Cole looks confused by the word. Of course he does. He’s spent the last two years in airlocked comfort, with HEPA visors and decontamination chambers. He’s probably never killed for immunity, never had to choke down a dose or see a child, lost in the Wrath, turn on their own mother.
I rub my arms, looking out the window as the trees fly past. ‘You know about the Wrath, right? How the scent of second-stagers makes people crazy? How it …’
‘Makes them eat infected people?’
I nod, suddenly aware of the scent of immunity wafting from my skin, and of what I did to get it. I force the thought away. ‘That’s a neurological response, like psychosis. When the Wrath takes over, people lose themselves, and some of them never come back. We call them Lurkers. They travel in packs, and they’ll kill and eat you whether or not you’re infected.’
Cole raises his eyebrows. ‘I’ve heard stories about people like that, but I always thought it was Cartaxus propaganda: don’t leave the bunkers or you’ll get murdered by people who kill for sport.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not like that. They’re more like wild animals, like bears or wolves. It’s like they’ve regressed to their basic instincts. They seem to recognize each other, and form packs to hunt together, but they tend to stay in the woods like animals do. That’s why we call them Lurkers. Don’t get me wrong – they’re bloodthirsty, and if you run across a pack, they’ll try to kill you, but they’re not hard to avoid.’
‘That’s good,’ Cole says, speeding up when we hit an open stretch of the trail. ‘Because I’d like to avoid them completely.’
The trail rises through the forest, winding closer to the entrance to the mines. Cole keeps peering through the windshield, frowning, as though trying to see something hidden in the trees on the mountain.
I open the folder on my lap. He glances over. ‘Where did you find that?’ he asks. ‘I thought I checked everywhere.’
‘In the basement, behind the cabinets.’ I flip through the loose mix of stained papers. Most are scribbled diagrams and calculations, nothing that can help us. My father must have used a kind of encryption on the vaccine that he’s used before, maybe in his time at the cabin. There must be instructions somewhere in his notes, but nothing I’ve seen so far is helpful. I shuffle through the rest of the papers in the folder, pausing when I reach a watermarked sheet with gold-embossed lettering at the top.
Cole glances over, raising an eyebrow. ‘You got into the biomaths programme at Cambridge?’
I nod, reading the letter, remembering how excited I was when it arrived. We’d only been at the cabin a few months, and I applied in secret to a special programme for minors, hoping to impress my father. I sent a portfolio of my code, and they offered me a full-ride scholarship for the next year. Cambridge was where my father had studied, and I thought he’d be proud of me, but we ended up having a fight about it when he found out.
Too young, he said, and too far away. He promised to teach me more than they could. I locked myself in my room and fumed about it for days. Then Dax showed up, with his tilted smile and easy charm, and I began to see the advantages of studying at home.
I drop the letter back in the pile, staring out the window as we drive up the side of the mountain. ‘My father wouldn’t let me go. I’d just gotten out of boarding school. I think he wanted me here for a while longer.’
‘Boarding school?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Saint Lucia’s, up in Canada. It was awful. Everyone spent all their time in VR, so I didn’t have any friends. Gave me plenty of time to learn to code, though. What about you? Where did you go to school?’
Something passes across Cole’s face – a wall coming down. ‘Military academy.’
Of course. I should have guessed. There’s a precision to Cole’s movements, a calculated alertness in his eyes that tells me he isn’t a new recruit. Most of the Cartaxus troops I’ve seen rely heavily on their tech and weapons, but Cole seems to have been trained for years.
‘What about college?’ I point to the Cambridge letter. ‘What were you going to study before the world ended?’
His eyes go distant for a moment, and then he shifts uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. I never really thought about it.’
‘There must have been something.’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s not worth thinking about.’
‘If you don’t tell me, I’m going to start guessing. Right now, I’m thinking professional clown.’
He sighs, slowing the jeep to pull us round a bend. ‘I wanted to study art.’
‘Oh.’ Of course. I’ve seen his sketches, but I didn’t think about it. It’s hard to reconcile the leylined soldier with the boy who wanted to draw. ‘Why art?’
‘Why biomaths?’ he asks sarcastically.
I roll my eyes. ‘I’m just trying to get to know you. We’re going to be stuck in this jeep all the way to Canada.’
He spots the base of the hiking trail that leads to the mine’s entrance before I can point it out and pulls us off the gravel road. The jeep crunches to a stop, its dash dimming. He opens his door to get out but pauses and turns to me instead. His hand picks nervously at the fabric of his cargo pants. He doesn’t look nervous, but that same energy I’ve glimpsed before is rolling off him, changing the pitch and the feel of the air. He meets my gaze and holds it so long I have to fight the urge to look away.
For the first time, I feel like I’m really seeing him instead of the Cartaxus soldier. He’s younger than I thought, probably my age. His ice-blue eyes catch the morning light. There are a handful of tiny freckles scattered across his nose.
‘You’re the coder,’ he says finally. ‘What genes make someone an artist?’
I raise an eyebrow. That’s a trick question, and he knows it. Most of human behaviour and its relationship to DNA is still undiscovered territory. We know what genes make rats afraid of eagles, and we know why birds fly south in the winter, but the complexities of human nature are still a mystery to science.
‘There’s no gene for art,’ I say. ‘At least, not that anyone’s been able to find so far.’
He nods, with what almost looks like pain in his eyes. ‘That’s why I wanted to be an artist.’
He slides from his seat before I can reply and shuts the door behind him, leaving me alone in the jeep’s airlocked silence with the lingering scent of his aftershave.
CHAPTER 12
When I get out of the jeep, Cole is striding back up the road we just came down, his arm held aloft as if trying to get reception. The landscape is rocky, the trees scraggly and sparse, and from here the trail to the mine’s entrance is so narrow and winding it needs to be hiked on foot.
‘Should have guessed,’ he says, walking to the jeep. ‘Come on, let’s make this quick.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m running blind, that’s what’s wrong. I’ve been setting off scans ever since we started driving, but they’re all coming back glitched. I think it’s the same thing that was giving me those strange readings in the cabin. There’s something in this mountain that’s throwing off my tech.’
‘What, like mineral deposits?’