Inhuman

2

I paced the cold, white box of a room. I’d been stuck in there for just over an hour and already I was losing it. It was too much like a hospital room. Too much like where my mother had spent her last days. But Director Spurling could lock me up for months if she felt like it. The Biohazard Defense Department had the authority to do whatever was deemed necessary to keep the nation safe.

What did it matter if they kept me in quarantine forever? I flopped onto the small, starchy bed. Even if I didn’t have Ferae — and I absolutely, positively didn’t — life as I knew it was over. A sneeze sent people running. A rumor of serious illness, even if it wasn’t contagious, turned a person into a pariah. I’d learned that when my mother’s cancer diagnosis set off a chain reaction of hysteria. Within days of her first chemo treatment, she was fired without notice. My father’s gallery business dried up. But hardest to understand was the way our friends cut off all contact once they heard the news. I wasn’t invited to a single birthday party or sleepover that year. Since our extended family had all died during the plague, in the end, as my mom grew sicker and sicker, it was just the three of us. Now we were a family of two, me and Dad.

The image of the last fetch — hooded and flailing as the bullets hit — dropped into my mind. I buried my face in the pillow. The longer I stayed trapped in this room, the harder it was to convince myself that Director Spurling was full of crap. She had sounded certain in a way that usually came with proof. Plus, the more I considered our life, the more suspect it seemed. Dad’s monthly business trips. The never-ending supply of valuable art. We didn’t live extravagantly, but I had wondered if my dad’s gallery was doing better than he let on. We had so much original art — paintings by Rothko, O’Keeffe, Lucian Freud, and more — hanging on our apartment walls. It was especially sketchy considering he’d had to declare bankruptcy after my mother died. Her hospital bills had created a gaping crater of debt and yet, within eight years, Dad had not only paid it all off, but also built up savings. Definitely sketchy.

“Your name is on everything in case something happens to me,” he’d said once while giving me keys to several deposit boxes, all at different banks. At the time, I’d figured that something meant a terminal illness or car accident — not execution.

At least the biohaz agents hadn’t arrested him. It was obvious Spurling didn’t know where my father was and thought that I did. Probably because most parents didn’t leave their kids with the housekeeper for a week every month with no way of contacting them. And I’d put it down as another one of Dad’s quirks: He hated dials and refused to carry one. What if all along his real reason for not calling was that he’d been in a place where dials didn’t work?

So, if my father wasn’t in California and the biohaz agents didn’t have him, where was he?

Please, please don’t be in the Feral Zone.

If he was on the other side of the wall, he couldn’t stay there forever … and not just because of the risk of infection. The only people living in the Feral Zone today were banished criminals. My art-loving father wouldn’t last a week.

Footsteps clacked in the corridor outside my door. I sat up as the lock of my containment room clicked and the door opened. A woman with sharp features and spiky gray hair stepped in. Director Spurling, without a face mask, without a jumpsuit. It could mean only one thing. “You got my blood test back.” I scrambled off the bed. “I’m fine.”

“Would I be standing here if you were infected?”

A weight seemed to slip from my shoulders like a sodden coat. I hadn’t even realized how worried I’d been. Some tiny part of me must have thought there was a chance that I’d been exposed. Probably the same part that was beginning to believe that my dad might be a fetch.

Spurling held out my dial. In her tightly cut black suit, computer tablet in hand, she was more than a little intimidating.

“Are you letting me go?” I slipped the dial’s chain over my head.

“It’s an option, but not one that will help your father.”

“I don’t know where he is. Really.”

“I’ve been thinking, Delaney, that perhaps this situation can be salvaged. Follow me.” Pivoting on her heel, Spurling strode away.

What else could I do? I followed. Though I couldn’t help noticing that Director Spurling was moving suspiciously fast and that there were no other agents around. In fact, the halls were so empty they echoed. Every containment room we passed was empty too. Yes, it was late, but the whole scene felt wrong. “Where are we going?”

“We’re problem solving.”

“What does that mean?” I spotted a floating camera bot bobbing near the ceiling, but it didn’t rotate as we walked past, meaning it wasn’t recording us. Had Spurling turned off the security cameras? As director of biohaz she had the power to do anything she wanted. When she didn’t answer my question, I slowed and put on my ice face. “I’d rather problem solve with my father’s lawyer here.”

Spurling turned so fast that I had to sidestep to keep from plowing into her. She thrust her computer tablet under my nose. “Don’t get smart with me, Delaney. I have a whole file on you. I know about the orienteering and the self-defense classes. You think I can’t guess why you take them?”

