‘Oh,’ I breathe, nerves kicking inside me. I take his hand cautiously and let him help me up. ‘Are you sure?’
He nods. ‘She’s alive.’ His eyes are blazing. The candle of hope I saw in him before has leaped into a roaring fire. ‘She’s alive, and she’s out there somewhere, which means you’re right. She’s vulnerable until we release the vaccine. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. We won’t go to Cartaxus. I’ll hide you from them. I’ll take you wherever you need to go. I can’t risk losing her again.’
‘OK,’ I whisper, the hair on the back of my neck rising. A low, thrumming power is rolling off Cole. The cluttered laboratory seems to shrink around him. It’s like looking at the sun. Like he could tear the world apart with his hands if he wanted to.
He is a weapon of considerable power. That’s what my father said. For the first time, I think I know what he meant by that.
‘We’ll leave tomorrow,’ Cole says, scanning the room. ‘We’ll take all of Lachlan’s notes and go through them on the way. We’ll find a clonebox – we can steal one if we have to. There’s no time to waste. We can make it to that lab in a day if the roads are clear.’
‘Sure,’ I say, still staring at him. He’s not even listening to me. I can see the plans for the journey to the lab forming in his mind.
Twenty minutes ago he was ready to slap a pair of handcuffs on me and drag me back to a Cartaxus cell. Now he’s pledging his allegiance, promising to do anything to help me, all because a girl he loved years ago is still alive. The change is so abrupt and deep, it’s left me spinning, and at the core of my confusion is a single, burning thought: my father knew all this would happen.
He knew that Cole would come to me, that I would find these clues, and that I would find Jun Bei to convince him to help me. The pieces of my father’s jigsaw puzzle have interlocked and now stand before me, a Cartaxus weapon allied to my cause.
It’s terrifying.
This is blackmail. I’m using Cole’s feelings to force him to help me, and I know that my father planned this; he played Cole with perfect pitch. I should be proud I heard enough of the melody to carry the song alone, but for some reason it’s left me feeling shaken.
My father was distant sometimes, even cold. He could lose himself in his work for weeks and forget to speak to me. He was blunt, he was eccentric, and he was sometimes hard to live with, but my love for him never wavered because deep down I believed that he was good.
He spent his life writing vaccines. Crafting medical code. His mind was a razor, but he only wielded it to fight suffering and disease. Never like this – as a weapon. As a way to control people. Standing here, watching Cole pace across the lab, I suddenly feel like I’m in a stranger’s house.
Cole turns to me. ‘You know, you look a lot like your father when you do that.’
My heart twists. ‘When I do what?’
‘When you look at someone like they’re a problem you’re trying to solve.’
‘My father looked at you like that?’
‘He looked at everyone like that, Catarina.’ He blinks, still distracted. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs. We need to pack and plan out a route to the lab, and you need to get a good night’s sleep before we hit the road. Are you ready to do this?’
I wrap my arms around myself, nodding. ‘Of course.’
Cole turns and heads up the concrete stairs to the living room. I follow dumbly. We finally have a chance to end the nightmare of this plague. I should be thrilled, I should want to celebrate, but all I feel is a growing sense of unease.
I’m beginning to realize that the father I remember isn’t the one Cole seems to know.
CHAPTER 11
The next morning I wake to the familiar sounds of the forest, with the last remnants of sleep still heavy in my bones. For a few precious moments I float in a state of half-alertness, snuggling deeper into the warmth of the blankets, hiding from the dawn. Just as I start slipping under, the squeak of floorboards sends me sitting bolt upright, falling into my body so hard it drives the breath from my lungs.
My father. The vaccine. It all slams into me in a gut-wrenching wave of grief that leaves me trembling. I push the tangled strands of hair from my face, pulling in a breath to steady myself as I take in my surroundings.
I’m on an air mattress on the living-room floor, my legs tangled in a silver Cartaxus sleeping bag Cole gave me when he ordered me to rest. The front door is open, and there’s no trace of the bags and weapons that filled the cabin when I fell asleep. My father’s notes are gone, too. We hauled up all the paper files we could find in the basement to take them with us on our journey. Two tattered cardboard boxes of handwritten notes and a few dozen sticks of memory.
Now they’re gone, and there’s no sign of Cole. My breath catches. Motes of dust rise from the bare floorboards, forming swirling patterns in the air. I scramble out of my sleeping bag and race barefoot through the front door, skidding across the front porch and down the steps to the driveway.
The chill of the morning hits me like a hand across my face. The bare skin on my arms prickles with goosebumps. I spin round, ratcheting up my tech to search for Cole, and find him leaning against his jeep, his arms crossed, smirking at me.
My hand flies to my heart, relief flooding me. ‘Dammit, Cole. I thought you’d taken off with the files.’
His smirk grows into a smile. He’s wearing a black tank top and cargo pants with a teched-up rifle slung across one shoulder. The bandage from last night is gone – the skin across his shoulders that was shredded is now flushed and puckered, but his injuries are healed. His jaw is dusted with a day’s worth of dark stubble that makes him look older, and more interesting, somehow. My eyes linger on him longer than I intend them to.
‘I made you breakfast,’ he says. ‘I want to get on the road this morning.’ He reaches into the open window of the jeep and pulls out a metal flask, tossing it to me. The Cartaxus antlers are stamped on one side, but my name is etched into the other in the careful script I recognize from his sketchbook. I look up to see him swigging from an identical flask. Steam curls from the top when he lowers it.
I turn the flask in my hand, feeling liquid slosh inside it. ‘Did you engrave this?’
‘I don’t want to get them mixed up.’
‘What, you don’t want girl germs?’ I unscrew the top, sniffing it. Coffee and hazelnut. The scent makes my stomach growl. ‘Having spent years studying biochemistry, I can assure you they’re not real.’
‘I’m more worried about you.’ He taps one of the black leylines curved around his face. ‘Agnes said you had hypergenesis, and my tech isn’t always stable. I don’t want to contaminate anything and make you sick.’