by Michael Ford
Hales took a deep breath, as if wrestling with some internal battle. “He’s still only thirteen, Alex, but . . . I know he could.” He paused. “It’s time to come clean with him, Alex. I . . . I don’t know how he’ll take it. I’ve lied to him his whole life. He thinks I’m his dad—and I am in a way. He’s my son, but he won’t see that. He won’t understand. I know it.” Hales seemed lost in his own thoughts, but then his head jerked to one side, eyes widening. “There’s something out there. . . . Oh my god . . . Alex, Snatchers!” His face came closer to the camera, and the room behind him spun. “Alex, I don’t have long. Kobi needs help. He’s on his own. Get him out of here. He’s the only—”
The message ended.
For a long time, nobody spoke, until at last Johanna bent down, replaced the drone in the box, then lifted it back onto the shelf. “He must have launched the drone just before he was captured,” she said.
He was going to tell me the truth, Kobi thought. For a moment, he let himself imagine if Hales had made it back from the lab. How different things could have been.
“What’s the Park site?” asked Asha.
“I don’t know,” said Kobi. “I need to look at the map. Something about it sounds familiar, but I can’t remember. . . .” A mix of emotions raged inside him. His chest felt tight with pain at seeing Hales alive again, his last moments captured on a screen. But there was a new drive, too, burning inside: everything seemed clearer now. He believed in me. He said I was the only one who could do it. “I’m going back to the Wastelands. I’m going to find the Park site.”
Asha spoke in a quick, urgent tone, locking him with a firm stare. “You can’t, Kobi. You can’t go out there on your own.”
“Exactly,” said Kobi, “which is why I’ll need help.”
Asha’s lips parted as she realized what he was asking. “I’ll go with you,” she said, “but we’ll need Fionn too.”
Johanna shook her head. “Mischik won’t let you go,” she said.
“Then we won’t ask for his permission,” Kobi said. “I have to trust in my dad.”
Asha looked startled. Kobi had called Hales his dad. He hadn’t done that since he’d found out the truth. But Kobi realized now: Hales had been his father in a way, whether Kobi liked it or not. He had raised him, nurtured him—and he had loved him. Kobi could see that love in the video, but he had felt it his entire life.
“Mischik is doing his best,” said Johanna, still looking at the frozen, glowing image of Hales’s terrified face. “But he doesn’t have the answers. We’ve got Waste closing in from below, CLAWS from above. It’s a matter of time. But Mischik just can’t see it.”
“Let’s get the others,” said Kobi.
Asha frowned. “You think we should all go?”
Kobi nodded. “We’re all Wastelings. We belong together.”
Asha smiled. “Wastelings? Sounds like something Rohan would say.”
Kobi nodded. “Yeah, it does—it’s what we’d be called in one of his superhero comics.”
“Or the name for our baseball team. The Wastelings,” Asha replied.
“I’ll get Leon,” said Johanna. “He’ll be with Rohan. You two go get Fionn and Yaeko.”
As they slipped out from the storage room, making their way back to the game room, Kobi kept glancing up at the cameras angled down at the corridors; he felt suddenly aware of how many there were.
Fionn was playing on a VR headset, and Yaeko was watching a reality TV show. Leon turned up a minute later with Johanna. His eyes were rimmed with red. “What’s this about, Caveman?” he said. His voice sounded hoarse from crying. “I want to get back to Rohan.”
“We’re leaving,” Kobi announced. There were gasps from the others. “And you’re all coming with me. If you want to.” He explained what they’d found out about the cure, already finished by Hales, out there somewhere in the Wastelands. Leon shifted in his chair, looking baffled. Yaeko just whistled.
“When do we leave?” Fionn’s face blazed with happiness.
“Soon,” Kobi told him. “We’ll go soon.”
“We’ll need a way out,” said Asha. “I don’t think Mischik will just fling open the door for us.”
“I might be able to help with that,” said Johanna. “I’ve got clearance for the doors. I can get you out. We need to plan though. Old Seattle is a hundred miles west over the mountains—and the land between us is scorched by incinerator drones to stop the spread of Waste. You’ll need to know the schedule of the drone sweeps. I might be able to get that. I know that Mischik has some contact with smugglers who travel there.”
