This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  If what Cole said is true, then there are hundreds more Lurkers heading for Entropia right now. I don’t know how I’ll tell everyone that these attacks are my fault. What little trust I’ve earned with them will be lost. I should have thought about what the glitch could do to people. I should have recognized the signs when I saw Matrix turn. I know how a person looks when an algorithm locks onto their mind and twists them to its will.

  How the hell could I have missed this?

  “That’s why I’m here—to stop this happening,” Cole says. “I’ve been sent to offer a truce. Cartaxus needs your help with this, and they’re setting up a laboratory for you. It would mean working with Lachlan—”

  I spin to face him. “You want me to go into a Cartaxus lab with Lachlan? Are you kidding me, Cole?”

  “You need resources.” He crosses his arms, leaning back against the counter. The weight of his gaze sends an unwelcome prickle across my skin. “Cartaxus has equipment and labs.”

  I turn from the window, pacing back across the room. “Yeah, and they have prison cells, too. I have everything I need here.”

  “You mean this lab?” Cole gestures to the rubble on the floor, the smashed nanite vials on the counter. “Cartaxus has entire facilities with cutting-edge equipment dedicated to solving this. You wouldn’t be going in as a prisoner—you’d be an ally. Lachlan is the prisoner. He’s being kept in a cell and under complete control.”

  “Lachlan is never under control,” I mutter. “He shouldn’t be part of this anyway. He’s the one who caused this mess. He won’t be able to fix the Panacea.”

  “Fixing your Panacea isn’t the objective,” Cole says. “Cartaxus wants your help to remove it.”

  I stop mid-step. He means to strip out the Panacea and leave the pure, untainted vaccine behind in everyone’s arms. That would remove the glitch, and it would stop people turning into Lurkers, but Lachlan designed the vaccine so that it would rely on my code. Stripping it out won’t be easy. The vaccine would need to be completely recoded, and that could take months, while fixing the Panacea might only take hours with the right experimental subject. Cartaxus clearly doesn’t care, though. They don’t understand how many problems the Panacea could solve, the kind of world it could give us. They don’t realize just how close I am to finishing it.

  “Why does Cartaxus want me?” I ask. “The vaccine is Lachlan’s work. He’s the only one who can recode it.”

  “He said he can’t do it without you.”

  I turn to him, frowning. That doesn’t seem right. Lachlan managed to merge the vaccine with the Panacea on his own—why can’t he reverse the process? Besides, he claimed to have done all of this for me—releasing my code, merging it with the vaccine, even creating Catarina. Why would he expect me to abandon my code and put my life back into Cartaxus’s hands?

  Unless that isn’t really his plan.

  “Tell me about this deal,” I say.

  Cole steps across the room, moving swiftly despite the rubble on the floor. “You, along with any of Entropia’s coders you think might help, are invited to work with Cartaxus’s top scientists. It wouldn’t be in one of their labs, either—it’d be a joint research facility. That’s how Crick put it.”

  “And Lachlan will be there?”

  Cole nods. “Like I said—he won’t be a threat to you. Please, think about it. I wouldn’t have come if this wasn’t urgent.”

  I chew my thumbnail. I don’t know what Lachlan’s playing at, and that bothers me. I don’t want to end up under his control again. But maybe he wants to help me fix the Panacea, and maybe he knows how to do it. Maybe he wants me to use Cole’s invitation to break him out of the lab he’s being held in.

  It might not be such a bad idea.

  “I need to talk to the others here first,” I say. “But I’ll consider it.”

  “Thank you.” Cole stands beside the hole in the wall, looking out at the atrium. The vast, curved concrete walls are studded with bullet holes, and most of the plants that once crept across them are dead. The lush, vibrant park is now a wasteland of ash and dirt. Cole leans forward, scanning the space. He’s older than the last time I studied him this close. His face has broadened, his features grown squarer. Part of me still feels the urge to step into his arms. But neither of us belong to the other anymore.

  “Where did you go?” he asks suddenly. “I knew you were planning to escape the lab one day, but I thought you were going to come back for us.”

