by Emily Suvada
“But I feel guilty,” I say. “I can’t stop thinking about those hackers back at Novak’s base, even now. I can’t stop thinking about everyone who’s died or been hurt because of me.”
Mato stares into my eyes, his face tight and deadly serious. “That isn’t you, Jun Bei. That isn’t the girl I know. It’s time to remember who you really are.”
CHAPTER 28 CATARINA
ANNA STIFFENS, HER EYES CUTTING to the horizon as the roar of the Comox’s rotors grows louder. From the sound of them, we only have a minute or two before it reaches us. That’s not enough time to pack Agnes’s files into the jeep, or even take Ziana with us. It’s not enough time for us to race up the driveway and get out of here. It’s over. Cartaxus is coming to take us back to Lachlan’s laboratory, and it’s all my fault.
“What the hell have you done, Agatta?” Anna spits, furious. “You called them, didn’t you? This was all a trap. We should never have trusted you.”
“No, please. Let me explain,” I beg. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
Cole is standing frozen in the grass, staring at me. “What did you mean about Leoben? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know.” My voice trembles. Even now, I can’t be sure if Leoben was alive in the flash I saw of him through Jun Bei’s eyes. I might just be trying to convince myself that he’s okay. “He was being held at Cartaxus, but Jun Bei took him. I think she’s experimenting on him.”
“How do you know this?” Cole’s brow creases. “Did you hack into her tech?”
“Something like that.” I turn to the mountain, where the dark shape of the Comox is drawing closer. “Cartaxus is coming for you. Maybe you can hide if you head into the hills.”
“I’m not going back to them.” Anna spins around, heading for the jeep, her rifle swinging wildly from its shoulder strap. “There’s cover in the trees. We can still run.”
“What about Zan?” Cole asks. “We might need the tank for her. There’s no time to load it.”
Anna looks back at Cole, then at the cabin. She must have left Ziana downstairs in the basement. She lets out a growl, then turns on me. “I swear to God, Agatta. I’m gonna hunt you down and make you pay for this, if it’s the last thing I do.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmur. It sounds pathetic, even to me. She’s right—this is my fault. I’m the one who brought us here. I’m the reason these troops are arriving now. I betrayed Anna and Cole, but I don’t want Cartaxus to take them anymore. This is bigger than the vaccine, than Lachlan or the chance of getting a body of my own. We have to find out if Leoben’s okay, and we have to figure out a way to stop Agnes.
The Comox draws nearer, its roar filling the valley. Cole turns and strides back into the cabin as the Comox swoops in across the mountains and drops down beside the lake. The wash from its rotors cuts white peaks into the dark water. Cole emerges from the cabin again with Ziana’s limp, unconscious body in his arms.
Anna looks back at him, her rifle in her hands. “There’s just one team in the Comox, Cole. We can win this fight.”
“No, you can’t,” I say, my chest tightening. Anna might be able to take out half a dozen soldiers, but Cole won’t be able to, not anymore. He’s lost his black-out upgrades—his targeting, his sensory filters. “Cole can’t take a bullet, not in the state he’s in. There’s not enough tech left in his body to save him. There has to be another way.”
“Another way?” Anna asks. She throws her hands up. “Another way would have been you not freaking out and calling Cartaxus. Now we’re screwed.”
“I’ll think of something,” I say. Cole and I have escaped from Cartaxus before. Maybe I’ll be able to hack the Comox and knock the soldiers out. Maybe I’ll be able to call Dax again and beg him to let us go. This is about more than the vaccine—Agnes is trying to start a war, and it’s working. Someone needs to go after her.
But even if I can get Cole and Anna free, I don’t think they’ll agree to help me again.
The Comox’s rotors roar as it jolts down on the grass beside the cabin. The door springs open, and a troop of black-clad soldiers spills out onto the ground. Their chests are stamped with Cartaxus’s white antlers, and they have rifles in their hands. They fan out in the grass, forming a loose semicircle around us.
