This Vicious Cure
Page 10
The bullet smacks into the wall behind me. Another miss. “I’m a hacker!” I blurt out, throwing my hands up again. “I got access to their systems, but I can’t get out physically. I need your help, Anna, please!”
“Did you hack my panel too?” she asks, striding closer, the rifle still aimed at me. If she shoots me from this distance, there’s no way she’ll miss. “I paid one of those freaks to jailbreak my panel and block Cartaxus’s access. I shouldn’t be able to see you.”
“They probably tried,” I say, panting. I back away until my shoulders hit the wall. “I’ve seen black-out tech before, though. It’s not easy to get around. I’m not here to fight you. Please. I need your help.”
Her face darkens with suspicion, but she doesn’t fire again. “Have we met?” she asks, her eyes still narrowed. “I feel like I know you.”
I open my mouth to reply but hesitate. I could tell Anna that I still have my memories because I was faradayed during the wipe, but that might bring up questions I can’t answer. Right now I need to focus on gaining her trust. I can’t let her know I wasn’t wiped. “I don’t know,” I say carefully. “I’ve come here because of Ziana.”
She tenses. “You know Ziana?”
“I don’t know her,” I say, keeping my hands raised. “I’m here to try to find her. She sent me a message, and I need your help to contact her.” I draw the letter from Ziana into my vision and ping it to Anna’s comm.
She glares at me as though the message is a trick before her eyes finally glaze, skittering back and forth as she reads. When she focuses on me again, her grip on the rifle relaxes. “I don’t understand why you came to me.”
“Because I can’t meet her in person. I told you—I’m a prisoner. I want to stop the war that’s coming, and Ziana might be the only way I can do that, but she doesn’t have a panel. I can’t meet her through Veritas. I need someone she trusts to meet her for me and find out what she knows.”
A flicker crosses Anna’s face—a hint that my words are reaching her. I glance around the room, trying to figure out what she’s doing here. All I see is trash and dirty clothes. It looks like she’s just been hiding. But Anna hates the genehackers—why is she camping out in a filthy apartment in Entropia?
My eyes slide back to the window. It looks out over the city’s slopes, the twisting frames of skyscrapers jutting from the ruins. The windows in the buildings around us are shuttered and dark—all except one. An apartment building with a penthouse at the top. Its floor-to-ceiling windows show a glimpse of a painted mural of butterflies covering its walls.
The image pulses in my memory. I know those butterflies from the flashes I’ve seen through Jun Bei’s eyes. That must be the lab where she’s been working. Anna’s window has a perfect line of sight to it. I look between the mural, the open window, and Anna’s rifle.
“Holy shit,” I breathe. “That’s why you’re hiding from Cartaxus—why you left them. You’ve come here to kill Jun Bei.”
She squares her shoulders. “It’s what I should have done when I had the chance. I kept waiting for Cartaxus to send a team to bring her in, but they didn’t. Crick’s as spineless as the rest of them. They don’t understand how dangerous she is. Next time Jun Bei will do more than wipe our memories. Killing her is the only solution.”
The cold brutality of her words sends a shiver across my skin. Killing her is the only solution. It’s close to the reasoning that’s been circling through my mind for weeks, but I haven’t thought about it as bluntly as that. Hearing it aloud twists at the same part of me that’s wavering at the thought of betraying Anna. The voice inside me saying that this is wrong. The voice that says these people, and especially Jun Bei, are my family.
But I’ve been listening to that voice ever since Cole first showed up at the cabin, and it’s taken everything from me. It’s the reason Jun Bei’s broken code is inside every panel; it’s why the world’s memories have been hacked, and why we’re now on the brink of war.
“You want peace,” I say, matching Anna’s stare. “That’s what I want too, but there’s more in play here than you think. People are turning into Lurkers—in Entropia, the bunkers, everywhere—and I think someone’s controlling it. I think they’re trying to turn the civilians and the genehackers against each other. It might be Jun Bei, but it might be someone else. Ziana says she knows what’s going on. If you help me find her, maybe we can stop it.”
