by Emily Suvada
I roll my eyes and stride toward the cockpit. The back of the helicopter is half the size of the Comox’s cargo hold, and after hours of flying, it’s hard to ignore the feeling that it’s pressing in on me—the darkness, the warmth of a dozen bodies, the eyes following me as I walk. “How much longer until we land?” I ask the pilot. She’s one of Novak’s people—a hacker with mirrored lenses grown over her eyes.
“Just a few minutes,” she says. “No sign we’re being tracked. A team is waiting at the rendezvous point with a Faraday tunnel to load you into a truck.”
I nod, turning back to the cargo hold, and almost walk into Mato. His lips tilt, one hand catching my shoulder to steady me. He’s ditched the jacket Cartaxus had him wearing and let down his shoulder-length black hair. His coding mask is opaque, an inky stain of darkness stretching across his skin. “You look excited,” he says.
Something sparks in my chest at the intimacy in his voice, but it comes with a surge of hesitation. I don’t really know what Mato means to me yet, and I can’t place the feelings that pass through me whenever I meet his eyes. We spoke every week in VR when I was at the Zarathustra lab, and I remember feeling something then, but it wasn’t like this. It’s strange to be so affected by him but not remember why. Especially because not everything from the time we spent together has been erased.
Memories are strange that way. If someone’s bitten by a dog, they could erase the memory, but the fear of dogs might remain, burned into their mind. I don’t remember the six months Mato and I spent together, but something deep and wordless buzzes through me as his hand lingers on my arm. A buried, heady feeling. It’s not one I need right now, though. Not on the brink of a war with Cartaxus. I have to keep a clear head.
I step past him, away from the distraction of his touch. “I’m just looking forward to getting into a lab. We’ve all risked a lot for this.”
He crosses his arms. “I can help you finish the code.”
I turn back to him. His tone is supportive, but something about it gnaws at me. He didn’t ask if he could help, or if I needed him to. “I know what I have to do,” I say. “It’s under control.”
“I’ve error-checked your code for years,” he says. “We don’t have long to finish this. Cartaxus is on the verge of losing bunkers to riots, and they’ll attack the surface just to keep their people under control. This code is the only way to stop them.”
“The code won’t stop them from hating us.”
Mato tilts his head. “Won’t it?”
A chill creeps across my skin. He’s not talking about using the Panacea to stop the Lurker attacks and usher us into a new and liberated world. He’s talking about the fact that, at its core, the Panacea’s code is designed to alter the human mind in the same way that gentech alters the expression of our DNA. But anything designed to alter the mind can also be used to control it.
I’ve been thinking the same thing since Dax told me about the civilians. I’ve known the world was broken and needed to heal ever since I woke up. I thought the wipe would help us—scrape away the pain of the last two years—but standing next to Mato, I know that was a mistake.
I don’t have memories of Mato, but I still have feelings for him, even if I don’t understand them. Wiping memories isn’t the same as erasing pain. The Panacea is the way to do that. But erasing the world’s pain would mean taking over the minds of every one of Cartaxus’s civilians against their will. I don’t know if that’s something I can live with. I don’t even know if I want to. I ran the wipe because I wanted to erase people’s pain for them. All I did was push us to the brink of war.
“Okay, landing now,” the pilot calls back.
The helicopter slows, dropping into a descent. I grab the closest seat to steady myself, looking out through the dust-streaked window. We’re landing in the middle of an empty, rocky plain. There’s nothing here but miles of scrub and desert, a hazy ridge on the horizon, and the pale scar of a road cutting north. A white, old-fashioned truck is parked next to the road to drive us back to Novak’s base. She sent half a dozen copters to pick up all the hackers we freed from Cartaxus, and we’re flying along different paths, heading to different landing sites to avoid being tracked.
