The Extinction Trials(81)

“But didn’t Will know your secret?” Owen asked.

“I think he did,” Alister said. “Or at least I think he suspected it after we got on the boat. The parts I took from the power plant didn’t fit the boat. I made him go away, and I retrieved the parts from the engine room where I’d hidden them. He may have known before, depending on how much data he had access to at the station. I’m not sure.”

“Why did he play along?” Cara asked.

“I think that was his programming,” Alister said. “As a terminal proctor, I think his role was to simply see where the trials went and to try to keep us alive. Probably, by his reasoning, exposing me would’ve caused harm to me and perhaps some of you. The other alternative is that he thought The Colony was your best chance of survival. And I do too.”

Owen shook his head. “If Garden Station is out there—holding countless humans waiting to repopulate the world—we have an obligation to find those people.”

“Exactly,” Alister said. “That has become both sides’ goal now: to find the Garden and repopulate their armies. When we find the Garden, we’ll cure the survivors who are infected with the Genesis Virus and bring them into The Union. We’ll finally have the army we need to win this war. We’ve been waiting a very long time for that. Keep in mind, we have chambers like ARC Technologies used in The Extinction Trials. We can leapfrog across time too. That’s what’s happening now—an endless war of attrition, a slow-motion bunker war on a ruined world.”

“What if you don’t find Garden Station?” Owen asked.

Alister shrugged. “I don’t know. The Alliance might eventually run out of food. Half of them have the Genesis Virus. It must be an unimaginable strain on their society—people who forget their past on a continual basis. They need a cure. We have it. They have robots and storms that hunt us. We both need the people ARC is holding at Garden Station to replenish our numbers if we have any hope of winning the war and returning to the surface permanently. The Colony isn’t large enough to support growing our population naturally. We need space. We need adults we can train and arm to kill the robots and The Alliance. As I said, whoever finds the Garden first likely wins the war and reclaims the surface and the world.”

Maya sat on the couch. “Why not broker a peace?”

“It’s been tried,” Alister said softly. “Many times. Always ends the same: betrayal by one side or another. So many Colonists have been lost. And Allied citizens.”

“The world needs us to complete the trials, Alister,” Owen said. “To find a way to put things back together.”

“Face it, Owen: the world is over. The Colony is your home now. The Change is your future.”

“I don’t know what The Change is, but I don’t want it,” Owen said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alister muttered. “You’ve already taken it.” He looked up. “It was in that injection with the GV cure. You’ll all change soon.”





Chapter Sixty-Four





When Alister left the room, guards came to the holding room to escort Maya and Cara away. Owen’s instincts told him to fight the guards. His good sense forced him to stand by as they were ushered toward the door.

Maya paused at the threshold to look back at Owen, and that moment seemed to stretch on for an eternity, and within it was all things they had left unsaid and all the things he felt he might never get to say.

He wished more than anything that they had more time together, that he could go back to those days on the boat and tell her exactly how he felt. He couldn’t read her face, but he knew what she was thinking: they needed to get out of here. They had to escape The Colony. But where would they go? To The Alliance outside? That seemed to be the only other option.

Once again, Owen felt like a trapped man in a burning building, staring at two doors in a smoke-filled room, wondering which one to open.

He also wondered where his mother was. Could she be here at The Colony? Or with The Alliance? Or did ARC have her at Garden Station? Those were the three possibilities. The last was that she was gone, her life taken in the Fall and buried in this ruined world like countless others had been.

When the door closed, Owen was alone in the holding room. He paced then, waiting, wondering what The Change was, when he would feel it, and if he would survive it.

He felt a strange mix of emotions about The Union’s cure: thankful that he would soon recover all his memories, and apprehensive about what else The Change might do to him.

An orderly in a gray uniform brought him a meal on a floppy plastic tray: leafy greens and red slime that reminded Owen of ARC’s green sludge. It seemed that good food was another casualty of the Change War.

When he finished eating, the orderly collected his tray and dropped off a new set of clothes—a gray outfit like the one Alister had worn. Owen removed his pants and reached for the gray trousers, but he then stopped, remembering the small item in his pocket. He reached in and retrieved the small round fire pin and studied it a moment, remembering the selfless act of the man who had given it to him.

He didn’t know what The Change was, but he did know what he had to do. The Colony was a burning building. He was going to get out. He was going to get Maya and Cara out too. He didn’t know where they would go, but he would get them to safety—somehow.