This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  Anna stiffens. “What?”

  I stare at the error messages, my head spinning. “I don’t know how, but I think… I think someone’s given him hypergenesis. They’ve made him allergic to the nanites that run most of his apps.” His panel is rejecting his tech, shutting it down systematically. It looks like the process was designed to take days, though. The toxic nanites are clearly malicious, but they shouldn’t be killing him like this.

  “His whole body runs on those apps,” Anna says.

  “I know,” I say, “but I don’t think that’s what’s hurting him so badly right now.” My eyes drop to the empty vials beside him. For a normal person, healing tech is a lifesaver. For someone with hypergenesis, it’s a death sentence.

  “Shit,” I gasp, blinking the readings away. I stare at Cole’s shuddering chest, his bloodshot eyes, the black veins pulsing across his skin. “It’s the healing tech. He must have taken it thinking it would help, but it’s killing him.”

  “Can you save him?” Anna’s voice shakes with panic.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “Keep him breathing. I’m going to try.”

  I close my eyes, letting my focus shift away from the desert and into Cole’s panel. The toxic nanites he’s been given are sharp, brutal, and efficient. They’re turning his own tech into a weapon and using it to destroy every upgrade that Cartaxus gave him. The code that lets him move across the room in a blur, heal from bullet wounds, and lose gallons of blood is being chewed up and permanently deleted from his panel. His body would be under enough strain if that were the only thing happening, but it’s not—the healing tech he injected himself with is rampaging through his cells. It’s reacting with the nanites he’s been given, turning every cell in his body into a raging battleground. If I don’t stop it, every single cell is going to be destroyed.

  I let out a shaking breath, trying to think of a plan. I’d need a lab and an industrial-size genkit to stop the toxic nanites, so all I can do is limit the damage and try to keep him alive. If he’s been given hypergenesis, then the only way to save him is with hypergenesis-friendly code.

  Which I happen to be an expert in.

  I pull my focus away from Cole’s panel and log in to Cartaxus’s servers. I used to hack these servers for the Skies, stealing random scraps of code in my clumsy attacks. Now I’m inside Veritas, with access to Cartaxus’s systems, and a single thought draws up millions of pieces of code from their libraries—enough to spend a lifetime studying. What I need is a shield—a wall that I can wrap around Cole’s vital systems to protect them from the war taking place inside his cells. There’s no way anyone will have written something so specific, so I’m going to have to code it myself.

  I skim through the vast libraries of hypergenesis-friendly code, grabbing scraps and subfunctions, stitching them into a messy, hacked-together script that just might work. My hands itch for a keyboard, for the comforting sensation of fingertips on plastic to counter the ball of anxiety swelling inside me as the script grows longer and more complicated. It’s probably full of bugs, but I don’t have time to fix them. I don’t even have time to test it. I’m just going to have to send it into Cole and pray it works.

  I blink back into the desert. Anna is giving Cole another breath, the black veins on his face pulsing down his neck. I brace myself and send the script from Anna’s arm straight into his tech. He stiffens instantly, his body seizing, and the deathly white skin on his face flushes scarlet.

  The wire in Anna’s arm retracts. She rocks back, startled. “What did you do?”

  “I tried to save him,” I say, staring down at Cole, praying I’m not killing him. He shudders again, the tendons in his neck standing out beneath his skin. For what feels like an eternity, he doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move at all.…

  Then he drags in a rasping, desperate lungful of air.

  “Atta boy!” Anna shouts. She grabs the lapels of his jacket, shaking him. “Breathe! Come on!”

  I grip my trembling hands together, a rolling chart of his vitals scrolling across my vision. The code I sent him had a handful of bugs, but his panel seems to have fixed them, and the script is working. His heart, his nerves, the lining of his lungs, and a handful of his internal organs are all being safely wrapped up in the shield I created. There isn’t much I can do to save his muscles or his skin, not without a genkit and hours of work on new hypergenesis-friendly code, but the damage to them shouldn’t be enough to kill him. He’s going to survive.

