by Michael Ford
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
About the Author
Books by Michael Ford
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
“THE RULES KEEP US alive.”
He’d heard it a hundred times, so why hadn’t he listened? Why hadn’t he stayed put like he was supposed to?
“Dad?” Kobi whispered. He cut a path through coarse grass as tall as his shoulders, using his machete, then climbed a tangle of roots twisting out from the enormous trunk of a cedar. His eyes darted around the mutated undergrowth, searching for movement or for a sign his father might have come this way. There was nothing.
“I scout ahead; you stay exactly where you are until I come back and give you a signal. It’s how we move safely. Got it?”
Kobi had begged his dad to take him along, to let Kobi go with him out into the Wastelands, train him how to survive. “I’m nine years old, Dad,” he’d said. “I’m ready.”
He’d been so stupid.
Kobi raised an arm to push through a curtain of leafy vines.
“Examine everything. Never move without looking.”
Kobi froze.
Tiny serrated teeth edged along the lengths of the vines. The Waste had mutated them into flesh-eaters, Kobi realized. He peered up. High among the branches, a massive gull was trussed up inside a crisscrossing prison of tendrils. Acid sap dripped slowly over the carcass, dissolving it one feather at a time. Kobi saw a rib cage, melted flesh, a gleaming eyeball. He remembered what his dad had said: the ivy Chokerplants weren’t as deadly as the ones that lashed out from underground, but if they got you they killed you a lot slower.
Trembling, Kobi crouched beneath the Choker. He glanced up at the sharp-bladed feelers, inches from brushing his back. He stumbled.
“Never rush, Kobi!”
Kobi screwed his eyes shut for a moment. His heart pounded like a drum in his ears, and he worried the feelers would sense the tremors.
After a minute, he moved off again, taking each step with careful precision, until he was finally out of the Choker’s reach. “Dad?” Kobi called out as loud as he dared. “Where are you?”
He wanted to shout, to scream so his dad would hear him. But that would be suicide. Anything might hear. Chokers, wasps, wolves, bears, eagles.
Snatchers.
His dad had said the drones could pick up audio from five miles away.
Kobi bit his lip to stop himself whimpering. He was lost. Alone.
“Out here we’re prey, Kobi. Remember that. There are a hundred things that can kill us.”
It had been going so well, their first training session. But Kobi had gotten scared. When his father hadn’t returned after ten minutes, he’d rushed after him. Betrayed his trust. That was the worst thing—worse even than the ball of fear building in his gut now. I’ve let Dad down.
He heard a noise, to his left. Just a rustle.
“Dad?”
He walked quickly, placing each foot with care on the spongy, moss-covered ground. He ducked under a branch, feeling twigs scrape at his hair. Sunlight trickled through a break in the foliage just ahead. The clearing where he was supposed to wait! He’d managed to circle back. He could wait here for his dad. Kobi wiped his tears away and hurried on. It was going to be okay. His dad might never know he hadn’t waited.
Kobi burst through the veil of branches, tearing aside leaves bigger than his head.
His feet skidded in the mud as he stopped. It wasn’t the clearing at all. It was a rocky wharf.
He gazed out over the largest expanse of water he’d ever seen—stretching out for miles.
“Elliott Bay,” Kobi whispered. He’d seen it on maps. His breath shuddered in his chest at the size of it.
Huge patches of phosphorescence shimmered like spilled oil, and lily pads several feet across floated on the surface, sprouting flowers of every hue. Shreds of dense mist drifted in places, hovering over the surface. In the distance, on what must have been the far shore, colossal green monoliths soared into the clouds. Downtown Seattle. Bill Gates High School, where Kobi and his dad had made their base, was in West Seattle, a formerly residential area of the city. Unlike his dad, he’d never crossed the bridge to the downtown area, but he’d heard it was once home to two million people, before the Waste had wiped out the population and the genetically modified vegetation and animals had taken over.
