This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  She strides out of the lab, leaving me alone with the scorpion. The heavy metal door shuts behind her, a beep sounding as it locks. The scorpion’s legs click over the counter’s dusty surface, its laser eye locked on me. I stand frozen, watching it, sending out a pulse from my cuff, but the only readings I get back are incomprehensible.

  The scorpion is running on an outdated coding language that I never bothered to learn. If I had a few hours to study it, I’m sure I could hack in, but I don’t think I have nearly that long. I take a step toward the door, and the scorpion skitters forward on the counter, its red eye flashing.

  Definitely not that long.

  I tense, sending a barrage of attacks through my cuff—nothing specific, just a sampling of viruses to see if any of them work. The scorpion lowers itself on its metal legs, its tail swinging from side to side, and for a moment its laser eye blinks out. I freeze, wondering if something worked, if I’ve beaten it. Then it lets out a metallic trill, leaping into the air.

  I haven’t beaten it. I’ve just pissed it off.

  I dive to the side, but I’m not fast enough. A bullet clips my shoulder, sending me spinning to the floor. The scorpion lands behind me, skidding, scrambling to a stop. I let out a choking cry of pain as it turns. Its red eye is locked on me. It draws itself into another crouch.

  “No, no,” I breathe, ignoring the explosion of pain in my shoulder, tilting my focus into my cuff. None of the attacks I sent did anything at all. Whatever hardware is churning inside this machine is immune to my attacks. The scorpion leaps again, and I grab a chunk of broken concrete from the floor beside me and hurl it at it, knocking it off course.

  The scorpion’s shot goes wide, slamming into the cabinets behind me. Its metal body spins in the air, its legs flailing as it lands on its back on the floor. I look around wildly, sprawled on my side, my shoulder burning. I might have a heartbeat of time to get away, but the door is locked, and the hole in the wall is too high—I’d never survive if I jumped. There’s no way out, and there’s no sign anyone is coming to help me.

  The scorpion flips over, its metallic cry rising into a series of short, furious clicks. It’s really angry now.

  My breath rushes from me as it dawns on me. The scorpion is angry, and that’s why my code is failing. Nothing I’m sending is working because I’ve been trying to hack it like it’s a machine. But it isn’t—it’s alive. These things are part biological. They have nerves. They have neurons. I might not know how to hack old-school code, but I know how to hack a brain.

  The scorpion crouches and leaps into the air, its tail aimed down at me, and I scramble together every neurological attack I can think of. The scythe, Catarina’s recumbentibus, Cartaxus’s own nightstick. They all unfurl from my cuff, beaming into the scorpion’s controls as it flies toward me.

  For a heartbeat, all I can see is the scarlet gleam of its eye; all I can hear is the echo of its shot. Its body jerks in the air as the bullet rips loose. Then it falls, curling up. The bullet slams into the floor beside my chest, and the scorpion lands with a metallic thud, its eye black and lifeless.

  “Holy shit,” I breathe, clutching my shoulder. I send another pulse, making sure it’s really dead. There are no flickers from its controls, no hints of light in my cuff’s interface. I did it. I took a bullet bringing the damn thing down, but it’s dead.

  I push myself to my feet, groaning, stumbling toward the terminal at the back of the lab. I have to warn someone, anyone that Cartaxus has the scythe. I reach the terminal and grip the edges, swaying, as an alert flashes in the bottom of my vision. My blood instantly runs cold.

  This isn’t an alert I’ve seen before, but I know what it is. It has no vitals, no glitch reports, no sign that I’m being hacked. Instead, there’s just a single message that doesn’t make any sense until I drag open the collar of my shirt and look down at the wound in my shoulder.

  It wasn’t a bullet that hit me—it was a pellet. It’s melting into a black, glossy liquid that’s oozing through my torn flesh and across my skin. These kinds of pellets are used to carry nanites designed to run custom code in whoever they hit. This pellet didn’t just wound me, it’s hacking me.

  Now my tech is scrolling with scarlet alerts, and they’re all telling me the same impossible thing: I’m infected with Hydra.

