Mutation (24 page)

‘Jordan,' Luke whispered. ‘Is this –? Do you know what this is?'

I sat down, throwing my feet over the edge, hope swelling again. ‘Nope. Come on.'

‘What if it's one of theirs?' asked Luke, but he was already crouching down to follow me.

I dropped through the gap and started down the steps. They were spongy with the damp, but they seemed stable enough – until one of the guards yelled out behind me and I almost slipped.

‘Sir!'

Luke raced down after me. The missing section of dirt had already begun sliding back out of the wall, and he had to duck to get out of its way. Just as it was sealing shut, I saw a beam of light swing through the sky above us.

And then it was gone.

We stood on the steps, listening.

‘Over here!' called Barnett, voice muffled by the dirt.

‘Where?' snapped Calvin. He had to be standing right on top of the entrance.

‘I – I thought I saw Hunter sitting down here somewhere.'

‘Sitting,' said Calvin. ‘Just waiting for us to come and pick him up, was he?'

‘Sorry sir. I'm just telling you what I –'

‘FIND THEM!'

I kept going, heart beating again. Calvin hadn't guessed where we'd gone. Which meant whatever we were walking into, the Shackleton Co-operative hadn't built it.

And then something else occurred to me.

What if Peter's down here?

Already I could tell that this staircase went deeper than the one in Pryor's office.

What if that was why the Co-operative hadn't been able to find him? What if he was too far underground, out of range of Shackleton's tracking computer?

What if we weren't completely screwed after all?

The stairs ran down in a tight spiral. I reached out to the right, but there was no handrail to keep us from falling over the edge. I held my left hand to the grimy wall to keep on track, trying to ignore the sudden mental image of a floating white giant seizing my ankle and dragging me away into the darkness.

I started counting steps to distract myself. After about fifty, I noticed a dim light glowing from somewhere below us. Not enough to see by, but it probably meant we were getting close to the bottom.

Ten more steps and I staggered forward, expecting another stair but hitting the floor instead.

‘Careful,' I said, as Luke stepped down behind me. ‘We're here.'

‘Right. Wherever that is.'

There was a door across the room. It was open a crack, letting in a little light. I tiptoed across and peered through the gap.

A hallway. Peeling paint. Dirty lino floor. Dim, flickering light coming down from the ceiling. All quiet, except for a tap dripping somewhere out of sight.

Empty.

We went through.

There was a row of doors to our left. I pushed open the first one.

The room on the other side was long and narrow. There were about a dozen beds inside. Steel frames, beginning to chip and rust. At some point, I assumed, the beds had been lined up in rows along the walls, but now they'd all been shoved to the back of the room, piled up on top of each other.

All except one. The remaining bed stood in the middle of the cleared space, surrounded by a few rusting lockers and some scattered clothes. The bedsheets were clean and white – out of place in the middle of all this decay.

Someone still lived here.

I shut the door again, careful not to bang it, and moved along the hall to the next room.

It was almost the exact same setup. A pile of beds up the back, and a makeshift living space for one person at the front.

‘What happened to the rest of them?' Luke said.

My first thought was Shackleton.

But whatever this place was, it was way older than anything the Co-operative had built. So maybe the real question was what was anyone still doing here?

I put my ear up to the next door. The dripping was coming from through here. I reached for the handle.

A bathroom. Three toilets and a couple of shower stalls. Dirty, but not as gross as they could be. Someone was at least trying to keep on top of the mould.

Water was splashing down into one of the sinks in the corner. I went over and wrenched at the tap. There was a loud squeak of metal and then the room went silent.

‘Why aren't they coming for us?' Luke whispered as we backed out into the hall again. ‘Whoever's down here –'

‘Maybe they're not home,' I said.

There was another door opposite us, slightly ajar.

‘Then who let us down here in the first place?' Luke asked.

I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

‘Whoever it was,' I said, looking inside, ‘I think I've figured out how they saw us coming.'

The room was small and cramped. Shelves lined the walls in front of me, stacked with document folders and old video tapes, all neatly ordered and labelled. An ancient TV and VCR sat on a desk in the corner, beside another door.

In the middle of the room was a big round table, covered with a circle of laptops that looked way too new for this place. They were Phoenix standard issue, all switched on, each one showing a different stream of video.

Video of the town.

Somehow, these people had hijacked Calvin's security feeds.

Two chairs were parked in front of the screens. I rolled one of them out and sat down.

I looked down on the food court, empty except for a cleaner mopping the floor. The welcome centre in the Shackleton Building, just starting to come to life for the day. The security centre, still quiet. Obviously word hadn't got back to them about this morning yet.

No footage from the medical centre. In all of my trips, I'd never seen a single security camera in that place. I was sure there was a reason for it, but in a town as security-obsessed as Phoenix, it just didn't seem to –

‘Uh … Jordan …?'

I spun around on the chair.

Luke was staring at the wall behind me.

Giant pin boards ran from one end to the other. They were crammed with bits of paper, all precisely arranged and linked together with different coloured bits of string. There was empty space left at the right-hand end, like this had all been built up over time and was still being added to.

Photos, newspaper clippings, print-outs from the security screens, emails, post-it notes, maps covered in pins. All with one thing in common.

Us.

