Cole sighs. ‘Look, Cat, I’ve been through a lot, but so has everyone. You think the kids who’ve lived through Hydra are happy? Some of them have eaten their parents. This a hard world, and your father made me hard enough to survive it.’
‘Stop defending him.’ I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘He was looking after me while he was hurting you. It’s not right. He locked you up –’
Cole cuts me off. ‘He created the vaccine. That’s all that matters. There’s no such thing as right any more – that ended when the plague hit. Sometimes we need to do awful things to stop worse things from happening. You’re still thinking in terms of right and wrong, but this is war, and the rules have changed.’
‘I know,’ I say, rubbing my eyes again. I know what he’s saying, and I felt the same way myself when I read the vaccine’s decryption code. He gave up his childhood, and I’m giving up my life, but that doesn’t mean I want to. It doesn’t make any of this OK.
The jeep’s dashboard flashes red all of a sudden, and I’m so angry and confused that I don’t see the girl until we’re almost on top of her.
CHAPTER 29
‘Stop!’ I scream, wrenching the steering wheel, sending us flying off the road. The jeep bounces through a barbed-wire fence and slams into a tree. Momentum carries me forward until an airbag hits my chest, bringing up a burst of shimmering stars in my vision.
‘Catarina!’ Cole shoves the airbag away. His eyes are black and terrified. ‘What the hell? Are you OK?’
‘The girl!’ I yank my seat belt off and kick the door open, jumping out into the rain. The dark storm clouds above us make it look like twilight, even though it’s the middle of the day. The ground is muddy and slick, and the air smells like lightning. Every time I blink, I see the girl’s emerald eyes in my mind, her ash-black hair flying across her face, lifted high on the wind.
What was she doing in the middle of the road?
‘We didn’t hit her, did we?’ I shout, squinting, one arm held above my eyes to block the constant assault of the rain. ‘What happened to the jeep?’
Cole just stares at me from his seat. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The dashboard, Cole! It went red, and we almost hit her. I have to find her – she might be hurt.’
I crouch down to search under the jeep, wincing as pain shoots through my knee. Part of me knows we can’t have missed her. I didn’t see her until it was too late, and if we hit her at that speed, there’s no way she’s still alive. I limp round the jeep, scanning the hood. The black metal is slick with rain and barely scratched, though the tree we hit is now a splintered wreck. There’s no sign of blood on the bumper, no hint of the girl at all.
‘Cole, I need your help. I can’t hear anything without my tech.’
His door swings open, and I turn in a circle, squinting through the rain. All I can see are empty wheat fields stretching into the haze of the storm. We’re miles from civilization, deep in abandoned farmlands.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t families still hiding out here, though.
‘Maybe she’s OK,’ I say. ‘Maybe we didn’t hit her.’ My boots sink into the mud as I limp back along the skid marks and up to the road. The highway to the north is empty, the asphalt glistening in the rain, and the only movement to the south is the distant headlights of Leoben’s jeep.
‘Catarina …’
‘She was here,’ I say, staring into the rain. But there’s no sign of her anywhere. No footprints, no blood. Just empty fields and shuttered houses. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere she could have run to. ‘Doesn’t the jeep have a recording or something?’
Cole frowns. ‘It’s not responding. I think the crash rebooted it.’
‘Well, I saw her, I swear, but it’s like she just disappeared.’
Cole watches me carefully, the rain trickling down his arms, glistening on his eyelashes. ‘There are no human life signs or bodies around us. Maybe you saw a bird.’
‘A bird?’ I choke out. I scrub my eyes. I only saw the girl for a second, but it was enough to know she was real. Standing like a statue in the road, staring at us as we hurtled closer.
‘There’s nobody here, Cat.’ Cole looks more troubled than I’ve seen him, like I’m hurt and he doesn’t know how to protect me. ‘What did she look like?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, shivering in the rain. ‘She was little, just a kid with green eyes and black hair, and she was wearing a white … gown, or something. Like a …’ I trail off. A hospital gown. That’s what I was going to say. But that sounds completely insane. What would a child in a hospital gown be doing in the middle of the road? A jolt runs through me as it comes together in my mind.
Cole is right. She wasn’t real. The little girl wasn’t a child lost in the rain; she was a hallucination of Jun Bei, looking just like she did in my father’s file. I was thinking about the Zarathustra kids just before the crash. I can’t believe I just hallucinated.
‘Oh shit,’ I whisper, bending over, pressing my hands to my mouth. I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m starting to see things.
We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I just crashed us into a tree. How am I going to hold it together long enough to unlock the vaccine?
‘Maybe we should take a break,’ Cole says. ‘You’ve been through a lot.’
I scrub my hands over my face, scanning the road. Maybe I did see a bird, something my brain caught hold of and turned into one of the Zarathustra kids. But there’s no sign of an animal. Just a face burned into my mind that’s quickly joined by the other four children. I rub my eyes again, over and over, until all I see is the empty road. Just the rain, the fields, and Cole’s troubled eyes.
‘I’m OK,’ I breathe, straightening.
Cole’s brow furrows. In the dim light of the storm the leylines curled around his face look like slivers of pure darkness cut into his skin. Water trickles from his close-cropped hair, weaving down the planes of his face.
I can’t stop staring at every pore, every drop of rain on his skin …
I blink. ‘I think my ocular tech is waking up again.’ I pull back the gauze wrapped around my forearm. A single dot of cobalt smiles up from my bruised skin. It blinks once every two seconds. That means the first wires have grown, linking up to the tech from my old panel. There’s still no battery, no function cores, no operating system, but it might explain why I just saw Cole’s ex-girlfriend in the rain.
‘It must have been a glitch in my tech when the wires connected,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I screwed up.’
He sighs, relieved. ‘Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get you out of the rain.’ He takes me by the shoulder to guide me off the road just as Leoben’s jeep screeches to a stop behind us.
‘What’s happening?’ Leoben yells out his window.
‘Nothing,’ Cole calls back. ‘Let’s keep moving. Catarina thought she saw something, but it was a mistake.’
‘I don’t think it was.’
Cole stiffens, turning round. ‘Why not?’
Leoben’s door swings open, and he climbs out of his jeep with a rifle in one hand. ‘Because I didn’t hit the brakes. The jeep stopped on its own, and now it won’t start again.’