  I stiffen. That wasn’t what I was expecting him to ask me. “I wanted to,” I say. “I don’t remember what happened, though. The last thing I truly remember was escaping from the lab, and in that memory, I had a plan to come back for you all.”

  “So what happened?” he asks. “I waited for years. I looked everywhere for you.”

  I swallow, searching his face. He obviously doesn’t remember Catarina—not after the wipe. He doesn’t know that I was kept asleep inside her, locked in a body that should have been mine. That’s why I didn’t contact him during the last three years, but it doesn’t explain why I lived for six months in Entropia, coding with Mato, and never went back for them.

  I always promised I’d come back and save the others if I escaped, and I meant it. I know I wanted to. But I didn’t. Instead, I lived in a beautiful house in the desert and spent my days coding while Cole and the others were trapped as Lachlan’s test subjects. I could have staged a hack and gotten them out. Regina would have given me a vehicle, maybe even a whole team to help me. But as far as I can tell, I never even tried.

  And I don’t remember why.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. It’s the most honest thing I’ve said to Cole since he arrived. “I’m still figuring out a lot of things, and that’s one of them. I’m missing years of my life, and I’m trying to piece them together from the scraps that I can remember.”

  He crosses his arms. “Is that why you ran the wipe?”

  I freeze, staring at him, the accusation ringing in my ears. He’s just watching me, silent, with a gaze I don’t recognize. Cole’s always been able to read me better than anyone—he’s skilled at sensing my frustration, my anger, my pain, and being there to comfort me. But there’s another level to the way he’s searching my face now. It’s deeper and colder, sending a shiver across my skin. He’s not the boy from the lab. He’s a Cartaxus soldier, trained to spy and interrogate. Right now, his gaze is a searchlight, and somehow he already knows the truth.

  I draw in a slow breath. “Yes, I ran the wipe. Go ahead—tell me that you and Anna were right to plan to weaken me. I knew what I was doing, and I knew the risks. I knew you’d hate me for it.”

  He uncrosses his arms. “I don’t hate you for it. I don’t agree with forcing the wipe on people, but I understand what you were trying to do. This outbreak has broken us. I don’t know if people will ever get past it if we keep living with the pain of the last two years.”

  I search his face for a hint of a lie, but there’s nothing.

  “I don’t remember everything from when we were children,” he says, “and I don’t want to. I don’t think there’s much benefit to carrying pain around forever. Memories can be precious, but sometimes they’re just a burden. A wound that won’t ever heal. If I’d known what you were doing, I’m not sure I would have stopped you.”

  I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to say. I’ve been hiding the truth about the wipe for weeks. The memory of that night has haunted me—a dark, gaping hole that no amount of shame has been able to fill. Hearing Cole tell me he understands feels like a light switched on inside me. A hint of warmth in a place I thought would always be cold.

  I reach for the wall, unsteady, fighting back the sudden urge to cry. “So you don’t think I’m a monster?”

  Cole’s gaze doesn’t waver. “We’re both monsters, Jun Bei. That’s what they made us into. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do good in this world.”

  We’re both monsters. Three little words that should trigger my d
efensiveness, but they don’t. Instead, they settle inside me somewhere deep, feeling like a truth I’ve spent years searching for.

  “Come back with me,” he says, his voice low. He steps closer.

  I drop my eyes. “Don’t pretend things are the way they used to be.”

  “They’re not,” he says, and he’s suddenly right in front of me, his skin streaked with my blood, his ice-blue eyes burning into mine. “I don’t love you like I used to, Jun Bei. I don’t know if it’s the years apart, the outbreak, or something that I don’t remember, but I know I’m not the same boy who almost let himself be destroyed waiting for you. That doesn’t mean that part of me isn’t still yours, though. Because it is, and I think it always will be.”

  The words hang in the air until the distance between us grows into a force I don’t have the will to fight against. I know why Cole’s feelings for me have changed, and it’s not the years apart. It’s the girl locked away inside my mind. Catarina. She’s the one he loves—the one who stole his heart. I can’t stop seeing him with her, remembering the two of them together. I don’t want to feel the pull toward him that I do now.

