The creature circles the tree house, and I peer out over the doorway. It tries to climb the tree and makes it up a few feet, surprising me. Startled, I come back to my senses. What am I doing? I fumble with the emitter, pressing it on. The creature falls from the tree and staggers back, unsure of which way to run to escape the sound. It darts toward the house at first, and I fear it will set off one of the alarms, but it changes direction and speeds back to the field, not stopping when it breaks away from the sound radius.
I exhale, realizing I had been holding my breath, and shakily sit down. Was I that desperate to see another person that I would risk my life . . . or was it something else? Something darker that I don’t even want to begin to think about? I shake my head. No. I want to live, even if it’s this solitary existence. I sneak a look out the window, searching for the Florae, but it’s long gone.
Leaving me alone again in the black, hot night.
I spend the next two days roaming through the surrounding neighborhoods, searching through houses I’ve missed or skipped before. Supplies are getting dangerously low, and I’ve combed through the area too thoroughly. If I want to keep living this way, I’ll have to start traveling farther out to scavenge. I make it home with nothing more than a dented can of spinach and some shampoo. There’s a pond I found a while back that I’ve been using for water, but I’m sure I can spare a couple of bucketfuls to wash my hair. The synth-suit keeps my skin clean, saps sweat away from my body, but my hair is another story, especially if I don’t wear my hood often.
As I settle into my sleeping bag, I hear a familiar crackle. It’s my earpiece. Kay remotely turned off the communication ability, so Dr. Reynolds couldn’t track me. It has a solar-powered microbattery, though, good for years, and I’ve been using it to amplify faraway sounds, keeping it in my ear at all times. It’s been so long since I’ve heard anything, I forgot that someone might actually try to use it to contact me.
“Sunshine? Are you there?”
I sit up in anticipation. It was nothing more than a whisper, but I know who it is. “Kay?”
Just the thought of talking to someone friendly makes my eyes flood. But she doesn’t answer.
“Kay?” I plead. “Kay?” Nothing. I slide back to the floor, my head in my hands.
And then, after a few minutes, she’s back.
“Sunshine?” She’s whispering, but there’s something else, a tone in her voice, something I never thought I’d hear. Kay sounds scared.
“Kay! Are you all right? Did you guys get in trouble? How’s Baby? How’s Rice? How’s my mother?”
“Amy, I don’t have a lot of time. Gareth hacked me in to the system so I could contact you . . . but I’m being watched closely.”
“By Marcus?”
“No time, sunshine. You making it okay out there?”
“I’m handling it.”
“Good girl. Listen, I need to tell you something. . . .” She pauses so long, I think she’s cut out again.
“Kay, what is it?!” I ask desperately.
“It’s . . . Baby.”
My stomach turns over as dread seeps into every pore of my body.
“Dr. Reynolds has Baby.”
Chapter Three
The world goes black. I blink hard, trying to regain focus on the now spinning room.
Dr. Reynolds has Baby.
“Amy, are you there?”
“Yeah,” I say. My voice sounds far away.
“Dr. Reynolds took Baby as soon as you escaped. I thought if I asked about it, it would look suspicious, so I had to wait until I could get to Rice. He told me that Dr. Reynolds just wanted to hold her at first, to use her against you in case you were found. But then he saw the mark on the back of her neck.”
I suck in a breath. “No,” I whisper. I had found Baby in an abandoned supermarket, alone. Later I discovered that as a toddler she was a foster child experimented on by the government. Rice has a similar mark, and I can only assume he was also part of the experiment. My mother, as it happens, was the main scientist on the project.
She also was in charge of another project: the creation of a bacteria that turned humans into Floraes. Meaning she is the person responsible for the apocalypse.
But I don’t let myself think about that.
The scars on both Baby’s and Rice’s necks are from the original vaccine my mother was developing so that American soldiers would remain unaffected by the Florae virus. It was never actually proven to work, but when I found Baby, she had a large bite on her leg. She’d been bitten by a Florae and remained human. So it seems, in this case, the vaccine worked just fine.
“They’ve been testing Baby,” Kay went on. “Taking her blood. Trying to replicate the results. The original vaccine doesn’t work. . . . Rice told me so. But somehow it did for Baby. They think it has something to do with her blood chemistry. All their attempts to modify the vaccine have failed. They just can’t get it right. They make us bring survivors directly to them for experimentation. And we never see them again.”
I gnash my teeth at Dr. Reynolds’s—and my mother’s—cruelty. So they’re turning people into Florae to test their vaccine.
“And Baby?” I ask. “Are they hurting her?”