“Thanks, Johanna. What do you say, Leon?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Kobi stared at him. “Aren’t you excited to finally do something? To take the fight to CLAWS?”
“I was,” he said. His voice was hollow. “But sure, I’ll come. Why not?” He turned away, hunched in an armchair as he watched the holo-TV.
Kobi met Yaeko’s eye. “We could use you out there too.” Leon snorted, not looking over. Kobi ignored him. “The only way we stand a chance is if we stick together.”
“We’re the Wastelings,” said Asha. “We were born from the Waste, and we are the ones who have to end it.” She smiled. “It sounds like our baseball team name, right? The Wastelings. Rohan never could find one.” The boy grunted something back.
Yaeko rubbed her jaw, then shrugged. “Sure, I’m in too. But FYI, chances are this is going to fail. Maybe some mutated freakazoid bear or eagle or whatever makes tofu out of us. Or we get picked up by CLAWS. Or if we’re really lucky, we die a slow, painful death from Waste poisoning. We’re not all one hundred percent immune like you, Kobi.”
“I’ll get cleansers for you to take with you,” said Johanna. “You don’t need to worry.”
“Okay. Thanks, Jo. I’ll stop worrying,” said Yaeko.
Kobi turned to the bark-skinned girl. “Aren’t you coming?”
Johanna returned his imploring gaze with a gentle shake of her head. “I don’t belong out there. I’m not like the rest of you. I’m not brave.” She smiled as Kobi tried to protest. “It’s okay. I belong in the labs. I know that. I’ll do everything I can to help the cause from here. And I’ll keep Sol off your back.”
Kobi nodded. Johanna stepped forward and hugged him. “Find the cure. Find it for Rohan.”
8
KOBI SAT ON HIS bed, staring at the map of Old Seattle. His eyes flitted between the many Ls representing Hales’s labs scattered across the city. Asha sat next to him. Kobi felt the prickling over his skull as she listened to his thoughts. The camera watched from above. Sol would be suspicious if Kobi removed the map from his room, so he’d decided to examine it here. He could communicate with Asha telepathically, and the camera wouldn’t pick up their exchange.
The “Park site” has to be one of these labs, he thought slowly and carefully so Asha could catch every word. She met his eye and gave a subtle nod. I thought I’d seen it before on this map, but there are no parks around any of Hales’s labs. I don’t get it.
His eyes drifted to the L drawn over Mercer Island, east of the main Seattle island, separated from the rest of the city by Lake Washington. It had been a wealthy district, full of the mansions of the super-rich with their own private quays to keep their yachts. Kobi had never seen the island, even from a distance. Mercer Island had been the epicenter of the explosion of Waste in the city. It was the most contaminated place in the world.
Wait . . . Give me your phone. Asha frowned and handed it to him. “Search Apana Park,” Kobi told it. He glanced up at the camera. To anyone watching, it wouldn’t look like Kobi and Asha were doing anything suspicious; just some innocent research into the original Waste outbreak. It was natural Kobi would be interested. Sol wouldn’t understand the real reason behind his internet search. He pressed on a video labeled, “Apana Park launch commercial, June 2022.” As the video began to play, Kobi said, “Holo-mode.” A beam of light displayed th
e video in 3D a few inches above the tablet.
A bearded man wearing circular spectacles paced through a pristine lab. Scientists worked all around him, peering into microscopes and arranging racks of test tubes. “Do you want to watch history being made?” the man asked. He stopped, smiling a toothy grin. “I’m Alan Apana, head of GrowCycle. Seattle, I invite you to witness a new dawn for humanity: the launch of a product that will revolutionize the world. GAIA!”
The image switched to a beautiful garden with large healthy trees and vegetables and fruits growing at a visible rate in a plot. The stems stretched and separated, spawning buds that quickly expanded into leaves, producing tomatoes, strawberries ripening and enlarging to full size in a matter of seconds, like something recorded with a time-lapse capture camera. Apana, now dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, sat in a lawn chair in the shade of a large apple tree. “This is my garden.” He stood up and plucked an apple from a low tree, taking a bite. The camera remained on the branch as another fruit began to swell in its place. He swallowed, giving a thumbs-up. “Using GAIA, I created this garden from seedlings over the course of only a few hours. Imagine this on a world scale: crops that can be grown and then harvested the same day. Imagine hunger solved. Imagine a world where starvation and famine are things of the past.”
