The Forgotten Ones Read Online Free PDF Page A

not to remind him that he’s supposed to be giving me the silent treatment.
    He remembers. He doesn’t take my bait.
    The next day, though, when I find him in his usual spot in the corner again, his chin resting on his fist, I give it one more try.
    “There’s more of them out there, aren’t there?” I ask. “Dust isn’t the last Chimæra.”
    Rex glares at me. His eyes are dead and distant, black holes. Dust is a cat now, snoozing under the table.
    “Listen,” I say. He doesn’t even look at me. “Dust would kill you if I wanted him to. You know that, right? You’re still weak, and even if you weren’t, he’s more powerful than both of us put together.”
    “So have him kill me,” Rex says dully, still not meeting my gaze. It almost sounds like he means it.
    I can’t hide my surprise. “I can’t believe a trueborn would say that,” I say. The shock in my voice is genuine.
    Rex’s head snaps up and he looks me right in the eye, his brow furrowed in some combination of anger and shame. It was the right thing for me to say.
    I push it further. “To stop fighting—that would make you even more of a weakling than I am.”
    “I’ll never stop fighting,” he snaps. “I’ll see the Loric dead if it’s the last thing I do. But killing you, Adamus Sutekh—that’s going to be the first thing I take care of.”
    “Fine,” I say. “Kill me.”
    He knows he can’t. Not yet, at least. Because I have Dust.
    “I know my days are numbered anyway,” I tell Rex. “You’ll kill me eventually, or my father will, or some vatborn who doesn’t even know my name. But right now, I’m the one with the power. You try to leave and that cute little guy napping under the table will turn into a ten-ton gorilla and peel you like a banana.”
    Rex rolls his eyes, angrily hocks a giant wad of saliva onto the cement floor and goes back to staring at the ceiling. He knows I’m right.
    I push on, knowing that I’m making progress. “I need you too, Rex. There’s a reason you’re alive. It’s becauseI can use you. You have information. And information is what I want.”
    “I don’t know anything,” he spits out.
    “Tell me what I want to know,” I say, “and we’ll get out of here. There will be plenty of time for you to kill me once we’ve made it out of this wasteland. I won’t even stop you.”
    I can see him considering it. I hold my breath. If this doesn’t work, I really will kill him, I decide. When I can see he’s at his most vulnerable, I lean on him with one last question. “‘They.’ You said ‘they.’ Where are the rest of the Chimæra?”
    “I haven’t seen them,” he mutters. “But there are a bunch of them. At least ten. Maybe more. They came on a separate ship from the Garde—at least, that’s what I overheard some of the other officers saying.”
    Suddenly it all feels incredibly important. “You said they were experimenting on them,” I say, trying to keep the sense of urgency from creeping into my voice. “What kind of experiments?”
    I guess Rex doesn’t see the point in clamming up now that he’s said this much already, because this time he answers my question without hesitation. He sounds almost proud as he explains it. “They’re trying to figure out how Chimæras’ transformations work. Setrákus Ra thinks that if we can isolate the gene that gives them their abilities, we can duplicate the process with the vatborn.”
    The way he says “we” chills me. I’d forgotten what it was like to live among them, to believe that your own self-worth is bound up in the messed-up glory of a warlord who chased nine teenagers across a solar system just to make sure they were all good and dead.
    “Where are they?” I ask. “Tell me where they are, and we’ll go there together.”
    He looks shocked at my intensity, but he takes a deep breath. “They’re not here. Dust got separated from the rest of them somehow and they were keeping him here until someone could take him