ALSO BY BRENDAN REICHS
PROJECT NEMESIS
Nemesis
Genesis
Chrysalis
THE VIRALS SERIES
Virals
Seizure
Code
Exposure
Terminal
Trace Evidence
The Darkdeep
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2019 by Brendan Reichs.
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Ebook ISBN 9780525517061
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Cover Design by Dana Li
Version_1
For my dad
CONTENTS
Also by Brendan Reichs
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE: FIRE LAKE ISLAND1: MIN
2: NOAH
3: MIN
4: NOAH
5: MIN
6: NOAH
7: MIN
8: NOAH
PART TWO: THE WILD9: MIN
10: NOAH
11: MIN
12: NOAH
13: MIN
14: NOAH
15: MIN
16: NOAH
PART THREE: CHRYSALIS17: MIN
18: NOAH
19: MIN
20: NOAH
21: MIN
22: NOAH
23: MIN
24: NOAH
25: MIN
26: NOAH
27: MIN
28: NOAH
29: MIN
PART FOUR
REPURPOSEMENT30: NOAH
31: MIN
32: NOAH
33: MIN
34: NOAH
35: MIN
36: NOAH
37: MIN
Epilogue
LIVINGSTON COLONY30 SOLS
60 SOLS
90 SOLS
120 SOLS
180 SOLS
210 SOLS LATER...
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
FIRE LAKE ISLAND
1
MIN
I promised myself I wouldn’t die that night.
I’d said it often over the past six months, whispering the words, when Noah was away and no one else was around to hear them. The vow didn’t feel momentous anymore. I’d “died” so many times in the past that I wasn’t particularly scared of it, even now that the threat was real. But I was freaked out by the mother of a thunderstorm bearing down on our settlement. While I sat there on my bed, alone.
I wish Noah were here.
But he wasn’t. He’d gone up to Ridgeline camp to see about a broken water purifier. The trip took several hours each way, so he wouldn’t return until morning.
Outside, hail fell like staccato punches against the roof of our cabin, littering the ground with icy shrapnel. I hugged my knees to my chest, wondering again whether Noah and I were crazy not to live inside the silo like Sarah and her friends. So what if it meant sleeping with a hundred yards of concrete hanging overhead? Those girls were warm and snug right now, unable to even hear this cataclysm.
I had the same thought every time an electrical storm came, and they always came. But I never actually moved down there. I was alive, in the real world. Surrounded by real wind and water and earth and sun. No way was I living in a basement at the bottom of a hole. To me that felt like crawling back inside the Program.
Then I snorted. It’s not like they invited me to join them.
There was only room for a dozen inside the lab complex anyway. My place was in the settlement. I couldn’t lead our fledgling little community from underneath a rock.
BOOM. Sizzle.
I stuck my nose outside the cabin door. The air reeked of ozone and charged metal. Chunks of hail were melting on the black, loamy earth surrounding the stream.
It never really got cold now, aboveground. The weather seemed stuck in a perpetual late-summer temper tantrum, like a cat that’s fallen into a pool and wants someone to blame for it. I felt a restless, relentless pressure in my eardrums. The hair on my arms stood in anticipation of the laser show about to be unleashed. Sour copper filled my mouth.
Lightning split the sky, followed by a crack of thunder that rattled my teeth. This was going to be a bad one. They were all bad ones. Earth may have recovered enough to support human life but it remained thoroughly pissed off.
I stepped from my home—a sturdy box of rough-hewn logs Noah and I had constructed by hand. In the first days after regenerating our class discovered a mountain of tools inside the silo’s supply alcoves, along with guides and sets of plans. We’d built our houses as strongly as possible, but these storms were nearly too much. Old tolerances didn’t seem to apply anymore. Sometime during the eons our digitized existences traveled the MegaCom’s circuit boards, nature’s fury had gotten a turbo boost.
A full moon hung in the western sky, kissing the fog and infusing the night with a pale, almost spectral glow. But I was staring in the opposite direction—at the roiling, malevolent cloud bank creeping closer from the east. A thick ball of pure ferocity, flaring yellow and red, lit by the ceaseless electrical flows thrumming inside it.
It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It cared nothing for me and mine.
The storm snarled closer, its violent light reflecting off the ocean seething beneath it. The nastiest howlers always struck from the east, where Montana used to be. Where there was nothing now but endless, iron-gray sea.
I glanced back to the west. The ocean in that direction remained eerily calm, though its turn was coming. When the storm finally pounced, it would cloak the moon in a blanket of dancing, glimmering sky-fire. A breathtaking sight, if it wasn’t so deadly.
