Undiscovered

  “A second member might be useful,” Klo said thoughtfully, gesturing crudely to his crotch.

  “Ugh.” Xaria scowled, letting out a grunt as she stood up. “I don’t know why I hang out with you guys. You’re so disgusting.” She picked up her tray and took off in a huff. “I’ll see you back in class.”

  I was somewhat grateful for her departure. At least I had space to move my arms now. I looked to Klo. “What about you? Are you in?”

  He popped the last quarter of his burger into his mouth and chomped ferociously on it. “Sorry. Count me out this time. Rustin’s right. If they put it that far away from everything else, it’s probably dangerous.”

  I shrugged and took a bite of my vegetables. “Fine. But I’m going. Right after school lets out.”

  Rustin eyed me warily. “Jeez, do you have a death wish or something? Or do you just really need to get glitched?”

  4: Girl

  I walked for nearly a half an hour through nothing but barren desert landscape before I came to the first security checkpoint. It was a VersaScreen. You don’t see many of these in the Residential Sector of the compound where we live and go to school. Except the one behind the Owner’s Estate so Dr. Alixter doesn’t have to look at the ugly hangars of the Transportation Sector from his bedroom window. Most of the screens I’d encountered were those that surrounded the compound perimeter.

  Any layperson probably would have run right into it, leaving a painful welt on their forehead. The synthetic glass is thicker and stronger than most natural metals and can project any holographic illusion you want. This one was programmed to resemble more of the same sparse empty field I’d been walking in, as though it went on for miles and miles.

  SynthoGlass is a highly unforgiving substance that feels like a sledgehammer if you crunch into it. Something I learned in my younger years of exploration.

  Now I knew the trick to spotting the screens. If you look up at the right angle, you can just spot the rounded top as it curves to complete the illusion. And every one hundred feet there’s a square shape located about shoulder-level that looks like fogged-up glass. That’s where the fingerprint scanner is.

  I secured the ultrathin NanoStrip with my mother’s fingerprint stored in it against my fingertip, feeling a tingle as it fused to my skin like a suction cup, and held it up to the scanner. A green light illuminated and a small screen flashed the words Secondary retina scan required.

  Annoyed, I dug a small case out of my pocket, removing a second NanoStrip. This one I’d fashioned into the shape of a domed disc resembling a DigiLens. I spit into it, getting it wet, then, blinking to moisten my eyes, I pried my lid open and placed the strip against my eyeball. It stuck and I blinked it into place, feeling my eyes water.

  It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but it worked.

  Cringing at the sting, I looked into the scanner and watched the small red laser flash across my eye. The panel illuminated green again, and a doorway appeared in the glass, outlined in electric blue. I stepped through, watching the screen seal closed behind me.

  As soon as I was on the other side, I tore the strip from my eye and returned it to the case in my pocket.

  I checked the diagram of the compound on my DigiSlate. Dr. Rio’s dot hadn’t moved yet, which made me think he was in some kind of laboratory, as opposed to just wandering around the desert. I had to disable my own tracker in my slate to avoid detection, so I had no idea how close I was to the destination. But my calculations told me it wasn’t far now.

  I kept walking, keeping my eyes peeled for security droids and patrolling HoverCams. They were normally pretty silent, but if you listened carefully enough, you could hear their faint buzzing sound cutting through the air before you saw them—or, more important, before they saw you. But something told me that the usual security protocols didn’t exist out here. Which eased my mind slightly and, at the same time, terrified me.

  Panting in the desert heat, I reached the top of a large hill and dropped to my belly when I saw what was on the other side. It took my brain a moment to process the large structure standing fifty feet in front of me. It looked so out of place on the Diotech compound. VersaScreens made of synthetically engineered glass, roving robotic droids that hovered six feet above the earth, those were things I was used to. Things I could handle.

  But this…

  This was a wall.

  A plain cement wall that rose ten feet in the air.

  At first I thought it might be another screen. But when I threw a small pebble at it, it made a low thunk sound, not the usual high plink that would have indicated SynthoGlass.

  And if the wall weren’t spastic enough, just beyond the top of it, I could make out the roof of what looked to be a simple one-story, cottage-style house.

  Confused, I scanned the length of the concrete barrier, noticing an unpatrolled solid metal gate on the east side, leading to a long road that disappeared over another hill. I could make out an additional identity scanner on the wall next to the gate, but my instinct was telling me not to use it.

  No doubt my mother’s ID was already showing up on someone’s slate somewhere, alerting them to her presence in this sector. But it was a big sector; she could be anywhere. This wall only enclosed a small area, about three thousand square feet. On the off chance she was not supposed to be here, I didn’t need anyone pinpointing my exact location.

  Which meant there was only one way in.

  The concrete took off layers of skin from several parts of my body, favoring my knees and palms. I felt ridiculous. After everything I’d done to get here. After every forbidden device I’d invented, every system I’d hacked, and every fingerprint I’d lifted, I was climbing a glitching wall.