  CHAPTER 34 CATARINA

  THE WALL INSIDE MY MIND shudders as I stare at Ziana. I recognize the curves of her face, her tiny, birdlike frame. But this isn’t the pale, sickly girl lying motionless in the Comox. Her skin is warm and gold tinted, locks of curly black hair falling to her shoulders. Thick lashes frame hazel eyes, her dark brows arching in surprise. The sun is dipping behind the mountains, the warm light turning the curls around her face into a halo. My vision ripples, her face splintering for a moment before re-forming, an ache burning through the base of my skull.

  I don’t know if it’s the shock of seeing Ziana, or if Jun Bei is hurt, but I can feel the implant straining. The world around me flickers, plunging me into darkness before reappearing. Something is definitely wrong.

  Ziana presses her hands to her mouth, choking back a cry, then runs down the driveway, hurling herself into Cole’s arms. “You’re here, you’re here!” she cries into his shirt, letting out a mixture of a sob and a laugh. Cole’s eyes widen. She draws away, sniffing back tears, grabbing Anna to pull her into a hug. I cross my arms, watching them, something tightening inside me.

  These three are family, and I spent weeks thinking that I was part of that family too. I’d just lost everything I’d believed to be true—my past, my identity, and my loyalty to the man I thought was my father. For weeks, all I could cling to was the knowledge that I was Leoben’s sister, Cole’s long-lost love, and someone who’d never gotten along with Anna but still shared something deep with her. All of us were connected by our shared past of pain and hope and comforting one another.

  Now I’m on my own, watching from the outside as they hug, and I couldn’t even join them if they wanted me to because I’m not really here.

  “You have… hair,” Anna says when Ziana finally steps away, swiping her sleeve across her eyes.

  “You have triangles on your arms,” Ziana says, staring at Anna’s tattoos. “And, Cole—you’re so big!”

  “How did you get out?” Cole asks, one hand clutching Ziana’s shoulder, the other wrapped around Anna. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been hiding,” Ziana says. She looks at the Comox, her eyes passing over me without registering my presence. I knew this would happen, but it still hits me with a thud—without ocular tech, there’s no way for Ziana to see me. “The Viper got me out,” she says. “Agnes—the old woman.”

  “She helped you?” Cole asks.

  “She didn’t mean to,” Ziana says. “She kidnapped me and locked me in her house. She said she needed to run experiments on me, but then she just… didn’t. She ended up being nice, and found me a family who took me in and helped me get better. They kept me hidden from Cartaxus. I came here to talk her out of what she’s planning, because I don’t want her to get hurt.”

  I stiffen. “What?” But of course Ziana can’t hear me. “Ask her what she means,” I say to Cole.

  He looks between me and Ziana, confused. “Oh, right. She can’t see you.”

  “See who?” Ziana asks.

  “There’s someone here,” Cole says. “Well, virtually, at least.”

  “Oh.” Ziana digs into her jacket pocket and pulls out a pair of aviator-style digital goggles with gleaming chrome frames and yellow-tinted lenses. The elastic crushes her curls as she pulls them over her head, and her eyes focus on me. “Oh, hi… Wow, you look a lot like Lachlan.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We’re related. It’s complicated. But I got a message from you telling me to come here to stop Agnes.”

  “You’re Catarina.” Ziana’s eyes widen. “Of course. Agnes talked about you all the time. She acted like you were her family.”

  My stomach t
wists. “I thought she was family too. But she’s killing people and trying to start a war.”

  Ziana nods, her curls bouncing. “I know. She used to talk about it when I was staying with her. She wants to break up Cartaxus and build something new in its place. I don’t know exactly what she’s planning, but she’s been working on this for years. She’s going to get herself killed.”

  Anna and Cole exchange a glance. A few minutes ago Anna was recommending that we hunt Agnes down ourselves. I thought Ziana wanted to meet me to suggest a way to stop Agnes’s plans because they’re threatening millions of lives, not because she wants to protect her.

  “I tried to talk Agnes out of what she’s doing,” I say. “She wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “That isn’t true,” Cole says. “She called off the self-destruct.”

