This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  “We don’t have much time,” Novak says. “My scouts spotted one of the local bunkers scrambling a fleet of jets.”

  Mato looks up. “They’re starting attacks?”

  “Not globally,” Novak says. “Not yet, at least. There’s just been one mobilization, but it’s a big one. We don’t know where they’re planning to attack, but it might be Entropia. They’ll want to strike back at us for taking Leoben. If we send the announcement in the next few minutes, we might get them to hold off.”

  “Perfect,” Mato says. “Jun Bei—are you ready?”

  I just nod, my hands clenching and unclenching. Everything feels like it’s happening too fast. A few minutes ago I had Leoben strapped to the chair beside me, and I knew what I was doing, and that it was right. The Panacea had to be finished. Nothing else was important. But now there’s so much more at stake than I thought.

  And I don’t know what to do.

  A boom echoes from the hallway. Novak flinches, her eyes glazing. That sounded like a bomb. The team in the loading bay are moving hundreds of them—missiles, mines, grenades—and they’re all forty years old. If one were faulty, it could take out half the room.

  “That was the eastern service entrance,” Novak says, frowning. “The cameras are blown out.”

  “There’ll be wounded,” I say, grabbing the tray of healing vials. Treating injuries might give me the time and space to get my head straight. “Mato and I will head there now.”

  “Wait!” Novak says. Her eyes are skittering back and forth, her shoulders tight. “My people aren’t loading ordnance through that entrance.”

  “Then how did they—”

  Another boom sounds—but this one is closer. It’s followed by raised voices, a tremor rolling through the floor.… And a burst of gunfire.

  Novak snaps out of her session. “It’s Cartaxus. Those jets weren’t going to Entropia. They’re here. There’s a goddamn army coming for us.”

  My stomach tightens. “They must have tracked us here. We must have missed something.”

  “That’s not possible,” Novak says. “The loading bay you arrived in is shielded. I put the others in faradayed rooms to be sure—there’s no way they could be transmitting.”

  I look at Mato. “It has to be one of us.”

  “Were you shot?” Mato asks. “Did anything pierce your skin?”

  “No,” I say, groping for the hem of my shirt, yanking it up. My ribs are a mess of black-and-purple bruises from Cartaxus’s plastic bullets, but there’s no sign of an entry wound. “I don’t think so. And it wasn’t Leoben—I took a tracker from his arm.”

  “It’ll be me.” Mato’s face darkens. “I found a tracker in my wrist, but it must have been a decoy. They’ve had me for weeks. They’ll have given me another one. I should have thought of it. They could have implanted it while I was sleeping—it could be anywhere.”

  “Well, find it and get it the hell out of you,” Novak snaps. “I’m going to see what we’re facing here.”

  She turns and strides from the room. I send a pulse out from my cuff, scanning Mato’s body, searching for a pinprick of light like the one I cut out of Leoben. There’s interference from the rooms around us—from the genkit in the lab, the Wi-Fi router in the hallway—but I boost the pulse’s strength, searching closer. There’s nothing in his legs, his torso, or his right arm, but his left arm, his face, and his neck are three blinding stars of light. His panel, his mask, and the implant in the base of his skull are so busy with electromagnetic interference that I’d never be able to pick out the faint signals from a tracker if it was hidden near them.

  “It has to be in your tech,” I say. “Can you stop it transmitting, or turn it all off?”

  He presses his lips together. “I can, but my tech isn’t designed to be turned off. A lot of my body is completely dependent on it. I don’t know if I’m even going to stay conscious without it. I might have a stroke.”

  “I’ll try again,” I say, sending another pulse, squinting through the blaze of light from his tech, but it’s useless. I can’t see anything. I remember Mato telling Catarina that he’d used the implant to take over some of his brain’s functions—movement, breathing, digestion. When he walks, it isn’t his brain that sends those commands to his muscles—it’s the implant. He used it to free up more space in his brain for coding and thinking, but that means that when his tech shuts off, he’s almost helpless. It’s dangerous enough to switch off anyone’s tech suddenly—it can cause a shock to their body, or even lead to their cells trying to reject the gentech that’s inside them. When you’re relying on code to breathe, it’s even more dangerous.

