by Emily Suvada
“Hold your fire!” I bark, lifting my fist, praying the others will obey.
A woman strides out from the open door in the ground, the soldiers parting around her. She’s dressed in form-fitting armor, a helmet tucked under her arm. Her hair is scarlet, shaved on one side, a silver circuit stamped into the tattooed skin of her head. Her lips are painted bloodred, her teeth glittering as she gives us a brilliant smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
She’s charismatic, brilliant, and ambitious. And, apparently, she has an arsenal of highly illegal weapons.
“Jun Bei,” Novak says, stressing the second syllable of my name instead of the first. I don’t know if the mispronunciation is a mistake or a power play. “And Ruse. It’s been too long. I’m happy to see you both here safely. I’m sorry about the scorpions—we weren’t expecting you to arrive in a Comox. Are you sure it’s clean?”
“We’re not being tracked,” Ruse says. He eyes the scorpions warily. “Are you sure those things are safe? I thought they couldn’t be controlled.”
“Then I wouldn’t get too close to them, if I were you,” Novak says, smiling coldly. Her steely eyes pass over the group behind us. “We should talk inside my base, but your people are going to have to wait here. I’m afraid we have strict protocols around who we allow underground, for our own protection. If the two of you will follow me, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.”
Ruse glances at me, and unease prickles across my skin. When I spoke to Novak before we flew here, she sounded eager to help us. Now she has a row of soldiers waiting for us along with scorpions, and she wants Ruse and me to come with her to an underground base that was somehow shielded from our scans. Her soldiers are standing down, but they’re still holding weapons, their visors pulled over their faces. She’s clearly trying to make us feel threatened. Maybe she’s insecure—worried that her people will turn away from her and join a new group, like ours. Maybe she doesn’t like the idea of someone else releasing the code that’s going to save us.
We need her to pull off this plan, but I’m going to have to keep my eye on her.
“That’s fine,” I say, looking at Ruse.
He seems as uncertain as me, but he nods. “After you.”
Novak leads us down a flight of dusty concrete stairs with caged lights set into the sloped ceiling above us. The air grows colder as we descend to a steel door with a sensor beside it. Rocks have collected at the bottom of the stairs, swept messily into a pile in the corner. Novak swipes her panel across the sensor, and the blinking light turns green. “This is one of the service entrances,” she says. “We’re discovering more each day.”
“Discovering them?” I ask. “Isn’t this your base?”
“Well, it is now,” Novak says. She swings the door open. “You won’t find any maps or floor plans of this facility online. We’re still not even sure who built it—whoever they were, we’re very grateful.”
The door opens into a vast underground room several stories high with metal walkways crisscrossing it, a puff of steam rising from a boiler at its center. There are ventilation ducts winding through the air, snaking to tunnels cut into the rock. The equipment looks old—ceramic tiles like the showers back in Entropia and a methane-combustion boiler. It’s pre-gentech equipment, built around the same time that Entropia’s bunker was dug into the ground.
“How big is this place?” Ruse asks, following Novak down a metal walkway.
“Large enough to house almost a thousand,” Novak says, “but the layout isn’t optimal. Some of the levels can’t be heated, and some don’t get enough oxygen. We’re adapting it as well as we can.”
We reach an entrance to a concrete tunnel, wide enough for a highway. The walls are lined with electrical conduit, the roof layered with ventilation ducts, yellow stripes painted on the floor. The place has the feel of a bunker, and I recognize some elements from the exposed concrete of Entropia’s tunnels and atrium.
“Are you sure Cartaxus didn’t build this?” I ask. “It looks like their work.”
“I thought so too,” Novak says, “but it was built before Cartaxus was founded. At least forty years ago according to the logs for some of the equipment. We think it was designed as a military research center. It was your friend Agnes who told us to set up here.”
A jolt runs through me. Agnes. Catarina’s confidant. “She isn’t my friend.”
“Oh,” Novak says, pausing. She turns, curious. “You don’t identify as her—as Catarina?”
“It’s not a matter of identity. She’s a different person.”
