by Michael Ford
“Evacuate!”
An alarm sounded.
The Guardian raised his gun, but the bear was on him in a mound of muscle and fur. Blood sprayed the glass screen, and behind it scientists screamed. “Close the door!” yelled Melanie. The steel-and-glass door began to slide shut.
The bear looked up to where the two other guards ran toward the exit. The guard in the truck jumped out and followed. It took a second for the bear to hunt them down. It bounded after them, pawing at one man, who had short blond hair. Screams ripped through the room. The bear turned on another guard, a dark-skinned woman with wide oval eyes. “Help me!” she screamed, pounding on the closed door. “Open the—” The bear’s jaws closed on her neck and Kobi looked away.
The final guard was hiding behind the truck. The man—elderly with gray hair and a goatee—gazed imploringly at Fionn. “Do something, boy, please. Save me.” The bear leaped onto the truck, which tipped, crushing the man, before the muscular creature set upon his exposed head. The man’s legs—visible sticking out from the bear’s body—shuddered briefly before going limp. A pool of red seeped around his boots. Fionn was sobbing in the corner.
The bear charged at the door, trying to escape. But the barrier was closed. The bear rebounded off. Enraged, it turned toward Fionn. It padded toward the small boy. Blood covered the creature’s fur, matted and dark around the muzzle. It growled softly. It stopped in front of Fionn, bending over him. Fionn met the creature’s eyes. The bear padded its feet on the spot, sniffed at Fionn, then pushed him with its snout. It snapped its jaws, then, at once, it seemed to calm, bowing its head. The lights on Fionn’s head sensors twinkled. “Hold it there, Fionn!” said Melanie. “You’re doing it!”
Streams of guards stormed into the room. Their semiautomatic weapons pulsed, and the bear roared as bullets exploded into its body. It tried to charge at the guards but fell. Its feet slipped from under it as it tried to stand again, and more bullets smashed into its side, making it shudder. It collapsed in a pool of blood. Kobi looked over at Fionn. The boy wasn’t crying. His eyes were like marbles: hard, shining, empty of expression. His face and bald head were speckled with blood, and his gray suit was smeared with crimson where the bear had nuzzled him. Kobi stared in shock as the edges of the room dimmed, collapsing into the center. The vision faded.
Kobi’s chest heaved with nausea. He gasped in a breath as he found himself in Fionn’s bedroom. Next to him, Fionn was shaking, chest heaving.
“That was horrible,” Kobi said. “I can’t believe they did that to you.”
“It’s been a long road for him,” said a quiet voice, and Kobi turned to see Asha walk slowly into the bedroom. “What happened with Fionn was terrible. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.”
“Asha . . . ,” said Kobi quietly. “This place is making him worse again. He was starting to speak again before we left Seattle. And he seemed happy.”
Asha looked upset. “I know . . . but . . . But here he will be cured. We all will. Thanks to you!”
“I didn’t do anything,” said Kobi, turning away. He shook his head. “It’s not right.”
“They need to understand the Wa—”
“I’ve already heard it all,” snapped Kobi. “Don’t you think it seems strange, though? That the Guardians don’t tell you anything? That they make you do these tests? What were they even doing in that experiment with Fionn? It didn’t look like it would help find a cure.”
Asha was quiet. “We don’t understand everything about what the Guardians do.”
Kobi was about to reply when a Guardian entered the room. He spoke quickly. “Kobi. You need to come with us.”
“Why?” said Kobi.
“It’s Dr. Hales. His condition has worsened.”
Kobi shivered, a dull weight in his chest. “What do you mean?”
“He doesn’t have long. If you want to see him, I suggest you do so immediately.”
19
KOBI FELT DISEMBODIED AS they climbed into the elevator, like he was a ghost. The guard called Krenner was watching him with barely concealed hostility. Melanie was beside him, tapping something in a tablet. Asha was there too. She had insisted on coming.
The elevator climbed, and Kobi tried to clear his head. He wasn’t sure what to think. Even how to think. In the space of a day, the world had tipped upside down and every time he thought he might have found some equilibrium, another earthquake shook him off his feet.
