Burn Page 3

  I pivot on my heel, keeping him in my periphery in case he makes a move. I grab the remote and flip channels until I find CNN, and after a minute of staring, I see it scrolling across the news ticker at the bottom of the screen: Frederick Archer’s body to be released by Secaucus medical examiner’s office . . . NYPD’s quick action averted yet another school tragedy . . . would have been the largest domestic terrorist attack since Oklahoma City . . .

  “Oh my God,” I breathe, rage crackling in my chest. “This is bullshit.” And that’s what Leo meant about the Core’s lies. Race kept everything quiet while he was chasing me, but now that he’s lost me, he’s probably spreading this story to get me to do something rash and stupid, to lure me out.

  “Well, not everyone buys it,” Leo says. “Especially because of her.” He points to the screen, a bemused smile on his face. They’re showing a clip of an interview with a spindly older woman who looks really familiar. Helen Kuipers is her name. I turn up the volume.

  “—telling you, it was some kind of radiation device. Or a laser. I don’t know, but the kid was waving it over everyone, and when it got to me, it changed color, from red to blue.”

  It’s the lunch lady from the cafeteria that day, one of the few who flashed blue—human—beneath the light of the scanner my best friend, Will, had snatched from me.

  “She’s been everywhere over the last two days,” Leo comments. “Making the most of her three minutes of fame, I guess. She thinks she was marked or irradiated or something, and she’s insisting it was linked to some government conspiracy . . . Really, she comes off as crazy. She’s one of the only witnesses willing to talk about what they saw, though, so she’s gotten a lot of play. I’m assuming the Core were able to intimidate the rest. But this lady thinks the whole blowup was about that glorified flashlight thing.”

  So Leo knows about The Fifty and the Core and my dad, but apparently he doesn’t know about the scanner. He’s looking at me like he’s hoping I’ll explain, but I’m distracted as the clip ends and a somber anchorwoman appears on-screen. “Authorities have confirmed that Helen Kuipers, one of the witnesses to the events in the cafeteria of Beacon High School on Monday, has been missing since yesterday morning. Her daughter says Ms. Kuipers never arrived home after taping an interview in the WABC studio. Police are investigating.”

  So the lunch lady talked, and now she’s missing. Just like the Core, silencing any human who poses a threat to their secret. “They got to her,” I say.

  “Who?” It’s Christina. She’s got the gun in her hand, and she’s cautiously watching me and Leo from the hallway. Her gaze flicks to the screen as they show my dad’s driver’s license photo. Beneath his photo, it says “Frederick Archer, suspected terrorist.” Her eyes get wide. “Oh no . . .”

  “Who are you?” asks Leo.

  She tears her eyes from the TV. “Christina. I’m Tate’s girlfriend. Who are you?”

  His brow furrows as he looks her over. “Which family are you from?”

  “This is Leo,” I tell her, pointedly ignoring his question, especially since he ignored hers. “He was raised at The Fifty’s headquarters, so he knows almost everything.”

  She nods at me, and something silent passes between us. We’re not going to mention that she’s H2. Some of The Fifty, most notably the Bishop family, are distinctly homicidal when it comes to the planet’s dominant species.

  “Sit down,” I say to Leo. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  He settles himself on the couch. “Are we going to get past this at some point? I’m on your side, and I was hoping you could be on mine. Uncle Angus left in a hurry after Uncle George disappeared, and I—”

  “What do you mean, ‘George disappeared’?” I ask.

  “About three days ago. Right after the board meeting. Angus lost touch with him. No one knows where he went.”

  Christina bites her lip and comes to stand next to me, looking down at Leo with curiosity. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye and then say, “George is dead, too, Leo. He was killed by the Core yesterday morning.”

  All the blood drains from Leo’s face. “What?” he whispers, his eyes going shiny.

  When she registers the pain on his face, Christina shoves her weapon at me and then goes to sit next to Leo on the couch. She takes his hand as tears streak down his face. “It was quick,” she says quietly. “He probably didn’t have time to be scared or in pain.” Leo curls in on himself, and she pats his back while my own eyes burn. I miss George, too. I was depending on him to help me. He was a good man, and—

  “Wait. He was missing for three days?” I ask. He was killed only twenty-four hours ago. “Angus didn’t know he was coming to Charlottesville?”

