The Lethal Agent (The Extraction Files Book 2) Read online

  “Why? I thought you wanted us to figure this out.” For the first time, Maggie sounded disappointed.

  “Oh, believe me. There’s nothing I’d like more than for you to figure out the bugs. Then we can all go live normal lives. But if they are what you say, if someone is controlling them, then this is going to be far more difficult than we ever thought.”

  “Well, we’ll figure it out. One way or another.” She sounded confident, not in a false bravado sort of way. She really believed it.

  “You like him don’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Kaufman.”

  “Oh, I guess. He’s fine.” She sounded less sure than she’d been before.

  Silas flopped back on his bed and laughed.

  “What?” she asked above him.

  “It’s good. If there was only one good thing I’ve done for you so far, it’s putting you with Kaufman, and I didn’t even do it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  Silas chuckled. “No, Nick did. He insisted. I couldn’t fight him without telling him too much. Turns out he was right all along. Maybe he should run this place.”

  A long moment of silence passed until she finally said, “I don’t think so.” Then, she collapsed beside him, curled into a ball so her knees touched his side.

  “You know I tried to take care of you. That’s probably hard to believe, but I did.” He was drunk and rambling, he knew, but he might not get another chance.

  “I don’t need you to take care of me. I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

  Silas sighed into the black void that was his bedroom. “I know. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Need anything else?” she didn’t move, but Silas, too, sensed that moment was gone.

  “No. I’ll sleep it off. Just promise me you’ll be good?”

  Maggie pushed herself up and off the bed. Standing over him, she said, “I’ll be good. I’ll figure out the bugs, and put an end to it. I give you my word, for all that it’s still worth to you.” Then, her feet shuffled out of the room and left him alone.

  How long ago had he said those words to her? It had been weeks since her recruitment interview, and she could recite it word for word. Silas laughed aloud. Maggie had been the right girl from the start, and now that Masry would remove him from CPI, Silas’s guilt couldn’t get in her way anymore. Maybe then, Maggie really would do it.

  ABRAHAM

  LUNA COLONY

  SEPTEMBER 6, 2232

  “This was the Earth in 1974, the first photo ever taken,” Charlene began. Above the kitchen table, a blue, green, brown, and white planet rotated. “And this is the Earth today.” She swiped to reveal a second planet, this one brown, orange, and grey. It looked nothing like the first, except they were both spherical.

  “By 2020, there were some pretty serious issues going on in the world. There were over 200 countries, each with individual laws and political systems. Some wanted to save the Earth—prohibit oil drilling, save the species, study the ecosystems. Others wanted to profit. There were nations that hunted whales in massive numbers and some that strip-mined whole mountain ranges. Every few years there would be some sort of issue between nations that didn’t agree. Add in four major world religions with a claim to own the heavens, and it was a recipe for disaster.”

  Siya chimed in with, “There is but one god, and he is called Allah.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Charlene said to dismiss him. “Anyway, there was a lot of little stuff at first. School shootings. Border disputes. Radical regimes that did the dirty work for larger groups. Then, in 2049, it just sort of boiled over.” Charlene’s hands mirrored her words, a bomb going off on the table before her.

  “It started in Jerusalem, though no one was really surprised. Muslims, Jews, and Christians had been fighting over it for literally centuries. There had already been wars fought for it, and every few years, the city changed hands, never really at peace. Then, a Christian killed a Muslim. It was just one man who killed one woman. One death among the thousands that were killed every day across the world back then, but it was the one that started it all.”

  “Her name was Ramada Al-Ghazal.” Both Abraham and Charlene turned to stare at Siya who spoke of the woman as if he’d known her personally. “She wore a hijab of yellow silk. Her hair was black, and her eyes grey.” Siya’s eyes grew distant with memory. “She was the prophet, the one Allah sent to show us the path. When she was raped by Christians, they cut her cheeks to steal her beauty. She still wanted peace in the city. When a Christian man killed her, Muslims heard Allah’s command. They cleansed the city.”

