by Emily Suvada
“Okay, stand back,” Cole says, taking the blade from between his teeth. A track of weeping, pink skin is traced along his shoulder and neck, curving around his face and into the outer edge of his eye. The leyline hangs like a wet, blood-flecked string from his fingers. He presses it in a rough circle to the door, smoothing it against the metal, and backs away.
“Three seconds,” he says, turning, scanning the hallway. Soldiers and civilians are bolting toward us, just moments away. Cole’s eyes lock on me, and for the briefest moment I feel like he’s the Cole I know—the one whose wounds I’ve patched up, the one who blew up buildings in Sunnyvale, screaming my name. I’m not really here in this hallway, but I can still be hurt.
Maybe that’s why he lunges for me, pushing me to the floor, and curves his body over mine as the loop of bloody leyline detonates in a blinding flash of light.
The door blows outward, taking chunks of the concrete wall with it. A roar cuts the air, followed by a wave of heat and a cloud of billowing smoke. Cole shudders, collapsing through me, slumping to the floor. The pressure of the blast rolls over me in a prickling crush as Veritas tries to re-create the feeling of getting trapped in the explosion. Anna stumbles back, falling against Ziana. The crowd racing down the hallway toward us skids to a stop. They turn frantically, pushing against one another to get away.
“Cole?” I ask, heaving myself up so I’m propped on one elbow. He’s lying right through me, his chest intersecting with mine, my image flickering around him. The sensation feels like I’m being crushed, a weight smashing down into my chest, but I don’t care—he’s lying flat and motionless. I don’t think he’s breathing.
“Cole!”
Anna crawls to his side, coughing, and grabs his shoulder to flip him over. He drags in a wheezing, gasping breath, blood spraying from an inch-wide wound in his shoulder. It looks deep, and it’ll strain what’s left of his healing tech, but it won’t kill him. She looks back at the crowd through the smoke. They’re starting to turn back to us now that the explosion is over and the door is open. The Comox is standing on the landing pad beyond it.
“Nice work, Cole,” she hisses through gritted teeth. “You protected the only one of us who isn’t really here. Now get up. We need to run.”
He wheezes, rolling to his side, then swoops up Ziana’s limp body and stands in one swift movement.
Anna looks like she might argue about him carrying Ziana while he’s wounded, but then she shoots a glance at the crush of civilians and leaps to her feet. “Come on!” she yells, bolting for the twisted wreckage of the door. “Hurry!”
“Stop!” one of the soldiers in the hallway shouts, and the crowd’s voices rise in confusion. They’re streaming back toward us now, shoving past one another to run for the blown-out door. Anna scrambles through it and out onto the landing pad with Cole and Ziana following close behind.
I angle myself through the jagged hole, bolting after them as a barrage of shots rings out. Soldiers and civilians are running from the loading bay, all desperate for a way out of the bunker.
Anna reaches the helipad and yanks at the Comox’s door. “It’s locked!”
“On it!” I yell, sending out a pulse with my cuff, diving into the Comox’s controls. The firewalls are rudimentary, tumbling within seconds. The door hisses open, and Anna sprints in, followed by Cole with Ziana in his arms. I bolt into the cargo hold and send a command to close the door. The loading ramp retracts. Anna runs to the pilot’s seat and grabs the controls, spinning up the rotors, looking over her shoulder at the hallway behind us.
It’s swarming with people now. They’re stumbling through the blasted metal door, some of the soldiers lifting rifles to fire at us. Others are racing for the Comox as it begins to rise. I don’t know if they’re trying to stop us or trying to get on board and escape the flood of panicked civilians stampeding from the bunker.
Anna leans forward, peering up through the windshield at a circle of light at the top of the chasm we flew down in. The Comox tilts, lifting away from the landing pad, a hail of bullets smacking into its side.
“I didn’t know you could fly,” I say.
“That’s because I can’t.” Anna’s knuckles are white on the controls, her shoulders tight. “I can babysit an autopilot, but let’s hope we don’t need much more than that.”
