by Michael Ford
“Kobi, please. You have to stop,” said Asha.
Kobi didn’t reply at first. He watched the numbers flash past as the elevator sped faster than Kobi would have thought possible. Halfway between floors 153 and 154, the lift suddenly jolted to a stop. Kobi stabbed at the button, but nothing happened.
“What’s going on?” he snapped.
“I guess they killed the circuits,” said Asha. “They’re not going to let you leave.”
Kobi grabbed the doors on either side and heaved. They shuddered open, just a crack at first. Kobi braced himself and strained, forcing them farther apart. They were between floors, but he clambered out into a corridor. Red lights flashed across the ceiling and an alarm was sounding. Asha remained where she was.
“Kobi, come back!” she said.
Kobi ran to a door at the end and pushed through. Two adults were by a set of lockers and looked at him in astonishment. “You’re not allowed up here,” one said. Kobi ignored them and turned back the way he’d come. Asha was climbing out now as well. He reached another door. It was dark on the other side, but lights blinked on as he entered. He staggered, knees buckling—the room was filled with vats, stretching almost to the ceiling, and inside each he saw an animal suspended in clear liquid. A horse with a bulbous deformed body, a giant rabbit sliced in cross sections, a two-headed coyote. And so many more—all Waste-infected corpses. It was like a nightmare.
A voice sounded over internal speakers—Melanie Garcia’s.
“We have an escaped patient. All personnel—if you see him, please apprehend.”
Kobi walked between the vats, staring in horror at their contents. Were all these creatures brought here by the Snatchers? So this was what the research looked like. . . .
He’d reached the far side of the room, and he was gazing at a giant dead bird, its wings splayed wide, extending the length of a bus. There was a door, and he went through it, finding himself in an unlit stairwell shaft, the walls bare concrete. He just had to get to the highest level. He had no idea if he could even fly a transport ship when he got there. If there was a Guardian, he could make them do it. He still had the scalpel.
Kobi heard a door slam open far below and looked over the balustrade. Guardians were swarming onto the stairs three floors down. Red tracer lights lanced through the darkness, and one flashed across his chest.
“He’s up there! Alone!”
Kobi backed up as a dart chinked into the ceiling above and bounced off.
Kobi began to climb, leaping five or six steps at a time, his chest burning. His muscle endurance was five times the average, his dad had told Kobi. He pushed himself harder.
Eventually, he reached the top floor. A door led off the stairs, but it didn’t budge from this side, and there was no handle. Kobi took a step back, then drove his foot into it. The door was steel and unmovable. Below, the guardians were closing—their shouts and the thump of their boots muffled. Kobi kicked again, and pain jarred up his knee.
The guardians were two floors down. At any moment he’d be in the firing line. Taking a deep breath he threw himself shoulder-first into the door, bouncing off hopelessly.
The guardians’ feet were tramping closer. Kobi launched his body against the door one last time, but he had no power left. Several tracers picked out points on the wall beside him, and he knew the game was up. Slowly, he lifted his hands, and turned to face them.
17
NONE OF THE GUARDIANS spoke to him as they marched him back to the elevator in formation. Four in front, four behind. Guns lowered, but close enough that they could reach out and touch each other. Even if Kobi could overpower one or two, the others would be ready. He didn’t stand a chance.
The elevator was functioning again and descended back down to a different floor—88. Melanie was waiting for him. “Kobi, please, let me just explain everything to you, then, trust me, you won’t want to run.” She led him, escorted by the Guardians, through the bare corridor. Guardians in lab coats as well as plain clothes paced purposely through it.
“Let’s go to my office,” said Melanie, putting an arm on his shoulder. Kobi flinched involuntarily. He still wasn’t used to being touched. Melanie seemed to mistake his gesture for fear.
“You’re safe, Kobi—I promise. For the first time in your life.” She smiled.
“I need to find my dad,” Kobi said.