“Because my dad makes me.” Other kids were forced to take piano lessons, but I had to suffer through night hikes in the park and memorize an attacker’s five most vulnerable areas — eyes, ears, throat, shin, groin. Considering that our live-in housekeeper was an ex-Marine and our apartment building was tricked out like Fort Knox — as most were, in case of another plague — I didn’t really need to know how to chop someone in the windpipe. Not that I was going to say this to Director Spurling, who looked like she’d chopped many a windpipe.

“Of course he makes you,” she snapped. “You’re his apprentice.”

My surprise came out as a laugh, which I turned into a cough.

“He takes you out and times you running,” she went on. “Why would he do that unless he’s training you to be a fetch?”

I eased back a step. She was a little too invested in her theory. “Actually, I asked him to. I’ve been trying to break my —”

“Shut up.”

I obeyed instantly since Spurling seemed on the verge of beating me to death with her computer tablet.

“I have been working on this investigation for five years, Delaney. Five years of trying to coerce rich scumbags into giving up their art supplier. They’re like drug addicts, thinking only about their next fix. They’ll clam up and lawyer up long before they’ll tell you who their dealer is. But last year, I got a solid lead on your father. And finally, finally, I have the evidence against him and where is he? Poof, gone.” She glared as if I had personally hidden him away. “I don’t accept that. Not after all the effort I’ve put into getting Ian McEvoy right where I want him. Now walk.”

Spurling pointed down the corridor, which ended at a massive steel door, made all the creepier by the bar across it, guaranteeing that it stayed shut. I focused on the bar in order to control the pricking sensation behind my eyes. If I dashed back the way we’d come, I could outrun this sadist in heels. But that wouldn’t help my dad.

“If you’re trying to make yourself cry, don’t bother. I had my heart surgically removed when I took this job.” She headed for the door. “Come on. Your father is going to need every minute.”

I glanced up. What did that mean?

“I first got whiff of him,” Spurling said, now sounding positively conversational, “at a dinner party.” She didn’t slow her pace, so I was forced to catch up. “There I noticed a landscape by Ferdinand Hodler on the wall.” She heaved aside the bolt. “It was an incredible moment. Not for the host, of course. He’d thought it was a safe-enough painting to hang in his dining room. Hodler is a fairly obscure Swiss artist. But I’m from Chicago.” She glanced at me as if to check that I was paying attention. “And I’d seen that particular blue mountainscape many times … in the Art Institute.”

“How is that an incredible moment?”

“Because it meant that some fetch had traveled all the way to Chicago and back — deep into the quarantine zone. No other fetch I’ve heard of will go that far, no matter how much a client offers.”

Spurling pressed a key fob to a pad, which unlocked the door. As it slid open, a sigh of cold air prickled my skin. Lights flickered on to reveal metal stairs descending into darkness.

Seeing my hesitation, she said, “We’re going under the wall,” and started down the stairs. “So, I did a little digging,” she said, continuing with her story without so much as a backward glance, “and found more valuable paintings here, in the West — paintings by Matisse, van Gogh, and Renoir — all from the Art Institute of Chicago and all on record as having been left behind.”

As we rounded each bend in the stairwell, a new set of lights flickered on. The air smelled musty, and I felt like I was breathing in decades of old pain and fear. “What makes you think my father fetched them?”

“I don’t think, I know he did.”

I swallowed. Again the fate of the last fetch played like a viral clip in my mind. Another heavy steel door awaited us at the bottom of the stairs. Spurling swiped her fob across the pad. This door slid open with a hiss to reveal a darkness so cold and profound that dread swelled like a wave and crashed over me.

Spurling swept her hand toward the doorway. “After you.”

I paused, unable to see anything in the darkness before me. I hoped that this wasn’t a trick — that if I stepped into the room, Spurling wouldn’t slam the door behind me, lock it, and leave me alone in the dark. Inhaling deeply, I stepped through the doorway and felt rewarded when the overhead lights snapped on to reveal an enormous white-tiled chamber. The air was stale, and dust coated the sparse furnishings: desks, chairs, and posts connected by chains to form a labyrinth of aisles.

“What is this place?” I eyed the two steel doors ten feet apart on the far wall. The doors were identical to the one we’d just come through. More camera bots floated like buoys inches from the high ceiling.

