Burn (7 page)

“Stop the vehicle!” shouts Congers as he peers out the windshield. “Now! Now!” The note of panic in his voice startles me. The minivan is pulling to the side of the road, so it would be easy enough to pass it.

Instead, Graham stomps on the brakes, and we all jerk forward. “Open the back!” Congers calls, throwing himself over our rear seat and leaping out as the hatch swings up. I twist to see him lugging an honest-to-God shoulder-mounted RPG launcher from a case on the floor of the trunk. “Get out! Get the prisoners out! Get behind me!”

I turn back around and look up ahead to see what’s got him so freaked. My heart stops.

It’s my mom. She emerges from the driver’s side of the minivan, which is parked about ten yards ahead. One of her arms is in a sling, but in her other hand is a semi-automatic, and she raises it and fires at the grille of the SUV, looking more pissed than I’ve ever seen her. And to my horror, Christina jumps out of the passenger seat, holding a gun of her own, her eyes blazing with fury and fear as she joins my mom. She raises her weapon, but my mom shoves her behind their vehicle as Mack opens fire.

“Move aside!” Congers calls. “I’ll take care of it!”

With a freaking
rocket launcher
? “No!” I shout, flipping onto my back and kicking the dark-haired agent next to me in the face. His head
thunks
against the frame of the passenger door he just opened. I kick him again and again, and he stumbles onto the road. I dimly register Leo struggling with an agent in the middle seat, but I can’t worry about him right now. I hook my ankles over the seat and drag myself toward the open door, desperate to stop Congers, who’s about to blow my mom and Christina to bits. My wrists still cuffed behind me, I heave myself out of the SUV.

The agents are wide-eyed and shouting as they fire on my mom and Christina. But I don’t slow down to look at the minivan—instead I spin and lunge toward Congers, who’s already put the grenade into the barrel and is hefting the green-gray launcher onto his shoulder. “Lovell and Warner, get over here. We’ll need your fire!” he calls as I charge at him.

Before I reach him, another agent tackles me from behind, and I fall. Knees-hips-chest . . . I turn my head, and my skull hits pavement. Breath explodes from me in a strangled cry as my bones rattle. Graham was the one who hit me; he’s on my back, but I buck my hips and jam my foot back, gritting my teeth at the impact of my heel against flesh and bone. He wheezes, telling me I probably got him in the balls. I raise my head to see Congers peering through the launcher’s sight. “Please!” I cry. “No!”

He pulls the trigger. A helpless noise winds from my throat as I curl onto my side to follow the projectile. The grenade rockets toward the minivan—

Holy shit what the hell what the fuck is that

A silvery, blurred thing rises above my mom’s vehicle, silent and slick. The grenade flies straight toward the thing, but it tilts lightning quick, and the grenade shoots into the forest across the road and explodes. I stare at the obelisk-shaped object hovering about fifty yards ahead of us, maybe thirty yards above the ground.
That
is what Congers and the other agents were firing at, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It shimmers like mercury in the light of the burning forest, moving like a helicopter even though it doesn’t have rotors. Or wings.

A black dot appears on its lower front, swirling and sparkling and growing. Like some sort of hatch. Or torpedo bay. “Grab the boy!” Congers cries. “Get him off the road!”

Movement near my mom’s van draws my eyes back to the ground in time to watch both her and Christina dive down the embankment—right as the obelisk thing gives off a low, throbbing
whomp.
The minivan explodes, flying into the air like a Matchbox car. One of the agents wrenches me to my feet and tosses me to the side of the road, where I roll and crash through thorny underbrush. My head thumps against a rock. Blood fills my mouth as I bite my tongue. I land in a trickling stream at the bottom of a shallow hill, on my back, smoke and flames spurting from the mayhem above me.

I open my mouth, but I can’t manage to draw in air. My eyes are riveted on the obelisk, which shoots backward suddenly as three more RPGs are launched. Congers and his men are shouting, calling to one another to reload, to fire. The obelisk, its hellish spire pointing at the sky, spins, but only dodges two of the grenades this time. The other glances its side and detonates. Before the smoke clears, the obelisk tilts backward, aiming that sharp nose at the horizon. I wait for it to fall from the sky, but instead, it darts away, moving too fast to track. A moment later, it’s like it was never there.