Luke, Peter and me. Everything the Co-operative had ever printed about us since we got here – and plenty they hadn't – all collected and sorted and staring down at us.

I stood up, and started walking along the wall. The timeline stretched all the way back to the day I'd stepped off the plane at Phoenix Airport.

And then it kept going.

My insides started to go cold again. It wasn't panic this time. It was a slow, creeping dread.

There was stuff here from before I'd come to Phoenix. Way before.

School photos from back in Brisbane. Three-year-old print-outs of an About Me website they'd made us all do at the start of Year 7. A newspaper clipping, curled and yellowing, from when my primary school debating team won the state competition. Progress reports from my preschool, held to the wall with old, rusting pins. A copy of my birth certificate.

They had just as much stuff on Luke. At least twice as much on Peter.

Someone was watching us. And they had been for a very long time.

‘Who do you think they are?' I asked, trying to mask the fear in my voice.

There was a thud from the next room, then a clattering sound, like something metal dropping to the floor.

I tore my eyes away from the timeline, spinning around to face the door in the corner of the room. I started creeping around the far side of the table – but then a sudden movement on one of the laptop screens caught my eye.

Footage from another security camera. But not one of Shackleton's. The image was grainy black and white, and it kept flickering, like it was being shot on a much older camera.

It was a picture of the bush. Judging by the angle, the camera must have been mounted somewhere up in one of the trees. A line of crumbling concrete ran through the shot – the remains of a wall. The camera was monitoring the entrance to this place.

And right now, it was also monitoring Calvin.

He was still there, pacing furiously back and forth across the tunnel entrance. He had his phone back out again. There was no sound coming from the computer, but from the look of his contorted face, he was screaming the ear off whoever was on the other end of that phone.

I kept walking. Nothing we could do about Calvin now.

I got to the door. Heard Luke scream from across the room.

And then my legs fell out from under me and I collapsed to the ground.

Chapter 30

T
HURSDAY
, J
UNE
25
49
DAYS

The smashed fingers. The gash in my shoulder. The cuts and grazes from my fall into the grass.

All of them disappeared, swallowed up in the mind-crushing pain shattering out from the base of my spine. My eyes spun out of focus, screams exploding from my throat.

The suppressors still reached down here. And Calvin had finally got through to someone on his phone.

It was like needles tunnelling through my legs. I looked down, and it seemed impossible that they weren't spewing blood or falling to pieces or engulfed in flames. All this agony and nothing to show for it.

Luke dragged himself across the ground towards me, clawing under the table, face red with the effort. He collapsed, moaning in pain.

I gathered my strength, trying to push myself up onto my feet. For a moment, the pain seemed to ebb away a bit and I threw myself forward, making a grab at the door handle in front of me.

Then another wave hit me and I fell, my head smacking against the door.

I knocked the handle on my way down.

The door swung open.

I crashed through to the next room, not even noticing the impact as my body hit the floor, pain receptors already pushed as far as they could go. I lay there, writhing in the doorway, clawing at the small of my back, trying pointlessly to make it stop.

And then, dimly through the pain, like it was coming from underwater …

‘Jordan!'

I pried open my eyes, fighting to hold still enough to take in the room.

Brighter light in here. Sinks and benches and metal instruments. Surgical stuff. Other equipment too.

More needles launched themselves down through my legs and I forgot about all of it, almost throwing up, almost blacking out.

I could hear Luke close behind me, grinding his teeth, still pulling toward the door.

‘Jordan!' the voice screamed again. ‘Up here!'

I forced my eyes back into focus. I was lying at the foot of a bed like the ones in the other rooms. The floor was a mess. Cereal and milk everywhere. A metal bowl and spoon lay on the ground near my head.

I strained to look up, stretching to my hands and knees.

He was lying propped up on the bed. Blood soaking through the bandage around his head. Left jaw all cut and bruised. His hands were free, but everything else below his shoulders was strapped down to the mattress.

‘PETER!'

His face was wracked with fear. ‘Jordan, no! Oh no. Get out! Get out of here before they –!'

Twin cries from Luke and me drowned out the rest of his warning. My knees collapsed sideways and I face-planted into the spilled cornflakes. I pushed up, slipped in the milk, and crumpled down again.

‘Jordan, please,' said Peter. ‘They're coming! You have to get out!'

A door flew open across the room, and a Eurasian man with spiky black hair ran in. He was dressed in a long, white lab coat that looked a bit too big for him.

White robes,
I thought dimly.

The man stopped, almost treading on me. He wasn't even a man. He couldn't have been more than a few years older than me. He took one look at Luke and me, thrashing on the floor, and dashed across to the sink.

‘Mum!' he yelled back over his shoulder. ‘They're here!'

He pumped some soap into his hand and ran the water, glancing back down at us with a mix of excitement and … something else.

A woman strode into the room. Probably in her mid-fifties. Greying hair, frameless glasses, and a matching lab coat. She had a pickaxe slung over her right shoulder.

The woman turned to the boy. ‘Everything ready?'

He nodded, rinsing the soap off his hands.

The woman propped her pickaxe up against the wall. She came straight past me and stared down at Luke, still only halfway through the door.

‘Luke Hunter,' she said, folding her arms. ‘At last. You have no idea how long we've waited for you to arrive.'