This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  This isn’t the real Zarathustra lab. I’m back in the simulation.

  “No, no,” I whisper, pushing myself to my knees. The lab’s walls are laced with cracks, the floor heaving. The implant is fracturing—I can feel it, but I’m not supposed to be here. I tried to let go, to let Jun Bei take over, but it didn’t work. I’m still alive, and I can feel the ocean of her mind thrashing wildly on the other side of the wall.

  She’s still trying to complete the fraction, but she’s losing strength fast. The infection is taking over, and she won’t be able to hold on for much longer. She isn’t going to finish the vaccine if I can’t help her, fast.

  I look around, wheezing. The ache in my skull is a throbbing mess of pain. The implant is straining, and the wall between Jun Bei and me is cracking, the jagged edges cutting into each of us as it breaks. But it’s happening too slowly—there has to be a way to let her through so she can finish this fraction and fix the vaccine. I have to figure out how to let go, how to let the implant take me, how to just give up.

  But that’s the problem. I don’t know how to give up. I’ve spent years living on the surface, struggling to stay alive. I made it through the outbreak, through the violence of the past few months, through everything I’ve learned. I’ve been under threat for the entire short span of my existence, and I’ve always found a way to keep breathing and fighting.

  All I know how to do is survive.

  I ball my hands into fists. Maybe I just need to close my eyes and force myself to relax. It won’t be easy with the pounding in my skull, but I’m going to have to find a way to do it.

  Lightning flashes in the storm outside, thunder crackling through the air. The pigeons swoop through the rain, darting between the trees. The door to the lab swings open, and tiny figures tumble in. Skinny, unkempt, and barefoot. Racing straight for me.

  “Cattie!” Ziana yells, bolting across the room. She throws herself at me. I fall back against the wall as she hits me, my head spiking with pain. The other children join her, small bodies piling onto mine, little arms stretching around me, the weight of them on me bringing up silver stars in my vision.

  “Whoa, easy there, guys,” I say.

  “Sorry,” Leoben says, burrowing his head under my arm. “We’re frightened.”

  The laboratory shudders, a chunk of concrete dropping from the ceiling near the window. The children shriek, huddling closer. “I’m frightened too,” I say.

  Jun Bei cuddles up to me, staring out at the storm. “It’s going to be okay.”

  I look down at her. “How do you know?”

  She wraps her arms around me. “Because we’re together now.”

  Another rumble shakes the room, the lights above us flickering. I close my eyes, leaning back against the wall, and hold the children close. In another life, maybe the girl whose cells I grew from would have been born here. I would have been one of these children—growing up in the lab, sleeping in their dormitory, and suffering through the nightmare of Lachlan’s experiments. I would have known them all and loved them. I would have had a family.

  But I don’t have to dream about that. These five are already my family, and I’m alive right now with their future in my hands. But they aren’t in this room—they’re in the real version of this lab, with a single chance at a future, and I can help them reach it. I can give them that future and a chance to end this plague once and for all. I’m strong enough to finish this.

  It’s time for me to let go.

  I close my eyes, forcing my focus inward, and the sensation of the children’s bodies grows fuzzy against my skin. But it isn’t my skin, and this isn’t my body. None of this is real. I’m not a girl huddled in a crumbling room—I’m a spark of electricity. I’m a fire burning inside a body that isn’t really mine. The only thing keeping me ablaze is the instinct to survive. But we’re more than just our instincts—we’re our choices and actions. Being alive isn’t about having a body, and it isn’t biological. Choosing this is the purest expression of who I really am.

  My back is against a wall, but I’m still fighting for the people I care about and for what I know is right. I’ve been broken. I’ve been lost, but now I’ve found my way back to the girl I used to be. The girl who had nothing but her mind and knew it was enough.

  I tilt my head back, blowing out a shaking breath, and let go of the struggle to maintain control. The wall inside me strains, and for the first time, I don’t resist. The barrier between my mind and Jun Bei’s warps, slowly falling away. Something vast and powerful rears up, teetering above me, then comes crashing down as the tsunami of Jun Bei’s mind breaks through.