I draw in a slow breath, trying to clear the buzzing in my head and send a comm to Dax. The network icon spins in my vision, but he doesn’t answer. One of the soldiers shouts for Anna to drop her weapon and for Cole to put Ziana down. They aren’t shooting at their legs like the soldiers did when they came to the cabin to get Lachlan and Dax during the outbreak. Someone must have told them that firing at two black-out agents wouldn’t be a smart idea.
“We’re with Cartaxus, you idiots!” Anna yells, standing beside the jeep. Her rifle is still in her hands, and she’s not getting on her knees. “We’re here on a mission that you assholes are screwing up.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” one of the soldiers shouts back. “We’re here on orders from central command. We’re to bring you to Homestake to prep for transport to headquarters tonight.”
Anna’s jaw tightens. Homestake is the closest Cartaxus bunker, and it’s where Cole, Leoben, Dax, and I went to steal a clonebox for the vaccine’s decryption. We got out of there by running Jun Bei’s kick simulation, forcing the airlocks open and escaping in a wave of chaos. The bunker’s security system has probably been updated to stop the same attack being used again, but there’s a chance I could find a way to hack their systems and get us out.
“We have to prepare before leaving,” Cole says, shifting Ziana in his arms. There’s color in her cheeks, and she seems to be breathing easily, but she’s still not showing any signs of waking up. There were sedatives in the fluid in her tank, but nothing strong enough to keep her out like this. “This girl needs a tank.”
“We have plenty of tanks at Homestake,” the soldier says. “We’ve been printing them for months. We’ll get her in one as soon as we arrive.”
Anna’s hand tightens on her rifle. Her eyes dart between the soldiers, as though sizing them up.
“I’m not giving up, Anna,” I say. “I want to go after Agnes too, but I don’t think we should fight right now.”
She scowls, standing silently for a long moment, then tilts her head back in frustration. “Fine,” she says, throwing her rifle down. “Take us in. You’d better keep me the hell away from whatever cell you’re being held in, Agatta, or you’re in for a very slow and painful death.” The soldiers move toward her, but she waves them off, marching to the Comox on her own.
Cole follows her in and stays with Ziana as the soldiers strap her to a stretcher on a collapsible metal cart. I walk up the Comox’s ramp behind them and head straight for a corner of the cargo hold, then lean against the wall with my arms crossed, trying to avoid getting too close to the soldiers. I can’t let any of them touch me or their hands will pass right through me. They don’t know I’m not really here, since only a handful of people even know Veritas exists. It’s normal for people to appear in VR to comm one another, but those calls aren’t visible to anyone else. If the soldiers think I’m here in person, it might give me an advantage if there’s a chance for Cole and Anna to escape.
We lift off, sending frothy waves lapping at the lake’s shores, then cut across the Black Hills, soaring over the mountains. The cabin shrinks below us, receding into the patchwork landscape of granite and pines. Anna paces back and forth like a caged animal, but Cole sits quietly with his back against the Comox’s side, his focus turned inward. I don’t think he cares about being brought back to Cartaxus, but he’s worried about Leoben, and I am too. The memory of Lee’s face as he lay in the operating chair keeps slicing through me. I know he’s not really my brother—I don’t have any claim on caring about him other than the few weeks we spent together—but he still feels like family, somehow. The emotion is so strong and pure, it’s hard to even think about him being gone. I’ve lost everyone else, even Agnes. I can’t lose
Leoben, too.
It only takes a few minutes to reach the mile-wide wasteland around the Homestake bunker. It’s as empty and desolate as the last time I saw it, the ground thick with ash, the perimeter still guarded by spiderlike gun-bots. The entrances to the top of the bunker look different, though. Before, all I can remember seeing was the control tower and a couple of heavily guarded doors with an underground entrance for vehicles. Now there’s a giant rectangular opening cut into the ground that looks like the blast doors at the top of Entropia. Massive square doors are tilted up and out of the earth, a small mountain of dirt and ash heaped around them. The entire entrance must have been buried, waiting to be unearthed when Cartaxus was ready to open the bunkers. The Comox tilts, heading for the dark, gaping opening, and drops into the ground.
