‘Could we stay for a while?’ Cole asks, rubbing his eyes. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to get back on the road.’
‘No, let’s go,’ I say, stepping to Cole, taking his arm. ‘I can drive. Don’t worry, I’ll get us to the lab. I feel fine.’
It’s the truth. Despite the anger boiling inside me, I do feel fine. Whatever Marcus knocked me out with, it’s wiped away every last trace of my migraine. My head is clear, despite the fact that my eyes seem unable to stay focused without my tech.
‘What lab?’ Amy emerges from the hallway, with Chelsea and Eloise on either side of her.
My jaw drops. She looks lucid.
Her scabbed, horned skull is wrapped in a towel, and a pink bathrobe hangs from her shoulders, covering the worst of her mutations. Her face is still strained and lined, her eyes horribly sunken, but there’s no trace of the Wrath I saw before. She walks up to Cole. ‘You’re Cartaxus, aren’t you? Are your people getting close to a vaccine?’
‘We’re very close, ma’am,’ Cole says. ‘Catarina is helping us.’
Amy nods, twitching. Her left arm hangs limp and bandaged by her side, which means Marcus cut my healing tech core out of me and sewed it straight into her. It’s a reckless, dangerous move, but as I watch Amy hobble into the living room, it actually looks like it worked.
But that’s not possible. My healing tech core was barely strong enough to repair skin-deep scratches. Amy seems rational now, but it must be the placebo effect. She’ll turn back into a snarling monster soon, and Marcus will regret letting her out of those restraints.
‘We should go,’ I say, nudging Cole. ‘Come on, we need to hurry. We need to get to the lab.’
‘The lab?’ Amy asks again. Her eyes narrow. I can see her fighting back the Wrath, her teeth grinding with the effort to keep it under control.
She steps closer. I stiffen, waiting for her to lunge, and for Cole to respond and unleash the carnage I’ve been trying to avoid.
Instead, she just stares at me. ‘Please take the girls,’ she whispers.
‘No,’ Marcus gasps. ‘You’re not thinking straight, you’re –’
‘This is the sanest I’ve been in months,’ she snaps. ‘They’re not safe here, not for long. You think you can protect them when a pack of Lurkers finds this place?’
‘Ma’am, I’m afraid we can’t do that,’ Cole says.
‘Chelsea can shoot,’ Amy says quickly, ‘and Eloise is helpful. They’ll do anything you tell them. Please, they’ll be safe with Lachlan.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. Lachlan is dead.’
Amy sucks in a breath, and Marcus’s face blanches. ‘If he’s dead, then God help us,’ he whispers.
Eloise starts crying. I grab Cole’s hand. ‘Let’s just go,’ I say. ‘Come on, we need to keep moving.’
‘OK,’ Cole murmurs, eyeing Amy as though he’s finally sensing the danger that lurks beneath her shaking facade.
We head through the kitchen. Cole’s footsteps are slow and laboured. Marcus follows close behind, offering suggestions. ‘Make sure he rests for the next few hours, and keep him warm,’ he says.
‘I will,’ I mutter, fighting the urge to yell at him.
I climb into the jeep, and Cole settles in beside me. My eyes cut to Marcus’s as I swing us round, sending out a spray of gravel. He looks guilty, as he should. He clearly thinks the function core he took from my arm will help Amy, but he doesn’t understand – my father wrote all my apps himself. Every app was as bland and generic as it could be to stop it triggering my hypergenesis. There was nothing in there that could help her. If Marcus had just asked me, I would have showed him that myself.
The jeep speeds us back down the driveway. I keep my eyes on the rear-view, where Marcus is watching us leave, with his broken, mutated wife at his side. Chelsea has her arms around Eloise, who’s crying into her hands. Marcus is a butcher, and his wife is a monster.
Maybe we should have taken the girls.
Two hours later, a light starts blinking in the corner of the jeep’s dashboard. We’re in Wyoming, after taking a detour to avoid Homestake and its soldiers. Now we’re deep in overgrown farmland, surrounded by sprawling fields and the occasional herd of buffalo. Houses are few and far between, most of them boarded up or burned to the ground. It’s only been two years since the outbreak, but everything looks like it’s been abandoned for decades thanks to the acidic nature of Hydra’s corrosive clouds. Every building has paint hanging in strips from the walls or blistering off the concrete, and fingers of rust creep round the edges of the road signs. Even the highways are cracked. It used to make riding my bike difficult, but the jeep flies over the potholes as though there’s nothing there.
Cole is asleep, his seat reclined as far as the boxes in the back will allow, and his eyelashes flutter every so often when a tremor shakes his body. He’s still recovering. The colour is back in his face and his breathing is steady, but his body will take time to repair itself. Judging by the flashing lights on his panel, some of his tech needs repairing too.
Those aren’t the flashing lights I’m worried about, though. The glowing symbol on the dashboard has blinked to red, showing me a picture of a lightning bolt. I scan the empty fields around us and pull the jeep to the side of the road, chewing my lip nervously.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cole asks, waking as we crunch across the gravel. ‘Why are we stopping? Are you OK?’
I kill the engine. The dashboard goes blank, but the blinking light remains. ‘I think we’re low on fuel. The jeep has a warning light.’
‘What?’ Cole straightens, rubbing his eyes. ‘We should be on batteries, not fuel. We had a full cell this morning.’
I flick the display, but the light keeps glowing. A cold feeling settles in my stomach.
‘We should have plenty of fuel, too,’ Cole says. ‘Are you sure you’re reading this right?’
‘Wait here,’ I say, swinging my door open. I grab the edge of the roof and haul myself up, but before I even see it, I know they’re gone. The roof feels too low, too flat.
Marcus stole the solars while I was unconscious.
‘Dammit!’ I throw myself back into the seat, punching the steering wheel. The jeep’s horn blares down the empty road.
‘They took them,’ Cole says.
I nod, my eyes scrunched shut, my hands pressed to my face.
‘But there’s more,’ he says slowly. ‘Catarina, what did they do?’
I let out a sigh, peering out through my fingers. ‘Marcus cut out one of my function cores. My panel isn’t working any more, and I don’t know if it’s going to repair itself.’
For a moment Cole is deathly silent, and then he swings his door open and jumps to the ground. ‘Out!’ he shouts, striding round the jeep. ‘Out, Catarina, now!’
‘No!’ I grip the wheel. ‘We can’t go back!’
He yanks my door open, grabbing me round the waist, and hauls me out on to the road.
‘They stole our solars,’ he shouts, ‘they cut you open, and you’re protecting these people? Get in the passenger seat. We’re going back there.’