The camera panned to a wall of giant hedges surrounding the garden. “Imagine trees that cleanse the air of pollution at a rate previously thought impossible. Imagine an unlimited source of biofuel—a solution for the energy crisis!” He reached down and picked up a canister labeled “GAIA,” with a logo in the shape of a globe. “This is my gift to you.” The picture switched to a sweeping shot of a huge field of cleared, ploughed earth. GrowCycle-branded drones hovered above it. “Thanks to a high concentration of GAIA, it will take only a few seconds for this field to grow into a wondrous botanical garden—Apana Park.”
Kobi turned excitedly to Asha, whose eyes were wide.
The Park site, Asha—Apana Park, Kobi said to her inside his head. It’s on Mercer Island. There must be an old GrowCycle lab there.
The GrowCycle commerical was still playing. Apana stood in the middle of the ploughed field, staring up at the camera with his arms wide as the shot expanded. When the camera had zoomed out enough, letters appeared in the form of trees shooting up from the soil: a teaser of what the lucky spectactors would witness at the big launch of Apana Park. The foliage spelled out the GrowCycle slogan: “GrowCycle. Nourishing Humanity.”
“Off,” Kobi snapped, and the projection vanished.
“Do you think GAIA actually worked for a while?” Asha said. “Before it went wrong? That garden looked pretty convincing.”
“I bet it was just CGI,” said Kobi. “That was just a commercial, a way to convince people to buy GAIA. I think he was as bad as CLAWS at misleading people.”
Kobi wished he could warn them all, everyone who had been drawn in by that video and made plans to go to the launch. The smiling figure of Apana and the fake, glossy quality of the commerical made Kobi seethe with anger. The reality of the Waste had been nothing like that, nothing but destruction, suffering, and death—including the death of Apana himself. “I wish Apana had survived,” said Kobi, voice hard and sharp. “So he could see what he’d done.”
Asha looked grim. “Me too. But it’s up to us now, Kobi. We need to put it right.”
“It’s time,” said Johanna in the game room later that evening. “There’s a room near the manhole cover—I’ve cordoned off the whole area. I’ve left some supplies there, including enough Horizon to last all of you a couple of weeks.” She turned to Kobi. “Except you, of course.”
“Thanks, Jo,” said Kobi. “We’ll see you soon.”
“You’d better,” said Johanna, her eyes starting to well with tears. She stepped away. “No time for goodbyes. Just . . . go. And good luck.”
They left her, slinking through the shadowy base, descending deeper. Yaeko took the lead, keeping herself disguised against the tunnel walls until she could give the all clear. But their route was quiet. They found the supplies in the room Johanna had mentioned: civilian clothing, first-aid kits, and food-packs, as well as flashlights and water flasks with built-in filters. Johanna had managed to scavenge a single stun baton plus utility tools, each equipped with a small knife. And most important of all, there were syringes filled with Horizon.
“Nice work, Johanna,” said Asha.
They reached the corridor leading to the manhole entrance when alarms began to sound. Everyone froze.
“It must be Sol!” said Yaeko. “They know what we’re doing.”
“Run for it!” Leon shouted. They broke into a sprint along the passage. Kobi wondered how their secret could have gotten out.
But that didn’t matter now. They ran ahead. But Kobi stopped suddenly when he heard shouts. Over his wrist communicator, he heard Mischik’s voice. “Kobi! They’re here! We need to get you out!” Kobi heard a mechanical whir he recognized all too well, making his blood chill to ice, and then a scream. He couldn’t tell if it was Mischik or not.
“Snatchers,” said Kobi. “CLAWS has found the base.”
As he said it, he heard thuds above their head and scuttling from down the corridor.
“Oh god,” said Yaeko, her skin rippling through different colors in her panic.
Kobi picked out a movement behind them in the gray scale of his night vision. The shimmer of long metal legs. As the Snatcher approached he felt a wave of terror pulse from Fionn.