  The laboratory’s lights blink out, plunging me into darkness. Jun Bei’s consciousness is a maelstrom of chaos. Suddenly I can feel her—her focus, her pain as the code she’s trying to finish wrenches at her mind. I can feel the cable in her arm, the fraction she’s struggling to reach. I can sense the others around her, linked to her through the genkit and the ballet of her code interweaving with the vaccine. She’s weak with fever, but she’s getting stronger now that the barrier between us is falling.

  I yield my strength to her, willing her to take over, and the fraction crackles into place.

  The code spins, wild and wondrous, the pieces flying together. Feeling her like this, at her full strength, is like staring into the sun. She is magnificent. I let myself be swept along in the wave of logic and power running through her, until the code coalesces and snaps into its final form.

  The vaccine stretches out before me, and Jun Bei’s relief roars through my mind. She did it. The fraction tumbles into itself, two worlds collapsing back into one. I can sense her elation, her relieved breaths, and the ocean of her mind growing calmer. Through the darkness of the laboratory I hear her calling my name.

  “Catarina!”

  The voice is distant. I try to stand, to move away from the wall, but my muscles are frozen, and my vision is a mess of shadow and light. I can barely feel the children curled around me or the laboratory’s walls shaking. All I can feel are fingers of icy, numbing coldness seeping into my bones.

  “Cat! Hold on! Come back to me!”

  I try to respond, to call back to her, but I can’t. The ocean of her mind is too vast, and I’ve already let go. There is no thread left inside me to cling to, no link to the body I once walked in. I’m a spark of energy inside her, and I can feel myself drifting free.

  “Lachlan!” Jun Bei screams. “You have to do it now! You have to save her!”

  Her voice is frantic. I know she’s fighting, struggling, and that someone is holding her back. I know she’s screaming my name as the implant finally breaks down and the walls around me split apart. I lie huddled with the children as the laboratory shakes, crumbling down on us.

  But there is no pain, and there is no sound. Because I’m already gone.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE BROADCAST STARTS WITH THE call of the Cartaxus trumpets. A man in a white lab coat appears, the exhaustion etched into his face the only sign that something is wrong. He’s next to a scarlet-haired woman with tattoos curling up her neck. The two of them sit together in front of a gray background, a single light shining above their heads.

  “I’m here to announce that the Cartaxus bunker system is now open and unlocked,” the man says, his hands folded in his lap. “I know the events of the last few days have been chaotic, but the silver lining of that chaos is the news that a joint team of coders from Cartaxus and the surface have perfected a Hydra vaccine. In doing so, they’ve also cured the condition that was spreading throughout the population and invoking uncontrollable rage in some of our civilians.”

  “The bad news,” the woman says, “is that you’ve already been given this vaccine. In fact, this isn’t the only piece of code that’s been installed on your panels without your consent. Dr. Crick and I recently discovered that the former founder of Cartaxus, an individual known as the Viper, has been using high-level clearance to access the panels of practically
everyone in the world. The Viper was aided by a scientist we thought was dead until recently—Dr. Lachlan Agatta. We’ve worked hard to identify and close the weaknesses in panels that the Viper and Dr. Agatta have been able to exploit, but in our research we’ve discovered uncomfortable truths about the vaccine and its origins that we’ve decided you need to know.”

  The broadcast runs for almost an hour. A fourteen-year-old girl stands alone in her living room in the Canberra bunker to watch it. Her parents have joined the troops fighting on the surface, and there’s nobody to help explain what she hears. She’s frightened of her panel—of the virus hiding inside it, and of the fact that strangers from the other side of the world were able to change the apps inside her without her knowing. She curls into a ball on her bed, waiting for her parents, sending them messages asking them to come home.

  A blond-haired man watches the broadcast in an abandoned house near the Homestake bunker. His stomach is empty, his two young sons running in circles through the grass outside. He’s been on the surface for just one day, and he’s barely slept, but he stands wide awake as the man and woman in the broadcast list the Viper’s crimes. The truth about Cartaxus’s past makes his stomach turn, and he’s relieved to be free of their grasp. Not just for himself, but for his children. He looks down at the cobalt stripe on his arm for a long time before walking outside and pulling his sons into a long and silent hug.

