This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  He groans, pushing himself up unsteadily, but it’s already too late.

  The Comox is tilting, swinging around to circle back to us. Cole’s eyes are midnight black, and he’s swaying on his knees. I can’t tell in this light if he’s wounded or not. His back still hasn’t healed completely from when I blew up the genkits in the lab, and there’s only so much damage his body can take. If he took a chunk of shrapnel in his back, his tech might be too overwhelmed to heal him right now.

  “Lee, I need you!” I yell, my voice ragged. He’s nowhere in sight. The Comox lurches back toward us, its rotors roaring. “Come on, Cole. You have to get up.” I slide myself under his arm, and he staggers to his feet, but we only make it a few steps across the muddy road before the Comox starts to drop. Its spotlights lock onto us, and the hurricane of its descent sends a wall of black smoke rolling out from the jeep.

  “Lee!” I scream, doubled over, choking. Cole stumbles and falls to his knees, almost taking me down with him. I try to lift him back up, but it’s no use.

  “Run,” he gasps.

  “No! We can make it.”

  But I don’t know if that’s true. The Comox is close, and there’s no sign of Lee. Cole can’t run, and I can’t take enough of his weight to carry him. But I’m not leaving him behind. We promised that nothing would tear us apart again. Not Lachlan, and not Cartaxus.

  We’ve just found each other. I can’t lose him.

  “I’m not leaving you.” I drop to my knees in the mud beside him and take his hands in mine. “We’re together now. Whatever happens.” His eyes are black and glassy, his brow furrowed, but I know he can hear me.

  The Comox jolts, touching down, when a shadow appears at my side.

  “I’ll take him.” It’s Leoben. I choke out a cry of relief. A ball of orange flames bursts from the jeep, lighting up the dark streaks of blood on his face. He loops an arm around Cole’s side and heaves him up. “Trees, now!” he urges, breaking into a run for the forest.

  I stagger after him, hope leaping inside me. With Leoben’s help, we might just make it out of here. A voice shouts at us from the Comox, but the words are lost in the roar of the rotors. We race across the road and down a muddy path into the trees. I stumble through the grass behind Leoben and Cole, my eyes watering from the smoke, dragging my tank top over my mouth to keep from coughing. The Comox rises again, turning to chase after us.

  “This way,” Leoben yells, charging uphill, hauling Cole with him. The forest is dark, the ground thick with ferns and bushes that tear at my leggings as I run. The pigeons are flying in circles, panicked by the explosion, their glowing feathers painting a whirlwind of light that we can use as cover. Between the birds and the canopy, there’ll be too much interference for the Comox’s systems to track us. Even the smartest targeting algorithms can’t see past millions of glowing birds in the middle of the night.

  “I pinged Cole’s jeep, but I don’t know if it can get to us through these trees,” Leoben says, then pauses, looking up. The Comox is soaring above us, sending wind whistling through the branches, but its spotlights are sweeping wildly, passing over us. They can’t see us through the flock. “They should turn back soon,” Leoben yells, but he freezes as a metallic noise starts up from above us, like the sound of a gun being cocked.

  “Cover!” he shouts, hauling Cole behind a tree as a hail of bullets rains down on us.

  I scramble into cover, throwing my arms over my head instinctively. Clouds of glowing feathers puff around me, the pigeons dropping like stones. The flock scatters, screeching furiously, another wave of bullets whistling through the air.

  No, not bullets. Tranquilizer darts.

  They slam into the ground around me, releasing sprays of yellow serum. Cartaxus doesn’t want us dead—they want us captured. Tortured and interrogated. An image flashes into my mind of restraints on an operating chair under blinding white lights. I push away from the tree, racing after Leoben and Cole when something smacks into my leg.

  “Shit,” I gasp, staggering to a stop. A dart is jutting from my calf. I bend down and yank it out, hissing. Yellow liquid bubbles from the tip, tinged with scarlet. A blood pressure warning flashes in the bottom of my vision.

  “Come on!” Leoben yells.

  “I’m hit!” I shout, limping after him.