The elevator arrived, and the doors opened. “Are you ready, Kobi?” asked Melanie.
He nodded.
Level 108 was completely sterile—the walls bright white, with airlocks and keypad doorways. Wards on either side had glass viewing windows, and contained empty beds and large arrays of medical equipment. In one, a scientist in a hazmat suit was spraying some sort of chemical into the air.
A doctor in a lab coat sat at a desk making notes on a screen.
He looked up, eyeing Kobi quizzically.
“How’s Dr. Hales doing?” asked Melanie.
“As we expected,” said the doctor. “The prognosis hasn’t changed.”
“Is there no way to make him better?” asked Kobi.
The doctor glanced at Melanie, then said, “The Waste has been cleared from his system. We’re keeping the quarantine as a precaution only. But the patient carried the toxic chemical on and off for almost thirteen years.”
Melanie put her arm on Kobi’s shoulder, softly. “The anti-Waste drugs he formulated knocked the contagion back, but each time, the damage was already done. It was always going to be a losing battle—”
“But he’s cured. This guy just said so. The Waste’s nullified.”
“I’m sorry, but this time he won’t pull through,” said Melanie. “His organs are shutting down. We’re making him comfortable, but that’s all we can do.”
“Where is he?” said Kobi.
“Room six—the last room on the left,” said the doctor before turning to Melanie.
“Come this way, Kobi,” said Melanie. Kobi set off, a step behind the director, followed by Asha.
At room six, Kobi looked through the glass. Waves of emotion almost floored him, buckling his legs and making his face crumple involuntarily.
The body on the bed looked more like a corpse than a living thing. Hales’s face was gaunt—with sharp cheekbones under paper-thin gray skin. His eyes were closed, the ridges of the sockets pronounced. A blanket had been pulled up to his chest, which was covered in various wired pads, and his bare, bony arms were free, with drips feeding into each. His mouth, ventilator inserted, hung open, and only a few strands of hair remained. He looked a hundred years old. On a table in the room, a Polaroid was propped up against a vase of plastic flowers—the photo CLAWS must have found with Hales. Unlike the other “yearbook” photos, Hales was in this one, wrestling Kobi as the camera timer went off. Two laughing faces. How things used to be.
Kobi put his hands to the glass. Despite everything he’d learned—all the deception and lies—all he wanted to do was be with the man who had raised him.
As well as the IV stands, there were several wheeled monitors beside the bed, and some sort of pumping mechanism.
Kobi realized he was crying, but he didn’t care. “Dad,” he said, fingers pressed to the glass. No—Jonathan . . .
“I’ll leave you to it,” said Melanie. “Take as long as you need.” She left the room.
“Do you want me to leave too?” asked Asha.
“No, you can stay here.” Kobi paused. “I want you to.”
He sat by Hales’s bedside for he didn’t know how long. He couldn’t decide whether he was angry. As soon as a wave of fury crashed over him at the sheer scale of the lies, it passed, leaving his emotions awash in a confusion of memory and self-pity. He thought how utterly different life would be if he had been raised here, and he kept returning to just how precarious and deadly an existence it had been at the school, yet how normal it had felt at the time. Compared to the sa
nitized spaces of Healhome, they’d been living in the Stone Age. Scraping by, always hungry, or scared, or worried about the future, or whatever new menace they might come across. But Kobi missed it.
Kobi reached out and took the Polaroid from the table. He placed it in the pocket of his jumpsuit. He didn’t know why he wanted to keep it. He only knew that it was the last remaining object from his old life, and the idea of it being thrown in the trash didn’t seem right. For good or bad, Kobi couldn’t entirely erase his past. But he could move on from it. He had to. Eventually, Kobi raised up a hand and placed it on Hales’s arm. It felt skeletal. Tears dripped down Kobi’s cheeks. “Goodbye, Jonathan.”
Whether it was coincidence or whether the man on the bed had actually felt Kobi’s touch, Jonathan Hales’s eyelids fluttered, and his skull-like head turned sideways. The eyes that locked on his and widened were brown, without a hint of yellow. As they did, the patient jerked in bed, and the heart-rate monitor began to spike. An alarm beeped, flashing red on one of the monitors.