  A curly-haired woman lifts the visor of her helmet when the broadcast is done. There’s a rifle in her hands and a set of orders in her panel that don’t feel as important anymore. She looks around the camp her team is in the process of clearing out—at the people they’re loading into tanks—and feels suddenly horrified at what she’s doing in Cartaxus’s name. She finishes her shift, because she doesn’t know what else to do, but she sits up that night in the barracks and stares at the wall. The next day she packs a bag and joins the stream of people leaving the bunker. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she knows she can’t stay with Cartaxus. She can’t keep supporting an organization built on secrets and manipulation. She buckles her backpack and starts to hike south through the forest. She listens to an audiobook about learning basic gentech coding.

  She’s been lied to, along with everybody else.

  But she isn’t going to let it happen again.

  CHAPTER 44 JUN BEI

  I WAKE BEFORE DAWN, MY sheets soaked with sweat, my scratchy wool blanket puddled on the floor beside my bed. The sky through the barred windows of the dormitory is dark and speckled with stars. My mouth is dry, my eyes itching and sore, and there’s a deep, gnawing ache in the base of my skull.

  I squint, groping in the half-light for the water on my nightstand, but manage only to clip it, sending the dented metal bottle clattering to the floor. A door creaks in the hallway, and I slump into the pillow, letting out a groan.

  It’s been five days since the operation. Five days of blurred vision and shaking limbs, of my body losing its ability to regulate my temperature. Five days of seizures, of headaches that sent me into a ball on the floor, screaming and scratching at my scalp until my nails drew blood. The first day, I couldn’t remember my own name. It took another two until I could speak. Yesterday I spent twenty minutes trying to remember how to button my shirt.

  But none of that mattered once I realized that the core of me had been left untouched. I still know how to code.

  Not that I’ll need to, not for a while at least. There’s no hint of sulfur wafting from my skin, no fever racing through my veins. The vaccine has been fixed, and every test that’s been run on it shows that it should block any possible mutations of the virus. The bunkers have been opened, and Cartaxus’s civilians have brokered a tentative peace with the genehackers on the surface. I don’t know how long that can possibly last. Both sides still carry so much pain.

  But so do I, and I’ve chosen peace. I have to trust that the rest of the world can too.

  Footsteps sound in the hallway, and a shadow slips through the door, padding across the room on bare feet to squat beside my bed. Bright hazel eyes smile at me through a mess of dark curls.

  “You hit it this time,” Ziana says, swiping the bottle from the floor. “You’re getting closer.”

  “Shut up,” I moan, rolling to my back. “I’m so thirsty.”

  Ziana grins, climbing nimbly over me to sit on the empty pillow beside my head. She shakes her curls over her shoulder, popping the bottle’s nozzle. “Open up.”

  I part my lips, grateful as she feeds me a long gulp of water. It’s faintly lemon flavored, tinged with a cocktail of nanites and chemicals that Lachlan said would help in my recovery. He’s been gone ever since I woke. The others said the operation took almost two days and that he didn’t eat or sleep throughout it, that he barely sat down. Then he left and handed himself over to what’s left of Cartaxus. He and Agnes are being held in custody, waiting for the new civilian government to form and organize public trials. There are calls to execute them both, but just as many people want them kept alive. They want them to spend their lives working to solve the problems they created. I thought I’d want them dead, but the feeling never crystallized inside me. This world has seen so much death, and more bloodshed isn’t what it needs right now.

  It needs patience and tolerance. It needs to breathe, to heal, and to start to rebuild.

  And so do I.

  “How did you sleep?” Ziana asks, taking back the bottle.

  “Fine,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “I still haven’t dreamed.”

  “Dreams are overrated. They’re not always good. I wish I had a panel to stop mine.”

