Infected (9 page)

“In my
sleep
.” Tanner reached out and gently tucked a stray section of Carina’s bangs out of her eyes. “I hate for you to go out there alone, though. We can’t be sure that Baxter and whoever didn’t take another train, track us here somehow. If they’re in Chinatown—”

“You’re being paranoid,” Carina said with more confidence than she felt. “You saw. No one was interested in us at all out there.”

“No one we noticed, true, but, Car, these guys train for this sort of thing, right? They know how to stay out of sight when they need to.”

“Okay.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll get us something, some sort of disguise. There’s got to be something in those tourist shops.”

“I don’t know,” Tanner said, drawing her close. “I still don’t like it, but I have to admit it makes sense for just one of us to go. But you have to be careful, okay?”

Tanner’s touch was both a comfort and a temptation. As Carina leaned against him and closed her eyes, she wished she could just stay here in his arms and pretend that the last few hours hadn’t happened. Inhaling his scent and wrapping her arms around him, she thought about how lucky she was to have found him.

A few months of dating had convinced her that what she was feeling was not only first love, but
real
love, the sort that most people rarely experience. The fact that she couldn’t bring herself to say so out loud … well, she was working on that. No one in her family had said “I love you” as far back as she could remember. Carina had tried to say the words to Tanner—three simple syllables, something people everywhere said to each other every day—and yet every time she tried, it was as though her system shut down, interrupting her power of speech and making her heart race. She’d resigned herself to the fact that it would take more time, and Tanner made her feel like he would give her all the time she needed.

She knew that most high school romances ended. But she and Tanner weren’t most people, and what they had wasn’t what most people had. When Tanner got lost in his coding or she was deep into her computations, it was like they each took a part of the other with them. They could sit next to each other in a crowded café and still be alone … or they could be alone on a hike in the hills and feel like they
had everything they needed, just the air and the sun and each other. Carina’s therapist suggested that she clung so hard to Tanner because she’d lost so much, but Tanner was no substitute for a missing dad or dead mother. He wasn’t an addiction or a dependency or a crutch. Tanner was just himself, and he fit with her perfectly, as though they were two halves of a whole.

Carina had dated before. Given so much independence by her mother, she’d been free to spend time with boys since middle school, and had never had any trouble attracting their attention. Carina knew it was more about the way she looked than who she was—it wasn’t like great math skills were a particularly potent charm—but she didn’t care because, until Tanner, she hadn’t been looking for anything serious. Someone to hang out with, to impress her friends, to take to school dances.

But Tanner’s touch was nothing like the touches of other boys, and he looked at her as if he really
saw
her. Tanner knew what she was thinking even before she said it; sometimes he seemed to know what she was thinking even before
she
knew.

Last night Tanner had called after dinner, asking if she wanted to go out for ice cream. Sheila had agreed reluctantly after Carina convinced her that she needed the distraction, and promised that she would be home well before midnight. Tanner picked her up from Sheila’s house in the car he’d borrowed from his dad and announced that there had been a change of plans: they were going to go up on the school’s roof to gaze at the stars high in the sky over the valley.

Carina didn’t bother to tell Sheila, figuring that since she was new to her role of guardian, she didn’t need to sweat the details. When they got to the top of the fire escape ladder and spread out a blanket that faced the long slope down the hill into town, Tanner spent the first few minutes staring at her instead of the stars.

“What,” she’d finally said, blushing. “So I got a haircut.”

It wasn’t just a haircut, of course, but Carina didn’t think Tanner would be interested in the detailed list of beauty treatments that ended up on Sheila’s bill, which totaled several hundred dollars by the time they were done.

“I like the haircut, but that’s not what I’m looking at. You look … different, somehow. Sort of … lit up.”

Carina was about to explain the complicated hair coloring process, the high- and low-lights and gloss treatment, when he’d kissed her. And gone on kissing her. For hours, it felt like, and then the kissing took them further, to the places she’d been wanting to go to for so long. Tanner had stopped several times to ask her if she was sure, until she told him to quit asking. There would never be a better time, a more perfect time, than under the bright moon, the valley dusted with the sparkle of lights below, in the arms of the boy who loved her, who could take away her pain with a smile, a touch, a promise.

Now, as she tried to hold on to the feeling of safety that came from being in his arms, she felt the longing again instead, the heat inside her that Tanner alone could make her feel. But it was overshadowed by fear.

And hunger. Raging, relentless hunger.

She brushed her lips against Tanner’s and forced herself
to get up. Taking the bills Tanner had peeled from the stack, she quickly tucked them into her pocket with the key.

“You’ll freeze,” Tanner said. “It’s getting cold out there. Maybe you should buy a sweatshirt.”

“I might do better than that, even.” Carina pretended she wasn’t holding her breath as she slowly turned the doorknob. She trusted Walter; whatever he’d done to this room, she knew it was meant to ensure safety. But still, it was hard not to imagine the place being blown to bits by some hidden trigger, and it was a relief when nothing happened after she pulled open the door.

The hallway was as silent and dark as it had been earlier. Carina eased the door shut behind her; it slid the last few inches by itself, closing with the same solid mechanical click. She tried not to worry about whether the code would work for a second time when she returned with the food.

She had the key; she had the code. Tanner would be waiting for her. It would be enough. It had to.

The crowds had thinned. Some of the merchants’ doors were shuttered for the evening, but the restaurants were doing brisk business. Carina’s stomach went weak with hunger and she found herself salivating.