“It was a checkpoint chamber. One of ten entry points into the West.” Director Spurling waved a hand at the door on the left. “The tunnel is just six hundred feet long, the width of the bottom of the wall, but with the security checks, it took days to reach this room. The people who didn’t pass the medical tests were forced to return to the East through that door.” Spurling pointed to the one on the right.

Shivering, I looked away, only to notice a beat-up leather satchel on the chair beside me.

“Recognize it?” Spurling asked in a silky tone.

I inhaled sharply and then wished I’d hidden my reaction — but she already knew the messenger bag was my dad’s. This was her show, and I was just playing the part I’d been assigned.

Hefting the bag onto a desk, she dumped out the contents. Curiosity drew me closer. Some of the items could have belonged to anyone: a flashlight, rolled bandages, a bottle of iodine, matches, a map. But the bone-handled machete was unquestionably my dad’s. And then there was the long rolled canvas stuffed into the side pocket. I didn’t know what it was specifically, but I’d seen my father with others like it.

Spurling pulled the canvas free and unrolled it. “Personally, I’ve always thought Lautrec was gaudy and overrated.” She turned the canvas toward me.

It showed a nightclub scene. The top hats and gowns, the garish face in the foreground, were all rendered with distinctive “heavy contouring” as my dad would say — unmistakably Toulouse-Lautrec. “It could be a copy.” I knew how ridiculous that sounded the second the words were out of my mouth.

“I doubt Mack would risk his life for anything less than the original.” Spurling rerolled the canvas.

I flinched. She’d used my dad’s nickname like she was his friend. “If that’s all you’ve got against him — his bag — then —”

In answer, Spurling activated her tablet and tapped the screen. The fluorescent lights dimmed overhead and the chamber filled with spectral light as the camera bots projected a holographic recording of the very room we were standing in. Tracing her finger across her tablet, Spurling made the camera bots circle the ceiling until the projected twin doors were aligned with the actual doors. I braced myself for what was to come, curling my hands into fists.

“For the past year, I was convinced that your father was bribing some line guard to smuggle him over the wall. That’s how most fetches get east. But I couldn’t find any evidence of it. And then I remembered the exodus tunnels.”

The projected images were shadowy, though clear enough that I could see the door on the right slide open.

“After the West closed,” Spurling went on, “the tunnels were backfilled with twenty feet of rubble. But if someone wants something badly enough …”

The chamber brightened as a flashlight beam appeared in the open door. It took me a second to realize that it was part of the recorded projection.

Spurling’s expression turned smug. “When I had the cameras installed last week, I didn’t expect such a fast payoff.”

I watched with dismay as a ghostly version of my father stepped through the steel door, his messenger bag in one hand. I scooted out of the way as he walked past, and then I caught Spurling’s faint amusement. When the ghostlike form of my dad was halfway across the chamber, a red light started flashing. Behind him, the door began to slide shut. My father whirled and raced for the tunnel, darting right through me. At the last second, he slipped sideways into the opening, but the messenger bag in his hand was too big and he dropped it just as the door closed.

Spurling frowned and froze the image. “He tripped the motion sensor, which was supposed to lock down this chamber with him in it. That way he and I could have had a face-to-face chat. Instead, I have an overflowing case file, damning evidence, and a missing fetch. That wasn’t the plan.”

A knot of pain tightened in my gut. It tightened and tightened, hard and cold, until it was the only thing I felt. Why had she shown me this? My father was all I had and she knew it. “What do you want?”

She turned off the projection and the lights came back on. “I just told you,” she said, tucking the tablet under her arm. “I want to talk to Mack privately, but at this point, that’s not going to happen.”

By “talk to” she meant “arrest.” Why didn’t she just say it?

Because she doesn’t want to arrest him, I realized with icy clarity. She wants something else.

Spurling watched me without a word, as if willing me to piece it together.

I drew in a shuddering breath. So, what did she want? To talk to Mack privately, or so she’d said. But that wasn’t really it. No, what Director Spurling specifically wanted was to talk to a fetch. One who had been all the way to Chicago and back … My heart rose in my chest. Maybe my dad’s fate wasn’t sealed after all. “You want him to fetch something for you. Something you left behind in Chicago.”

“Aren’t you the bright one?” Spurling took a cream-colored envelope from her suit pocket. “If Mack brings me what I want, I’ll destroy the recording and his file. All the information he’ll need is in here.” She handed me the envelope.

I stiffened, seeing the catch. “I can’t give it to him. I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh, but you do.” She tipped her head toward the twin steel doors.

A heavy wave of cold moved through me. “You want me to go into the Feral Zone?”