  “It only needs to be off for a few seconds,” I say. “Just long enough for me to find the tracker. You’ll be okay, I promise.”

  Another boom echoes from the hallway, followed by screaming. The soldiers must be getting close to making it inside the compound.

  “Maybe I should just go back to them,” Mato says, a note of fear in his voice. “We don’t have much time, and the tracker could be deep. It could be in my brain.”

  The thought makes me shiver—not because it’s frightening, but because it’s exactly the kind of thing Cartaxus would do. “We’ll deal with that if we have to. Let’s just figure out what we’re up against first, okay?”

  He nods, glancing at the hallway, and sits down on the surgical chair, leaning back. He closes his eyes, and the dim glow of his mask fades. A tremor racks his body the moment his panel blinks out.

  “Sh-shit that hurts,” he gasps, his eyes scrunched shut, his head snapping back. “Quickly.”

  I grab his shoulders to lean over him, sending a pulse out from my cuff. The brilliant glow of his panel is gone—there’s just a lingering aura in its wake, and I can’t see any pinpricks of light left behind. I look up at his head, stepping around the table, scanning from different angles, searching for a glow in the base of his skull. He jerks, spasming on the chair, letting out a cry of pain. I move my gaze to his face and finally see it—a bright flicker, even smaller than the one I saw in Leoben’s arm.

  “I see it!” I yell, holding him down on the chair as he shudders. “Turn your tech back on.”

  He shakes again, choking, and the stripe of his panel blazes to life. His mask flickers on, glowing scarlet, his rigid muscles slowly relaxing as his tech comes back online. The screaming from the hallway stops, followed by shouted orders to put up barricades. Novak’s voice. Her people are still holding the compound. They’re fighting back.

  Mato’s tracker is buried deep, but we might have just enough time to get it out.

  “L-let’s not do that again,” Mato says, coughing, his eyes still shut. “Where is it? Can you get it?”

  “I can,” I say, sliding my hands from his shoulders. “You’re not going to like it, though. I’m sorry, Mato. It’s inside your left eye.”

  CHAPTER 26 CATARINA

  “SO WHO’S THE VIPER?” ANNA asks, staring up at me. She’s sitting cross-legged on the basement floor with Ziana’s bald head in her lap. The Viper’s files are scattered around us, the floor dotted with droplets of blue nanosolution, but I can’t see any of it. All I can see is Agnes. Her gray hair, her kind face. The cardigan she used to wear. A hole opens up inside my chest. She used to come here with food and supplies for me—home-cooked soup and her terrible boiled candies. I trusted her from the first moment I saw her. Now I don’t know if she was ever really my friend.

  I turn and pace across the basement as the pieces start falling into place. Agnes disappeared after Cole showed up at the cabin, even though I knew she’d never abandon me. She wouldn’t answer my comms, and then she showed up during flood protocol out of nowhere. She somehow had access to Regina’s lab in Entropia, and she stopped Anna from shooting me by taking over her black-out tech. I run my hands through my hair, trying to keep them from shaking.

  I should have seen it before. I should have understood.

  “She’s… she was my friend, Agnes,
” I say, pacing back across the lab. I want to turn and race up the stairs, to run into the woods. I want to pick up one of the lab stools and hurl it at the wall. I trusted Agnes with my life. She disappeared, and she didn’t call, but I was sure she had a reason.

  And she did. She was spreading the virus through the pigeons, and now she’s triggering the Wrath. She’s the person who’s been behind so much of the death and destruction of the last few months, and I didn’t even notice.

  “You met her,” I continue, trying to keep my voice level. “You both did. She was there in flood protocol—she helped us stop the attack.”

  “How long have you known her?” Cole asks.

  “Since a few months after the outbreak started,” I say. “She’s the one who lived in the bombed-out house we drove past.”

  “Well, that makes sense now,” Anna mutters.