  But I’m aching, and I’m lonely, and stepping to Cole feels like coming home.

  His hand slides to my shoulder, mine to his chest. Raised voices from the park float through the hole in the side of the lab, but I can barely hear them over the pounding of my blood, the voice inside me shouting that this is wrong even though it feels so right. I’ve stood this close to him, looking up like this countless times before, but he was just a boy back then. Now he’s older, with broad, strong hands, and a new hunger in his eyes that sets loose a part of me I didn’t know I was keeping caged away.

  He lowers his face, but then pauses, tilting his head. “Do you hear that?”

  “No,” I say, my hands sliding up his chest.

  “Something’s wrong.” He pulls away, sending a flare of frustration through me. The two of us are alone, and we’re old enough to stoke the fire between us into an inferno for the first time in our lives, and he’s worried about someone shouting.

  “People are noisy here,” I say. “It’s just that kind of place—”

  I break off as the voices change pitch, rising into a roar that echoes through the lab. The people in the park aren’t shouting anymore.

  Now they’re screaming.

  CHAPTER 8 CATARINA

  I SWAY, STARING AT THE body floating in the tank, my heart pounding. She looks just like me. Her hair is streaming around her face in swirling dark ribbons, her muscles slack, her body marred with familiar scars that tingle across my skin as I scan them. The cuts across my cheek from when I fell out of a tree. The puckered bullet wound in my shoulder from when Dax shot me at Sunnyvale. She’s a perfect copy, down to her very DNA.

  Lachlan and Dax aren’t just offering me freedom—they’re offering me a future. A life. The thought is overwhelming.

  I step toward the tank, mesmerized, imagining how it would feel to wake up inside this clone—to breathe and speak and draw in a real lungful of air. I’ve spent weeks coming to terms with being a prisoner locked inside Jun Bei—knowing that whatever I did, I would never walk on my own two feet again. I’ve given up my dreams of feeling real sunlight, of ever truly touching another person. But now there’s hope floating right in front of me. Hope, at the hands of my enemy.

  “God, he’s good,” I breathe, turning to Dax. “Lachlan knows just what to do to make people play his games, doesn’t he?” This is more than I’ve let myself dream of—impossibly more. Enough to make me ache, to turn the low candle of hope inside me into a blazing fire. It’s the one thing in this world that I’d do almost anything for.

  Almost.

  I won’t sell the world for it. The last time I followed one of Lachlan’s plans, I helped send out malicious code to everyone on the planet. He’s only offering me this body because he wants to keep Jun Bei alive. Everything he’s done has been for her—changing our body, creating me. He’s done it all to keep her safe and help her release her code out into the world. Now he wants me to believe that he’s going to take that code away and delete it from the arms of every person on the planet. It has to be part of another plot by Lachlan to help her take over the world.

  “She’s gonna need to think about this,” Leoben says, walking to my side. My eyes are locked on the floating body. I can’t stop staring at her face, her skin, imagining myself in it.

  Dax’s brow creases. “What’s there to think about?”

  “You’re asking me to lie to people I care about,” I say. “And what if Ziana’s right? What if this is part of a bigger plan? We can’t trust Lachlan—that would be a mistake.”

  “There’s no evidence that he’s lying to us,” Dax says. “We’ve looked into it, trust me. There’s no pattern to the side effects we’re seeing, and we can’t think of anyone who’d benefit from them. The pigeons that were carrying the mutated strain of the virus were engineered, but our researchers found traces of human DNA in their genome, which is why we think they became infected. I don’t believe anyone is trying to start a war. If it’s one of the genehackers, they’ll be bringing about their own annihilation. If it’s someone in Cartaxus, I’d know. I have full clearance to every command sent through our network, and we haven’t found anything that makes this seem like a coordinated plan. The only thing we’ve learned from Ziana’s note is that she’s alive, and she’s looking for you. Now I need you to bring her in.”

  “Why wouldn’t you send Lee to get her? I’ve never met Ziana. I don’t know her. He’s her family.”