“Of course you do; we’re working on that,” said Melanie. Melanie’s eyes looked pained, as if she understood exactly how he was feeling. She waved at the Guardians escorting them. “There’s no need to accompany us.” They looked at one another. “Please, I am in no danger,” she said. They moved away.
Melanie led Kobi to a door, flashed a card from her waist against a scanner, and they entered. Melanie Garcia’s office was comfortable if sparsely decorated, with a small desk tilted at a slight angle to show a large CLAWS logo, with touch buttons up the side in some sort of interactive display board. One wall was entirely given to a window, and Kobi gasped at the outlook. A carpet of green, as far as the eye could see. They were hundreds of feet up, above the tops of the tallest canopy. There were no buildings, no man-made structures of any sort. Asha was right—living on Healhome was like being marooned on an island in the middle of a vast ocean. He wondered how far they were from Seattle.
“Take a seat,” said Melanie. She pressed a few buttons on the desk, then sat on the other side.
Kobi lowered himself into a comfortable leather chair. How are you feeling now?” she asked.
“Like a prisoner,” said Kobi.
Melanie nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sorry things got out of hand,” she said. “You must understand, Kobi—bringing you here, keeping you here, it’s all for your protection.”
Kobi hardly needed to reply. He trusted his glare of contempt to do all the talking.
“You don’t believe me,” said Melanie. “And I don’t blame you. The way we brought you in was . . . heavy-handed. We didn’t know what we were dealing with, but we had to act fast, for your own safety.”
“Stop saying that!” said Kobi. “I was fine out there.”
“So far,” said Melanie. He caught a flash of impatience in her eyes.
“So, what now?” he asked. “How long are you going to keep me here?”
“Until we can earn your trust,” said Melanie.
Kobi almost laughed. You may as well throw away the key, then.
Melanie sighed. “I imagine it’s a little odd, after so long alone.”
“With my dad,” Kobi corrected her.
He thought he saw Melanie flinch.
“I’m going to explain some things to you Kobi, some things you might not want to hear. Firstly, Asha told us about your headaches, and her theory about your father’s vitamin pills.”
“Did she . . . ?” said Kobi.
“She was correct,” said Melanie. “We ran some tests on pills we found back at the school.”
“Dad said I have to stay strong,” said Kobi.
“They’re not nutritional in the slightest,” said the Healhome director. “They’re neuropathic blockers that target the temporal lobe of your brain.”
Kobi just shrugged. “And?” He didn’t want to hear what she was going to say.
“They suppress your telepathic ability,” said Melanie. “Jonathan was worried Projectors like Fionn would send you a message, or Receptors like Asha might sense you.”
Kobi didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to believe it. The familiar way she’d said the name Jonathan chilled his blood. “You know my dad?”
Melanie hesitated. “This is going to be hard for you to hear, but I’ll lay it out.
“The man you think is your father is a CLAWS scientist. Jonathan Hales kidnapped you, Kobi, and he took you to the only place we couldn’t follow—the Wastelands. He—”
“Shut up,” said Kobi. “You’re lying. You—”
“No,” said Melanie patiently. “Dr. Hales is the liar. He was one of us, here at CLA
WS. And he was brilliant, Kobi, I’ll admit it. He realized you were different from the others, and he took you because he wanted all the glory himself. He wanted to be the one to save the world.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Kobi.
Melanie shrugged. “Why not? Ask yourself, Kobi—why did he never tell you about any of this?”
Kobi shook his head, searching for an answer, but he couldn’t find one. He wasn’t ready to accept it though.
Melanie tapped a few times on her desk screen. Then she rotated the display to face him. The page read “Personnel file C/HH/HalesJ,” and showed a picture of his father looking a million miles from the man he’d last seen three weeks ago. But it was definitely the same person—a similar age to the photo from the lab, and Kobi’s earliest memories. The file contained a list of specialisms, including genetic sequencing, biotechnological engineering, and evolutionary biology.
“Hales was a great mind,” said Melanie, a little more brusquely, “but he always put himself first. I know it’s hard to hear, but you have to forget about him.”