“Johanna!” said Asha. “We need to go back and help her!”
“We can’t,” said Kobi. “We have to go, now!” His panic had cleared—a reaction to danger forged over his years in the Wastelands. He pulled out the stun baton, activated the charge.
He heard the dart coming. He swiveled and thrust up his backpack, and the dart exploded against it, smashing some vials of the Horizon inside, the leaking serum dampening the fabric. Kobi grimaced. Come a little closer. . . .
As soon as he saw the red eyes, Kobi fired the baton. Sparks exploded from the end, fizzing across the Snatcher’s wiring. Its legs buckled. “Go!” yelled Kobi. The group raced down through the manhole. Kobi slammed it closed behind him.
“The Snatchers can’t get through here, but we need to move fast.” Kobi dropped down and forged ahead with a flashlight. His communicator came to life again, playing sounds of explosions and ricocheting gunfire. Screams. Shouts of pain, voices.
“We’re being overrun!”
“We’ve got drones coming in through three tunnels.”
“I don’t think we can—”
“Evacuate! Emergency exits.”
“Use the doors to block them off.”
Kobi felt a tight pull in his gut. None of them was Mischik’s voice. They were coming through on Mischik’s channel, but Mischik himself wasn’t saying anything.
Kobi thought of him lying dead or too injured to move. He thought of Spike, of all the Sol workers he didn’t know. Johanna. He took off the watch and threw it to the ground, the bursts of voices and static fading in the dim, dripping passage behind them as they ran. He couldn’t do anything to save them now.
“They have an evacuation plan in case the base is invaded,” said Kobi. He was trying to reassure the others, but Kobi could see his own doubt reflected in their faces. No one else said anything.
9
THEY HURRIED FOR WHAT seemed like hours. They couldn’t afford to rest. Kobi kept expecting Snatchers around every corner. He refused to let fatigue hinder his senses. He had the blueprints of the sewer network in his hand, illuminated by the beam of his flashlight. Yaeko kept asking how long before they reached the edge of the city.
“You asking isn’t going to make us get there any sooner!” Asha finally snapped at her.
“If I’d known we were going to be down here for eternity,” Yaeko replied, “I wouldn’t have eaten my sandwich in one go. I don’t know why Johanna thought I liked tuna salad.” A heavy silence foll
owed.
“She’ll be okay,” said Asha. “Either she escaped, or CLAWS will want as many people alive as possible. They’ll want to question them.”
Maybe they’ll wish they hadn’t been taken alive, Kobi thought, but kept it to himself.
Finally, Kobi directed them to the location Johanna had circled on the blueprints. Kobi climbed a rusted ladder and punched out a warped sewer grate above his head, emerging into a sparse, quiet area at the edge of the slums. They could see remnants of the old city of Wenatchee, which had mostly been leveled to build New Seattle: old-fashioned housing, motels, and highways broken into lumps of crumbling asphalt. The route of the old Columbia River, diverted for fear of contamination, scarred the soil, full of rubbish and a few makeshift camps.
Workers that Kobi guessed were on their way to the industrial farming facilities outside the city began to congregate around stalls selling coffee and food. Kobi and the others found the fruit pickers’ stop easily enough and joined a herd of people waiting in line. Several showed signs of Waste deformities, and one middle-aged man didn’t stop coughing, except to spit blood into the road. When the transport eventually came, it slowed but didn’t stop, and workers filed onto it. The transport was open-topped, something between a train and a bus. Kobi and his friends climbed aboard the last car.
The transport joined a small highway of other such vehicles, all heading west. Intersections split off toward enormous hangars and warehouses, and they passed fields of gleaming solar panels and forests of spinning wind turbines. Kobi couldn’t help but remember the tiny solar generator he and Hales had once relied on, barely enough to power the refrigerator and charge their flashlights. Occasional drones now zipped overhead, but they didn’t look like Snatchers. Hopefully CLAWS wouldn’t even think of looking for them all the way out here.
The sheer scale of the farms was astonishing, spreading out under the distant silhouettes of the mountains of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The vehicle in which Kobi and the others were riding joined a procession of similar transports. There must have been thousands of workers, Kobi thought. Automated announcements read out various combinations of numbers and letters.