A cloud of dust kicks up as the helicopter lands, but its rotors don’t spin down. I watch through the window as two men climb out of the truck and haul out a shimmering circle of wire. It stretches into a fine, barely visible tube large enough for a person to walk through. It’s a Faraday tunnel—a tube of interlacing wire designed to block electromagnetic radiation. If Cartaxus has trackers embedded in anyone we freed, the trackers will alert them unless we keep the hackers faradayed all the way to Novak’s lab. The helicopter is shielded, and the truck will be too. But we can’t risk even a single second of exposure.
“One more trip to go,” I call out to the hackers huddled in the helicopter’s cargo hold. “We’re not far away now. A truck is going to take us the rest of the way.”
“Where are we going?” one of them asks. A woman, pale and ordinary-looking except for the frilled gills stretching down her neck.
“Somewhere safe,” I say. “But to keep it safe, we have to keep it hidden. We’ll drive the rest of the way and make sure we’re not carrying any spyware.”
The helicopter’s doors creak open, the wire tunnel forming a narrow path to the truck. There’s no automatic ramp like the Comoxes have—just a steep drop to the ground. I jump down, wincing as I land, holding my ribs. Mato follows, landing deftly beside me, his mask gleaming in the sun. We help the rest of the hackers down and usher them through the mesh tunnel and into the back of the truck.
There aren’t any seats, but there are a few crates of water and a box of medical supplies. The walls are lined with a Faraday grid, but there’s a comm panel built into its side for messages. I stride to it, punching in the access code Novak and I agreed on, and her face splashes onto the screen, her scarlet hair pulled back into a knot on top of her head.
“Jun Bei,” she says, relieved. “You made it.”
“Not all of us.” I glance over my shoulder as the others file in behind me. “We lost Rhine and her team, and Ruse. We didn’t get Lachlan out.”
Novak lifts an eyebrow at the mention of Ruse’s name. “That’s… unfortunate. But I see you have Mato and… Leoben?”
I nod. “We’re still going to be able to finish the code. I’ll need a surgical lab set up for when I get there.”
If Novak is surprised, she doesn’t show it. “I’ll start preparations now. The other groups are on their way already—I just spoke to them. They’ve found trackers.”
“I knew they would,” I mutter, shooting a glance at Mato. He’s swinging the truck’s rear doors shut. The engine rumbles, the floor shuddering.
“The trackers were subdermal,” Novak continues. “Usually in their arms. It’s safest if you find and destroy them before you get here.”
“On it,” I say. The truck lurches forward, and I stumble with the movement, grabbing the grid on the wall for balance.
“I’ll let you go,” Novak says, but pauses, giving me a rare, genuine smile. “I’m glad you pulled this off, Jun Bei. I’ve been waiting for a way to fight back. Now get here safely, and let’s finish this.”
The feed cuts out, the screen blinking to static, and the truck swings around in a U-turn, tilting me against the wall. The dull ache in my ribs flares into a spike. My healing tech is running at its maximum rate—I had to chew down an energy bar while we were flying to keep it from stalling. It won’t take much to push my body over the edge again, and I won’t have time to recover when we land. Once we get to Novak’s base, I’ll need to jump straight into working on the Panacea. That could take hours, or it could take days, and I don’t have any time to waste.
I clutch my side, walking unsteadily over to Leoben. He’s still handcuffed, sitting on the floor with his back against the metal grid. I pull a genkit wire from the pocket of my cargo pants. The fabric is still damp f
rom the nanite fluid in the tank, the dry patches crusted over with glittering streaks of blue. I lock one end of the cable into my cuff, and drop down to my knees beside Leoben. “I need to check you for spyware.”
He doesn’t offer me his panel. “If you expect me to be happy about this situation, then you’re out of luck.”
“I need you, Lee. I know how to fix this code, but I can’t do it without you.”
He looks down at the cuffs on his wrists. “That’s what Lachlan always said to me.”
“He wrote a vaccine, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Leoben says, meeting my gaze, “but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a monster.”
My stomach clenches. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying not to think about Lachlan. The man who raised me. The man who fathered me. That fact still hasn’t sunk in. Every time I think about it, it bounces off a shield that’s built up around my heart. I don’t want to be anything like him, but he’s still the closest thing I have to a role model. If he’s a monster, maybe I am too.