“Is?” Novak asks, tilting her head.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s… complicated.”
Novak studies my face, and I curse internally for saying anything. I don’t need more people knowing that I’m keeping the girl who tried to kill me inside my head. They don’t understand, and deep down, I’m not sure that I do either. The easiest way to finish the Panacea would be to wipe Catarina and reclaim her half of my brain. I’d be faster, smarter. I could justify it a million ways. But my chest tightens every time I even think about it. I can’t let myself slip up and mention her again.
Novak’s eyes search mine, but then she turns away, swiping her panel over a sensor beside a metal door. “I thought this might be an appropriate room to have this conversation in.”
The door swings open. Inside there’s a vast, yawning space the size of a hangar. The walls are lined with shelves that stretch up to a towering ceiling. Dozens of people in orange safety vests are working at wide wooden tables and conveyor belts moving pieces of machinery across the room. One half of the space is filled with vehicles—trucks, drillers, old-fashioned helicopters, and a hulking Cartaxus destroyer painted in desert camouflage. Every table, every shelf, and every surface of the room is stacked with weapons and military gear. An entire shelf on the far wall holds a fleet of microdrones, along with the curled steel forms of dormant scorpions that send a chill up my spine. There’s even a tank parked in one corner, its tread caked with dirt.
“What the hell?” I breathe.
“Most of this equipment was already here when we arrived,” Novak says. “A lot of it’s outdated, but we’ve been working hard to upgrade what we can. Do you think you’ll be able to find what you need?”
“Oh yes,” Ruse says, a grin spreading across his face. “This is definitely going to work.”
“You can see the need to keep this location a secret,” Novak says. “Cartaxus would launch a preemptive attack if they knew we had an arsenal like this. I suppose that won’t matter soon. If you take Lachlan, they won’t wait long to retaliate.” She turns to me. “That’s the plan, isn’t it, Jun Bei—taking Lachlan?”
I nod, staring around the room. I should be happy—this is more than I was hoping for—but seeing it has left me reeling. With this equipment, we should be able to get out of Cartaxus with everyone we need. We have a hidden base to work from too. Labs, rooms, shelter.
But staring at the shelves of weapons, I can’t ignore the fact that we’re starting a war.
The drones, the scorpions, the endless racks of guns pulse in my vision. Cole said I was going to start a war, but it hadn’t truly hit me until now what that meant. Ruse was right—this isn’t just a game. People are going to lose their lives, and it’ll be because of me. I’m choosing death for a lot of people. If we fail, I’ll be the architect of our destruction.
But maybe that’s the risk we have to take to step into a new world.
“This is perfect,” I say, swallowing my fear down. I can’t falter when we’re so close to finishing this code. I turn to Ruse and Novak, forcing myself to smile. “Let’s figure out a plan.”
CHAPTER 14 CATARINA
ANNA SPRINTS ACROSS THE APARTMENT, snatching up the duffel bag of weapons. I wheeze, clutching my chest. The wound between my ribs is a blazing, crackling well of pain. These might just be simulated injuries, but my mind believes they’re real. My hands are shaking, my breathing shallow, and an ac
he is pulsing in the base of my skull. My vision shimmers for a moment, and I feel myself inching closer to the dark, jagged edge inside me. The implant seems stronger than it was while running Jun Bei’s simulation, but it’s still nearing collapse. I don’t know how much more damage I can take.
“How far away is Cole?” Anna asks, hauling the duffel bag over her shoulder.
I force myself to straighten, my hands still pressed to the wound in my chest. The room blurs as I let my eyes glaze, drawing up the location from Cole’s message. “Ten minutes’ drive if we go fast. His vitals aren’t good—we should bring a medkit.”
Anna looks around the bare apartment. “I have a few supplies, but not much. Let’s just get moving. Send me his location.”
