Exile (Keeper of the Lost Cities) Read Online Free PDF Page A

names she’d carefully memorized—the names the Council had forbidden her to know.
    “Show me Connor, Kate, and Natalie Freeman,” she whispered, opening her eyes as the Spyball flashed and three figures came into focus in the center of the orb.
    Her mom looked thinner, her sister looked taller, and there were streaks of gray in her dad’s hair that Sophie didn’t remember him having—but it was them . Sitting around a dinner table in some faraway part of the world, eating fettuccini like the perfect happy family. With no idea she even existed.
    It was what she’d wanted for them—what she’d begged for. To be erased, so they wouldn’t have to miss her in their new lives. But it wasn’t easy being forgotten. Especially since she couldn’t forget them.
    She watched until her eyes blurred with tears. Then she smeared them away and whispered, “Show me Mr. Forkle.”
    The Spyball turned black and flashed the word she was getting very tired of:
    UNKNOWN .
    Her grip tightened on the sphere, trying to squeeze it into submission. She knew it wasn’t his real name, but part of her kept hoping the Spyball would somehow figure out his real identity. He was her only link to the Black Swan. The one who’d rescued her and Dex when they’d been taken. The one who’d triggered all of her new abilities. He’d even posed as her next-door neighbor when she lived with her human family, and was probably the one who planted the secrets in her head.
    He had all the answers she needed.
    But he didn’t want to be found.
    She wrapped the Spyball back in the cloth and returned it to its hiding place. The drawer above it held a thick teal book, which she removed next, along with another silk bundle. She sank to the floor, leaning against the side of her desk as she unwrapped the bottle of moonlight. The pale glow made it just bright enough to see, without letting Sandor know she was awake.
    Her fingers traced the etched lines of the silver bird on the cover. A moonlark .
    Seeing it gave her chills every time.
    Alden had given her the memory log as a way to chronicleher dreams and keep track of any memories that weren’t hers. But since the kidnapping she’d been using it to conduct her own investigation into the Black Swan. She kept hoping they’d left clues in her memories that would tell her how to find them.
    The problem was, she had no idea how to access any of the secret information they’d planted. All the times she’d had “flashes,” there’d been something to spark the hidden memory—usually a note or gift the Black Swan had given her. Without anything to trigger the flashback, she was stuck wading through thirteen years of memories—and thanks to her photographic memory she had a lot of memories to sort through. But she’d been focusing on two incidents that felt like they had to be key.
    The first was when she was five. She’d woken up in the Emergency Room, and the doctors told her she’d fallen and hit her head and her neighbor had called 911. From that moment on she’d been able to read minds. She knew now that Mr. Forkle had triggered her telepathic abilities that day. What she didn’t know was why. Five was incredibly young to manifest a special ability, and the talent had made it much harder for her to blend in with humans. So why trigger it then? And why couldn’t she remember what happened?
    The second incident was when she was nine. Again she’d ended up in the hospital, this time for a severe allergic reaction. The human doctors never figured out what caused it, but a few months ago she’d found out the hard way that she wasdeathly allergic to limbium, a special compound that affected certain areas of the brain. She even had to wear a vial of an antidote Elwin had created in case she accidentally consumed any. Only elves knew how to make limbium, but she knew now that she’d had contact with at least one elf back then without realizing it—and the symptoms of both reactions had been the same.