by Emily Suvada
“Jun Bei?”
She looks back. Her eyes are red, her hair wild, but a look of pure, unfiltered joy crosses her face as she sees me. It’s Jun Bei—I’m sure of it. She’s here in the simulation with me. A surge of emotion kicks through me at the sight of her, and even though I’m feeling weaker than ever, I can’t help but smile back.
“Catarina?” She pushes herself to her feet. “You’re awake. I thought something happened to you. I know you’ve been asleep—”
“I haven’t been asleep,” I say. “Lachlan hacked the implant to keep me hidden from you.”
Her breath stills. “You’ve been… in here? All this time?”
“Not the whole time. Dax found a way to let me into Veritas. I was helping him. I was…” I look down, my voice softening with guilt. “I was trying to bring the other Zarathustra subjects to Lachlan so he could fix the vaccine.”
I expect Jun Bei to be horrified, but her face crumples instead. She sniffs, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. “That’s what I should have done. I was at a lab with him—I could have just stayed there, but I ruined everything. Now we don’t have a vaccine, and Agnes is taking the Panacea, and I’m… we’re infected.”
Infected.
The word sends a jolt of fear through me. That’s why the implant has been straining so much—why the base of my skull feels like an open wound. I walk to the window, my mind filling with images of mottled, black-blue skin. With blowers tilting their heads back and detonating into mist.
“We’ll figure this out,” I say, clutching my hands around my chest.
She follows me to the window, her bare feet silent on the concrete floor. “No, we won’t. It’s over. The Panacea is an abomination. I deleted it, but everything is still wrong, and I turned everyone against me. I thought I could save us all and start a new world, but it sounds ridiculous when I think about it now.”
“We’ll get help,” I say, but I don’t know who from. Jun Bei has turned Cole and the others against her, and I’ve done a good job of turning them against me, too. “What about the people in Entropia?”
“They hate me.” She looks up, her eyes welling with tears. “And Mato’s dead. I let him die.”
I freeze, stunned. Jun Bei buries her face in her hands again, and I take her shoulder, not sure how to comfort her. The bones in her arm feel strange, but somehow familiar. I’m not seeing her real face or touching her real arm—we’re both just avatars inside the simulation right now, but I can’t help thinking that the body I’m living in looks like her right now. Her features, her bones. The thought is unnerving. The face I’m used to seeing is gone.
But it doesn’t matter what our body looks like. I don’t think I’ll ever walk in it again.
“We need to fix the vaccine, but Agnes has to be stopped too,” I say. “There must be a way. Do you know what she’s planning?”
Jun Bei wipes her eyes with the collar of her tank top, nodding. “She’s going to steal the Panacea from Lachlan and take over everyone’s minds.”
Horror grips me. Agnes said she wanted to control this war, and manipulating people’s minds is definitely one way to do that. She must have been using Ziana’s DNA to develop a way to alter people’s thoughts and realized it would be easier to steal Jun Bei’s code instead.
Jun Bei sniffs. “She said she needed your DNA to fix it, but I don’t know why.”
I look out at the pale sky above the jagged ridge of the mountains. “I think I do. I found some old files from the Zarathustra program. My DNA wasn’t randomly created by Lachlan. It was based on your sister—the one you shared a tank with.”
Jun Bei steps back. Her eyes aren’t red anymore, and the vulnerability in her face is fading. I can see her mind turning my words over, her thoughts moving faster. “You’re sure?”
I nod. “And I think I know why Agnes needs me. Lachlan was running tests on samples from your sister, and Agnes had written the note ‘vector’ on the files. I think my DNA has properties I didn’t know about. Agnes said it was invasive, that it spread through cells—”
“Like a virus,” Jun Bei says. She goes quiet. The sun through the windows catches the glossy black waterfall of her hair. She blinks suddenly, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
My heart races. “What is it?”