Cole lays Ziana on the floor, then stands and looks through the window. I join him, pressing my hands to the glass as the landing pad shrinks below us. The soldiers have given up on shooting at us and are running for a metal stairwell leading down to another landing pad with a Comox waiting on it. Behind them, figures are spilling through the hole in the door, stumbling in the smoke, searching desperately for a way out. It must be like this on every level. Eighty thousand terrified civilians. After losing their oxygen supply, they’re not going to want to be locked up in an airlock ever again. They won’t trust Cartaxus to protect them. Word of this is going to spread—and that’s exactly what Agnes wants. To destabilize Cartaxus and turn their people against them. She’s throwing gasoline onto the spark of a devastating war.
We fly up through the open blast doors and above the bunker’s wasteland. The air is swirling with dust from the thousands of people streaming out of the surface exits. Some are huddled in groups, staring around them, while others are running for the perimeter fence and the forest beyond it. Homestake’s civilians are out, and I don’t think they’re ever going back inside.
“What the hell do we do now?” Anna asks. She looks back at Cole and me.
“We have to stop Agnes,” I say.
“How?” Anna asks. “We don’t know where she is, and we don’t have a plan.”
Cole turns from the window, kneeling back down beside Ziana. He checks her pulse with his fingers. “Whatever we’re doing, Zan still might need a tank. And we have to find out if this is really her.”
“I can’t do that without a lab,” I say. “We could go back to the cabin.”
“So you can freak out and call Cartaxus on us again?” Anna asks.
“That’s not what happen—”
“Sure it isn’t,” she says. “You’re the old man’s daughter, and you led us into a trap. We should never have trusted you.”
“Cat said that isn’t what happened,” Cole says, a hard edge to his voice. “She helped us escape, Anna. The jeep is at the cabin. We should go back and figure out a plan from there.”
“Cat?” Anna spits. “I’m not gonna let myself get captured because you have feelings for her.”
Cole’s shoulders tense, and a jolt runs through me. He called me Cat. He threw his body over mine when the door exploded. My heart kicks hard against my ribs. Suddenly our past feels so close—like if I just grabbed his hand and pressed my lips to his, I could make him remember. But I know that’s impossible. I can’t even touch him.
“I don’t know how I feel,” he says carefully, “but I know how I felt. I trusted Catarina before, and I trust myself. I say we go back to the cabin.”
Anna glares at us, her eyes cutting between me and Cole, then lets out an exasperated sigh and turns back to the Comox’s controls. “Fine, but when we end up in a lab with a cable jacked into us because she dragged us there, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The Comox tilts south. We race over the rolling, shadowy forest of the Black Hills, following the pale outline of a highway. The sun is high, the sky cloudless, craters and scorch marks from Cartaxus’s attacks slashed across the landscape like the scars on Cole’s chest. Ziana, or the body that looks like her, is still and lifeless on the floor. There’s no muscle response, no sign of her waking up—just the occasional twitch along with her slow, steady breathing. I don’t understand what Agnes would need her for, or what she’s planning to do next.
Agnes said she wanted to control this war, including bringing about its end. She said she could build a new, stronger world. But any world built on the back of manipulation and violence can’t be much better than this one.
&n
bsp; The Comox slows, dropping as we draw closer to the cabin. Cole pushes himself back to his feet to watch as we descend. “Someone’s taking the jeep,” he says, staring through the window. “They’re heading up the driveway now.”
“Could it be Agnes?” I ask. “Now that she’s seen Ziana, she knows what we found in the cabin. She might have come here to take the files.”
“The Comox’s scanner can’t tell who’s driving,” Anna yells back. “One person, though—looks small.”
“That could be her,” I say, my stomach tightening.
“I’m gonna try to land in the driveway and cut them off,” Anna says, jerking the controls. The Comox tilts wildly, its engine straining. “I don’t really know how to do this part, though, so you’d better both hang on.”
Cole grabs hold of the netting on the ceiling, and we veer down toward the trees. The black jeep is barreling up the hill away from the cabin, picking up speed, fishtailing on the curves. We jolt down in the middle of the driveway. The jeep swerves wildly, trying to get around us, but there’s no room and nowhere to run.
