This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  Lachlan.

  The light is dim, but I still recognize him instantly. His eyes, his chin, the sweep of his hair. The same features that are etched into my bones and my DNA. My breath catches as he steps into view. This is the man who took my life from me—he fed me lies, changed my face, and ripped my identity into jagged pieces. We’ve been talking about killing him all week, and I thought that seeing him would have me itching for a gun. I thought the first thing I’d feel would be rage.

  But it isn’t as simple as that.

  Lachlan scans the clearing, his gray eyes sharp, his left hand twitching as he sees Jun Bei. It’s a nervous tic I recognize from our time in the cabin. He only ever did it when he was upset, and seeing it now tugs at something inside me. I’m angry, but there’s a low, deep ache spreading through me too.

  Lachlan hasn’t just taken away my identity.

  He’s taken away the father I loved.

  “It’s okay—he isn’t real,” Cole says, pulling me against him. His body is like rock, his eyes blazing as Lachlan walks past us.

  All Cole is feeling right now is fury—I can sense it rolling from him, humming in the air. I know he wants to kill him. There’s nothing that could hold him back if Lachlan were really here. That’s the natural, reasonable reaction, and I thought I’d feel it too, but it’s only been a week since I called this man my father. I spent three years loving him, idolizing him, proud of the resemblance I bore to the great Dr. Lachlan Agatta. I know he’s a threat, and I hate him for what he’s done to me.

  But I don’t know if I can kill him.

  “Running again?” Lachlan asks, marching through the grass. The guards fan out in a semicircle behind him, rifles gripped in their hands.

  I don’t understand why Jun Bei isn’t running, but suddenly slender cords of what looks like smoke puff from the metal pylon, billowing out in brilliant blue jets, crackling with electricity. Triphase. Clouds of magnetically controlled nanites, designed to chew biological matter into ash. It’s the same weapon Novak used to force us to go to Sunnyvale, but I’ve never seen a version that looks quite like this. The glowing ropes flow out from the pylon, stretching through the trees, linking to more pylons that blink into view as my eyes move across the forest. They form a continuous, wavering river of light.

  It’s a fence. This is the barrier they kept around the lab to stop us from running away.

  Jun Bei is standing with her back to it, several feet away, flyaway hairs rising in a halo around her head in the electrically charged air. The guards and Lachlan stop beside us, watching her, and Cole’s grip tightens on me.

  “Tell them to turn off the fence,” Lachlan says to one of the guards. A beat of silence passes, and the flowing ropes of smoke die away. The ground beneath them is left scorched and smoking, a line of black cut through the snow. Jun Bei turns to stare across the perimeter, but she doesn’t run.

  “Come back,” Lachlan says. “You have nowhere to go.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she murmurs.

  “No, you won’t,” he says. “There are people out there who would do terrible things to gain control of your gifts. You’ll be a prisoner anywhere you go. I know you don’t really want to run, or you’d already be gone. You’re safer in here.”

  She lets out a soft, bitter laugh, turning back toward Lachlan. Her hand lifts to tug down the collar of her hospital gown, revealing a mess of red and purple scars. “You think I’m safe here?”

  “Our work is important, darling,” Lachlan says. “I know you understand that.”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t know anything about me.” Her voice trembles, her glossy hair slipping across her forehead. “You don’t know me. None of you do. Nobody knows me.”

  “Jun Bei—” Lachlan starts, his voice growing thick, but she lifts up a hand.

  “You’re right about one thing,” she says. “I don’t want to run. I came out here tonight because I wanted you to watch this.”

  Her eyes glaze, and the glowing ropes rush back into place behind her. I stare, confused, as she blinks out of her session. It seemed like she turned the fence on again, but that wouldn’t make any sense. Surely she’s trying to get away. She must have a plan, a weapon. Some way to fight past these guards. But instead, she balls her hands into fists and turns to the rippling cords of light. Cole’s grip tightens on me, and it hits me with a low, sickening thud.

  She didn’t come out here to escape. She came out here to die.

  “Stop her!” Lachlan roars, and the guards surge forward, but Jun Bei is already running.

