Cole’s grip on my shoulder tightens.
Dax jumps out into the rain. He stalks to the side of the road, sniffing the air. ‘Do you smell that?’
Cole draws in a slow breath, narrowing his eyes. ‘Ozone. I thought it was the lightning.’
Dax shakes his head, scanning the road. He drops to his knees, swiping one finger across the asphalt. It comes up coated with silver. His eyes glaze over for a second before cutting to me. ‘This is triphase. It’s all over the road.’
I swallow, bringing up my own mud-streaked hands, inspecting them in the glow of the headlights. My fingers are shaking, dotted with rain, but there’s a strange glint to my skin that shouldn’t be there – tiny, iridescent specks of silver. A sheen of nanobots, just like the ones genkits and panels build, but these aren’t coded for healing.
They’re coded for killing.
Triphase is built to destroy, to chew up every organic molecule of every living thing it comes in contact with. I look at Cole and Leoben, seeing the same silver sheen on their feet, their hands, their necks.
We’re all covered with it.
‘How did this get here?’ Cole asks.
‘It’s in the air,’ Leoben says, grimacing. ‘Shit, it’s everywhere. Why aren’t the little bastards eating us?’
‘They haven’t been activated yet.’ Dax’s voice is distant. ‘They’re coded, waiting to be set off, and they haven’t been here long. It’s like they’ve just come down in the storm.’
Cole and Leoben both freeze and lift their eyes at the same time. I follow their gaze up into the rain, squinting through my fingers. Dark clouds cover the sky, still dropping rain in lashing sheets, but through the storm I can make out a hint of something else.
Something dark, moving in a loose formation.
Drones.
Leoben steps instantly closer to Dax, shouldering his rifle.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Lieutenant,’ a voice booms from the sky. Sharp, female, cocky. I know the voice from somewhere, but I can’t quite place it. ‘In the event of their destruction, these drones are programmed to send out a pulse that will activate the triphase. Our scientists estimate that it will take you approximately fourteen seconds to die.’
‘What do you want?’ Cole shouts up. ‘We don’t have anything of value.’
‘Quite the contrary. You have an end to this hideous nightmare.’ Spots of light flicker on across the sky, revealing a network of at least a hundred drones hovering above us. They drop slowly, until I can pick up the whine of their propellers, then pause and splash down pinprick beams of light on to the road.
The beams dance through the rain, catching the droplets as they fall, gradually intersecting to form the life-size shell of a woman. She floats in midair, her torso dropping away into vectors of light that glitter on the silver-sheened road. Her face is distorted, rippling as the rain rushes through the rudimentary hologram, but I’d still recognize that trademark smile anywhere.
My hands curl into fists. ‘Novak.’ The leader of the Skies. The woman I’ve spent the last two years working for. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
She spreads her hands. ‘We’re here to help you, Catarina. You’ve had a difficult journey, what with Lieutenant Franklin being shot. We’ve been impressed by your determination, but we think it’s time you got the help you need to complete this mission.’
I shiver, staring at her, my clothing soaked through. How does she know Cole was shot? How does she know anything?
It suddenly hits me. ‘Marcus.’ I turn to Cole. ‘Marcus put them on to us.’
‘Yes indeed,’ Novak says. ‘It seems that his wife spontaneously developed hypergenesis after installing an app from your arm. Unfortunately her body was already running a considerable amount of code. From what Marcus told me, it was a miracle they were able to save her.’
My breath rushes from me. Amy. I hadn’t even thought about her. I was so angry that I didn’t realize the code he took might do the same thing it did to me: bubble the skin off her back. It would only have taken a few hours to install; it must have kicked in just after we left.
‘Marcus was furious, naturally,’ Novak continues, ‘so he sent me everything he’d downloaded from both of your panels, to make sense of what had happened.’
My stomach lurches. Cole stiffens, his eyes darting to mine.
‘What we found in your panel, Catarina,’ Novak says, giving me a cold smile, ‘was so complex that it would take our best coders years to unravel. But the message in your arm, Lieutenant, told me everything I needed to know. It looks like Miss Agatta is the key we’ve all been waiting for.’
CHAPTER 30
Novak’s hologram doesn’t listen when I tell her that we need to get to the lab in Canada, to use the equipment my father left for us. She doesn’t understand that the procedure we’re going to run is so complex and specific that it could go wrong in countless different ways. She doesn’t believe Leoben when he tells her that Cartaxus is monitoring the Skies network, that even talking to her has now given them our position.
She doesn’t listen at all, and since she’s the one controlling the triphase on our skin, there isn’t much we can do about it.
‘We’re screwed,’ I say to Cole as we climb back into the jeep, our clothes soaked through from the rain, glittering with the triphase. It’s all over us, and there’s no scrubbing it off. It’s in our lungs now, wedged between our cells. The faintest blip from one of Novak’s drones will activate it and chew us into dust unless we follow her demands. We have to follow a route she gave us to Sunnyvale, the secret Skies HQ I’ve heard about but have never actually seen. The drones will follow us. They will watch our every move, ready to send a signal on Novak’s command and activate the triphase. When we get to the Skies base, she wants to unlock the vaccine live, in one of her broadcasts.
Of course she does.
I pull my door shut, shoving the wet hair from my face. ‘If Leoben’s right about Cartaxus spying on the Skies, they probably heard that whole conversation. We just stole one of their cloneboxes. They’re going to come after us.’
‘I’m sure they will.’ Cole’s voice is low, furious. He grips the steering wheel until his knuckles bloom white.
‘We could run,’ I whisper, glancing through the window at the drones. ‘We could call their bluff.’
‘No.’ He shakes his head, starting the engine. ‘Not like this. We can’t do anything until we get this stuff off our skin.’ We roll back from the splintered tree and swing back on to the highway. Leoben’s jeep follows us, a few car lengths behind, its headlights forming coronas of light in the rain. ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I’m not so sure they’re bluffing.’
‘They won’t kill us,’ I say. ‘They need the copy of the vaccine that’s in your arm, and they need me to decrypt it.’