Burn (3 page)

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.

“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.”

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 screens.”