  Her eyes are scrunched shut, her black hair streaming out behind her. She’s fast, but she’s small, and the guards are on her in moments. Gloved hands stretch for her arms, for her hair, yanking her off her feet.

  “Let me go!” she screams, writhing in their grip. She sends a kick into the side of a guard’s helmet, an elbow to another’s throat, but there are too many of them. One stumbles and topples into the fence, half his torso disintegrating into a wafting pile of ash. The others wrestle Jun Bei to the ground, dragging her away from the rippling blue fence, and she lets out a strangled cry of rage.

  “Sedate her!” Lachlan shouts. “Hurry!” The guards tighten their grip on her, one of them sliding a vial from his pocket.

  But she stops fighting suddenly.

  Her eyes glaze. Her lips move silently, as though she’s coding, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. I don’t know what she’s doing, but I can feel something—a shadow descending across my memory. Something cold and violent. Something profound.

  Jun Bei stares into Lachlan’s eyes, whispering a command, and the soldiers fall to the ground.

  CHAPTER 3

  I SCRUNCH MY EYES SHUT, my hands pressed to my face. Memories slam into me like meteors to earth. The fence. The guards. The attack on their panels. The footage of Jun Bei is gone, but the images are still racing through my mind.

  Cole’s arms lock around me as my legs buckle, a wash of silver rising in my vision. “Look at me,” he urges. “Look at my eyes. I’m here. I’m real.”

  I clutch his shirt, trying to drag in a breath, but my lungs won’t respond. I’ve been trying all week to keep my past locked away, but seeing Jun Bei like this has shattered something inside me. A door to my childhood unlocked, a barricade forced open. My chest shudders, images of scalpels and wires racing through my mind like a flock of panicked birds.

  “It’s not real.” Cole’s voice is shaking. He takes my face in his hands, pressing his forehead to mine. “Cat, please. Come back to me.”

  I blink through the mess of silver in my vision to look up at him, the sound of my name on his lips like a beacon in a storm. His ice-blue eyes are locked on mine, and somehow I’m able to breathe as long as I’m looking into them. The hurricane of memories subsides, my focus clearing. I look back at the grass where I saw Jun Bei, shaking, and a single thought arises:

  That wasn’t me.

  The thought sends a flare of horror through me. The girl I just saw in the clearing didn’t look like another version of me—she looked like a completely different person. I could see it in the expressions on her face, in her stance, the pursing of her lips. I thought I was keeping my past at a distance out of fear of the pain in my memories, but now I’m not so sure.

  Maybe what I’ve been frightened of is the thought that my memories aren’t really mine at all.

  “I’m not . . . her,” I whisper, looking up at Cole. I know he sees it too—the truth I’ve been telling myself that I didn’t need to face. I thought I could put my past aside to focus on stopping Lachlan, but it was madness to think I could keep ignoring this. Lachlan told me that he gave me his mind—he overwrote my brain with his—but I haven’t really let myself believe it.

  I can feel it now, though—a divide rising inside me.

  A wall between her past and my present.

  “I know you’re not her,” Cole whispers. His hand trembles as it slides to the back of my head, pu
lling me against him. “You’re your own person, Cat. You need to hold on to that. You have to keep sight of who you are.”

  I close my eyes, pressing my face into his shoulder. My breathing is still fast and shallow, my pulse racing. Seeing that clip must have been as hard for Cole as it was for me, and I don’t know how he’s holding himself together. He’s giving me his strength right now, letting me lean against him, and it’s the only reason that I’m still on my feet.

  “Come on,” he says, pulling away, his grip tight on my arms. He shoots a glance at the dark patch of grass where the guards pulled Jun Bei down. “Let’s go down to the creek and get you cleaned off. Staying here isn’t going to help either of us.”

  He slings his backpack over his shoulder but keeps one hand on my arm, the feeling of his skin against mine steadying me somehow. I let him guide me away from the clearing, his presence quiet and tense beside me as we walk through the trees.

  “Not what you had in mind for our time alone together, huh?” I ask.

  He lets out a breath of laughter. “Not really, no.”