I flick Cole’s coordinates to her and follow her through the door. She jogs along a hallway littered with broken furniture and the occasional patch of vines sprouting from cracks in the walls. We run down a flight of stairs to the ground floor, and Anna shoves the front door open with her shoulder, stumbling into the street. It’s dark, the sky a deep royal blue. We’re on a steeply sloped road cutting between apartment buildings, their concrete foundations riddled with bullet holes from Cartaxus’s attack. I follow Anna out, squinting, trying to figure out what the black, gleaming substance covering every surface is. It rises up in ashy clouds around Anna’s legs as she runs.
But it isn’t ash. The fragments are too large, too distinct. They’re feathers.
“What happened to the pigeons?” I ask. The dead birds are everywhere. There must be millions of them—they cover the roads, the buildings, stretching out as a black wash into the farmlands.
“Started falling after flood protocol,” Anna yells over her shoulder, running down the street. “Only a few left now, and they’ve stopped blowing.”
Unease curls through me. These pigeons weren’t like the rest of the flocks—someone created them with panels grown into their bodies. The strain of the virus they were carrying was such a wild mutation that Cartaxus didn’t even account for it in their testing of the vaccine. It’s these pigeons that made Cartaxus launch flood protocol. They couldn’t control the virus in the birds, so they decided to scorch the surface instead. But now the birds are dead, and the remaining ones aren’t blowing. I look around at the dark carpet of feathers and slender bones. It’s almost like somebody created this flock and infected them on purpose—as if they wanted Cartaxus to attack.
Maybe now, after the pigeons failed, they’re trying again.
“Come on, truck’s down here,” Anna calls, jogging between feather-coated vehicles, heading for a yellow pickup. I clutch my side, running after her, and force my thoughts from the pigeons and back to Cole. The truck is old and beat up, but it should have cameras built into its driving array that will update Veritas. Between them and the feed from Anna’s ocular tech, I should be able to see the landscape around us while we drive. The truck’s doors are closed, but I focus hard, my vision swimming, and the hook inside my chest yanks me into the passenger seat.
The interior is pleather lined and small—just two seats. A gray tarpaulin covers the trailer at the back. Anna races to the driver’s side and yanks the door open, slinging her duffel bag onto the floor at my feet.
“How is Cole?” she asks, starting the engine. It rumbles to life, and she swings us around to head out of the city. A cloud of black feathers lifts into the air, billowing across the windshield. The streets are littered with rubble, but somehow Anna steers us along a winding route, zigzagging wildly down the mountain’s slope.
“I’ll check,” I say, pulling up the feed from Cole’s emergency beacon. His vital signs are spiking and more erratic than before. He won’t last much longer without help. “He’s getting worse.”
Anna floors the accelerator until the truck’s engine lets out a rattling whine. “Then we’d better hurry.”
We reach the base of the mountain and careen through Entropia’s farmlands, the truck bouncing over craters as we race through a gap in the razorgrass border. I ball my hands into fists, Cole’s location fixed to the corner of my vision. The land flattens out as we speed across the desert. There are still dead pigeons everywhere—enough to form a shadowy carpet of feathers that flutters up around us as we drive. Anna’s knuckles are white on the wheel, the muscles in her shoulders growing tighter with every minute that ticks past. I scan the dark plains ahead of us, Cole’s location blinking in my vision. All I can see is an endless expanse of rocks, dust, and dead pigeons.…
And a scrap of silver crumpled on the ground.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing.
Anna barely looks—she just wrenches the wheel, sending us off-road, careening through the desert. “Do you see him?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It looks like… a parachute.”
Her shoulders tense. “A Comox left this evening. He might have been on it.”
Panic sparks inside me. “Do you think he jumped out?”
“I don’t know.” Anna floors the accelerator. The engine shudders, the truck bouncing toward the gleaming silver fabric. It’s definitely a parachute. I can see the white Cartaxus antlers emblazoned on it, the tangled white ropes of the harness. And I can see a figure slumped on the ground, motionless, dressed in black.
It’s Cole.
Anna slams on the brakes, swerving, sending the truck into a skid. She flies out of her seat and hits the ground before we’ve even stopped moving. I summon my focus to jump after her. The truck’s interior fades, and the desert appears around me. I stumble on the rocky ground as I land, the wound in my chest flaring with pain, but I grit my teeth and force myself to run.
