by Emily Suvada
CHAPTER 24 CATARINA
“WE HAVE TO GET HER out,” Anna says, her voice frantic. “Cole, help me move this thing.” She yanks at the handles on the side of Ziana’s tank, dragging it away from the wall. Cole takes the other side, grunting as the two of them move it in a shuddering arc, swinging it into the center of the cabin’s basement. The steel frame screeches against the floor, and the glittering blue liquid sloshes wildly inside the tank.
Ziana rocks with the movement, her eyes closed, her features blank and expressionless. Anna drops to her knees and presses at the control panel inlaid in the glass. “How do you unlock this thing?”
“Wait,” I say. “We can’t just open it—”
“He trapped her in here,” Anna says, snapping her head back to glare at me. Her gaze is sharp, but there’s a tremor in her voice. I haven’t seen her this afraid since she picked up Cole’s emergency beacon. “Open it now. We don’t know how long she’s been like this. It could be killing her.”
“Or it might be keeping her alive. This is a stabilizing tank. They’re used to help people heal from injuries. There’s a chance she’s sick or hurt.”
Anna’s hands draw back from the control panel warily. “Can you check?”
“I can try.” I send out a pulse to find the tank’s controls and check the nanite settings. If Ziana’s sick or wounded, it should show up in the type of tech supporting her. The results ping back into my vision. The tank has been set to send a steady stream of healing tech and anesthetic into the liquid, but that could be a standard setting. I can’t see anything that looks like treatment—no warnings, no medication being pumped into the nanosolution. It’s hard to tell for sure if there’s anything wrong with Ziana, though, since she doesn’t have a panel.
“I think she’s okay,” I say. “You can open it.”
Anna wrenches the glass lid up, and a wall of vapor rolls down the sides of the tank, dripping streams of blue liquid onto the floor.
“Oh, Zan,” Cole says, reaching in and lifting Ziana up carefully. “Let’s get you out.”
Anna scans the room, then bolts upstairs and comes back down with a towel. Cole hooks his arms under Ziana to lift her from the liquid. He lays her down on the floor, wiping her face. Her skin seems even paler somehow, the color of paper, her bare scalp traced with a web of purple veins. She can’t be more than five feet tall, with a small-boned, painfully thin frame. She’s not awake, but she seems to be breathing on her own. Blue liquid streams from her mouth as Cole rolls her to her side, rubbing her back.
Anna drapes the towel over Ziana, then cradles her head in her lap to check her eyes. “She looks doped, but I think she’s okay. She might take a while to wake up. Lachlan must have done this—this is his cabin. He did this to her. He’s the one behind everything.”
“Maybe,” I say, my head spinning. I still don’t understand what Lachlan would have to gain by starting a war and turning people into Lurkers. It doesn’t help Jun Bei, and it doesn’t help him, either. And Ziana sent me that message just a few days ago. Whoever put her in this tank must have been to the cabin recently—but Lachlan has been in Cartaxus’s custody this whole time. There’s no way this could have been him.
My eyes slide to the boxes that weren’t here before. Whoever put Ziana in this tank probably left these boxes here too.
Cole follows my eyes. “You don’t think it was Lachlan?”
“The timeline doesn’t add up. Someone’s been here recently. Can you show me what’s in these boxes?”
He stands and wipes the nanosolution from his hands, then flips open the first box and pulls out a stack of folded blueprints. They’re architectural plans of a building I haven’t seen before—an underground facility that looks like an early version of a bunker. It isn’t as big as the ones Cartaxus built, though. The notes scrawled on it say it can only hold a few thousand people. The closest bunker, Homestake, has eighty thousand civilians living inside its walls.
I lean forward, scanning the blueprints. “Do you know where that is?”
“No, but the plans are old,” Cole says, flipping through them. “These are dated from forty years ago. That was before Cartaxus began—before the virus was discovered. Lachlan would have been a teenager. I don’t think these notes are his.” He sets the file down and flips open the other boxes. The files in one are stamped with Cartaxus’s logo, from a twenty-year-old project called Gemini. Another has a stack of maps with bunker locations, and the third has files tagged with the codename Zarathustra.