  We cut down a hill toward the creek. The water winding through mossy boulders, splashing down into a clear knee-deep pool. Cole’s shoulders loosen as we get closer, and he drops his pack near the edge of the water, then shrugs his jacket off and folds it neatly, laying it on the rocky shore. He’s wearing a tank top underneath, the white Cartaxus antlers emblazoned on his chest, scars peeking from the collar. His leylines cut across his skin, black and matte, curving up from his panel and branching into the outer corners of his eyes.

  “I should have warned you about clips like that,” he says. “That’s not the only one you’re going to find once your panel is finished installing.”

  I kneel at the creek’s edge and dip my hands into the water, splashing it over the mud on my arms. “What was that?”

  Cole tugs up the knees of his cargo pants, dropping to his haunches on the rocks beside me. “It was a VR clip re-created from ocular footage. We all made them to store moments we didn’t want to lose. Sometimes Lachlan would wipe our memories—we’d come back from days of experiments and not know what had happened for the last few weeks.”

  I pause, looking up at him. “That’s terrible.”

  He lifts a handful of water from the creek, splashing it over his face. “Sometimes memories aren’t worth the pain they hold,” he says simply. “Anything that was important, we stored in VR and encrypted it.”

  “So you have VR files like that too?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, lifting a handful of water from the creek, splashing it over his face. “Not from back then, not anymore. When I joined the black-out program, they wiped my panel. Same with Lee’s and Anna’s.”

  He means Anna Sinclair. The blond-haired girl whose file I have in my backpack, whose face I’ve seen in countless memories from our childhood in the lab. “They took your files from you? Everything?”

  “I gave it up,” he says, dropping his eyes to the water.

  It suddenly hits me. “So you haven’t seen Jun Bei like that for . . . years?”

  He shakes his head, smiling bitterly. “I haven’t seen her since that night. That was when she escaped. I joined the black-out program just a couple of months after that.”

  I rock back on my heels, my mind rolling back to the footage of Jun Bei—the desperation in her eyes. The way the guards fell to the ground. I dip my hands back into the water and splash it over my face, scrubbing the mud off my skin. “She killed those guards, didn’t she?” I ask.

  A shadow passes over Cole’s face. “Yeah, she did.”

  I blow out a breath, closing my eyes. When Cole told me that Jun Bei had killed fourteen people when she escaped from the lab, I assumed she must have shot them.

  But it seemed like she’d killed them with her mind.

  I saw it in the footage—her lips were moving. She was coding. It looked like she launched a wireless attack at their panels and somehow kicked off a piece of code that killed them instantly. That kind of code is supposed to be impossible, but clearly it isn’t.

  Jun Bei must have written a scythe.

  The two genehacker holy grails that have never been cracked, or at least I thought they hadn’t, are scythes and ambrosia—apps to kill people, and apps to keep them from dying. The other big puzzles—cancer, aging, dementia—all have promising work being done in hundreds of labs and genehacker camps around the world.

  People don’t do much testing when it comes to death, though. I’ve heard rumors of other scythes before but never believed them. There are more layers of security around gentech’s biological controls than there are for nuclear weapons. There’s a whole universe of firewalls built into every panel to stop lethal code like that from running.

  But Jun Bei must have figured out a way to do it when she was just a kid. I just watched her kill fourteen people with what looked like a single command.

  Cole reaches for his backpack and tugs a canteen from the side, dipping it into the creek to fill it. “I didn’t know she was that close to breaking. I thought she’d planned to escape, but it didn’t seem like that in the footage. She must have panicked and run after she killed those soldiers. She didn’t even have a bag. It was freezing. I don’t know how she got away.”

  I lift my hands from the water, remembering the snow on the ground in the clip. “So it was winter when she escaped.”

  “December,” Cole says, lifting the canteen from the creek.

  “Right,” I murmur, my mind turning over. I’ve managed to piece together a rough time line of my past starting when Lachlan changed me. It matches up with the records of when he quit Cartaxus, but it starts in the middle of July. My memories get foggy then—I remember fighting him, struggling, but every flash I’ve seen from that time was lit with a bright midsummer sun.