  Leo wipes his face with his sleeve and peers up at me. “What’s in Charlottesville?” he asks in a raspy voice.

  Christina’s brow furrows as she meets my eyes. “Maybe your mom asked him to keep it secret?”

  “She didn’t ask him to go to Charlottesville until Tuesday morning at the earliest.”

  “But today’s Friday, and the last time anyone heard from him was Monday night,” Leo says, sniffling. “He was supposed to come to headquarters for a meeting on Tuesday, but he never showed.”

  “It could fit,” Christina says. “By that time, your mom had called him.”

  “Angus and a few of George’s family members went to his hotel room in the afternoon, and it was a mess.” He grimaces, and his voice cracks as he says, “They said it looked like there had been a struggle. They thought maybe the Core had taken him away. But I hoped he’d escaped and come here.”

  His face crumples again, and he covers it with his hands, his shoulders shaking. Christina puts her arm around him and scoots closer, whispering comforting words to this stranger, this boy who understands my world better than I do. The last ten minutes has added yet another dimension of mystery to this whole thing, and I can’t take it. “I’m going back down to the lab,” I say, clicking off the television to suppress my urge to throw it across the room. “You’re going to come so I can keep an eye on you. And if you turn on us, Leo, please believe that I’ll kill you, okay?”

  Christina shoots me a look that says Is the asshole act really necessary? I clench my teeth. Enough people have violated my trust in the last few days to make me permanently wary, and I’d think she would understand that. This kid is playing on her sympathies, and that’s pissing me off, too. Not to mention the fact that my dad is being framed as a freaking terrorist. Leo’s lucky I don’t kick his ass right now just to work off the sheer, blinding frustration of it all.

  The three of us head down to the lab, and I hunch over the keypad and enter my code, not wanting him to see it. Once we’re in, I grab a stool and settle Leo in the corner by the door. “Are those vibracoustic probes?” he asks, pointing at a set of wands on a rack across the room. “Uncle Fred let me help him on that design, and—”

  “We’re not here to reminisce,” I snap, not wanting to hear how this kid had a better relationship with my dad than I did. “Just . . . be quiet, okay? I need to finish searching this place, and then we’ll decide our next move.”

  His mouth shuts, but his chin trembles as he nods. Christina stands close to him, her arm over his scrawny shoulders. Her scowl tells me she no longer believes my behavior is an act. She’s just thinking I’m an asshole. And I don’t really have the energy to explain myself to her, so I head over to the population counter screen. When I touched the display in the other lab, it had showed some plans, like a blueprint for something. It might be for the satellite, or it might be for the scanner itself. And since my dad said the scanner was the key to our survival, I need to find out as much about it as possible. If I can do that here and now, so much the better, because the Core is probably—

  “Tate.” Christina’s voice is like a whip, sharp and sudden. “Look at the surveillance screen
s.”

  I do. And my heart just about stops. There are people in the New York apartment. In the middle row of screens, the ones that show the place where I’ve lived for my entire life, black-suited men are milling about in the living room. Core agents. In my home.

  I lunge for the display, seeking a volume switch, anything to activate some sound so I can hear what they’re saying, but there’s nothing. So I squint at the screens, trying to read lips. I don’t recognize any of the men. Race isn’t there. But one of them, a guy with a hook nose and hair the color of a storm cloud, seems to be in charge. He partially covers his mouth as he points around the apartment, directing the men where to search. It’s like he knows there are cameras on him, and knows exactly where they are.

  I watch helplessly as they ransack my living room. Something dark streaks across the floor at the agents’ feet, and with a pang, I realize it’s Johnny Knoxville, my cat.

  “What are they looking for?” Christina asks.