But first she needed to do one other thing. They couldn’t stay hidden in Uncle Walter’s secret room forever; they would need to venture out to the BART station at the Civic Center as soon as possible. By now, Sheila would have given
their description to more people, all searching for them. It was terrifying to think about, especially since Carina was still having trouble believing that her uncle had been working on something so sensitive that armed men were hunting her down for it. But the worst-case scenario was that a small army of trained agents knew that she and Tanner had boarded the inbound BART train and were looking for them in the city. If they had somehow figured out that Carina and Tanner had exited at the Montgomery stop, it greatly increased the chances that they were nearby.

So Carina had to make sure that she and Tanner were invisible.

Two blocks from the apartment, Carina found a brightly lit souvenir shop on Stockton. Racks of postcards and novelty key chains gave way to T-shirts and caps and inexpensive sportswear inside the crowded store. She shopped quickly, guessing at Tanner’s sizes. When she was finished, she had filled a big plastic shopping bag with purchases; the bored clerk barely glanced at Carina as he rang her up.

Carina’s next stop was at a busy restaurant. The woman working the register merely grunted and pointed when Carina asked for a take-out menu. Carina didn’t recognize most of the dishes, which were described in Chinese and broken English, so she just pointed at items in each section. Finding a chair tucked between the kitchen door and a large plant, she sat down and waited. She kept her eye on the entrance, watching as pedestrians strolled by the tall windows.

When she saw a man in a black track jacket with his hand at his ear, she shrank back against the wall.

Was that the lab logo, stitched onto his jacket? She thought she saw a flash of red and silver, but maybe it was just the bright neon lights reflecting off the glass. It was possible that he’d just been running his hand through his close-cropped hair, not adjusting an earpiece—and that Carina was becoming way too paranoid.

She thought about Baxter. He had the training and resources that could keep them safe. She was certain, if she called him, he’d do whatever he could to help. Maybe he could get them out of the area, to another city where Sheila would never think of searching.

But if Sheila found out, there would be hell to pay. If she knew he’d betrayed her, then he would be in danger too. Maybe there was a way he could do something behind the scenes, perhaps direct the search away from Carina and Tanner.

The taciturn woman placed two large white plastic bags on the counter, interrupting Carina’s spinning thoughts. Carina paid quickly and asked if there was a back entrance to the restaurant. If the woman found the request odd, she didn’t let on; she motioned down the hall and muttered something Carina didn’t understand.

Threading her way through the crowded restaurant, she kept her head down, continuing past the restrooms and down a dank hall to a small door propped open into an alley. The smell of garbage and car exhaust assaulted her. Behind the buildings, workers emptied trash into the Dumpsters and carried boxes from loading docks. Carina was getting the feeling that Chinatown never slept, and she
was glad for the commotion as she hurried down the street in the direction of the apartment.

She missed her turn the first time but eventually found her way back to the tiny street, breathing a sigh of relief when she was finally back inside the dim lobby. When she got to the apartment, the door opened by itself, startling her so much that she almost dropped her shopping bags. Tanner reached through the narrow opening and pulled her in.

“How did you know I was back?” she asked as soon as she was safely inside.

“Because your uncle’s a genius. Look at this.”

He showed her a small square mirror mounted on the wall of the bathroom. Carina bent her face closer, as Tanner instructed, and found that she was somehow looking out into the hallway.

“It’s all mechanical,” Tanner explained. “It’s not a camera; he did it with mirrors. I checked it out. There are tons of tiny mirrors mounted at angles. There are holes in the ceiling, so he had to have figured out how to get into the space above the ceiling. It’s a completely low-tech way to see what’s in the hall.”

“He probably just did it to amuse himself,” Carina said, feeling a pang of sadness. Walter had been a tinkerer; he’d rebuilt old shortwave radios for fun. On the surface, it was a contradiction—a technology master devising alternate solutions to problems that could be easily solved with technology—but it just underscored her uncle’s curiosity and love of discovery.

“Whatever.” Tanner shrugged. “I still think it’s genius.”

“Yeah.” Carina wiped her eyes. “Uh, can we eat? I agree Walter’s the greatest, but I’m starving.”

“I have more to show you, but if I don’t eat something soon I’m going to pass out.”

It ended up taking less than half an hour to get through dinner. The dishes included soup and some sort of dumpling and pork and tofu dishes, enough to feed four hungry people, but Carina couldn’t stop eating until every bit was gone. Tanner too seemed ravenous.

“Wow,” he said with wonder when there was nothing left but the white cardboard containers and a few packets of soy sauce. “I wonder if that was some sort of delayed stress reaction.”

“In both of us?” Carina said dubiously, putting the trash back in the bags and tying them shut. “Unlikely. What did you find while I was gone, anyway?”

Tanner tapped the laptop’s touch pad and the screen sprang to life, showing a list of files, most of them with numeric names.

“I opened a few of the most recent,” Tanner said apologetically. “They’re video files. I didn’t want to watch without you, when I saw what they were. Carina … your uncle recorded himself talking, here in this room.”

“ ‘Play me first, Carina,’ ” she read, squinting at the file list. “Seriously? That’s what the file’s called?”

“I guess he didn’t want to leave anything up to chance.”

“This was recorded three days before he died. Does that mean he was here then?”

“Well, yeah, unless he hacked the internal clock or FTP’d the file onto the laptop.”

“Uh … in English?”

“Well, let’s just say he would have had to go to a lot of trouble. Besides, Carina, why would he modify the date on a file he wanted you to have?”

The knot that Carina had been carrying in her gut all day, grief wrapped in layers of fear and adrenaline, pressed on her lungs and deprived her of breath. Uncle Walter had left her a message in the form of a file. How long had he suspected that he was going to be killed?