Burn (2 page)

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 from 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.

Nothing happens. I look down at the bent nail, which has turned my fingers orange with iron oxide. It was right above my head. Right above the sock. I kick the ragged thing aside, uncovering a small hole in the floor. I kneel next to it and then, following my instincts, insert the nail into the hole. It catches, and a deep vibration thrums up my arm. Christina clutches at my shoulder while the house shakes and the door behind me unlatches, opening a crack. I push it ajar in time to see the floor of the room sliding open, revealing a metal staircase descending into darkness.

I stand up, stick the nail back in its hole in the ceiling for future use, and take Christina's hand. “Definitely my dad's place.” And it's both awesome and gut wrenching. “Come on.”

Together, we descend the stairs, our palms skimming along the cool concrete walls. I feel another vibration before I hear it, and I look up to see the floor sliding across the opening to the staircase, plunging us into total darkness. Christina touches my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. “It's okay. Just keep a hand in front of you so you don't hit a wall.”

Groping in the inky murk, we walk down a few more steps and reach the bottom. My hand brushes a metal door, and I feel my way to a keypad, which lights up as soon as I touch it.

“Please say you know the password,” Christina says.

“I might.” My heart beats a jittery rhythm in my chest as I punch in
Josephus.

It buzzes and lets out a tiny electric shock. I yank my hand back with a yelp and shake the pain from my fingers. “I guess that wasn't it,” I mutter, frustration prickling along my limbs.
Goddamn.
Another dead end. Dad wouldn't have wasted his final breath on that name, on that message, if it wasn't important. So what the hell did he mean? I grit my teeth. It barely matters right now, because I've trapped myself—and my girlfriend—in the basement of a shack in the middle of freaking nowhere. What matters now is finding out what the password actually is.

I try
tenacity.
Shock.
Spruance.
Shock.
Scanner
—“Shit!” I step back, the painful tingles coursing up my fingers.

Christina's breath is warm in my ear. “Slow down. Take a few minutes and think about it. We're okay. No one's chasing us at the moment. It's all right.” Her arms are tight around my waist, like she's trying to hold me up. “Have you tried passwords he used in the past?”

I blink down at the obnoxious keypad. I can almost hear my dad's grim chuckle. The shock isn't damaging, just annoyingly painful. Like my dad's criticisms. I blow out a breath, and then I slowly type my mother's middle name, one of his favorites despite the obvious security risk. And . . . no shock. The door clicks and swings open. Several lamps and overhead lights illuminate the space, motion-activated, I guess.

“Whoa,” Christina mutters as we walk into an apartment, echoing my sentiments perfectly.

This place looks exactly like our apartment in New York, minus the windows. Same furniture. Same layout. Even a few of the same family photos. All that's missing is my stuff, strewn all over the coffee table. I close the metal door behind us and head for the kitchen. And sure enough, when I pull open the refrigerator, I see several Meal Number Tens. Eight ounces pinto bean soup with lean ham. Four wheat crackers. Two ounces dried pineapple, banana, and mango. Two ounces mixed nuts. “Hungry?” I say to Christina, pulling two of them out.

“Thanks,” she says, taking them. “Are you going to tell me how you're doing with this? It's so strange.”

I shrug. “Not for my dad. If I'm right, he'll have a lab here, too. I need to go take a look at it, but let's eat first. You look like you're about to fall over.”

We sit at the table, and as I take my usual seat, I think of the last time I did. The last time I saw my dad as he was supposed to be, combed and pressed and ticked off at me. We'd been eating breakfast with George, and they'd been talking about population estimates, and how my dad's calculations showed the numbers shifting more quickly than anticipated. Now I know he meant there are more H2 every day, and fewer humans. But there were also anomalies—fourteen of them. And, thinking about how George's skin flashed orange under the light of the scanner instead of red or blue like everyone else, I have to wonder if he was one of those anomalies. I wish I knew what that meant.

After we're finished, I try to call my mom, but her phone goes straight to voicemail. I send her a text:
SAFE. Call soon?
I hope she'll understand my meaning. And if she got Dad's message, too, she might even know where we are. Still, I really want to hear her voice right now, and I need to know she's okay. I can only hope she's safe in the hospital, sleeping off the anesthesia, and not in the hands of the Core. Maybe Angus McClaren flew from Chicago to help her out. She said they were friends. I don't like thinking of her alone and vulnerable—especially because I left her that way. After a few minutes of waiting for a response, I start to poke around the apartment. It's precisely like my home in New York, but there's no sign my dad was ever here, save the fact that the fridge is stocked.

Finally, we make our way down yet another set of stairs and find a door that looks exactly like the one leading to my dad's lab. Except: I don't have my dad's fingerprint. It's sitting in a plastic case in my room in New York. Exhausted, I lean against the wall. Another freaking puzzle to solve.

“Tate, it feels late,” Christina murmurs.

I'm about to argue when I notice the shadows beneath her eyes. I pull out my dad's phone. It's only eight, though it feels way past midnight. “I know what you mean. This can wait until tomorrow. Let's go get some sleep.” We've been up since four, and I barely got two hours of rest last night.