  I have a sinking feeling I know. Somewhere, probably in his lab, my dad is storing wreckage of an H2 spaceship, the alien technology he used to make the scanner. Race told me he wanted to get to my dad’s stuff, and now they’re trying to take it by force. I’m willing to bet that they tried something yesterday—whether it was attempting to hack his system remotely or trying to enter one of his other safe houses or labs—that triggered that text message that was sent to his phone. “They’re trying to get their flying saucer back.”

  Leo bolts up from his stool. “Are you serious? An actual spaceship—in your dad’s lab?”

  “If they try to get in my dad’s lab,” I continue as I search for a remote in my dad’s desk drawer, “they’ll be in for some nasty surprises. He has lethal security measures in place.” I’ve seen the plans in his files. He probably had the same setup outside the lab in this safe house. Hydrogen cyanide, which boils at just over room temperature. If the keypad registers three fails within ten minutes, wall panels open to reveal vents, within which are blowers motion-activated by movement in the hallway. As the door to the first floor closes and locks, heating elements beneath the eight cyanide canisters hidden in the walls melt the cap-seals and turn liquid to gas. No one in the basement would survive. I hope they give it a try.

  I turn around to expand my search for the volume control. I need to hear what those agents are saying. Leo’s drifted over to the monitors. He still looks like he hopes I’ll tell him the only thing about my dad he doesn’t seem to know. Christina frowns as she watches the Core agents in my living room. And then her expression fills with horror, and she starts to scream. I whirl back toward the screens to see what’s making her freak out, and my blood turns to ice. The hook-nosed agent is standing right in front of the surveillance camera hidden in the heating vent above the trophy case. And he has a pretty blond woman by the throat, a gun to her head.

  It’s Christina’s mom. The agent inclines his head at the camera, and Mrs. Scolina stares up at us with a terrified, pleading expression. The agent smiles. And then he speaks, the movements of his mouth exaggerated. I can almost hear his voice in my head as he says, “It’s time to come home, Tate. We’ll be waiting at your girlfriend’s place. You have until eight p.m.”

  FOUR

  I MANAGE TO CATCH CHRISTINA IN MY ARMS WITHOUT taking my eyes from the screen. As she cries, the screen goes dark. Then it begins to play again, on a loop, the whole thing unraveling before our eyes, letting us relive the horror.

  Leo’s voice cracks as he curses. “That’s her mom, isn’t it? It’s her mom.”

  I lock eyes with him as I hold Christina against my chest. And I nod. This is my fault. All my fault. I bow my head and whisper into her hair. “They won’t hurt her. I’ll give myself up. We’ll figure this out.”

  Christina only sobs harder. My fingers burrow in her hair, and I wish I could draw the fear and the sorrow out of her head and carry it for her. My own eyes are stinging as she shudders against me. “They said we have until eight, which gives us thirteen hours. It takes about twelve to drive to New York. We have to get out of here.” I glance at Leo, who’s staring down at the Steno notebook where my dad wrote “Race: ‘Sicarii’” and “Find it in 20204.” I snatch the notebook out of his reach and flip it shut. “Can you make it back to Chicago by yourself?”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “I can’t take care of you, too.”

  Leo stands up straight, his eyes at the level of my chin, all skinny and defiant. He reminds me of me in a way, not yet realizing how small he is, and maybe stronger than he looks. “I can help you guys. You’re not the only one with skills.”

  “Ballistics?” I ask.

  He nods. “And self-defense. Chemistry, too. Strategy.”

  “And tactics,” we say together. Because my dad taught him. All those trips to Chicago, and some of that time away from home was spent on this kid. I shouldn’t feel jealous. But I do.

  Maybe he senses it. “Uncle Angus and Uncle George taught me a lot, too,” he offers.

  “The moment you get in my way, I’m putting you on a bus back to Chicago. Do you understand me?”

  He shoves his hands into his pockets and bobs his head. His jaw is tense—he’s clenching his teeth. Determined to prove himself. Fine. I’ll let him. “We need cash. Where do you think my dad would have kept it?”

  He smiles. “Maybe in the underground garage out behind this shack?”

  My mouth drops open. “What?”

  “You didn’t notice it when you came in?”

  I muscle down the urge to flip him off. “Let’s go see what he left me, then.”

