But that’s what Dax and my father did too.
I lean against the Comox’s side, watching fields and forests pass below us. The jeep has disappeared into the distance, following behind us on the ground. Leoben transferred one of the batteries from the Comox into it, which should give it enough juice to drive itself to Homestake. It’s still stocked with the boxes of my father’s notes, but I have the five musty folders I found behind the kayak stashed in my backpack. Something tells me they’re the only notes we’re going to need.
‘Almost there,’ Dax says, peering through the window. I strain against my harness to get a clearer view. We’ve reached Homestake’s buffer zone – a mile-wide patch of wasteland that circles the bunker to keep blowers from detonating nearby. The perimeter is lined with a deep trench and rolls of razor wire atop a towering concrete wall. Inside it, every building is bulldozed, every tree is gone, and the roads are covered in a dark layer of ash.
It looks like a war zone. Despite this, crowds of people are still huddled on the perimeter, trying to get in. They’re probably infected. The blowers love the bunkers – they come from miles away in the desperate hope that Cartaxus can help them. The crowd is being kept away from the checkpoints by gun-bots on arched metal legs that skitter around like giant steel spiders. A low-altitude army of drones hovers above them, ready to incinerate anyone who might break through.
‘Think they have enough security?’ Leoben calls back. He’s joking, but Cartaxus is right to guard the wasteland fiercely. I’m sure Homestake’s airlocks are sophisticated, but the buffer zone is still their best defence. No airlock is foolproof, and it only takes a single virus particle to cause infection. Keeping the blowers a mile away from the bunkers is the only way to guarantee the air is safe.
‘It won’t be enough for much longer,’ I say, pointing down at a plume on the perimeter. One of the people has detonated, sending the others scattering. The cloud drifts sideways, flattened by the wind, but even from here it still looks enormous. The others follow my gaze, but none of them seem to understand what I’m saying.
Of course they don’t. They haven’t learned to read the clouds like I have, to analyse the shape and colour and guess how the wind might change. My life has depended on it ever since the outbreak. They’ve all spent the last two years inside.
‘That cloud is twice as big as they used to be,’ I explain. ‘The virus is evolving, and the detonations are getting stronger. A mile is still a decent radius to keep the air clean, but pretty soon those clouds are going to reach the bunker.’
Dax stares down at the cloud. ‘Hopefully that won’t be a concern for much longer.’
I nod, watching the cloud drift across the buffer zone. ‘Yeah, hopefully.’
The Comox drops lower. In the centre of the wasteland, a single lookout tower juts from the blackened ground. This is Homestake, at least what we can see of it. Almost all of the bunker is underground, built into an enormous abandoned gold mine. I’ve seen the lookout tower from afar, and I’ve skirted the perimeter on supply runs with Agnes, but I’ve never seen it up close like this. The sheer size of the place stuns me, along with the realization that eighty thousand people are currently beneath me. It’s hard to get my head around.
Dax taps the black cuff on his forearm. A diagram of the bunker flickers on the Comox’s floor, projected by a row of lights on the cuff’s side. ‘The top third of Homestake is military,’ he says. ‘The civilian levels are underneath, in a different airlock system. The only point of access to the whole place is the central shaft.’
I look over the diagram. The bunker is shaped like a house built entirely underground, with the civilian floors forming a giant rectangular section. The military levels slope in above it like a roof, linked to the ground by an elevator shaft that looks like a chimney.
‘The clonebox is here,’ Dax says, gesturing to a red dot near the top of the bunker. ‘It’s in the main lab, which I have access to, but alarms will sound as soon as it’s disconnected. Cartaxus thinks we’re here to stay for a few nights, so I’ve got rooms booked in the military barracks to avoid suspicion. We’ll check in, and you can shower and have a meal. The only problem might be your panel. None of the hypergenesis-friendly apps your father wrote for you are on the list of approved Cartaxus tech. I’ll talk to the scanning officers, and –’
‘There’s no need,’ I say, pulling my sleeve back, showing him the bandage wrapped around my forearm. A few black stitches poke out from between the layers of gauze, and a thin line of blood has seeped through from the incision.
Dax frowns. ‘What happened?’
‘Someone cut out one of my function cores. The panel might repair itself, but I don’t know yet. I don’t have a backup node, so it could be ruined.’
Dax’s face darkens. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll help you fix it once this is over. We’ll get it running again, I promise. But in the meantime, I suppose it’ll make this easier. You and Leoben can check in to the barracks, but Lieutenant Franklin and I will need to be debriefed on the mission they think I sent him on. That might take a few hours.’
‘Won’t they want to talk to me?’
‘They will, but not today. I told them you were a friend of mine, and that you’d be frightened. I convinced them to give you a day to settle in. Don’t worry, we’ll be in and out in a matter of hours. After Lieutenant Franklin and I are done debriefing, I’ll get the clonebox, and we can leave.’
‘What happens then? How do we get out?’
Dax spins the diagram, zooming in on the top few levels. ‘Once we start the kick simulation, we’ll have control of the elevators and the doors to the parking garage. Homestake will think it’s under attack, and we’ll evacuate under the pretence of keeping me safe. We’ll send the Comox to the Los Angeles bunker while we drive north – you and Cole in his jeep, Leoben and me in another. By the time Cartaxus figures out that we’re not in the Comox, we’ll be halfway to the lab, and they won’t have a hope of finding us.’
I stare at the diagram, trying to get a feel for the scale of the bunker. It seems to stretch impossibly far down into the earth. Ever since Homestake opened, I’ve tried to imagine what it’s like. A giant, forbidden fortress whose drone patrols I could sometimes glimpse in the distance. Thousands of people, locked underground. Living, eating, breathing.
I look up at Dax. ‘I want to see where the civilians live.’
He shakes his head. ‘Like I said, the civilians are in a different airlock system. It’s a pain in the ass moving between them.’
I cross my arms. ‘I want to see it.’
‘Sheesh, talk about a pain in the ass,’ Leoben yells back.
Cole smirks, the first flicker of emotion I’ve seen since we took off.