We take showers, and I find some clothes for us in the drawers of the bedroom—clothes that fit me, like he knew I'd come. With wet hair and heavy limbs, we settle onto my bed. I'm relieved that Christina doesn't ask to sleep somewhere else, because I need her here beside me. She rests her head in the crook of my shoulder, slides her arm over my chest, and settles in. “Thank you,” I whisper.
For so many things. For being all I have in the world right now. For sticking by me.

She squeezes me like she hears every thought, and then we drift into sleep.

• • •

I awake with a gasp, yanking myself out of a dream of my dad tossing ice water on my face. I grab for his phone and see that it's four in the morning—the time he usually woke me up to work out. Wincing at the memory, I inch out from under Christina, resting her head on the pillow and allowing myself to stroke her cheek before tiptoeing out of the room. I need to get into his lab. Maybe he left something for me. He had food in the fridge, clothes for me in the drawers. He was prepared for me to come. I pad down the stairs to the lab and stare at the entry mechanism. A fingerprint scanner. On impulse, I press my thumb to it.

And to my shock, the screen flashes green and says:
Welcome, Tate. Password?

“I have no idea what the password is,” I mumble. But . . . my dad
wanted
me to get in here. He programmed it to accept my thumbprint, and not just his own. And then it occurs to me—what if I wasn't the only one who could hack? He had no idea I'd invaded his systems, but what if he'd been invading mine? With shaky eagerness, I punch in the last password I used to access my server at home. It works. “You wily asshole,” I whisper, chuckling to myself. “You must think you're pretty clever.” It comes out strained. I never could have anticipated missing him this much.

The cool interior of the lab raises goose bumps on my arms for more reasons than the temperature. Once again, it's a replica of my father's lab in New York. Some of the same weaponry lines the walls. It's chillingly familiar—right down to the screen across the room, black with three numbers in the center:

2,943,287,999

4,122,239,861

12 (?)

That bottom number . . . It used to read: 14. Two fewer anomalies now. Once again, I think back to George and how he flashed orange. Everyone else had flashed either red for H2 or blue for human. Was he one of the two who are gone now? Does my dad have some satellite orbiting Earth, scanning the population? I'm betting he does. I just don't know why he wanted to do that. Population numbers aren't that interesting. It only told him what he already knew, that the H2 outnumber us by more every day. But most H2 think they're human, and the Core want to keep it that way. My dad seemed pretty eager to keep this technology a secret, too. So why was he scanning everyone? And what do those anomalies represent? It can't be hybrids, because when humans and H2s reproduce, the result is another H2, which is why the population numbers are the way they are. So . . . is it some next step in our evolution?

“I thought I might find you down here,” Christina says as she peeks through the door I left open. Her hair spills over her shoulders. She looks amazing in my clothes. Or maybe it's the fact that she's here at all.

“Morning,” I say, pulling my gaze from her body and peering around the room. And as soon as I do, I see it, something that wasn't in the lab at home. On the desk in the corner is a notebook. I stride over to it, swallowing back hope. It's a simple Steno, full of scrawled calculations and diagrams, none of which make sense to me. That's saying something, since I was studying some pretty advanced mathematics before everything went to hell. I turn page after page, looking for something familiar and finding nothing. And finally, I get to the last page with writing on it—the rest of the pages are blank. But on that page, it says
Find it in 20204
scribbled in unusually sloppy handwriting, like my dad was in a hurry. And at the bottom of the page, it says
Race: “Sicarii.”

“What's a Sicarii?” Christina asks, appearing at my shoulder.

“It's Latin for ‘assassin,'” I say, thinking back to my language lessons. “Probably the perfect word to describe Race Lavin.” He was, after all, responsible for my dad's death.

“And the number?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's a zip code?” I punch it into my dad's GPS, and sure enough—20204 is a zip code located within Washington, DC, containing a few major government departments. “I wonder if this is where the Core is headquartered or something.”

“Please don't tell me you want to go there.” She sounds frightened.

“Yeah, you and I are going to wage an assault on the US Department of Health and Human Services.” I gesture at the rack of weapons along the wall. “That doesn't sound fun to you?”

She smacks my arm. “You're so obnoxious.” But she doesn't seem as scared now, which makes me smile.

“My priority is to find whatever my dad wanted me to, and if I have to go to DC, I will. But first I need to see what else he left for me here.”

“Are those security cameras?” Christina points over my shoulder.

I turn to a set of screens to the left of Dad's desk. “Yeah, probably. That's what he had set up at home.”

She laughs. “Is that your room?”

I glance up to the screen in the top row and see my room . . . but it's not the room we slept in last night. It's my room at home. I recognize the spill of dirty laundry off the edge of the bed, the sneakers on the floor, the clutter of papers and books on the bedside table. “Yeah . . .” I take a closer look at the screens. “These are from all over. Look—” I point to a screen in the middle row, where bright sunshine glares from a window in a living room that looks like the one upstairs. “It's only five in the morning on the East Coast. This must be in a safe house that's somewhere else entirely. And look at that one.” I point to the bottom row, where security cameras show our backs as we gaze at the screen. “These are from here, obviously.”