Dante shrugged and laughed defensively; lying, again, so obviously that it was almost pitiful. He abandoned this particular lie even more quickly than any of the others. “Oh well. Whatever happens, you’re going down with me. At least I have that.”
She said nothing.
“It’s not that I hate you, Holly. I don’t. In fact, here’s something that’s true. Take it or leave it: at first, I told Roger I wasn’t grounding any Karrier if you were on board. I didn’t want you to get hurt. But then he showed me what you did to Gianfranco and, you know… I changed my mind. But that’s the whole thing: seeing that footage didn’t make this personal, it made it not personal. Before that, I wouldn’t have consciously done anything that might have hurt you. But now? You’re collateral damage, just like the rest.”
Holly shook her head, getting involved in a heated discussion exactly as Grav had warned her not to. “You expect me to believe that? After everything we’ve—”
“Listen to me, Ivy,” Dante interrupted, derisively adding barbed emphasis to the name. “As hard as this might be for you to believe, not everything is about you.”
Holly re-taped Dante’s mouth and encouraged Viola to return to the lander.
Alone again with the traitor, this time Holly did watch him. She stared at him until his features became a blur and long after he grew uncomfortable and turned his own gaze to the floor.
After however long it had been, Holly’s hollow concentration was broken by another arrival: Robert’s.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
Holly nodded, blinking several times having looked at the same thing for far too long. “He was blabbering more lies so I had to tape his mouth again.”
“Viola told me,” Robert said. “Anyway, I know no one really wants me to be in here, but can I ask him one question?”
Holly held a hand towards Dante, palm up, inviting Robert forward.
Robert ripped the tape from Dante’s mouth with a sudden yank.
Dante grimaced but made no sound beyond a sharp intake of breath.
“What’s the code?” Robert demanded.
It was a good question — the question, really — but Holly was nonetheless surprised to hear it stated so plainly.
Dante looked at the ground.
“Look at me,” Robert yelled. Dante did. “What’s the fucking code, you cretinous mercenary?”
Dante grinned. “I’ve been thinking something since I met you. You’re Robert and your wife is — oops, was — Olivia, right? So Robert and Olivia had two kids, and they decided to call them Robert junior and Viola. Here’s what I’ve been thinking: what kind of narcissists name their children after themselves?”
Without warning, Robert raised his fist and slammed it into Dante’s thigh. An odd place for a punch, Holly thought, but Dante’s desperate scream told her that Robert had delivered it with some serious force.
Robert lifted his fist, dropping something to the ground as he did so: a huge thorn. As Robert’s eyes remained focused on Dante, now writhing in agony, Holly belatedly noticed that Robert was wearing a glove and holding a thick cloth in his right hand.
Dante’s legs began to shake. His back spasmed.
“What did you do?” Holly yelled, panicking at the sight.
“Sped things up,” Robert said distantly. “The antidote is obviously in the bunker, so if he wants it…”
“Two eight two,” Dante stammered, fighting what looked like the start of some serious convulsions. “Eight zero two.”
“Two eight two, eight zero two?” Robert said. “Six digits? Two eight two, eight zero two?”
“Y-y-yess. Yes. Yessss!”
Robert turned to Holly. “Go!”
Holly hesitated. “Two eight two, eight zero two.”
“Right. Go!”
She looked back at Robert. “Don’t kill him,” she begged. “Please.”
“On my children’s lives,” Robert promised. “Just go to the bunker, open the door, get the antidote, leave the door jammed open and come back. Okay?”
Holly nodded, having no time to wonder how things had changed so quickly that she was now taking orders from Robert Harrington.
She ran to the lander, knowing that she had to tell Yury where she was going in case she ran in to any problems, and explained as quickly as she could without even fully climbing the ladder: “Don’t ask any questions, but we have the code. Robert is watching him and I’m going to test it.”
“Excellent,” Yury called. “Go, go! And Viola, you too. No one is going inside that bunker alone.”
“What about me?” Bo asked. “I found that bunker!”
“Hurry up then,” Holly said. An extra pair of eyes looking for the antidote couldn’t hurt, and Bo certainly had a keen inquisitive streak.
He jumped down the last several rungs of the ladder and ran outside before Viola was even in Holly’s sight.
The girl soon followed. “How did you get the code?” she asked.
“We’ll get there quicker if we don’t talk,” Holly said, speaking between deep breaths.
Viola got the message.
“I can’t run as fast as you two,” Bo called, his voice weak.
Holly looked back and saw that he was a ridiculous distance away given how little time they’d been moving. She backtracked towards him, picked him up like a toddler and set off again.
“So how did you get the code?” Bo asked, speaking directly into Holly’s ear.
“I’ll tell you later,” she lied. There was no way she would; Bo didn’t need to know what his father had done. When it came time to explain why she was bringing an antidote back from the bunker, Holly would take the dubious credit for inflicting Dante with the injury.
Bo shrugged in exaggerated frustration. “Fine. But can I at least type the code on the keypad when we get there?”