Except for the carnage it left behind.

Two agents plunge down the embankment and grab me while Congers barks orders, instructing the others to mount up. My voice returns to me as they lift me from the ground. “Mom! Christina!” They should be nearby. I saw them roll down the embankment. They couldn’t be more than a hundred feet away.

But they don’t answer me.

No.
I can’t have lost both of them. I shout until the only sounds that come from me are hoarse croaks. I curse at the agents; I kick and struggle; I rage and thrash. The minivan is a twisted husk, overturned in the road, not two feet from the spot where I was lying when that
thing
fired on us. I spew question after question, but no one speaks to me. They’re focused on getting me contained, on getting me into the SUV. As they do, I see Leo, strapped into the seat in front of me, pale and scared as he watches me lose my shit. I’m wedged between Congers and Mack, the red-haired agent. The men on either side of me are sweating, tense, their movements abrupt and hard.

“Mute him,” growls Congers, and Mack pulls a black case from the seat pocket in front of him. “He’s panicking.” Congers loops his steely arm around my throat and cuts off my air supply. “You have to calm down. Calm down now, or you give me no choice.”

I gulp for air and come up dry. Vision spotting, I buck and elbow until a spike of pain pierces my thigh, and once again, that heaviness swirls in my veins. I fight it, slamming my head back, trying to hit Congers, but he only squeezes tighter. “When you wake up, we’ll talk again.”

SIX

MY DREAMS ARE MADE OF FIRE. I LOSE MY MOM AND
dad in a hundred hellish conflagrations. Mom always calls my name, and her longing and terror is like a language of its own. Dad is silent and grim, but before the flames devour him, his eyes tell me that he doesn’t want to go, that he’d stay if he could, that he’s sorry I have to do this without him. I am always bound, unable to move or change things no matter how much I fight. I watch helplessly as the obelisk rises high, moving like a whisper, and opens its sparkling, swirling portal.

Everything after that is death and defeat. And even though the inferno never touches me, it burns all the same.

“Give him another shot. I need him alert.”

“Don’t touch me,” I slur, my defiance hardwired even though it feels like I’m swimming in a sea of motor oil and rebar, everything sharp and jagged, the air too thick to breathe. I’m upright, but only because I’m bound to a chair.

Congers is squatting in front of me as I open my eyes. His expression is stern, and his face is paler than it was before. “Cooperate, and I won’t.”

It takes effort, but I raise my head. I’m in a windowless box of a room. Buzzing fluorescent lighting above me. Old radiator against the wall. Not a new building, nothing high-tech. I glance at the door, painted metal, covered in nicks and scrapes. I blink, trying to gather my wits.

“I expected your lab facility to be a little swankier,” I say, my consonants a bit more defined this time.

Congers slides his finger along the bridge of his nose. “We thought it best not to flee straight to a top-secret facility.”

“And what exactly would constitute ‘cooperating’?” My hands are cuffed behind the office chair I’m sitting on. My ankles are shackled to its legs. Graham is standing near the door, his gray-green eyes on me. His posture straightens as I size him up.

Congers glances at the young agent before returning his attention to me. “As you are aware, your father had something that belongs to us. We need to reacquire it immediately, especially given this evening’s unfortunate series of events. Even more unfortunate, we need your help.”

Fuck you.
Those are the words on the tip of my tongue. But instead, I stay quiet and simply stare at him. Memories are slipping into place like puzzle pieces. We were being taken somewhere for questioning because I’d called too much attention to us in the city. My mom and Christina showed up. And then . . . “Where are they?” I ask.

Congers’s expression doesn’t change. He’s probably an excellent poker player. “They mean a lot to you.”

I try to keep my face as blank as his, but between the pain and the images of Christina and my mom flying down that embankment as that
whatever it was
blew their van to hell, I must give something away.

Congers’s eyebrow arches. “I thought so.” He stands up. “We have them. All of them. And their survival is very much dependent on whether you give me the information I need to access Frederick Archer’s private laboratory.”