Anna jumps out of the pilot’s seat, slamming the button beside the Comox’s door to open it. She throws her head back suddenly. “Dammit. I can’t do anything without my goddamn rifle.”
The jeep’s engine roars as the driver reverses into a tree and then flies forward again, trying to turn around and head back toward the cabin.
Cole climbs out of the Comox, his eyes glazing. “I should be able to send a command to stop the jeep, but I don’t think my tech is working.”
“Give it to me, I’ll send…,” Anna starts, then trails off as the jeep brakes suddenly. Its engine cuts out, its taillights going dim. She looks around at me. “Did you do that?”
I shake my head. The driver’s door swings open, and a girl steps out, staring back at Cole and Anna. Her eyes are wide, her body small and thin. She’s looking at us like she can’t believe we’re really here, and Cole and Anna are staring at her in the exact same way.
It’s Ziana.
CHAPTER 33 JUN BEI
AGNES WALKS ACROSS THE LAB, the scorpion skittering along the lab counter beside her. Its metal legs click over a heap of broken glass, its laser eye trained on me. The charred hole in the concrete wall lets in slanting shafts of afternoon light, and the hum of the celebrations in the park fills the air. Agnes’s gray hair is back in a plait, her eyes piercing as she looks me up and down.
A sudden image flashes back to me of her sitting in the cabin’s basement. It’s one of the few memories from Catarina that have bled through to me. Agnes must be important to Catarina. So why is she here now, in Regina’s lab, threatening me?
“Agnes,” I say cautiously. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” She glances at the scorpion. Its scarlet eye splashes out a laser grid, scanning me. “Don’t worry—it won’t attack unless I tell it to. This one has been my companion for a long time now. It’s fairly well-behaved.” She reaches one hand out, and the scorpion crawls beneath it, pressing up against her fingers affectionately. It’s not just a machine, I remind myself. Scorpions are full of neural tissue. They can think and learn on their own. That’s what makes them so dangerous.
“How did you get in here?” I ask. Agnes is lucky Mato isn’t with me. The last time he saw Agnes, she shot him in the chest, and now she’s standing uninvited in Regina’s lab, with a scorpion aiming the muzzle-point of its tail at me. Mato hasn’t been shy about using the scythe at the first sign of a threat. But if this scorpion is hers, then killing her might set it off, and I have no idea how to destroy it.
“I always had one rule with security design,” Agnes says. She turns her head, looking through the hole in the wall out at the curving concrete walls of the atrium. “Don’t build a prison you can’t escape from, or a bunker you can’t get into.”
I frown. “Are you saying that you built Entropia?”
“In a way,” she says, a smile crinkling her eyes. “I was the one who organized its construction, along with the rest of the bunkers. I built them, just like I built Cartaxus. And now I’m here to help you bring them down.”
It hits me suddenly. “You’re the Viper. You used to run Cartaxus.”
It isn’t a question—it’s the only thing that makes sense. Agnes’s access to this lab, the way she took control of Anna’s black-out tech during flood protocol. The fact that she’s here with a scorpion. I grew up hearing snatches of gossip and stories about the Viper’s cruelty. She’s done unconscionable things to motivate her scientists in their work on the vaccine. I look down at the crusted blood on my hands, remembering Leoben’s fear when he learned what I was going to do to him. I know what it’s like to hurt people to finish a piece of code that you think will save the world. It makes sense if you force yourself to think about it. But that doesn’t make it right.
“I’ve never cared for that name,” Agnes says. “But yes, I used to run Cartaxus. You and I have even met before. I visited the Zarathustra lab once to check on you and the other children. I doubt you’d remember—you were very young, and I looked a little different back then, but I still remember you. I’ve watched you grow, and watched you develop into the coder you are today. I tracked you as you built the Panacea—forging it out of Lachlan’s work and your own. I know you’re planning to send it out, and I’m sure you’ve realized that you’ll have to keep control over it, but you’re far too young to have the weight of that kind of responsibility on your shoulders.”
