Forgotten City

by Michael Ford

  “Hard to say,” she replied. “Can’t tell if I’m picking up the wolf or something else.”

  Still, they proceeded slowly. The inside of the market was like a dank cave—anything fresh had rotted away long ago. Fionn muttered occasionally, not words exactly but worried grunts and groans, like he was having some sort of nightmare. Each time, Asha reached over and touched him softly. At one point a helicopter definitely drew nearer, and they all stopped, holding their breath, as its shadow passed overhead.

  “Maybe the Snatcher in the tunnel sent back some sort of signal,” Asha said, sounding nervous. “They might be on our trail. We can’t afford any delays. Fionn . . . I’ve never seen him this bad before.”

  Most of the clothes stores were swamped in vegetation, but in one Kobi spotted some coats still wrapped in polythene and untouched by any plant growth. He pulled them out.

  “Wear this,” he said, handing a duffer jacket to Asha. “They might help mask our heat signatures.” He pulled one on himself and carefully draped the other over Fionn.

  Anything to give us an advantage. When we get in the open again, we’ll need it.

  On the far side of the market, they paused at the doors.

  The university where the lab was located was still a dozen blocks east and four south, the route uphill. In the daylight, most of the bigger predators would be asleep, but if a Snatcher or a CLAWS chopper flew overhead, they’d be in trouble. Fionn’s skin was almost pearly white, his breathing wheezy. Kobi felt for the boy’s pulse. It was racing.

  They didn’t have a choice. They had to press on.

  The first part of the journey took them between towering green skyscrapers. Most of the flora in the streets consisted of wide-leaf giant ferns and exotic flowers sprouting from the former shop fronts. But as they climbed higher still, the buildings shrank and the way ahead grew more forested and wild. The squat buildings on either side of the road were almost entirely coated, like small green hillocks with only the flashes of steel or glass to show their true nature. It was so much farther than Kobi had ever come before. As they traveled, he counted off the blocks on his map.

  Near the university campus, the wolf stopped by a stream that babbled across the road. It dipped its head to drink, then lifted its dripping muzzle.

  “We’re here,” Kobi said, eyeing the complex of plant-covered buildings ahead. It didn’t look at all promising, but his heart thundered. “Can you sense Dad?” he asked Asha.

  She paused and looked around, and then sighed and shook her head. “No . . . But that doesn’t mean he’s not here. There’s a lot of interference, and if I haven’t met someone it’s harder to recognize their electromagnetic brain signatures. That’s what the Guardians told me.”

  “Let’s split up. Call out if you find anything that looks like a lab.”

  Kobi turned to the wolf. Fionn lay draped over its back, murmuring, his fingers clenching at the wolf’s coarse fur, like a baby instinctively gripping its parent. Kobi strode over to the wolf, who looked up from the stream, its muzzle wet, tongue lolling from its mouth. Kobi pressed his foot into the wet earth in front of the wolf. He crouched over the print, pointed at it, then jabbed a finger to his chest. “Remember when you tracked me behind the tree stump? You found where I was hiding.” He swept his finger over the building complex. “I need you to find someone hiding now.” The wolf’s yellow-stained eyes glinted with intelligence as it gazed down at the print, then at the surroundings. With a growl, it brushed past Kobi down the overgrown street, nose dipped to the ground. Kobi grinned at Asha, but she was watching Fionn being carried away. “Fionn will be safe with the wolf,” Kobi said.

  Asha nodded. “I know.” She tapped her head. “I’ll keep track of them anyway. I’ll come and find you if I discover anything.”

  Kobi wanted to tell her to be careful, and go over his father’s rules of traveling through built-up areas. But Asha was already treading carefully through what looked to have once been a parking lot. Kobi turned in the other direction, hurrying down a slight incline, to a wide sunken courtyard surrounded by steps. It looked a bit like the jungle-claimed ruins of the Aztec ziggurats that he’d seen in books from the school library. The Waste made everything, ancient and modern, look the same.

