CHAPTER THREE

Sitting alone in his room, Chase felt like the walls were closing in on him. After locking him in the house, Parker had once again offered to play the same dumb piloting game with him, and then stalked away when Chase turned him down. It was starting to infuriate Chase that Parker treated him like a funny houseguest and not someone with a major problem.

He reached back and tore the bandage from his head. Unable to see his wound, he pulled aside the hair that fell over it and gingerly touched the area at the base of his skull. The doctor’s healing gel had done its job—the wound was already covered in a layer of smooth, tender skin.

Whatever had happened to Chase, whoever had given him this injury, the biggest question bothering him was how he had gotten to this place. Parker said nobody knew, but he could have been lying. Clearly he had no problem with dishonesty, since he’d lied to Chase about living alone.

The house was a frosted prison, surrounded by a forest of monsters. The doctor had deceived him. Mina, whoever she was, was a weirdo who’d barely spoken to him. And Parker was, well, Parker. There had to be a way to contact the outside world from this house. Even if he couldn’t get out, he could try to look for help from someone.

Chase slipped out of his room and down the hall. He returned to the foyer, where a second hallway branched off, but this hall only lead to an empty dining room. Hadn’t Parker said something about there being a downstairs?

When Chase walked back from the dining room, he noticed a closed door that he hadn’t seen the first time. It opened onto a flight of stairs leading down.

“Hello?” He stood at the top of the stairs for a moment and descended, taking light steps. Would he be in trouble if someone caught him coming down here?

Another long hallway stretched out before Chase at the bottom of the stairs. The first door he came to was locked, as was the one after that. He didn’t expect much from the third door he tried, but it swung open on a small room that held little more than a trio of video monitors and a keyboard. There were some other items in the room that he barely glanced at, wall panels and storage cabinets. He went straight to the monitors.

Maybe Parker was on to something with his semantic memory talk, because Chase navigated easily enough through the video screens, and the keyboard felt natural under his hands. He found his way to a messaging console and started looking for emergency contacts. A notification blinking on the side of the screen caught his eye: Transmission pending.

Chase clicked on the notification, and a message popped onto the screen.

Code Maartens—immediate response required

Unknown Earthan boy, approx. 13 years, appeared within compound yesterday with blaster wound to back of head and damaged ID marker. Bypassed all level 1 and 2 defenses by no explicable means (see attached video); destruction countermeasure initiated but deactivated by P. Current status: Silvestri examining marker, boy being held pending your instruction. Threat level: uncertain.

Pending whose instruction? Who had written this message, and why were they calling him a threat? He had to scan the words destruction countermeasure several times before their meaning sank in. The compound’s defenses would have annihilated him if this P, undoubtedly Parker, hadn’t stepped in.

With a growing sense of dread, Chase opened the attachment. A video window opened, playing a recording that must have come from a security camera outside the house. It showed the pale lawn outside the compound, with the grass forest waving gently in the background.

A prone body suddenly appeared on the lawn. Was that him? How had he just shown up like that? He winced as he watched himself sit up and curl over in pain. There was a flash of black in the background, and then another: the Zinnjerha.

Parker raced across the lawn, sliding to a stop beside him, throwing his arms in large gestures. The black shapes of the bounding Zinnjerha grew in number, darkening the back of the screen. Chase saw himself speaking and then collapsing in front of Parker. After a moment of looking around in a panic and shouting, Parker hooked his hands under Chase’s arms and dragged him back toward the house.

When the video clip ended, the screen went gray. Chase leaned back in the chair. So Parker had saved him. For a moment he was impressed, but he reminded himself that in bringing Chase inside, Parker had merely been protecting himself and his home.

“What are you doing here?”

Chase jumped out of the chair, heart thumping. Mina stood in the doorway with a sober and somehow menacing expression. “Who are you trying to contact?” she asked.

“What? No one, I was just—”

She took a step toward him. “Who sent you? What are you doing here?”

“No one.” Chase’s voice shook as if he’d been caught stealing. “I wanted to see the video. I’m trying to figure out what happened to me.”

She advanced another step, backing Chase into a corner. “I won’t hurt you if you come with me.” Her hand fell on his shoulder like an iron weight.

“Let me go!” Chase twisted out from under her hand and tried to dart past, but she sidestepped, blocking him. His panic skyrocketed and his legs felt so shaky, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to run anyway.