That doesn’t mean I can’t help create a better world.
“If you’re trying to get me to change my mind, it won’t work.”
“I know that,” Leoben says, extending his arm to let me jack the wire into his panel. “I could never change Lachlan’s mind either.”
I ignore the tightness in my stomach and slide the needle tip of the wire into his panel to log in to his tech. Someone has been in here before me. Leoben isn’t a gentech coder, but his tech is laid out in a clean, pleasing style that I’ve only ever seen in a few panels before. Most people’s systems are like houses—cupboards full of old possessions that nobody uses anymore, outdated tech tucked into the corners, gathering dust. They’re messy, full of clashing apps, put together piece by piece instead of carefully and elegantly architected.
But Leoben’s panel is a gleaming, light-filled room holding perfectly selected libraries of code. Someone has spent time on this, and it wasn’t Leoben.
I look up at him, raising an eyebrow. “So things are pretty serious with you and Dax?”
He just stares at me. “Is he okay?”
I think about Mato shooting Dax with the tranquilizer gun. Cartaxus will have found him by now. He’ll be awake, and he’ll be furious to find out that Leoben is gone.
“He’ll be fine,” I say. “A little pissed off, maybe.”
Leoben’s stony expression softens. “He’s running Cartaxus. That’s pretty much his default mood.”
I run a scan on Leoben’s tech for spyware, but it would be hard to hide anything in a panel as elegant as his. There’s nothing lurking in his backup systems or databases. I eject the wire, sliding it back into my pocket, and send out a pulse from my cuff. If Cartaxus gave Leoben a physical tracker, it’ll have to be transmitting from inside his body somewhere. Novak said the trackers were subdermal—hidden just below the skin. I let my eyes rove over Leoben’s body, searching for pinpricks of light. His panel is a blazing white star, another bright point shining in his chest.…
And there’s a tiny flickering light in the middle of his right bicep.
“Got it,” I say, sliding my knife out. “Sorry, I have to dig it out.”
He grimaces as I grab his arm and press the tip of my knife to his skin. The tracker is buried right below a tattoo of a soaring eagle. Anna’s animal. I carve a line through its beak, prying open an incision, and flick out a tiny glass bead the size of a grain of rice. I crush it against the truck’s metal floor. It crackles with electricity, letting out a puff of white smoke.
“I think there’s one of them in my arm,” Mato says, appearing behind me. I wipe the knife on my pants, holding it out to him. He flicks an identical bead from his wrist and smashes it on the floor. “Are you ready to get to work? One of Novak’s team said we’re almost there.”
The same worrying feeling from before rises in me—the sense that Mato is trying to be part of finishing the Panacea. Maybe that’s natural, though. I worked on it while I was living with him. I don’t remember those days, but maybe I wanted to release it together. I take my knife from him, sliding it back into my belt. The truck jolts, tilting downward. The engine slows as we roll along what must be an underground ramp before shuddering to a stop.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I say.
Mato smiles. “It’s time to finish this, Jun Bei.”
The rear doors swing open, revealing a bustling loading dock in Novak’s underground base. Hundreds of her people are lifting crates into trucks, filling them with military supplies to send out to other genehacker communities to prepare for Cartaxus’s inevitable attacks. They can’t reach everyone, though, and there’s only so much these defenses will do against a coordinated Cartaxus strike. People are going to die because of what we did today. Now it’s up to me to prove that it was worth it.
I grab Leoben’s arm, leading him down the truck’s ramp. A message from Novak pops into my vision with the details of the lab she’s set up for me. “I’m heading straight to the lab,” I say to Mato. “I want to get started immediately.”
“I’ll handle the others,” he says, gesturing to the genehackers. “But then I’d like to come and help, if that’s okay?”
The doubts swirling through me grow quieter at his tone. Not possessive, not assuming. I’m probably just being overprotective of the Panacea and reading too much into things. Of course he wants to be involved. I ping the lab’s details to him. “That’s fine—I’ll see you soon.”
