by Emily Suvada
“Close your eyes!” he shouts, groping behind him for the door. The rest of the scientists stiffen, closing their eyes, but that won’t help them. The masks would have hacked their tech the moment the pattern entered their field of view. They’ll be blinded for the next ten minutes. There’s no turning back now.
“Everyone stay still, and no one gets hurt,” Ruse says, standing.
One of the scientists reaches inside their coat for a gun, and I scramble over the table to grab it from their hand, slamming an elbow into their temple that sends them to the floor. The other two launch themselves to their feet, and Ruse smacks the butt of his rifle into the back of one of their heads, then hits the third scientist in the face, leaving them slumped over the table.
“Or everyone move, and everyone gets hurt, I guess,” Ruse mutters.
Dax backs against the wall, his eyes open and unseeing. He scrambles blindly for the door, and I grab the lapels of his jacket, pressing the scientist’s handgun under his chin. “Not a sound,” I hiss, dragging him back to the table.
He swallows. “This base is heavily guarded. There’ll already be troops on their way.”
“He’s right,” I say to Ruse, my voice muffled by the mask. “There’ll be more security than we thought with Crick here. We need to work fast. Rhine, open the backpack, and pull the nanite vials out of the genkit.”
She dumps the backpack onto the table, sliding out the battered genkit, then pulls the glass vials in the back out one by one, setting them upright. There are two—gleaming silver cylinders the size and shape of a test tube, loaded with basic nanites ready to be laser coded and sent down a wire into a person’s panel. Only, these vials aren’t just holding nanites. There are coin-size black discs floating in the swirling silver liquid—flash buttons. The same kind that Ruse used to collapse the ceiling in the caves in Entropia.
Rhine’s eyes widen. “Holy shit. These could have blown us all to hell.”
“You’ll need them to get into the cells,” Ruse says, picking up one of the vials. He looks at me and Rhine. “Do you both know what you’re doing?”
I nod. We’re splitting into three teams—Rhine and her group will blow the walls to the prison cells, then focus on finding Lachlan and getting him out to the Comox. Ruse’s team will free the genehackers Cartaxus is holding, then lead them out to another landing pad, where Novak’s team will pick them up.
I’m staying behind alone to hack into the lab’s systems and help the others remotely. A barrage of viruses is loaded in my panel to help our teams move through the base. And I’ll be prepared to get us out of here with the scythe if it comes to that.
“I’m ready,” Rhine says.
Ruse nods, handing her the other vial of explosives. “Take your team and go. You know what to do. Jun Bei and I need to be hooked into your feed so we can track you.”
She clutches the vial in her fist, and the feed from her ocular tech pings into view. It’s Ruse and me seen through her eyes—our noses and mouths covered by the masks. Silver scars creep up my cheek and beneath my left eye, my hair still wild from the Comox. I pin the feed to the corner of my vision, and Rhine turns and runs from the room, followed by three hackers. The feed from her eyes shows a hallway, the image bouncing as she runs. The pattern on the masks will scramble the cameras in the ceiling, but the hack won’t last forever. I just hope it’ll be long enough.
“I’ll send you my feed,” Ruse says. Another floating square of footage appears in my vision, and I pin it next to Rhine’s. He looks over at Dax. “You can’t kill him. He’s their leader.”
“I know that,” I say. “I can handle him.”
“I know you can,” Ruse says. He touches his forehead in a mock salute, then straightens the mask over his face and jogs from the room, followed by the rest of his team.
Their footsteps echo down the hallway. I lift the barrel of the gun from Dax’s neck to his face, pressing it into his freckled cheek. “It’s just you and me now, Crick.”
Dax lifts an eyebrow, letting out a breath of laughter. “Technically, that isn’t true.”
I stiffen. He’s talking about Catarina—about the fact that she’s locked inside me right now, dormant. “Lachlan told you?”
“Of course he did,” he says. “I care about her. There aren’t many people in this world who do. I’m grateful that you haven’t erased her, but the implant isn’t going to keep the two of you apart for much longer. Lachlan never intended for it to be a permanent solution. It’ll fail, and you’ll consume her like he wanted you to.”
