The Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

hopelessly loved.
    I tried to stand in order to help him, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. Fortunately, even wounded Ritter was more than a match for his opponent.
    “I got him, Ritter,” Stella said.
    I looked to see her pointing a rifle at the guard, who froze as he noticed the weapon. Ritter stepped forward and dealt him a crushing blow. The man crumpled.
    Stella bent to check the pulse of the man Mari had knifed. “I was careful,” Mari said. “He’ll heal in no time.”
    “No one else has shown up.” Ritter wiped blood from his face with a cloth Mari had found somewhere and then held it tight against the side of his skull. “But if we take these two with us, the Emporium will know something’s up.” His gaze slid to me and then skittered away.
    I knew what he needed me to do. I tried again to rise, with as little success.
    Stella came over and crouched beside me. “You okay? You made him miss Ritter, didn’t you? It’s natural you’d be drained. It always happens when you overexert yourself.”
    “Not like this. It wasn’t as much effort as I’ve used before. I can still see. My head doesn’t even really hurt.”
    Stella frowned. “It’s been a rough couple months. Accumulative stress can do a lot of damage.”
    I wanted to protest. I’d had two weeks’ rest since my last mental battle, and for Unbounded that was enough time, with the help of a little curequick, to regenerate completely. So maybe it was something more. All the Renegades knew about the shiny miniature snake—a type of mental binding—Delia had planted in my mind during our last battle and had voted to keep me active but under regular mental checkups with Ava. Knowing Delia as well as I did, I wasn’t sure it had been the right decision.
    Ritter walked toward us, the grisly wound on the side of his head still bleeding. I knew the request he would make before the words came. “Can you deal with those guys or should we take them with us?”
    “I can do it,” I said. “But even if I remove memory of us, they’re going to know something’s up when they wake up hurting.”
    “At this point, just erasing us will be good enough.”
    For long moments, I sat there and absorbed, pulling in nutrients from the vegetation around us. One of the best things about the Change was that we were no longer dependent upon eating or drinking but could sustain ourselves completely by absorbing. It was as natural as breathing, and we did it unconsciously, though we could increase our rate as needed. And I needed energy now.
    Feeling stronger, I pushed to my feet and steadied myself enough to walk to the first unconscious patrolman. Sinking to his side, I sent in my thoughts. I was getting rather skilled at dropping into the unconscious mind and examining thought bubbles. The ability to insert false memories had supposedly been lost over the centuries, but having glimpsed at what else Delia had hidden from even her own people, that might only be more of her lies. I planned to try my hand at fabricating a memory someday, but the first time shouldn’t be on Unbounded agents who would later be examined by the Emporium. Tonight I’d have to content myself in simply removing the memory of me and my companions.
    Dropping into the calm blue lake of the man’s unconsciousness, I dodged a thought bubble, looking for what I needed. There it was, at the point they’d left the gate. They’d heard the shots, and he was reporting it to the guard inside the security room as they ran, so obviously they’d left themselves some way to communicate, even though the shield would have kicked back on. The patrolman was filled with anticipation since this assignment at Desoto’s was normally boring enough to make him wish he were assigned elsewhere.
    That was when they’d spotted us—particularly me doing acrobatics over the car and Ritter whirling into his opponents faster than the eye could follow. A tremor of fear mingled with anticipation rippled throughout the