A Girl From Forever (The Forever Institute series Book 1)

by Yolanda McCarthy

  A polite notice on the wall tells me that this fire door should be kept closed at all times. Its red plastic is cool to touch, despite the smoke drifting under it, reaching for my ankles. I put my palm on the door and push through, into the serum laboratory.

  Heat wafts over me, as if the air itself has been burning. I pull my jumper up to cover my mouth, trying to block out the taste of burning plastic, and peer through the smoke, standing with my weight on my good leg. The other leg burns hot, so hot.

  The rows of machines aren’t gleaming anymore, they’re blackened, twisted into weird metal sculptures, and the external wall is almost entirely missing, broken concrete and steel rods framing the night sky outside. KHH hit the lab, despite Rehan’s worries. Rehan and I didn’t need to come here at all.

  Unless he lied to me, and he’s here to steal the serum, not destroy it. I’m not sure if I care anymore. Except if I’m being lied to. I really hate lies.

  The laboratory has been hit, almost entirely destroyed. Small fires play across machines where they’ve found fuel, and at the edges of the missing wall, the flames are small and decorative. The fire isn’t spreading, at least for now, because the blackened floor is scattered with puddles where sprinklers tried to put out the fire. Looks like KHH’s second hit put out the sprinklers. The floor is covered with broken glass: the blast destroyed the glass cabinets, and the rows of serum bottles that used to line this room.

  A movement catches my eye. Past the smouldering machines in the centre of the room, I see a dark figure, his back to me as he sweeps bottles from the few undamaged shelves in the corner of the room, filling a bag. Betrayal grabs me again, and my leg suddenly burns more fiercely. Rehan was lying, he did want the serum all along.

  “Rehan?” My voice is so quiet that it hardly qualifies as a gasp, but the figure spins around. It isn’t Rehan. It’s John.

  The fire door thuds closed behind me. A second, I’ve been here only a second. Time is stretchy. I realise that I’m swaying, and place a hand against the wall.

  “Fern. Our broken little butterfly.” John’s eyes flicker over me, and fail to find my gun, still tucked in the back of my waistband. He smiles. “Come to collect?” He makes a sweeping gesture at the shelves. “There’s a little damage, but – why not, feel free.” He grabs his bag and moves to the next cupboard.

  A door at the other end of the room shakes, and I realise that Rehan went the wrong way around the corridors. He’s gone in a circle through the building, to the other side of the labs, and is locked out.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I say quietly.

  “A shame, the serum would give that leg a boost, and it’s not like you have to worry about another dose destroying any talent.” The words drift over his shoulder as he moves on to another cupboard, and glass bottles clink as he locates another batch of serum. I don’t get why he’s so keen to take it with him, he can make more, but I don’t care because suddenly I’m angry, so angry, that this man who took me from my mother, dictated my life, lied to me, shot me, can’t even be bothered to meet my eyes.

  So I pull out the gun and shoot the cupboard in front of John. He curses, tumbling backwards as glass and liquid spatters onto him, the bag flying out of his grasp, sliding across the laboratory floor, towards the cliff into night that used to be the exterior wall. He climbs to his feet, and now he’s looking at me, his hands raised, face pale.

  Two shots, pinging into metal. Behind John, Rehan is shooting at the other door’s lock.

  Any moment, KHH could hit the building again, or something in here could catch fire, explode. We have to get out of here, but I can’t let John escape, to restart all of this, to keep hunting children. I don’t want to kill him, but this isn’t about me. I have a duty.

  “You should have run,” I tell John, pointing the gun at him with a steady hand. “You could have made more serum.”

  “I can’t. Just let me take this, and go. I’ll leave Forever, leave you and your friends alone. Please.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you leave, you are the Institute.”

  He’s shaking his head frantically. “You don’t understand. It’s not me, it was never me.”

  He’s lying, must be. Or all this…

  John babbles on. “You think a man clever enough to make the serum is stupid enough to be its public face?”

  Rehan is silent outside, now. Listening, or working on the door?