  Abraham’s stomach churned, though not from the wine.

  Charlene accepted the tale with more grace. “A warning was sent out to Muslims. They had three days to leave the city. At sunset on the third day, a nuclear warhead flew straight into the center of Jerusalem. They still don’t know where it came from. Some said Pakistan, others Saudi Arabia. It didn’t really matter. Christians attacked Muslims in retaliation for the lost city. Muslims attacked Christians in return. Any group with religious affiliation took up arms.”

  “World War Three,” Siya laughed. “It was the first world war if you ask me. The first time the whole world fought in a war. In South Africa, they call it Mwisho. The End.”

  “It lasted six years. Estimates say over five-hundred nuclear bombs were dropped, most of them in the Fertile Crescent region, central Africa, and Russia. The radiation leached out into the oceans before they really knew what happened. They say the oceans turned brown in less than ten years.”

  With the planet rotating above them, Abraham saw the wide swaths of brown with newfound understanding. They were the oceans, and they were dead.

  “In 2066, the International Commission was formed. Later it became the Global Council. First, they nullified national borders and created the sectors. Then—”

  “People actually let them do that?” Abraham sat in awe, thinking the whole world had given their homes to a handful of strangers.

  “Well, yeah. Everyone was starving. There was so much radiation back then, whole regions were killed off or became refugees. Millions became homeless, and no one could take them all in. The survivors let the Council take over because it was the only way to stay alive.”

  “Why? How does giving up their countries keep them alive?”

  “The Global Council created a uniform set of laws. They instituted the class system, abolished all personal weapons, and quarantined the really bad radioactive zones. Religion is widespread but quiet now. Those of us who believe do so in our own homes, without making claim on the rest of the world. The big thing they wanted was the preservation of Earth. After all the radiation, they had big fears about the future. Militaries were repurposed into the Scholar class. Instead of warfare, they focused on research that could save the Earth.”

  “Too late,” Siya said.

  Abraham tried to take it all in. The wars, the oceans, the names of places he didn’t know. If Siya knew the history of Earth, then clearly everyone did. Only Abraham remained ignorant of such a huge portion of his past.

  It was yet another reminder of what he’d lost.

  “With the oceans dead, there was no reason not to farm it for water at least. They’ve pulled so much now, there’s a good mile and a half of exposed shelf around the coast in most places. The poles used to be white with ice. Now they’re white with salt. There isn’t enough surviving plant life to support the human population, so now the atmosphere is maintained with converters. The domes are all outfitted with the converters, but outside them, the air is pretty thin on oxygen.

  “The air changed so much that the patterns of wind motion were completely altered. On top of that, radiation in war zones killed the crops and produced these wide bands of dust. The wind picked up the dust and created these massive storms.”

  “The haze?” Abraham asked, putting it together.

  “The Orange Death. Cloud fire. Ukungu. The haze. It has many names.
”

  “Between the haze and the low-oxygen, almost everyone wears a mask. In Europe and Africa, the haze is highly radioactive. In North America and western Asia, it’s less severe. The dust is still thick enough to choke out the crops. By 2075, there was a global food crisis. Huge areas of farmland were going to waste. There was a big push in the seventies to get food redistributed. Of course, by then, the Scholars had the idea to go off-world.”

  “And here we are!” Siya held his arms out like that was the end of the story.

  Charlene sipped her wine for the first time since the start of the lesson. “Supposedly, there are teams that are looking for a ‘new Earth’ for us. We won’t see it in our lifetimes, of course, but it’s possible. That’s why we’re here—to investigate survival strategies in off-world colonies. Someday they’ll use our experience to help the human race start over.”

  “Now, they mine hematite from Mars and send it back to Earth to make fuel to take people to the moon. No one wants to live on Earth.” His accent was thick as ever, but Abraham finally had some small measure of understanding of Siya. When he wasn’t being an arrogant ass, Siya could even pass as intelligent. Who knew?

