by Emily Suvada
The farthest connection in my vision looks like it’s a mile away.
“It has a wireless extender,” Mato says. “But that’s not all it does.”
I lift my arm, feeling the glass stretch on my skin. A menu flashes into my vision—not my panel’s interface, but something new, showing me the apps installed in my arm, filtering the mountain of Jun Bei’s code into folders and databases. The menu spins across my vision, offering scans on my DNA, suggesting upgrades to some of my apps. I focus on an icon with a loop of wire on it, and a silver wire slithers from the side of the cuff, coiling like a snake.
It’s a needle-tipped reader wire.
“Holy shit!” I say. “This is a genkit, too?”
Mato grins. “It should help you control the implant as well. Its software is more sophisticated than anything you can run inside your body.”
“This . . . this is amazing.” I curl the fingers of my panel hand into a fist. There’s no pain from the wires anymore—just the cool press of the glass against my skin. Something about it feels familiar, and impossibly right. It isn’t like I’m wearing a piece of tech—it’s like the cuff is a part of my body that I was born without.
“Jun Bei must have worn one,” I say. “This feels so natural.”
Mato nods. “I agree, but Cartaxus’s records don’t show her using one in the lab. It would have been after she left.”
“That six months,” I mutter, tracing my fingers across the seams in the glass over my wrist. “They’re just . . . gone.”
Mato flips the briefcase shut. “It sounds like you were wiped.”
I look up. “Wiped?”
He nods. “Depending on how ERO-86 is used, it can either be a neural suppressant, or it can erase memories completely. Cartaxus does it to black-out soldiers sometimes. It works backward, destroying the most recently created neurons in your brain. If you run it for a few minutes, you can erase weeks. Run it for longer, and you’ll take away years. The fact that you can’t remember anything for six months tells me that’s probably what happened.”
I sit back in my chair. He’s right—it does seem like those six months were wiped. But why not more, or why not just suppress those months like the rest of my memories? And why the hell would Lachlan ever give me this cuff? If Jun Bei was his prisoner during those six months, he would have wanted to keep her under control.
So why would he give her a cuff that made her a better hacker?
“Those memories are likely gone,” Mato says, “but if you’ve worn a cuff like this before, then it probably wasn’t far from here. These cuffs can’t be bought with money—only with code, and it happens that the person who designed them is the same person who designed the implant, and my mask.”
“Regina,” I breathe.
He nods. “If you’re looking for answers, she might have them.”
I hold his eyes, the wireless feed from the cuff buzzing in my senses. He’s given me more clarity in one conversation than I’ve felt all week. And he’s given me a genkit. I open my mouth to thank him, but footsteps sound in the hallway, and Cole pushes into the room. His face softens as he sees me, but I can’t return his smile. I still don’t know how to process what I overheard between him and Anna.
“The jeep is stocked,” he says, but stops abruptly when he sees the cuff on my arm. “What’s that?”
“A cuff,” I say. “It’s a genkit. That’s what the wires that came out of my arm were for. I think Jun Bei wore one like this after she left the lab.”
Cole stares at the sheath of black glass wrapped around my arm. “What do you need that for?”
“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “I’m useless without a genkit. I can’t fight unless I’m able to code.”
“Can’t we find you one like the model you used to have?” Cole asks.
“I like this one,” I say, frustrated. “It’s just a cuff.”
He looks between me and Mato. “Fine. It’s not my arm. If you’re both ready, then we can leave.”
He turns away and heads back down the hallway. I run my fingers over the cuff’s black glass, turning my arm to look at it. I don’t know why Cole was so upset to see it. This thing might be the best weapon we could have. I still have the scythe in my arm, and now I can reach a mile with it. It’s not that I want to hurt anyone, but there’s some comfort in knowing I can defend myself.
Apparently Cole doesn’t see it that way.
“He’s afraid of you,” Mato says, watching Cole leave. His mask has darkened to black again.