“Of course not. You’d never make it across the river. Go as far as Arsenal Island.”

My vision tunneled. Spurling, the envelope, the chamber, all slipped back as if to give me room to think. She was offering me the chance to save my dad. I didn’t need to think. I’d do whatever it took — even cross the quarantine line.

Spurling watched me with sharp eyes. “You want to help your father, don’t you?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Good.” She began putting my dad’s things back into the messenger bag, all except the rolled canvas and the map. “There’s a doctor on Arsenal Island — Dr. Vincent Solis.” She spread the map on the table and pointed to a rectangular island in the middle of the Mississippi River. “Dr. Solis will probably know where your father is. He has an ongoing deal with Mack.”

“What kind of deal?”

Spurling gave me a thin smile. “I’m not at liberty to say. Just know that I have chosen to look the other way when it comes to Dr. Solis’s activities … for now anyway.”

The map had been printed pre-exodus — there was no symbol on it to indicate the Titan wall, which ran from the Canadian border with its trenches and electrified fence to the Gulf of Mexico. Also, the map showed dozens of bridges crossing the Mississippi River when only one was still in existence. Known as “the last bridge,” it crossed into the quarantine zone by way of Arsenal Island. Everybody knew that. Everybody also knew that the last bridge was heavily guarded.

“Isn’t Arsenal Island a line patrol camp?”

“It is. Dr. Solis lives there with the guards. So, don’t get caught,” Spurling said as if it was no big deal. “If you do, don’t expect me to intervene on your behalf. I’ll deny everything. By the way, when you find Mack, tell him that he has five days to complete the fetch.”

“Why only five days?”

“The patrol is shoring up the rubble along the east side of the wall. They start work on these tunnels Thursday morning.” She flicked a hand at the two steel doors.

“Tell them not to!”

Spurling arched a penciled brow. “The line guards work for the Titan Corporation. They don’t take orders from government officials, not even me.”

“But what if it takes me five days to find him?”

“Arsenal Island is directly on the other side of the wall. It should take you ten minutes to get there. After that, either Dr. Solis knows where Mack is hiding or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, do not go looking for your father. Just come back here and press the call button outside that door. I’ll come get you.”

“If I try but don’t find my dad, will you still destroy the evidence against him?”

“Please. Why would I put myself at risk if I have nothing to show for it?”

“But —”

“The more time you waste now, the less Mack will have for the fetch.”

Before my legs locked up entirely, I slung the deadweight of the messenger bag over my shoulder and picked up the map. I would find my father and give him the letter and then he’d do the fetch and everything would go back to normal. I could do this. I would do this. And I wasn’t going to freak out about it … much.

I lifted my dial. “I need to call our housekeeper and tell him that I’m okay.” Howard had to have heard from some parent that I’d been hauled off by biohaz agents. He was probably outside the quarantine center at this moment, trying to kick down the door.

“Howard was arrested hours ago.” Spurling’s tone was offhanded. “I have to say, for an old guy, he’s a tough nut to crack.”

“Crack?”

“He’s being questioned about his knowledge of your father’s illegal activities.”

I stared at her, wanting to shout that Howard didn’t know anything. But was that true? I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“By the way,” she went on, “we dropped off your pets at the local shelter. You have until the end of the week to claim them.”

And I’d thought this woman couldn’t make me hate her any more. “What if I can’t?”

“Well, someone might adopt the one-eyed dog or the diabetic cat, but the rest? Even you have to admit they’re a pretty sorry lot.”

I drew a breath against the tightness in my chest. Director Spurling had just painted a bulls-eye on everyone and everything I loved. And if I didn’t do what she wanted, she was going to start pulling the trigger. I cleared my throat. “I’d like to get going now, if that’s okay.”

“Of course.” She led me across the room to the twin doors. “I knew you were the right girl for the job, Delaney,” she said, and pressed her fob to the pad on the wall.

The door on the right rolled open and I found myself staring into a gaping darkness. Feeling close to heart failure, I stepped into the tunnel.

“One last thing,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that the Ferae virus isn’t as lethal as it was nineteen years ago.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t planning on testing it out.

“Then you’ve probably also heard that instead of dying, when people get infected now, they mutate.”

A cold feeling crept along my neck. “Those are just stories.”

“No, actually, they’re not. So be careful.”

Every muscle in my body went rigid. “What? Are you saying there are mutants over there?”

“On the far side of the river, yes. Stick to the island and you should be fine. Good luck, Delaney.” Spurling pressed the lock pad again and the door slid shut behind me.