“Your aunt is choosing brain damage by her non-compliance.”

“Nobody chooses brain damage.” I clench fistfuls of sheet and pain fires through my back. “That creepy little girl’s doing this to her from the tank?”

“Don’t speak about the Proxy like that.” She glares at me. “Her whole life is a sacrifice.”

“You have to do something. Didn’t you say you were the caretaker? Can’t you turn it off? Stop them.”

“Child, I have no authority to do anything of the sort and nor is it possible.” She taps the side of the bed and the head begins to rise with a hydraulic whirr. “Besides which, we have twenty-three Wardens here right now, going through amplification before district sweeps.”

I press back into the mattress as I’m brought upright, my skin crawling with the clearer view of the bodies in the beds all around me. I’m the only one awake. The only one not wearing a headset. Wardens, the telepaths that sweep through towns identifying active Sparks and Shields. I wonder if the woman who came to the Gallaghers’ is here. My gaze shifts to the monitors and the tubes that lead to the central pipe that runs along the ceiling. Black glass. “I can’t feel their signals.”

“Most people don’t feel signals at all,” she says with a huff. “The Symbiosis acts as a buffer.”

“It comes through the headsets?”

“The Symbiosis conducts the Proxy’s signal from the isolation tank to the ReProg room and to here.”

“I thought I was in recovery.”

“You are.” She picks up a small silver disc, like the one Tesla used in the operating room to paralyse me. I stiffen as she points it at my neck but all it does is beep and she gives a satisfied nod before returning it to her pocket. “A room of amplified signals increases your rate of recovery. They want you prepped for ReProg, now.”

“Now?” I baulk, my mind reeling. That’s what she’s doing. Taking me to ReProg. Now. “I can’t. I need to talk to Tesla first, it’s important.”

“He can’t leave the hearing; that’s why he sent me.” Her expression grows troubled, conflict in her eyes as she moves to the foot of the bed and slowly rolls me out into the aisle. “He wants me to tell you …”

“Tell me what?” I say, half choked.

She hesitates and drops her voice to a whisper. “He says you must keep your aunt’s secret.”

REPROG

Benjamin and Davis wait beyond the sliding door. Benjamin is cool and detached, though I read tension in his clamped jaw. Davis doesn’t hide his loathing. My escorts to ReProg. I should take it as a compliment they think I’m capable of putting up a fight. Benjamin pushes my bed down the long concrete corridor, Davis in front. Felicity walks beside me, clasping the small silver disc. A deterrent – fight and she’ll zap me. The ceiling rises high above, metal vents, white lights. Narrow, windowless. The bed wheels sing on the polished floor. Felicity doesn’t look at me or speak. My heart hammers, but I’m cold like there’s no blood in my body. I can’t control my trembling or focus on a single coherent thought.

What’s my defence? My plan? Please let Aiden be far away. Tesla’s warning. Miriam’s secret. He must know. There is no other secret. I’m her daughter, she’s my mother. Miriam’s my mother! She’s Aiden’s mother! How do I keep it from a freaking super telepath when it’s right there, throbbing in the forefront of my mind?

Physical memory.

It has to be physical, Kinetic Memory – Transfer and Harvest. She can’t just plunder my thoughts or read what I’m thinking, only things that I’ve done, places I’ve been – moments with strong emotional and physiological connections. She’ll see me Sparking at Kitty’s touch, training in Miriam’s underground room, fighting Aiden on the Gallaghers’ estate, kissing Jamie beneath the willow tree.

Jamie.

Has he been in ReProg too? Is he hurt? Does he know I’ve ruined his chance at Deactivation – another thing to hate me for? At least Kitty must be home by now. Benjamin gave up his search for her at the 7-Eleven, in a hurry to get me to the compound. Would they have gone to the Gallaghers’ estate afterwards? Interrogated her there? The idea makes me nauseous.

Please don’t let this all be for nothing.

If I could just speak to Tesla, explain about the sample, beg him to test it …

There’s a blank metal door at a T-section at the end of the corridor. It’s one of four in the brushed concrete wall, each illuminated by a stark pool of light, the shadows between thickly dark.

“Stay calm,” Felicity says. “Or they will pacify you.”

Before I can react the door swishes open. As I expect – as I fear – it’s the room with black glass walls, suspended chair and, like the operating room, a sloping floor and grated drain. ReProg.

As they wheel me in, the glass reflects our monochromatic procession. Benjamin and Davis in black. Felicity in white scrubs. My pale and stiffly propped body covered in a white sheet, my scraggly black crop making an erratic outline around my head. My eyes seem huge, cheekbones pronounced, lips bloodless. I look like a child. I look like a crone. My edges blur in the glass and I realise it’s my trembling and I curl my fists to quell it but can’t.

I brace, expecting a static storm like when Tesla and his team came to the house, but as Benjamin positions the bed beside the suspended chair nothing troubles the bandwidth. The only signals I sense are the three that came in with me. Unnerved, I have to force myself to exhale. The Executive must be behind the black glass opposite the chair. The observation room – I didn’t see it in Felicity’s memory but I knew through her focus and tension that it was there. I try to relax, open my senses for the sound of quiet conversation but there’s nothing.

Maybe they haven’t assembled yet. Maybe they’re still with Miriam. I no sooner form the thought than the black glass of the central wall transforms from a solid, mirror surface to liquid that drains away between thick clear panes. The process takes all of three or four seconds, leaving the glass pristine. Behind the central panel, five people stand on a metal walkway. Their signals hit me full force, a torrent. My head presses back into the inclined mattress and the muscles in my arms and legs spasm.

Again, it’s like watching a dozen televisions at the same time, with the volume at maximum. Images chase away images, fast and vivid – a sensory assault. Faces. So many faces. People struggling, fighting. Details get ugly, as though my mind zooms towards violence, breaking bones, flooding wounds, gunshots, flashing knives, then worse, glimpses of confronting intimacy, naked limbs, mouths, hands and hot skin.

Recoiling, I shake my head but one magnetic scene fills out.

In the memory, I’m standing in the ReProg room by the suspended chair, observing a young man strapped beneath tight bonds, dark hair plastered to his handsome but agonised face, sweat gleaming on his heaving chest as he strains against the bindings, moaning but trying not to moan. At first I think I’m Harvesting Felicity’s memory again – but I turn my head and find Counsellor Knox’s reflection looking back at me. This Robert is young, his face thinner, the cleft pronounced, no silver in his hair. I look back at the young man, growing more aware of my feelings, or lack of them; I’m unmoved by his agony. I’m simply waiting for him to break, confident it will happen soon. A cry of anguish erupts from the tortured young man. “Ich werde nicht töten!”

It shocks me out of the memory, back into the present and I shake myself, my throat hoarse and my ears ringing with the sound of my own voice. I shouted it? Ich werde nicht töten.

“I will not kill?” Counsellor Knox’s voice fills the room and I look up at him on the metal platform where he stands in the middle of the group. “Good God, is she Harvesting?” He glances to the left, where Tesla stands at the end. “Now that is an old memory. What an impressive reach.”