Anna drops to her knees beside Cole, her eyes wide and frantic. “He’s not breathing!”
He’s lying on his stomach, his body convulsing. She grabs his shoulders and flips him over, ripping open his armored jacket. I fall to my knees beside her, my heart stuttering at the sight of him. His eyes are open and rolling back in his head, the whites bloody with burst capillaries. His skin is deathly pale, streaked with jagged, pulsing black lines that I realize with horror are his veins. His mouth is open, but he’s not breathing—his lips are turning blue. There’s an empty vial of healing tech on the dirt beside him, another in his hand. Anna grabs a handful of his hair to hold him down and forces a breath into his lungs.
I stare at him, my stomach clenching. The healing tech he must have used clearly isn’t working. This isn’t just an injury, and it isn’t just crashing tech. This is something else—malicious code racing through his system, killing him. A medkit isn’t going to help.
My eyes cut to Anna. “I need to get into his panel. Do you have a genkit, a wire—anything?”
She shakes her head and reaches into her jacket pocket, pulling out two more silver vials. “I have healing tech.”
“He’s already tried that—it might be overloading his system and making it worse. We can’t risk giving him anything until we know what’s hurting him.”
She blows another breath into his lungs, her blond hair falling around her face like a curtain. “So what can we do?”
I glance over my shoulder at the truck. Anna doesn’t have a genkit, and the truck’s computer is too old to be useful. There’s one way I might have a chance at helping Cole, but it means getting full access to Anna’s panel. She definitely won’t like that. I turn back to her, trying to keep my expression neutral. “I need you to cut into your elbow with your knife. Right at the crease, in the center.”
She slides the knife from her belt. “Why?”
“Because there’s an emergency wire stored there that can send Cole a stream of tech directly from your arm to his, like a transfusion.”
She hesitates for a second, then yanks back the sleeve of her shirt and presses the tip of the blade to her elbow, dragging it across her skin. A trickle of blood rolls across the glowing cobalt stripe of her panel, and a coiled silver wire unfurls from the wound. She yanks it out and pushes back the sleeve of
Cole’s left arm. His panel is flashing wildly, the skin around it streaked with silver and black. Anna jams the bloodied tip of the wire into the center of his panel, and it jerks from her grip, diving into his skin.
Her eyes glaze as her tech connects to his, but she won’t be able to help him without me. “Now what?” she asks. “I’m seeing error messages.”
“I need to read them,” I say. “I can help him if you give me access to your panel.”
Her focus jerks back to me. “I’m not letting you into my arm. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
Cole coughs, shuddering, silver-tinted blood trickling from his lips. I grit my teeth. “Either you let me into your panel, or I’ll hack my way in. Cole could be dying.”
She glares at me, one hand clutching Cole’s shirt, then shakes her head, cursing. “Fine. You’re an Agatta—that’s for sure. I bet the old man is proud of you.”
The words send an uncomfortable jolt through me. I don’t know if I’m upset about being compared to Lachlan, or if I’m worried she’s right. I share Lachlan’s DNA whether I like it or not—I am an Agatta. Now I’m here following Lachlan’s plan, and so far, I’m succeeding.
Even after all he’s done, some deep and unwelcome part of me warms at the thought that he finally might be proud of me.
Anna’s eyes glaze, and an access invitation flashes in front of me. I tilt my focus into my tech, diving into the open connection between Anna’s panel and Cole’s. Messages scroll across my vision, but they don’t make sense—they’re a mixture of errors and installation alerts. It’s almost like every app in Cole’s panel is scrambling to repair and reinstall itself, and most of them are failing. I’ve never seen a gentech attack that looked like this before.
Only, that’s not true.
“Oh no,” I breathe, scanning the readings. I have seen errors like this. They’re the kind I used to get when I thought I had hypergenesis. Any time I’d try to run foreign code, my panel would freak out and stop it from installing. The same thing is happening inside Cole’s body right now. But that shouldn’t be possible.