The words make my fists clench. “He doesn’t know that.” I keep the gun pressed to Dax’s face and reach behind me with my free hand for the genkit, hauling it down beside us. Dax is trying to get under my skin, and I need to focus. Rhine’s team will need my help to get Lachlan safely through the lab and out to the Comox. I flip open the genkit’s screen, booting it up. I have to launch the viruses that’ll get our people out of here.
“The implant is weak,” Dax continues. There’s a pleading tone to his voice now. “I don’t think you want to kill Catarina, but that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”
I yank a reader wire out of the genkit with my free hand, the other tightening on the gun. “You need to stop talking, or I’m going to put a bullet in your leg.”
He flinches. “Please, Jun Bei. I can save you both. Stay with us here, and you can both have the future you deserve. I can give Catarina a body.”
I pause, holding the wire in one hand, the gun in the other. “What are you talking about?” But then it hits me—the cloned body. The one Regina grew to use as a decoy in case Catarina ever needed to hide from Cartaxus. “You mean cut her out of my brain? That’s madness.”
Dax shakes his head. “Lachlan doesn’t think so, and neither do I. It’s risky, but it’s possible.”
His voice is steady. There’s no hint of a lie. I thought Lachlan wanted Catarina to disappear. I didn’t think he’d be willing to do something like this to save her. Maybe he finally understands what he’s done: He gave me a sister—the one thing I’ve always wanted—and then tried to take her away again.
Or maybe Dax is just doing a good job of wasting my time while the hack’s precious minutes run out.
I shake my head. “I’m not listening to this.” The footage from Rhine’s ocular tech shows her team blasting open a steel door in a corridor with several guards lying prone on the floor. They’re getting Lachlan out now, and they’re going to need my help. “I thought I’d be hacking into this lab’s systems,” I say, holding the genkit wire near Dax’s wrist, “but it’ll be easier to just hack your panel and control the lab through you instead.”
I let the wire go. It dives beneath the cuff of his jacket, burying itself in the cobalt glow of his panel. He lets out a grunt of surprise and reaches for the wire to yank it out, but I drive the barrel of the gun into his face.
“Move again, and I’ll start shooting unnecessary limbs.”
He lifts his hands in surrender, and I tilt my focus into his panel and kick off a hack on his tech.
The first of his firewalls falls almost instantly. The security around his tech is intense now that he’s Cartaxus’s leader, but after hacking Brink, I know what to expect. It’s a lot easier with a genkit and a wire jacked into his arm. The viruses stored in my panel blaze through his security, chewing through his firewalls one at a time, until his panel and the lab’s systems unfold before me.
Floor plans of the laboratories spring open in my mind along with lists of every person staying on the base. I can see where Lachlan and the other hackers are being held, and I can see the route Rhine’s team must have taken, along with the way they’ll need to go to reach the exits. There’s a security protocol running on the landing pad where we left the Comox that I’ll need to kill before they can fly away, but the rest of the route is clear. I start to attack the landing pad, loading up a script that will let Rhine’s team get out easily, and pause.…
; Leoben’s name is on the list of the people staying here.
I look up at Dax, letting out a slow breath. “Of course. That’s why you’re here. I should have seen it before.”
He frowns. “What are you talking about?”
“You aren’t here to talk to us. You could have done that in VR. You’re here for Lee. He’s here, at the base. You need him to be an experiment again to fix the vaccine, and you couldn’t bear to hand him over to Lachlan without being here to protect him.”
Dax’s jaw tightens. “What does Leoben have to do with this?”
I tilt my head back. “He has everything to do with this.”
The final piece of the Panacea that I’ve been looking for is living inside Leoben’s cells, and now he’s here—a few hallways away—just waiting for me. We came here to take Lachlan, because I needed his knowledge to finish the code, but this is so much better.
If we have Leoben, I don’t have to rely on the man who tortured me. I can finish the code myself.
