The Lost Code Read Online Free

itched faintly. The feeling surprised me. I didn’t remember hurting my neck. I started to scratch, but she stopped my hand. “Careful,” she said, “these are delicate wounds. You need to try not to touch them.” She sat back and her brow wrinkled. “So, Owen, do you remember what happened?”
    I tried. Things were murky in my head. “I got a cramp,” I said. “I couldn’t do the butterfly.”
    “Mmm.” Dr. Maria smiled and shook her head. She picked up a computer pad from the table beside my bed and swiped her finger over its glass surface. “I always thought that was a weird stroke,” she said. “You’d see it in the Olympics and think, Why would someone ever choose to swim like that?”
    “Olympics?” I asked her.
    “Oh, sorry,” said Dr. Maria. “Showing my age. Yeah, back before the Rise, there were a lot more countries, and there used to be these games where each country sent their best to compete. They tried to keep them going, but too many countries were either in chaos or too much debt. I think I was about ten when the last one happened. Anyway, they swam the butterfly. It’s weird to think that with everything that’s been lost, something so silly has lived on.” She sighed. “But, then again, that’s the goal here at EdenWest, to make everything just like it was.” I almost thought I heard a note of disapproval in her voice as she finished, but I wasn’t sure.
    She held a stethoscope to my chest and listened for a moment. “Sounding good. So, any idea how you got those neck wounds?”
    “No, not really,” I said.
    “Maybe you got tangled in the lane lines or something, before you went under?”
    I just shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
    Dr. Maria pushed a loose strand of hair back behind her ear and held a light to my eye. “Well, they weren’t deep enough to need stitches, so I gave you a topical antibiotic.” My left eye went blind in the flash of white. She checked the other. “I’d like you to come by tomorrow for fresh dressings. And you really shouldn’t go in the water again until they heal, although I bet that wasn’t first on your agenda, anyway.” She smiled.
    “No,” I said, smiling back. That sounded fine to me. The more I thought about the wounds, the more they itched, simmering, like the skin was cooking in there.
    “Maybe something got on your neck on the lake bottom,” said Dr. Maria. “Lake Eden is supposed to be a fully functioning ecosystem—you know, real fish and leeches and things. That’s probably not what you want to hear.”
    “No,” I said. I thought about the fake plants that had been on me. But that didn’t mean there weren’t real creatures too, like in an aquarium, and if I had really been down there ten minutes, like Lilly said . . .
    Lilly.
    I remembered her lips against my ear. What was with her? What did she mean, “No matter what happens in the next couple days, don’t tell them anything”? What exactly did she think was going to happen? I drowned, maybe got my neck munched on, and got pulled out in the nick of time. Except, ten minutes wasn’t the nick of time. Wasn’t there basically no way I should have survived that? Maybe Lilly had been exaggerating. Dr. Maria had said it was only a few minutes. Kind of a big difference, in drowning terms. But then there was something else. . . .
    Find me, Owen. That light, that voice. What had that been? Probably just some kind of hallucination, my brain tripping on a lack of oxygen.
    “I think it’s okay to take this off,” Dr. Maria was saying. She bent over my left arm, where a clear tube emerged from my elbow and led up to a bag of fluid. She unhooked the line, then grasped my forearm. “You might feel a slight sting.” She pulled and the tube slid out, chased by a drop of blood. It stung, but the feeling faded quickly.
    “There we go.” She placed a sticky round bandage over it. I noticed her black fingernails, which seemed a little fashionable for a camp doctor, and as