‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘I want to see where they live.’
‘Fine,’ Dax says, sighing. ‘I’ll move the booking to the civilian levels, but you owe me for this. Those airlocks mess up my hair.’
‘What if I like it better messed up?’
The Comox dips sharply, then rises just as fast, making me jerk against my harness and slam back into the wall.
‘What was that?’ I mutter, rubbing the back of my head.
‘A glitch,’ Leoben yells back, a slight edge to his voice. ‘You better hang on, Agatta.’
I glance at Cole, to see if hitting my head activated his protective protocol, but his eyes are still blue. The smirk on his face has grown into a grin. Dax crosses his arms, watching Leoben with a stony expression on his face.
We approach the lookout tower, and the Comox drops smoothly, landing on a black airstrip, sending up clouds of ash and dust. A laser scanner throws a scarlet grid across us, and a row of gleaming gun-bots ambles towards us, forming a line between us and the base.
The Comox’s rotors slow. My harness releases automatically, and I stumble forward, grasping my backpack to my chest. This time Cole’s arm shoots out instinctively to steady me, grabbing my hand.
His eyes meet mine for the briefest second before he lets go and looks away.
‘Welcome to Homestake,’ Dax says, opening the door, letting in a swirling wall of dust.
I throw my hand over my eyes, coughing, squinting at the gun-bots still lined up around the Comox. ‘Where do we go now?’
A black-gloved hand takes my elbow, and I look up into deep brown eyes lined with blue shadow. ‘You’re with me, Agatta,’ Leoben says. His voice is sharp. ‘These two have to debrief. I’ll take you through the airlocks to the civ section.’
I sling the backpack on, nerves jumping inside me. Leoben has the same rippling energy as Cole, but it rolls off him in a completely different way. Cole is reserved, focused, controlled, but Leoben looks like he’d kick someone through a wall just for the thrill of it.
The steel in his eyes when he looks at me tells me he doesn’t like me at all.
He steps to the door, leading me by the elbow. Cole grabs his arm as we leave, pressing their panels together. Something seems to pass between them, though I’ve never seen anything like it. It must be a way to transfer messages without Cartaxus listening in.
Leoben’s eyes narrow, and he nods. I don’t know what Cole told him, but when Leoben pulls me down the ramp, his fingers dig into my skin. He looks back once, meeting Dax’s eyes, but doesn’t say anything. He just pulls me into the wasteland. I swallow, jogging to keep up with his strides.
He definitely doesn’t like me.
Dax and Cole stay by the Comox while Leoben leads me past the twitching gun-bots and through an airlocked door in the side of the tower. We pass through a series of dimly lit hallways with sloped floors that I have a feeling are designed in a labyrinth, to make it difficult for anyone to break in. I’m lost after just a few turns, unsure if we’ve been climbing or dropping underground, if we’ve been moving forward or walking in circles. Eventually we come to an unmarked elevator that opens as soon as we reach it and closes behind us with a hiss.
Leoben leans against the side of the cab, crossing his arms. A whine starts up above us as we begin to drop.
‘You and Dax seem to get along,’ I say.
He grunts but doesn’t reply.
‘Has he been … OK? In the lab, were he and my father treated well?’
He looks me up and down, taking in the scars on my cheek, my dirty fingernails, the lines of my too-thin shoulders. ‘Compared to you, they were living like kings. I can’t believe you were an hour away from this place. Eating doses to stay alive? You guys on the surface are all insane.’
Something tells me he’s trying to change the subject, but I can’t help rising to his bait. ‘It’s not crazy to want to be free.’
Leoben’s eyes glitter coldly. ‘Try telling that to the good people who’ve been forced to stay down here because murderers like you have kept the plague alive.’ He steps closer – close enough that I can tell he’s trying to intimidate me. It takes all my strength not to shrink away from him. ‘You people on the surface always talk about freedom,’ he says, ‘but you don’t see that you’re the ones keeping the rest of the world locked away. You’re the jailers, not Cartaxus. If we rounded you all up at gunpoint like we should, pretty soon the virus would be gone, and we could all move back up to the surface in safety again.’
I hold his gaze. ‘That’s ridiculous. You think the virus would just disappear if everyone on the surface joined a bunker? There are millions of frozen doses and bodies out there that could thaw and blow at any time, and every lab in the country has viral samples that could be accidentally released. The only way to protect the people in these bunkers is to release a vaccine.’
He leans back again. I can’t tell if he’s frustrated or impressed that I’m not intimidated by him. ‘OK, so the virus wouldn’t disappear,’ he says. ‘But it wouldn’t evolve, either. If we’d rounded everyone up in the outbreak, the first vaccine Lachlan wrote would have worked.’
A chill creeps down my spine, and it’s not just from the callous way that Leoben keeps talking about rounding up millions of people. It’s because this time he has a point. Cole said my father coded a vaccine in the first weeks of the outbreak, but the virus evolved and made it obsolete. If Cartaxus had forced everyone on the surface into a bunker, the virus wouldn’t have had a chance to mutate. The vaccine would have been safe – fragile, but safe. There’s a chance society could have rebuilt itself after that.
Only, that’s not true.
If everyone on the planet had let themselves be rounded up, we wouldn’t all have lived to see the rebuilding. Eloise wouldn’t have survived. Neither would Novak, or half the people in the Skies whose lives depend on unsanctioned code.
‘Cartaxus always talks about safety,’ I say, turning Leoben’s words back on him, ‘but you don’t realize that you’re the ones forcing us to live in danger. If you dropped your restrictions on unsanctioned code in the bunkers, then millions of people whose lives depend on it wouldn’t be forced to live on the surface.’
‘Is that why you stayed up there?’
‘My father told me to stay away from Cartaxus.’
He lifts an eyebrow. ‘You look like him,’ he says finally. ‘Same hands, that’s weird. I never thought I’d recognize a pair of hands.’
‘You knew my father?’
‘Cole didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
Leoben glances up at a camera in the ceiling, then pulls the bottom of his tank top up.