  John is moving slowly towards me.

  “Get back!” I snap. “Where are my friends?”

  “It’s not me you should be angry with, Fern, it was never me. Let me tell you a story,” soothes John. “A story about a man – call him Paul. Born into another time, with less technology, but also fewer restrictions. Paul was a scientist. His experiments involved blood, the blood of unborn children, but Paul was not ashamed of what he did, for he discovered what every scientist before him had only dreamed of, the secret of eternal life.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care who you are, or about Paul or whatever. Where are my friends?”

  “They’re fine. Safe! They think that this is all a drill, they’re locked in upstairs. I can take you to them, let me show you.”

  There’s a small explosion at the locked door, then the door crashes into the room, Rehan following, panting, his gun swinging around, past me, settling at John. I hold my breath, waiting for the shot, but Rehan has questions of his own.

  “Were you there when they killed my father?” Rehan asks conversationally.

  John tilts his head. “Who are you?”

  “Rehan Silver.”

  I realise with a jolt that I’ve never known Rehan’s surname.

  “I wasn’t, I didn’t know about that operation until it was over.” John shifts away, then stops as Rehan clicks off the safety catch on his gun.

  “Liar.”

  John looks to me. “Fern, perhaps you could persuade your young friend to put his gun down as well, so we can talk in a civilised fashion?”

  I don’t speak, although I suddenly realise that my gun’s been pointing at the floor since Rehan entered the room. I jerk it back up.

  Rehan is moving closer to John, too close for me to risk shooting at John. “Who killed my father? Where are they?”

  John holds out his hand, uncurling the fingers. A small bottle lies on his palm, unlabelled, but we all know what it is. It’s the reason John came back to the burning lab. It’s the reason we’re all here. He holds out the bottle of serum to Rehan. “Would you like to live forever?”

  The question hangs in the air, but then Rehan sneers. “I don’t think so.”

  John’s brow furrows slightly in incomprehension. “Everything that you hate in the world, everything you’d like to change – you can. One lifetime, two, that’s far too short to achieve anything – but the serum, this will give you the time to do anything you want. Be anything you want.”

  John told me that the serum only gives you an extra year, unless you were already dosed as a foetus. More lies.

  Rehan’s face is expressionless, as he steps forward, closer and closer until he’s standing in front of John. My heart stutters, but then the tip of his gun slowly pushes John’s hand away. John’s forehead wrinkles slightly, like he can’t understand, but he lets his outstretched hand carry on moving away from Rehan – towards me.

  I was dosed in utero, according to John. But I’ve no talent, so what happens if I take a second dose? Would the serum give me a year, like it does to people who weren’t dosed in utero? Or would it teach my cells how to renew forever? I stare at the bottle in his hand, at the light reflecting on its glass.

  “I was always going to give it to you,” he says softly to me. “To all of you. Did this boy tell you that you weren’t immortal? You were as good as. You just didn’t need the serum until you were adult, but you were part of Forever, it was always the plan to give it to you all.”

  “That’s not what you said before.”

  He changes tack again. “Befo
re doesn’t matter, the future does. Ask your friend to put down his gun so we can talk. Anything you want, everything is possible.”

  “Rehan,” I say.

  “No way, Fern. This guy started it all. Everyone that died – even that girl you saw – it’s all on him. He’s not walking out of here.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to let him go. But I am asking you not to kill him.”

  “Why? You want to save him?” His gun gestures at John in disgust.

  “No. You.” People have died because of Rehan, but he’s not a murderer. In this flickering light I can see the scars on his soul so clearly, and I can’t let him add any more, I want to heal them. If anyone is going to kill John, it should be me.

  John lunges forward while Rehan is distracted, grabbing Rehan’s wrist and directing the gun upwards as Rehan fires. Bullets slam into the ceiling, again, again. Chunks of plaster already weakened by the mortar begin to fall, stamping out the tiny flames where they land, puffing up clouds of concrete dust.

