Burn

by Sarah Fine

  Also by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

  SCAN

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

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  Copyright © 2015 by Walter Jury.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jury, Walter, author.

  Burn / Walter Jury and Sarah Fine.

  pages cm

  Sequel to: Scan.

  Summary: “Tate learns quickly that the H2 are the least of his problems when a new alien race begins to threaten the planet”—Provided by publisher.

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Inventors and inventions—Fiction. 4. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Fine, Sarah. II. Title.

  PZ7.J965Bur 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014031200

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN 978-0-698-17364-4.

  Version_1

  Contents

  ALSO BY WALTER JURY AND SARAH FINE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM SCAN

  For Mom and Dad—Nana and Babba,

  as their grandkids call them!

  —W.J.

  ONE

  IN MY WORLD, THINGS ARE COMPLICATED. AT LEAST, they are right now. I’ve just destroyed a Walmart. At any moment, my worst enemy is going to come charging out of its front entrance, determined to hunt me down. I’m standing, exposed and vulnerable, at the side of the road not a quarter mile away, so it wouldn’t take him long. And the thing I’ve been fighting for is gone.

  The past three days have rearranged my understanding of myself and this planet so drastically that I’m not sure I can cram another hard truth into my head. The things I do know tumble over one another in my mind:

  My mother is in surgery. For a bullet wound. She can’t help me.

  Race Lavin, the guy she was trying to protect me from—who also happens to be part of an alien race called the H2—is probably regaining consciousness right now in the hardware section.

  His men have taken my father’s invention, the scanner that tells the difference between H2 and human, the device my dad said was the key to our survival, the thing he died for. And his best friend, George, the guy I was trusting to help me put the pieces of this puzzle together, is a few feet away from me, slumped over the wheel of his car. His blood is smeared across the seat. Another life lost in our secret war.

  “Tate, I think we have to go.” Christina’s slender fingers encircle my wrist. “I hear sirens.”

  I blink. Wisps of her dark blond hair blow around her face, which is pale with fear but set with determination.

  “I don’t know where . . .” I have no idea where to go. My mom said I should meet her at the hospital, but it doesn’t seem safe.

  Nothing seems safe.

  Christina’s grip tightens. “We need to move, though. I’m not sure it matters where right now. As long as we’re away from here.”

  I take one last look into George’s bullet-riddled car. I would have expected it to be armored, seeing as he works for Black Box, a private weapons manufacturer. But even if it was, it was no match for the large-caliber ammo Race’s agents were firing from their shiny black helicopter. Which means they could tear through our current ride—a sedan borrowed from Rufus Bishop and his inbred clan of human supremacists—like paper. There’s already a bullet hole in the thing’s rear panel, a farewell gift from the Bishops in return for the accidental death of Aaron, Rufus’s oldest son.

  I’ve made a lot of enemies this week. Alien and human.

  My only ally is tugging me back toward our car. I have so many things to figure out, so many things to do, but as her hand slips into mine, I realize I need to prioritize. And protecting her is at the top of the list. I put my feet in motion and jog beside her. We jump into the car, and I swing us onto the road, heading north.

  “Are we going back to New York?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say hoarsely. “I need to get into my father’s lab and dig up what he was working on, but I have a feeling Core agents will be waiting for me to show up.” The H2 central leadership has a history of brutally suppressing any threat to their secrets, and I am most definitely that, even without the scanner. Just before I choked him out, Race made it clear that the device wasn’t the only thing he was after. He wanted me to help him get into my father’s lab. As. If.

  “Your dad’s phone.”

  Her voice yanks me out of my churning thoughts. “What?”

  Christina touches the side of my face. “It’s buzzing in your pocket, Tate,” she says quietly. “Why don’t you let me drive? You need to think things through, and I can manage this part.”

  I pull off the state highway into a subdivision, parking in front of the community pool. We switch places, and I lean over and kiss her cheek. “I’d be in serious trouble without you,” I say, and then instantly regret it. She shouldn’t even be here with me. Her biggest worry should be passing the chemistry final tomorrow, but right now, missing an entire week of school is the least of her problems.

  I stare down at my hands, using my thumbnail to scrape off a few red smudges. This is the third time in as many days that I am wearing the blood of someone I care about. This time it’s from George, but last time . . . I look over at my girlfriend. The white bandage is visible beneath her thick, wavy hair. It covers the stitched-up graze wound given to her by Core agents. She’s not even recovered from the concussion she sustained two days ago. She hasn’t had a chance, because we’ve been running and fighting nearly every moment since it happened. “Christina . . . you really need to see a doctor about your head—remember what David Bishop told you? You need a CT scan. Maybe you should—”

  “Don’t even, Tate. I feel fine. And I can tell by the look on your face that you’re about to try to be noble and send me home, but it’s not going to happen. I’m in this with you, and that’s it. Save your head space for something else, like seeing who’s trying to reach you.” She frowns. “Or who’s trying to reach your dad, I guess,” she murmurs.