All of them are marked as briefings for Cartaxus’s director—the woman Regina called the Viper. Regina said she was ruthless and that she did awful things to keep her people in line. These files look like originals. The papers have yellowed with age, and they have handwritten notes scrawled across them. But what would half a dozen boxes of the Viper’s original files be doing in the cabin’s basement?
“Anna, look at these,” Cole says, spreading the Zarathustra files across the floor. They’re not the same as the research files Cole and I found in the mines—these are status reports written by Lachlan. Some are just lists of supplies, while others show observations of the children, and some have pages of genetic diagrams. They’ve all been marked up with an emerald pen, with paragraphs circled and question marks scrawled in the margins. Every report is labeled as For: Director, Cartaxus.
Anna cranes her neck to look at the files. “These look like the Viper’s archives. She’s been missing for years, and nobody knows where she is. How would Lachlan have gotten these?”
“I don’t think it was Lachlan who left these here,” I say.
“Maybe he’s working with her,” Anna says.
I frown, scanning through the files. That doesn’t seem likely. It was the Viper who killed Lachlan’s daughter and then created Jun Bei to keep him from leaving. I can’t imagine the two of them would have been friendly. “Maybe,” I murmur. “When did the Viper leave Cartaxus?”
“During the outbreak,” Anna says. She scrubs the towel over Ziana’s bald head and across her neck. There’s still no sign of her waking up. “The Viper took the blame for the virus spreading. Cartaxus’s whole mission was to find a vaccine and prevent a pandemic, and she failed. Supposedly she stepped down, but I’m pretty sure she was pushed out. Some say she’s dead. She’s not in the bunker system—that much I know. She’s probably out here on the surface somewhere. It’s ironic, really. She might have turned into a hacker like you.”
Cole meets my eyes, his shoulders tightening.
“Oh, wait,” Anna says. “Do you think she could be behind the attacks? The Viper?”
“I don’t think it was Lachlan,” I say. “He’s been held by Cartaxus since flood protocol. It can’t have been Jun Bei, either. She’s been in Entropia, and she couldn’t have made the pigeons. It has to be someone else—someone with connections and a lot of knowledge.”
“Like the Viper,” Cole says.
“If she was kicked out of Cartaxus, she’d have the motivation to make them look bad,” I say. “She could have turned against them. Most people on the surface hate Cartaxus. Maybe she’s obsessed with bringing them down.”
“But what would she want with Ziana?” Cole asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, a knot forming in my stomach, “but this feels right. I think the Viper is triggering these attacks. Maybe she’s trying to take back control of Cartaxus. I don’t know. She’s the only person with the motivation and the ability to do this.”
Anna looks around at the files, Ziana’s head still cradled in her lap. “We shouldn’t be touching these. There could be DNA. We need to sweep this whole cabin. Are there cameras?”
“She probably would have wiped them,” I say, but I send out a pulse to link up with the cabin’s security network anyway. There are a handful of cameras Lachlan installed when we were living here. I couldn’t access their feeds with my old panel, but connecting with them now barely takes a thought. The list of cameras scrolls in my vision, bu
t their footage has been wiped like I expected. No stored footage, no sign of who left these files and locked Ziana away.
But the cameras will have been feeding into Veritas. I don’t know if there’s a way to see what past versions of the simulation looked like, but it’s worth trying.
“I’m going to check Veritas,” I say, closing my eyes. I tilt my focus into my cuff, trying to pull up the simulation’s settings. I’ve never really looked through them before—there are options to change the way I look in Veritas and the way it behaves around me. There’s nothing in the settings for scrolling back through time to see what a place looked like in the past, though. I push myself deeper, moving into the code of the simulation itself.
Diving into the source code of something as powerful as Veritas would normally take days of planning and a long, dedicated hack, but the simulation is still a trial version. It’s never been officially launched, and the source code is practically unprotected. I circle through the architecture of the system, hunting for the code that updates the simulation with new data. Like I hoped, there’s a cache of old versions. They’re not continuous, but snapshots are stored every hour. A few moments of scanning the system gives me enough information to draft a script to see the past versions of any location.
