Shattered Minds by Laura Lam

Author:Laura Lam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

TWENTY SEVEN

CARINA

The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

Raf has planned his next attack. It’s time to send the Viper back to the nest.

As the Trust prepare to return to the Long Beach silo, Carina locks herself in her room. There are two images left from Mark’s unexpected gift. Two sections of information she wants out of her head. If they’re gone, the Trust won’t need her any more, not really. She has nothing to contribute. Her neuroscience skills are out of date and her hands still shake sometimes, even now that the Zeal habit has been kicked, or at least temporarily suspended. Once they have what they need, she doesn’t have to look back.

Carina can fall. Fall back into Zeal, to her world of blood and death. She can forget this brief return to reality. There’s nothing here but a group of hackers who don’t trust her. Dax is the only one who truly interacts with her, and Carina sometimes feels he only thinks she’s an interesting case from a doctor’s point of view. The rest of them hang back, watching her like a feral dog with a rabid bite. How much do they know about her Zeal dreams? It makes her want to prove them right.

The urge to kill has not left her. It’s burrowed so deep that no amount of surgery or abstinence from Zeal will be able to take it away. She’s a killer, and has been for a long time.

Carina shuffles through the memories like ragged playing cards, trying to find the two jokers, those hidden wild cards that will set her free.

So many memories don’t seem like hers. Once she moved to San Francisco, she actively stopped herself from thinking of her life in Woodside. Life began when she returned to Sudice. After cordoning the memories off for so long, actively reaching for them is strange. Once, she climbed to the top of her school, looked down on the people walking to their brainloading Chairs within, and wondered what it’d be like to jump, spread her wings wide, and pretend she’d fly instead of sink like a stone.

Carina keeps searching through the memories, hunting for the key. None of the memories give her what she wants. Everything’s a jumble. The friendships she abandoned once Roz sunk her fingers into her brain. Brief blips of happiness in a childhood tainted by the acrid tang of fear. Standing up to receive the diploma for her PhD, knowing there was no one in the audience clapping for her. Learning she’d be going back to Sudice, unable to fully feel the import of what it meant to return to the place that had destroyed her.

A ping interrupts her. Dax is at the door. Carina comes out of her fuzzy, fractured memories. She opens the door and raises her dry eyes to his calm brown ones.

‘You coming?’ he asks, holding out his hand.

She stands unsteadily, reaches out and takes it.

As the Trust set up their gear in the silo in Long Beach, Raf dances a little jig in the middle of the room.

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