  This time I don’t even think about it. My gun jerks. My bullet hits John in the thigh, just where he got me.

  John staggers, staring at his bleeding leg with an open mouth. Then more ceiling is coming down and they’re leaping apart, Rehan diving towards me, John tumbling back towards the missing wall. He should get back from the edge, but his bag of serum is silhouetted against the sky as it spins through the air, and instead of moving to safety John makes a lunge for the bag, slipping and sliding in his own blood as more ceiling falls, hiding him in a puff of dust and smoke.

  Rehan uses his body to shelter me as more plaster comes down, but I push away from his chest, my eyes searching for John, he can’t get away, this has to end…

  A chunk of ceiling hits John in the back, his knees give way, and he stumbles forward, towards the edge where floor meets sky. It’s just a silent moment, less than a moment… He’s gone. Not even an immortal can survive a fall from the sixth floor of a building. I think.

  I shake off Rehan, and crawl forwards through the rubble, past the last few flickering flames, towards the jagged edge of the building, squinting against the wind which is blowing dust at my eyes. My fingers reach the edge first and I lie very still as I shift forward, peering down through the night, my hair swirling around me in the night breeze. I have to see John’s body, have to know that it’s over. But it’s dark, and down there people are running in all directions, reminding me that any moment, someone could decide to hit the building again.

  I crawl back away from the edge, and brush against John’s bag of serum. He dropped it. I take it, glancing at Rehan, daring him to challenge me, to tell me not to take it. It’s for my friends, they have talent, it would stop them aging, permanently. Or… No, I don’t want it.

  I don’t even know if it would work on me.

  My leg throbs.

  Rehan says nothing, as I thread the bag’s drawstring through my belt loops and tie it there with knot after knot.

  “So.” I wave a hand at the flames flickering at the edge of the room, they’re only small, but I don’t know what chemicals are stored here. We must go. “This building seems to be sort of on fire?”

  “You’ve not seen anything yet.”

  I lean against the door, while Rehan pulls a bottle of something from his pack. Soon, he’s spraying gel around the room, over the cupboards, everything he can safely reach. He grabs my hand and pulls me through the lab exit. There’s a flare of light and a weird roar, and I glance over my shoulder to see that the white hot flames ripping along the gel. Napalm. He napalmed the labs, and no amount of dust from the collapsing ceiling will put out that fire.

  “My friends are upstairs,” I pant.

  “Not for long,” Rehan promises, as he lifts me into his arms, carrying me away from the labs as fast as he can.

  We both know that there’s no way I’m getting back up through the hole in the ceiling, but Rehan finds the fire stairs and up we go, his chest heaving under me.

  “I can feel them – this way,” he says as he runs up the narrow steps.

  But the stairs end in a wall.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Have we gone past the top level?” Rehan asks, frowning.

  “No,” I twist in Rehan’s arms, my eyes searching the wall and finding the hairline cracks. “It’s another of those concealed doors that they can’t see from the other side. Search for a button, a panel, or something.”

  He puts me down and looks around. Sure enough, there’s a lift-top panel at the top of the hand-rail. He flips it up and slaps the button inside, and I’ve never been so glad to hear that little chime, warning anyone near enough that the door is active.

  He moves to pick me up and I stop him, as the wall slides open. “It’s really not that bad, it’s not deep. Just – let me lean on your arm. You can’t carry me everywhere.”

  “We’ll see,” he mutters, looping my arm over his shoulder. He’s practically carrying me, but I feel less of a burden.

  We step into a corridor I’ve never seen before. The door in front of us is marked “Program 9A”. There’s an electronic keypad next to it.

  “Can you disable that?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  Rehan shoots off the lock.

  “That’s not what I meant!” I shove open the damaged door and we burst into a corridor that is just like my home, but not my home.

  A murmur of voices comes from my left and I don’t need Rehan to tell me where my friends are, I hobble over and slam my palm against the door, which swings open to reveal a dining room, so like mine. Not mine.

  Ten faces look up. Ten chairs scrape back as the teenagers stand. But I’ve never seen these people before.