I turn, tugging Leoben toward a door, following the directions in Novak’s message. We walk down a series of hallways, striding past people pushing carts of weapons and equipment, and stop outside a nondescript lab with a numbered door. I swipe my cuff over a sensor, and the door swings open.
The lab inside is small, vaguely dirty, and pitifully out of date. Everything is pre-gentech and ancient—the floor and walls are covered in white ceramic tiles, a surgical chair set in the center of the room with a metal cart holding medical supplies beside it. There’s just one genkit—a small, boxy model, the kind you’d find in a school or an amateur coder’s home. It’s not hospital grade. It’s not even medical grade, but it must be the best Novak could source on short notice.
“What the hell is this?” Leoben asks, looking around. “This place is from the Stone Age. You think you can fix the vaccine with a cheap genkit?”
“I only need to run one test,” I say. “You have to be strapped in the chair.”
He curses, walking over to it. I lock the straps around his legs and arms, a final one looped across his forehead.
“Are you even gonna tell me what you’re doing?” he says.
I press a button on the genkit’s side, booting it up, unfurling the thick, coiled cable on the cart. “I started working on a piece of code to control people’s instincts when we were kids.” I keep my eyes on the cable, avoiding Leoben’s gaze. “I always thought it would be a way for people to change how they feel. I know I can be cruel, and I get angry easily, and I’m more frightened than I want to be most of the time, and I thought the code would help me to feel better. Then I realized what Anna’s gift was—and I realized that death was an instinct too. Then the code became something bigger. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just coding a way for people to be happy and brave—I was creating immortality.”
I shoot a glance at Leoben’s face. His eyes are locked on mine, but he doesn’t say anything. “That’s the code that Lachlan merged with the vaccine when he released it,” I continue. “It wasn’t working, though. It was glitching, and I couldn’t figure out what it was missing. I realized today that it’s something I need from you. My code is a way to control instincts, and you might not know this, but your gift is based on instincts too. Your DNA behaves differently depending on how you’re feeling—and so does your immunity to the virus.”
Leoben closes his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Lachlan had to make me frightened, or make me angry, to see it working properly.”
I nod. “Lachlan made the va
ccine strong by testing thousands of instincts on you and seeing how your immunity would respond, but there’s one he didn’t test. He never checked to see how your DNA would respond in its presence—but that instinct is the core of my code. That means the vaccine and my code are clashing. They’re not woven together perfectly, and it’s causing glitches. I think I need to activate that instinct in you, measure your response, and use it to merge the code again. Then they’ll work together perfectly, and the glitches will stop.”
Leoben opens his eyes, staring at me, his forehead creasing. “What do you mean… another instinct? What didn’t Lachlan test on me? He sure as hell tested the Wrath.”
I swallow, looking at the floor, the cable gripped in my hands.
Leoben’s face pales as it hits him. “Holy shit, Jun Bei,” he breathes. “It’s death, isn’t it? You’re gonna kill me.”
CHAPTER 22 CATARINA
IT TAKES UNTIL MIDMORNING TO drive to the edge of the Black Hills, the night passing in a dark, quiet blur of gray fields and distant mountains. Anna drives through the night, not sleeping, barely even moving as we speed along leaf-scattered, empty highways. When Cole’s had time to rest, he takes over and settles into the driver’s seat, a cable from the jeep’s dashboard jacked into his arm serving as a rudimentary genkit. I sit cross-legged in the passenger seat beside him, monitoring his tech. Anna crashes in the back with her blond hair strewn across her face, clutching the duffel bag of weapons.
“You’re so quiet. You’re making me nervous,” Cole says after I’ve been scanning his tech for a few minutes. “Am I going to live?”
He’s joking, but I can tell he’s worried. His veins have faded to a purple gray, and it doesn’t seem like he’s in much pain, but his body is still being ravaged by Jun Bei’s nanites.
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “You’ll live—you’re doing better, but your tech is… I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same again.”
“Right,” he murmurs, his brow creasing. “What does that mean?”
