Cole sends me into the downstairs bathroom to get changed and gives me a plastic packet of disinfectant wipes to clean the scratches on my leg. The wipes smell like the soap I used at boarding school – something close to vanilla, but cheaper and sharper, with a hint of ammonia. I’ve always hated the scent. It reminds me too much of those lonely years at school, which I’ve done my best to forget.
I spent most of my childhood at boarding school, after my mother died and Cartaxus stationed my father at a remote research lab. He tried to quit, but it took him over a decade to get out. When he did, he bought the cabin and pulled me out of school, and we had a single year together before the outbreak.
That year feels like a lifetime ago. Days spent coding, talking, reading. My years at boarding school are so distant now they’re barely more than a blur.
I sit on the bathroom floor, running the wipes over the scratches on my calf and ankle. Pots clatter in the kitchen.
‘I hope you like pasta,’ Cole calls out.
My stomach growls at the thought. All I’ve been eating for the last six months are floury, stale nutriBars from a stash I found in a garage outside town. They’re nutritious, but they’re designed to be eaten while using a taste-bud-hacking app that you can download flavours for. To me, they just taste like dust. ‘Pasta sounds great.’
‘OK,’ Cole replies. ‘Ready in five.’
I give my face and hands a rub with the last of the wipes for good measure, and pick up the clothes Cole gave me to wear. Every piece of clothing I own was stuffed in my rucksack when I blew out the wall in my father’s room, and now they’re all ruined. Cole brought a few sets of clothes in various sizes in case I might need them, and they’re all stamped with the Cartaxus logo, but otherwise they’re not too bad. Black cargo pants like the ones he’s wearing and a grey tank top that’s cool to the touch. The fabric is soft, but I have a feeling it’s pseudometallic, the kind of fibre that’s made by genehacked bacteria in industrial vats. It won’t stop a bullet, but it’ll probably stop a knife. I tug it on over a black sports bra and turn to the mirror.
A single glance reminds me why I don’t look in mirrors any more.
My face is pockmarked and thin, my gaunt cheeks traced with scars from where I face-planted out of a tree last summer. My hair is wild and tangled, my right canine tooth badly chipped. I’m completely and undeniably hideous.
I don’t usually care what I look like, but despite all logic and reason, having a male presence around stirs up old feelings of insecurity. Like, despite the apocalypse, I’m somehow supposed to be pretty. It feels stupid even thinking about it, but I still find myself tilting my head back and forth in the light from the naked bulb overhead, searching for an angle that makes me look good. All I see is sun-damaged skin, chapped lips, and untamed eyebrows over my father’s piercing grey eyes.
The longer I look at myself, the more I see him in my features, until it hurts too much and I have to look away.
‘OK, I’m out,’ I say, leaving the bathroom, running my hands through my still-damp hair.
‘Just another minute,’ Cole calls from the kitchen.
I wander through the living room, glancing at the front door, where the frame has been splintered apart on either side at knee height. That’s where I hooked up the electromagnetic trap to yank out the sockets from an intruder’s knees. It looks like Cole got to the trap before it got to him. The broken pieces lie on the floor. I let out a sigh. It took me a whole week to set it up.
The room is littered with Cartaxus-branded equipment that Cole must have brought here with him. There are two sleeping bags and air mattresses, a bag of clothes, a box of food and a terrifying assortment of weapons. Guns, knives, lasers and darts are laid out across the coffee table in the living room, along with a leather-bound book. I pick it up, check the spine for a title, and flip it open without thinking. The pages fall open to a sketch of a young girl.
Black glossy hair, a wide smile and delicate features shine out of the paper, rendered in simple, elegant lines. I flick through the pages, seeing a dozen more portraits of the same girl. Running, laughing, sleeping. She’s stunningly beautiful. In one picture, her cheeks are tracked with tears, her distress practically screaming through the paper. I glance at the kitchen nervously. The sketches are signed with Cole’s name, and it’s clear that he must have been in love with her.
Her name is printed in careful script beneath each portrait: Jun Bei. She looks like she was around his age when the sketches were done. Most are dated from before the plague, and as I flip through the pages, I see the tone of the sketches suddenly change. They grow softer, more refined. As though the girl herself has been distilled and condensed, scraped back to her very essence.
It’s like the earlier sketches were drawn from life, and the later ones from memory.
‘Don’t touch that.’
I spin round to find Cole standing in the doorway wearing a fresh tank top over his bandages, two steaming plates of pasta in his hands.
A chill races through me at the look on his face. ‘I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –’
‘Put it down now.’ His voice is like ice. He sets the plates on the dining table and strides across the room, his movements inhumanly fast. He grabs the book in a blur, sending fear skittering down my spine. A second ago he was a boy cooking dinner, but now he’s transformed back into a trained Cartaxus weapon.
He yanks the sketchbook from my hands. The pages slide open to the drawing of the girl with tears glistening on her cheeks. He stares at it for a moment, then snaps the sketchbook shut and sets it on the table beside the gleaming knives.
‘I-I’m sorry,’ I say again, then stop myself when I realize how pathetic I sound.
I’ve spent two years on my own, dodging blowers and protecting the cabin, doing whatever it took to keep myself alive. I just found out my father is dead, that there’s a Hydra vaccine, and that its fate has been left in my hands. I’m grieving and tired, but I’m not weak, and I’m not going to let a jacked-up Cartaxus soldier order me around in my own home.
I cross my arms. ‘No, you know what? You’re in my house, soldier. You showed up uninvited, and you have no right to fill up my living room and then snap at me when I touch something. Maybe you shouldn’t have brought the book with you if you didn’t want me to see it. What the hell do you need it for on this mission, anyway?’
He meets my eyes, a muscle twitching in his jaw. ‘It’s all I have left. You think Cartaxus will let me back if they find out why I’m really here? They’ll court-martial me for this. They’ll destroy everything I own. I’ve left my whole life behind on the back of a single note from your father, so I’m sorry if you’re a little put out by having my things in your living room.’
I open my mouth, then close it. I don’t know what to say to that. I hadn’t considered what Cole might be risking by coming here like this. Of course Cartaxus will court-martial him if they find out why he’s here. I’d be surprised if they didn’t kill him.