  I pull my dad’s sleek, untraceable phone from my pocket. “Someone texted.”

  “Who is it?”

  I stare at the icon, a black envelope on the screen. And the name next to it is—“Raymond A. Spruance.” I touch the black envelope, and a box p
ops up, requesting a password.

  “Is that one of The Fifty?” she asks, sounding nervous. The Fifty are a group of human families who understand the threat from the Core very well—they’ve been defending themselves from this alien elite ever since the H2 crashed their ships into the oceans four hundred years ago, refugees fleeing from something pretty bad, if I’m to trust Race Lavin. Which I won’t. But my father, who sat on the board of The Fifty, warned me to be careful with them, and he was totally right. So far, two of their number—Rufus Bishop and my dad’s former boss, Brayton Alexander—have tried to kill us.

  “I don’t know, but the name . . .” I stare at it, sifting through my memories. “This isn’t about The Fifty. Raymond A. Spruance was a famous admiral during World War II.” My heart picks up its pace. An encrypted, secret text from a long-dead admiral—one my dad made me study in depth. “What if this message is from my dad?” I whisper.

  “Tate . . .”

  I can tell by the way she says my name that she’s worried I might be losing my mind. “No, listen. This is exactly like something he would do.” For years, he made me study military history. Along with chemistry, physics, ballistics, jiu-jitsu, and a host of other things. I thought he was just a hard-ass, but he was preparing me for this, and now I need to use what I know. “What if he set up some sort of messaging system in case something happened to him?”

  “Sent to his own phone?”

  “Who knows where else this message went?”

  “But, Tate, how would it know something had happened to him? And . . . he died on Monday. It’s Thursday now. Though it feels a lot longer than that,” she adds quietly.

  “I know. Something could have triggered it, though. Maybe because he hasn’t logged in in the last seventy-two hours. Or there was an intrusion in his systems, or someone unauthorized tried to enter his lab? Race straight up told me that the Core want to get in there.” I stare at the password box. “It will only open for people who know the password.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “No, but that’s kind of the point. I’ll bet he didn’t tell anyone.”

  Or maybe he did. His last words to me were When the time comes . . . it’s Josephus. There are eight little sections in the password box—that’s how long the password must be. My fingers shake a little as I type Josephus.

  The screen flashes red, and the upper left quadrant goes black. “Shit.” I bow my head and try to get my heart to slow down. I need to think. He didn’t send a message under the name “Spruance” randomly. I type 07031886—the birth date of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance.

  The screen flashes red again, and the lower left quadrant goes black. I’m guessing I’m running out of chances. If I don’t figure this out, this message might disappear, and it’s important. It has to be.

  I blow a long breath from between pursed lips, thinking about Spruance. His nickname was Electric Brain. I slowly type electric. Another red flash, and the upper right quadrant goes dark. “Damn!”

  What is wrong with me? I’ve burned through three of four shots at getting this message, all in less than a minute. I’m supposed to be thinking like my dad, but instead I’m thinking like . . . me. My dad made me study at least a hundred major battles that took place throughout the centuries; he was a fan of Spruance in particular because the guy stayed cool in the midst of chaos, and my dad valued that highly. Spruance was involved in the Battle of Midway and won a Distinguished Service Medal afterward, and Dad actually made me memorize the citation, because he said that those qualities would help a man get through anything. It had commended Spruance on his endurance and tenacity. And this password is eight characters long.

  I hold my breath and type tenacity.

  The screen flashes green. A message appears:

  BROKEN BY IT, I, TOO, MAY BE; BOW TO IT I NEVER WILL. AND, JUST IN CASE: MARGARET DEAN, I HAVE LOVED YOU ALWAYS.

  “What does it say?” Christina asks, and her brow furrows as I tell her. “Are you sure that’s from your dad?”

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “Yeah. The first part is a quote. Abraham Lincoln said it.” And God, it’s like my dad was predicting his own death. Especially because—“Margaret Dean was Raymond Spruance’s wife. I think my dad is referring to my mom. I wonder if she got the message, too.” It’ll tear her heart out if she gets access to it, and she’s so smart that I bet she could figure it out.

  “What’s he trying to tell you?”

  Dad always planned ahead. Four steps ahead, Rufus Bishop had told me. “Christina, I think we need to go to Kentucky.”

  She laughs. “What?”

  “Whenever Dad had me study a specific person, like a general or a president or whomever, he told me to go back to the very beginning, because if I understood where a man came from, I could understand what shaped his thoughts.”