Kobi was about to retreat from the bay and continue searching for his dad when his ears caught a sound: the soft slap of water. Then ripples began to pulse from a patch of mist, furrowing the surface until they reached the bank near his feet. When Kobi squinted, he could just make out a dark shape in the center of the lake, moving steadily parallel to the shore. His knees almost buckled as he took a slight sudden step forward. A sail? A boat!
His dad had always been so sure there were no other survivors, and if by a slim chance they were out there, they would be too hard to reach. But Kobi had always hoped. He could never get rid of the thought, a lingering, impossible dream that one day they might find others like them—kids his age, other families, people who they could rely on. And now, almost like a miracle, that day had really come. Here they were: survivors, just a few hundred yards away. Kobi found his voice. “Hey!” he called.
The boat kept going, drifting away into the mist.
“No! Wait!” Kobi shouted, waving his arms.
But the ship maintained its course, becoming a ghostly shape in the mist before disappearing entirely from view.
Kobi looked around for something to throw—a rock or a branch. Anything to get their attention. But there was nothing. He watched the mist again, pleading in his heart for them to turn around and come back. How could they not have heard him?
“Kobi!” called a distant, frantic voice. Dad. “Kobi, where are you?”
His eyes still on the water, Kobi shouted back. “I’m fine! I’m by the water. Dad, I—”
A vast gleaming fin sliced up from the depths, twenty yards out, and the surface ballooned upward as a massive body followed. Kobi staggered back.
What he’d seen, he realized, hadn’t been a boat at all. A wall of water overwhelmed the bank and crashed over him, freezing and sudden. The ground turned to slick mud, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Kobi felt the current snatch him up and suck his legs into the shallows. He twisted and clawed at the bank, but his fingers slid over the ground. And then he was under.
Kobi flailed. Water burned up his nostrils and into the back of his throat. He scrambled for purchase, but the bank dropped away suddenly. The churning water dragged him deeper. He couldn’t swim. He couldn’t breathe. But rearing above both of those fears was a greater terror: the creature looming out there in the murky water. His fingers brushed something slimy, and he recoiled, kicking out and striking a harder surface. A low, mournful sound—an eerie call—seemed to come from every direction at once. It was impossible to pinpoint. He felt the water stir again below, and looking down into the depths, he saw a flash of silver flesh, rolling, then a sickly yellow eye, watching him. It rolled back in a fleshy red socket, and the creature rose. The scale of its body seemed impossible. Frozen, Kobi took in the scarred flesh of its head
, a blunt nose, a mouth that stretched open like a crack in the ground. Rows of jagged teeth, each curved fang long enough to pierce right through Kobi’s body. . . .
Something clamped his upper arm, digging into the flesh, and pulled. Suddenly he was out of the water, being hauled to shore, slithering across the muddy bank. The water exploded upward, drenching him in its spray as a black-and-white body rose, then crashed down again. It was some sort of orca, Kobi realized, its skin gouged with scars and patches of red, raw flesh. Kobi watched it disappear beneath the surface as he was dragged farther from the water’s edge.
His dad was here, hands clamped on Kobi’s shoulders, pulling him to his feet. His eyes searched Kobi’s body frantically.
“Are you hurt? Did it bite you?” he was saying.
“I . . . No . . . I’m fine,” Kobi managed to reply.
His dad crouched in front of him, a look of utter panic on his face. “What the hell were you doing, son?”
“I . . . I thought it was a boat. Survivors.”
His dad looked incredulous, shaking his head. Then he pulled Kobi into an embrace and held him firm. Kobi could feel his father’s heart rattling.
“Never run off again,” he said, squeezing more tightly. “Got it?”
“Got it,” said Kobi.
His dad released him, staring hard and angry until Kobi couldn’t maintain eye contact. His face flushing red, he glanced down.
“Look at me, Kobi,” said his dad.
Kobi raised his gaze. His dad’s face wasn’t furious anymore. It was resigned. Sad, even.
