“You think Holland made the Bug down there?” Melisa asked.
That set me back. “Bug m—” I realized what I was saying. The Bug had become such a normal part of our life that we just said it like it meant nothing. I needed to find a better word. “Yeah. Must be.”
“That’s severely spammed up,” Melisa said. “We were probably just in the birthplace of the murder weapon that nearly wiped out humanity.”
“I know.” I grabbed a rail and led the way up the stairs. My chest light flickered a few times on the way up. “And the birthplace of what nearly wiped us out, too.”
“Nearly.”
The water rushing down the stairs parted around our calves as we climbed. By the time we got to the main floor again, I was out of breath.
“That wasn’t easy,” Melisa said. She still held the papers I’d pulled off the wall downstairs in one hand.
I grunted and pointed up the next flight of stairs. “Let’s keep going up.”
“Yeah,” Melisa said. “We can find a dry place with light to figure out what we found.”
I led the way again, since I had the light and the stairs had no windows to the outside “I’ll never not appreciate waterless stairs again.”
She laughed. “Maybe you should just learn how to swim.”
“What do you think I was doing back there?”
“Nearly dying,” Melisa said.
“Speaking of nearly dying.” I looked over my shoulder. “You going to tell me how you got out of there? And what happened to your light?”
“It must have gotten so much water in it that it shorted out.” Her voice echoed off the concrete walls and stairs.
The metal railing felt cool under my hand. How many people climbed these stairs before? Is their DNA still here? “Must be why mine keeps flickering.”
The higher we got, the quieter the sound of the water grew. The air also smelled crisper, less contained than it had in the basement.
We reached the second story. The floor here was cleaner, with less sand and debris, and no seaweed grew. It felt like it was still some kind of stone, but smoother—almost polished. What must have been dark patterns in the floor were now faded splotches and shapes.
“So how did you do it?” I asked again.
“It was bad at first,” Melisa said. She stood next to me in the hallway. We had no trouble seeing, because natural light was coming from the rooms that lined the hallway. There must have been windows in them. We started walking, our footsteps loud. “I kept going under. I couldn’t get through the current of the water coming down, either.”
“You told me to keep going,” I said. “What was that about?”
“You had the papers. They were your only hope of finding your parents and Holland.” She went quiet. “You had to get out.”
“You wanted me to leave you to drown.” It came out angrier than I’d meant it to.
“No, actually.” She grinned. Her eyes shone at me through the pale light of the hallway. “The second or third time I went under, I think when I lost those other papers, I noticed something. The current was bad at the bottom, and the top was rough, but the water in the middle wasn’t hard to get through.”
“What? It’s all water.” I stopped at an empty doorframe. How would this place have looked with all its doors and windows and furniture? And people, too?
“No, right,” Melisa said. “But the current wasn’t as bad there. If I took a breath and went down, I could wave my arms and legs and move as long as I stayed above the current coming down the stairs.”
We went into a bare room with a floor that looked like it had once had something covering it. It was just blank concrete now. “So you swam out?”
“Yeah. Well, mostly.” Melisa crossed the room to the raw square of a window. “Wow, look at that.”
I joined her. Water covered every street in sight, lapping at the bottom of the buildings as far as we could see. “It’s an underwater city,” I said.
“A kind of underwater city,” Melisa said. “Anyway, when I realized I could probably swim out, I told you to keep going.”
“Probably swim out? You told me to keep going because you could probably swim out?”
“I was pretty sure,” she said.
I faced her and caught her gaze. “That’s not okay.” Melisa had been with me longer than anyone else. She’d been captured within hours of joining me in New Frisko and come close to dying more times than I could count in the last few months. She’d saved my life. Just thinking of her not making it out of the underground room made my knees weak. That desperate clenching I’d felt in my stomach came back. “I don’t leave you and you don’t tell me to leave you.”
She met my eyes with a smile, ready for a joke. Her smile faded. She looked down. “Okay, I won’t.” She looked up again, fire in her dark eyes. “Same goes for you.”
I nodded. “Agreed.”
Silence stretched between us. I didn’t know what to say next, or how to move past the moment.
Melisa looked out the window. “My keeper and backpack were pulling me down, so I dropped them and came up for air. I told you to go again and thought of that tube I’d found. My backpack was right under my feet, so I went down and got the tube out. I thought maybe I could use it to breathe.”
“Wow, nice thinking.”
“No, it was stupid. Didn’t work at all. I just caught a lungful of nasty ocean and building water,” Melisa said. “I should have let it go, but for some reason I hung onto it.”
“How’d you get above me on the stairs?”
“I went under and couldn’t see much. But I did see stairs. So I kicked off that table—which must be bolted to the floor.” She stepped back from the window and knelt, sorting out the papers she still held.
“Like in the Enjineering Dome,” I said. I found the paper I’d taken down first and spread it out on the floor, carefully unfolding it.
“Yeah.” Melisa unfolded the other two sheets of paper. “That and some crazy paddling got me to the railing. I tried to get my head above the water for air, but I couldn’t while holding the rail. That’s when I tried the tube and sucked down half the ocean.”