This question caught Holly off guard, causing her to laugh slightly despite the gravity and urgency of their current situation.
“Sure thing,” she said. “You can type the code.”
fifty-two
Holly said the code out loud several times during the short but tiring run to the bunker, knowing it was safer to have it in Bo’s head as well as her own in case her brain froze at the crucial moment.
She wasn’t counting any chickens just yet, but Dante hadn’t previously given any fake codes and she couldn’t see any angle where he would gain something from sending her on a wild goose chase. Even had he not been writhing in agony when he shouted the digits into the extension’s muggy air, Holly would have been very confident in the code’s veracity.
At the bunker’s door, where Viola stood waiting with an expression of undisguised impatience, Holly held Bo high enough to reach the buttons.
He typed in the code: 2 8 2 8 0 2.
Immediately, the door clicked. Holly pushed it, suddenly light, and it swung open.
“Stay right here for a second,” Holly ordered. Neither of the children protested.
She grabbed a wheeled chair from just inside the bunker without looking around and used it to jam the door open. Holly had been inside enough buildings with security systems which required different codes for entry and exit to fall victim to such an amateur oversight.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s safe.”
And safe it was: there was no poison gas or other booby traps, as others in the group had openly considered, and nothing else to cause alarm.
The bunker’s interior could be best summed up as functional. It truly was a bunker, with cold concrete-like walls and flooring which were at odds with its clinical metallic exterior. It was far more spacious than the doorway suggested, opening into a rectangular shape which was almost as long as the lander was wide.
A long control console dominated the wall opposite the door.
“I’ve never been inside a submarine,” Viola said, “but I’ve seen pictures.”
Though Viola didn’t really complete her thought, Holly knew what she meant. The control
console did evoke a vintage submarine’s, with its countless dials and displays. Everything was blank, but the overhead light which automatically flickered to life when the door swung open proved that the bunker had functioning power.
The wall perpendicular to the door and control console contained nothing but an extremely large map. It wasn’t Earth and the near-total absence of water suggested that it was the planet — or romosphere, as Dante called it — that they were currently stranded on. Holly glanced at the map; the glance was brief, but long enough to see that the map was divided into grid-like zones with a seemingly random two-digit alphanumeric code printed in each. Holly asked Viola to take the map down and either roll or fold it until it was small enough to carry back for Yury to look over.
The door was located in a corner, and there was nothing else on the wall it was built into.
The final wall housed a storage unit of sorts, with sixteen square compartments.
Fifteen were closed with small doors which were evidently hinged yet contained no visible locking or unlocking mechanism. Holly assumed they were magnetic and likely linked to the same unseen power switch as the control console.
The sixteenth compartment had no door and housed precisely what she was looking for: a shoebox-sized container helpfully marked with the universally understood red cross symbol.
“This is all we need right now, anyway,” she said, lifting it down from its position at the far right of the top row. The box was heavier and deeper than she expected, but she managed to lower it gently enough to avoid damage.
“Why do we need that?” Bo asked.
“We need the antidote,” Holly said. “Dante… well, Dante has the same kind of injury you did — from the same kind of thorn — and we need to give him the antidote or he’s going to die before he tells us why we’re here.”
Bo stepped back. “You got him with one of the plants? On purpose?”
Holly didn’t say anything.
“That was a good idea,” the boy went on. “It made sense to think the antidote was in here, and he had to give you the code or he couldn’t get it! Smart.”
“The antidote he brought for you didn’t look like any of these,” Holly said, sifting through tubs and bottles and boxes of various emergency medicines and remedies.
With the map folded under her arm, Viola walked over to the first-aid box. “That’s because he disguised it as his own anti-allergy stuff,” she said. “Remember? And the ointment he used was probably just for show. Whatever he injected… that’s what we need.”
“Here!” Holly yelled joyously. She lifted out a pack of three filled but unlabelled syringes. They were inside an opened case with space for four. “This has to be it.”
“What about these other drawers?” Bo said. “Or shelves… whatever they are.”
“We’ll come back,” Holly promised.
“Right,” Viola said. “Because if we want Dante to tell us how to open them, he needs to be alive.”
Bo ran to the door. “Okay, let’s go.”
“I can’t believe you jagged him with one of those plants,” Viola said. “That is badass.”
“Thanks,” Holly said, pulling Viola back to whisper the next part. “But it wasn’t me; it was your dad.”
fifty-three
“Take the map inside to Yury,” Holly said to Bo, putting him down outside the lander having again carried him during the exhausting run back from the bunker.
Viola, waiting patiently having arrived back a full minute before them, handed Bo the carefully folded map.
Holly’s body language silently offered Viola the choice of either going into the lander with Bo or following her into the extension.
Unsurprisingly, the girl stuck with Holly. They hurried to Dante’s makeshift holding cell, where he was lying deathly still as the effects of the thorn’s poison set in. Robert — the inflictor — stood over him, expressionless.
Holly wasted no time in injecting the antidote directly on the site of Dante’s puncture wound, as Dante had to Bo’s.