  He twists his neck, wincing, bringing up one hand to cover his eyes. “Y-you found me,” he says, coughing. His throat sounds raw, a spray of blood misting his lips.

  “You have to stop getting yourself hurt, asshole,” Anna says, her voice wavering. “Why are you out here—what happened to you?”

  “Jun Bei…,” he rasps, his eyes searching the darkening sky. “Injected me… threw me out.”

  The breath rushes from my lungs. Jun Bei. She could have killed him. I stare at the jagged black veins standing out on his neck, horrified. It looked like the toxic nanites were designed to remove his tech with a minimum of damage, so I don’t think she meant to risk his life, but injecting him and leaving him behind was wildly reckless. The healing tech he gave himself would have chewed his cells into liquid if we hadn’t gotten here in time. She might be a genius, but she didn’t think once about how Cole might react. How he might feel. Maybe I was right before—maybe she is too dangerous to live.

  If she did this to Cole—someone I know she cares about—what could she do to the rest of the world?

  Anna’s hands ball into fists. “I’m gonna murder her.”

  “Where is she now?” I ask. “What’s she doing?”

  Cole’s eyes rise to me, struggling to focus, and I remember with a jolt that I’m not really here. He’s using his VR tech to see me—tech that Jun Bei’s nanites are destroying. When they finish, I won’t be able to talk to him, and if he really does have hypergenesis, there’s a chance he’ll never be able to use VR again.

  Not that it matters, anyway. He doesn’t remember me. My stomach twists. There’s nothing between us now.

  “Sh-she’s flying to meet with Crick,” he says, his voice rough. “She’s going to attack them. I think she wants to kidnap Lachlan.”

  Anna snorts. “Of course she does. Hopefully, she’ll get herself killed instead.”

  I keep my face blank. Dax said he was trying to get Jun Bei to visit Cartaxus so he could keep her there—Jun Bei might think she’s going to attack Cartaxus, but she’s flying into a trap. Lachlan needs her just like he needs the other kids. All we need to do is find Ziana, and this could all be over.

  But now that Cole’s here, finishing this mission doesn’t just mean lying to Anna—it means lying to him, too.

  “Can you see me?” I ask Cole. My voice wavers, and I bite my lip. I thought I’d locked my feelings for him away, but kneeling here beside him is harder than I imagined. It doesn’t help that he’s hurt, and that all I want to do is wrap my arms around him. Anna’s eyes cut to me, suspicious, and I force myself to keep my face blank.

  “You’re a little blurry,” Cole says, his brow creasing. “You’re… Catarina?”

  “You know me from the broadcast,” I say. “From the release of the vaccine.”

  “No…,” he says, and lifts his head, wincing at the movement. He slides his hand into the pocket of his black Cartaxus pants and pulls out a sheet of paper. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  I glance down at the paper, and my heart stops. It’s creamy white, folded into a square, the edges torn and stained with dirt. The creases are soft, as though it’s been folded and unfolded countless times. I already know what’s on it, though I’d forgotten it existed. The sight of it makes my breath catch.

  Cole unfolds the sheet of paper, revealing the drawing of me he did in Sunnyvale. The pencil strokes are clear in the dim light. My head is lifted, my eyes bright and bold, blazing from the page. He still has it. His sketchbook is gone, alo
ng with his drawings of Jun Bei, but he’s carrying this in his pocket. He’s been looking for me.

  The realization pushes me over the edge. All the pain of the last few weeks—my loneliness, my fear—drags a choked gasp from me as I stare down at Cole. He doesn’t remember me, but there’s still something between us—it isn’t just me. It isn’t gone. It’s clear in the way his eyes are locked on mine. A flame sparks inside me, threatening to burn away my strength, my walls, and my resolve.

  Anna’s eyes cut to me again, and I realize too late that I’ve screwed up.

  I shouldn’t remember Cole after the wipe—not enough to care about him as much as this. I shouldn’t be clutching my hands to my mouth, kneeling beside him with tears swimming in my eyes. I try to clear my throat, to steady my voice, but it’s already too late.