  He had no idea how big the university complex was or where the lab might be. Now that they were there, the doubts he’d kept at bay set in and multiplied. If his dad had made it there, why on earth would he have stayed until now? He’d spent so long thinking about reaching the university, he hadn’t even stopped to consider how big the complex might be, or where he’d even start. He’d thought, if his Dad was here, he’d somehow just know, as if they had an invisible connection or a telepathic link like Asha’s.

  He was beginning to lose hope when he heard a far-off cry. Asha was calling to him. He sprinted in her direction, and arrived just at the same time as Fionn and the wolf.

  “I’ve found something,” she said. “Look.”

  Under an archway, foliage had been cut away from a doorway, and there were engraved letters on a brass plaque beside the door: “GrowCycle Laboratories.”

  The same company that sponsored the football stadium. The ones behind the outbreak. Kobi’s dad said they were a biotech company, but perhaps they had done some of their research here too.

  “Think this could be it?” said Asha.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that the door was partially cleared. Someone had used it. Recently.

  “It has to be,” said Kobi, trying to keep himself from getting carried away. He tried the door, and it was unlocked. No sign of anyone inside, and it was filled with plant life.

  “Dad!” he called. “It’s me—Kobi!” His shouts echoed along the deserted corridor.

  “We need to help Fionn,” said Asha. “Where’s the cleanser?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kobi. “Let’s split up.”

  They wandered across the mossy, spongy corridor, checking the doors on either side. It seemed to be offices and the occasional classroom. A small kitchen area.

  The wolf paused, sniffing at a set of vine-ensnared stairs. It swung its head toward them.

  “It’s found a scent,” said Asha.

  The wolf stood by Kobi and bent down so Kobi could lift Fionn off its back. Then the wolf began to climb the steps, nose lowered.

  Asha hurried after it, and Kobi, carrying Fionn, followed. When they reached the top, his heart flipped. The wolf was waiting by a door a few feet up—a door sealed from the outside with tape, which could only mean one thing. “That’s it!” he said. But at the same time, as he hurried toward the door, he felt a drag in his stomach as he realized what the tape on the outside meant. Whether he’d come and gone or never made it in the first place, his dad wasn’t there.

  Asha shoved through, tearing the tape, and they rushed into a room filled with signs of his father. A lab coat hanging on a peg, masks and gloves. A notebook with a pen resting on it. Vials and test tubes in racks. A board covered in his dad’s handwriting. And there, in the corner, a working fridge, no doubt powered by solar panels on the roof. Kobi laid Fionn on the table, and went to it. Inside were several vials in a rack marked with a chemical formula in his dad’s hand. Cleansers. They were dated, all within the last two months.

  He grabbed one of the antibody dosages and a sterilized syringe pack.

  “Quickly!” said Asha. “I think he’s stopped breathing. Fi, hang on!”

  Kobi tore open the pack with his teeth and loaded the syringe. Fionn was completely limp—he looked like a corpse already. Kobi tapped his arm a couple of times hard to get a vein up. No reaction. Holding his breath he plunged the syringe and eased the medicine into Fionn’s arm.

  “Please . . . Please . . . ,” Asha mumbled. She clutched Fionn’s hand, massaging the back. “Have you got any more? Give him more.”

  Kobi wanted to tell her that if this dose didn’t work, there was no point injecting more, but he already suspected it might be too late. “Wa
it . . .” was all he could manage.

  The seconds ticked on, and Fionn just lay there like a doll. Asha began to cry quietly.

  Finally the wolf lay down too, whining with its head on its paws.

  Like it already knew.

  14

  FIONN’S FOOT TWITCHED.

  “Fionn!” Asha cried. She leaned closer to him, pushing a lock of hair from his brow. “Fionn, can you hear me?”

  Then Fionn’s lips parted and he let out a moan. A smile exploded across Asha’s face. “Fionn, we’re right here. Don’t try to move.”

  But Fionn did anyway, opening his eyes and rolling onto his side. He half fell off the table, but Asha rescued him. “Stay put,” she said.

  Fionn was blinking, looking left and right, then focusing on Asha.

  “Kobi saved you,” she said.

  “My dad saved you,” said Kobi, smiling down. “We’re at his lab at the university.”

  Fionn managed to sit, dangling his legs over the side of the table. He mimicked drinking.