  Abraham swiped the planet away. The original Earth appeared, blue and green and beautiful. “It took six years?”

  “It’s crazy right? It’ll take hundreds of thousands of years to fix the damage they caused in only six. And all of it over one woman. Over the right to live in a certain city under a certain god.”

  Siya stood without warning and walked to the far side of the kitchen. He pulled a cup from the cabinet and the carafe of wine from cold storage. Returning to the table, he refilled each of their cups before pouring his own.

  Abraham had new appreciation for his sad little wine. He’d grown the grape vines from seeds, harvested them, fermented them, acidified them and here they sat as a too-bitter wine. If the haze was as bad as Charlene said, it had been far easier for him than anyone on Earth. He fed his unconventional family with better foods than most of the world.

  They may not have been on the moon. They may have been farther away from Earth than they ever imagined, but Abraham was glad for it.

  Charlene and Siya chatted about Earth for a while longer, but Abraham sipped his wine, lost in thought. When Charlene announced she was going to bed, Abraham stood to walk her to her room.

  At the doorway, he turned back to Siya who said, “I know. Go straight to bed. Don’t touch the children.” He tossed back the remaining wine in his cup, set it on the counter, and started toward Abraham’s old room.

  Abraham put his hand at the small of Charlene’s back as he walked her to her room. He could feel the warmth of her skin beneath the olive-green body suit.

  “You okay? That was a lot to take in.”

  “Yeah, it just makes me glad to be here,” he admitted.

  Charlene smiled up at him. “I’m glad you’re here, too.” When they arrived at her door, she cocked him a crooked smile. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

  In fact, Abraham did want to go in. He did want to stay with her, to never consider being apart from her again. To hold her until her breath relaxed in sleep.

  But that wasn’t what she meant. “No, I need to get back to the boys.” He kissed the top of her head.

  Charlene only giggled. “All right, fine. See you in the morning. When the sun is bright,” she said, butchering his usual phrase. Abraham walked back down the corridor, checking on the girls on his way. He crept between the rows of boys beds and crawled into the largest bed that was still too small. The whole time, he couldn’t keep his heart from hammering in his chest.

  DASIA

  CPI-RQ-04

  SEPTEMBER 7, 2232

  Rather than the usual morning knock, the meep-meep-meep sounded to wake her. Dasia checked her tablet and found an ecomm from Mable. COME TO THE LAB.

  Okay? When did she get back?

  Dasia rubbed the sleep from her eyes and slipped into some more appropriate clothes—a pair of fitted navy pants and a loose white top. Using her finders, she raked her hair into a messy pile and made her way to the seventh floor.

  When the elevator opened to reveal the sealed-shut door to the lab and the empty corridor, Dasia wondered if maybe it had been a joke. Or maybe she’d misunderstood.

  Nonetheless, she was here. She knocked at the door, startled when Dr. Quincy opened it.

  “Hi, uh, good morning. Mable sent me—”

  Sour as ever, Dr. Quincy grumbled and walked back into the lab, leaving the door open.

  Dasia slipped inside and closed it behind her.

  The lab was as grim as she remembered. She’d only been there once, when Nick gave the group a walk-through when she first arrived. Dasia had never had a reason to go back. A room with strange, preserved bugs that had been collected from people’s brains, many of them now dead. It wasn’t her favorite spot.

  For whatever reason, Mable liked it.

  Dasia wandered around the tables, some with holographic displays of bugs or data charts. At one, she caught sight of Theo manipulating the image of a bug, his changes evident in the graph to the side. “Mable here?”

  Theo looked up. “Oh, uh, yeah she’s at the back table. Kind of adopted that one for herself. Go down this little aisle, then take the last one on the left.”

  Maybe she should have brought breadcrumbs or something.