I drop my fingers from the smooth, warm glass. “Why do you say that?”
“I saw it in the lab when you killed that soldier. He was frightened by what you could do. They were all afraid of you, even Brink.”
“And you?”
Mato shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t afraid. I know you don’t remember, but you’ve been my coding partner for years. All I saw in that moment was something impossible becoming real. I felt like I was seeing you for the first time.”
My eyes lift slowly to his, something trembling inside me, and a white alert from the cuff blinks at the top of my vision. A background scan. Something detected in the distance. I lift my eyes and send a pulse out, the command already instinctive and natural, and outlines glow around me—cameras, microphones, a halo of open connections.
“What is it?” Mato asks.
I narrow my eyes, staring up at three glowing points of light superimposed on the ceiling above me. They’re faint, small. Far above us, in the sky.
“Drones,” I say, standing from the table. “Someone’s found us.”
CHAPTER 14
MATO RISES FROM HIS CHAIR, a light blinking on the corner of his mask. “I see them too.”
I stare up at the glowing specks of light, urging my cuff to scan their wireless signals. There are three drones hovering far above us, but I can’t tell what model they are or if they’re armed. There’s no clue to who sent them—Cartaxus, Entropia, maybe even Lachlan. The cuff offers me connection details in case I want to try to hack them, but I have no idea how to do that.
I’ve never even thought about being able to hack a drone while it’s in flight.
“We have to warn the others,” I say. “They’re exposed.” I push away from the table and back into the hallway. The feeling of the cuff stretching on my skin is strangely reassuring. It has the same calming weight that Lachlan’s rifle did when I slept with it at my side in the cabin. A weapon, loaded and ready. I can’t help but wonder if that’s how Jun Bei felt about it when she wore it.
I stride past the storeroom and jog up the sand-covered stairs that lead to the house’s main level, sending another pulse out from the cuff to keep track of the drones. They haven’t moved. They’re locked in a triangle above the safehouse, circling slowly. Definitely watching us.
“This has to be Entropia,” Mato says, following me up the stairs. “It looks like a scouting fleet. We want to be discovered and taken to Regina. This is all going to plan. They’ll scan us and go back, and then they’ll send someone out to look for us.”
“Maybe,” I say, reaching the house’s main floor. “I still don’t like the others being out there.” My boots crunch over the grit blown into the hallway from outside. I reach the door and pause, looking out. Cole and Leoben are standing at the back of the jeep, and Anna is sitting on the hood, her face tipped back to the sun. None of them seems to notice the drones hovering silently above us. For a moment I don’t understand how I could possibly notice them before three black-out agents did, but then I remember the cuff on my arm.
My wireless scanner must be even better than theirs.
“Guys,” I call out, standing in the hallway. I take a single step closer to the door, and one of the points of light from the drones streaks in a blur across my vision. Something whistles through the air from it and smacks into my hand. I stumble back wildly, clutching my arm to my chest, letting out a cry. Mato grabs me to pull me back into the house, his eyes flying wide, b
ut another whistle cuts the air, and something hits his arm.
He shouts in pain, and we fall into the hallway together, landing in a heap on the floor. Whatever hit me doesn’t hurt as much as sting, which is somehow even worse. There’s a lump forming on my hand, a tiny puncture wound between my thumb and forefinger. I scramble back on the floor, trying to get into cover. Whatever we were just shot with, it wasn’t designed to injure us.
It was designed to be implanted into us.
Cole’s head snaps up, his eyes flashing to black. He looks around, wrenching open the jeep’s rear doors for his rifle. I try to shout to him to get inside. . . .
But the moment I open my mouth, the desert disappears.
I stare around, blinking, scrambling to my feet. Mato and I aren’t in the safehouse anymore. We’re in a tall, circular room with no windows, its concrete walls covered in hanging plants and hundreds of metal cages holding animals—birds, snakes, and lizards, their cries filling the air.
