Strong arms lift me from the floor, a warm chest against my side. ‘I’m here now,’ Cole whispers, lowering me to the bed.
My eyes flutter open. Dax stands behind Cole, staring. ‘Shit,’ he whispers. ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice …’
‘What the hell were you doing?’ Cole grabs the medkit.
‘Here, use this.’ Dax pulls a vial from his pocket. It’s filled with glistening silver fluid – emergency healing tech – raw nanites that don’t need a panel to run them. It’s not hypergenesis-friendly, but that doesn’t matter any more.
Nothing matters any more. I’m just a chess piece in my father’s plan.
‘She can’t use that,’ Cole says. ‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘No,’ Dax says, uncapping the vial. ‘It’s OK, she can use it.’ He presses the silver canister to my neck. Cole watches, stunned, as the nanites surge into my body. They spread down my neck and into my chest like slivers of ice scratching through my veins.
I feel them hit my heart. It skips a beat, then my back arches on the bed as they explode inside me, racing through my cells.
‘Why can she use the tech?’ Cole asks, his eyes wide. ‘Crick, what did you just do?’
‘I healed her,’ Dax says. ‘She doesn’t have hypergenesis. Lachlan faked it, and she’s going to be fine, but we need to keep working. She’s the key to the vaccine – we found the procedure to unlock it. I need to get samples, and run tests, to figure out the rest of the plan –’
‘No,’ Cole says, cutting the air with his hand. ‘We don’t need to figure anything out right now. Catarina needs to rest.’
‘But the vaccine,’ Dax says. ‘We’re supposed to leave in a few hours.’
‘It can wait until morning.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Dax urges.
Cole’s head snaps round, and he stands fluidly. A steel spring coiling. A blade drawn from a sheath. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand,’ he growls, the very air around him rippling with his anger. ‘She was on the verge of death when I came in, while you were standing right beside her. You say she’s the key to the vaccine, and you talk about this plan as if it’s something separate, something intellectual. But it’s not. She is the plan, and Lachlan sent me to protect her. My job is to make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and I intend to do it. That means she’s going to rest now, and you’re going to leave.’
Dax glares at Cole. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’
‘No, I can’t,’ Cole snarls, ‘but if you don’t get out of my sight, I’ll break your neck for letting her bleed out like that.’
Dax and Cole stare at each other, the air humming with anger, then Dax’s eyes cut to me, hard and cold. He gives me a sharp nod, then sneers at Cole and turns on his heel to stride out of the room.
It takes a full minute until Cole’s hands unclench, and then he turns back to me, dropping to his knees beside the bed. ‘Are you OK?’
I shake my head. I don’t have the strength to list all the ways that I am not OK right now.
‘I’m tired’ is all I manage.
He pulls a blanket over me. ‘Then sleep, Cat. You’re safe now. I’m not going anywhere.’
CHAPTER 24
Hours later, through snatches of sleep and half-remembered dreams, I find myself back at home, standing in the cabin. It’s cold, but I’m sweating. I don’t know if it’s night or day. My father must be here somewhere, but I can’t hear him.
‘Hey, Princess.’
Dax catches my arm, spinning me round. His hair flickers between long and short, his face both young and old. ‘Aren’t you happy to see me?’ He brushes the hair from my face. ‘Why aren’t you happy to see me, Princess?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re bleeding,’ he says, pulling his hand away from my face, holding his fingers up to the light. His skin is dotted with blood that splits into smaller and smaller drops, like water on a sheet of glass, spreading across his hand.
‘Nanites,’ he murmurs, staring at the blood that is now barely more than a scarlet mist. ‘I always knew there was something wrong with you.’
I clutch my face where he touched me, feeling wet, scabbed skin that comes away under my fingers, sloughing off my neck. ‘I-I’m sorry,’ I stutter, backing away. ‘I need to go.’
He just watches me, disgust etched in every line of his face.
I turn and run. I need my father. If I don’t stop the reaction soon, it’ll spread down my back. This is my hypergenesis. If I don’t get help, I’ll bleed out like my mother did.
But that’s not right.
I skid to a stop. I don’t have hypergenesis – that was just an app in my panel. So why is my skin splitting apart?
I turn round, finding myself outside my father’s door. Part of me knows I need to open it, but I’m gripped with a rush of dread.
Something lurks on the other side of this door. Something I’m still not ready to face. Something dark and powerful that rises up like a long-forgotten memory.
I close my eyes, drawing in a breath, and swing open the door.
My father isn’t here. One wall of the room is blown out, the books and shelves covered with streaks of dried pink foam. Outside, a million-strong flock of passenger pigeons changes direction, racing for me. Their eyes are black. Their wings are flames. They shriek as they swarm into the room and surge over me.
I jolt awake, my heart pounding, staring wildly around me. Concrete walls. A bunk above me.
It was just a dream.
I’m in Homestake, in my little room deep underground, and my empty, wounded arm is aching. It’s wrapped in gauze, so Cole must have bandaged it, but I slept right through it. I roll slowly to my side on the bunk to look around.
The room is dark, but a bar of pale light in the ceiling traces out the lines of a mattress on the floor. The mess of my panel and the pools of blood have been cleaned away, and my genkit and the Zarathustra folders are stacked neatly in the corner. Cole is lying silently on his side on the mattress, but two twin points of light in his eyes tell me he’s awake.
Watching me.
As if in a dream, I push myself up and drift across the floor until I find myself standing above him. I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I don’t know what I need from him. All I know is that I need something, and that something is Cole.
His eyes meet mine, his arms bare above his blankets, the first rows of scars on his chest gleaming in the muted light. I open my lips, but I don’t know what to ask him. I don’t know why I’m standing above him in the middle of the night.
Then he opens his arms as if he was expecting me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that I would come to him tonight. I drop into the blankets, and his arms fold around me, warm and secure.
I curl into his chest and fall into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 25