This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  That was a dark time, though, and the only light I’d been able to see was Cole.

  “Okay, landing now,” Leoben says, guiding us toward the parking lot. The wind from the rotors sends ripples across the knee-high grass, the Comox’s spotlights blinking on, lighting up the lab’s cracked concrete walls. Its front door is open, a row of guards standing outside. They lift their rifles as we land.

  Cole steps in front of me. “Don’t make any sudden movements. Try to let us do the talking.” He reaches back one hand and squeezes mine for a moment, then lets it drop.

  I open my mouth to tell him that we’ll get through this, and that I’m sorry for bringing him back here when he wants to run, but the Comox’s door slides open with a hiss and the ramp folds down.

  Cole and Leoben lift their hands, moving to the door. The soldiers keep their rifles trained on them as they walk down the ramp, but there are no shouted orders, no handcuffs, no bullets. Cole looks back at me, giving me a slight nod, and I follow him out, my hands raised, with Dax walking unsteadily behind me.

  The grass is wet, the air cold, ringing with the cries of the pigeons. A figure is standing in front of a row of guards—a sandy-haired man in a gray military jacket. He steps forward, looking between the four of us, his eyes landing on me.

  “Catarina,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. My name is Charles Brink.”

  I straighten. Brink. The leader of Cartaxus’s central command. I’m surprised to see him here in person. His voice is warm, but there’s an edge to the way he looks at me, like he’s trying to figure out how much I might be worth to him. He’s tall, with a politician’s smile and carefully constructed wrinkles around his eyes that lend him an air of easy credibility.

  “At ease, Lieutenants,” he says. “My team tells me you’ve both been dark for the last week.”

  “We were injured, sir—” Cole starts, but Brink cuts him off.

  “You were planning to go after Lachlan on your own.”

  Cole’s shoulders drop. “Yes, sir.”

  Brink nods, apparently satisfied. “It’s hard to blame you for that, but I’m glad you came back in. I see you’ve been taking care of Miss Agatta. We were concerned that something might have happened to her.”

  He walks along the row of guards to stand before me. “This must be a difficult time for you, Catarina. We’ve all been shocked to learn that Lachlan isn’t the man we thought he was. I’ve known your father since we were boys, but I had no idea he was capable of this. I didn’t even know that he had a daughter. He must have worked hard to keep you hidden all these years. Who was your mother?”

  I shoot a nervous glance at Cole. If I say the wrong thing, Brink might figure out that I’m not really Lachlan’s daughter. “She died when I was little,” I say. “She had hypergenesis.”

  Brink’s eyes glaze as he checks something in his panel. “Ah, of course. The hypergenesis trials. Interesting. Well, I’m glad you’ve joined us now.” He steps back into the line of soldiers, and his elbow passes through one man’s armored torso.

  He’s not really here.

  The man in front of me is just a VR avatar, sketched into my vision like the flash I saw of Jun Bei. Only, this feed isn’t coming from a saved file in my panel. It’s live, like a comm. Lachlan and Dax used to have conversations like this with other coders when we were at the cabin, but I could never see who they were talking to. There’s a faint pixelated fuzz around the edges of his image, but that’s the only hint he isn’t real. It’s going to take me a while to get used to seeing people just appear like this.

  “And Crick,” Brink says, turning to Dax, arching an eyebrow. “I must say I’m surprised to see you here.”

  “I sent him,” a voice calls from inside the lab. A figure strides out—a boy my age, maybe a little older. The guards part as he steps between them, clapping his hands as though dusting them off. His skin is pale, his shoulder-length hair dark and straight, hanging messily around his face. A rush of recognition rises through me as he steps into the light.

  I know him.

  I know his stance, his eyes, the planes of his face. Looking at him makes me think of code and coiled strands of DNA, but nothing rises in my memory. His clothes are black—ripped jeans, a leather jacket, and a T-shirt with a molecule printed on the front. Dopamine. A triangular piece of dark glass covers part of his forehead, sitting on his face like a second skin. It drops from his hairline to cover his left eye, arcing into a point on the edge of his cheekbone. It’s a coding mask—a computer hooked directly into the net of electrodes lining his skull, connected through holes drilled into his forehead. A handful of leylines spill from the mask’s edges, veering across his cheeks and down the sides of his neck, disappearing into his collar.