“Son, there aren’t any survivors,” he said. He pointed at the city skyline across the bay. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. There’s no one.”
“But we survived,” said Kobi. “Maybe there are others. If they had a home and could get food like us—”
“There aren’t,” said his dad. “Trust me. Even if the predators didn’t get you over there the Waste would. There’s no medicine. The air is toxic. A human wouldn’t last a week.”
Together they watched the surface of the lake for a few seconds. It was completely still again, with no clue of the horror that lurked within. Kobi wondered if he’d ever get chance to go into the city. Probably not, after today.
“Come on,” said his dad. “Let’s get back to base.”
He stood, and helped Kobi to his feet as well, then folded an arm over Kobi’s shoulders. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said quietly, then sucked in a breath as if trying not to choke up. “I thought I lost you, son.”
Kobi reached up and touched the rough skin of his father’s hand on his shoulder, sliding his fingers through his dad’s. They felt real, but he knew they weren’t, and that made his heart ache too much to bear.
Kobi awoke from the dream. Though it wasn’t a dream. It was more than that. A memory. A flashback. Kobi had been having them often. Like his past invaded the present whenever he was most vulnerable. He pushed his legs out from under the sheets and sat up, visions of the Wastelands still around him, cast against the gray concrete walls of his bedroom. There was no natural light, only a blue night-light. Kobi didn’t like much other decoration. A few books, a couple of posters of his favorite movies he used to watch with Hales—classic black-and-white ones from almost a hundred years ago. Hales had liked those the best. Kobi realized his cheeks were moist, and he brushed the tracks away with his pajama sleeve.
“I thought I’d lost you. I thought I lost you, son.”
Hales’s words echoed again in Kobi’s foggy brain, causing him a spasm of hurt. “I was never your son,” he replied out loud.
“Kobi? You awake?” There was a knock at the door. Kobi wasn’t allowed a lock, and before he could say anything the steel door swung open. It revealed Asha, watching him with dark eyes filled with worry. Her thick, black hair was hanging to her shoulders, bunching at the collar of a beige fleece and drifting in the air over her scalp, from the static, Kobi guessed, of putting on the sweatshirt. In the blue lamplight, her brown skin shone the color of dusk.
“I sensed you,” she said. She tapped her temple. “This dream was really vivid.”
Kobi just nodded. Asha was a Receptor, a telepath who could sense the thoughts and emotions of all organisms contaminated by the Waste. Without waiting for an invitation, she strolled in and sat beside him. “You saw an orca? That’s what that thing was in the bay.”
“Yes,” said Kobi. He cleared his throat. “That was my first day training outside the school with Hales. After that we didn’t go out again for months. I still don’t like water—the ocean or lakes or anything. Not many of those around here.” He smiled at her.
She returned the smile for a second before looking away, wistful. “I’d like to see the ocean one day. We never saw it when we were with you in the Wastelands.”
“I guess there wasn’t much time for sightseeing.”
She sat down on the bed. Kobi didn’t need Asha’s telepathic powers to read the guilt on her face. “Not really,” she said. “But that’s the past now. We need to focus on the future.”
Like Kobi, Asha had grown up believing human society had been completely destroyed by the Waste after it was released into the environment over twenty years ago—the chemical that had been intended to accelerate the growth of crops but had instead spread through the environment, mutating plants and animals and killing humans. Until six months ago, she’d lived her whole life in a secure facility called Healhome. The scientists there, led by Melanie Garcia and calling themselves “Guardians,” had told Asha and the other kids that they had a natural resistance to the Waste. They said they were studying the kids’ resistance to find a cure. But it was all lies.