  Kobi fished his canteen out and handed it to Fionn, who drank deeply. Afterward, he wiped his mouth. He looked at them both. “Thank you,” he said out loud, making Kobi pull back in surprise. Asha laughed. She grabbed him in a fierce hug. “I thought . . . I’d lost you.”

  Fionn grinned. He petted the wolf that was nuzzling him.

  “Just rest up for a few minutes,” said Kobi. “I’ve got to see if there are any clues about where my dad is.” He spotted some sealing tape and tossed it to Asha. “Would you mind sealing the door?”

  Asha nodded. “You think your dad made it here?”

  “I hope so.”

  Kobi scanned the room—there was a notebook on the lab bench, with a pen beside it. Kobi opened it to look and skipped to the most recent page, hoping to find a date that might tell him when his dad was last here. Apart from a few scribbles of various chemical equations, and some complex molecular diagrams, there was nothing to help. The lab was adjoined by an office. The door was open, and inside was a desk, bookshelves, and a couch with a sleeping bag rolled at one end. The trash can held some empty cans of food, but it was hard to tell when they might have been eaten. Kobi imagined his dad at the desk, working as he ate. There was an empty syringe in the trash can too.

  But it was the photo on the desk that drew his attention. His dad, looking so young, standing shoulder to shoulder with three others; one was an older man in a black gown, and the other two, along with Kobi’s father, wore mortarboard hats and clutched rolled-up scrolls of paper. Graduation day. Maybe the old guy was a professor. Kobi picked the photo up carefully to look closer. It had to be pre-Waste. The four people in the image stood on the grassy shore of some lake or river, in front of a huge, modern, multistory mansion, surrounded by exotic flowers and trees. The photo had been taken from a jetty, just visible extending through the water in the foreground. The older professor was a large man with thick gray hair and a trimmed beard. He wore spectacles, and his head was drawn back in a hearty laugh. One of the students beside Kobi’s dad was a tall and sallow-cheeked man with dark auburn hair. He had his arm over Kobi’s dad’s shoulder and smiled at the camera. Kobi’s dad was looking sideways at the woman beside him. Kobi felt an odd prickle across his skin. His dad had never wanted to talk about Kobi’s mother, clamming up at the first mention, and after a while Kobi had learned to stop asking. Could this be her? She had straight, black hair and delicate features. Kobi tried to see himself in them but couldn’t. He put the frame back down, sadly. Trying to imagine life before the Waste was almost impossible. The picture looked fake, or like something taken on another planet.

  Kobi sat down in the desk chair, taking the room in. On the wall opposite were two posters with the same GrowCycle lettering from the front door. One showed acres and acres of crops growing in neat rows. Some sort of harvesting vehicle was cutting through the center, spelling out the letters GAIA, and across the bottom of the poster were the words—Nourishing Humanity. The other poster showed the cover of a magazine called TIME. It was a picture of a bearded, smiling man. His face was etched with deep lines, and spectacles were balanced on his large nose. Kobi recognized him as the older man from the graduation photo. He wore a lab coat and held up an impossibly glossy apple as if about to sink his very white teeth into it. The headline in the corner read: “Professor Alan Apana, head of GrowCycle’s GAIA program, reveals the hunger that drove him to solve the world’s food shortage.”

  Kobi’s father had known Alan Apana, the head of GrowCycle. The man who had destroyed the world. Kobi tried to focus his whirring thoughts. In some ways it made sense. His father had managed to survive because he had understood how to create the cleansers from Kobi’s blood. He had always been reticent to talk about the past, about the Waste disaster. Was that because . . . he was involved in it? Had he worked at GrowCycle? He was young back then. He couldn’t have been high up in the company. No, you’re reading too much into one photo. Apana was probably just his teacher.

  Kobi continued to search the room. He pulled out the desk drawers and ruffled through their contents. Apart from some stationery, there were reports of meetings, mostly dated in early 2031, which was hardly a surprise. In the bottom one, there was a bound set of pages. The cover simply read:

  GAIA 1.3: New Findings (Restricted. For L3 Clearance Personnel Only)

  I guess that includes me now, thought Kobi.