One of the creases in the paper I was working with tore. I hissed and went slower. “And?”
“I let go of the rail, couldn’t hold on. The current pushed me back down and I hit the table. I thought I was going to die for a second. But I pushed off the floor and got some air in the last bit of space left at the top of the room.” She leaned back and told the rest of the story quickly, without much expression. “I dropped down, pushed off the table, got hold of the rail, and just pulled hard and fast. As soon as I felt the stairs under me, I stood up and saw you land in the water. I figured you were going after me, so I went up the stairs and waited.”
“Sounds easy.”
She gave me a look. “It was only mildly terrifying. And it turns out I’d rather not learn how to swim because I hate water.”
“What will you drink?”
“You’re such a funny person.” She swept her gaze across the papers we’d laid out. They’d gotten a little wet on one edge, but had stayed mostly dry. They were very flimsy, too, and I had tears all over the meter-by-meter square I’d unfolded.
“I try,” I said.
We knelt in the abandoned room for in silence, both of us focusing on the papers. What must have once been vivid lines on the square in front of me were faded with age, but still visible.
“There’s not much on these,” Melisa said. “They look like some kind of printout.” She bent closer. “This one has dark letters across the top. All I can make out is ‘Memo.’” She glanced up. “You think that’s someone’s name?”
“No idea,” I said.
“And this one didn’t even get wet.” Melisa angled her head. “They spoke English back then, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “Why?” There wasn’t much left on my paper. The water had damaged it on some edges and whatever they had used to pri
nt the words and lines on it had faded over a hundred years.
“I can’t understand these other two. The top of one says ‘Disease Control,’ which kind of makes sense, but the rest is about parties and something called liability.”
“Do you think they had parties here?”
“I don’t know.” Melisa made a frustrated sound. “Why did they fade down there? I mean, no sun or weather. It was totally sealed.”
“A hundred years is a long time.”
“True. I think this one says…” she tapered off. “That’s weird. I think it says ‘Practice Sterile Transitions.’”
“What does that mean?” That was strange. I crawled on all fours around to her side. I squinted and cocked my head. “Yeah.” I read the paper aloud. “That’s all it says.” The letters were tall and must have once been dark.
“Blaze,” Melisa said. “Totally blaze. That’s exactly what we needed.”
“Only sterile transitions will do,” I said. “Whatever they are.”
“And this last one has a lot more, but it’s mostly faded. I can see a couple words. Looks like this one” —She hovered a finger above the paper— “says ‘strain’ and then ‘heart.’”
We both realized what she’d said at the same time. Her eyes went wide. Tingles slid down my arms, sharper than the cold that was coming from my wet clothes.
“Nik,” she whispered.
“That’s the Bug. It’s talking about the Bug!” I dropped onto my hands and put my face nearer to the paper. “Let me see if I can make anything else out.”
Melisa bumped me. “Scoot over.”
I sidled a bit to my left. We hunched over the paper. Melisa reached over and adjusted my chest light so it was shining at a different angle. It helped.
“Okay, I have ‘facility’ and ‘off-site,’” I said.
“Down here there’s something,” she bent closer, then moved her head to the side. She was practically under me.
“You want me to move?”
She grunted. “That would help, yes.”
I pushed off and gave her space.
“No, keep your light there, though.”
Sliding over a bit, I angled the light down. “Is that good?”
“A bit to the side. It’s like whatever this was printed on catches the light differently—there!”
“What does it say?”
“That can’t be good,” Melisa said. She straightened and sat back on her legs. “I can make out ‘the’ and ‘it’ here and there, but the other word is ‘weaponize.’”
More tingles slid down my back and arms. “That must be the Bug. But it was posted next to ‘Practice Sterile Transitions.’ And Holland weaponized the Bug on his own.”
“That was a big lab down there, or whatever it was. Could he have been working with other people?”
I thought about that, forcing my brain to remember the short exchanges I’d had with Holland. “He said he was working on a team, but that they didn’t…” I trailed off. How had he put it? “Like, they didn’t have the will to make hard decisions.” I shook my head. “I might be remembering that wrong. I don’t know.”
“So maybe this is talking about something else?” Melisa stood and stretched. “Wet clothes are really comfortable.”
“Aren’t they?” I pulled a sleeve up from an arm. “Let’s look at the big one.”
I crawled over to the paper I’d unfolded and she knelt next to me again. “Wow, this one’s really big,” she said.
Smoothing one side down, I traced a faint red line with a finger. “It’s got these lines like this.” I pointed at the section to the right that was a very light blue. “And this part’s a different color.”
Melisa studied the thing closely. “Well. One thing’s for sure.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “It’s upside down.”
I moved to flip it over. She stopped me. “No, not like facedown.” She went around to the other side. “Upside down from that side.”
I leaned closer to the paper and was able to make out a few letters—that were upside down. “Ah, yes.”
Bending close, we both examined the hundred-year-old paper. This paper was older than anybody alive. Except Holland. Because—who knows?
