Pop … Pop.
I wake with a pounding headache to a sound that feels like nails being driven into my skull. Beyond the throbbing in my temples, there’s a fuzziness to my thoughts that tells me I’m getting another migraine. They come every few months, pounding at the base of my skull, tracing glowing silver scotomas across my vision. I ran out of pills last year, so now they leave me crippled for days. Another thing my panel doesn’t do: synthesize painkillers.
Pop.
Wincing through the pain, I take a slow breath and open my eyes, searching for the source of the sound. Wooden beams ripple into view on the ceiling above me. Real wood, not the cultured stuff where the knots and carefully engineered imperfections repeat at regular intervals. This wood is old and ragged, coated in thick spiderwebs that stretch down to mouldy boards nailed over a window. It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know how I got here.
Perhaps more concerning: I don’t know where I am.
Bladelike shafts of light slant obliquely through the boards nailed over the window, so it’s either late afternoon or early morning. I’m lying on a wrought-iron bed in a small room with a heavy woollen blanket draped over me, facing a row of dusty bookshelves. A portrait hangs on the far wall, a framed sketch of a little girl with long dark hair. Her pursed mouth is captured with sparse, confident strokes, her eyes lifted, as though she has been asked a difficult question and is contemplating her response.
Her image is frustratingly familiar. A name on the tip of my tongue, held aloft and out of reach by the pain at the base of my skull. I dig my fingernails into my palms. An old trick my father taught me. Wrestle the pain into a spike, force it under your control. The fog in my mind clears, and I sit bolt upright on the bed.
The little girl in the sketch is me. My father drew it when I was a child. I’m on his bed, staring at his books, sitting in his room in the cabin. I twist to look round, gripped by the sudden, insane hope that he’s home, that he’s here, but the movement sends a stab of pain through me, and it all comes hurtling back.
The plumes, the jeep. The dose blowing in my stomach. The soldier shaking me, shouting my name before I passed out. Was he the one who brought me here? My breath catches at the thought, and I stare wildly around the room, sending my tech into overdrive.
My audio tech spins up, but I can’t hear the popping sound that woke me from my sleep. I can hear my own breathing, my heart pounding inside me, and a sudden blare of scrambled noise rushing in from the forest. It grows louder as my tech isolates and amplifies each source. The rustle of the pine trees. The cries of a distant flock of pigeons. A steady thump, somewhere below me.
The footsteps of a man on the front porch, pacing back and forth in heavy boots.
My heart slams against my ribs. It has to be the soldier. The memory of his black eyes sends a chill through me. I need to find a way to get out of here, to call Agnes …
Shit. I completely forgot about Agnes.
I invoke my comm-link, closing my eyes. I don’t have enough reception in the cabin to make a call, but I can usually send a text.
Agnes. Where. Are you. Soldier … took me.
The pixelated words appear in my vision slower than usual. My mind is racing, making it hard for my panel to detect the shape of my thoughts. I focus on Agnes, on the command to send. The text disappears, but her username shows her as offline.
Agnes, I send again, struggling to form the words. Agnes. You OK? Please respond.
A network icon spins in my vision next to Agnes’s username, pinging her to connect, but she’s still offline. She’s always responded in seconds before. The icon stops spinning, and Agnes’s username appears above a line of grey text.
This user either does not exist or is out of range.
A gasp escapes my lips before I can clamp my hands over my mouth, and the footsteps on the front porch stop. The soldier. He heard me. I hold my breath, frozen.
Every time I’ve seen this comm-link message, it meant the user was dead.
But that’s not possible. My mind spins with alternatives: maybe she turned off her panel; maybe she’s faradayed and her signal is being blocked. There’s no way Agnes is dead. Downstairs, the front door swings open, its rusted hinges squealing. I scrunch my eyes shut.
Get yourself together, Bobcat.
The voice rears up, sharp as a whip. It’s not Agnes, but I know that’s what she’d say. The old girl would probably yell at me for sitting here like this. Quit your moping, she’d say, and get back on your damn feet.
Footsteps thud across the living room below me. I push myself up from the bed, swallowing hard against the pain. I don’t know why the soldier brought me back here, but I know it can’t be good. I clutch my stomach, scanning the room for something I can use to get away.
One of my father’s silver fountain pens gleams on the mahogany bedside table atop a stack of dusty, handwritten notes. I pick it up, turn it in my hand. The ink-stained nib is flimsy, but it’s sharp and metal, and it’s better than nothing. I grip it in one fist and run to the far wall, where my rucksack has been dumped on the floor. I slump to my knees and rifle through it, finding the dirty clothes I was taking to Agnes’s, a water filter, bandages …
And thirty-five ounces of frozen infected flesh.
My breath rushes from me. The freezepak is soft, completely thawed. I pull it from the rucksack and flip it over, checking the meat. It shudders in my hands, letting out a pop as a bubble of gas forms at one end. The sound that woke me from my sleep. The meat is starting to detonate, cell by cell, and it could blow at any minute. When it does, it could take out half the room.
My eyes slide to the boarded-up window, a rough plan forming in my mind. It’s dangerous, and crazy as hell, but it just might get me out of here.
Footsteps creak up the stairs. I hold the fountain pen in my teeth and lurch to the window, squeezing the freezepak between the boards. It catches on the splinters, but I manage to shove it through and spin round, hiding the pen behind me just as the door swings open.
The soldier stands in the doorway, looking me up and down with ice-blue eyes that I could swear were black when he attacked me. He steps forward slowly, his eyes darting to the corners of the room, and the hair on the back of my neck bristles.
This isn’t just a soldier. He is a weapon.
That fact is written in the leylines stamped around his face, in the fierce alertness of his sparkling blue eyes. He’s unarmed, but every movement seems threatening. Every footstep is a steel spring coiling, the flash of a razor’s edge. There’s an air about him that speaks to a lifetime of military training, of shouting and drills and cleaning weapons. His hands are empty, slightly open, and I have a flash of them closing on my neck.
‘Good evening, Catarina.’ He reaches out one hand. ‘I’m Lieutenant Cole Franklin.’