“What’s wrong!” said Kobi. “Help him!”
A moment later, the doctor came running back, zipping up a hazmat suit. Behind Kobi, Asha edged closer too. The doctor tapped in a code and the airlock opened. Inside, he pulled on the helmet, then entered the room.
Jonathan Hales was convulsing on the bed, and one of his drips tore free. His leg almost toppled an IV stand.
The doctor worked quickly, grabbing a syringe and injecting Hales’s shoulder. Slowly, Hales’s spasms ceased, but as they did, he was reaching for the ventilator tube, as if trying to pull it free. The doctor gripped his arm and straightened it. In a few more seconds, the patient’s eyes fluttered closed again.
“Come on, we should leave,” said Asha.
She gave Kobi’s arm a tug, and after a moment more—when the heart monitor dropped again to a regular beat—Kobi let himself be led away. He knew it would be the last time he would ever see his father—the man he’d thought was his father—alive again.
20
OUTSIDE, ASHA PULLED KOBI away from the medical rooms. Some Guardians stepped after her, but she said, “Give him a minute! Where are the restrooms?”
They pointed, and she pulled him through a door into a corridor and into a cubicle.
“What are you—” Kobi began, but she placed a finger to her lips. Her face was filled with urgency, eyes wide.
She made sure the door was clicked shut, then whispered, “I need to talk to you.” She peered up at him, her eyes filled with confusion. “Kobi, something’s going on, and I don’t understand.”
“Go on.”
She seemed full of nervous energy. “You know I can read the thoughts of people who have been contaminated with Waste, right? Well, when I saw that man down there in the infirmary . . .”
“Dr. Hales?”
“I heard his voice.” She tapped her head. “In here.”
“And what did he say?”
Asha lowered her voice. “It was really clear, Kobi. He said, ‘Get outside. They’re lying to you. You need to see outside.’”
Kobi heard the words in his own head, in Hales’s voice. “Are you sure?”
Asha nodded.
Kobi leaned against the wall. “He’s telling us we need to escape.”
Asha chewed her lip. “I don’t know. It was very clear. He didn’t say to run away. He said ‘see.’ You need to ‘see’ outside.”
Kobi didn’t understand. “I’ve seen outside. It’s just like everywhere else—a wilderness. Haven’t you been in Melanie’s office?”
“No, of course not—we’re not allowed.”
“I have. I looked through the window. It’s just miles and miles of—”
“She’s got a window?” said Asha.
“Uh-huh,” said Kobi.
Asha was frowning. “So why don’t we? They said it was because of the Waste—that walls were safer.”
Kobi shrugged. “But you’ve been in the transports—couldn’t you see out of those?”
Asha shook her head. “Same excuse. Avoiding any risk of contagion.”
Kobi had to admit—it was a bit weird. Still, he wasn’t inclined to listen to anything Dr. Hales had to say.
He didn’t say it, though, did he? He thought it. And why would he lie to himself?
“Is there a way to get outside?” he asked Asha. She nodded.
They hurried out of the restroom, along the corridor, until they reached the elevator, but Asha went past and pushed through a pair of double doors with a fire escape sign above it. The door opened onto concrete stairs. Kobi peered up. “No cameras. Hangar’s top floor, right? One-eighty-two.”
Asha nodded. “We’re on one-fifty-one. That’s a lot of climbing.”
Kobi began to jog up the first flight. “Come on, then!”
Twenty floors later, enhanced strength and stamina or not, Kobi was tiring. Asha was flagging badly, and Kobi had to help her, then stop after each flight for a rest. They’d passed an internal door on every floor, and much as Kobi had wanted to look, it wasn’t worth the risk. If there were alarms, or cameras, they’d be found out in seconds.
As Kobi waited on a floor toward the top, the lactic acid draining from his thighs, he wondered again if this was a waste of time. Asha seemed so convinced of what Hales had said, but the man on the bed had hardly been in a fit state to communicate anything. Plus, Kobi had seen what was outside, and it was exactly like everywhere else—completely overrun.
