by Michael Ford
As he woke to a dawn sky one day, he realized he wasn’t alone. A giant gull stood nearby, Fionn and Asha on its back.
“Is this a dream?” he’d said. “Are you real?”
“That should be my question,” said Fionn. “Asha sensed you were still alive.”
The pain as they wrestled him onto the eagle told him he definitely wasn’t dreaming, and he passed out again. When he woke, they were already landing at the high school, where Yaeko and Niki were waiting to help him inside.
For the first two days after, he’d done nothing but rest. On the third day he could walk with a stick, and by the seventh he barely had a limp. He wasn’t sure how he’d survived the bomb at all. Maybe the trunk of the gnarled Waste tree had shielded him from the worst of the concussive blast. But that seemed impossible. Secretly Kobi thought he knew the answer: it couldn’t be explained by science, not totally. He remembered the spirit of Jonathan Hales watching over his body. His dad had protected him. Not literally. It was something he had given Kobi, something inside him.
Johanna had told Kobi, back at the Sol base all those weeks ago: Our powers run far deeper, and are more complex than we know. Our powers depend on our state of mind, on our physiology—on something inside. It’s different for all of us. You have to find that thing inside you.
Kobi had found it: something inside him so strong his body had survived the central blast zone of the bomb.
Kobi made his way past the gym, through the showers, and into the changing room: none of those had escaped the encroaching vegetation, and a filigree of vines covered the lockers, with springy moss on the floor. The locker room was where his whole journey had begun six months ago, when he’d set out alone to find the man he thought was his father. He paused with his hand on locker D22 and drew a breath to steady himself. Several times since coming back he’d thought about opening it, but something—fear, perhaps?—had made him reluctant. He wasn’t sure he was ready now, but he exhaled and pulled open the locker door.
“Hey, Max,” he said, addressing the boy in the photo tacked to the inside of the door. “Long time no see.”
Maxwell Trenton, whose name was inside every book within, had been the owner of the locker before the Waste hit. A short kid, chubby, with a crooked smile, he looked maybe twelve from the photo, taken with two members of the Seattle Seahawks NFL team.
There was only one book inside the locker now, under a Seahawks cap. Kobi took it out carefully. The Yearbook, with the annual photos Hales had taken of them both. Kobi flicked through from the earliest, when he was just a baby in Hales’s arms, through his toddlerhood, then as gap-toothed young boy. For every year that Kobi aged, Hales seemed to age five, turning from an athletic young man to a hunched elderly one as the Waste wreaked havoc on his metabolism. It was a stark reminder of the price he had paid for keeping Kobi safe. The only thing that remained the same in each photo was the look on Hales’s face. Pride, protectiveness, a hint, at the edges of the eyes, of fear.
Love.
Kobi slid the last picture from his back pocket—charred around the edges—into the Yearbook and placed the Yearbook back in the locker.
“Bye, Dad,” he said, closing the door gently. “I love you too.”
Fionn’s panicking voice punctured his thoughts. “Kobi—quickly! Get out here!”
Kobi ran from the locker room and down the hall, leaping vines and roots and pushing leaves aside. As he burst through the school’s front doors he saw the Snatchers had already arrived. Dozens of them hovered over the school, and more landed on the ground, completely encircling the Wastelings with their stingers poised.
“How did they find us so fast?” asked Yaeko.
The wup-wup sound of rotors approached, and over the trees three helicopters appeared. Not CLAWS but military. They landed on the old school field, and the soldiers jumped out in camouflage fatigues, wearing visored helmets and clutching their weapons. In single file they ran up the bank toward where Kobi and his friends were pinned back by the Snatchers.
The lead soldier swiped over his wrist tablet. Instantly the Snatchers on the ground lowered their stingers and shut down. The ones in the air shot off vertically, then flew over the school and out of sight.
“You’re not CLAWS?” said Asha.
“We’re not,” said the sergeant, lifting his visor.