I blink back into the lab and turn to Cole and Anna. “I think I can check the camera feed from the past few weeks.” I let my eyes glaze, running the script, and the lab blurs and shifts around me. The boxes and files scattered on the floor straighten into neatly stacked piles, and the tank we pulled Ziana from slots back beneath the lab counter. There’s no sign of anyone else here, though. The lab shifts again, the images rolling back in time, and the tank moves to the center of the floor again, suddenly.
There’s a figure kneeling over it. But they’re just a blur.
“What the hell?” I ask, pausing the script. This is the Viper—it has to be. She’s here in the cabin, kneeling over Ziana in the tank, but I can’t see anything. She’s just a person-shaped smudge, as though she’s been completely scrubbed from the simulation.
“What is it?” Anna asks.
“I can see someone,” I say, “but their image is blurred out. I can’t tell who it is.”
Cole shakes his head. “The Viper was the one who built Veritas. It makes sense she’d think of a way to avoid being recorded in it.”
I let the script keep running, looping back through time, faster and faster. The tank holding Ziana disappears, then the piles of boxes in the lab are suddenly gone. Every few seconds I see a flash of the blurry, indistinct figure. It looks like they were working here after Cole and I left. It can’t have been Lachlan, and it can’t have been Jun Bei. This is definitely the Viper. But what the hell was she doing working in Lachlan’s personal lab?
“This is hopeless,” I say. All I can see is the hazy figure. The script keeps running, scrolling back until the lab is empty again. It shifts suddenly, growing messy, and I see a flash of Cole and me that makes my heart clench. That was the day I hacked his panel, the day we agreed to work together. That was the day my life pivoted and changed its course. I see his face for the briefest moment before it disappears, and then all I can make out are flashes of myself working during the outbreak.
The sight tugs at something inside me. The girl sitting at the lab counter looks dirty and skinny, but there’s an innocence in her eyes that I don’t have anymore. She doesn’t know what lies ahead of her—the truths she’s going to face. She doesn’t know that the days she’s spending in this cabin are coming to an end, that she’ll lose her home, her past, the only family she has, and even her body.
The images keep flashing before my eyes, ticking back through time, and I stiffen as the same blurry figure reappears. But that can’t be right. What would the Viper be doing in this lab while I was here? The image disappears as the script keeps running, rolling back through the weeks and months before Cole arrived. Maybe it was a glitch. Maybe there’s something wrong with the code I hacked together to scroll back through time. The lab flashes, showing me sitting by the lab counter next to the figure.
I pause the script, my heart slamming against my ribs.
This time there’s no denying it. I’m sitting on a stool by the counter with my old laptop genkit open in front of me, the blurred figure standing at my side. My head is turned to them, and I’m laughing. There’s a bowl of soup beside me, and the hand of the hazy figure is resting on my shoulder.
“No,” I whisper, ice slicing through my veins. I remember that day. I remember that moment. I’d been down here working for weeks. I’d locked myself inside, not wanting to face the world, wanting to bury myself in code. My only friend had come around to cheer me up, bringing me soup. Telling me she cared. I stare at the blurred figure, tears welling in my eyes.
She’s the only person I’ve always trusted—who’s never betrayed me. But the proof is right in front of me. She’s the one who locked Ziana in a tank.
“Guys,” I breathe. “I know who the Viper is.”
My closest friend. My yaya.
It’s Agnes.
CHAPTER 25 JUN BEI
“THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE everything,” Novak says, pacing across the lab. Her eyes are alight, her scarlet hair hanging wild around her face. There’s blood on my hands, on Mato’s, and a trail of it leading through the door where Novak’s people took Leoben away. I grab the metal cart beside me, swaying.
I’ve finished the Panacea.
