears.

“Arden, really now.” She places both palms on her hips in the middle of the dank hallway. “You need at least a 3.75 GPA to get into this school. That means you need to be smart. And yet you continue to ditch class and deliberately disobey school rules.”

“Sorry,” I say, trying to brush past her. “I should get back to class.”

Mom lifts the strap of my cardigan. “Where were you last night?”

I cross my arms to stop my hands from shaking and give her my best Past Arden impression I can muster. After all, the best lies stem from the absolute truth. “I was hoping you wouldn’t remember.”

She leans toward me and sniffs my hair as if she might be able to detect the telltale scent of motel linens instead of shampoo. “What I remember is making a mistake when I grounded you for a month. Make that two.”

I cringe. Two months takes me straight through the end of the school year. But then I think back to what Sebastian said last night about being grounded: didn’t stop me just now. I could use a copy of his confidence. “Mom, I promise I’ll behave once I get my memories back, but—”

“About that.” Her expression draws tight. “The Ethics Committee thinks they might have isolated the source of the glitch. Arden—” Her jaw clenches. “According to the latest report, most of the activity related to archiving and restoring is coming from your account.”

“It’s not me.” The words fly from my lips, desperate, rushed. They sound defensive, and when I hold up my hands in what seems like surrender, my mom’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “I’m just trying to protect my account and stop the hacker, I swear.”

Mom crosses her arms, her frown deepening. “Arden, you’re the only hacker here and all you’re doing is making yourself seem incredibly suspicious. Stop trying to bypass the rules. Stop your little investigation right this minute.”

I’m already shaking my head, sweat gathering in the folds of my elbows. Hot tears press against the backs of my eyes. “I can’t. I won’t.”

Her nostrils flare. “You will. You need to start trusting the authorities. We have your best interest—” Her forehead wrinkles, cutting her eyebrows into sections instead of smooth arcs. Her mouth puckers like she tasted a really sour lemon. She presses one hand flat against the janitor’s door to steady herself.

“Mom? You okay?” When she doesn’t answer, I tug on her shoulder. She remains frozen with all her features set to horror. Panic amps in my gut.

The next period bell blares. My mom continues to impersonate a mannequin, void of any life except the subtle way she sways. I pull frantically on her sleeve, but she doesn’t even flinch. A full minute passes before she shakes her head and blinks at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“Mom?” My voice comes out panicky.

The arch of her brows softens. She smooths down her skirt and checks her watch. “Arden! What are you doing down here?”

My pulse pounds. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um.” She presses a hand to her forehead. “Sitting at my desk.”

I swallow hard. The lie bubbles on my lips, tasting vile. “You brought me down here. To talk to the Ethics Committee.” An uneasy knot lodges in my throat, a twinge in my chest. I have to look away from her for a second so she can’t see the guilt twisting my lips into a grimace. An itchy crinkle of remorse creeps down my spine. “And now you were escorting me to my next class.”

Mom presses the heel of her palm to her forehead. “Okay.” She nods as if to reassure herself. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I hesitate for a moment, biting my lip. But then she starts heading toward the exit. I let out a breath at dodging the detention and grounding bullet. There aren’t many benefits to someone messing with HiveMind and removing people’s memories, but I’ll take this unexpected one.

She escorts me all the way to my second-period class but doesn’t say a word the entire time. Instead, she’s busy firing off emails and texts and looking extremely worried. After she pops her head into the room to let my teacher know my tardiness is approved, she gives me a tight smile and heads in the opposite direction.

In my next class, I plop into the chair next to Zoey, and she gives me a cheery raising of her brows. After I open my laptop, I continue today’s theme of pretending to take notes during lessons and instead attempt to reconnect to my SSD drive to retrieve another memory. I can’t get the image of Bash on that hospital bed out of my head. I need more info, anything, about what might be wrong with him. But the device doesn’t register on my laptop anymore.

I slam my fist against my laptop in frustration. Two girls across the way giggle at me. I shrug an excuse while my stomach swirls. The Ethics Committee must have reduced the signal strength, making it impossible to connect directly to the server outside of physical range of it.

Fuck.

I need to see this report that my mom referenced. Yesterday’s report should be archived on the server by now because each day’s report is only downloaded the following day. I bypass the password to the locked Ethics Committee folder on the public file share drive thanks to the password-cracking script I wrote when I was thirteen.

Zoey shifts beside me, crossing her long legs and whispering, “What are you doing? Please tell me it involves sending dirty texts to Sebastian.”

“I think you sent more than enough of those on my behalf last night.”

A few heads swivel in my direction, but the squeak of a marker on the whiteboard indicates Mrs. Catalano is still scribbling notes and not catching me.

Since today’s report won’t be available until tomorrow, I pull up yesterday’s Ethics Committee report, and Zoey returns to her own laptop. I skim past the boring analysis and their security recommendations to the section where the affected accounts are listed. I let out an audible gasp. Every single student in the school is listed.

Every single person’s memory has been tampered with.

And every single memory removed involves Sebastian and me.

My body hums, eyes greedily drinking in every tag and title on the first page. If I went to my first-anniversary dinner two years ago, that means Bash and I have been together for three years. Seven months ago our project didn’t work. I have no idea what “schematic design for personality transfer” means, but I copy the words onto my forearm before anyone can catch me, just in case. It seems important.

Using the track pad, I start to greedily scroll down to read the rest of the entries. This document is over three hundred pages long. Except the scroll bar won’t budget. When I click on the document again, the screen freezes.

I bang my fist against my thigh to muffle the sound of my frustration. With the document frozen, I have no choice but to X out of my word processing software and restart it. After restarting the program, I try to click on the Ethics Committee report.

An error pops up: File not found.

“Fuck.” The word comes out so loud that every head turns toward me, including Mrs. Catalano. My temples pound. I thought I was getting answers, but that small glimpse of the memory-archiving activity only raises more questions.