Forgotten City by Michael Ford

Author:Michael Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

14

FIONN’S FOOT TWITCHED.

“Fionn!” Asha cried. She leaned closer to him, pushing a lock of hair from his brow. “Fionn, can you hear me?”

Then Fionn’s lips parted and he let out a moan. A smile exploded across Asha’s face. “Fionn, we’re right here. Don’t try to move.”

But Fionn did anyway, opening his eyes and rolling onto his side. He half fell off the table, but Asha rescued him. “Stay put,” she said.

Fionn was blinking, looking left and right, then focusing on Asha.

“Kobi saved you,” she said.

“My dad saved you,” said Kobi, smiling down. “We’re at his lab at the university.”

Fionn managed to sit, dangling his legs over the side of the table. He mimicked drinking.

Kobi fished his canteen out and handed it to Fionn, who drank deeply. Afterward, he wiped his mouth. He looked at them both. “Thank you,” he said out loud, making Kobi pull back in surprise. Asha laughed. She grabbed him in a fierce hug. “I thought . . . I’d lost you.”

Fionn grinned. He petted the wolf that was nuzzling him.

“Just rest up for a few minutes,” said Kobi. “I’ve got to see if there are any clues about where my dad is.” He spotted some sealing tape and tossed it to Asha. “Would you mind sealing the door?”

Asha nodded. “You think your dad made it here?”

“I hope so.”

Kobi scanned the room—there was a notebook on the lab bench, with a pen beside it. Kobi opened it to look and skipped to the most recent page, hoping to find a date that might tell him when his dad was last here. Apart from a few scribbles of various chemical equations, and some complex molecular diagrams, there was nothing to help. The lab was adjoined by an office. The door was open, and inside was a desk, bookshelves, and a couch with a sleeping bag rolled at one end. The trash can held some empty cans of food, but it was hard to tell when they might have been eaten. Kobi imagined his dad at the desk, working as he ate. There was an empty syringe in the trash can too.

But it was the photo on the desk that drew his attention. His dad, looking so young, standing shoulder to shoulder with three others; one was an older man in a black gown, and the other two, along with Kobi’s father, wore mortarboard hats and clutched rolled-up scrolls of paper. Graduation day. Maybe the old guy was a professor. Kobi picked the photo up carefully to look closer. It had to be pre-Waste. The four people in the image stood on the grassy shore of some lake or river, in front of a huge, modern, multistory mansion, surrounded by exotic flowers and trees. The photo had been taken from a jetty, just visible extending through the water in the foreground. The older professor was a large man with thick gray hair and a trimmed beard. He wore spectacles, and his head was drawn back in a hearty laugh. One of the students beside Kobi’s dad was a tall and sallow-cheeked man with dark auburn hair.

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