  Stifling her concerns, she followed Theo’s directions and found Mable sitting at a light table, back turned. Her eyes were on the massive chart that hovered above the table. Her fingers made deft movements, adding notes and drawing lines.

  “There you are,” Dasia said as she approached.

  “Hey, thanks for coming up.” Mable stood and squeezed her tight. She kissed Dasia’s cheek then asked, “You’ve been working on identifying possible bug hosts?”

  Dasia laughed a little. “I’m not sure we’re doing that much. Just looking at the profiles. Osip doesn’t know much about Scholars, and it’s been so long since I did any kind of science or anything. I’m not really sure what we’re looking for.”

  Mable stood up and walked around the corner. She returned a moment later with a short stool in her hand and set it beside her own. “Sit down. I want to show you something.”

  Dasia sat, completely out of her element.

  “Okay, so remember the first extraction we did? The pharmaceutical researcher in Toronto?” As she spoke, Mable swiped the enormous chart in a few directions until she found the one she wanted, Dr. Divya Prataban in a light-blue circle.

  “Yeah, but I’m kind of surprised you do.”

  “Well, yeah. They filled in the details later,” Mable said of her considerable injury and resulting memory loss. How she could cope like that Dasia would never understand. “Anyway, so she had a bug, a Slight that I got, right? She deleted all her research, something to do with Anth. The only person who had any data was her mentee in Berlin. A few weeks after Prataban, we went to Berlin to extract an Echo from Dr. Ludwig.”

  “You think there’s a connection?” Dasia refused to let the memory of Anth derail her again.

  “Well, we weren’t sure. Theo thought it was weird, too, so we started mapping the Scholars that had bugs to see if there were any other relationships. You know, people who worked in the same lab, mentors and mentees and things. We’re not done, but here’s the chart so far.”

  Dasia looked up at the holograph display with new appreciation. Each circle held the name of a bug host. Each line, a professional relationship. She reached into the air and manipulated the chart, looking for the outliers, the ones that didn’t have lines, the ones that didn’t fit. There were only a handful.

  “So, obviously the bugs are transmitted between colleagues,” she said thinking aloud. “But some of these are on the other side of the world from each other, or in colonies, or the LRF. Some aren’t even Scholars. This one, she’s a shuttle pilot.”

  “It can’t be an organic transmission,” Mable repli
ed. “It’s intentional.”

  “Like a person is choosing which people get infected?” It was a sinister concept.

  “Theo and I found evidence that the bugs are manufactured. They have identical weights and high metal compositions. It’s certainly possible that a person could have created them and used them for some sort of advantage, though I don’t know what it would be.” Mable tapped the circle for Dr. Ludwig. “She and Dr. Prataban were researching a cure for anth, some sort of chemical that would neutralize the addictive properties. Basically, they would eliminate the anth epidemic entirely. They would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives every month.”

  “So whoever it is, they profit from anth being on the market.” Dasia didn’t want to think of her own personal contribution to the anth market. She’d paid her share and then some. In some ways, she had lined the pockets of whoever was responsible for the bug infections.

  Dasia was only slightly guilty. She had loved every minute of her addiction, right up until it killed the most important person in her life.

  “But some of these people have no connection to anth. This one was a geneticist. This one, a planetary researcher. This one, a propulsion engineer. None of them have any real connection to anth or the treatment.” Mable tapped on a few circles to enlarge them in the cloud of the others.

  “Maybe they’re addicts?” Even as she said it, she knew it didn’t make sense. One or two Scholars on drugs, maybe. But dozens? No way.

  Dasia was more confused than ever. Just when she thought she was starting to figure it out…

  “Sorry I’m not more help,” she offered with no small measure of disappointment.

  “What are you talking about?” Mable scoffed. “You just figured out one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle. And you have access to every possible host profile. You can apply this to your search for bugs. Maybe that’ll make a difference.”

  Dasia tried to feel as confident as Mable. Cole was confident. Dasia could be, too.