Inside, we descend through a vast concrete chasm, its sides lined with metal railings and blinding floodlights. It isn’t circular like the atrium in Entropia; instead it’s shaped more like a wedge, its sides veering in and out as we drop past landing pads and loading bays. It’s hard to fathom how big the bunker really is—this is just the top section, where the military barracks and scientific labs are located. For every floor we drop past, there are another dozen levels deep below us, buried in the earth, holding tens of thousands of civilians. It looks like Homestake is loosening its security in preparation for eventually opening up, but I’m sure the civilians are still being kept in their levels, safely locked underground.
We swing into a helipad on a dimly lit level. Crates are stacked across the floor, stamped with the names of various polymers and ceramic powders. Printing supplies. The Comox jolts, touching down, and the soldiers train their rifles on us as the doors slide open.
“You can put the rifles away,” Anna says, rolling her eyes. “We’re not even armed, assholes.”
“We’ve been told you’re highly trained,” the soldier who spoke to us before says. “You’re to be prepped for transport. Follow us, please.”
One of the others starts wheeling Ziana’s stretcher down the Comox’s ramp. Cole stands. “What do you mean, prepped?” he asks. “Where are you taking her?”
“You’ll see soon, sir,” the soldier says, gesturing for us to leave. “We’re not trying to make this difficult. We’re on the same side, but orders are orders. None of you will be harmed if you cooperate.”
Anna’s face darkens as she heads down the ramp, following the soldiers along a hallway to a bigger loading bay. It’s stacked with more crates, and the air smells faintly of burned plastic. The man wheeling Ziana’s stretcher swings open a door and pushes Ziana into a wide, shadowy room.
I follow Cole and Anna in, the floor shifting beneath my feet as the Veritas simulation updates. The darkened edges of the room warp in my vision. Someone closes the door once Cole is through and flips on a light. Anna stops suddenly, looking up, and I freeze as the walls come into focus.
They’re glinting, lined with glass, but not from windows. It’s the glint of countless suspension tanks identical to the one we found Ziana in. They stretch out along the sides of the room, stacked in columns all the way to the ceiling, with metal handles built into the glass to pull them out like drawers in a morgue. I sway, looking over them. There must be thousands, all filled with floating bodies and coiling black cables. Flashes of green skin and multicolored hair peek through the tanks’ blue, glimmering fluid. They’re obviously genehackers. These are the people Cartaxus rounded up and dragged into their bunkers during flood protocol. These tanks aren’t here to stabilize or help them, though. This is a prison.
“What the hell is this?” Anna asks, horrified. “Who told you to lock these people up?”
“Orders came from Brink,” one of the soldiers says, wheeling Ziana toward a row of open, empty tanks. “Thankfully, he got us printing the tanks a while before we needed them, so we were ready.” He nods to the far wall, where a printer has been built into the concrete. Its three nozzles slide back and forth as it constructs a new tank. “They’re adapted from the vats we use to grow meat for the bunkers,” the soldier continues. “We’ve been needing more every day. Not for the freaks—for the civs. They’re getting rowdy. There’s a protest downstairs right now.”
“So you’re locking the civilians up?” Cole asks.
“Can’t risk a rebellion,” the soldier says. “Half the bunkers around the world have been putting down riots for weeks.”
I stare in horror at the tanks. Locking people up like this is better than killing them, I guess, but it’s just as dehumanizing and wrong. There are children in some of these tanks. These people have been herded like cattle, stripped, and forced into these glass prisons. They must have been terrified.
I dig my fingernails into my hand. Whatever people do to animals, they’ll eventually do to their enemies. And whatever they do to their enemies, they’ll eventually do to one another. One of the tanks holds a boy who can’t be more than ten, his eyes open and unseeing, a black cable curling into the back of his neck. Part of me wants to hack every door in this room, to open every tank, to kill every soldier keeping them locked away.
“Wait. What did you mean about us being prepped for transport?” Anna asks, her eyes cutting to the row of freshly printed tanks. The soldiers are wheeling Ziana to one, jacking cables into the side. “You’re not expecting us to let ourselves get locked in those things, are you?”