“What’s going on?” Parker appeared in the doorway, looking confused.

“Go back to your room, Parker,” said Mina. Still blocking Chase, she opened a cabinet on the wall, from which she pulled out two silver rings. She slid one on her finger and held the other out to him. “Put this on.”

“No!” Parker rushed into the room and snatched the ring from her palm. “You can’t take him away! I won’t let you.”

“He’s becoming a threat. I’m removing him from the house.”

“I wasn’t doing anything!” insisted Chase.

“You were spying on our network and interfering with our communications.” Mina took another ring from the cabinet. “Put this on and come with me.”

Parker grabbed her wrist. “Stand down, Mina. Stand down, you stupid—”

“Where are you taking me?” Chase interrupted.

“To Dr. Silvestri.”

Chase paused as a spark of hope ignited inside him. While he still didn’t know how much he trusted Dr. Silvestri, he did have Chase’s microchip, and possibly more answers for him by now. “Okay,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’ll go with you.”

“I’m coming too,” said Parker, slipping the ring he’d taken onto his finger.

“You’re staying here.” Mina’s tone was flat and final.

“No!” Parker shoved her shoulder as she turned to the terminal on the desk, but she barely moved. “You can’t leave me out of this.”

“It’s safer if you stay here.” She entered something on the terminal, and then glanced at him. “Do I need to lock you in your room?”

Two bright red spots had risen in Parker’s cheeks. “I hate you,” he spat.

Mina kept her eyes on the monitors. “Let’s go, Chase. Stand on one of those.” She indicated a trio of metal disks stamped into the floor.

Stepping onto the nearest circle, Chase avoided looking at Parker, embarrassed by his outburst. He still didn’t understand how Mina could act like his guardian but not be his sister. Was she some kind of teenage bodyguard? But he was too excited about the prospect of seeing Dr. Silvestri to waste any time asking about her. “How are we getting there?”

“Just stand still,” said Mina. She entered something onto a panel on the wall and held her hand against it for a moment.

“What’s—” Chase began to ask, and then the entire room faded out.

A horrible, icy sensation rushed over Chase, as if every nerve in his body had gone dead. He would have shouted had he not been utterly paralyzed. A moment later, the numb feeling passed and he buckled to one knee with a cry. A pinging sound came from the ground below him. He opened his eyes to see that his ring had slipped off and fallen to the asphalt.

They were standing on a city street, in what looked like an abandoned warehouse district. Mina looked down at him. “Are you okay?”

“That felt awful! What was that?” He picked up the ring and rubbed his arms, his skin still crawling.

Mina arched an eyebrow as she helped him to his feet. “Teleportation. It’s not supposed to feel like anything.”

“You didn’t feel it?”

“Of course not.”

As Chase looked around, adjusting to the new location, he realized that this must have been how he’d appeared so suddenly on Parker’s lawn—he’d teleported. Tall, dilapidated buildings surrounded them, and there were no other people or vehicles anywhere in sight. The sky overhead had faded to a grayish violet color, the white disk of one sun lingering near the horizon.

“Where are we? I thought you said we were going to the doctor’s,” he said, trying to hand the teleport ring back to Mina.

“No, keep the ring on, we might need to leave quickly.” Mina glanced around. “The doctor has an anti-inport device installed at his home. No one leaves their home open for anybody to teleport into without a return ring. It’s the same as leaving your doors unlocked.”

“He lives around here?” The desolate neighborhood didn’t look like the kind of place where anyone would live.

“He has an apartment above his lab.” Mina rushed down the street, glancing at the tops of the buildings like she was looking for snipers.

“Is this place dangerous?”

“This is an abandoned district. There’s no perimeter fence here. Normally when the sun is setting, the Zinnjerha are no danger because they go underground at night. But they’ve been acting against their nature for the past two weeks. Keep moving.”

After a minute they stopped in front of the boarded-up window of a dilapidated building. Like many of the others, it was decorated with a patchy mosaic of rust and spray-painted symbols.

“Dr. Silvestri, will you let us up?” Mina asked the solid wall. Chase gave her a dubious look, but moments later a segment of wall swung inward like a door. Ahead of them was a dark stairway leading up. The air inside had a sharp chemical tang.

Dr. Silvestri appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs. “Mina, what’s wrong?”