  The idea felt so old-fashioned and archaic, I would have laughed had I not been trying to keep my intrusion quiet.

  But eventually, after much effort, I made it to the other side. And if I had known what was waiting for me, I would have gotten there much sooner.

  I would have run.

  I would have leaped over that wall in a single bound.

  I would have found a way to fly.

  To say it was a girl would be like saying the earth orbited around a lightbulb and the Milky Way was nothing but a tangled string of Christmas lights.

  She was hiding behind a pillar of a white wraparound porch, her face barely visible. But when she braved a glance in my direction and our eyes met, I swear the planet tilted on its axis.

  It wasn’t just her eyes—a vibrant, sparkling shade of purple. It wasn’t just her skin—hands down the most beautiful, flawless maple-colored skin I’d ever seen. It was the way the air seemed to bend around her, the ground seemed to slope toward her, as though she created her own gravity.

  Like the universe itself was pointing a giant flashing arrow at this exquisite girl locked away behind a wall.

  A real wall.

  It was something out of a fairy tale.

  A very deranged, glitched-up fairy tale.

  The kind of fairy tale that only a place like Diotech could write.

  She was dressed in gray. An uninspiring shirt/pants combination that reminded me of pajamas.

  But her face.

  Holy flux, her face.

  She looked like she was pulled straight from an advertisement on one of the DigiBoards you see alongside the highway, a few miles away from the compound. She was more breathtaking than even the computer-generated models gracing the covers of the beauty feeds that the girls at school pored over on their slates every morning.

  I took a step toward her, my whole body entranced. I opened my mouth to speak, unsure if words would come out. A safer bet would have been indecipherable, nonsensical babble.

  But luck and syllables were on my side that day, and I managed to form a full thought. A coherent question.

  “Who are you?”

  Her spellbindingly perfect pink lips parted and, in a stilted, almost robotic voice, she answered, “My name is Seraphina.
”

  Seraphina.

  The name echoed for eternity in my mind. Like a shooting star caught in a jar.

  I suddenly knew how Galileo felt when he discovered that the Earth rotated around the sun, how Newton felt when he discovered gravity, and how Handler felt when he discovered the first signs of life in the Andromeda galaxy three years ago.

  I knew, without another word spoken, without another step taken, without another breath exhaled, that what I had stumbled upon would change everything.

  5: Promises

  The girl scooted closer to me. She smelled amazing. Like flowers dipped in honey. We’d been sitting on the lawn in front of the house for the past half hour, and every few minutes she’d move a few inches toward me. But she was still too far away.

  I had the sinking feeling that no matter how close she got, she would always be too far away.

  I found it funny that earlier the same day, I had tried so desperately to distance myself from Xaria, and now I was drowning in my need to get closer to this mysterious girl.

  Klo and Rustin always thought I was crazy. Crazy for not responding to Xaria’s obvious interest in me. Insane for not returning her advances.

  “There’s only, what, a hundred kids on this compound?” Klo reminded me last week, “Ten of which are actually our age. And only two of those ten are of the female variety. You don’t exactly have the luxury of being picky, now do you?”

  I knew he was right. I didn’t have the luxury of being picky. But girls had just never appealed to me. Or rather, the two girls my age that lived on this compound had never appealed to me.

  But they were not her.

  They were not Seraphina.

  “How old are you?” I asked her, picking at a blade of grass so I would have something to do with my hands.

  “Sixteen,” she answered immediately. Her voice was so mechanical. So stiff. For a moment, I worried that she was actually just another droid. A very advanced droid. But I ruled it out solely based on the way she made me feel. The way she created a thunderstorm in my chest just by being near me.

  The way I felt like nothing in my life mattered anymore.

  There was no way a Diotech-built robot could do that.

  She had to be human.

  Whether or not she was real was another story.

  I had already convinced myself that I was dreaming. That any minute I would wake up in my lonely apartment, faced with another boring monotonous day of life in this prison.

  “How come you’re not in school?” I asked her. If she was sixteen, she should have been in our classroom. The Diotech school was divided into three groups: primary, secondary, and tertiary. The primary school was for the youngest kids: three to seven, after they graduated from the compound day care. The secondary school taught the kids aged eight to twelve and the tertiary school was home to us crazy teenagers. After you turned eighteen, you were “encouraged” to leave the compound (which was code for “kicked out”). Unless, of course, you showed significant promise as a scientist, in which case, you’d probably be recruited into one of the advanced training programs. I had no intention of showing significant promise.

  She tilted her head in curiosity at me. “School?” she repeated like she’d never heard the word before. And then she did the oddest thing. Her eyes blinked rapidly as if she were a high-speed DigiCam snapping a thousand photos a second.

  “School,” she recited. “An institution for educating children. A large group of fish or sea mammals.”

  I burst out laughing. But the laughter was quickly choked down when I saw the mirthless expression on her face. She was not making a joke. She was being completely serious. A massive lump started to form in my throat.

  Who was this girl? I was beginning to think the answer was more complicated than I could ever handle.