  He scanned the opening paragraphs. It had been compiled offsite, at a location called the Park, and though Kobi was only skimming, certain words stood out: preliminary findings . . . worrying trends in primary and secondary samples . . . unexpected side effects in organic samples . . . rapid growth combined with potent mutagenesis.

  Kobi looked up to check on Asha and Fionn. They were sitting together, stroking the wolf, which was lifting first one paw, then the other, as if obeying direct commands. Fionn was actually laughing.

  Kobi returned to the report, forcing himself to read more slowly and take it all in. He didn’t understand some of the language, but the meaning was quite clear. A scientific team—their signatures listed at the bottom of the report—was carrying out research into the GAIA program. Kobi scanned the signatures quickly but, thankfully, his father’s name, Jon Hales, wasn’t among them. Kobi found himself shaking his head in dismay at the reasoned scientific tone. It was like no one saw the catastrophe coming. There was evidence that the fertilizer was mutagenic, increasing its effectiveness but also bringing the risk of toxicity. A couple of scientists had already fallen ill after accidental exposure. The report ended with three recommendations.

  The immediate suspension of GAIA 1.3 testing until further evaluations can be carried out.

  Delay in testing at the Park site.

  An urgent meeting with the PR and communications teams at GrowCycle.

  A voice made him look up. Asha was standing in the door.

  He hadn’t even heard her approach. “Sorry?”

  “You were in another world. I said, ‘Anything interesting?’”

  I was in the past, thought Kobi.

  Kobi closed the report.

  “Did you find any leads on your dad?” asked Asha softly.

  Kobi pushed himself to his feet. Looking at the cans in the trash, and then the rolled-up sleeping bag, he felt a sharp stab of emptiness. It was almost a month now, and he hadn’t come across a single clue his dad was alive. “No.”

  He heard a sudden growl from the other room and a man’s voice, then Fionn yelped. Asha turned on her heel and they both rushed in. Kobi looked around in confusion, searching for the source of the voice, heart thudding in expectation. But all he saw was the wolf, hackles up and snarling. Fionn was pressed against the wall.

  There was a disembodied head sitting on the workbench, being projected from a shoe-size black box. It flickered in and out of resolution, and though it was talking, the words were sporadic, and out of time with the movement of its lips.

  “. . . careful, Jon .
. . No, we shouldn’t. . . . onto us. We’re supposed to be scientists, right?” Kobi edged nearer. He had no idea who the man was. “You have to send more, Jon. Test subjects’ reactions are remarkable. . . . If it turns out to be . . . we’ve won! Please, as soon as you can. . . . It was all worth it.”

  The face came into sharper focus, and then Kobi froze. He had seen it in the other room. The head belonged to the gangly graduate standing beside his father, only now the man was much older, with salt-and-pepper hair and a gaunt look.

  So many thoughts and feelings tangled in his mind, such deep confusion, but the foremost was betrayal. The man in the hologram was talking to his father. He was calling him Jon. And that meant one thing.

  Dad’s been lying to me. He said there was no one else, and he knew it wasn’t true.

  “It’s all right,” said Asha to Fionn. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” She glanced at Kobi.

  “Who is that man?”

  Kobi couldn’t produce words. He stared at the flickering projection. The man’s face was frozen in urgency—in the middle of sharing something with Kobi’s father that Kobi had been excluded from.

  It’s a coincidence, he tried to tell himself. The drone is old. It could be a recording. Jon could be anyone.

  But Kobi’s brain was too rational, too well-trained to take stock, add up the probabilities, and draw logical conclusions for him to believe it.

  “There has to be a reason,” Kobi murmured.

  “Jon’s your dad, right?” said Asha. She didn’t seem to get the significance of what she was saying.

  “Jon’s my dad.” Kobi echoed, hoping it might give him some form of comfort, but he just sounded desperate. Memories flashed through his mind. All the times his dad could have told him the truth. All the times he’d lied instead. The secret trips to the lab. He told me I was too young to come, but that wasn’t the reason he left me behind. He didn’t want me to see this. Asha is probably right about the vitamin pills too. He didn’t want me to sense other people.

  It all seemed to fill Kobi up, too overwhelming to contain. He fell into a seat at the desk, heart vibrating so much he felt his body might shatter.