“I think this says ‘Bakers’ here,” I pointed at a faint word.
“Like people who bake stuff?” Melisa focused in. She made a noise. “Maybe your eyes aren’t great. There’s more word after that, but the letters are too faint.”
“Bakers-something? What does that mean?” We were getting nowhere. We had already known that the Bug had been weaponized. Every one of the Pushers knew that. It didn’t get us any closer to finding my parents and Holland.
Melisa leaned back on her legs again. “It’s got words all over it, but not in straight lines like on the other printouts.”
“Good point,” I said. I leaned back too. That made my wet trousers bunch up behind my knees, so I stood to shake them out. We needed dry clothes. It was getting cold, too. Standing next to Melisa, I looked where I’d seen ‘Bakers.’
“This says ‘Fres' something’. Might be two O’s,” Melisa said. “Fresoo?”
She moved her finger and leaned back again, giving me a full view of the square paper. It looked like—
“Melisa, stand up.” I reached down and tapped her shoulder. “Stand up!”
“What? What is it?” She stood and stared at me.
“No, look. We were too close,” I said.
She turned to the paper and got quiet.
“Those are cities. That’s why they’re a different color. Bakers-something and Fresoo or whatever—those are cities,” I said. I wanted to shout. This had to be it. We were going to find them.
Melisa did shout. “Bug me, it’s a map!”
Chapter 27
We grew silent. It was a map. But what were the chances that there would be an X or something where Holland—
“Nik, look!” Melisa dropped to all fours and pointed at a red circle I hadn’t seen. “This isn’t part of the original.”
“What?” I got down and peered. “How can you tell?”
Melisa looked at me with a confused expression. “How can you not?”
So she could see better than me. Lucky her. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “This circle’s lines are thicker than the rest.”
“Well, what does it say?”
“I don’t know, give me a second.” Melisa got closer and moved around, trying to see the spot from different angles.
I was kneeling near the left side of the map. I examined the blue section taking up part of what was probably the west side of the place on the map. A crooked line started at the top, went sort of straight down and then angled in to the right, with the blue part following it. Something clicked. I’d seen this shape before. In one of the history classes. I felt like the air had just been punched out of me. I got as close as I could without kissing the paper. I dredged up the memory of the map we’d seen in class and tried to match it to this one.
“I think this first word is ‘Edwards,’” Melisa said. “I wish we could make it bigger, or make the writing darker.”
“Edwards? That sounds like a name,” I said.
“It is. There was an Edward in our class.”
“So there’s a city named after him? Or someone with his name.”
“I don’t think so. There’s more here. The next word is really short. And I could swear the circle is covering an area that used to be colored red. Like, all of it was red and these other cities aren’t all red.”
“Well.” I tapped the word I’d finally found. “Want to see where we are?”
“What?” Melisa dove my way, bumping into me. “Is this—”
“It’s here. We saw a map like this in History. It’s a map of California,” I poked the map again. “And this is San Francisco.”
She bent close, tucking hair behind her ears. She was warm, which reminded me of the wet clothes I wished would dry faster
. We needed to make a fire or something. The cool late afternoon breeze blowing through the gaping window didn’t feel great.
“You’re right,” Melisa said. “Which means—” She scooted back over and jabbed a finger on the spot she’d been looking at. “It means this circle means something. The second word is ‘Air,’ so Edwards Air is important.”
We knelt in the empty office and alternated staring at each other and the map we’d found.
“We’re going to find them,” I said.
“We are,” Melisa said. A lock of hair slipped from behind an ear and hung off to the side of her face. And there went my heart pounding again. She was so—
I made myself look away. What is wrong with you?
We spent the next hour hovering over the map, turning it to different angles, trying to pry more secrets out of it. We found more city names like Diego, Las Veg, and I even found the old Anjeltown. Of course, it was spelled the old weird way, with the confusing G.
“Do you have any food in your pack?”
The shadow of the window frame was stretching more than halfway across the room and my chest light’s beam was getting brighter. Oh yeah. We haven’t eaten. I’d thought the clenching in my stomach was just nervousness, but as soon as Melisa mentioned food, it got a hundred times worse.
“Wow, I hope so.”
“We could go down and see if the tide’s out, maybe find my keeper and backpack,” Melisa said. “I had some protein tubes in there.”
I stood and stretched out. My shirt was finally mostly dry, although it still felt a little clammy. My pants still clung to my legs uncomfortably. I rooted through my damp backpack, finding the spare shirt I’d packed and the extra drum of ammunition. I pulled a wrapped rectangle out. “Better! I’d forgotten I had this.” I tore the paper open.
“What is it?” Melisa stood too, stretching her back and raising her arms overhead and going onto her toes.
“Deer jerky,” I said. “I’d forgotten that Lily had given me some.”
Melisa took the strip I held out to her.
We sat on each side of the window and ate the way too small chunk of cured deer meat.
“Tide’s mostly back out,” I said. I glanced over at Melisa.
Push (Beat series Book 2) Page 17