by Emily Suvada
Cole is pale, his eyes unfocused, like he was after Leoben’s jeep blew up. He can’t take another resuscitation. His body is already swimming with emergency tech.
This blow could kill him.
The thought turns my focus inward, something inside me shuddering—the wall between my mind and Jun Bei’s memories. It’s cracking at the sight of Cole’s injuries, and the memories are spreading, shattering across my skin. Jun Bei’s past is rising, howling, memories slicing through me like knives. I see a blond-haired girl beside me whispering in my ear, Cole standing in the rain, shouting at Leoben. I see a bald girl with paper-white skin curled into a ball on the floor. I can feel the sting of stitches on my chest, scars curling over my neck. The memories are a wave, crashing against me.
But there’s more than just fragments of them now.
The images rolling through me aren’t just flickers or blurred moments. They’re deep and real. There’s more of Jun Bei’s past locked inside me than I thought. This isn’t just a handful of snatched images. It feels like an ocean of memories locked in my mind, pressing against the cracks inside me, trying to get out.
I gasp, swaying under the weight of the memories. They feel like they’re going to sweep me away, tugging at the slender threads of identity I still have left. For a second I hear Jun Bei’s voice, like I did when I was fighting Lachlan.
And then, suddenly, it’s gone.
The room snaps into sparkling focus. Cole is on the floor, the soldier’s weapon coming down on him. I reach into my panel instinctively, grabbing the first virus that rises to my call. It’s something from Jun Bei’s files, hidden in the depths of her folders of code. My mind tilts and pivots, flinging it into the soldier’s panel.
He drops the rod and falls to the floor before I realize what I’ve done.
Dax steps back, his eyes flying wide as the soldier’s head hits the tiles with a crack. Cole looks around, woozy, at the soldier on the floor.
My heart stops. The soldier isn’t just down. He’s dead.
I just killed him with Jun Bei’s scythe.
Cole stares at me, a look of horror in his eyes. “What did you do, Cat?”
I blink, getting control of myself. The soldier’s body is limp, sprawled on the tiles. I didn’t know that the code I sent would kill him, but he was going to hurt Cole. I didn’t have a choice.
“I did what I had to,” I say, my voice sounding strangely distant. “Brink, you have to let us go. We know where Lachlan is. We can find him.”
Brink is watching me with a calculating look on his face. He doesn’t look angry that I killed the soldier—he just looks interested. “Lachlan really did this to you,” he murmurs, walking closer. His feet step right through the soldier’s body, his brown eyes locked on mine. “You must be worth something to him.”
“I am. He needs me to finish his plan. He’ll let me get closer to him than anyone else. Please. Let me help you stop him.”
“She’s right,” Mato says. There’s a strange light in his eyes as he looks at me. “Lachlan left that tracker in her, but it’s also a way to find him. He wants her to go to him. I need her on this mission.”
“Since when is this your mission?” Brink asks.
“Since it’s sending us to Entropia,” Mato says. “I’m the only person who can get to Lachlan if he’s there, Brink. And I need Catarina to do it.”
Brink’s eyes glaze, and Leoben’s fade to brown, his muscles jolting as he slides out from under Brink’s control. Lee looks around, standing unsteadily.
“You might be right,” Brink says. “It’s a fair trade, I suppose. Catarina did just give us her scythe code. We’ve been trying to re-create it since she first escaped. Every Cartaxus soldier’s panel has been fitted with an app since then to record all incoming attacks. This is going to make flood protocol much easier for us in case we have to launch it.”
I suck in a breath, horrified. I’ve handed Jun Bei’s scythe to Cartaxus.
I just gave them a way to kill everyone on the surface.
“Okay,” Brink says. “I’ll give you a chance, I suppose. I want Lachlan back under control, and you have three days to do it. That’s as long as I’m prepared to wait and let this virus keep evolving. Mato, Franklin—Catarina is your responsibility now. I won’t wait for you to return before launching flood protocol.”
“We need Leoben,” I say.
Brink shakes his head. “Out of the question. He’s too valuable.”