“I don’t think I can go on,” said Asha, sitting on a step.
“We’re almost there,” said Kobi. “Four more flights.”
“You go—if there’s something there, you can—”
An alarm started wailing, startling them both, and red lights along the ceiling flashed.
“They’re on to us!” said Kobi. He hoisted Asha up to her feet as Melanie Garcia’s voice said urgently over the speaker, “We have a code four. Two missing patients. All personnel respond.”
The frantic siren seemed to give Asha a jolt of strength, and they set off again, Asha hauling herself with the bannister as Kobi took two steps at a time. Doors banged farther below, and he saw flashlight beams in arcs whipping up and down the stairwell. Then the thud of boots many floors down.
He grabbed Asha’s arm to help her.
When they had two more floors to go, a door slammed not far below, and Kobi saw three Guardians emerge. They saw him too.
“Contact! Contact!” one shouted. “They’re heading to the roof.”
Kobi tugged Asha roughly up one more flight, then reached a door with the number 181. That’s not right. There should be one more. For a brief second he feared it might be locked, but as he felt the handle it turned. It pulled open, and they bundled through. Asha gasped and Kobi stopped dead, heels squeaking on the polished concrete floor.
Facing him were row upon row of crouching Snatchers, perhaps a hundred altogether.
Kobi held his breath, but the Snatchers did not move. Deactivated. There were two transports on the far side of the hangar space, one flush against a wall, the other a few yards away. There was no obvious way out.
Kobi knew they didn’t have long. He ran, darting among the stationary Snatchers, with Asha trailing.
As they made their way to the closest transport, Kobi almost tripped on a ridge in the ground. He stopped, looking around. It was a circular section of flooring, maybe thirty feet across, slightly detached. Looking up, the ceiling seemed to be made of some sort of sliding hatch, with a cantilevered arm mechanism folded up. On the wall beside them was a panel of buttons.
It’s a takeoff pad. . . .
“Stand back,” he said, and he hit the green button. Straightaway, the circle of ground juddered and began to rise. At the same time, the ceiling hatches slid back to reveal a growing patch of black night sky.
“Freeze!” yelled a voice.
Guards spilled out from the stairwell and red lasers flashed all around him.
“Wait for me!”
cried Asha.
Pfft. Pfft.
Darts ricocheted off the Snatchers’ metal shells.
Asha reached up, and Kobi took her arms, lifting her onto the raising platform. They both crouched behind a Snatcher, using it for cover. I wonder what dose their weapons are set to now. Probably enough to floor me right away.
“Stop them!”
Melanie’s voice. And as Kobi turned he saw her emerging from the elevator with Krenner and three other guards at her side.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. The darts all missed.
As the platform rose, Kobi and Asha stayed low to avoid being hit. He was ready to run in whatever direction seemed most promising. Maybe across the rooftops—there might be trees he could climb down, slipping into the foliage.
But then, as the night revealed itself, he couldn’t move at all.
Kobi felt dizzy, his muscles utterly drained.
“No . . . ,” said Asha at his side.
All he saw was gleaming metal and twinkling glass. Skyscrapers rising like gleaming spires toward the sky. Cars, sleek as bullets, zipping through the air. A train on a suspended track looping between buildings, tunneling into their sides like a caterpillar. Giant holographic images flashing, showing people, and clothes, and food, and faces. Kobi turned on the spot, reeling.
It stretched for miles in every direction.
Not a leaf in sight. Not a speck of green.
A perfect, Waste-free city.
21
KOBI MANAGED A FEW more steps across the rooftop, then dropped to his knees, eyes drinking in the vista. A breeze chilled his skin. He could see people in the streets below—hundreds of them—walking across clean sidewalks, crossing the roads under flashing stop signs, as cars with impossibly reflective skins threaded almost soundlessly around bends, occasionally rising over one another, or climbing into the air and joining the other flying traffic looking like sparkling mirrors.
It can’t be . . . I must be seeing things. They’ve done something to me.