  • • •

  He left me a lot. As I explore the underground garage, Leo sits with Christina on the grass at the top of the ramp. Through the open doors, I hear snatches of their conversation, enough to know that the kid is actually trying to distract her, telling her some story about a time he made a red cabbage pH indicator for a chemistry experiment and ended up accidentally dyeing both his hands red. When I hear her let out a raspy chuckle, I’m amazed. And, okay, a bit grateful. It makes it easier to focus, knowing she’s all right for the moment.

  Until I hear shots fired, which sends my blood pressure so high that my vision spots. My heart in my throat, I scramble up the ramp and realize Leo’s moved on to teaching Christina how to handle a gun. She looks angry and determined as she squeezes the trigger. He’s not only made her laugh, he’s given her something to focus on, something that makes her feel a little less helpless. Now I’m both annoyed and grateful. I can’t get a bead on my feelings about this kid, and I don’t have time to worry about it—we’ve got bigger problems.

  “Hey,” I say between shots, “people will hear that for miles. Pretty sure it’s not deer season.” Most major hunting seasons are in the fall and winter, and it’s freaking May. This property is in the middle of nowhere, but gunshots carry.

  Leo shrugs. “In Kentucky, you can hunt wild pigs, groundhogs, and several species of bird year-round.” He holds up his phone. “I looked it up before we fired a shot.”

  Christina hands Leo the weapon. “It’s okay,” she says quietly, then looks at me. “Can we go soon?”

  “Almost ready.” I can tell by the tension in her posture that every minute of waiting is agony. I jog back down the ramp. This space is neat, three vehicles parked at the base of the ramp, boxes of tools, stacks of building supplies, almost enough to build another shack. I’ve already chosen our vehicle, so I make my way to a worktable in the corner and go through the drawers. My heart skips when I see my father’s face peering up at me from a Kentucky driver’s license for someone named Ray Spruance. I pick it up, staring at his steely gray eyes while my own burn.

  He’d planned to be here with us.

  I force myself to set the license aside and flip through the other fake IDs in the top drawer. There are a few more for him, several for my m
om under the name of Margaret Dean . . . and several for me, all under the name of Edward Spruance—Admiral Spruance’s only son. I put our pictures side by side. Me and my dad. We have the same eyes and same dark brown hair, except his was always combed and mine is always a mess. Our cheekbones are high, our chins rounded, but maybe we’re saved from looking soft by our square jaw. The similarities make my throat tighten. He should have been here with me, helping me figure this out. If it hadn’t been for the Core, he would be. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m the one who brought the scanner to school. I’m the one who started this whole thing—and now Christina could lose her parents because of it.

  I shove my fake driver’s license into my pocket, grab a wallet full of cash I find in one of the drawers, and snag the keys for our ride. “Let’s go, guys!” I shout up the ramp.

  Less than ten minutes later, we’re pulling out of the garage bunker in a nondescript forest-green sedan that has some major horsepower under the hood. Christina’s in the passenger seat, and now that she’s not all purposeful movement, the horror of what’s happened seems to have caught up with her again. Her eyes are closed, and she’s leaning against the window. “Does your head hurt?” I ask her, and she barely nods. It was a stupid question anyway. Of course it hurts. I put my hand on her thigh and am relieved when she doesn’t brush me off. “I’m so sorry. About everything.”

  She squeezes my fingers. Her skin is cold. “I can’t talk about it now. Can we just . . . let it be?”

  I guess funny stories about cabbage dye worked better for her. I swallow hard and nod. I’d talk about stupid stuff if I could, but I don’t have it in me right now. This is a no-win situation if I’ve ever seen one. If I don’t give myself up, I have no doubt the Core will take it out on Christina’s parents—and her little sister. God, I want to kill every member of the Core with my bare hands. If I do give myself up, I have no idea what they’ll do to me. And I hate to admit it, but it scares me. They want to get into my dad’s lab, and they’re willing to do awful things to get what they want. Can I withstand torture? I’ll try, but I’ve studied enough to know that every man has a breaking point. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m different.