“I had to remove him from the compound.” She spoke confidently, addressing the doctor like an equal. “He was becoming a threat.”

“I wasn’t threatening anything!” Chase protested.

Dr. Silvestri came down and met them midway on the landing. “Let’s go into my lab. Hi, Chase.” He opened a door on the side of the staircase, giving Chase a squeeze on the shoulder, but his worried smile made Chase’s stomach plummet. It didn’t look like he had good news.

“David, is everything okay?” came a woman’s voice from the apartment.

“It’s fine, Anna,” he called back up the stairs, closing the door gently behind them. Track lights flickered on overhead.

His lab was a long, narrow room lined with high tables. Strange machines filled the space, some whirring, others silent and covered in plastic sheets. A scattering of medical devices and flat metal screens covered the tables.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Chase blurted out before Mina could say anything. “I was just trying to…” He realized he couldn’t say, trying to look for a way to escape the house. “I found the video of how I showed up outside.”

Dr. Silvestri nodded in a distracted way. “I don’t think you need to worry, Mina. I don’t think he’s a threat to us.” He leaned against a table and rubbed his forehead, frowning.

“What is it?” she asked.

“His microchip.”

The word brought Chase a mix of excitement and fear. “Did you get more information? Do you know where I’m from?”

The doctor kept speaking directly to Mina as if Chase weren’t even in the room. “The data on it is fairly corrupt, and also highly encoded, so I’m having trouble retrieving any information. But the technology…” He paused and glanced over, like he didn’t want to say this in front of Chase.

“What is it?” asked Mina in a low voice.

“It’s extremely similar to Parker’s,” the doctor told her quietly. “The design is … I’m almost certain it’s Asa’s work.”

A connection to Asa? Maybe this was why he’d shown up at the compound. Chase’s mind immediately began twisting and testing the name, trying to find any memories to fit it into, inventing an entire history with a stranger named Asa Kaplan. It was impossible to imagine, but so was everything else with a blank memory.

Mina hadn’t responded, fixing the doctor with her implacable stare, although it didn’t seem to bother him as much as it did Chase.

“Have you been able to contact Asa yet, to tell him what’s happened?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’ve queued up a message, but he’s out of range this week—I’m not expecting him to be reachable for two more days.”

Dr. Silvestri crossed his arms. “Do you think … could he have another?”

“No. Not that I’m aware of.”

“Another what?” asked Chase.

The doctor barely spared him a glance. “You’ll have to hold on to him at the compound until we reach Asa. I don’t know what this all means, but with his injury, I have a bad feeling that this is only the beginning. And we still don’t know how he got inside the compound.”

“I teleported, right?” said Chase. “That’s the only way I could just show up outside like that.”

Dr. Silvestri shook his head. “That’s impossible. The entire perimeter is ringed with scramblers.”

“With what?”

“Anti-inport devices. That compound is locked down like a fortress. For you to just turn up like that—it’s very strange. And very worrying.”

“Why?” asked Chase.

Dr. Silvestri pushed his glasses up on his nose and glanced at Mina. “Because Asa Kaplan has a lot of enemies.”

A million possibilities opened up in Chase’s mind, none of them good. All of them blocked by his missing memory. The freshly healed wound on the back of his head prickled, and he rubbed it. Had that been the work of Asa Kaplan’s enemies?

Mina was watching him with her creepy analytic stare. “I’ll take him back to the compound and keep him under close surveillance for now.”

“Give him the same level of protection you give to Parker.”

Mina nodded. “I’ll send the message to Asa as soon as I see his signal come back in range.”

Dr. Silvestri drew a deep breath and turned toward his work table. “I’ll keep working on the chip. I’ve also got a tissue sample I took from Chase’s wound. I’ll see if I can find any matches on his DNA. Be safe.”

“Be safe,” said Mina, taking a step away from the doctor. Chase reached for the door, but she stopped him. “No, we can leave from here. Just hold still.”

From the corner of his eye, Chase saw her touch the ring on her finger. This time he squeezed his eyes shut as the horrid sensation rushed over him, numbing his entire body. Instinctively he jerked backward from the discomfort.

Before he opened his eyes again, he knew something had gone wrong. A strong breeze blew on his face, and he heard a whistling, rustling sound all around him. Chase looked out into the darkening twilight, and his heart began to race. He was standing in the middle of a grass jungle, outside an electrified dome.

And he was alone.