UNCHANGED (Unremembered #3) - Excerpt

BEFORE

The girl didn’t fight. She knew it was pointless. She watched the doctor prepare the needle, drawing up the Cv9 into the reservoir and inserting it directly into her vein. 

Of course, there were more modern ways to inject sedatives but he preferred the tactile feel of the needle. The small popping sound it made as it penetrated the skin. The pressure of manually compelling the drug into the blood stream.

He could trust his own fingers.

He couldn’t say the same for much else.  

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “This won’t hurt. And you won’t remember a thing.”

The serum worked fast. The dose was significant. As she drifted to sleep, she held one face in her mind. The face she longed to remember. And also longed to forget.

She would wake up chained. She would wake up changed.

She knew this.

The smile on her lips as her mind slipped into darkness was her last act of rebellion.

The doctor watched her vitals on a monitor. When she was fully under, he sent for the president.

The slender blond man entered the room ten minutes later, limping against a cane. It was a vast improvement over the mechanical chair that carried him only yesterday.

“She’s ready,” the doctor informed him.

The president walked unsteadily around the edge of the hovering metal slab which held the unconscious girl. Without uttering a word, he gazed down upon her. An ignorant bystander might even describe the look in his eyes as adoring, particularly as he reached down to brush a strand of golden brown hair from her face.

But the longer he watched her, the less innocuous his stare became. Hardening with each passing second. Until icy blue stones glared out from the sockets where his eyes had once been.

She had betrayed him for the last time. He would not make the same mistakes again.

“I have a Memory Coder standing by,” the doctor informed him. “I’ve ordered a full wipe to be initiated on your command.”

“No.” The president’s response was swift and stern.

The doctor was certain he had misunderstood. “No?”

“We’ve tried that before. Countless times. And it always leads us right back here.”

“But surely this time the Coders can—”

The president silenced him with a shaky raise of his hand. “She keeps her memories. All of them. Restore everything we have in the server bunker.”

“Everything?”

“Guilt is a powerful weapon. Her memories will be a constant reminder of her disloyalty. Every time she thinks of him, I want her to feel that betrayal. Tell the Coder we’re going to implement the new procedure.”

The doctor squirmed. “Sir, with all due respect, that procedure hasn’t been fully tested and—”

“That will be all.”

The doctor stood in stunned silence until he finally managed to utter an acknowledgement of the order.

The president returned his gaze to the girl, reaching out to gently stroke her silken cheek. Then, so the doctor couldn’t hear, he bent down and whispered in her ear. “This time you won’t be given the luxury of forgetting.”

***

Excerpt continues in 1: Updated

UNCHANGED is the final book in the Unremembered trilogy by Jessica Brody.

Available February 24, 2015 wherever books are sold. 

Published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books for Young Readers (an imprint of Macmillan Children's Publishing Group)