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“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not you. Well, it is, but it’s both of us. It’s Lazarus. People aren’t used to seeing us out of the labs.” He tapped the distinctive orange pass that hung from a lanyard around Natalia’s neck. “This is what they’re looking at.”
Natalia nodded with apparent relief. “Good,” she said. “Although it is not as if we never leave the laboratories.”
“Really?” he asked. “When was the last time you were anywhere apart from the labs or your quarters?”
“When I went to the infirmary,” she said, instantly. “To see you.”
Matt smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “But you know me, and I was here before Lazarus existed. And you know Kate, and Jamie. Most of our colleagues have never spoken to anyone outside the project. I doubt most of them would even know what happened at Château Dauncy if the Professor hadn’t briefed them on it.”
Natalia picked up a pair of trays and slid them on to the first counter. “Perhaps it is better that way,” she said. “Perhaps it is easier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Inside the laboratories is science. There are problems that need solutions. Outside there is blood and fear and everything is life or death. Perhaps thinking about that would not help.”
Matt nodded; he knew exactly what she was saying. Not thinking about the consequences of Lazarus undoubtedly made it easier to get up and go to work every morning, whereas dwelling on the ramifications of each day that passed without the discovery of a viable cure would likely be crippling.
“How are your friends?” asked Natalia. “I have not seen them since France.”
Matt shrugged. “Truthfully?” he said, placing a cheeseburger on his plate and piling the remaining space with fries. “I’m not sure. It was bad when they got back, after what happened to Cal, and so many others. Bad for everyone. I don’t know how they keep going, to be honest with you.”
“Because they have faith,” said Natalia, as she filled a small bowl with salmon salad. “They believe we will win in the end.”
“They did believe that,” said Matt. “And I’m sure some of them still do. Not all of them, though. Not any more. That was their best shot, as far as a lot of the Department is concerned. And they missed it.”
“So it is all down to us,” said Natalia, and smiled at him.
Matt grinned. “Then I guess we’re screwed, aren’t we?”
He lifted his tray and led Natalia across to an empty table. He attacked his burger as soon as he sat down, and within three bites half of it had disappeared. Natalia picked delicately at her salad with a fork, a smile on her face as she watched him eat.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. It’s like you’re so deep in work that you manage to forget you’re even hungry, then you remember all at once.”
Natalia frowned. “Why did you say sorry?”
“When?”
“Just then. You said sorry, then that you hadn’t realised how hungry you were. Why were you sorry?”
Matt shrugged. “I saw you smile at how fast I was eating,” he said. “It’s just what people say.”
“Perhaps you apologise too often,” said Natalia.
Matt sat back in his chair. “What makes you say that?”
“I hear you say sorry many times. But you are a brilliant scientist, and a good friend, and you have nothing to apologise for. I wonder if you know that.”
Matt grimaced. “It’s hard for me.”
“To do what? Believe in yourself?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Matt. “I felt like a disappointment for a long time. It’s a hard habit to shake.”
“Because of your father?”
His eyes widened with surprise. “I … yeah. Maybe. I think I always felt like I should apologise for not being the kind of son he wanted.”
“If you are not what he wanted, he is an idiot,” said Natalia, and smiled fiercely at him. “He should have been proud every day to be your father.”
Matt felt heat rise into his cheeks. “Thank you,” he said. “I think he is now. But I wish we could go back in time and have you tell him that.”
“I would tell him.”
He smiled. “I know you would.”
Natalia smiled back at him, then frowned as a shadow fell across their table. Matt looked up and saw an Operator he didn’t recognise standing over them, his helmet under his arm, his face set and solemn.
Oh shit, he thought. We’ve been here before. Why are neither of my super-powerful vampire friends ever with me when this type of crap happens?
“Can we help you?” asked Natalia.
The Operator glanced at her, shook his head, and fixed his gaze on Matt. He put the helmet carefully down on the table and extended his hand towards the teenager. Matt took it, a look of profound confusion on his face, and was almost jerked out of his seat as the Operator pumped his arm up and down.
“I’m Tom Johnson,” he said, in a thick American accent. “You’re Matt Browning, right?”
Matt nodded; bewilderment had robbed him of the ability to form words.
“Awesome,” said Johnson. “I just wanted to tell you that me and the rest of Intelligence heard about what you did in San Francisco. Driving into a brick wall on purpose to take out a double agent? That’s insane, dude. Seriously.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw a smile spread across Natalia’s face.
