A sly smile spreads over his face. “Your father mentioned that unfortunately Ava has been detained by another stray blow dart.”
I get an idea, possibly a brilliant one. “Can you do the procedure on her, the same thing you do to control the spies? And Gray, too? They’re already knocked out—”
“Top-tier staff has been vaccinated against it,” he says. “You have no idea the hell people went through when the kingpins directed me to create that. Rough couple of months. Ava told me every day how lucky I was that I was the scientist, not the test subject.” He laughs, but it is brittle and broken.
“I thought my father said you didn’t have a vaccine?”
“He said we can’t cure it. Big difference. A vaccine won’t reverse anything—it just prevents the procedure from taking effect in the first place. It’s what I injected you with, actually.”
Oh. Oh.
It’s reassuring—it is. In a way. I can trust Pellegrin, I can trust Dad, I can trust myself. None of us can be compromised.
But I’m not there to take the blow-dart blame this time, is all I can think. “Won’t they figure out who shot Ava?” Part of me wishes, and how horrible, that Dad would take her completely and permanently out of the picture. But like Dad’s love and pain are flip sides, so are his mercy and his confidence. I know he won’t become a direct agent of death unless he absolutely has to—even at his own expense. He would have killed for Mom, though. And definitely for me.
Pellegrin’s deep-chocolate eyes are bitter melted with sweet. “More than likely, I’m sorry to say. He may have to resort to extreme measures to keep that information contained.” His blunt bedside manner is so honest it hurts. “But this is everything we’ve worked for, and there’s not going to be an easy way to do it. We’re both well aware of the risks.”
There are no pictures on his desk, no prized-possession mugs on his countertops. I wonder if it’s because he doesn’t have anyone to remember, or if it’s simply too difficult to remember. “Do you . . . have a family?”
The sweetness has all but evaporated from his eyes. “Had one,” he says. “Long time ago.” He looks like he’s on the edge of elaboration, but then he pulls back. “Will’s my family now. And even though you’ve never met me before, he’s told me everything about you. Feels like you’re family, too.”
That he lost his family, that he’s heard all about me from Dad, that he feels like he knows me well enough to call me family—I don’t know how to respond. To any of it.
Fortunately, Pellegrin clears his throat and changes the subject rather abruptly. “This one”—he points to the third syringe, the one filled with liquid the color of this sky-blue room—“be very careful with this one. Use it only if your life is explicitly threatened. Don’t let anyone steal it; don’t even take it out of the case until you’re certain no one will overtake you and stab you with it.”
A pit forms in my stomach. “Why even send it along, if it’s that dangerous? Who’s the target?”
“As much as I wish there were a target, and you didn’t hear me say that, this is not a kill mission,” he says. “But it is imperative for you to stay alive.”
He moves to his counter full of equipment, to the test tubes and beakers, and presses his palm against a glass door just below. Piercing blue light scans his palm print, followed by a series of soft beeps as he cracks the door open. A fog of cold air is there, and then it’s not: he’s fast to reach in and retrieve whatever it is he needs.
“If anyone sees this, they will kill you.”
You, he says. But it’s clear you means more than just me.
“This is a bloodlock. Inside it is—”
“My . . . father’s blood?”
Pellegrin’s expression changes, as if I am an equation he hasn’t yet worked out. It’s only a matter of seconds, I’m sure, before he puts it all together.
The test tube in his hand: it is so exactly like the one I’ve carried for two years, so exactly like the one I just shattered outside this lodge.
Perhaps the field guide wasn’t my father’s only fail-safe.
He nods, once and finally. “A bloodlock is the most comprehensive method of information transfer on the planet. Everything your father has felt, imagined, lived—all the knowledge he’s acquired—specifically here, in regard to the Atlas Project—it is in this tube. We bloodlock at the end of every day, destroy the previous day’s contents. We don’t have a backup system, because the information is entirely too sensitive. This is the most recent, and it is the only.”
The truth falls like a feather, but it holds the weight of worlds.
If anything happens to my father, this tube is the only thing left.
If anything happens to the tube, my father’s lifelong work will be gone.
And if anyone finds out just how valuable this tube is, my father could be in an extremely vulnerable position. A tube of information would never betray the Wolves like its living human counterpart could—and said traitorous human counterpart wouldn’t be of any value to them anymore.
I meet his eyes. “Why are you giving it to me?”
Pellegrin puts the tube in my hand, closes my fingers around it. “You’re the only one he trusts.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
THIS IS THE plan: in the middle of the ocean, not far from here, there is an island.
On this island lives the hope of our drowning world—the Atlas habitat—and one of its great terrors, Anton Zhornov. It is like an iceberg, the island, 90 percent of it hidden below the surface. Zhornov lives up top, above the water, the great privilege of the man who made it possible for the Wolves to pursue its completion at all. No one lives below. It isn’t ready yet.
A man will meet us on this island, Dr. Reem Marieke of Cape Town, South Africa. He requires a demonstration of the habitat before he commits to work on it, Zhornov has been told. He offers expertise where my father is lacking, on sustainable subsea waste management, Zhornov has been told. He is necessary for the completion of the project, the last piece. Zhornov has been told a lot of things.
What Zhornov doesn’t know could fill another of my father’s books.