  “And he’s a Cartaxus soldier,” Dax says. “There’s a good chance that Ziana knows he’s working for us. I can’t risk letting him leave, and she wouldn’t trust him if he showed up to find her. She’d realize it’s a trap.”

  “And you expect her to trust me?”

  “You’re the one she contacted,” Dax says. “She won’t be suspicious if you get in touch with her.”

  I shift uneasily. “I don’t know if I can give you an answer right now. I… I need to get out of here.”

  Dax gestures to the door. “Then leave. You’re in a simulation the size of the entire world now. Do you really think a locked door is an impediment to you?”

  I walk to the door cautiously, shooting a glance back at Leoben. The handle feels cold beneath my fingers, but it doesn’t move when I touch it. I close my eyes, sending out a pulse from my cuff without thinking. It shouldn’t work—I’m not really here, so there’s no cuff in this room to send out a pulse—but my vision still dims, the connections in the room growing brighter. Flickers of light dance across the walls—genkits in adjoining rooms, the panels of people walking down hallways. However Veritas is coded, it’s allowing me to use simulated versions of my tech. When I trigger a pulse from my cuff, it must be triggering a scan in the servers for nearby open connections that are part of the Veritas simulation.

  It means I’m not completely helpless. I can still code.

  I pull up the list of open connections, scrolling through it. It isn’t quite the same as the interface I’m used to—the list floating in my vision shows locations I can jump to—rooms, hallways, stairwells. I pick the hallway right outside the door, but there’s no command or option to jump to it.

  But maybe it’s not that hard. When I wanted to send a pulse from my cuff, all I did was think about it. When I wanted to walk across the room, I thought about it and the simulation responded. I focus on the hallway, then close my eyes and think of jumping through the locked door.

  The floor tilts suddenly, something yanking inside my chest, and when I open my eyes, Dax and the lab are gone. I’m in the hallway. Three people are wheeling a metal cart down it, chatting to one another, their backs to me. The walls and floor are concrete and there are doors open on either side, the hum of voices echoing in the distance. There are no barriers around me. Nobody here to stop me.

  Dax is right. I’m free.

  I almost laugh with
relief, taking a tentative step. After weeks of being trapped in Jun Bei’s constrained simulation, I suddenly feel like I can fly.

  Footsteps sound behind me, and a door clicks shut. I turn to see Leoben. “You can’t just go anywhere,” he says. “I’m supposed to babysit you.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “I’m still kind of angry about you turning on me in Jun Bei’s simulation.”

  “You did stab me first, to be fair.”

  I chew my lip. “Why didn’t you just tell me it was Dax who sent you?”

  “Because you’re a stubborn piece of work who would have died in that lab if I didn’t get you out?”

  I open my mouth to argue but shake my head instead. I don’t want to fight with Leoben. He’s not my enemy. “I don’t know if I want to trap Ziana,” I say. “Or even Anna. I know they’re not my family anymore, but I don’t want to betray them.”

  “Don’t worry about Anna,” Leoben says. “She’ll hate you whatever you do.” He moves aside as a woman with another cart comes down the hallway. She’s wearing a blue shirt, the kind the civilians in Homestake were wearing. She glances at us briefly as she walks past, and I stiffen at the realization that she can see me. The Veritas simulation must be set up so that I’m automatically sketched into anyone’s ocular tech that Cartaxus can reach. I don’t know if it’ll work for anyone, or just people in the Cartaxus network, but it definitely makes me feel like I’m really here.

  “Would you do it?” I ask. “Lie to them, and bring them back to be Lachlan’s test subjects?”

  Leoben rubs his neck absently, his fingers running across the top of the scars that cover his chest. “We’ve always been his test subjects. That’s what we were made for. The others will be pissed, but I’m more worried about the way things are going right now. We need to fix the vaccine and start rebuilding the world, or none of us are gonna have a future, including them.”

  “So betraying them is really… saving them?”

  Leoben wrinkles his nose. “When you say it like that, it sounds like something Lachlan would do.”