“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good of you to say. I didn’t really plan it, to be honest.”
Johnson laughed. “Probably a good thing,” he said. “You might have had second thoughts. Your neck all right?”
Matt touched his fingers to the foam brace. “Getting there,” he said. “This comes off tomorrow.”
Johnson nodded. “Glad to hear it. And apologies for the interruption, I just wanted to say hello. You two look after yourselves, all right?”
Matt nodded. “Thanks. We will.”
Johnson turned and strode across the room to where a group of Operators were waiting for him. They exited the canteen, and Matt turned to Natalia as the doors swung shut behind them.
“Well,” he said. “That was different.”
(#ulink_a9c503e8-e753-5997-a01b-a7851367b7b3)
Jamie walked along Level B, concentrating on keeping his feet on the ground.
He wanted to fly down the grey corridor as fast as he was able, but he shared Larissa’s instinctive reluctance to demonstrate his vampire abilities inside the Loop. It was not that his colleagues were unused to seeing such powers – the Blacklight base was one of the few places in the world where they might be considered unremarkable – but rather that they felt like something that separated him from the ranks of Operators, a sensation he took no pleasure in.
Jamie had flown back from Brenchley as the eastern sky had begun to purple, reaching the hangar minutes before dawn broke over the horizon. After Larissa had departed, he had spent the rest of the long night deep in thought, his mind churning as it sought answers and explanations. His anger had eventually given way to a profound sense of loneliness, of having everything that he most relied on ripped away from him, and that loneliness had in turn been replaced by self-pity and bitter tears, as he silently raged at the unfairness of it all. He did not deserve the lies he had been told and the betrayals he had suffered; he had always tried to do the right thing, and had received only heartbreak in return. The eventual drying of his tears had been accompanied by a burst of self-loathing at having acted like such a child, like a spoilt brat who believed the entire world revolved around him.
Finally, as the darkness began to soften and lift, determined clarity had settled on him. The intermingled issues of his father and Frankenstein could wait, as could the decision about what, if anything, to tell his mum.
What could not wait was Larissa.
As soon as he touched down on the concrete floor of the hangar, he had sent her a message asking if she was awake. He had received no reply by the time the lift had carried him down to Level B, so he had walked quickly along the corridor and knocked on her door. There had been no response, and his supernaturally sharp ears had detected no sounds of movement from inside her quarters, so he had gone reluctantly to his room and slept fitfully, his mind whirring with worry. He had climbed back out of his bed barely two hours later and pulled a clean uniform on, trying all the while to quiet his increasingly frantic brain.
It’s fine. It’ll be fine. She just didn’t want to talk to you last night, and you can’t really blame her for that. Go and find her and tell her you’re sorry and sort it out. It’s not too late.
But there had still been no answer to his repeated knocks on her door or increasingly frequent messages, and no sign of her in the canteen or the Playground or the Briefing Rooms on Level A. He had sat through a routine Operational review with his feet tapping and his fists clenching and as soon as it was finished, after what felt like a thousand hours, he had sent a message to the one person he could ask for help in finding Larissa. To his enormous relief, Kate had replied immediately.
IN MY QUARTERS. WHAT’S UP?
Jamie stopped outside his friend’s door, took a deep breath, and knocked on it, hard. A second later it swung open and Kate appeared, a slightly quizzical look on her face; it took all of Jamie’s self-control not to hug the breath out of her.
“Morning, Jamie,” she said. “Everything all right?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Can I come in?”
“Of course,” said Kate, and stepped aside.
Jamie walked into the small room and stood beside Kate’s desk as she closed the door behind them. “Have you seen Larissa?” he asked. “Today, I mean?”
Kate laughed. “What is it with you two? I had her asking the same thing about you yesterday. Can’t you keep in touch with each other without my help?”
“Have you seen her or not?”
Kate frowned. “No,” she said. “Not today. What’s going on, Jamie?”
He grimaced. “We sort of had a fight.”
“I’d worked that much out for myself,” said Kate. “What about?”
Jamie hesitated; he didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to tell anyone. But he had thrown the promise they had all made to each other in Larissa’s face, had deliberately used it to make her feel guilty, and it would be unforgivably cowardly if he did not apply it to himself.
