Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) by Lenore Appelhans Read Free Book Online Page B

responding to Julian when my soul wants only Neil. I close my eyes, and with all my strength I back away, breaking off the contact. The effect is like being thrown into a cold pool of water and all too quickly going numb. I want to reach for him again. But I don’t. I won’t.
    When I open my eyes, Julian is looking at me curiously, and his expression has softened. “No need to worry about your friends. The guardians of this place aren’t after them. They’ll simply extinguish the fire and pump in their doping gas, and no one in there will even remember it happened.”
    “Guardians? Doping gas?” I ask dumbly. I feel like a computer whose circuits have overloaded.
    “Unless you want to end up as charred as your chamber, I don’t have time to explain.” He reaches for me, but I step away from his grasp. I’m not letting him touch me again.
    “I see you’re fit.” He barks out a laugh. “Let’s go.”
    My only real choice is to follow Julian. Even if I could somehow get back into my hive, my memory chamber is ruined. And I have no idea how to navigate the outside on my own. “You really know where Neil is?” I ask him, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.
    “Yes.”
    “Then lead the way.”
    His lips twist into a satisfied smirk. Not his best look. “Stay close behind me, and let me know when you start to feel woozy. We’ll stop and find a place for you to plug in.”
    He takes off running the corridor at a brisk pace, and I run after him, my bare feet slapping on the polished pathway. I make sure to leave a few strides between us.
    Pushing down my fear and confusion, I register the grand scale of our surroundings for the first time. On either side of us are seemingly never-ending rows of identical hives. Each individual hive is shaped like a traditionalEnglish skep, the kind beekeepers used to weave from straw to house their bee colonies. Taken together, the hives look like mountains of neatly arranged plastic eggs pressed up against one another, half buried. The ceiling, if there is one, is high enough that I can’t see it. Just as inside the hive, every surface, including the pathway beneath us, is a blinding, pristine white. If anything, it’s even brighter out here—so bright that everything blurs around the edges. I’m struck by the utterly eerie foreignness of it all. I almost feel like I’m a lab rat in some futuristic sci-fi maze.
    It’s strange to run in the afterlife. Because I breathe only out of habit and not out of necessity, I don’t have to worry about what lying around so much has done to my conditioning. It’s liberating. Like the first turn on the track, when you still feel invincible.
    “What did you mean when you said I should tell you when I feel woozy?” I call out to Julian.
    He slows enough so we can run side by side. “You’re an addict. And you don’t want to go cold turkey with this drug. We will have to wean you off it little by little. Put your hacking skills to good use.”
    So we are being drugged. That explains why we’re all so lethargic. “Who is drugging us? And why?” Though I’m less than thrilled it’s Julian, it’s nice to finally be around someone who might have some answers about this place. He must have some good connections if he knows so much.
    Julian shoots me a sidelong glance as if contemplating how much he should tell me. “It’s a long story, and weshouldn’t be talking out in the open like this. We don’t want to attract unwanted attention.”
    As if to prove his point, a low buzzing sound comes up behind us, rapidly getting louder, like a plane coming in for a landing. Julian shoves me into the V-shaped recess between two hives. He clamps his hand over my mouth and whispers into my ear. “Scanner drone.”
    I wrestle away from his hand but stay in the shadows with him. I’m grateful for his protection, but he still has a long way to go before he’ll have my trust. We stand there as a bee roughly the size of my head