Cole’s face blanks. He turns to stare back down the highway, his eyes blinking instantly to black.
‘No,’ I say, sensing his thoughts. ‘No, I need you here. We need to figure out how to stop this.’
‘It would only take a minute.’ He stares down the road. ‘I have a sniper rifle. I could do it from the hill.’
I close my eyes, pushing down the memory of Dax’s hands on me. His fingers around my neck, digging into my throat. A ball of rage spins in my chest, but vengeance isn’t what I need. That wasn’t Dax who hurt me; it was something else. The daemon he found, the four million lines added to the vaccine. I saw the change come over him as clear as day. It happened to everyone with the orange panels. It’s still happening to them.
We need to stop it.
‘I need a genkit,’ I say, pushing myself up, reaching for the side of the jeep. ‘If I can read the vaccine’s code, maybe I’ll understand what’s happening. Maybe there’s a way to turn this off.’
‘That’s a good idea –’ Cole starts, then freezes. ‘Lee just commed me. He couldn’t find Dax, and he’s on his way here. He said Cartaxus … Oh shit, they’re sending drones.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Cole throws a sleeping bag over me. ‘Lie down, stay low. I need you to hang on to something.’
‘Cole?’
He pulls the doors shut and climbs into the front.
‘Cole, what’s happening? They’re not going to attack, are they?’
He doesn’t reply. The jeep surges back down the freeway, and a high-pitched whine starts up in the distance. I scramble to my hands and knees, staring out the rear windows as points of light fly in over the mountains. Drones. Thousands of them, in a cluster-blast formation.
Enough to blow all of Sunnyvale to oblivion.
‘Wait, Cole!’ I yell. ‘Tell them to stop! You have to explain!’
The jeep races forward, screeching along the freeway.
‘They’re not listening to me,’ Cole calls back.
I grab his backpack to steady myself. ‘You have to try again. Dax is down there – they can’t kill him!’
We race round a corner, and I’m thrown into the window, staring in horror at the sky. The drones are hovering now, a thousand points of light in a geodesic dome above Sunnyvale’s ruined town centre. I open my mouth to shout to Cole, but it’s too late. The formation scatters, and I know it’s over.
I see the detonations before I hear them – brilliant streaks of light and a blinding flash that illuminates the midnight sky. Thousands of lives blink out of existence in the space of a heartbeat, blown into a cloud of dust.
The jeep races up the freeway, tyres screaming on the road.
Five seconds later the shockwave hits us and throws us into the air.
CHAPTER 41
When the darkness clears, I’m in a laboratory looking through a window at three mountains that rise in the distance, carpeted in verdant green forest. I can’t remember how I got here. I’m dressed in grey, my hands are small, and my fingernails are bitten down to stubs.
‘Careful, honey.’
I turn round to find my father behind me. He’s in a white lab coat with the Cartaxus antlers embroidered on the pocket.
‘You’re going to mess up the replication if you don’t watch those proteins.’ He points to the glowing desk in front of me, where the hologram of a curled strand of DNA hovers beside a few lines of code. The DNA spins as I brush it with my hand, zooming in until I see the flaw in my work.
‘Is this better?’ I focus until the image ripples and changes.
My father nods, resting one hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s perfect, good girl.’
Pride swells in my chest. I’ve been working so hard to please him, and I’m finally getting this right.
‘There’s something I want to talk about,’ he says, sitting beside me. He waves a hand, and the hologram blinks and disappears. ‘It’s about the Hydra virus. You know about it, don’t you?’
I nod. The scent, the detonations. I’ve been studying it for months.
‘So you know I’m working hard to find a vaccine, don’t you?’
‘Uh-huh,’ I say with a child’s voice. ‘I know you’ll make one. You’re so clever.’
The skin at the corners of my father’s eyes crinkles as he smiles. ‘There’s something I need your help with, but it’s going to be long and difficult. You’ll have to be very strong.’
‘I can do it,’ I say eagerly.
He smiles. ‘I know you can.’
‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Nothing yet. This is a special project. It will be hard, but we’ll be saving everyone if we get it right.’
I clutch my hands into little fists. ‘We’ll beat the virus. I know we will.’
‘Oh, we’ll do so much more than that, darling. We’ll be saving people from themselves.’
My father reaches for the glowing panel on my arm, but his fingers feel like fire where he touches me. The skin on my forearm splits and peels off in burning, brittle flakes. I jerk my arm away, clutching it to my chest, but the flakes are spreading fast, like cracks racing through glass.
‘What did you do?’ I gasp.
My father simply laughs as the cracks in my skin race up my neck, sending glowing flakes into the air like scraps of burning paper. My face blisters, burning away. I let out a scream, but my father just smiles down at me.
‘That’s my good girl.’
CHAPTER 42
I jolt awake, staring around wildly as the dream fades away. I’m on my stomach in the back of the jeep, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket. I can hear the steady sound of Cole’s breathing nearby, but I have no idea where we are.
We were leaving Sunnyvale; that’s the last thing I remember – the daemon, the orange panels, the fighting. We got on the road to escape it, and then …
Then Cartaxus bombed the valley.
The memory hits me like a punch. I close my eyes, seeing the pinprick lights of Cartaxus’s drones. So many lives, gone. I thought releasing the vaccine would bring the world back to normal.
Instead, I’ve made it worse.
I lift my head to look around, wincing as the movement sends a jolt of pain through my wounded shoulder. We’re parked in the forest, and the jeep’s back doors are open, the air heavy with the scent of pine and wood smoke. It’s just before dawn. A layer of mist is curling in from the trees, wafting across the dew-spotted grass. We’re in what looks like an old national park campsite, complete with a stained cinder-block restroom and a few blackened fire grates.
Cole is asleep on a mat beside the embers of a fire, his breathing steady and slow, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks cold, as though he lay down beside a warm fire and fell asleep before he could gather the energy to get a blanket. His eyes are lined with shadows, and a rash of dark stubble on his jaw tells me I’ve been unconscious for more than a few hours. At least one day, maybe two.