Anna chews her lip, considering. The geometric tattoos on her arms shift as she relaxes, the barrel of the rifle dropping. “I’ve heard rumors about the Lurkers. Jun Bei has to be the one behind it, right?”
I’ve been asking myself the same thing ever since Dax first told me what was happening. If Jun Bei is the one behind this—the attacks, the glitching code, the brewing war—then delivering Anna and Ziana to Lachlan isn’t the way to save us. Anna’s right—killing Jun Bei might be the only choice, no matter how wrong it sounds. But even after everything that Jun Bei has done, I can’t believe she’d be capable of this.
I nod toward the window. “If we find out that Jun Bei is behind this, then I’ll be the first one to help you stop her. I promise.”
She holds my gaze, her shoulders still tight, but she lowers the rifle slowly. She’s about to lean it against the wall when she freezes, her face paling suddenly.
“Cole,” she breathes. Her eyes skitter back and forth, and she stiffens. “No!”
My blood runs cold. She just said Cole’s name. Something’s wrong with him—something important. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“I just got an emergency message from my brother’s panel. That means he’s hurt.”
The room spins. I stride across the room to her, my heart pounding so hard, it makes my vision swim. “Show me the message,” I demand.
She blinks out of her session, her eyes flaring at how close I am. She slides a hunting knife from a sheath at her thigh, holding it toward me. “Not so fast, Agatta. Why do you care so much about Cole? What the hell is going on here?”
“Where is he?” I urge her. “Give me access to your panel. Show me the message.”
“I’m not giving you access—”
“Dammit, Anna,” I spit, grabbing the knife. I’m not really here and I know I can’t move it, but I can show Anna just how serious I am. The blade cuts into my fingers, blood dripping from my hand. “I don’t care if you hurt me—send me the goddamn message. If I can get a trace on his signal from it, I might be able to get to him in Veritas and help him.”
Anna searches my face. “If you’re lying to me—”
“Message, now!” I snap, letting go of the blade, sending a spray of blood across the floor. “If he’s hurt, then we might not have much time.”
She steps away, her eyes glazing, the knife still clutched in her hand. A transmission pings into my vision—a data packet from Cole’s panel. It’s an emergency beacon, sent out to let other people know he’s in trouble and help them get to him. It shows his vitals and a link to his coordinates. He’s in the desert, not far from the city. But there’s nothing out there—no buildings, no roads. No vehicles or cameras for me to jump to in Veritas—and Cole’s tech isn’t letting me jump to it like Anna’s did. The error messages from his panel aren’t like any I’ve seen before.
It looks like every system in his body is shutting down. But his whole body runs on gentech. Whatever’s happening to his tech, it could kill him.
“Is he okay?” Anna asks.
I blink out. “We need a vehicle. He’s close.”
She lifts the knife again. “Is he okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say. My heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest. “His tech is glitching—I can’t get to him. I think… I think he might be dying.”
For a moment Anna stares at me as though the words don’t make sense. Suddenly she’s not a tattooed soldier—she’s the little girl who spent the last three weeks clinging to my sweatpants. The knife is still pointed at me, and she drives it forward sudden
ly, until the blade is embedded in my chest. “Who the hell are you?” she hisses. “How do you know Cole?”
I gasp, grabbing uselessly at her wrist, pinned against the wall. The pain is ridiculous—splitting and crackling across my skin, radiating out from the knife. I want to blink out of the room, to run, to disappear—but I’m going to need a body to get to Cole, and Anna is the closest thing I have.
“I—I’m someone who cares about Cole,” I choke out. “I’m a friend, and I’m not leaving. You need me to save him. I’m a genehacker, Anna. I can help keep him alive. You can’t save him on your own, and you know it.”
Her eyes darken, and she leans forward, the knife burning through me like a red-hot branding iron. The room spins, an ache starting up in the base of my skull. Just as my vision starts to fade, she steps back, sliding the knife into its sheath. The wound in my chest erupts like a fireball, and I slump to my knees.