Kobi smiled helplessly. Forget about the man I’ve lived with all my life? None of what she was telling him matched the person he knew. A good, caring, selfless man. “But he must have known he’d be exposing himself to Waste by leaving here,” said Kobi.
“All the scientists were allocated a single orphan case,” said Melanie. “You were his. He deleted all his notes before he disappeared, but we think he realized you were special and knew he could keep himself alive by synthesizing some of the compounds your body produces naturally. He should have lasted less than a week out there, but he managed almost thirteen years. He used you to stay alive.” She paused and breathed out through her nose. “Like a parasite.” She looked at the smiling face on the screen. “You could have been here all this time,” said Melanie. “You could have had friends. And we—CLAWS—might have found a cure years ago.”
“That’s all my dad wanted,” said Kobi quietly. “I know it. He was using my blood to develop cleansers.”
“The fact you still defend him does you credit,” said Melanie. “It looks like Dr. Hales had an accomplice. Another renegade. We found the drone at the GrowCycle lab. We’re running tests on the compounds we found in the lab as we speak.”
At least that part of her story rang true. The face in the holographic message. But as for the rest of it . . . the stuff about his dad not being his real dad . . .
“He loved me,” said Kobi, hugging himself. “I know he did.”
Melanie placed a gentle hand on his wrist. “I think he probably did,” she said. “In his own way. Kobi, Dr. Hales lost people to the Waste. His wife and child. We all lost . . . someone. He took you for the wrong reasons, for himself, but maybe he really did care for you as well.”
Kobi closed his eyes, reeling, trying to shut out the world. But his mind rebelled, flashing up a jumble of memories. Riding his father’s shoulders as a young boy, playing football in the gym, the candlelit meals filled with laughter, the sling when he’d broken his collarbone falling off a desk, the hundreds of stories they’d read together huddled under a blanket, the certificates and medal ceremonies when Kobi passed tests or achieved new feats of strength . . .
The love. What other word was there?
And yet, if Melanie Garcia was telling the truth, it was a lie too. An act that Dr. Hales had played from day one.
“Do you know how many kids we’ve lost here while Dr. Hales pursued his own fame?” Melanie said softly. Kobi waited. “Nineteen,” she continued, her lip trembling. She tapped the screen several times and rows of images popped up—kids of every age. Some were in color—he saw Asha, Niki, and Fionn among them—but others were grayed out with the word DECEASED written beneath their portraits.
Kobi could hardly bear to look at their smiling faces. He leaned across and pressed the tab that closed the file, turning his gaze away as his eyes teared up.
“Look at me, Kobi,” said Melanie.
He turned back to her.
“We can care for you here,” she said. “And if Dr. Hales’s secret research is confirmed, we may be closer than ever to a real cure.” The director’s eyes sparkled feverishly.
As he looked at Melanie, he realized he’d seen her before—the woman in the photo from the lab. Kobi had thought she might be his own mother. She looked so different now. But it was definitely her. More evidence that she was being straight with him.
“You were friends with him, weren’t you?”
“Who? Jonathan? Yes. We were part of a group of highly able postgrad students that Alan Apana took under his wing. Apana—the man who engineered Waste—was once an emeritus professor of biochemistry at Seattle University. The ‘minds of the future’ he called us. Alex Mischik was another.”
“That’s who Dad—Hales—was communicating with. They were sending each other messages by drone.”
Melanie sighed. “Yes, Mischik and Jonathan. They were always the most ambitious of all of us. Quite brilliant, both of them. No one could have predicted their plot to steal you. The arrogance is quite astounding. But then, they had the most arrogant of teachers. Anyway, that’s enough about the past. Would you like to see him?”
“Who?” said Kobi.
Melanie looked grave. “I wanted to give you the full picture before I told you,” she said. “We have Jonathan Hales in the infirmary, Kobi.”
Kobi’s blood chilled. Melanie tapped some buttons on the screen and it flicked to a camera feed showing Jonathan Hales lying on a bed. Kobi swallowed. His first reaction was relief, but it was soured by a bitter sickness in his stomach. Anger. That was what he felt. A pure, focused rage.