  “Only when Catarina threatened to kill Ziana,” Anna says.

  Ziana tilts her head, confused.

  “Not you,” I say, shoving my hand back through my hair. “We found a clone of you. It’s in the Comox.”

  Ziana’s eyes light up. She balls her hands into fists, shaking them with delight. “That’s what we need! Whatever code Agnes is working on, I know it needs my DNA. That’s why she took me from Cartaxus, but then she couldn’t bring herself to experiment on me, so she made a copy she could use instead. If we have the copy, and we have me, then she can’t finish her code.”

  Cole looks at me. “Could it really be that easy?”

  “Maybe,” I murmur, thinking back to the self-destruct sequence at Homestake. Agnes called it off because she thought Ziana was under threat—the real Ziana, next to me. But she didn’t care about the clone. I thought she canceled the self-destruct because she needed Ziana’s DNA. But maybe she’s already got what she needed from the clone, and she just didn’t want to kill the girl she’d grown fond of.

  “What does she need from you?” I ask Ziana. Cole once told me that Ziana’s gift is another sense—that she can feel her body’s systems the same way we feel pain or hunger. Cole said she has too many neurons, but that doesn’t explain how she’d be useful to Agnes.

  “She said she needed my DNA,” Ziana says. “It was something to do with brains. If she already figured it out from the clone, then we need to keep you away from her.”

  I blink. “Me?”

  “Of course,” Ziana says. “That’s why I contacted you. The code she’s working on is based on my DNA as well as yours.”

  “What?” I stare at her. “That can’t be right. There’s no way Agnes needs me. What was the code supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Ziana says, “but she said your DNA was the most important thing she needed. We should go to someone who understands this stuff. They might be able to figure out what she’s working on, and then maybe we can stop it.”

  “You mean Lachlan?” Cole asks.

  “No,” Ziana says. “If I never see him again in my life, I’ll be happy. There’s someone else who could do this, though: Jun Bei. She knows more about my DNA than anyone.”

  “No, no, and no,” Anna says, shaking her head. “We’re not going to that psychopath for help. She almost killed Cole.”

  “She might be our only option,” Cole says.

  “Can you please chill on defending her?” Anna asks. “It’s disturbing, Cole. She threw you out of a goddamn helicopter. She destroyed your tech. You used to be a black-out agent, and now you’re just a walking error message.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Cole asks me, but I barely hear him. My head is spinning. It doesn’t make any sense that Agnes’s plan relies on my DNA—I don’t know what code she’s working on, but I can’t imagine why I’d be useful to her. My DNA isn’t special. I’m not one of the Zarathustra subjects. Unless…

  My mind rolls back to the files in the cabin’s basement, to Jun Bei’s sibling who died. I share her genes. Agnes had circled the report and written my name. Maybe my DNA is more interesting than I thought.

  “I need to see Agnes’s files,” I say, my voice growing tight. “The boxes we found in the basement. We need to go back to the cabin.”

  “So you can freak out again?” Anna asks.

  “Please, I need to see them.”

  “I have them,” Ziana says, walking to the jeep, swinging open the rear doors. The back is a mess of boxes and paper—Ziana must have hauled it all out of the cabin and just thrown it in. I clamber through the open doors and into the back, scanning the files, and spot the folders that were in the box for the Zarathustra Initiative.

  “Cole, can you help me?” I ask, but he’s already climbing in with me.

  He spreads out the files, flipping them open as I point to them. There are pages on Leoben’s immunity to the virus, on Cole’s behavioral responses to gentech code, and on Jun Bei’s genetic flexibility. I freeze when he flips open a file on the other subject grown in Jun Bei’s tank. The girl who shared my DNA. There’s more information here than I saw before, and more notes from Agnes, too. A handful of words are scribbled in emerald ink. Replication. Invasive. Rapid spread. On the file I saw before, she’d written my name, along with “vector.”

  There’s something here—I’m sure of it. I just need to figure out what it means.

  “What are you looking for?” Cole asks. “This is the same person’s file that you were looking at in the cabin.”