  “I thought Dax might be able to bring in Catarina,” the boy says. “Looks like I was right.” His eyes dance over us, a half-smile on his lips, and a low, trembling flame of fear lights up inside me. Brink doesn’t frighten me, not really. He has the air of a businessman, and I know the guards surrounding us are just normal people beneath their armor and visors, but this boy is different.

  He’s a coder, and he’s smart—that fact is clear from the piercing look in his eyes, the black glass on his forehead. The only reason to wear a mask like that is to code just slightly faster than you can through a panel. A mask doesn’t need to use the cables in your body or your panel’s memory, making every command just a fraction of a second faster. Anyone willing to drill dozens of holes into their skull for that shouldn’t be underestimated.

  “Ah, Mato,” Brink says. “How’s the lab?”

  “Filthy,” Mato says, flicking the collar of his jacket to dust it off. He walks past Cole and Leoben, glancing briefly at them, then pauses beside Dax, looking at the bruises on his face before turning to me.

  “Catarina Agatta,” he says, his gaze unnervingly intense. I can only see one of his eyes clearly, but the one beneath the mask is still faintly visible, his lower lashes catching the Comox’s spotlights. “I’m Somata Watson, but most people call me Mato. It’s good to finally meet you in person.”

  “We’ve spoken?” I ask, forcing my voice to stay level. I’m sure that Jun Bei knew this guy somehow, but he definitely shouldn’t know me.

  His mask clears slightly, the leylines on his cheeks exaggerating the lean, sharp angles of his face. He’s beautiful in a cold, intelligent way, but there’s an arrogant air about him. “I was the one blocking the hacks you did with the Skies,” he says. “You had decent—if rudimentary—attacks. You could be a good coder someday with training. That polyworm last summer almost made me break a sweat.”

  I just stare at him. Is he seriously smack-talking me about my hacks while a mutated strain of the plague is sweeping across the world?

  Brink clears his throat. “Mato, the mission.”

  A flash of frustration crosses Mato’s face, his mask darkening again. “Yes, the mission. I understand that Lachlan fitted you with a neural implant, Catarina. That’s why we’re here. I think it can help us.”

  I exchange a glance with Dax. He’s the one who discovered the implant during the vaccine’s decryption. He said it was designed to suppress my memories, but then it added Lachlan’s extra code to the vaccine. I’ve tried to check it a few times over the last week, but every test I’ve been able to run showed that it was blank.

  “I think it was wiped,” I say.

  “She’s right.” Dax pushes away from where he’s leaning against the Comox’s side. It looks like he’s having trouble staying on his feet. “The output I saw from the decryption showed the implant being erased. Lachlan covered his tracks.”

  “Yes, I know,” Mato says. “I read the output too, obviously more closely than you. I have the same implant installed, and I know how it works. There’s a trace in the log from Catarina’s that I can’t account for. It might help us find Lachlan.”

  “Wait,” I say. “What do you mean, find him?”

  “I th
ink your father put a tracker in it,” Mato says. “It looks like it’s pinging your location to him.”

  My hand rises cautiously to the back of my head. One of the first things I did when my new panel was installing was have Leoben check my tech for trackers. If I’m as important to Lachlan as he made it sound, then he wouldn’t have left me alone through the outbreak without a way to keep an eye on me. Leoben couldn’t find anything in my panel, but we didn’t think to check the implant. We figured I was clean, anyway, because Lachlan hadn’t come after us.

  It’s been a week since Sunnyvale. If Lachlan needs me and knows where I am, why hasn’t he come for me?

  “I’d like to hack the implant,” Mato says. “I might be able to follow the signal back to Lachlan. This lab is . . . outdated, but it has everything I’ll need. We can try it now, if you’d like?”