  He reaches back with his free hand to grab my waist and drag me forward as more darts slam down behind us. I lean my weight into Leoben, limping as fast as I can, my vision blurring as we veer through the trees. The cloud of pigeons parts before us, the air echoing with their cries. We stagger down a hill toward a valley with a creek winding through its center, and the Comox’s rotors grow fainter. We’re not moving fast, but it looks like Leoben’s plan has worked. They must have lost us in the flock.

  We stumble to the bottom of the hill. The creek is only ankle-deep here, wide and rocky. Leoben sucks in a breath, scanning the trees. I don’t know how he’s managing to carry us both like this. “We can’t stop here,” he says.

  “But they’re pulling back.” I look over at Cole. His eyes are still black and half-closed, his face shiny with sweat. He looks like he’s getting worse. “We need to stabilize Cole.”

  Leoben shakes his head. “If there are troops in that Comox, they’re going to storm these woods. We have to keep moving. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. My left leg is tingling and heavy, and I can feel the sedative working through my body, but I can still run with Leoben pulling me forward. We splash through the creek, the icy water jolting the nerves in my foot back to life. “Where are we going?”

  “As deep into this flock as we can get—” Leoben freezes again, lifting his head as a crashing sound echoes through the valley. The pigeons’ cries pitch higher, a copse of trees shaking in the distance. It doesn’t sound like the Comox, and it’s definitely not troops. Leoben’s eyes narrow, then he grins as Cole’s jeep hurtles along the creek, bouncing over the rocks to follow the water’s path.

  “Holy shit,” I breathe. “You’re amazing, Lee.”

  “Oh, I’m aware,” he mutters. “I can’t believe they blew up my goddamn jeep.”

  Cole’s jeep splashes out of the water, its autodriver pulling it to a stop beside us, the rear doors flying open. Leoben heaves Cole inside and reaches out for me, grasping my upper arms to lift me into the back. It’s cleaner than Leoben’s was—the clothes are packed away, and there are no piles of trash, but it’s still cramped, with our backpacks, blankets, and a few boxes of files we pulled out of the lab.

  “There’s an antidote for that dart in the medkit,” Leoben says. “Shouldn’t take long to kick in.” He grabs Cole’s shoulders, turning him so he’s lying on his side.

  “Won’t they follow us?” I ask, crawling over Cole to get my backpack. The tingling in my left leg has dropped into numbness, stretching up the side of my back.

  Leoben shakes his head, clambering between the seats to climb into the front. “If they’re smart, they’ll give us some clearance now that we’re in the jeep. It’s too dangerous for a single copter to chase us. We could have a rocket launcher or be leading them into a trap. They’ll land and call for backup and bring in drones instead. I doubt they’ll spot us through these pigeons, but they might set up checkpoints on the roads. Let’s get moving and see if we can beat them.”

  He presses his hand to the dash, and the jeep’s windows darken, its rear doors swinging shut behind me. We reverse through the creek and spin around, heading back uphill. I rip open my backpack and yank out a medkit with shaking hands. It has a row of vials strapped into one side, each marked with Cartaxus glyphs. They meant nothing to me before my panel started working, but now I can see white text hovering beside them, sketched into my vision by my VR chip. Muscle relaxant, emergency blood thinner. I slide out a vial marked TRANQUILIZER ANTIDOTE and press the needle-tipped cap to the side of my neck.

  It only takes a second before I feel it burn through me, hot and sharp, countering the risi
ng tide of numbness.

  “Do you know where he’s hurt?” Leoben asks, looking back at Cole.

  “Not yet.” I drop the empty vial and turn to Cole. His eyes are closed, his breathing shallow, his face pale and dotted with sweat. “Have you seen him like this before?”

  Leoben nods. “A few times. Some of our black-out code is experimental stuff—it doesn’t play nicely with the rest of our tech. If we push it too far, it can glitch out and crash us. You’d better give him some healing tech, quick. He’s not looking so good.”

  “Okay,” I murmur, searching through my backpack again, sliding out the box of healing tech syringes. It hisses open with a puff of cold air. Only three left. Healing tech works best when it’s injected right into a wound, so I need to find where Cole is hurt before I can give him one.

  “Cole, can you hear me?” I lean over him, scanning his back. I set the syringes on the floor and run my hands over his body, searching for swelling or a hint of shrapnel. The skin on his back is still silver-tinged and strangely firm from the nanomesh that grew through it when he was injured in the explosion in the lab, but it doesn’t seem to have been wounded again. I grab his face in my hands, trying not to focus on how weak he looks. “Cole, I need you to tell me where you got hit.”