  “Yeah,” I say, tracing my fingers over the smooth skin on my chest where the scars from my childhood used to be. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Ziana tucks her legs under her, clicking the bottle’s nozzle closed. She’s taken on most of the work of looking after me, and the others haven’t been enthusiastic about helping. Cole has been busy, Anna barely talks to me, and Leoben said he forgives me, but there’s a new divide between us, and I don’t know how to bridge it. It doesn’t help that I’m keeping them at arm’s length too. I have a lifetime’s worth of pain to work through, and they’re at the heart of it—all of them. Years of repressed emotions, of love that I twisted into anger. Just being around them these last few days has left me feeling like I’m drowning. Seeing their closeness, their bond. Their easy comfort with one another. We’re family, and I know we’ll find our way back together someday, but right now I need to heal, and I need to do it alone.

  Ziana glances at the bunk beside mine. My black duffel bag is zipped up on it, a set of clothes folded on the pillow. It took me three hours to pack my bag last night—figuring out how to fold my towel, remembering that socks came in pairs. I was so proud when I managed to use the zipper that I almost told the others, but that would have ruined my plan to disappear without a word this morning. Turns out, all I needed to ruin it was my own clumsiness and a noisy water bottle.

  “You’re not ready,” Ziana says. If she’s surprised that I’m leaving, she doesn’t show it. “Another week, maybe, but not today.”

  I shake my head and reach for the water bottle, taking it with one trembling hand. I press the nozzle to my mouth, biting it open, sucking down another gulp. “Has to be today. I’m meeting some people from Entropia. I’ll be okay once I’m with them.”

  “Really?” Ziana frowns. “I thought they hated you.”

  I swallow another gulp of water from the bottle, then close the nozzle with my teeth. “I can’t hide from what I did. I need to make it right, and they’re giving me another chance. I don’t want to control the world anymore. I just want to code.”

  It’s more than a want—it’s a need. I know that letting go of the Panacea was the right thing to do, but it still hurts. Releasing it would have been like throwing gasoline onto the fire of this broken world. There’s a new dawn of gentech on the horizon, though—one based on a new vector. A future without Carta
xus holding back the genehackers. It might not be time to release code to control people’s minds, but it’s the perfect time to fling open doors that have been locked for decades and see what’s waiting behind them.

  Nobody really knows what the future will look like. But I’m going to find out.

  Ziana rolls her eyes. “Jun Bei, you can’t go back to coding yet. You just lost half of your brain.”

  “It’s lucky I’m so smart, then,” I say, rolling to my side. “I can live without it.”

  I swing my legs over the bed and lean forward slowly, rocking carefully to my feet. Walking is still a challenge, but there’s a chip jacked into the brand-new neural implant in my skull with a range of built-in motions—walking, running, using stairs—and I’ve been letting it control my muscles. It feels like I’m a puppet moving to someone else’s strings as I walk across the room, but at least I don’t end up face-planting on the floor. I tug off my pajamas with shaking hands and slide on a fresh tank top, then sit down on the bunk to shimmy into cargo pants. I should take a shower—I’ll be itching from dried sweat in a few hours, but I don’t want to risk waking everyone. It’s going to be hard enough saying good-bye to Ziana. Of the five of us, she and I understand each other the best. The strain I’ve felt being around the others has been mirrored in her eyes too. Neither of us can deal with the pain of our past while we’re constantly being reminded of it.

  That’s why she’s been taking care of me, and it’s why I know she’ll disappear as soon as I’m gone.

  “You’ll have to hide,” Ziana says, watching as I painstakingly tug a sock over my foot. “Lachlan won’t tell them about the wipe or the rest, but they might still come after you.”

  “They’ll be busy,” I say, sliding my feet into my boots. The world’s civilians should have enough scandals to keep them occupied for years. Lachlan’s face has been constantly splashed across every news feed alongside Agnes’s. The architects of the apocalypse. Every secret from Cartaxus’s past is being dredged up. The creation of the virus, the cover-ups to hide its use in gentech. The vulnerabilities that Cartaxus left in the heart of every panel. Years of pain and horror are bubbling into outrage at the people who almost destroyed this world. They’ll turn to me eventually, but I should have enough time to hide or build a new identity.