Fire Lake Island rose from the encircling sea like a giant middle finger, a lonely tower of cracked and crumbling granite. Our whole world. The peaks of the Rockies were all that remained above the angry waves. So much had changed while we . . . slept? Dreamed?
I shivered, aware of just how much had sunk into those inky depths. How precariously our refuge was positioned. How easily we could be swept away.
That had been the biggest shock—discovering that our quiet mountain valley was now an island in an endless sea. The silo was perched at its eastern edge, one concrete wal
l sheer and exposed, dropping hundreds of feet straight down to the ocean. The only recognizable feature remaining was Fire Lake itself, still cold and beautiful in the valley’s center, collecting rainwater dumped by the countless savage cloudbursts.
We might physically be in the same place, but nothing, nothing was the same.
A wave of static electricity prickled my skin. Then a bolt of pure energy, highlighter yellow, struck the island with a scream of triumph. Thunder boomed like heaven’s anvil, shaking the trees around me.
Screams erupted from the settlement below, a tight grid of cabins and storage buildings that bordered a gurgling creek. Orange tendrils lofted into the sky. The stench of scorched pine and burning fuel rolled up the mountainside in a humid wave.
I was already running downhill, past the thicket we used for firewood and into the village. Early on some jokester had dubbed the place Home Town—because everyone was from there, get it?—and the name stuck. Though I’d been its elected leader since Day One, I lived slightly apart from the others, on a ridge overlooking the ocean. When my days were done I needed to unwind away from prying, judging eyes. Plus, I shared the place with Noah. I’d take whatever privacy we could get.
“Fire!” someone shouted. “Get the hoses!” yelled another. This wasn’t the first hit we’d taken, and everyone knew their jobs. But as I watched, flames leapt higher in a ragged, whipping breeze. I prayed for rain to hurry up and get there.
I sprinted down a dirt-packed trail, lungs burning as I reached the main square. Fires rose before me, and I grimaced at our bad luck—the initial bolt had struck a gas depot. We didn’t keep much on the surface, but the ATVs drank their share and no one wanted to haul canisters up the shaft every day. This storm was teaching us a lesson about complacency.
BOOM. Sizzle.
A second blinding dagger stabbed the valley. I glanced up at the writhing neon mass now screaming directly overhead, like northern lights gone feral. Worst one yet. In a blink, I questioned every assumption I’d made about the planet’s surface. Maybe it wasn’t safe to be outside at all.
I spotted Derrick setting up water pumps while Akio and Casey fueled the portable generator. Piper and Hector were struggling to unwind fire hoses when the next bolt struck in nearly the same spot as the first. A storage building exploded. I watched in horror as a fireball engulfed three people carrying buckets.
Everything around me froze, then zoomed into fast-forward.
“Get back!” I shouted, but my warning was gobbled up by more growling thunder. Lightning struck in quick succession like artillery fire. A second blast rocked the village, spreading the inferno to nearby cabins.
Screams. Someone ran into the night, wreathed in flames.
My eyes burned as a gust of scorching black smoke tried to shove me sideways.
“Min!” a voice bellowed.
I spun, rubbing grit from my eyes. Derrick was pounding on the fire equipment with a socket wrench. Akio and Casey crouched behind him, hands on their knees and puffing hard. I streaked over and slid down beside Derrick as he slammed a fist to the ground.
“The valve broke!” Derrick shouted. “I can’t get the pumps to start!” He pointed to a jagged part inside the machine, as if it would mean something to me.
“Double the buckets!” I yelled, pawing stray hair from my eyes. The charged air was standing the loose strands on end. “We can’t let any more buildings catch!”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem,” Akio said, pointing to the eastern horizon. A heavy curtain of rain was marching across the island, swallowing the landscape one foot at a time. The downpour sounded like a million plinking xylophones closing in on us. At least the lightning had stopped.
I rasped a relieved breath. “Okay, good. That’ll put out the fires.” Shooting to my feet, I started scanning for victims of the explosion. A sick feeling swept over me. How many people did we lose tonight?
Derrick stood tall beside me, dark eyes grim as he examined the approaching monsoon. “That’s . . . Min, that’s a lot of water coming down. And we’re near the bottom of the slopes.”
I stiffened in alarm. He was right—an entire river was dumping onto the heights ringing the island’s central valley. All that liquid had to go somewhere.
The radio at Derrick’s belt squawked. I heard Sam’s voice crackle through a wall of static. “Watch o— . . . a freaki— . . .—ll of water coming right fo— . . .—ryone inside th— . . .—IGHT NOW!” Derrick tried to signal back, but the connection went dead.