“If you’re lying to me, then I’ll kill you,” she hisses. “I’ll hunt you down and do it myself, Agatta.”
I nod, clutching at my chest, gasping for air. “P-please, we need to hurry.”
She looks over her shoulder at the desert through the window and nods swiftly. “I have a truck waiting downstairs. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 13 JUN BEI
WE FLY SOUTH FOR AN hour, the desert passing beneath us in a blur of jagged ridges and sandy plains. The darkness paints the landscape gray and purple, the dark hills dotted with the occasional glimmer of headlights and flickering campfires. Rhine and the others are talking quietly, some leaning back against the Comox’s side, some lying on rows of plastic seats pulled up from the floor. Ruse is in the cockpit, talking in a low murmur to one of the others about our plan. Nobody argued when I told them what to do.
I haven’t heard a disrespectful word from anyone since I threw Cole out into the sky.
I stand at the window, my forehead pressed to the glass, spinning the empty washout syringe between my fingers. Cole’s tech will be breaking down by now, and his systems are probably struggling. It won’t be painless, and it won’t be quick, but I hope he’ll come to see that what I’ve given him was a gift and not an attack. He wants freedom from Cartaxus—he deserves freedom from them—and removing his tech is the only way he’s going to get it. I patched his comm through to Anna, and I know she’ll find a way to get to him. It’ll take him a few painful weeks to respond to the code, but then he’ll finally be free. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to use gentech in the same way again, but I don’t feel guilty about that. He and Anna were going to remove my panel and do the same thing to me.
And yet I still can’t stop thinking about the fear that I saw in his eyes. He wasn’t afraid of the tech I gave him, or of being pushed into the sky. He was afraid of me, and what I’m capable of.
I can’t help but wonder if maybe he was right to be.
“We’re at the coordinates you gave me,” Ruse calls back from the cockpit. “There’s not much here as far as my scans can tell. The buildings are all empty. Are you sure this is right?”
“It’s right,” I say, striding through the cargo hold, syncing my cuff with the Comox’s systems. We’re not flying straight to Cartaxus, but we’re not stopping to recharge, either. If we’re going to get into this meeting and make it out with Lachlan as our prisoner, we need to be prepared. Entropia has some of the world’s top coders, but most of them don’t have any idea how to fight. The city is the kind of place that produces agricultural innovations, not military code. Nobody there ever wrote a scythe, because they couldn’t see a use for one. That’s why they need me—why they’ve let me craft this plan. But to pull it off, I need an army.
“There’s a genehacker camp here,” I say. “They’ve promised to give us weapons and any other equipment we might need. Novak is leading them.”
“Novak?” Ruse asks. “You have to be kidding me.”
I can understand his reluctance. I’ve heard stories about Novak from the chatter in Entropia. She ran the Skies for years, holding the allegiance of millions of genehackers on the surface, but then she abandoned them and allied with Cartaxus. She let them bomb her city, and then, when flood protocol started, she publicly urged the people on the surface to give themselves up to Cartaxus. She’s not someone I’d normally trust, but the chatter also said she had weapons, and in the brief conversation I managed to have with her before we left, she said she wanted to help.
I stare out through the Comox’s windshield at the dark, endless desert. “She’s a good ally for us. She still has a lot of people loyal to her. She’s put together a base out here.”
Ruse shakes his head, the silver circuits on his cheek catching the scarlet lights glowing on the Comox’s dash. “I wish you’d told me she was the contact we were meeting. She’s not trustworthy. There doesn’t seem to be anything at these coordinates, anyway. We could be flying into a trap.”