  “I don’t know yet.” It looks like Lachlan kept studying samples of this subject’s DNA after she died. It’s clear he found something interesting, and Agnes did too.

  “What does that mean—replication?” Cole asks, scanning the file.

  “I think it means that this girl’s DNA replicates unusually. It looks like it duplicates itself and spreads through cells like…” I trail off, rocking back on my heels. “Like a virus.”

  My head spins. When I confronted Lachlan after Sunnyvale, he told me that all of the Zarathustra subjects were created in tanks in a lab. He said they were infected with the Hydra virus when they were developing. From the files, it looks like barely any of them survived—the only ones out of what must have been hundreds of subjects were Cole, Anna, Ziana, Leoben, and Jun Bei. The virus’s DNA combined with theirs as they were growing, giving them mutations Lachlan had never seen before. Leoben is immune to Hydra. Jun Bei’s cells can survive her DNA being rewritten.

  And the DNA of the subject I’m based on looks like it swarmed through cells, replicating like a virus.

  Or a vector.

  I look up at Cole. “I think Agnes wants to use my DNA as a vector.”

  He frowns. “You said that’s how gentech code gets into cells, right?”

  I nod. Vectors are proteins designed to invade cells and carry DNA into them. They’re like syringes, and the DNA they’re carrying is the medicine inside. All genetic code needs a vector to transport it throughout the body, and most of them are built from viruses. “I think Agnes wants to use me as a vector for whatever code she’s working on. But I don’t know why.”

  Anna leans into the back of the jeep. “Why are you saying that now that you’re looking at these files? Who the hell are you?”

  I look between the three of them, swallowing. I can’t keep this secret any longer, not if we’re going to try to stop Agnes. If she really needs my DNA, there’s a good chance she’ll be going after Jun Bei right now, which means I need to warn her. I can’t keep pretending, and I can’t keep lying. It’s time to tell the truth.

  “I haven’t been honest with you,” I say, looking down at the files. “I’m not Jun Bei’s sister. I mean, I am, but not in the way you think. When Jun Bei left the lab, she was hacking her brain, and she screwed it up.”

  “No surprises there,” Anna says.

  “She almost died,” I say. “She tried to clear out half her brain, and she fell into a coma. Lachlan came and found her—that’s when he left Cartaxus. He took her back to this cabin to look after her, and he realized that it could take years for her brain to recover. She was still in a coma,
and he figured out that she’d heal faster if she was awake. So he changed the side of her brain that she’d cleared out, and rewrote its DNA.…” I swallow, lifting my eyes. “And then that half woke up.”

  Cole goes still, watching me. “The person who woke up is me,” I continue. “Lachlan changed Jun Bei’s face and her body, and her DNA, to hide her, and made me believe I was his daughter. But I was just a tool—a placeholder for him until Jun Bei was ready to awaken. Then the outbreak happened, and he got taken to Cartaxus, and he left me behind. He figured I could survive it on my own until there was a vaccine and it was safe for Jun Bei to be woken up.”

  Anna blinks. “Holy shit. Are you serious?”

  “I should have told you—”

  “You’re inside her brain?” Anna spits. “You’re not even a real person?”

  “I am real,” I say, my voice growing sharp. “I just don’t have a body of my own.”

  “Did you know this?” Anna asks Ziana. “Is that why you sent her a message?”

  “No.” Ziana’s eyes are wide. “That’s… a lot more complicated than I thought. So who got that message—Jun Bei?”

  I shake my head slowly. “Cartaxus got it, and they asked for my help. Lachlan said he can’t fix the vaccine unless you all go back to him and let him run another test on you. I thought this was the only way to save you. That’s why I agreed to come and find you, and it’s why Cartaxus came and took us to Homestake. But I’m not doing that anymore. This is bigger than all of us. Ziana’s right—we need to stop Agnes.”

  Ziana’s face pales. “You were here to trick me? To call Cartaxus?”

  “I was,” I say. “But not anymore. Whatever Agnes is planning is more important. That’s all that matters now.”