  For a split second we’re all frozen, as Rehan peers around me.

  “Vol!” shouts the tallest boy. “Get them!”

  I don’t think about the fact that we’re armed and they’re not. I think about whether they’ve taken all the daily ‘self-defence’ classes I grew up with. I shove Rehan and we back out of the room. I try to run, fail.

  “Not your friends?” he asks, pausing to lift me into his arms.

  “No!”

  If these people are anything like my friends, then to them, we’re terrorists: a bloodthirsty menace with mutating brains who need to be put down for our own good before we become fully psychotic. But the floor below is still burning, with fires Rehan and I started. These people who are chasing us, trying to kill us, are our responsibility. It’s our fault they’re in danger.

  We dash through a maze of white hallways and fire doors, blasts ringing in my ears as Rehan shoots off a lock at the end of the hall, then another one on the next wing, labelled 10A. I wonder how many bullets he has left.

  “In here,” Rehan says in a loud whisper, and I want to tell him that it’s ok to use telepathy, I don’t care anymore, I never even expected him to keep that promise, but I’m panting and it’s hardly the time as he drops me in an empty classroom, where I stare around wildly while Rehan hauls furniture in front of the door, building a barricade. I shove tables to him.

  Those people we saw aren’t armed. They have nothing with which to break down the door. But what talents do they have? Do they have a Katrina? Could we hold our barricade in place against a telekinetic?

  There’s angry shouting in the hall, and shoulders slam ineffectually against the door. They don’t have a Katrina. What talents do they have? I feel sick.

  “Get the laser cutter out of my pack,” Rehan hisses to me. Then, “We’re not here to hurt you!” He shouts through the door. There’s a pause in the voices, then they burst into laughter. They laugh and laugh as they renew their slamming against the door, hyenas wearing down prey.

  They sound drunk, or drugged. Perhaps they are.

  “Cut a hole to the roof,” Rehan says, nodding at the ceiling as he holds the barricade in place. I fumble with the cutting thing. If they follow us, we can lead them to the roof. Surely once they see the building’s b
urning, they’ll listen.

  Or kill us…

  I grab tables, chairs, and stack them. I can almost reach the ceiling. I stack another. This is just a classroom, but as I balance another chair on a stack of tables, subtle differences jump out at me. The bright coloured spines on the books on the shelves. The simplicity of the chart on the wall, polar bears and lions smiling around the numbers. My stomach sinks, my heart understanding before my mind.

  “Fern, what are you doing?” hisses Rehan as I abandon my stack and wrestle the laser cutter from his pack. I don’t answer, concentrating on my task as I cut a waist-high doorway in the wall. It’s only plasterboard, and a moment later I’m on my hands and knees, crawling through the hole into the dormitory.

  The children of Program 10A stare back at me from their cots. They’re too old to be in cots – three years old, perhaps four – but I guess Forever prefer cages wherever possible. The cots have mesh lids.

  There are bullet holes in the centre of the floor, from Rehan’s gunshots downstairs.

  “What is it?” Rehan asks.

  “Children.”

  He curses and abandons the barricade, crawling through the wall. When she sees him, the child nearest me starts to cry. I pick her up. A girl, eyes dark but bright, she reminds me of Katrina. When I lift her, she stops crying and starts sucking her thumb instead, while her other hand grabs a fistful of my hair like she’s never going to let go. Rehan looks like his brain is imploding.

  “You said everyone else had gone to the lower floors,” I hiss. I’m furious with Rehan, for his mistake, but mostly for firing into the ceiling so casually. Maybe we are terrorists after all. The floor below our feet is hot, and I remember the fires Rehan set. A line from one of Geraldine’s books drifts through my head. When fighting monsters, you yourself may become a monster.

  “I thought they had! I can’t sense children, their minds are too unformed. I thought I felt something… Lab animals perhaps – I never thought…” He stares around the room, picking up another child automatically. “I didn’t know. We have to get them to the roof.”