“I need him,” I say, forcing myself to straighten. “He’s coming with us, or I’ll kill the rest of these soldiers.”
Brink waves a hand. “Go ahead.” I can tell he’s just calling my bluff, but the soldiers on the edges of the room stiffen.
“I can reach you, too,” I say. “You’re connected to my VR chip right now. That connection goes two ways.”
Brink goes silent. I’m just bluffing again, and he probably knows it, but he still turns to me with that same appraising look in his eyes. I don’t know if I’m becoming more or less valuable to him. I don’t know what I’m becoming at all.
But I know I’m not walking out of here without my brother.
Brink’s lips curl. “Fine,” he says. “You can take the Comox you came here in. You have three days, Catarina. You had better hope that Lachlan needs you as much as you think he does.”
“Come on,” Leoben says. He slings an arm around Cole and lifts him up, his eyes blazing as he looks back at Dax. Something passes between them—fierce and urgent—then Leoben staggers down the hallway, half carrying Cole.
Mato takes my arm. “Come with me,” he says, his touch gentle, the arrogance in his voice gone. “Let’s go, Catarina.” I let him lead me away from the soldier’s body, down the hallway, through the waiting room and outside.
The Comox we flew in on is waiting on the grass, its rotors already spinning. Leoben hurries up the ramp and inside with Cole. I jog up behind them with Mato, my hair whipping around my face, clutching my wounded arm to my chest. The door hisses shut, and I close my eyes, seeing the lifeless soldier on the floor. I can feel the rush of instinct that led me to Jun Bei’s scythe, that let me fling it into the soldier’s panel.
I can sense the vast ocean of her memories locked inside my mind.
We lift into the darkness through the glowing flock of pigeons and tilt south, racing away from the lab. We have three days to find Lachlan and force him to fix the vaccine. He hasn’t patched it yet, and he hasn’t come in to Cartaxus, but he must know about the strain. Surely he doesn’t want the virus to keep evolving any more than Cartaxus does. Maybe he’s waiting for me to go to him. Maybe he’s still trying to finish his plan.
And now I’m on a Comox, racing through the night toward him.
Either we’re going to stop him, or we’re flying straight into a trap.
CHAPTER 11
IT’S MORNING BY THE TIME we make it to the northern reaches of Nevada, the faint penumbra of the Comox’s shadow sliding across barren desert plains. There are no trees below us, just an endless expanse of wiry bushes in shades of olive and brown, intersected by the occasional pale stretch of road. A flock of pigeons is flying in from the east, their plumage black and cobalt, the roar of their cries barely perceptible above the rotors’ drone. Flickers of recognition rise through me as I watch the landscape pass below us, but the ocean of memories that I glimpsed in the lab is locked back in the depths of my mind.
The four of us are silent. I managed to sleep for a couple of hours on one of the plastic chairs that fold down from the Comox’s side. Leoben is in the cockpit, Mato is standing to look out the window, and Cole is beside me, his head tilted back against the seat, his eyes closed. He’s not asleep, but he’s not talking either. His tech is keeping him stable, and I don’t think he’s in much pain, but ever since we left the lab, there’s been a wall of silence around him that I’m afraid to cross.
Not that I’m in the mood to talk. My panel arm is cradled to my chest, a plastic pressure b
andage wrapped around it. It hasn’t stopped aching since we left the lab. I should scan my tech to figure out what caused the wires to erupt like that, or at least turn on an anesthetic, but I can’t bring myself to dive into my panel and dull the pain.
I killed a man.
The thought feels like a wound inside me—something I need to fold myself around and wait for it to heal. But it’s been hours now, and the guilt isn’t fading. If anything, it’s growing sharper. It doesn’t help that Cole’s silence carries the same undercurrent of horror that I saw in his eyes in the lab. Which is ridiculous. He would have done the same thing to protect me, and it’s not like I’ve never killed anyone before. I lived through the outbreak; I’ve eaten people. There’s plenty of blood on my hands.
But it’s never been quite like this.
