Free Tremble by Jus Accardo Page A

pocket and snapped a few pictures.
    “Ben Simmons,” Lu read aloud. “Who’s he?”
    I e-mailed the pictures to my account and pocketed the cell. “It’s not so much who he is but what he can do.” I tapped the page again. “It says he’s a memory thief. If he can steal memories, maybe he can fix broken ones.”
    Her expression turned sympathetic, and she reached across, awkwardly patting me on the shoulder. “Did you lose a memory?”
    I closed the file and pushed it back underneath the stack of papers. “Not me. My boyfriend. These guys who did this to us? They took him. Messed with his head. He doesn’t know me anymore…”
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “It’s cool. If anyone can beat this, it’s him and me.” The words came out strong and sure, but deep down I still had my doubts. Every time I remembered the way Kale looked at me in Conny Delgeto’s garage, my fragile hope slipped just a little. But maybe I didn’t have to wonder. Knowing what she could do, I couldn’t resist. “I don’t suppose you know how this is all gonna turn out?”
    “My gift only allows me to see things about my own life. I wish I could tell you what you want to know, but I only know what’s going to happen to me. Moments I’m in, events in my life. It’s sadly limited.”
    “And it’s always been like that?”
    “Yep.”
    She turned eighteen in about three months. Maybe there was hope for her. If nothing had changed, maybe her body wasn’t rejecting the drug. “You might be all right, then. One of the earliest signs the body is starting to reject the drug is a noticeable change in your ability. If there hasn’t been any change, and you’re this close, then you might be okay. My ability changed back in the beginning of summer.”
    I had what I’d come for. Staying longer would be pushing my luck. As I started for the door, I turned back and asked, “You said you knew how it was going to turn out for you. Are you going to start showing side effects?”
    She shrugged and, with a sad smile, followed me out of the room. As I changed the knob back to its normal metal state, she said, “I’m not sure. I don’t make it long enough to find out.”
    …
    Lu’s confession haunted me the rest of the night. I was tempted to tell someone but decided it wasn’t my place. Her future. Her choice. That was my new motto.
    I lay in bed, brain whirring two million miles a minute as I tried to come up with a plan of attack. Somehow, I needed to get to Ben Simmons. The address in his file was just over the Connecticut border, but getting there without letting the others know would be tricky. With the word out to terminate the Supremacy kids, the chances of Mom and Ginger letting me skip around on my own were slim.
    I knew Ginger would send someone to get him, but she wouldn’t make it a priority, which seemed stupid. Denazen had the same list we did. If Ben were still alive, Denazen would make it its business to get to him ASAP to keep him from reversing what was done to Kale—unless they knew it couldn’t be done.
    I’d almost slipped into dreamland, thinking about Kale and our last trip to Gino’s—a little Italian restaurant several towns over we liked to sneak out to—when something shook the bed. Without rolling over, I swatted the air. Ginger had taken in a stray cat and the damn thing, for some reason, loved my room. More specifically, my bed. I warned her that the first time I found a dead animal of any kind between my sheets, the cat was history.
    “Stupid cat. Go away,” I mumbled into my pillow.
    “Dez?” Huh. Cats didn’t talk. It took a second to shake the impending sleep from my brain before I figured out who it was.
    “Alex? What the hell—”
    “Dez, we don’t have time. Wake up.”
    “Time?” I untangled myself from the covers and twisted to see the clock. Two a.m. “You realize it’s the ass-crack of sleepy time, right?”
    “We need to go. Now.”
    I bolted upright and threw off the