  Jun Bei left the lab in winter, but the next thing I remember is half a year later.

  I’m missing six months of my life.

  “How old am I?” I whisper.

  “Eighteen,” Cole says. “Same as all of us. You know that.”

  I sway, standing from the creek, nausea rolling through me. “No, I thought I was seventeen. The dates don’t match up. I’m missing six months. I don’t know what happened between Jun Bei leaving the lab and ending up in the cabin.”

  Cole’s eyes narrow. “Are you sure?”

  My hands tremble. “There’s nothing in my memories. I have no idea where I was.”

  “Hey,” he says, reaching for me, but my vision flashes suddenly and I stumble back on the rocks. He catches my shoulder, his eyes flying wide. “Cat, are you okay?” His face blurs in and out of focus, and his name appears beside his head, a comm icon blinking in green below it.

  “Shit,” I breathe, gasping in relief. I thought I was going to see another VR clip of Jun Bei. This is what I’ve been waiting for, though—it looks like my tech is finally working. I try summoning my panel’s menu, and it flashes cleanly across my vision, folders and files spinning out in a curved wall, hovering in the air.

  “What’s wrong?” Cole asks.

  “Nothing’s wrong. My panel is working.” I let my eyes glaze, scrolling through the files. There are photographs, videos, and hundreds of snippets of text I recognize as gentech code, labeled and dated, stretching back for years. Half of them are password protected. Breakable, but time consuming. But they’re there.

  Every file that Jun Bei ever wrote is stored inside my arm.

  Cole starts to reply, then stops suddenly, staring at the trees behind me. I turn, following his eyes. The forest stretches out behind us, the pigeons soaring above it, but it’s not dark anymore. A light is cutting through the canopy, sweeping across the trees, and a low thud starts up in the distance, cutting through the cacophony of the pigeons.

  It’s a Comox. Cartaxus has found us.

  Cole’s eyes flash to black. His protective protocol isn’t running anymore, but he can still invoke it when he wants to. He grabs his rifle
and his backpack. “Head for the road,” he says. “Lee’s coming to get us.”

  He breaks into a run, and I race to follow him, heading for the dirt road that cuts around the lab. The trees on the edges of my vision blur. A week ago I never could have run this fast, but my legs are stronger now. Tech-enhanced, with oxygen-heavy nanites swimming in my bloodstream. We race through a grove of pines and burst out onto the road, skidding to a stop as Leoben’s jeep barrels toward us, its engine whining. I run for it, but the Comox swoops closer, and Leoben flies out of the jeep.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “We need to go!”

  “They’re already onto us,” he says. “It looks worse if we run. It’s only the one copter. It might just be a routine patrol.”

  “They’re not answering my hails,” Cole says. “They’re running dark. There’s something wrong here.”

  “Well, we’re outgunned,” Leoben says. “Let’s play this out, okay? I have the jeep’s weapons locked on it. We can handle them if they land.”

  The Comox quadcopter roars over the road, its rotors sending down a gust of wind. I can see the sheen of its windshield, the Cartaxus antlers slashed in white on its belly. Its spotlights sweep across the jeep, then swing over us and intersect in a blinding circle of light. I throw my hands over my eyes, stumbling into Cole.

  “Stay calm,” he yells. “They might just want to talk—”

  He’s cut off as an arc of blazing light shoots from the Comox’s belly, and Leoben’s jeep explodes.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE EXPLOSION KNOCKS ME OFF my feet, but I don’t hit the ground. Cole’s arms lock around me, shielding me, clutching me to his chest. The blast sends a burst of light and pressure slamming into us, turning the night to day as a roar rips through the air. My ears whine, a wall of heat billowing over us, thick with the choking scent of smoke and burned plastic. Cole shudders, his arms tightening on me for a second before he goes limp.

  “Cole!” I scream, rolling him off me. Arcs of flaming shrapnel hurtle through the darkness, tracing orange streaks across the starlight of the pigeons. A hunk of twisted metal lands with a crack beside Cole’s head. “Get up, come on!”