“I knew I had a sister—I saw Lachlan testing samples of her DNA, and I always wanted to know more, but he would never talk about it. When I kept asking, the samples disappeared, and when I escaped from the lab, that’s the only thing I was missing. I stole his work—his code, his notes, everything. But I couldn’t steal anything on the sister who’d been in the same tank as me. I didn’t even know what her DNA was like. But I always wanted to find out more about her—to run tests of my own.”
“But you couldn’t,” I say. “Not without knowing her genome, or having a sample.”
“That’s just it.” Jun Bei throws her hands up. “I didn’t know her genome, her characteristics—none of it, but there’s a way I could have figured it out. We were grown in the same tank, right? Like twins in the womb. And she died from the virus. It would have detonated her.”
I blink, my mind swimming with the horror of Jun Bei being grown in the same tank that her sister disintegrated in. But it’s not as horrible as it seems. A lot of people absorb twins in the womb and carry some of their DNA—most people don’t ever know it’s happened. Jun Bei could easily have grown up with a few of her sister’s cells left alive inside her. If she wanted to study her sister’s DNA, all she’d need to do is find those cells and cultivate them.
The air stills. “Jun Bei, what are you saying?”
She paces back across the room, filled with a nervous energy. “There are places on my body that I haven’t been able to change back to my DNA. I have patches on my face, my arm, and my ankle. I keep trying to change them to look like me, but they keep staying as you. I think those places started out as individual cells from my sister that I carried all my life, and they spread when I cultivated them. One place has never changed, though I haven’t tried to get rid of it. It’s your half of our brain.”
My vision swims. The sunlight slanting through the window seems to freeze—every particle inside the simulation coming to a stop. I stare at Jun Bei, my blood pounding in my ears.
“You mean… some of my cells were always inside you. Part of me was always there.”
“In a complicated way, you’re really my sister. But that’s not all. If the Viper marked your file as vector, then that makes sense—you have a gift, just like the rest of us. Your DNA spreads through cells. That’s why the patches on my body are as big as they are now. And that must be why, after a few months in the desert, I tried to wipe half of my brain and almost killed myself. I haven’t been able to figure out what would frighten me enough to make me do that.”
I sway, heat racing across my skin. “What do you mean?”
Her gaze locks on mine. “I think your DNA spread through my brain just like it spread through my body. And I think that after a while you woke up.”
Blackness creeps into the edges of my vision. I walk blindly to the lab counter, leaning against it for support. “Lachlan didn’t create me?”
She shakes her head. “He thinks he did, but I think you were already there. I was just using the implant to control you—to hold you back from taking over everything. Lachlan must have seen the parts of me that held your DNA and known I was studying my sister, so when he tried to hide me, he just changed the rest of me to match. But nobody created you, Cat—not Lachlan, and not me. You started off as a dormant cell from a girl who’d died before I was born, and then you tore through my brain, taking it as your own. You created yourself.”
My head spins. I lean forward, bracing my hands on my thighs. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought I was just a tool created by Lachlan. Something disposable he could use and discard without treating me like a real person. This doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have
a body, or that I’m just half of someone else’s brain, but it takes the sting out of what’s been hurting me the most.
Lachlan may have lied to me and used me, and I may share his face and DNA, but he didn’t create me. The fact that there’s even a sliver of independence in the twisted story of my past is enough for me to cling to. I’m not just another part of his plan. I’m not just a fool. I’m my own person, and he’s underestimated me.
“So you’re a vector,” Jun Bei mutters. She chews her thumbnail, thinking. “I don’t understand why Agnes would need you for that. The Panacea doesn’t use a special vector—it uses gentech’s basic proteins.”
“Maybe it’ll run better with another vector,” I say. “What do you know about gentech’s basic proteins?”
Jun Bei’s brow furrows. “Not much. They’re huge. They haven’t changed since gentech was invented—they’re the reason it works.”
I lift an eyebrow. “Gentech’s basic vector hasn’t changed in thirty years?”
She shakes her head. “Not at all. It’s completely stable, and completely efficient.”