  It sounds like a question, but it’s clear he isn’t asking my permission. I don’t know how I feel about this guy hacking anything of mine, let alone something in my skull, but if there’s a chance it’ll lead us to Lachlan, we have to try it.

  “Yeah, fine,” I say.

  “Good,” Brink says. “Once we know where Lachlan is, we can bring him in. Franklin, we’ll be wanting you in the extraction team.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cole says.

  “I’d like to volunteer,” Leoben says.

  Brink shakes his head. “Not this time, Lieutenant. You’re too important to risk. I shouldn’t have let Dax take you off-base in the first place.”

  Leoben’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “What about me?” I ask.

  Brink turns to me, surprised. “You don’t have any combat experience. You’d be a liability.”

  “If you want to bring Lachlan in alive to fix this vaccine, then you’ll need someone who can talk to him. I can help you.”

  Brink looks me up and down, considering. “Maybe. Get us his location first, and then we’ll talk. Why don’t you wait inside? I need to brief Lieutenant Franklin.”

  “Come on,” Leoben mutters, taking my arm.

  “It was nice to meet you, Catarina,” Brink says as we step past his avatar. “You’re a smart girl. You could have a bright future at Cartaxus. You clearly have your father’s mind, though you must have your mother’s looks.”

  I blink, exchanging a confused look with Leoben. I don’t look anything like my mother. I’m the spitting image of Lachlan—everyone who’s ever met me has said that. His DNA is coiled inside every one of my cells. I have his hands, his nose, the exact shade of his skin. “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, you certainly don’t look like Lachlan,” Brink says. “He never showed you pictures of himself when he was younger?”

  I hold his gaze, unsure of how to answer. I don’t know what he’s talking about—what Lachlan looked like when he was younger. I know Lachlan’s DNA better than anyone: gray eyes, a narrow nose, olive skin. The phenotypes are clear. There’s no way he could have looked much different than he does today, which means there’s a chance Brink is testing me. He said he’s known Lachlan since they were boys. This could be a trap for me to reveal that I’m not who I seem to be.

  But there’s no reason for him to play games. I’ve already offered to let Mato run a hack on the implant in my head. He could easily run a scan on my DNA, too.

  “He wasn’t really into photographs,” I say.

  Brink nods. If he suspects anything, it doesn’t show in his face. “I thought he was just trying out a new look, but it makes sense having met you. It must have comforted him to see your features in the mirror while you were apart. A reminder of what he was working for, I suppose. Still, I always thought he looked better with his natural red hair.”

  CHAPTER 8

  LEOBEN GUIDES ME AWAY FROM Brink and into the lab, leaving Cole and Dax behind us. I walk numbly down the hallway with the triangular fluorescent lights set into the ceiling, Brink’s words circling through my mind.

  I always thought he looked better with his natural red hair.

  There’s no way that Lachlan could have red hair. It would be obvious from his genetic profile. Lachlan’s hair is dark brown, nearly black. He doesn’t even carry a recessive copy of the red-haired gene.

  I should know. The same DNA is in my cells.

  Leoben pushes open one of the doors, leading me into a small laboratory. A set of shelves on the far wall holds a terrifying array of surgical equipment, a humming genkit beside it, a metal table standing in the center of the room with plastic chairs stacked on top of it. The walls and floor are glistening white tile, a lab counter along one wall set with a row of sinks. A screen hung high in the corner of the room shows a silent mess of green and purple static.

  No memories rush back to me as I step into the room—just blunt sensory flashes of pain, cold, and the fog of anesthetic. I eye the shelves of scalpels and saws, probes and coiled wires. Cole said that sometimes memories aren’t worth the pain they hold. Standing in this room, I’m starting to agree with him.

  Maybe there are some things that I’m better off not remembering.

  Leoben swings the door shut behind us. “It’s safe to talk in here.” He points to the ceiling. “No cameras. They couldn’t risk anyone hacking in and seeing what they were doing.”

