The guard who stepped forward pulls off his visor and unzips his hazard suit. He’s young, with alabaster skin and long black hair with a single streak of white at his temple, just like Dax used to have. He gives us a broad smile, revealing curved white incisors. Vampire enthusiast. I wonder if he’s had his stomach lined so he can digest blood.
‘Welcome to Sunnyvale,’ he says. ‘We’re sorry to have brought you in like this, but we couldn’t risk letting you go, not with such precious cargo. We’ve set up quarters for you all, and you’re free to move about the town as you like. You’re not prisoners. We just want your help with the vaccine, and then you’ll all be free to leave.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ Leoben mutters. ‘Very generous of you.’
‘You’ll want to shower and change,’ the man continues, flashing his fangs. ‘My people can help you settle into your quarters now, but Miss Agatta will have to come with me to HQ.’
Dax steps forward, his face paling. ‘You can’t just take her.’ He thinks they’re going to do the procedure now, that I’m about to die. He doesn’t realize that the Skies don’t have the kind of programmers who could take my father’s file and translate it into a procedure this quickly. That’s what Dax is here for. That’s why my father made him part of this. He’s one of the few people on the planet with the skills to run the decryption.
‘What’s happening?’ Cole asks, narrowing his eyes. He turns to Dax. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll talk to them,’ I say, giving Dax a meaningful look. ‘I mean it. I’ll be OK.’
Dax nods reluctantly, and Cole gives me a suspicious, lingering stare as I follow the guard.
I hope I’ll be OK.
CHAPTER 31
The guard takes me through blocks of tree-lined streets filled with rows of clean, pretty houses. Some have gardens bursting with beans, herbs, and perfect-looking tomatoes that are probably genehacked to hell and back. We stop outside one of the larger houses, which looks normal except for the grid of metal welded over its walls. It forms a building-size Faraday cage that should stop any wireless transmissions from coming into or out of it. The guard leads me up the worn stone steps, through an iron door, and into the beating heart of Novak’s network.
Inside, the floor is covered with wires snaking between banks of computers, with glazed-eyed technicians jacked into them. Almost everyone is clearly running a serious amount of what Cartaxus calls ‘nonstandard’ code. Some of it makes the guard’s vampire teeth look tame. One woman has a lion’s mane that stretches down her back, another has three glossy lenses embedded in the back of her head, and a man carrying a roll of wire has a tail that twitches when he looks up and sees me.
‘Catarina.’ Novak smiles and strides across the room, dressed in the uniform I recognize from her broadcasts: black pleather with glowing cobalt stripes across her shoulders. She looks younger in person, early thirties at most, and there’s something eerie about her eyes. One of them has a too-bright sheen that means the eye is probably synthetic – a tiny camera wired up to let her see in extra wavelengths. It’s sure to be useful, but it’s creepy as hell to look at.
In fact, everything about her is kind of creepy.
‘I’m so happy to meet you after all this time.’ She reaches out to shake my hand. A silver stud glints on the side of her nose, and a tattoo of a double-helix curls up her neck, disappearing into her scarlet hair. Her grip is firm, but her fingers are cold, matching the steeliness of her gaze. ‘I’ve been worried about you ever since you broke off our conversation last week.’
I look down at the dead triphase still dusted across my skin. ‘You have a funny way of showing your concern for my safety.’
She just smiles. ‘You’re my best hacker, Bobcat. Of course I was worried. I sent Agnes over to check on you, but I didn’t hear back. I thought about sending a search team, but we received an anonymous tip-off that you were travelling across the country with an encrypted copy of a vaccine. When we heard from Marcus, we decided we had to do everything in our power to find you. I’m so glad you agreed to join us.’
I frown. An anonymous tip-off? It must have been Agnes. But if she got in touch with Novak, why didn’t she contact me?
‘I’m happy to help release the vaccine,’ I say, ‘but I do have some demands.’
Novak blinks. ‘Demands?’
‘I’m sure you’ve read the code that explains the decryption?’
She nods, and something in her expression tells me my guess was right – she’s read the code, her people know it uses my body to unlock the vaccine, but they don’t know much more about it than that. Only Dax and I are familiar enough with my father’s style of coding to understand the intricacies of the procedure so quickly. That gives me an edge. If I play my cards right, I might be able to bluff my way to some kind of leverage.
‘Then you’ll know that the vaccine won’t be properly decrypted unless I allow it,’ I say. ‘My father wrote it that way, so Cartaxus could never force me to decrypt it. I’ll only allow it to be decrypted to my specifications, and only if it’s going to be distributed freely, to every survivor on the surface and in the bunkers.’
Novak’s eyes narrow.
Everything I just said is a lie, but it has enough of a ring of truth to make it believable. I don’t need to be willing to decrypt the vaccine – I don’t even need to be awake. My cells are all that matters, but Dax and I are the only people who know that.
‘Yes,’ she says finally, ‘I’m aware of that. But there are some things you should be aware of, Miss Agatta.’
‘Like what?’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Things that your father, perhaps, should have told you long ago.’
Novak says she needs to prepare something, so she leaves me to wait in a room filled with photographs documenting the last two years. One image is blurred at the edges, taken from an ocular implant, showing a riot in a busy downtown street. I’ve seen the picture before. It was taken when a bus carrying a dozen second-stagers to quarantine broke down in Chicago. Someone panicked and opened the door, and the scent washed into the street, triggering one of the largest documented occurrences of the Wrath. The madness gets worse in crowds. Normally it drives you towards the infected, but in a crowd, the hysteria grows, and people turn on each other blindly.
By the time the Wrath wore off that day, more than a hundred bodies littered the streets.
I chew my thumbnail, staring at the wild eyes of the people in the photograph. There’s no worse feeling than catching the scent and knowing you’re slipping into the Wrath – that you’re about to hurt people but can’t stop yourself. I can’t help but wonder if it’s the same way Cole feels when his protective protocol kicks in.
‘Miss Agatta?’
I jump, spinning round. A leylined guard is waiting by the door. ‘We’re ready for you. Just this way.’