My heart is starting to speed. He could be lying. My mom and Christina could have escaped. Or they could already be dead. And if I give the Core access to my dad’s lab, they won’t just have whatever H2 artifacts his ancestor might have found—they’ll have designs for all his weapons. They’d have access to that satellite controller. They’d have everything they needed to shut down The Fifty permanently, not to mention the rest of the dwindling human population. “I need to see them. Leo. And my . . . Christina.” They would have recognized Christina on the road—but they might not have recognized my mom. And if they don’t have her—

“Dr. Shirazi is in our custody, Tate. I don’t bluff.”

Shit. “If you want me to believe you, I need to see them.”

“We believe your mother knows how to access the lab, too,” he says. “I wonder which of you will break first.”

Heat spreads over my skin, my anger rising to the surface. He’s playing a game. Keeping us isolated from each other, each blind to how the other is doing, hoping one of us will crack out of concern for the other. But I know my mom. If she really is alive, she’ll know what’s at stake if the H2 get access to Dad’s lab. They could hurt her over and over again, and she wouldn’t give them what they want. “Probably me. Why don’t you give it a try?”

“But your mother came for you. A foolhardy rescue attempt fueled by the same emotion that might lead her to help us if we apply the right kind of pressure. If you don’t want that to happen, I suggest you give us what we need sooner rather than later.”

“First tell me about that thing on the road. The ship that attacked us. You knew what it was.”

For the first time, his expression changes, fury hardening every feature. “Distraction techniques won’t work, not on me. Tell me how to get into the lab without triggering the countermeasures.”

It’s not just distraction. The questions are piling up in my brain, crowding one another as they try to escape my mouth. “Are you guys in some kind of covert civil war? Is that why you need my dad’s stuff?”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Tell me how to get into the lab. It has a self-destruct mechanism as well, doesn’t it?”

“Was that H2 technology? Who was flying it?”

His voice takes on a razor edge as he says, “How many chances does the entry mechanism give before lethal measures are activated?”

“Where’s Willetts?” The professor may be H2, but he’s no friend of the Core—he wanted to keep the scanner away from them and was working with George to do it. “Does he have something to do with this?”

“Enough.” Congers clenches his jaw. “Graham, go ahead.” He nods at the agent, whose mouth is tight as he slams his fist into my stomach. Breath explodes from my lungs, and I pitch forward. Congers catches my chair before I topple to the ground. He wrenches me upright.

“Let’s consider that a hard reset,” Congers says. “Please stop wasting my time.” While Graham rubs his knuckles and waits for his boss to acknowledge him again, Congers repeats his demands for information to access my dad’s lab. I keep firing questions at him, trying to find out what the hell is going on, what attacked us on the road, and what it means for the scanner and the rest of my dad’s inventions. Every time I evade his demands, Congers’s face gets more mottled. He’s angry. Maybe a little desperate. But I don’t give in.

The third time Congers gives Graham the go-ahead, the guy punches me in the head. He seems determined to pound information out of me—and also to show Congers how tough he is. The impact of the blow turns my vision white. The iron-salt tang of blood fills my mouth.

“I’m going to go speak to your lovely girlfriend.” Congers’s voice rolls through the thick haze of pain in which I’m floating. “Think about what’s at stake for you, Tate. You’ve already lost your father. How much more can you stand to lose?” I hear the door opening. “Come on, Graham.”

The door slams shut. The sound of footsteps fades. Even blinking hurts. But I force myself to do exactly that, trying to organize a few coherent thoughts. I focus hard on any sounds that come to me, but apart from the hum of the light overhead, I’ve got nothing. From the painted cinder-block walls and lack of windows, I gather that I’m probably in a basement, maybe of some old warehouse or office building.

And if that’s true, it’s possible that I can get out. Maybe wreak enough havoc to escape. The idea jolts adrenaline through my veins, and I raise my head, moving my jaw to make sure nothing’s broken in there. I wiggle my hands—standard metal cuffs. Same around my ankles. My eyes scan the floor, searching for a paper clip or an old ballpoint pen, anything I might be able to use to pick the cuffs. But this chamber’s been swept, and they probably expected me to try something like that. I grit my teeth and scoot my chair backward toward the radiator against the wall. Leaning back, I search for loose wires or metal fixtures with the right shape . . . nothing. I’m going to have to find my means of escape outside this room, and I know one place to do it, but I need more information first.