‘Oh.’ That’s thoughtful. I take a sip of the coffee, picking up the chalky taste of nutrient powder mixed in with it. I hadn’t thought about nanite contamination. It’s probably not a concern unless Cole were to kiss me, which isn’t something either of us needs to worry about.
The thought makes my eyes stray again to his face, until heat prickles at my cheeks.
‘Are you … OK?’ he asks.
I almost spit out the coffee. He can see me blushing. Of course he can – his tech probably has biosensors to check my heart rate and skin temperature. ‘Yeah, I-I burned my mouth,’ I stutter.
He frowns. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think I made it that hot.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say quickly, turning back up the steps, the coffee gripped in my hands. ‘I’m going to get changed and check the cabin again.’
He nods, but doesn’t reply. I hurry inside, feeling his eyes burning into my back as I go.
After I’ve changed into fresh clothes and finished the coffee, I check the cabin over one last time. All the doors are thrown open, each room rifled through for anything we might need on the trip. I won’t lock it when I leave. That’s basic courtesy in a post-apocalyptic world: an empty house belongs to no one. I don’t even know if I’ll come back. These walls hold too many memories of the last two years, of the things I’ve done to stay alive. I look back at the boarded-up windows, stepping away from the porch, giving the cabin a silent goodbye before I turn away.
Cole is waiting beside the jeep with his hands stuffed in his pockets, his brow pinched as he squints up at the mountains. The lines of his face are smooth; he must have shaved while I was double-checking the rooms. The scent of his aftershave wafts around him in a haze of ice and pine.
‘Is that everything?’ he asks.
I glance down at a folder clutched to my chest, filled with every scrap of paper I could find. ‘Yeah. This is probably all junk, but I didn’t want to risk leaving anything behind. The rest of the notes are in the storage rooms in the mine shafts.’
He blinks. ‘Mine shafts?’
I smile. ‘That’s why my father bought this property. The family who used to own it secretly dug a bunch of shafts into the mountains, hoping to strike gold. I don’t know if they found any, but they left a whole network of tunnels. We get forest fires here sometimes, and the mines are a good place to hide. My father stored a lot of things in them, including most of his notes. The best entrance is up a hiking path on the other side of the mountain. We can take the fire trail there.’
‘You’re telling me Lachlan stored his genetic research notes in amateur-built, illegal mine shafts? That’s … eccentric.’
‘Did you meet my father?’
His face softens. ‘You’re right. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.’
The moment hangs in the air, and I let it linger, analysing the way it feels to joke about my father. The same avalanche of grief I woke up to is still there, heaped against the forged-steel walls in my heart, but there’s more than that. The wound of his death aches, but he was too complex a man to feel just one emotion for. Part of me is furious with him for tasking me with this – for throwing me together with a stranger and putting the world’s fate on my shoulders. But part of me is overjoyed, too. I want to shout his name, to laugh and celebrate the fact that he coded a vaccine.
Then, deeper down but refusing to be silent, part of me is curious about the man I spent so little time with. Cole seems to have known him well, and I want to ask him everything – how he knew my father, when they met, if he knew what his room at Cartaxus looked like. The questions spin around inside me, but every time I think about asking them, I see flashes of the scars on Cole’s chest, the terrifying code in his panel. I’m not sure if I’m ready to find out just how closely my father worked with Cole.
‘So we’ll get the notes,’ Cole says, patting the side of the jeep. The rear doors swing closed, locking with the hiss of an airtight seal. ‘Then we can hit the road. I want to reach the border by nightfall.’ He pulls open the passenger-side door, gesturing for me to get in.
I walk over, admiring the jeep. It’s a beast of a machine. Black and hulking, with a roof of gleaming nanosolar sheeting. Diamond-dusted tyres glint beneath the armoured side panels, and the windows are dark and non-reflective. The interior is finished in the standard Cartaxus palette: black trimmed with more black, and subtle hints of gold.
‘This is a nice machine,’ I say, climbing in, setting the folder on my lap.
Cole snorts. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
He climbs into the driver’s side and pulls his door closed. The tyres send out a spray of gravel as we lurch up the driveway, swinging on to the fire trail that winds round the outside of the mountain. The jeep seems to be doing most of the driving, but it still has a steering wheel, and Cole keeps one hand resting on it constantly.
‘What about the clonebox?’ I ask as the cabin disappears into the trees behind us. My father said we needed two things – his notes and a clonebox – to unlock the vaccine.
‘I have a few ideas about where to find one.’
I raise an eyebrow. Hospitals sometimes have cloneboxes, but they’re usually only found in research facilities. They’re rare machines, though it’s debatable that you can call them machines, since, technically speaking, cloneboxes are alive.
If you’re testing brand-new gentech code, it’s not safe to try it on a person. Badly programmed code can be lethal, so scientists test their ideas on cloneboxes instead. They’re two-foot cubes of steel and glass, filled with cylinders holding millions of synthetic cells in liquefied form. The cells are able to be recoded to match the DNA of whoever jacks their panel into one – to clone them, effectively. Only, the cells you’re cloning aren’t in the form of a person – they’re a soup of blood and muscle and brain tissue.
It makes sense that we’d need a clonebox to study the vaccine, because the code running inside Cole is locked to his panel. When we jack him into one, the cells inside the box will act like an extension of his body, and the vaccine should spread to them. That solves the problem of getting the live code out of Cole’s arm, but it doesn’t help with the problem of how to decrypt it. The answer to that should be in my father’s notes, and once we have both, we should be able to release the vaccine.
Cole leans forward, peering up at the mountains through the windshield. ‘Do you have neighbours?’
‘Not any more. Why?’
He squints. ‘I’ve been getting strange readings from that mountain ever since I got here. I think it might be people, but I can’t tell where they are, and I’m not catching any words.’
My skin prickles. ‘Maybe they’re not talking.’
‘For two days?’
‘They might not talk at all any more if they’re Lurkers.’