‘No!’ I grab my father’s coat, but Dax wrestles me away. I kick and thrash, but his grip is tight as he jogs to the back of the house with me clutched against him.
It’s no use. I can’t fight. All I can do is cry. Cartaxus is going to take my father, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
The voices outside grow louder. Heavy boots stomp across the porch. Dax drops me and yanks open the panic-room door.
‘Be safe, Princess,’ he whispers. He shoves me into the cramped, padded closet, then kisses me urgently, crushing his lips to mine.
The last thing I see is his face, white with fear, as soldiers burst into the house.
Then he slams the door on me, and everything goes silent.
I know there are Cartaxus soldiers outside, and I know they’re shouting, smashing, swarming into the cabin, but I can’t hear a thing. The only sound I hear is my heart as it pounds against my ribs, loud enough that the padded walls and their interference circuits can’t possibly be enough to hide me. The soldiers must hear me. I clutch my hands over my mouth to muffle my breathing, waiting for a black-gloved fist to yank open the door.
But nobody does.
Ten minutes pass in blank, terrified silence, until my traitorous heart begins to slow of its own accord. There’s only so much adrenaline your body can manufacture while you’re standing in complete sensory deprivation. An hour passes, then two. Finally, I can’t wait any more and force myself to flick the pressure lock on the panic room’s wall and swing open the door.
Night has fallen, and the cabin’s lights are out. The living-room window has been shattered, but the glass is already regrowing in snowflake-like crystals that split the moonlight into rainbows. The room is a mess. Dead shards of glass are strewn across the floor, along with scattered gold feathers, muddy boot prints and a pool of glistening blood.
I stand on shaking legs above it, gripped with a fiercer anger than I have ever known.
They shot him. I know it without checking. Cartaxus burst in here, and they shot my father and dragged him away.
My genkit confirms that the blood belongs to my father, and I find no bullet casings even after scouring the room. My rudimentary panel can’t show me the VR feed from the security cameras, and they don’t convert easily into 2D, but I finally manage to coax out a grainy, black-and-white feed on my little laptop genkit’s screen. It shows my father kneeling on the floor beside Dax, both their heads lowered, their hands raised as twelve soldiers storm into the room.
Orders are shouted. Twelve semi-automatic rifles are aimed at two unarmed men – two scientists Cartaxus needs to build them a vaccine. My father turns his head and stands suddenly to reach for something on the wall, and when I see this on the video, I start to cry. I know what he’s reaching for. He wants the photograph of my mother, from when I was nothing more than a gentle curve beneath her dress. As my father stands, he barely manages to take a step before a soldier fires two bullets, the flashes saturating the feed.
One bullet in the thigh, another in the bicep, avoiding the femoral artery, doing musculature damage that healing tech will fix in a week.
In the grainy, stuttering video, my father slumps to the floor, and Dax screams. It’s silent, but I can hear him screaming. The soldiers drag him and my father out of the cabin, and the copters send a hurricane of feathers through the windows as they leave.
The night burns into morning. I sit alone in the empty cabin as the viewscreen reports a steady stream of outbreaks around the world. I kneel on the floor with the photograph of my mother in my hands, beside a pool of my father’s blood, and make him a promise I intend to keep.
No matter what happens, I will do what he told me. I will stay safe, and stay free.
I will never let them take me.
CHAPTER 3
Present Day – Two Years After the Outbreak
The sunset is a single hyphen of light on the horizon by the time I’m done with the infected man’s body. The glimmer of moonlight on the lake’s surface guides me to the shore, where I shove my filthy sleeves back and scrub the dirt and blood from my hands. The water is icy against my skin. Stray feathers dot the surface, fallen from the pigeons that are still overhead, silhouetted against the stars.
I’ll sequence this flock’s DNA tomorrow, but I already know that all I’ll find are lines from the same poem, growing more garbled as the birds mutate. Each new generation brings more typos. Whole words collapse into nonsense. I’m starting to think that was the poet’s message all along.
My hands shake in the water, jittery in the aftermath of the trigger response to the infected man’s scent. Its official name is intermittent acute psychotic anthropophagy, facilitated by the neurotransmitter epinephrine-gamma-2. Most people just call it the Wrath. The beast that claws into your mind, taking your humanity. It’s hard to remember the details of what happens when you yield to it. Everything blurs into a fog of teeth and flesh and instinct. Some people don’t realize they’ve succumbed to it until they stumble away and see the blood on their hands.
you OK bobcat?
Agnes’s text burns white in my vision. Blocky Courier script, the only font my measly graphics card has built in. The words swing across the lake’s surface as I tilt my head, moving with my vision until I blink them away. Fine, I reply, focusing on the word until my panel detects the thought. It ripples into my vision. I’ll be there soon … maybe an hour.
want me to get you
No. I splash my face. Going to drop into the market on the way. Got some slices to trade for ammo.
Slices of flesh, that is. There’s an immunity market in town where the locals gather to trade doses for food and bullets. I dragged the body as far from the cabin as I could, cut fifty doses from it and shoved them in my last freezepak, then smacked them against a tree until they froze. That’s enough to keep a person immune for years. Half will go to the market, and the rest will sit in the cabin’s solar freezer as my own personal supply. I won’t let myself run out again, not after tonight. This might have been the closest call I’ve had since the outbreak.
A herd of deer melts through the trees on the other side of the lake, coming down from the mountains for an evening drink. They approach the water cautiously, watching me with wide, reflective eyes, lifting their noses, confused by my scent. It wafts from my skin like a too-strong perfume. Sulphur and wood smoke – almost the same scent as the infected man, but missing a crucial note. My skin and hair, my clothes and breath, all stink of the plague, but I’m not infected.