“What are you doing?” Dax asks, his eyes still glazed.
“I’m going to save us,” I say, navigating back through his panel’s systems. I pull up his comm-link and compose a message to Leoben. The teams of hackers swarming through the lab are blowing doors and taking down guards to get our people out of here, but Leoben won’t need their help. He’s a black-out agent. A walking weapon. The only thing he’ll need to get out of this lab is a message from Dax saying that he’s leaving, and telling him exactly where to go.
I send the message and wipe it from Dax’s panel, then put a blocker on his comm. That should buy me enough time to get to Leoben before he figures out the message wasn’t real. Now I just need to kill the security on the landing pad so Rhine can fly the Comox, and my job here will be finished.
I circle back through the lab’s systems, racing to find the code that controls the landing pad, but Dax blinks suddenly. His eyes brighten, and my blood runs cold. He looks around the room, straightening, and rips the wire from his panel. The hack has worn off.
Dax smacks away the gun pressed to his cheek before I can react, moving with a speed I’ve only ever seen in black-out agents. He reaches for my neck, but I throw myself backward, scrambling to the door. I kick it open and burst into the hallway, running for the Comox. I’m not supposed to be going this way—I’m being picked up by Novak’s people at the other end of the lab, but I didn’t kill the security on the landing pad where Rhine’s team is flying out from. I’ll have to do it manually. Rhine’s ocular feed shows her team racing to the landing pad, Lachlan limping as they drag him with them. There’s a gash on the side of his head, his hands are tied behind his back, and there are what look like burn marks traced across his skin. A thrill runs through me at the sight of him looking so vulnerable.
I race around a corner, heading for the hallway we came in through, and skid to a stop.
A troop of guards are running for me. They’re armored, carrying rifles with yellow stripes around the barrels. Knockdown guns. Three of them fire, a plastic bullet smacking into my ribs. Pain lances through me, and I stumble, choking for air.
In my vision, the Comox starts to lift. Rhine’s team is escaping with Lachlan, but the image rocks suddenly. A hole erupts in the Comox’s side as a harpoon blasts through the metal. My blood freezes. That’s the security system I was supposed to kill.
I choke, spitting blood as another bullet hits my sternum. The harpoon in Rhine’s feed jerks the image, dragging the Comox back to the landing pad, where a squadron of soldiers is waiting. The Comox crashes on its side, and Rhine’s feed cuts out.
“You’ve failed,” Dax says, striding down the hallway, backed by a team of guards. These are holding orange-striped guns—tranquilizer darts. I don’t want to get hit by one of them. I’ll go down, and the others will be gone by the time I wake. Dax grabs my shirt, yanking me upright, and snaps a white lock around my cuff.
It’s an electromagnetic dampener. My vision blurs with static, ears screeching as my tech scrambles to fight the interference being pulsed into it. Two guards grab my hands, locking them behind my back, and Dax walks back down the hallway. The guards grip my upper arms and drag me after him.
“I really did intend to work respectfully with you,” Dax says, looking over his shoulder. “I’m even sparing the lives of your team members who surrender to us now.”
He walks through a set of double doors and into a lab the size of a basketball court filled with rows of coding stations and research benches. Humming genkits line the walls, and a glass cylinder stands in the center of the room. A suspension tank. The sight sends a chill through me.
“You never intended for me to work with you,” I spit. “That tank is here for me.”
“Yes, and I would have let you out after each test if you’d cooperated,” Dax says. “Why on earth did you think you could come in here and take Lachlan from us? You were never going to win. We suspected you were planning to kidnap him ever since we invited you here. I’m impressed by the masks—I didn’t anticipate those—but this was an amateur attack, Jun Bei. I expected better from you.” He nods to the guards holding my arms. “Put her in the tank.”
“Wait!” I yell, struggling against the gloved grip of the guards, but it’s no use. My panel’s interface is a mess of static. I can’t code, can’t hack, can’t fight. I couldn’t send the scythe out now even if I wanted to. The guards shove me through a door in the side of the curved glass tank and lock it behind me. The sounds of the room outside grow muffled, and something clicks below me. Warm, blue, glistening nanosolution pulses into the tank.