  I nod vaguely, pacing to the back of the room, rubbing a lock of my still-damp hair between my fingers. “Lachlan’s hair is brown, right?”

  “As long as I’ve known him.”

  “So what was Brink talking about?”

  Leoben crosses his arms, leaning back against the counter. “Maybe Lachlan used an app to turn it red when he was younger.”

  I shake my head. “That was before gentech. If he’s using anything to change his hair, it’d be now, to make it dark. But he’d still be a redhead underneath. Gentech doesn’t change your natural DNA. I’m the only one who can do that. I know Lachlan’s genes, though, and they say his hair is dark.”

  “Maybe he masks his DNA,” Leoben says. “Dax was saying he could fake ours to get us into a bunker.”

  I brace my hands against the lab counter, leaning over one of the sinks. It’s possible. I’ve heard of apps that can trick a genkit into misreading your DNA. Genkits aren’t foolproof—that’s part of the reason I never realized who I was when I was at the cabin. If Lachlan really is a redhead, though, he’s going to great lengths to hide it. But it doesn’t make sense—Lachlan changed me into his daughter. He made me look like him.

  Why would he make me look like a version of himself that isn’t even real?

  “Brink’s probably just trying to mess with your head,” Leoben says. “That’s what they do. You saw what they did to Dax.”

  I look up. “Yeah—Dax. Anything you want to tell me?”

  He looks away, kicking the heel of his boot back against the cupboards below the lab counter. “There isn’t really anything to tell.”

  “Bullshit. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  He lifts an eyebrow. “Maybe because he’s your ex, and because the last time you two saw each other, he shot you, and you bit his ear off.”

  “Fair enough,” I mutter.

  He tips his head back. “I didn’t even think I really cared about him, but now that he’s infected . . . I can’t think about anything else.”

  I push away from the counter, ignoring the flicker of jealousy that coils through me at his words. Dax and I were barely even together back at the cabin, and we’ve been apart for the last two years, and I’m with Cole now. I should be happy for Lee, and I am, but that doesn’t ease the sudden tension in my shoulders.

  I lift down one of the chairs stacked on the table. “How long have you been together?”

  “We aren’t together.” He follows me, grabbing a chair, lifting it down. “I don’t know. A year, maybe.”

  I roll my eyes. “A year? You guys are totally together.”

  He grabs the last two chairs, one in each hand, and lowers them, his movements swift and gracef
ul. “Not all of us fall head over heels at first sight like you and Cole. It isn’t anything serious. He couldn’t understand the vaccine, so he ran tests to study me, and we got . . . close.”

  Goose bumps rise across my skin at the thought of Dax experimenting on Leoben. I don’t know how that could possibly have brought them closer. My eyes drop to the curled scars peeking from the collar of his tank top, and his hand rises self-consciously, following my gaze.

  “Speaking of experiments,” he says, glancing at the shelves of medical equipment, “I never asked—did Lachlan run tests on you when you were at the cabin?”

  “I’m not done talking about Dax,” I say.

  “Well, I am.” He crosses his arms. “So, did he?”

  I sit down on one of the chairs, the skin on my chest tingling in the place where I once carried a map of scars like his. There’s nothing there but smooth skin now, but there’s still a tract of scar tissue running down my spine.

  “No, he never hurt me, except for the code he used to stop me hacking my panel. It took off half the skin on my back when I tried to install an aesthetic suite.”

  “I’d say that counts as hurting you. What an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” I mutter, shifting uncomfortably at the instinctive urge to defend Lachlan. Somehow, despite everything that’s happened, it’s still hard for me to hear anyone else insult him. It’s maddening. “I just don’t understand the whole charade of making me his daughter,” I say, “especially if I don’t really look like him.”

  Leoben leans back against the lab counter, crossing his arms. “What was he like as your father?”

  I shrug, tracing my finger along a scratch in the metal table. “I don’t know—he was busy. He was nice whenever we coded together, but the rest of the time he was pretty distant. He was never really affectionate, but he was always protective, and I figured that meant he had to care.”