  “She was part of the Skies,” I say. “She was the one who brought me into it. She used to take care of me—she never hurt me. She never did anything but make me food and wash my clothes. I don’t know what she wants, or why she was so interested in me.”

  I can’t reconcile the kindly gray-haired woman I remember with someone who’d lock Ziana in a tank.

  “So why did she leave Ziana here?” Cole asks. “Or these boxes?” He leans over to the box with the Zarathustra files, pulling the rest of them out.

  “I don’t know,” I say. The tank and these files have been moved here in the last few days. “Maybe Agnes is planning to do something here—something that needs Ziana’s DNA. She probably set up in this lab because her house was destroyed.”

  “So we wait,” Anna says, shifting Ziana’s head from her lap. Ziana is still limp and unconscious, her small body wrapped up in a towel. Anna stands up, brushing her hands off on her pants. “If she’s the Viper, and she’s the one triggering the Wrath, then we should kill her. Problem solved. We could end this war ourselves.”

  “That’s your solution to everything,” Cole mutters. “Kill Jun Bei, kill the Viper.”

  “Don’t forget Lachlan,” Anna says, crossing her arms. “Don’t tell me the world wouldn’t be a safer place.”

  She looks at me, challenging me to argue with her. I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to say. If Agnes really is the Viper—if she was behind the pigeons and the Wrath—then the blood of countless lives is on her hands. She’s taken us to the brink of a war that I don’t even know we’ll be able to avoid, but I still don’t know why. I know Agnes hated Cartaxus, but I can’t believe that she’d be so ruthless.

  If what Regina told me was true, though—about the Viper infecting her daughter to force her to work on a vaccine—then maybe the Agnes I knew during the outbreak was just a lie.

  “Why was she so close to you, anyway?” Anna asks, her eyes narrowing. “Why would she want to help Lachlan’s daughter?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, dropping my eyes. Anna and Cole don’t know the truth about who I am—that I’m sharing a body with Jun Bei. But that has to be the reason that Agnes came to me. It’s the only thing that makes me special. Maybe she wanted to experiment on me.

  But she never did. We were friends for two long years. What the hell was she playing at?

  “We should get out of here,” Cole says, stacking the files in a pile. “She’ll be watching this place. Ziana seems stable enough to move.”

  “We still don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I say. “That tank could have been keeping her stable. I can’t check much without a panel in her arm, and any scans I run won’t mean much if her DNA is unusual. I don’t even know what her baseline readings are supposed to be when she’s healthy.”

  Cole lifts a file, waving a page of data readings at me. “We’ve got plenty on Ziana’s DNA here. We’ll find a place to stop and check on her—we can even bring the tank in the jeep, I don’t care. I just want to get the hell away from this place.”

  I frown as he closes the file. “Wait—can you show me that again?”

  “Sure.” He spreads the pages out on the floor for me to read. I drop down to my knees, scanning them. They’re DNA reports on Ziana and the other children. Ziana’s DNA is like nothing I’ve seen before—she has sixty chromosomes, and there are clearly genes from Hydra’s DNA mixed with her own. But there are more than five reports here—there are eight, grouped as four sets of two. Leoben’s, Ziana’s, and Jun Bei’s reports are grouped with other subjects, but Cole’s is grouped with Anna’s. Each pair shares a vat number and hexadecimal code. Lachlan said the children were grown in tanks—but it looks like they weren’t grown in them alone. They were grown in pairs.

  “What is it?” Cole asks.

  “The Zarathustra experiments,” I say. “You were all grown in pairs, two subjects to a tank.”

  Anna exchanges a look with Cole. “Were we in one together?”

  I nod, gesturing for Cole to flip the pages. “You were—I think all the pairs were siblings, but most of them didn’t survive.”

  “So Ziana…?” Anna asks.

  “Had a sister,” I say, rocking back on my heels. I scan the file with Lee’s report. “Leoben had a brother. I think some of them were twins, but they died when they were infected with Hydra during the experiment. You were the only ones to survive.”