“Damn it!” Derrick holstered his radio in disgust. “Too much charge in the air. But I think we got the message.”
“Forget the pumps. Get everyone into the silo!” I ran toward the largest clump of people I could find as the electric blur engulfed the moon. The effect lit up the night like the Vegas Strip. People were stumbling about, trying to help but unsure what to do. The storm’s power seemed to have scrambled everyone’s senses.
I grabbed the closest shoulder I could reach. Aiken Talbot, ash-covered and coughing, eyes red and glistening from more than just wood smoke. “Head to the silo! We can’t stay out here—this one’s too much!”
Aiken shrugged me off angrily. “People need help!” He pointed to a still form lying beside the burning fuel dump. “The fire’s too hot to get close, and it’ll spread. We need a water brigade!”
“It’s not going to spread.” I spun him around to face the wall of rainwater sliding closer by the second. “The storm will douse the fires, but that’s a flash flood waiting to happen. We have to hurry!”
Aiken blanched. “Crap. Okay. I’ll gather a team and help the . . . the wounded.”
He swallowed. I squeezed his arm. We both knew the person on the ground was likely dead.
“Don’t take too long,” was all I said.
We split up, each gathering people as we ran. I began herding everyone up the main path—a gravel road that led to the silo’s entrance no more than two hundred yards upslope. Though most of the class had moved outside to live like people, we hadn’t gone far. Safety was close if we hurried.
The downpour finally reached us, and in seconds I was soaked to the bone. I splashed back down toward the village, alert for stragglers, but quickly realized it was pointless. I could barely see my own hands in front of me. When a small group led by Casey and Derrick appeared carrying electric lanterns, I gasped in relief.
“Do you have everyone?” I shouted.
Derrick shrugged, his jaw clenched. “No way to tell! We can’t see anything!”
Rainwater began running down the path in a thickening stream, covering my feet up to the ankles. Soon it’d be too slippery to climb. “Keep going!” I shouted, grabbing Casey’s lantern. “I’ll do one last sweep, then—”
Bang. Bang. BANG.
Something rumbled, followed by a deep groan. Everyone froze.
The sound of stone smacking stone echoed across the valley. A low vibration hummed through my legs.
I heard several loud cracks echo from upslope, followed by a noise like ogres chewing rocks. An instant later two massive boulders rolled out of the darkness, passing a dozen yards to my left.
“Landslide!” Aiken shouted.
The hill shook with a roar like a jet engine screaming, then a scythe of dirty water leapt from the darkness, washing my feet out from under me. I tumbled downslope in a tangle of mud and flailing limbs.
Shouts erupted in the darkness as others were swept along with me. Something heavy and solid struck my temple and I nearly blacked out. I tried to scream but water filled my mouth and nose, causing me to gag and choke.
The area below the trail flattened and I lurched to a halt, covered head to foot in cloying mud. I’d lost both shoes and was bleeding from a gash on my head, but all my bones seemed intact. I whispered a silent prayer of thanks to any deit
ies that might’ve stuck around while the Program ran.
Classmates were picking themselves up around me. The rain continued pouring down like a faucet as we staggered into a ragged cluster and counted off. Thirteen. There’d been twenty-five people in Home Town when the storm struck. Some had definitely gone ahead of us, but had they been caught in the slide, too? I shivered, thinking of the burning silhouette that had run toward the lake. How many never reached the path at all?
I should have planned for this better.
Mercifully, the rain slackened. I glanced eastward. The sky in that direction was clear and brilliant with stars. The storm would be over soon. Nothing that furious could last.
Derrick sloshed over beside me. He let out an exhausted sigh. “I think we have some bad news,” he said quietly.
I nodded, unable to speak. Again. There’d been death on my watch before—real death, final death—and everyone knew it.
“This ain’t on you,” Derrick said as if reading my mind, though he kept his eyes on the lake. Water was rushing into it at a startling pace. How much would drain through the surrounding hills in the next few hours? Our creek must’ve overflowed. The village might be a total loss.
“This was a disaster, D. If not on me, then who?”
“Not every situation requires blame.” Derrick sat down on a log and pulled off a sodden boot. A stream of brown liquid gushed out. “We’ve never had a storm that bad. My balls are still rattling.”
“Gross.”
“True story.”
I rubbed my face. “I wish Noah were here.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, and I blushed in the darkness. I hated showing weakness, but was it wrong to want your boyfriend around after getting washed over a cliff? Plus I had no idea where he was, or if he was okay. What if he’d been caught outside in that nightmare?
“I left my high-tops by the fire pit,” Derrick grumbled. “I know they’ll be ruined. Last pair, too.”
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