  “Holy shit,” Anna says, shuffling back on her knees. Her hand slides to a gun holstered at her side. “You didn’t get wiped.”

  “I—I can explain,” I say.

  She just shakes her head, aiming the gun at my chest. “I think it’s time you told me what the hell is going on.”

  CHAPTER 15 JUN BEI

  IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG FOR Ruse, Novak, and me to come up with a plan for when our team reaches the Cartaxus lab. Ruse and I head back through the concrete tunnels and metal walkways of Novak’s base to the Comox, carrying a single backpack. We have no guns, no knives, no grenades. Just a beat-up laptop genkit and a dozen fabric surgical masks decorated with a jagged black-and-white pattern. The fabric is silky and soft, musty from being stored in a box for years. One hangs around my neck, loose, ready to be tugged up over my mouth and nose. But I won’t need to do that until we reach the lab.

  Rhine looks me up and down as the Comox’s door hisses closed and we take off, tilting south toward the Cartaxus lab. “What happened?” she asks. “Are they going to help us?”

  “They already did,” I say. “Novak had everything we need.”

  She raises an eyebrow, looking at the backpack hanging from my shoulder. “I thought we were getting weapons.”

  “We did.” I drop the backpack to the floor and pull out a handful of the printed masks.

  “Masks?” She looks between me and Ruse, frustrated. “Are you serious? We can’t go in there without weapons.”

  “These are weapons,” I say, handing out the masks. “You can loop these around your necks, but don’t put them on yet. Try not to unfold them, either, unless you want to screw this mission up before we even get there. I mean it—be careful.”

  Rhine doesn’t look convinced. She slips the mask over her head and slides her hair through it, her braid tugging at the folded fabric.

  I grab her wrist. “I said be careful. They’re not for decoration. These masks are printed with a visual hack.”

  Rhine’s eyes widen. “I thought those were a myth.”

  “Apparently not,” I say. “They’re just very, very rare.”

  A murmur ripples through the cargo hold. Rhine lowers the mask, being careful to keep the jagged black-and-white design on the fabric from unfolding. Visual hacks are like extremely complicated barcodes—a series of black-and-white patterns encoding digital information. Only, in the case of these masks, the information that’s encoded is an entire computer virus designed to blind cameras, confuse targeting systems, and scramble the ocular tech of anyone who sees it. They won’t even need to consciously look at the design—their ocular tech will scan their field of view automatically, and the moment the image is processed, the pattern will upload as a full-fledged virus. It’s the kind of thing every young coder dreams of designing, but most agree it’s impossible. And yet, there was a box of them shelved in Novak’s warehouse that her team swore would work.

  I still can’t understand why someone would build a base like that and then abandon it.

  “You’ll need to update your panels so the hack won’t affect you,” Ruse says. “I’m sending out a configuration file now. These masks will probably buy us ten minutes until Cartaxus’s security scanners figure out how to shut the hack down. Then the pattern will be useless—not just in this mission, but in any Cartaxus system ever again. We’ll only get one shot at this, so make sure you follow my lead.”

  I hand out the last of the masks and zip the backpack up, then walk to the window, chewing my thumbnail. The dark, empty desert blurs into a wash of gray beneath us. I can’t stop thinking of Novak’s warehouse—the shelves of scorpions and vials of triphase. We’re going to need them in the days to come. If this plan works and we take Lachlan, then Cartaxus will attack the surface in retaliation.

  I’m starting a war, and I still don’t know how to feel about that.

  Rhine joins me at the window when we near the lab’s coordinates, the Comox soaring in across the glittering lake that feeds into the dam. The structure seems small from the air, though I know it’s a towering miracle of engineering. The weight of the lake rests against a concrete wall that funnels the water into a churning river at the base of a canyon. The lab itself is built into the dam, where a road cuts across the canyon, marked by twin rows of brilliant lights. Cartaxus sent us instructions to land on a helipad joined to the lab’s side—a white metal grating jutting out over the river, the water wild and foaming beneath it.