“He’s in bad shape,” Melanie said. “A retrieval drone picked him up about five days ago in the old city, and he was already unconscious. He couldn’t tell us anything, so we knew we had to find you fast.”
“So that’s why you sent Asha and the others.”
“They took an enormous risk,” said Melanie. “For a long time, we’d doubted you and Dr. Hales could have even survived. When we found him, we found a picture of you in his wallet. To be honest, we couldn’t believe it.” Kobi nodded. He remembered the pictures well. Dad . . . Dr. Hales . . . had found an old Polaroid camera in a school cupboard. He took a shot of them both together every year in front of the same white board. He called it the yearbook photo.
“I don’t want to see him,” Kobi said.
Melanie frowned.
“I have nothing to say.”
“We think it would be good for you to see him with your own eyes,” said Melanie. “Of course, there is no rush. Though we think it would be cathartic for you, help you move on.”
Kobi had already stood up and made his way to the wide window. He stared out across the panorama of the Wasteland. He shook his head and spoke softly. “I don’t want to see him. My dad . . . my dad died out there.”
18
KOBI WAS TAKEN BACK to the Healhome quarters. The kids were in their sectioned-off rooms still, but no one looked as relaxed as before. They huddled in groups, and when Kobi emerged with his armed escort, the looks he got were a mixture of naked disbelief and suspicion. He felt as though it was him behind the glass, being inspected like a zoo animal.
The guard called Krenner was there. Kobi remembered where he’d heard the name before. He’s the one who fled the Chokerplant attack. So he made it back. He pressed a few buttons on a keypad by one of the glass walls. It slid upward, then he looked toward Kobi and gestured inside to an empty room. Kobi walked inside. The Guardians turned away, leaving only Krenner. He stared at Kobi with something close to hatred.
Melanie came from across the other side of the room, carrying a tablet and walking quickly, to stand beside the security guy. She muttered something to him, and he nodded, then turned and left, following his squad. Melanie focused on her tablet, swiping her finger a few times. The wall to Kobi’s right folded open. Kobi found himself looking at the other kids he’d seen be
fore, with nothing but air between them. There were about a dozen. There was a boy in the middle, tall with drooping hair, and a sinewy body like a rock climber. Kobi recognized him from Fionn’s telepathic vision of the Frisbee game. He’d been speaking with Niki. Beside the rock climber boy was a girl with deep cracks across her skin, like bark. She swallowed, staring at Kobi. On the other side of the tall boy was another boy of a similar age, who looked Indian. He was short, with incredible yellow eyes. The others looked more or less normal. Kobi’s periphery caught movement on a chair and a girl he hadn’t even spotted peeled herself off sinuously and came to join the others. Her eyelids flickered. There was something weird about her hands. She grinned at him and waved her fingers, and Kobi saw that they were bulbous at the tips, like they were swollen.
No one else moved, and no one said anything, until Asha pushed to the front. She stood a yard in front of the others. “This is Kobi, everyone,” she said quietly. “And Kobi, this is . . . everyone.”
The tall rock climber kid in the center nodded. “Right.”
The girl with the bulbous fingers whispered something in the yellow-eyed boy’s ear.
“Why don’t you ask him?” he replied.
“Is it true you lived outside?” she asked. “We don’t believe Asha.”
“Yes,” Kobi said. He was very aware of his voice, with all these people listening, watching him. “We had a base in an old school. Me and my dad.” He swallowed as he said the word. Dad. Kobi couldn’t bear to tell the full truth right now. He was still trying to process it himself.
The kids all started talking at once, throwing questions at one another and him. The invisible barrier that seemed to hold them back before broke, and several edged toward him.
But in the chaos, Asha held back.
“Were there other kids?” asked a girl with ginger hair and freckles.
“What did you eat?” said a boy who looked painfully thin.
“Where’s your dad now?” said the girl with bark skin, her long straight hair falling over her shoulders, almost down to her waist.