  He just shakes his head. We pull onto a gravel road, and he groans with the movement, his face paling. Every bounce of the jeep’s wheels makes his eyelids flutter, and I still can’t see where he’s hurt. I roll him onto his stomach, running my hand along his side, searching for a wound, and pause.

  A piece of metal is jutting from his ribs.

  “Shit,” I breathe.

  “What?” Leoben calls back, swerving us around a corner. I grab the side of the jeep for balance, yanking my backpack open for the little genkit I’ve been using, but it’s not there. It was in Leoben’s jeep.

  Which is now in a hundred pieces.

  “Shit,” I say again.

  “Getting worried here, squid.”

  “He’s got a puncture wound,” I say. “I don’t know how big it is inside, and I don’t have a genkit.” Without a genkit, all I can really do is turn on and off the apps that are already on Cole’s panel. I can’t install anything new or send an emergency stream of custom-coded nanites into his body to heal him. Panels are made to interact with each other, but they aren’t designed to update and override other panels. They aren’t even made for coding—panels don’t have the ability to compile and check gentech code or optimize it for a person’s unique DNA. That’s what genkits are for.

  Leoben pulls us over the crest of a hill and back onto the road. “You got healing tech?”

  “Yeah, but it won’t work properly if he’s got a piece of metal inside him.”

  Leoben’s eyes meet mine in the rearview. “Can you pull it out?”

  “I don’t want to make it worse.”

  “Field medics yank, then jab,” he says. “Healing tech’ll get him back on his feet.”

  I nod, doubt prickling inside me. It’s true that healing tech can handle most wounds, but that doesn’t mean people are indestructible. There’s code to oxygenate your blood in case your heart stops, and triage code to run repairs on the body’s vital organs, but if your brain activity cuts out—if that spark of life dims, even for a moment—then no amount of tech is guaranteed to bring it back. Your body could heal, your heart could even beat again, but you’d never wake up.

  I press my fingers to the wound in Cole’s ribs. His vitals are low, his tech is still regenerating, and I don’t know how much energy his panel has left. He spent the day on lookout in the rain, so he’ll be hungry and exhausted. Yanking out this shrapnel will heal him faster, but it just might kill him too.

  “Hurry, squid,” Leoben urges me, swinging the jeep through a grove of trees.

  Cole lets out a wet cough, a tremor passing through him. His eyelids flutter open. “What . . . what are you doing?”

  “Shhh,” I say. “Just stay still. You have a piece of metal in your side.”

  He groans, shifting uncomfortably. His breath is starting to stutter. If I wait much longer, he’s going to die anyway. The thought feels like a hand around my throat. I grab the blood-slicked edge of the metal, hold my breath, and pull it out.

  It slides from his ribs with a squelch, followed by a gurgle of blood. Cole stiffens, letting out a cry, another tremor running through him. The piece of shrapnel is shaped like a knife. Cruel, sharp, the size of one of my fingers. I toss it to the floor and uncap one of the healing tech syringes, shoving it deep into the wound.

  “You okay back there?” Leoben snaps his head around. “His vitals dipped. What did you—?” He pauses, his eyes lifting to the jeep’s rear windows. “Dammit. Hold on, this is going to get rough.”

  I loop one arm around Cole, using the other to put pressure on the wound in his side, and follow Leoben’s gaze. The Comox is back, soaring over the forest, its spotlights blazing.

  “I thought they were supposed to land and call for backup.”

  “They should have,” Leoben grunts, jerking the wheel. We speed off the gravel road and back into the forest, veering through the trees. “They’re not following Cartaxus’s rules of engagement, and they’re definitely using manual controls.”

  “Maybe we should stop.” I lift my hand, looking down at Cole’s ribs. He’s still bleeding. “Cole’s hurt, we have nowhere to run to—”

  “I haven’t spent the last week living in the mud to give up now, squid,” Leoben yells back.

  We lurch over the crest of a hill and bounce down a rocky slope, the movement throwing me into the side of the jeep. I grab the back of Leoben’s seat to steady myself as we ram through a patch of saplings. The Comox roars above us, its lights sweeping through the darkness. Cole coughs, trying to sit up.