No more secrets.
He lowered himself into Kate’s chair and began to talk. To his great relief, his friend listened in silence; she allowed him to plough through the whole story of his trip to Norfolk with Frankenstein, his reunion with his father, and the terrible conversation between himself and Larissa, without interruption or reaction. But as soon as he was finished, she shook her head and stared at him with eyes full of anger.
“You’re an idiot, Jamie,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes. Do you like being unhappy? Are you actively trying to make your life colder and more miserable?”
“Of course not,” he said. “I was angry, Kate. I’d just found out that my dad wasn’t dead, that he and Frankenstein had lied to me for years. I wasn’t really thinking straight.”
“I get that,” said Kate. “I really, really do. And I’m sorry about what you discovered. But none of it was Larissa’s fault.”
“Don’t you think she should have told me what she heard?”
“What did she hear?” said Kate. “A name? Three words that might easily have been completely meaningless?”
“They weren’t, though,” said Jamie. “And if she’d told me I could have—”
“You could have what?” interrupted Kate. “Asked Cal if he was keeping your dead dad in a cell? What do you think his answer would have been?”
“I’m not stupid, Kate,” said Jamie. “I know Cal would have denied it. But maybe I could have found out some other way, or managed to get in to see him, or …”
“That’s all well and good,” said Kate, “but you’re overlooking the most important thing. She was going to tell you, unless you’re actively calling her a liar. It’s bad timing that Frankenstein decided to come clean on the same day, but that’s not Larissa’s fault either. She was going to tell you, and before you say she had plenty of time to do so, think about what’s been going on around here lately, and whether or not she might have had one or two other things on her mind.”
Jamie stared at his friend. He knew she was right; everything she was saying was true.
“I need to see her, Kate,” he said, his voice low. “I was angry, and I said some stuff I regret. I just … I need to tell her I’m sorry. Can you help me?”
“I’ll run her chip,” said Kate. She drew her console from her belt and Jamie watched as she tapped the screen with her fingers, silently urging her to hurry. After an agonisingly long wait, the console beeped as the results of the search were returned. Kate grimaced as she read them, and Jamie felt his heart sink.
“What is it?” he asked. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” said Kate, looking up and staring at him. “Her chip stopped transmitting nine hours ago.”
“Where?” asked Jamie. “Where was the last position it was tracked?”
“About seven hundred miles off the west coast of Ireland,” said Kate. “The middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
Kate pushed the door of her office shut and slid into the chair behind her desk. She turned on her terminal, trying to slow her rising unease as she waited for it to go through its series of security checks.
She had left Jamie in her quarters with strict instructions to stay there until she got back. He had looked thoroughly defeated, as though the life had been drained out of him, but she knew from long experience that it would only be temporary; his despair would rapidly turn to anger, and before she knew it he would be charging through the Loop, demanding a search party be raised for Larissa or, more worryingly, going to look for her himself. He’d agreed to sit tight, but Kate knew she needed information fast; right now, they had nothing to go on, and a response based on nothing was only likely to make an already bad situation worse.
Her monitor bloomed into life and Kate’s fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing the Security Division logs and entering Larissa’s name into the search field. The terminal worked quickly, bringing up a minute-by-minute record of her locator chip for the last twenty-four hours. Kate scrolled down to the point where Larissa had left Brenchley, and studied the subsequent lines of text and coordinates.
She came back through the hangar. Went to her quarters, then down to the cellblock, where she stayed for eleven minutes. Then back to her quarters, out through the hangar, and in a straight line west until her chip stopped transmitting.
Kate’s eyes settled on the line that listed the Level H cellblock. She knew full well that there were only two vampires currently being held down there: Marie Carpenter, who was perhaps the least likely person in the Loop that Larissa would decide to visit, and the third oldest vampire in the world.
Valentin, she thought. Why did she go and see Valentin? And what the hell did he say to her?
One floor below, Jamie sat on Kate’s bed, his foot tapping incessantly as he waited for his friend to return. He knew that waiting was the right thing to do – they needed to know more before he made the fuss that he was already itching to make – but doing so was frankly killing him.
She’s out there somewhere, he thought, as he checked the time on Kate’s bedside clock for the hundredth time. And there’s only one reason why her chip would have stopped transmitting.
Because she doesn’t want to be found.
He checked the clock again.
Twenty-six minutes.
