Incineration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 2) by Laura Disilverio

realize I’ve said the name aloud until Wyck follows my line of sight and puts a hand on my arm. “She’s not—”
    I pull away from him, race up the gangplank, and circle the cabin until I reach the narrow stairs that lead to the top deck. I pound up them, breathing hard. The woman’s at the stern rail, looking out past the paddle wheel. I can’t believe I cut Wyck off yesterday, fearing that he was going to tell me Fiere had died in the IPF attack on Bulrush headquarters. I saw her get shot. I should have known better than to underestimate Fiere. It would take more than a beamer blast to the shoulder to stop her.
    “Fiere!” I call. I’m practically tripping over my feet I’m so eager to greet her.
    She starts to turn, and I see the familiar profile, the sharp nose and strong chin, the scar slicing through her eyebrow. She looks thinner than I remember, and holds her right arm awkwardly. I throw my arms around her and hug her tightly. “I thought you were dead.”
    I expect her to come back with a scathing comment—scathing is Fiere’s specialty—but she wiggles away from me and takes a step back. Okay, I should have known better. She’s not the huggy type. I’m lucky she didn’t drop me to the deck.
    “Sorry,” I start.
    She stares at me with unblinking eyes, so dark the pupils blend with the irises. A frown wrinkles her brow. “Do I know you?”
     

Chapter Ten
    Her voice is hesitant, not Fiere-ish at all.
    Is she having me on? “I didn’t think four months in prison changed me that much,” I joke. “A little thinner, but there’s a lot of that going around.”
    She doesn’t respond in kind. “Leave me alone,” she says irritably. That sounds more like the Fiere I know. She gives me her back and returns to studying the river.
    “Fiere, what—?”
    Wyck’s hand lands on my shoulder. I give him a puzzled look and he draws me toward the other end of the deck. “I should have told you,” he says in a low voice.
    “Told me what?” But I already know.
    “The IPF captured Fiere the day they took you. When I joined up with the Defiance, they had just received intelligence about her location. Idris immediately launched a rescue mission—he’s loyal, I’ll say that for him, and hell-bent on ‘no man left behind.' We got her out the day before she was set to be shipped to work in a plastics refinery, if our source was accurate. She’d had a hard time of it, Ev—she was skinny as a laser beam and her arm had been broken in several places and never set right. On top of that—”
    “She was memory-wiped.” I steal a glance at the slim figure standing at the rail.
    Wyck nods sadly. “Yeah. She’s not Fiere anymore.”
    I round on him. “Don’t say that,” I tell him fiercely. “She is. The old Fiere is in there somewhere. Wiping severs the connections between the stored memory and the recall mechanism—it doesn’t fry the actual memory. Those connections can be restored. What have you been doing for her?”
    He shuffles his feet. “All she wants is to be left alone.”
    I give him a disgusted look. “Really? She says she wants to be left alone so you all leave her alone, make no attempt to help her?”
    “We’re not doctors, Ev.”
    I pfft air through closed lips to let him know what I think of that lame excuse. “Memory isn’t really my field, but there was a researcher at the Kube—”
    “Dr. Frangelica.”
    “Right. She ran that SMO—specific memory obliteration—experiment and a few of the kids volunteered for it. They used to talk about how you need to help a memory-wiped person rebuild associations, expose them to familiar surroundings, have conversations with them about shared experiences . . . stuff like that. Exercise helps, too, she said, I guess because it increases the blood flow to the brain or something. I’m not sure of the science behind any of it. I am sure that letting Fiere mope around by herself has got to be doing more harm than good.” I glance over