Burn Read online

  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.”

  Christina’s hand closes over my forearm. “And that?”

  The bottom left screen shows a yard filled with weeds. In the distance is a field. It’s the front of this house. And the sight of it sends adrenaline exploding through my system. Because there’s a blond guy climbing the rickety porch stairs.

  We’ve been found.

  THREE

  “STAY HERE,” I SAY TO CHRISTINA AS I STRIDE OVER TO the wall rack and pull a semi-auto pistol from one of the pegs. Like all things my father made, it’s black, sleek, and dangerous. Once I’ve got it cocked and locked, I glance over to see my girlfriend staring at me with wide eyes.

  “He’s in the house,” she whispers, pointing to a screen next to the one that displays the yard—and this one shows the interior of the shack. I can’t believe I didn’t notice the camera when I came in, but this guy doesn’t, either. He’s skinny and young-looking. More like a boy than a man. Younger even than I am. His eyes are focused on the two doors at the back of the main room, just like mine were.

  “He won’t get in,” I assure her. “There’s no way—” My mouth snaps shut as he pulls the rusty nail from the ceiling and sticks it in the hole in the floor. We hear the machinery working above us, the floor moving aside, the stairway to the basement being revealed. “Okay, take this,” I say, walking toward her and holding out the gun. “You see this little thing?” I touch the thumb safety. “If he comes in here, you point this at him, and if he threatens you, slide this down and start pulling the trigger. Do not mess around.”

  She gingerly takes the pistol, and I curl my hands around hers, showing her how to hold it. “Tate, he looks like a harmless kid.”

  I meet her dark blue gaze. “So do I.”

  She swallows hard and nods. I head over to the rack, grab myself another, and jog out the door, shutting it behind me. I take the stairs to the main level two at a time, knowing the kid is probably already at the door, wondering if he could possibly know the code to get in, wondering who the hell he is. I reach the top of the steps and pause, pressing myself against the wall and listening.

  From the kitchen comes the crinkling of plastic wrap. What the fuck. He’s already inside. I creep silently through the living room and peek around the wall, into the kitchen. The kid has his back to me and is shoving crackers from a Number Ten into his mouth. I raise the weapon, aim it at the back of his head, and thumb the safety off. At the muted click, the kid freezes.

  “Tell me who you are, or I’m going to ruin your meal permanently,” I say.

  The meal falls from his grasp, sending soup and dried fruit and nuts spattering across the floor. “D-don’t, please,” the kid whispers, raising his hands in the air. “I’m just looking for Uncle George.”

  I frown. “Who the hell are you?”

  The kid looks over his shoulder at me. He’s a few inches shorter than I am, wearing wire-framed glasses over bright green eyes now glazed with anxiety. His blond hair flops over his forehead. “Leo Thomas. Can I turn around?”

  I step back. “Go ahead, but keep those hands up.”

  He obeys. His Adam’s apple bobs as he stares into the barrel of my weapon. “If you’re not Tate Archer, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

  I step forward and press the weapon to his forehead. “I’m not playing, Leo. How did you know how to get in here?”

  His eyes are round and slightly crossed as he peers up at the black snout of the gun. “Um. Having trouble thinking straight. Imminent death on the brain.”

  I roll my eyes and move away, but only a little. And I wait.

  He draws in a shaky breath. “I’m looking for my uncle George. He was supposed to be here if something ever went wrong.”

  I arch an eyebrow.

  Leo’s fingers twitch nervously. “I think something went wrong.”

  “And if I told you my name was Tate?”

  He smiles. “I’d be really relieved.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it means I’m in good hands.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because your dad told me so. And it didn’t take much to know he’d use your mom’s middle name as his password.”

  I grit my teeth and take
a few more steps back. “Dude. I need you to tell me your story. Now.”

  “Do I have to stand here with my hands in the air while I do it? I mean, I could, but—”

  I flick the safety on and lower the weapon. “How did you know my dad?”

  He grins. “I knew you were Tate. I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’ve known your dad for as long as I can remember.” His smile falters when I don’t return his enthusiasm. “He’d come for Fifty board meetings, and he’d visit me whenever he was in town.”

  “How do you know about The Fifty?” This kid can’t be older than fourteen, and my mom told me that members of The Fifty didn’t tell their kids about the H2 or anything until they were at least sixteen. It was certainly a shock when I found out, though the circumstances had something to do with it.

  “My parents were members. The Thomases. But . . .” His glasses slip a little on the bridge of his nose. “They died. About eight years ago. Car accident. My dad was the only Thomas left, except for me. So The Fifty raised me at the headquarters in Chicago, and I’ve been allowed to sit in on board meetings. I can’t vote, though. Not until I’m sixteen.”

  So this kid can probably tell me a lot. And he looks fairly harmless. I relax a bit. “You said you thought something went wrong. What have you heard?”

  “What happened to your dad, for one.” He shakes his head. “I want you to know I don’t believe anything they’re saying about him on the news. I know it’s a big lie made up by the Core.”

  My stomach feels hollow. “He’s really dead, Leo. I was there when it happened.”

  “I know. I mean . . . the rest of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How he’s a terrorist, how he was going to blow up that school in Manhattan.”

  “What?” I say with a laugh, though it comes out strangled.

  He looks over my shoulder at the television in the living room. “It’s all over the networks. You can see for yourself.”