It still doesn’t feel real. I thought I’d be overjoyed to see the code completed, but instead I’m just overwhelmed. I’ve been so focused on finishing it that I’ve barely let myself think about what will happen once it’s done. It’s been a puzzle—an intellectual game for me to turn over in my mind, to prod at and untangle in my every waking moment. But now it’s real, and there’s no going back.
The bold new future I’ve been dreaming about is here—a future of immortality, of control over our bodies and our minds. This is what Lachlan plunged the world into chaos for. The code is clean, safe, and ready to be sent out to the world. So why is there a flicker of doubt sparking to life inside me?
“People need to know we have this code.” Novak wheels to face me. “It’s time to tell them.”
“We think we have it,” I say. “The code is five minutes old—it needs to be tested. We have to run some human trials to make sure it’s ready.”
“Of course, of course,” Novak says dismissively. “What do you suggest?”
“The Lurkers,” Mato says. “I don’t think many people will have ethical concerns about us giving them code that’s designed to cure them.”
I glance at him, raising an eyebrow. It’s a good idea. Cole said there were hundreds of Lurkers headed to Entropia when we left. If the glitch in the Panacea is what turned them into monsters, then sending this version out should cure them. And with a group of hundreds of test subjects, we should be easily able to see any flaws in the code.
Novak nods, her eyes glazing. “Perfect. There’s drone footage of the horde around Entropia being shared in our network right now. There are thousands of them.”
I blink. “Thousands of Lurkers? I didn’t know it was so many.”
Novak just nods, distracted. I don’t understand how there can be a group that size. Perhaps if there were hundreds in dozens of smaller packs, but Novak called this group a horde. There’s no reason for thousands of them to converge on the city like that—not unless something is leading them there. But what would draw them to a city in the middle of the desert?
“Jun Bei—you and I can hack their panels and send the code to them,” Mato says. “It should be obvious enough whether it works or not.”
“Yes, whatever,” Novak says, pacing across the room again. “You can run a test, but we’re still going to announce this now. I didn’t risk my people’s lives so you could solve a coding problem. The sooner we get word out about this, the more likely Cartaxus is to hold off their attacks. I can get the broadcast ready wi
thin minutes.”
“What would we say?” I ask, my head still spinning. I thought the code would take longer to finish and that I’d have time to prepare a statement before we announced it to the world. I need to find a way to show people that the Panacea offers the only true kind of freedom—the freedom to control your own mind as well as your body. I want to tell them they don’t have to be ruled by their pain or fear any longer. They can become whoever they want to be. They can take control of their instincts, their past, and even death.
How am I supposed to come up with a way to say that in the next few minutes?
“It’s easy to sell,” Novak says. “We tell people the truth about the vaccine. We say that they’ve been manipulated and lied to, that there’s code in their body that Cartaxus wants to use to control them. We’ll say this code is a tool to alter their bodies and their minds in any way they want—but Cartaxus wants to use it to keep them subdued. The civilians will turn against them, and this war will be over before it begins.”
I frown. “But Cartaxus is trying to remove the Panacea. They’re not interested in it.”
“Of course they are,” Novak says. “They’d do anything to have more control over their civilians. That’s why we have to make sure it doesn’t fall into their hands. I can’t think of anything Cartaxus would be more interested in than a way to alter their civilians’ minds.”
“We’re making it sound like the code is dangerous, though,” I say. “People will think it’s a weapon. They won’t want it.”
“What does it matter?” Novak frowns. “With a single broadcast, we’ll stop the war, and we’ll bring Cartaxus down. That was your plan, wasn’t it? To start a new world without them?”
“Yeah,” I mutter, my voice small. The flicker of doubt inside me is rising into a flame. The Panacea is supposed to herald the dawn of a new age—not because it’ll stop this war, but because it’ll eradicate fear and pain forever. Novak doesn’t care about that, and what’s worse—she’s right about Cartaxus. If they get control over the Panacea, they’ll use it as a weapon. Releasing it could be just as dangerous as releasing the scythe. I’m supposed to be creating a new world with this code—one that’s free of violence and oppression. Suddenly it doesn’t feel that way.