“Dax, let me out!” I slam the glass, but he’s talking to the guards. Two silver cables snake down from the top of the tank, coiling beside me. I try to duck, but they move like lightning—one slamming into the small of my back, the other looping around my neck and locking into the socket at the base of my skull. I gasp, letting out a choked cry as the cable at my back sends a needle into my spine, linking up with the socket embedded there. The liquid in the tank is up to my knees now, sloshing as I struggle. I try to slam against the glass again, but my hand feels suddenly heavy.
They’re drugging me.
A surge of anger races through me. This isn’t how this was supposed to go—I should be on a copter right now, racing away from here with Lachlan as my prisoner and Leoben as the final key I need. I’m supposed to be moments away from finishing the Panacea—from bringing about the dawn of a new world and destroying Cartaxus’s control forever.
Instead, I’m locked in a tank with a cable in my spine.
The lights flicker, and Dax’s head snaps to me. But it wasn’t me who did it—the dampener is still strapped around my cuff. A sound like gunshots echoes from the hallway, screams cutting the air.
Dax looks around at the guards. “I thought you found the others. There was another team—they headed for the cells.”
“We searched there,” one of the guards says. “They’re being cuffed right now.”
“Then who the hell is doing this?” Dax says. “You must have missed one.”
I can’t stop a smile from creeping across my face. The guards haven’t found another hacker here because there isn’t one. The reason Ruse’s team was supposed to blow out as many cells as possible wasn’t just to cause chaos, or even to release Entropia’s citizens. It was to give us a chance of releasing someone I couldn’t be sure would help us. But I hoped he would.
Dax spins to me. “Jun Bei, stop this—whatever’s happening.”
I just shake my head. “You really shouldn’t have put me in here.”
Dax’s face pales. The lab’s double doors swing open, and the ceiling lights blink out. The liquid in the tank has risen to my chest, but I’m not afraid anymore. We’ve lost Rhine’s team, and we’ve lost Lachlan, but there’s still a chance of salvaging this mission. A figure steps through the door and scans the room. The guards lift their weapons, but none of them can fire—empty clicks echo through the air.
The man in the doorway isn’t even armed. He doesn’t need a gun. He doesn’t need backup, guards, or explosives.
All he needed was to be set loose.
Mato locks eyes with me from across the room, his coding mask gleaming.
“Hello, Jun Bei,” he says, and every soldier in the room collapses to the floor.
CHAPTER 18 CATARINA
“OH SHIT,” I WHISPER, STARING at the Lurkers. Dark plains of flat, rock-strewn desert stretch between us, but the Lurkers are moving fast, the light of their panels giving the writhing mass of bodies an eerie cobalt glow. Dust swirls around them as they run, rising up in clouds that form a towering silhouette against the night sky. There must be thousands of them—a stampede of snarling, furious monsters. The Wrath has turned every one of these people into a mindless beast.
“What is it?” Anna shouts, staring through the back window. “I can’t see anything.”
“Lurkers,” I say. “A lot of them.” It’s hard to tell where the edges of the horde are—it extends across the horizon in a wall of flailing limbs. They’re just a few minutes away, heading right for us. We’re completely, overwhelmingly outnumbered. We’re going to have to run.
“What the…,” Anna breathes, leaning forward, squinting into the darkness. She swears under her breath, grabbing the truck’s gearshift, gunning the engine. There’s still smoke rising from the damage left when the missile hit us. The engine lets out a choking sound. “Come on, come on,” Anna mutters, trying again until it starts. She twists in her seat to reverse, spinning the truck around, but the engine still sounds strangled. I don’t know how much longer it’ll make it.
“Okay, new plan,” she says, flooring the accelerator. “We go wherever the hell those guys aren’t going.”
“Why are they stampeding?” Cole asks, his head twisted to look through the rear window, his voice still slurred from the anesthetic. “Are they coming after us?”