My chest tightens. Now I understand why she’s here. She’s brought a scorpion to try to take the Panacea away from me. The Viper’s obsession with finding a vaccine was as legendary as her manipulativeness. My eyes cut to the darkened spot on the floor where Regina died. Regina told me that Agnes almost broke her—she took her daughter and infected her, then created me as a human bargaining chip to try to keep Regina and Lachlan under control. Now the vaccine she’s been so desperate for is in my arm, along with a way to control people’s minds. Of course she wants it.
My skin crawls with the thought of what she could do with the Panacea.
“I’m guessing you think you’d be a better person to keep control of it?” I ask. I look over my shoulder. There’s still no sign of Mato. He’s working on getting the network ready, making sure we can send out the code.
“I’m just here to help you,” Agnes says. “If you join me, we can work together to build the new world you’re trying to create. You can’t go up against Cartaxus on your own. They’re too strong. I’m the only person who can break them apart and make sure that this world rises from their ashes. I’ve already turned their civilians against them with the Lurkers. The world is on the brink of war, but it doesn’t have to spill into bloodshed. This was always supposed to be a controlled transition.”
Her words spin in my mind. I step back, swaying. “You… you’ve been creating the Lurkers? It wasn’t my code? It wasn’t broken?”
“Oh, it’s broken,” Agnes says, “but not in a way that would turn people into monsters. Your work is stunning, Jun Bei. It’s also deeply flawed, just like Lachlan’s vaccine, but you’re holding the key to fixing it. Join with me, and there’ll be no stopping us.”
I frown. “What do you mean—the vaccine is flawed?” There haven’t been any reports of infection since Catarina and I sent out the patched version of the vaccine. If the code started failing, that would change everything. The Panacea is entwined with the vaccine. If Lachlan’s code stops working, then mine will be worthless too.
“The vaccine will never be strong in the way Lachlan has written it,” Agnes says. “But you and I can fix that, and I can fix your Panacea, too. All I need is to run a simple test on your DNA. Well, not your DNA, actually. The DNA of someone very special that you’re keeping inside you.”
A chill rolls through me. She means Catarina. I can’t imagine any reason why Agnes would want her DNA, though. Catarina’s DNA was just created by Lachlan as a cover-up to ke
ep me hidden. Agnes steps closer. “Join with me and let me run the tests I need, and we can both bring this world into a new and stable peace.”
“I think you should get the hell out of here before I use the scythe.”
I’m not bluffing, I realize with surprise. Everything Agnes has said so far has been a threat, and there’s a laser-eyed scorpion aimed at me, but nothing has ruffled me until she brought Catarina into this. There’s no reason for Agnes to need her DNA or run a test on her. Catarina has been through enough already. She’s supposed to wake up in a new world, when I’ve found a way to save her.
If Agnes wants access to her DNA, then she’s going to have to go through me.
“You think the scythe will work?” Agnes lifts an eyebrow. “Mato used it on a dozen Cartaxus guards. I still have access to their systems. They have your code now as well as a defense against it. It won’t work on me, child.”
I ball my hands into fists. Mato. I knew it was too big a risk to use the scythe when we were at Cartaxus. Now they can send it out, and the genehackers on the surface are vulnerable. The war that’s brewing might not be a war at all. It could be an instant digital genocide. Everything I’ve fought for will be gone.
“You’re angry,” she says. “That’s understandable, but I was hoping to have you beside me to launch this code.”
“I’m not giving you the Panacea.”
She shakes her head. “Fine, but you’ll be begging to join me within hours. You just don’t know it yet.” She steps past me, heading for the steel door that leads out of the lab.
“You’re leaving?” My hands itch to grab her as she walks past, to scramble for one of the scalpels in the lab counter’s drawers, but the scorpion’s muzzle is aimed at my chest.
She turns back. “I have other ways of getting the Panacea and Catarina’s DNA. I’m not going to cut into your skull against your will—Lachlan has a clone that should give me what I need. He has the Panacea, too, I assume, since he’s the one who added it to the vaccine. When you realize how wrong you’ve been and decide you need to join me after all, I’ll be waiting. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but some lessons need to be learned the hard way.”