  I skim the pages, spotting the report on Jun Bei’s tank. Jun Bei was right when she said she had a sister she’d lost. She was grown sharing it with another girl, who didn’t survive the infection process. A half sibling. I scan the pages, and my blood runs cold. It’s my DNA, base for base.

  But that can’t be right.

  My heartbeat thuds in my ears. How could my DNA be printed here, years before Lachlan created me? I stare at the report, trying to understand. The subject who died was also Lachlan’s daughter, but she wasn’t Regina’s. She had a different mother—someone with dark hair and gray eyes.

  Jun Bei wasn’t the only child of Lachlan’s the Viper created to control him.

  I press my hands to my eyes, my thoughts spinning to the photograph of Lachlan and the woman I thought was my mother. Regina said he was married to someone else when she became pregnant. That must be her. But why would Lachlan create me in the image of another child he’d lost, when he was planning to wipe me? Why torture himself like that?

  “Are you okay?” Cole asks me.

  I just drop my hands, shaking my head. I can’t speak, can’t think. The genome report of Jun Bei’s sister is spread out before me, marked in the same emerald-green pen as the rest of the files. A segment of the DNA that matches mine has been underlined and circled. But there’s another note beside it, scrawled in a different pen.

  Catarina, it says. Vector.

  I stare at the file, my stomach tightening into a fist. This is too much—I don’t understand who I am. Why would Lachlan base my DNA on this daughter? Why was Agnes so interested in me? Why is everything in my life a twisted mess of lies?

  “Cat?” Cole urges, a note of panic in his voice. He drops to his knees beside me, but I can barely hear him over the hurricane inside my mind.

  “Just… just give me a second,” I manage to choke out. My vision is wavering, an ache starting up in the base of my skull. The fear I’ve been locking away inside me, the anger and confusion is rising up in a wave that’s taking my breath away. I scrunch my eyes shut against the files spread out on the floor, balling my hands into fists. But there’s no darkness behind my eyelids.

  I’m in a gleaming white room surrounded by medical equipment, the air scented with copper. There’s a figure lying back on an operating chair beside me, and the base of my skull feels like it’s on fire. The implant is glitching. I’m seeing through Jun Bei’s eyes. There’s blood on my hands, and my heart is pounding.

  And Leoben is lying beside me, his skin pallid, a jagged incision open in his chest.

  I jerk back into the cabin, gasping, scrambling to my feet. Cole and Anna are both staring at me, their eyes wide. My stomach twists. Leoben didn’t just look hurt—he
looked dead. Jun Bei had his blood on her hands. She was experimenting on him. That was real.

  “Holy shit,” I gasp. “I think she killed him.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Cole says. “What happened? You disappeared. Who got killed?”

  “I… I need to call someone,” I say, dragging my hands back through my hair. My breathing is quick and shallow, my heart feeling like it’s beating out of my chest. I have to get out of here, away from these files, from the tank, from Ziana’s unconscious body. “It’s an emergency. I’ll explain later.”

  “Who are you calling?” Anna yells, but I’m already across the room, running up the stairs and through the cabin’s living room. The front door is closed, but I focus on the lake beyond it, my mind spinning frantically for a way out, for air and space and safety. And suddenly I’m outside.

  The air is warm, the lake glittering. I’m standing on its shore. I must have jumped here in Veritas without even meaning to. All I can think about is Leoben’s face, his skin deathly pale, his eyes closed. He looked dead, but that can’t be possible. Maybe that wasn’t really a flash. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe Leoben is safely at Cartaxus, and everything is okay.

  I drag up my comm and try calling Dax. A connection icon spins in my vision for less than a second before disappearing. Dax blinks into view in front of me, his hair wild, his eyes bloodshot.

  “What’s happening?” he barks. “Why didn’t you answer me before?”

  “Where’s Leoben?” I blurt out.

  He stiffens. “Why?”

  “I saw him—but it wasn’t here. I saw him through Jun Bei’s eyes.”

  He stares at me. “You can do that? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have used that kind of intel—”