‘He means shut up and go in.’ Leoben grabs my shoulders, guiding me into the airlock. The tiny steel room is just big enough for the two of us, with a metal grating for a floor and a gaping air vent overhead. The door closes behind us, leaving us in the dim glow of a row of lights built into the floor.
‘What did that green light mean?’ I ask.
‘It means your father found a way to trick our systems into letting in non-standard tech.’
‘Oh,’ I breathe. ‘Of course.’
‘What kind of wireless chip do you have?’
‘Basic model, K-40 line. It barely connects to anything.’
‘Easy to tweak, though,’ Leoben says. ‘He could have planted a mirror.’
I look up at him. ‘You know how to code?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘I’m not just a pretty face. I don’t know shit about DNA, but my hardware skills are pretty solid.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘Then you’d know that a mirror won’t run on a K-40 encoding. You’d have to use a Joburg echo.’
‘Ah,’ he says, tilting his head back. ‘Of course, that’s old-school. Nice.’
He looks down, meeting my eyes, the hard lines of his face softening for a second before he looks away.
An electronic voice starts up in the ceiling. ‘Air cycling starting now.’
The vent above us opens with a crack, and ice-cold air blasts over us with enough force to make me cower against the wall. I scrunch my eyes shut, huddling with my arms over my face for what feels like an eternity, until the vent slams shut.
The voice starts up again. ‘Air cycled. No viral particles detected.’
‘Y-you could have warned me,’ I say through chattering teeth.
Leoben shrugs. ‘What would be the fun in that?’
I glare at him, clutching my arms around myself as the wall beside us slides open. Beyond it, a long hexagonal corridor stretches out with another circular door set into the far end. The corridor’s walls are slick concrete covered with tiny nozzles, and the floor is another metal grating. My eyes water with the sharp scent of disinfectant.
‘Please proceed to airlock two.’
My stomach sinks. ‘I’m guessing this is the wash part.’
Leoben nods, pushing me through. ‘You guessed right.’
The door slams shut behind us with a hiss of cold air, and the grating below us starts to shake.
‘Anything you want to warn me about this time?’ I ask.
Leoben looks me up and down, a low smile on his face. ‘There’s no preparing for this, Agatta, but you might want to close your eyes.’
I obey. A humming sound starts up, growing louder until it makes the whole corridor shudder. Thousands of tiny jets of ice-cold liquid hit my skin, choking the air with the harsh vanilla scent. I hold my breath but still get a splash of bitter liquid in my mouth, and cover my face with my hands, coughing. After a few seconds the streams cease, and I suck in a lungful of air that burns lines of fire through my sinuses.
‘Please keep your eyes closed. Stage two is almost complete.’
‘Almost complete?’ I splutter, opening my eyes just long enough to see a hurricane of air spiralling through the airlock. It’s like a horizontal tornado, strong enough to make me stumble until Leoben grabs my wrist, yanking me upright. My wet hair whips around my face, covering my mouth. Something above us clicks and the airflow ceases as suddenly as it began. The third and final steel door opens with a hiss.
‘Thank you,’ the mechanized voice says. ‘Welcome to Homestake.’
‘I guess I know why Dax was complaining about the airlocks,’ I say.
Leoben chuckles, dragging me through the door and into another concrete room with a row of doors along the far wall.
‘You look hilarious,’ he says, shaking his hands, splattering the walls with disinfectant. His clothes are dripping, but the fabric must be hydrophobic, because his tank top already looks dry. The blue shadow under his eyes isn’t smudged at all, making me think it might be a pigmentation app, and a masterfully well-coded one at that. My backpack is waiting on a scratched steel counter, along with Leoben’s gear. He swings his holster back around his shoulders and tucks his weapons away. ‘You ready to see the civ levels?’
I nod, shivering. My eyes are burning, one ear is blocked, and my hair is strewn across my face in tangled ropes, but I’m ready. I’ve spent two years wondering what this place looked like on the inside. I want to know what my father told me to stay away from.
I pull my backpack on, shoving the sopping hair from my face. ‘OK, let’s go.’
Leoben leads me through one of the doors and into a cargo-size elevator. It runs sideways, groaning, then drops for what feels like an eternity. When it finally shudders to a stop, I hear a murmur of voices on the other side, and for some reason I can barely breathe.
The doors slide open. I expect to see more concrete, or rows of cells.
Instead, I find myself in the middle of a street.
There are trees and flowers. Bright green grass. Cobblestoned paths wind between cafés, shop fronts and pretty stone buildings. I know there’s a ceiling above us, I know we’re underground, but all I can see when I look up is a perfect azure sky.
Families are strolling and chatting, all dressed in blue – some in overalls, some in T-shirts with the Cartaxus logo stamped on the front. At a sprawling café across from the elevator, people are sitting on couches drinking what looks like coffee from steaming white mugs. Families are sharing meals. Children are running between tables, playing and shrieking as their parents pass plates of food to one another.
Suddenly I know why nobody who went to Homestake ever came out.
This place isn’t a prison. It’s a goddamn paradise.
Leoben takes my elbow, leading me out of the elevator, but his touch is gentler than when he led me in. He must sense the shock rolling through me. ‘You OK, Agatta?’
I nod dumbly, staring at the people. With a single glance, I can tell that none of them have killed for immunity, never lost themselves in the darkest moments of the Wrath. They’ve never starved through winters or hidden from Lurkers. They’ve never watched a crying child with bruises on his skin detonate in the middle of the street.
They all rushed into Homestake as soon as it opened, and they’ve been here ever since – eating muffins, sipping coffee.
I’ve been dying from the inside out, and why? Because my father told me to? Because he said Cartaxus was evil?
The file about Cole in my backpack looked pretty evil to me too.
A ripple of silence spreads through the crowd. Heads turn slowly, until every eye is locked on me. I see horror in their faces. Snatches of their words echo around me.
‘New arrival, just a kid.’
‘Look how thin she is. I can’t believe she made it this long.’
‘I wonder what she did to survive.’
I pull my wet sleeves over my hands, hiding my dirty nails, suddenly seeing myself as the crowd must see me. As a scarred, filthy freak. A monster. Someone who’s killed to survive rather than come here.
Why would my father keep me away from this?
‘You want food or something?’ Leoben asks.
I shake my head, staring at the crowd. ‘I could have been here, but he made me promise to stay away. He never called, he could have told me …’
Leoben’s eyes narrow.