“Hmmm,” I say, pushing away from the counter, walking back to the window. A wild idea is circling in my mind. When Cole’s panel was glitching, its error messages said he was infected with the virus, and he asked if something in his panel could be using Hydra as a vector. Nothing would be as fast or efficient at invading every cell in the body, but there’d always be the danger that the vector could mutate and become infectious. Using even a part of Hydra’s DNA in a gentech app would be wildly irresponsible. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
“The Viper founded Cartaxus thirty years ago,” I say, looking back at Jun Bei. “That’s when they discovered Hydra and started studying it.”
She tilts her head. “What are you thinking?”
I blink, remembering the files we found in the cabin. “The first panels came out thirty years ago too, right? They were created by Cartaxus.”
Jun Bei nods. “That’s right. They only had a couple of apps back then.”
“But they weren’t the reason Cartaxus existed. It was founded to develop a vaccine.”
Jun Bei’s eyes narrow. “Which they’ve sucked at.”
She’s starting to see it too. The timeline doesn’t make sense. Cartaxus created a world-changing technology within a few short years, and then took thirty more to develop a vaccine. They only managed to finish one when the virus had killed half the people on the planet—and even then, it wasn’t strong.
“Cartaxus created lines of mutated children,” I say. “They built bunkers all over the world, and they managed to keep people living in them more or less peacefully for two whole years—there isn’t much that Cartaxus hasn’t been able to do, except…”
“Except create a Hydra vaccine,” Jun Bei finishes. “The one thing they were tasked with doing. Maybe it was impossible. Agnes told me that all of Lachlan’s vaccines were flawed, like she knew they couldn’t ever work. Then when she infected me, it wasn’t with a sample. It was with code. It was like…”
“Like the virus was already inside you, and she just activated it.”
Jun Bei holds my eyes, the two of us standing frozen. My heart is pounding against my chest, and I can tell hers is too.
“Could it be?” I whisper. “Could gentech be based on Hydra? What if the vector that underpins it is the virus—just a version of it that’s been wrapped up and harnessed, and hidden in plain sight?”
Jun Bei presses her hands to her forehead. “That’s why they’ve never been able to finish the vaccine. Whatever shields you build around people’s cells to keep the virus out would also stop gentech from getting in. Coding a Hydra vaccine with gentech isn’t just hard—it’s impossible.”
I sway, staring at her. The idea is so wild that it has to be true. It would be the biggest cover-up the world has ever seen—a lie that’s living inside the arms of every person on the planet. No wonder Lachlan’s vaccines have never been able to stop every strain of the virus. The code they’re written in relies on one.
“That’s why Agnes needs you,” Jun Bei says, her eyes going wide. “Your DNA is a vector she can use instead.”
My blood chills. She’s right. Agnes knows none of Lachlan’s vaccines can last. She’s already destroyed one vaccine with the pigeons. Now she’s pushing everyone into war, and when there’s nothing but chaos, she’ll offer her vaccine. It will be the only piece of code that will be able to withstand any strain she might release, so people will turn to her. They’ll accept whatever she offers them. And then she’ll have the entire world.
“She doesn’t just want to fix the vaccine, though,” Jun Bei says. “She’s going to find Lachlan and steal the Panacea—she’s going to take over everyone’s minds. We have to stop her.”
“We will,” I say. “We’re going to need Lachlan’s help too. That glitching code can’t stay in everyone’s arms. Lachlan knows how to strip your code out of the vaccine, but he said he needs all of you—all five Zarathustra subjects.”
“All six of us,” Jun Bei says. “I think I know how to use your DNA to make the vaccine strong. It won’t rely on the Hydra vector anymore. The world will finally have a real vaccine. We’ll just have to convince Cartaxus and the genehackers to accept it.”
She holds my eyes, and a surge of excitement runs through me at the thought of partnering with Jun Bei on this. We’re working together again, as allies. As partners. As sisters.
The word feels right, and not just because of our DNA, or because she’s carried my cells her whole life. It feels right because there’s nobody else I’d want to be facing this with but her.
“First, we have to get out of here,” she says. “I’ve been sedated, but I can hack the implant to wake us up.”