  There’s nobody waiting outside for us—no soldiers, no gun-bots. A single spotlight is aimed at the landing pad, painting it in a dazzling circle of brightness. The Comox jolts as we touch down, and the sound of the rotors is overwhelmed by the roar of the water.

  “Last chance to back out,” Rhine says, her fingers playing over the gun strapped to her hip. She’s wearing the backpack I brought up from Novak’s base, her mask crumpled around her neck.

  I shake my head. “This code is the only thing that’s important anymore. There’s no backing out.”

  The Comox’s door hisses open, the metal ramp unfolding. Ruse and I jump out together with Rhine behind us, our boots clanking on the landing pad. A cold, damp wind is rushing off the river, lifting my hair across my face, filling the air with negative ions. A door in the side of the lab swings open, and five white-coated scientists file out, followed by a man in a dark suit with a shock of red hair.

  I stiffen. It’s Dax Crick. I’ve only ever seen him through Catarina’s eyes. I know they have a history, and that she respects his skills as a coder. I also know he’s the one who came to Entropia to take Mato and Leoben away. I’ve seen him infected, seen him slide into the Wrath and try to choke Catarina with his bare hands. From what I’ve heard by following Cartaxus’s network, he’s the one leading them now.

  “Crick,” I say, puzzled as he walks across the landing pad, his jacket flapping in the wind. He’s not an avatar—he’s really here, in the flesh. I was expecting to be greeted by rows of armed soldiers, not a team of white-coated scientists, and not by Dax himself. There’s no need for the leader of Cartaxus to meet us in person. There must be some reason he’s here that I’m not aware of yet. I file the thought away and walk with Ruse to meet him.

  “Jun Bei,” he says, shaking my hand. “And Ruse. I’ve read your papers on autonomous swarm behavior. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person. I want to introduce you to the people you’ll be meeting with. These are the scientists in charge of our antiviral, engineering, and neurology teams.”

  Ruse takes Dax’s hand, shaking it firmly. “These are my top coders. They’re all here to help.”

  Dax looks over the team behind me, his eyes lingering on the gun at Rhine’s hip and the rifle slung over Ruse’s shoulder. “You all have masks.”

  “Filters,” Ruse says. “A precaution.”

  Dax cocks an eyebrow. “You think we’re going to gas you?”

  “I think I’m walking into a Cartaxus facility with my best people. Would you have me come here without any precautions?”

  “I suppose not.” Dax looks at Ruse’s rifle again, but doesn’t tell him to take it off. “Wasn’t Lieutenant Franklin with you? He contacted us while you were
leaving Entropia.”

  “We had an… altercation while we were recharging along the way,” I say. “We decided it would be better if he made his own way back.”

  Dax tilts his head, suspicion flitting across his features. “Can you elaborate?”

  “I was the one who decided to leave him,” Ruse says. “He was picking a fight with Jun Bei about some girl. It got heated, and I didn’t like the way he was talking to her. I don’t tolerate that kind of behavior in my team. We left him with his weapon and water. He’ll be safe.”

  Dax looks between us, searching our faces. I can’t help but be impressed by how well Ruse just covered for me. I don’t know how he picked up on the fact that Cole and I had a history, or that Catarina is part of it. He must have guessed when Novak asked me about her at the base. Dax seems to buy his explanation. “I’m sure Lieutenant Franklin will be fine,” he says. “You’ll have to forgive him—he’s been through a lot. Anyway, let’s go inside. There’s a conference room ready for us.”

  He leads us down a white hallway and into a low-ceilinged room. The Cartaxus scientists take seats along one side of a marble table. I sit down on the other with Ruse and two of our hackers while Rhine and the rest of the team members stay standing, positioned close to the door.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” Dax says, straightening his jacket. “I’m here to propose a deal. We need to work together—neither of our teams can fix the vaccine on our own, and we’re all aware of the tensions that have been building between our people. My engineers have been working hard on making long-term plans—not just for dealing with the virus, but for reintegrating both our populations into one cohesive society once we open the bunkers.”

  I exchange a glance with Ruse. He leans back in his chair. “That’s not going to be easy after your people slaughtered ours.”