I bring up the Comox’s scans in my vision. Ruse is right—the coordinates Novak sent me look empty. Abandoned. There’s a ruined town there with enough buildings to provide cover for an army, but no obvious signs of movement. If Novak is still working with Cartaxus and she’s double-crossing us, this would be a good place to have us land. We’d be easy to ambush. The plan would be ruined, and Cartaxus would have proof that we’re plotting against them. They’d have the perfect excuse to arrest us, blame the Lurkers on me, and annihilate the genehackers.
But I’ve brought us this far, and with the results from Cole’s DNA spinning in my panel, the Panacea feels like it’s finally within my grasp. We can’t turn back now.
“Trust me, Ruse. I know what I’m doing.”
Ruse’s steel-and-silicone eyes hold mine. “I hope you do. Our lives are in your hands, Jun Bei. This isn’t a game.”
“I know that,” I mutter. But he’s wrong. The battle for the future has always been a game. That was one thing Lachlan said that’s stuck with me. Anyone who doesn’t see the game is just being outplayed.
The Comox drops into a descent. I lean over Ruse’s shoulder, staring through the windshield. The land is desolate, dotted with structures that form a sparse, scattered town, but there’s nobody on the surface. No sign that hundreds of people are living here. The Comox straightens as we land, a wave of dust kicking into the air. I stride across the cargo hold and peer through the windows, seeing nothing but empty buildings and shadows.
“We should send a message,” Ruse says, unbuckling his harness.
“She’ll be here.” I yank the lever beside the Comox’s door. It hisses open, and I step down the metal ramp. The air is cold, the gravel on the rocky ground crunching underfoot. Rhine follows me out, her hand on the gun at her hip. The others walk out slowly in a quiet, uneasy formation behind us. There’s still nobody here to greet us. No flickers of life on my cuff’s interface when I send out a pulse…
Except for small, swiftly moving creatures crawling through the empty buildings.
“Do you see anything?” I ask Rhine, squinting. All I can make out are hints of light in my cuff’s scan. There are dozens of them. They could be the electrical signal for heartbeats, but they look more like wireless chips. They’re not drones, though, and they don’t look like cameras or security bots.
“No, I don’t see anything.” Rhine’s brow furrows. “What are you picking up?”
“I don’t know yet.” I send out another pulse, trying to lock onto one of the signals moving through the buildings. They’re swift and agile, moving like rats through the ruins. Rhine draws her gun, staring into the darkness, the others silent behind us.
“What are we dealing with?” Ruse asks, moving to my side, his rifle cocked.
The scan comes back, blinking red in my vision, and the breath rushes from my lungs.
“What is it?” Rhine asks, lifting her gun. The rest of the team draw their weapons.
“Don’t move,” I whisper, barely breathing. “Nobody move a muscle. Lower your weapons slowly. There are scorpions here.”
Scorpions move like animals, thinking and learning like predators. They’re fast, deadly, and practically impossible to kill. They were known for escaping their handlers, for figuring out how to hunt in packs, and for getting smart enough to turn against the people who created them.
Lachlan sent ours back from the lab when one of the guards wandered into the woods and the scorpion shot him nine times and injected him with a paralytic drug so he couldn’t call for help. Every prototype and model was supposed to have been destroyed years ago.
But there are at least a dozen surrounding us now, forming an ever-tightening ring around the Comox.
“Where the hell have you taken us?” Ruse breathes.
I just shake my head, because I don’t have an answer. I was expecting to find a bunch of genehackers squatting in the desert. I hoped they’d have fighters, guns, maybe some vehicles we could use. But whoever they are, they have far more complex tech than I was expecting. Maybe Ruse was right, and I’ve led us all into a trap.
A grinding of gears echoes from across the clearing, and a metal door swings up and out of the earth, loosing an avalanche of rocks and dust. A swarm of people jog out, armed and wearing black Cartaxus gear. Ruse lifts his rifle, and I freeze instinctively, but I know how Cartaxus soldiers move, and I know their formations. The people running out of the earth might be wearing Cartaxus gear, but they don’t move like the troops I’ve seen before. These are genehackers dressed in stolen gear, carrying stolen weapons. This is the army I’ve come looking for.