  “Yes,” I replied warily. “That’s what a school is. Why aren’t you in it?”

  Her eyes got sort of glassy and she shook her head. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Never mind.” I decided to try another tactic. “What are you doing way out here?”

  Once again, her answer came without hesitation, making me feel as though I were asking my slate for a location on a map. “I live here. It is safe here. It’s not safe out there.”

  She pointed to the concrete wall I had scaled. And as she did, I caught sight of a strange mark on the inside of her left wrist. I reached out and caught her hand, pulling it toward me.

  She flinched in surprise, but didn’t pull away. Her skin was warm. Velvety. Perfect. Touching it shot tiny prickles of fire up my arm. It was a heat that felt familiar and foreign at the same time. And I instantly knew I would crave it long after I let go.

  Gently, I turned her palm over, revealing a thin black line etched into her skin, running below the crease of her wrist. It looked a lot like a tattoo. The kind people used to get with ink before they invented flash implants.

  When I glanced up, I saw that Seraphina wasn’t looking at her wrist, she was looking at me. She was studying me, like a scientist studies a pod of data.

  I brushed my fingertip slowly across the length of the mark, marveling at how amazing it felt to touch her. How forbidden it felt. Even though I didn’t know why.

  “What is this?” I asked, looking into her brilliant purple eyes. Something mesmerizing coursed between us. Words without letters. Music without sound.

  “It’s a scar,” she told me, gently easing her hand out of my grasp. Once again, she spoke in that confident, measured tone. “I’ve had it since I was a baby.”

  I knew it was a lie. No scar looked like that. But I didn’t care.

  She could lie to me or tell me the truth or tell me nothing at all and it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change how hopelessly I wanted to touch her again.

  “What is your name?”

  “Lyzender,” I told her.

  “Lyzender,” she repeated and the sound on her lips rendered me useless. “I like Lyzender.”

  I wanted so desperately to ask what she meant by that. Was she referring to the name itself or to me? But I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words in fear that her answer might crush me like a bug on the desert floor.

  So I simply replied with a similarly vague statement. “I like Seraphina.”

  Her lips twitched in what I swore was the hint of a smile, but it vanished quickly. “I did not choose this name.”

  My smile was big enough for the both of us. “I did not choose mine, either.”

  Something caught her eye then, and she was on her feet faster than I could process her movement. Her speed startled me. I was convinced I had imagined the blur around the edges of her frame.

  No one moves that fast.

  I pushed myself up and followed after her. She was standing by the edge of the small yard, crouching down to examine something along the base of the wall.

  I knelt down next to her, half afraid and half fascinated. My heart was pounding as I tried to track her line of sight. What was she staring at so intently? What was making her stand so perfectly still?

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Shhh.”

  “What is it?” I asked again, this time in a whisper.

  Carefully her hand stretched out. Her movement was an exact contrast to the smear she had left across my vision only moments ago. Now she was slow and controlled. Like the robotic arms they used for surgeries.

  I didn’t even realize my breathing had stopped.

  My eyes followed her fingertip until it landed gracefully atop the feathery white sphere of a dandelion seed stem. When her skin grazed the downy surface, she recoiled, like she’d been burned.

  “It’s…” she started to say, but it was as though the words failed her.

  “White?” I guessed lamely.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” I asked, looking between her and the weed.

  If anything they were rare. Diotech had managed to eradicate most weeds thanks to
the work done in the Agricultural Sector. And the grass planted around the compound was genetically engineered to repel weeds. But every once in a while, one slipped in.

  Like this one.

  “Beautiful,” she said again.

  “You’ve never seen a dandelion before?”

  Her head spun to me so fast, I was afraid she would get whiplash. “Dandelion.” She tried out the word, smiling at the way it felt on her lips.

  “Yes. Dandelion. It’s a weed.”

  “Weed,” she repeated, and I almost had to laugh at what was beginning to feel like a game. “A wild plant growing where it is not wanted.”

  I considered her definition. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  “Why isn’t it wanted?”

  I shrugged. “I guess because they get in the way of other plants.”

  “But it’s more beautiful than other plants.”

  Once again I looked from the small white globe to her. “It certainly is.”

  She reached out again, her fingertips grazing the top of the cottony head. This time, however, her touch was too strong. The sphere dissolved beneath her hand, half of the seeds fluttering to the ground like snow, the other half scattering into the wind.

  She gasped and watched the airborne fibers fly away. For a minute I thought she would cry, and I wanted so desperately to reach out and catch them for her. Scoop them into my hands and reassemble them onto the stem like a hopelessly tiny puzzle.

  But she didn’t cry.

  She didn’t show any emotion at all beyond the initial gasp.

  “It’s gone,” she said with a chilling detachment.

  I nodded. “They’re very fragile. I think people used to wish on them.”

  “Wish,” she echoed, and when she didn’t spout a definition ten seconds later, I knew she didn’t understand the word. I was starting to see a pattern.

  “Like this.” I scooped up what was left of the dandelion seeds and held them in my palm. “Now, think of something that you really want.”