And as had been the case with Bo, the antidote acted quickly; Dante groggily groaned and blinked his eyes open. He didn’t speak or display any overt signs of anger. Holly couldn’t tell whether this was a sign that he had surrendered to the helplessness of his situation or whether he was only temporarily subdued by the poison vs antidote battle which was currently raging in his thigh.
While Dante stared dumbly up at the extension’s metallic ceiling, Robert turned to Holly and Viola. “So… what else was in there?”
“A lot of locked drawers,” Holly said. She didn’t care that Dante might have been listening; he already knew what was inside the bunker, anyway. “Well, not exactly drawers. More like small doors to compartments on a shelving unit. They’re hinged and I think the locking mechanisms are magnets controlled by a button somewhere, but we could almost certainly brute-force our way in.”
“How many doors?”
“Fifteen. The sixteenth compartment had no door, just the first-aid kit.”
“And there’s a big control console,” Viola added. “Like inside an old submarine. Screens, buttons, everything. It’s all turned off, but there must be a switch somewhere.”
“Was there a radio?” Robert asked. “It may be a communications bunker.”
Holly had thought of this when she first saw the console, and it did seem likely that the bunker would have some kind of communications system. She had kept it to herself, deciding there was no sense in getting the children’s hopes up prematurely. But now that Robert had put the idea out there, she offered a cautiously optimistic response: “I don’t know for sure, but it’s definitely possible.”
Robert’s eyebrows rose. “Did it look like there might be a radio in the console?”
“Maybe,” Holly said.
He clapped his hands together. “So what are we waiting for? Yury can come out here for guard duty and we can go—”
“No.”
Robert’s expression, excited just a moment earlier, suddenly fell. “No what?”
“We’re not going back inside the bunker until Rusev and Grav get back here,” Holly said. “We don’t know what they’ve managed to do: fix the power, look at the cameras to see what Dante did in there, even fix the radio and contact the station. And we don’t know what Grav might have found.”
“What do you mean? What’s he looking for?”
“Nothing in particular, but he said he would go through every inch of Dante’s room and track his movements in the hours before the impact. There’s bound to be a clue. And we can’t just go rampaging through the bunker without them; we could accidentally break something or — and this might be way worse — we could accidentally activate something.
Robert sighed. “But time is against us.”
“We brought back a map,” Viola chimed in. “That was the only thing that wasn’t locked away. Yury and Bo are looking at it, so we could all help out with that until Rusev and Grav get back. Because Holly’s right: if we rush, we might do something we regret. Something we can’t undo.”
“Okay,” Robert said, walking out of the holding cell as he spoke. His demeanour had lifted at the mention of a map, and Viola’s interjection had evidently been enough to sway him towards Holly’s side of the argument. “So when are we expecting them back?”
Holly and Viola followed him out. Dante wouldn’t have been fit to go anywhere in his current state even if he wasn’t so decisively restrained, so there was no real need for a guard.
“There’s not much light left,” Holly said as they exited the extension. “If they don’t leave the lander in the next hour, they won’t be here until tomorrow. It’s way too cold and way too far for them to set off at night.”
“Jesus,” Robert groaned. “Tomorrow?”
Holly spoke in a more upbeat tone: “If they’re still there and still busy, it’s probably good news.”
fifty-four
In the lander, Yury and Bo were busy at work lining
up the bunker’s huge paper map with Yury’s own digital composite attempt. He called the entering trio over with his hand and pointed them to a few areas of interest he had already identified.
“This is the bunker,” he said, tapping a small rectangle in the very centre of the map and focusing closely on the area around it.
Holly scanned the map more generally. The sight of a lone body of water some way across the map brought back a distant memory of the beautiful sandy beach she’d found three long days earlier. But the fact that the beach looked closer to the edge of the map than the “you are here” centre point suggested something else.
“This place is a lot smaller than we thought,” Holly said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Yury agreed. “Unless, of course, this is only one section.”
In the top left of the map there was a large irregular shape denoting a structure of some kind. It lay beyond a tiny square which corresponded perfectly with Yury’s approximation of the spot where Dante had led Holly and Viola to find the walled-off crops. None of the group had ventured beyond that point, leaving the irregular structure as the greatest remaining cartographic mystery.
When everything from Yury’s homemade map had been placed correctly, including his approximations of some of the zonal grid lines which Holly and Viola had walked along in opposing directions for just that purpose, attention turned to making sense of the alphanumeric codes in each of the square zones.
“Could someone turn the light on,” Yury requested.
Holly rose to do so. Daylight was fading fast, and she was beginning to think that Rusev and Grav wouldn’t be back until the morning.
But lo and behold, when she looked out of the window before sitting back down, she saw them approaching in the distance.
“They’re outside,” she excitedly announced. “I’ll go out in case they need help carrying anything.”
“I’ll come, too,” Viola said.
Holly shook her head, more harshly than intended. “It’s okay. They’ll be here in a minute, anyway.”
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