Every time I close my eyes, I see the flash of commands, the soldier’s head bouncing when he hit the floor. Part of me is afraid to even think about Jun Bei’s scythe in case I somehow run the code again. It feels like a loaded gun inside my mind, and I don’t know if I’m in control of the trigger. I killed that soldier on instinct, but the instinct wasn’t mine. Nothing I’ve experienced in the last three years taught me to lash out with code like that. It was a behavior Jun Bei learned.
Her past is bubbling into my thoughts, pushing into my actions, and I don’t know if I like it.
I’m starting to understand how Cole must feel being a black-out agent, acting on commands and responses that are not his own. The difference is, Cole’s protocol is controlled by his tech, but the instinct to kill that soldier came from my own mind.
“We’re almost at the coordinates Cartaxus gave us,” Leoben calls back from the cockpit. “Does Entropia have anti-aircraft missiles?”
Mato turns from the window, concerned. “It’s possible. Why?”
“Because I can see the city, which means they can see us.” Leoben tilts the controls, and the Comox dips. “I’m gonna start a descent and get out of visual range.”
I stand from my seat, using my good hand to grip the camouflage netting on the ceiling, and step across the cargo hold. Cole stays seated, but Mato follows me to the cockpit’s entrance. His hand grips the netting beside mine, close enough for me to feel the tension in the fabric. I still can’t remember how Jun Bei knew Mato, but I’ve been hyperaware of his presence the entire time we’ve been flying, and I know he’s been watching me too. Twice I looked over and found his gaze on me while I was trying to sleep, and each time it sent an uncomfortable jolt through me.
I can’t quite place the way I feel when I look at Mato. It’s something close to the way I felt when Dax and I used to work together. There are so few people who code as intensely as we do that whenever I meet one, it feels important, like two ships crossing paths in a vast and empty sea.
I know Jun Bei coded for Cartaxus when she was at the lab, so there’s a chance that she and Mato worked together. Whatever their connection, I feel like it was deep.
But he still hasn’t mentioned anything to me.
“There’s the city,” he says, lifting his hand to point through the windshield. The curved glass of his mask is dark now, almost opaque, obscuring his left eye and brow. I don’t know if there’s a reason it keeps changing color, or why he even has it over his eye, unless he prefers it that way—as an intentional barrier between him and the rest of the world.
I follow his gaze to a smudge in the distance, letting my ocular tech sense the focus of my eyes. The horizon swells in my vision. The desert is barren, rocky and brown, but a cluster of steel and concrete towers juts from a patch of color: green and scarlet, white and lemon yellow. Fields and rows of flowers and plants are spread haphazardly around the base of a small mountain, canals shining between them.
Entropia.
I first heard about the city from the news stories about the passenger pigeons, back when they were first released. Entropia’s hackers created the flocks, along with dozens of other strains of animals and plants that have spread out of control. The hacker Regina moved here and started a commune decades ago, and people have been coming to join her ever since, setting up homesteads in the mountains, taking over most of this corner of the state. When the government tightened its laws on genehacking, Regina declared the territory around the city a sovereign state with herself as its queen. She barricaded their roads, erected a border, and cut off contact with the outside world.
Regina says they’re a team of artists, scientists, and gentech enthusiasts dedicated to reinventing themselves.
I always thought they sounded like a cult.
“I didn’t know the city was this big,” I say as we draw closer. The buildings are constructed into the mountain’s slopes—a mix of gleaming skyscrapers and tilted wooden shacks clinging to every inch of the rock. Narrow, dusty streets wind in zigzags between them, a haze of drones and pigeons filling the air.
It’s a jagged pyramid rising from an oasis in the middle of a dead and sprawling landscape, and something clenches inside me at the sight of it. It’s sprawling, wild, and beautiful.
I’ve definitely been here before, but I can’t remember anything about it.
Leoben turns the Comox, heading for a rocky mountain ridge, and I scan the desert around the city. Miles of barren rocky plains stretch out from the mountain’s base, meeting a wide ring of dark, gleaming purple. It looks like some kind of natural border encircling the city. Razorgrass, probably. The serrated leaves are distantly related to wheat, and they’re sharp enough to shred tires and bleed trespassers to death. The border must have been Regina’s way of keeping her city safe from infection, like the mile-wide wastelands that Cartaxus builds around its bunkers to keep the clouds from drifting too close. Two narrow roads are cut through the border from the city, leading to what look like busy checkpoints in the desert.