  “Cole,” I gasp, tightening my grip on him. “Don’t move just yet. Are you okay?”

  He nods, staring blearily through the rear window, and lifts his hand to a chain around his neck. “Bait drop,” he whispers.

  “Too risky,” Leoben yells, reversing to pull around a copse of trees. “Not when we can run.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask. “What’s a bait drop?”

  Cole tugs at the chain. A gleaming black pendant is tucked under the collar of his shirt. Nightstick. The same weapon I used at Sunnyvale to knock out Dax. It shorts out gentech panels, knocking out anyone in a twenty-foot radius. It didn’t affect me in Sunnyvale because my panel was still installing, but it’ll take us all out if we set it off now.

  But if we use it when the Comox is close enough, it’ll also knock out the pilot.

  “You said they were flying with manual controls,” I say.

  Cole nods. “We can crash it.” He pushes himself up on one elbow, grimacing against the pain from the movement. “We need to stop the jeep somewhere clear. They’ll drop down lower, then you and Lee run. I’ll stay behind and set the nightstick off once the pilot’s close enough, then you can come back.”

  Leoben shakes his head, yanking the wheel to swing us back toward the road. “Too dangerous. If this goes wrong, we may as well hand ourselves over to them.”

  “They’ve chased us down twice, Lee,” Cole says, his teeth gritted. His face is still pale, slick with sweat. “This way we might get ourselves a copter. We could get across the country tonight.”

  Leoben’s jaw tenses, his eyes lifting to the rearview as the Comox roars closer, the pigeons screeching away from it. We’ll never outrun them in the jeep. They’ll flip us with another rocket. They could follow us for hours.

  “I say we do it,” I say to Cole, “but I’m not leaving you. They take you, they take us both.”

  For a second I think Cole is going to argue, but he nods.

  “Goddammit,” Leoben says. He shakes his head but slows the jeep, veering us into a clearing. His door flies open, and he turns back to me. “Twenty feet, okay?”

  “Run,” Cole says, clutching the nightstick.

&n
bsp; Leoben curses, then slides out of his door and races into the night.

  Cole reaches for my hand, his other hand clutched around the nightstick pendant. The jeep shakes, the air roaring as the Comox descends. Forty feet, thirty. Twenty now. Close enough to make this count. Cole squeezes my hand, his eyes locked on mine.

  Then he twists the pendant, and everything goes black.

  CHAPTER 5

  FOR A MOMENT, AS THE darkness clears, I’m lying on Agnes’s couch with one of her quilts draped over me. I can smell her lavender soap and hear her voice like she’s in the next room. The clatter of pans, her footsteps soft as she moves about in her kitchen. Distantly I know it isn’t real, but the memory feels like a blanket that I want to wrap myself up in. This might have been the last time that I felt truly safe—waking in her home, knowing that she was watching over me. Cooking lentils, humming to herself, her shotgun leaning against the wall. I want to lose myself in the moment, but I can’t ignore the sense that something is wrong.

  “Wake up.”

  The voice is a blade, cutting through the memory. I scrunch my eyes shut against it, struggling to slip back into Agnes’s home again. Her crowded shelves of food and supplies. Her wispy gray hair, her keen eyes.

  “Wake up, dammit.”

  The voice returns, sharper and more insistent. I open my eyes, but there’s no sign of Agnes. The air is cold, heavy with the scent of rain. I’m lying in the back of the jeep, the rear doors flung open, the cobalt glow of the pigeons streaking across a midnight sky. Leoben is beside me, blood soaked into his white-blond hair.

  It all comes back in a sickening blur: the Comox, the chase, the nightstick. I gag, covering my mouth, scrambling out into the grass to throw up.

  “That’s the nightstick,” Leoben calls back. “Makes some people puke. Come on. Cole’s waking up. Help me carry the gear.”

  I straighten, wiping my mouth. We’re in a clearing at the base of a hill, tire tracks cut into knee-high grass behind us. The Comox that was chasing us is crashed, one window shattered, one of its rotors bent. It’s perched on the stump of a snapped tree that’s now lying across the clearing, the grass around it strewn with leaves and broken glass.