The truth was, only pockets of the world had been ruined by the Waste. Those had been cordoned off in quarantine zones; the rest of the world was intact. Healhome was really hidden away at the top of a skyscraper in the city of New Seattle—a hundred miles from the city now called Old Seattle, built as a symbol of humanity’s defiance against the Waste. Melanie had told the truth about one thing: she was CEO of CLAWS—the Corporation of Leading Anti-Waste Scientists. But they weren’t trying to find a cure. They just wanted their drugs to work well enough that the people of New Seattle would keep coming back for more. CLAWS had been experimenting on human embryos, contaminating them with Waste on purpose. Most died, but some survived, the Waste’s mutations giving them strange, superhuman abilities.
Kobi had been one of those embryos too, and the only one to develop complete Waste immunity. So when he was a baby, Dr. Jonathan Hales, a CLAWS scientist, had kidnapped him and taken him to Old Seattle, the heart of the Wastelands. He’d thought they would be safe there, long enough for Hales to develop from Kobi’s blood a real cure for the Waste. Hales knew that if CLAWS realized Kobi was entirely immune, they would kill him rather than see their empire threatened. Hales told Kobi he was his father so Kobi would never question anything he said.
Six months ago, CLAWS had dispatched Asha and two other Healhome kids to the Wastelands to find Kobi—an eleven-year-old boy called Fionn and Niki, who was fourteen like Asha, a year older than Kobi. After finding Kobi’s dad’s secret lab, Asha had called in reinforcements from CLAWS. Kobi didn’t blame her anymore—she had been manipulated. But Asha still found any mention of it awkward.
“Sorry. I don’t always mean to listen in on your dreams, you know,” Asha said. “I can’t control my powers when I’m sleeping. It’s not actually fun to live other people’s nightmares.”
Kobi nodded. “Right. You don’t have to apologize.”
“Have you told Mischik about this memory?” She pointed to the journal on his desk, where Kobi had been ordered to write down anything he remembered about Hales’s work. Next to it lay a map of Old Seattle that Kobi had labeled with all of Hales’s labs and supply caches.
“I’ve told Mischik about everything, just like he asked. But he doesn’t seem that interested.”
“He just wants you to keep focused on
the plan,” said Asha, echoing what Mischik had repeated over and over to Kobi.
Right. The plan. The one that means I’m stuck waiting around here.
He’d thought that joining the resistance against CLAWS would mean doing something. But so far all he’d done was wait.
Kobi stood up and moved to his small wardrobe. “Let’s head to the game room. I need to . . . do something. Blow off some steam.”
Asha watched him. “I know you’re frustrated, Kobi. I’m sure this place is pretty claustrophobic to you, coming from your old life outside. But we have to stay strong.”
“I know,” Kobi grumbled. The longer he stayed in this base, the less strong he felt: his body felt tired, his mind foggy. “I need to get changed.”
“I’ll wait outside,” Asha said.
As soon as the door shut behind her, Kobi sighed. He couldn’t go anywhere without someone accompanying him. It felt like he was being watched every second of the day.
And he was. In the corner of the bedroom, the small red light of a camera blinked. “We can’t risk anything happening to you, Kobi,” Mischik had said. “We need to keep an eye on you. Just in case.”
Kobi changed and left the room, brushing past Asha to lead the way through the base. Hales had taught him to imprint safe routes into his memory; it meant he could navigate the maze of tunnels toward the game room without thinking. Kobi heard the gushing of running water above him, and for a moment he felt himself transported back beneath the lake: the current rushing in his ears, drowning his scream, heavy clothes pulling him down, a giant yellow eye watching him through the murky depths. His step ceased, his boot making a heavy clang on the metal floor.
“You okay?” Asha asked. Kobi felt his head prickling as Asha read his mind.
Kobi squeezed his fists. “Yeah, it’s just the water pipes.”
Asha looked up. This facility had once housed machinery for generating, storing, and transmitting hydroelectric power from the nearby Columbia River dams, before the tech was made obsolete by the biofuel plants of CLAWS. But the underground tunnels had never been removed. There were enough secret access shafts that Sol’s resistance fighters could stay hidden but also move around the city, like rabbits in a warren, out of sight of CLAWS and the New Seattle authorities.