“Yeah, this place is huge,” Leoben says, spinning around in the pilot’s seat. “What’s the plan? It could take days to search all these buildings.”
“I have a plan,” Mato says, “but first we need to land, stock up, and load into vehicles. Our coordinates are for a Cartaxus safehouse an hour’s drive from the border.”
“How are we going to get past those checkpoints?” Leoben asks. “Looks like they’re armed.”
“I can get us in,” Mato says. “I’m a resident of Entropia. This is where I grew up.”
I look over at him. “You lived here?”
He nods, a few strands of his dark hair falling across his mask as he stares through the window at the hazy rise of the city in the distance. “I was here until a couple of years before the outbreak. That’s why Brink let me take over this mission. I can get us a meeting with Regina—I’ve worked with her, and she respects me. She’ll be a useful ally in helping us find Lachlan.”
“Are you serious?” I ask. “Regina could be working with him. We should be trying to lie low. Can’t we just go to the coordinates Lachlan is at?”
Mato shakes his head. “That tracker is only accurate to within a few miles. It puts Lachlan in the city, but we’ll still have to search for him. He’ll already know we’re here, anyway. Regina’s a little out of touch, but I don’t think she’d be part of a plan that would put her people at risk. She’ll help us find him.”
I exchange a worried look with Leoben. Mato doesn’t seem concerned about meeting with Regina, but the thought sends a flare of unease through me. We’re walking a dangerous line—we need to find Lachlan and force him to fix the vaccine, but if we make a wrong move, I could end up back under his control. Then there’ll be no stopping him. He could use my DNA to rewrite everyone’s minds—turn the whole world into one of his experiments.
But Leoben’s right—it could take days to search the city. If Regina can help us, meeting with her might be worth the risk.
“All right, I see the safehouse,” Leoben says. “I’m going to set us down. Hold on.”
Cole’s face stays clouded as the Comox starts to drop. I don’t know if he’s worr
ied about this plan, or if he’s still upset about what happened at the lab. I sit back down, buckling my harness carefully around my wounded arm, and lean against the Comox’s side as we descend.
The windows show a view of the flat, rocky desert and a two-story concrete building that must be the safehouse. It’s painted the same pale beige as the empty scrub-covered land around it. The Comox’s rotors kick up a cloud of dust and feathers as we land—black feathers with cobalt tips, like the birds that were at the lab. They must have covered half the country by now. I’ve never seen a strain multiply this quickly.
The Comox jolts, touching down. A blast of hot, dry air billows into the cargo hold as the door swings open and the ramp unfolds. The sunlight is blinding after the dim view through the tinted windows, but my ocular tech adjusts smoothly, bringing the house into focus. It’s a mess. The windows are boarded, junk strewn around it. A broken floor lamp leans against the rusted remains of a burned-out car, and one side of the house is smudged with black streaks from a pile of charred tires.
“This place is trashed,” Leoben says, unbuckling his harness. He steps through the cargo hold to the ramp, lifting his hand to shield his eyes.
“That’s how it’s supposed to look,” Mato says. “It’s to discourage scavenging. The equipment is hidden in the basement.”
“There’d better be food,” Leoben says, jogging down the ramp. “I checked the Comox’s inventory. There’s nothing on this thing, not even water. We’re gonna need clothes, too—we can’t show up wearing Cartaxus gear.”
“There should be plenty of supplies inside the house,” Mato says, following him. His mask darkens as he steps into the sun, taking on a matte texture, as black and dull as charcoal. “It looked like there was a market near the checkpoint too. We don’t need much for this mission.”
“I need a meal,” Leoben says. “There’d better be something in here.”
They head for the house. Cole stands quickly, one hand rubbing his ribs. He starts after Leoben and Mato, but I catch his arm. This might be our last chance to talk in private about what happened at the lab—the scythe, the soldier. The ocean of memories I glimpsed during the decryption.
