TAMPA, FLORIDA
NOW
SIMON WAS STILL furious as he and Max went to meet the scientists.
This was Max’s punishment. No matter how much Max protested, no matter how obvious it was that it was the only way to keep Simon alive, Simon still clung to his insistence that even his stupidest orders were to be followed, no matter what.
The days after the disaster at the party—or the Ballroom Blitz, as one of the wittier reporters at the local TV station called it—were nothing but tooth-grinding humiliation for both of them.
At heart, Max knew that Simon still believed himself a soldier. His earliest training had been for war. He’d learned patience and strategy over his long, long life, but when attacked, his basic instinct was to respond in kind. He never changed. It was like trying to talk Napoleon out of marching on Russia. That hadn’t gone well, either.
Simon found himself answering questions from the authorities. First the local police, then federal officials, and then again from the people put in charge of the joint task force that combined both. There were a lot of rich people among the dead, wounded, and frightened, and this demanded a massive response. (Some things really had not changed since they were young; no one strikes at the nobles without paying for it.)
Now all Simon wanted was a target, someone on which he could vent his frustration. Max was elected. So Simon brought him along for this chore.
They entered the conference room. The young men and women who’d assembled to meet them all wore their white lab coats. They were scientists, like David. Some of them had worked on Revita, and other pills and wonders that Conquest had discovered and sold while trying to crack the secret of the Water. Some were close to brilliant.
But David outshone all of them, like a sunrise blazing against a candle. He’d spurned their help in most cases, and treated them like grad students and assistants the rest of the time. He hadn’t done it to be cruel, Max believed. It was just the native arrogance of a genius. David wanted to do everything himself, because if someone else could do it, then, by default, it wasn’t worth doing.
That ruthless process of elimination had created more than a little resentment between David and his so-called colleagues. David’s massive salary and access to Simon hadn’t helped. Neither did the discovery that Revita would cause cancer in one in ten of its users. Simon didn’t care. They had plenty of things to do to keep them occupied with the rest of Conquest’s medicines. He’d believed in David, because he believed it was possible for a single genius to succeed where the crowd of ordinary men would fail.
Now David was gone, and they were forced to turn to these ordinary men and women to learn what the fallen star had been doing all those months.
Max expected at least a little triumph from the assembled white coats. They were being recognized while the boy wonder had vanished.
But the Conquest scientists were not showing him anything like victory. They sat around the table, looking away from him, staring at the walls or into their coffee cups. Some of this had to be shock—many of them had been at the party, and probably still heard the echoes of the gunfire before they went to sleep—but it was something else as well.
Max recognized it instantly: they were embarrassed.
Simon looked around the whole table, waiting for someone to speak. His anger was evident. No one wanted to be the focus.
“Well?” he said.
Silence. Finally, one of the men in the white coats cleared his throat. His name was Quentin Reed, and he was an exceptional scientist in his own right. Before he came to Conquest, he had a list of publications that filled twenty pages when printed out. He’d done work on HIV and blocking viral contamination of healthy cells by using monomolecular barriers. It was all groundbreaking, but in an ordinary way. None of his work was the quantum leap forward that David Robinton was capable of, and deep down, Max suspected Reed knew it.
But if there was anyone who could take David’s recipe and start baking with it, it would have to be Reed.
“We need more time,” Reed finally said.
Wrong answer. That was obvious from the look on Simon’s face. “Do you, now,” he said flatly.
“You have to understand. Robinton didn’t let any of us into his work. Not very deep, anyway. We’re looking at most of this for the first time. And sure, we can understand the basics, we can see where he started, but we’re having trouble making some of the leaps he did.”
Simon stared at Reed for a long moment. “How long?”
“It’s not a problem,” Reed said quickly. “We’re very close.”
Someone else at the table muttered at that. Reed shot them a hard look. “We’re very close,” he said again. “You have to understand, we’ve got the bare bones here. But to get you a finished product, that’s going to take longer.”
“Robinton had a finished product. I saw it. He showed it to me.”
“Well, yes,” Reed admitted. “But we’ve only got the formula. Not the samples. He didn’t leave any samples.”
“And the formula isn’t enough?” Simon’s voice was dangerously soft now.
“No, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” Reed said. “We can do it from formula.”
That seemed to be too much for another one of the white coats. A woman at the other end of the table spoke up. “Oh, bullshit, Quentin. You looked at his notes as long as we did, and you were just as confused.”
“Shut up, Michele,” Reed snapped back.
But the dam had broken now. The white coats were squabbling. “I’ve never even seen anything like that kind of synthesis.”
“—fucking hydrogels? How are we supposed to—”
“Do you know what would happen to a test subject if we got even one thing wrong? We’re talking an indictment, not a lawsuit—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Reed shouted.