I pause, the ache in the base of my skull still pounding. It hasn’t let up the whole time I’ve been here, and neither has the weakness in my muscles. The implant doesn’t have long, and any hack Jun Bei runs through it is sure to add to the strain.
We don’t have a choice, though, and we don’t have much time. We’re infected. We’ll slip into a fever soon. Our window to stop Agnes and fix the vaccine is shrinking rapidly.
There’s nothing I can do but hope the implant lasts long enough for us to finish this.
Jun Bei steps over to me, taking my hands. “You’ll go back into Veritas when the hack is finished. Come and find me when we wake up—we’ll do this together.”
“Together,” I repeat, clutching her hands in mine.
Her eyes glaze, and a spike of pain tears through the base of my skull.
Then everything goes black.
CHAPTER 37 JUN BEI
THE LAB DISAPPEARS, SOMETHING TUGGING hard inside my chest. When I open my eyes, everything around me is blurred and strangely blue. There’s a pleasant warmth enveloping me, but my sense of gravity is wrong—like I’m standing up and lying down at the same time. I blink again, trying to clear my vision, and my surroundings sharpen into a room with polished concrete walls. There’s a black lab counter near me, an industrial genkit in the corner. This is one of the labs in Entropia’s bunker. Everything still looks blue, and there’s something chillingly strange about the way my body is moving.
No, not moving. Floating. I’m locked underwater in a suspension tank, and there’s a cable jutting from my arm.
Panic takes me like a fire. I cough, my lungs locking. Logically, I know this liquid is breathable, but I can’t make my body believe it. I choke, swallowing a gulp, my instincts urging me to punch through the glass and haul myself out of the tank, to drag in a lungful of air. But I can’t. The tank’s walls have the frosted sheen of transparent aluminum, with no buttons or levers to let me out. I kick at the glass, memories from my childhood battering my senses. Suddenly I’m eight years old again, locked in an immersion tank, waking screaming from a badly coded anesthetic app. I pull at the cable in my arm, thrashing in the liquid, images of scalpels and wires racing through my mind
like a flock of panicked birds.
“Jun Bei!” A figure appears by my side, kneeling over the tank. It’s Catarina. She’s in Veritas, her eyes warped by the tank’s glass walls. “Jun Bei, listen to my voice! You need to calm down.”
“Open it!” I shout, but the sound comes out garbled through the liquid, and the effort hurts my throat. I slam my fists against the glass, choking in a lungful, trying to force myself to relax.
“Okay, I think I can get into the controls!”
A click sounds above me, and the glass lid levers open. I grab the edge to haul myself out, the cable in my cuff retracting with a jolt. The blue liquid in the tank splashes onto the floor as I slide out and fall to my hands and knees.
Without thinking, I drag in a breath, and air rushes into my lungs. My chest shudders instantly. I retch, curling into a ball, coughing up a mess of mucus and blue liquid. My body was just getting used to the sensation of breathing underwater, and now the rush of air through my sinuses feels like I’m swallowing fire.
“Just try to breathe normally,” Catarina says, crouching at my side. “I don’t want to scare you, but we have to get out of here, now.”
I force myself back to my knees and drag my hand across my mouth. I’m in my underwear, my hair hanging loose and sopping around my face. The skin on my wrist is bruised, but I can’t tell if it’s from being taken by Cartaxus’s troops, or from the fever itching beneath my skin. I shove my hands through my hair, shaking, looking around.
“H-holy shit,” I whisper, spluttering. Half of the rear wall of the lab we’re in is stacked with glass tanks identical to the one I woke up in. A few are laid out on the floor like mine with motionless bodies floating inside them. The people inside are hackers I recognize—citizens of Entropia. One purple-haired woman has a wound in her shoulder that’s leaking a stream of blood into the tank’s glistening blue fluid. I stare at the stacks of empty tanks. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Cartaxus’s people are rounding up the genehackers and locking them away,” Catarina says. “They’re printing these tanks in the agricultural levels. I’ve seen thousands more before, in a bunker. They’re putting people in a coma and locking them away. This is how the civilians are justifying the war. This way, they can stop the genehackers without killing them.”