  “And Spruance was born in Kentucky?”

  “No. He was born in Maryland. But this quote is from Lincoln, and Dad never did stuff by accident. He’s trying to tell me—and maybe my mom—to meet him . . .” I clench my fists. “He’s trying to tell us to go to Lincoln’s birthplace. Which happens to be Hodgenville, Kentucky.” I program it into the GPS on his phone. “It should take us about eight hours to get there.”

  “We’ll have to get gas.”

  I curse. “We can’t use my debit card. It’ll tell the Core exactly where we are.”

  She smiles grimly. “Good thing I stole some cash from the professor.” She pulls his wallet from the pocket of her sweatpants and hands it to me. It’s an expensive-looking leather thing with CW on it. Charles Willetts. A friend of my mother’s who turned out to be an enemy, though I’m still not sure what side he was on. He never scanned himself, and thinking back, I wonder if he avoided it on purpose. He was supposedly H2, but he wanted to keep the scanner away from them. He wanted to get it to George instead, even though they were seemingly on opposite sides.

  I peek inside the wallet. “There’s at least a hundred. It’ll get us there.” I raise my head. “Did he hurt you?”

  Her mouth tightens. “Only a little. He . . . he got really weird after you left, Tate.” She shudders. “He was pulling at the neck of my shirt, saying he needed to touch my skin . . .”

  I take her hand, wishing I could find Willetts and kill the creepy old guy. She squeezes my fingers as she says, “He got distracted when someone started banging on the door, and I grabbed the gun and hit him with it. I took his wallet and keys and ran.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Same way you did, judging by the dent you put in the roof of that SUV in the parking lot. It was crazy, all these ambulances and stuff, a helicopter landing on the lawn in front of that university Rotunda, so I slipped away in the chaos.”

  And she could have gone anywhere. She could be halfway to New York by now. Yet she came straight to me. I stroke her hand. “You’re amazing.” And I love her. I told her as much last night, but it turns out she was dead asleep. I want to tell her again, but I also want it to be the right time. Preferably when we’re not running for our lives.

  Christina turns on the radio and sets the station when she finds some of her cherry-flavored pop music. I sit back and allow myself the luxury of staring at her while she sings along. We motor down the road, heading for a tiny town in central Kentucky that is, I hope, the location of one of my dad’s safe houses. If I really understand who my dad was, though, it won’t be just a place to lie low. There’s a reason he’d send us that kind of message, a reason he’d direct us to that place specifically. It’s not New York, and it’s not his lab, but I’m hoping that once we get there, some answers will be waiting.

  TWO

  SWEAT PRICKS AT THE BACK OF MY NECK AS THE LATE-AFTERNOON sun beats down on us. Christina shifts slightly, trying not to make any noise. We’re squatting behind one of the many chokeberry bushes in this large yard, having walked here fr
om the gravel road about a half mile away.

  In front of us is a shack. Like, really, a shack. Rotting clapboard, cracked and broken windows, front door hanging off its hinges. No sign of life anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we’re not being cautious. When we rolled into town, we went straight to the birthplace of Lincoln, but as soon as I saw the National Park sign, I knew it wasn’t a place my dad would locate a safe house or any kind of meeting place. So we headed to the Hodgenville town hall and looked at property records. My dad’s name wasn’t anywhere to be found. Neither was my mom’s. Or mine. But there was one name I recognized: Raymond A. Spruance bought a property on the outskirts of town about two years ago, and here we are.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” Christina whispers.

  I glance over at her. She looks dead tired, and I’m sure she’s craving a hot shower, a nice meal, and a long sleep. I know I am. “If this isn’t it, we’ll go back to that hotel we passed in town, okay? But let’s investigate first. Come on. I don’t think anyone’s here.”

  We come out from behind the bushes and cross the yard, then carefully mount the rickety stairs to the shade of the porch. I lead the way as we edge around the door and into the shack. The floor is dusty and bare . . . except for an old sock lying in the corner. I walk over to it, and when I see the musical note stitched on the ankle, I start to laugh.

  “What’s up?” Christina asks, coming over to me.

  I point at the musical note on the sock. “Did you know there was a famous composer named Frederic Archer?”

  Her arms slide around my waist. “So this is definitely your dad’s place, then?”

  “Yeah, has to be,” I say, my voice strained. I stand right on top of the sock and look around to see what this vantage point shows me. There’s no furniture in this place, which is an open room with two closed doors at the back, maybe leading to a bedroom and a kitchen. Nothing’s written on the walls, and the ceiling—wait. There’s a rusty nail hammered into the wooden board right above my head. I reach up and twist it, pulling it out, my breath coming faster.