They all quieted down. Except the one called Michele.
She looked right at Simon and Max. “Listen. Bottom line: this is frontier biotech, and we can barely read the map. We’re starting from where he left off. But we don’t know what he did to get where he went. What David Robinton did was out-of-the-ballpark, next-level stuff. He came up with three or four ideas that would have been enough to take us five years ahead of everyone else on the way to the finished product. As for the final result, I’ll admit it, even if Quentin won’t. There’s stuff in there I’ve never seen before. Even with instructions, we have to go back and learn how to do it all over again. And we’re making a lot of mistakes. It’s not like assembling an IKEA desk, either. This is more like learning how to repaint a Van Gogh.”
Reed swore at her. “You’re being overly dramatic, Michele.”
“Am I? Then show him your work, Quentin. Show us all how it’s done.”
Simon ignored the bickering. “How long?” he asked again.
“A year.”
“A year?”
“Minimum. If you don’t want to kill everyone who takes it.”
Reed was still talking. “You just have to roll back the product launch, right? It’s not fatal, right?”
Fatal. Max almost laughed at that. They still thought Simon was worried about release schedules and stock prices.
“Let’s say it is fatal,” he said. “What would you say if I needed it inside six months? Life or death.”
The white coats exchanged worried looks. No one spoke. Then Michele found the courage again.
“Six months?”
“Three would be better.”
“Life or death?” she asked.
Simon nodded.
“We just can’t,” she said. “There’s no way. If three months is life or death, I’m sorry, sir. You’re dead.”
SIMON WAS STILL GIVING Max the silent treatment as they rode the elevator down to the subbasement.
It was time to refill the bottles. They had all used a lot of Water to heal from Shako’s attack. Peter still had a scar.
“So, it’s going to take time,” Max said. “We still have the formula. We have time.”
Simon didn’t respond.
“I’m saying we still have options. There’s no reason to panic.”
Again, nothing.
Be that way, Max thought.
Ordinarily, Simon refilled their flasks and bottles with the Water by himself. Max wondered exactly how this was meant to teach him a lesson, and Simon wasn’t saying anything more than necessary.
When the elevator doors opened, the cold air hit Max in the face. The basement was always cold, even when it was scorching and humid outside.
It had been difficult, digging into the swampy Florida ground all those years ago, and nearly a century of maintenance and upgrades had cost them as much as it would have to build a skyscraper. But this cellar was now better built than the White House’s fallout shelter. It had systems and pumps maintaining fresh air and perfectly balanced humidity. It was the storehouse of the greatest treasure the world had ever known.
This was where they kept the last of the Water.
Over the years, they had stored it in various places, at first in the wooden casks that they’d made themselves with the broken planks from their shipwrecked landing in Florida. Then they had transferred the water into barrels crafted by the best coopers they could find in Cuba and Mexico. Years later, the water was transferred again, like old wine into new bottles, or in this case, into airtight steel drums.
When those began to rust, Simon had the Water drained into specially designed containers made of high-tech ceramics and million-year, non-degradable plastics. They could be dropped from a height of nine stories without breaking, and would not lose so much as a molecule to evaporation.
Then he and Max moved them back into the Vault.
Max, as Simon’s right hand, knew its location. It was a secret to the others. But only Simon knew the combination to the door. Simon usually handled the Water personally. Max tried not to take it as too great an insult that he was rarely allowed access to this holy of holies.
Simon pressed the buttons, and the heavy steel slid back noiselessly into the walls.
Max got his first look inside in several years.
And felt like he was dying.
It was almost empty. There was one barrel.
“It’s only half-full,” Simon told him. Then he laughed. “Or half-empty, depending on how you look at it.”
Max found he was having trouble breathing.
“You were saying something about not panicking, Max?”
Max swallowed. “How . . . how did this happen?”
Simon laughed at him, genuinely amused. “It’s been a long time.”
Max put a hand on the cold, metallic wall to steady himself. He was looking at death: not just the death of his dream of moving forward, of evolving past their current state, but true death. The end of a life that, he realized now, he had not ever really believed was capable of ending.
He felt sick. He felt like he was about to fall to the floor.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me, Simon?”
“I’m telling you now,” Simon said. “Do you finally understand? We are out of options, Max. This is the reality. We either succeed with David or we die without him.”
Max managed to pull himself together. He wiped the cold sweat off his forehead and stood up straight. “You’re right, of course,” he said.
Inside, however, he couldn’t stop his mind from spinning as he looked at Simon.
How many times have I protected you and kept you from your own bad decisions? Too many to count. Still, through it all, I’ve always trusted you to find the right path.
But now, for the first time in centuries, Max was filled with doubt.
Maybe Max could not save Simon after all. At this point, he was wondering if he’d even be able to save himself.