Chapter 6: Secrets“WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” Cadence sounds faint.
I clamp my fingers around my elbows and flatten my back against the wall.
“Oh,” she says in quite a different tone. “Oh, no, it’s okay. You’re okay. It’s gonna be okay.”
I stare at a jagged crack in the paint and try not to see what’s left of Bell at my feet. Suzie.
No. It can’t have been real; this isn’t Suzie, but Bell. A declining worker, old and worn and probably senile. I try not to think about her abbreviated ID. Another discontinued, defective only. Is that why she was killed?
“I don’t know what you did just now,” Cadence says. “But all this stuff has been coming back to me—flashes of memories from before. It’s incredible. You’re never gonna believe—”
“I didn’t mean to.” I tuck my hands out of sight. “I know I shoul