The soldier in charge shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Orders are orders, ma’am.”
“Oh hell no,” Anna says, backing away, her eyes flashing to black. “If you have some plan to get us out of here, Agatta, now would be the time.”
“On it,” I say, letting my eyes glaze, sending out a pulse from my cuff. There’s no way I’m letting these soldiers lock Cole and Anna up in tanks. I draw up the bunker’s system interface in my vision, scanning its networks, trying to remember the best way to launch an attack to get us out of here.…
But before I can run a single script, the screen in the corner of the room flashes red. An alarm blares through speakers in the ceiling, and the soldiers freeze halfway through lifting Ziana into the empty tank.
“What is it?” one of them calls.
“The system says it’s detected a mutiny,” the leader says. “Protest downstairs must have gotten out of hand. We’re to secure the stairwells.” He flings open the door we came through, gesturing for the others to follow. “Come on, we can leave them locked in here. They won’t be going anywhere.”
The soldiers rush out into the loading bay, slamming the door behind them. The sensor beside it blinks to red as the lock clicks shut.
“Well, this is just great,” Anna says, throwing her hands up. “We should have killed these soldiers back at the cabin. It’s gonna be a shitshow getting out of here now.”
But I don’t reply. White text scrolls across the screen in the corner.
MUTINY DETECTED. LOCKDOWN IN PROGRESS.
Suddenly the red background switches to black, a countdown blazing in white, square numbers, ticking down from ten minutes. A single line of blocky text is printed above the numbers.
MUTINY PROTOCOL: HOMESTAKE BUNKER SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED.
“Guys?” I say, staring at the words. “I think we have a bigger problem.”
“What?” Cole asks. His brow creases as he follows my gaze. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I think it means exactly what it says,” I say. “We have ten minutes until this bunker kills us all.”
CHAPTER 29 JUN BEI
MATO INSISTS THAT I GET some rest as we drive across the desert. I mean only to close my eyes, but sleep takes me under, and it’s midday when I wake. The sun is high in a cloudless sky, the rocky hills on the horizon forming patterns that grow familiar as we approach Entropia. At first the land is barren, with nothing but rocks and wiry brown bushes clawing their way across the dirt, but then the occasional splash of color appears. A scarlet vine creeping over a boulder. A patch of swaying, butter-yellow wheat. E
very mile we drive, I see more mutated plants, their seeds stolen on the wind or in the stomachs of birds, scattered in a patchwork of color around the city. We start to see feathers, too—black and cobalt-tipped—drifting across the ground in waves and collecting at the base of cliffs.
Mato sits beside me, his mask almost transparent, Leoben’s blood still caked into the creases of his knuckles. He has to be exhausted, and I know he’s in shock after losing his eye, but he hasn’t complained. He doesn’t push me to talk, and the silence between us feels comfortable rather than strained. My thoughts keep circling back to what he said about the day I wiped my memories—about the sixty people killed by my code.
He said I murdered them.
The thought sends a chill through me. There’s no reason to think Mato is lying. He’s the only one who knows what I was doing in those six months. I know I killed people when I was escaping from the lab, and I’d hurt people when I was younger, but that was in self-defense. It’s wildly different from sending sixty people to their deaths.
Who did I become when I was in the desert with Mato?
“We’re not far away from the city,” he says, looking over at me. “We should reach the outskirts in just a few minutes.”
“Good,” I say, flipping down the sun visor, checking my face in the mirror. I look awful. Blood on my skin, dust in my hair, and a purple bruise on my forehead. “Any news from Novak’s people?”
“The chatter about the attack has gone dark, and there hasn’t been a word on the Skies forums about it either. It’s being kept quiet.”
I flip the visor back up. “But there must be survivors. People were getting away, right? We got away.”
Mato presses his lips together. His missing eye is still closed beneath his mask, a bruise blooming around it. “That’s because Novak left us this vehicle. There were destroyers on the way. Novak might have managed to evacuate, but there’s a chance everyone else was killed.”