“But the Snatchers—”
“CLAWS doesn’t control them anymore. They don’t control much at all, actually. Is this all of you? The Sol kids?”
Kobi looked at his four companions. “That’s right. Who are you?”
“Federal response team,” said the soldier. “Monitoring the new growth. We traced your broadcast signal. You can’t stay here—important people need to talk with you. The president, for one. But hey—there’s a hero’s welcome waiting for you at home.”
Home . . . , thought Kobi. It seemed an odd choice of word. What was home if not this place, where he’d lived most of his life?
He and his friends looked at one another. He’d always known they’d be leaving at some point, he supposed. Only Fionn looked upset at the thought, and Asha hugged him close, whispering to him. He sniffed and nodded.
“We need to make another stop,” said Kobi to the soldier. “Alan Apana needs a ride.”
The soldier’s eyes went wide. “Apana is alive? Sorry, I thought he hadn’t made it. Where is he?”
Kobi shook his head. “Looking after his strawberry bushes. He’s got a bunker at his mansion on Mercer Island. The whole house got destroyed in the bomb blast, but there’s a greenhouse in the bunker, and he wanted to save the last of his fruits and vegetables. Guess when you live with nothing but plants for thirteen years, you get kind of attached to them.”
“Right,” said the soldier. “I guess we’ll need to stop off there, then.” He frowned. “Strawberry bushes?”
Kobi smiled as the soldier relayed the destination to the pilot through his radio. Kobi knew it wasn’t just his produce Apana was going back for. The emergency bunker was meant to be an emergency fallout shelter in case anyone ever decided to blow up the Wasteland. It contained personal mementos, photos of his family, his son’s old guitar. The room and its contents were all that was left of his home, and he needed to say goodbye to it. Kobi understood the feeling.
The Wastelings followed the troops down toward the helicopters and climbed on board the largest. Soon Bill Gates High School was falling away beneath them.
“You said CLAWS wasn’t in charge anymore!” Kobi shouted over the blades’ roar.
“There are warrants out for the arrest of Melanie Garcia and the rest of the board,” said the sergeant. “Their assets are frozen pending a federal investigation.”
Kobi should have felt a thrill of triumph at the thought of Melanie going to jail, but he took the news with barely a flicker of joy. What did it matter now? As long as CLAWS was out of the picture, that was enough.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“The CLAWS medical program has been suspended and turned over to us.” He looked askance at Kobi. “Is it really true your blood made those cleansers? We tested the Horizon. It is incredible. It’s a two-pronged attack: we cleanse anyone who’s already infected, and GAIA makes sure they’ll never get recontaminated. You really are the savior, you know that?”
Kobi grinned. “People keep trying to call me that.”
The soldier whistled. “They’ll want to keep you in a layer of Bubble Wrap!”
Kobi felt uneasy at the thought but laughed it off. He’d be back to being prodded at and examined, his blood taken and analyzed. But that was his duty, and compared with the fates of so many others who’d fought CLAWS and the Waste, it was a light one.
Asha was watching him from across the other side of the chopper, smiling warmly.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’re not on your own anymore.”
Kobi thought of Jonathan Hales. He’d known from the start how special Kobi was and what he re
presented. And everything he’d done had been designed to keep Kobi safe, even if it meant giving his own life. Kobi couldn’t let that sacrifice be in vain.
Below they crossed the wall, and the green expanse seemed to stretch forever.
“I was never alone,” he replied.
About the Author
Courtesy Michael Ford
MICHAEL FORD lives in the north of England with his wife, two obedient dogs, and two less-obedient children. He writes books for childlike adults and adultlike children.
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Books by Michael Ford
Forgotten City
Copyright
LOST HORIZON. Copyright © 2019 by Working Partners Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Interior Art by Michelle Taormina
Cover art © 2019 by Ronan Le Fur
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944061
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-269701-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-269699-1
1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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