“What the hell?” I spit, my heart pounding. This feels like the flashes of memory that have been hitting me, only Mato is here.
“It’s okay,” he says, standing, brushing himself off. A strand of his dark hair has slipped from his braid, falling across his mask. “We’re still in the desert. This is a VR simulation. Regina wants to talk to us.”
I look around, still gasping for air, my hand held to my chest. I reach an arm out to where the wall in the safehouse’s hallway should be, and my hand hits a hard, invisible surface. I can feel grit under my boots, even though the floor beneath me looks like slick, glossy concrete. Everything looks perfectly real, the rendering smooth as I move forward, scanning the walls.
It’s like I’ve just stepped through a portal and into a completely different place.
“Where are we?” I breathe, rubbing my hand where I was shot. The stinging has faded, but the lump between my thumb and forefinger is still swelling.
“This is Regina’s lab,” Mato says, straightening his jacket. It isn’t the one with the sequins sewn into the shoulders that he was wearing just a minute ago, though—this is a plain black jacket. I look down, scanning my body. I’m dressed in gray Cartaxus pants and a fresh black tank top. The skin on my arms is smooth and clean, my hair hanging in neat waves, sliding over my shoulders.
This isn’t a recording of me—there are no VR cameras around us in the safehouse to send our images to Regina. This is an avatar being generated by the panel in my arm, based on whatever information it can find about how I look. I turn, searching for a reflective surface, suddenly frightened that Jun Bei’s features might be stored in the avatar from when she used this panel—but my own face blinks back at me from the glass door of a cabinet.
The sight of my features, and of Lachlan’s face in them, is more comforting than I expected.
I turn back, scanning the room. It’s vast, the cries of the animals echoing from the curved walls. There must be a hundred different types of animals here, including dozens of strains of pigeons. This is definitely a lab, but it’s not like any I’ve seen before. Black counters curve around the outside of the room in a ring, complete with shelves of glassware and sample canisters. The floor is sloped slightly toward a dark hole cut into the center of the room, like a massive drain. There’s a steel platform hanging over it, suspended by a chain. It looks like the platform is designed to be lowered down through the hole to whatever’s beneath us. One side of the room opens up to a wide hallway set up like a farm, with rows of raised garden beds dripping with water that flows in rivulets across the concrete, disappearing into the drain.
It’s wild, bursting with life and color, nothing like the sterile, cluttered labs that I’m used to. Across the room from us, a small shrine is set up beneath an arch of flowering vines, displaying red candles, gilded photographs, and a bowl of fruit. There’s a massive coding terminal in the wall that looks like it’s a Cartaxus model, linked to a humming genkit and four cylindrical glass tanks filled with bubbling clear liquid.
The tanks are holding four human bodies.
“Holy shit,” I say, staring at the tanks. The bodies have mottled skin, their eyes open and unseeing. They look like teenagers—hairless and floating, dressed in gray pressure suits. “Why does she have bodies?”
“They’re not bodies,” a soft voice says from beside us. “They’re alive, and I like to think they’re listening, so I’d prefer it if you’d speak kindly about them.”
I turn, stepping back as a woman walks into the room from the hallway, flanked by two guards. I’ve never seen her before, not even a photograph, but I have no doubt that it’s Regina. Her skin is covered with glossy scales in shades of forest green and black, with a pattern like an overturned crown across her face. Her eyes are as black as the scaled skin around them, her cheekbones ridged and angled, a silky emerald dress hanging from her shoulders, rippling where it pools around her feet. There are tiny dots of cobalt light studded between her scales like a constellation of stars twinkling across her skin. She’s short—even shorter than me—with long blue-black hair tumbling over her shoulders, topped with a crystal tiara. A white snake is looped around her neck, a raven perched on her shoulder.
She is completely and utterly magnificent.
Some of the hackers I met at the Skies base at Sunnyvale were seriously modified, but none of them compare to Regina. They all looked like people who were running apps, but she looks like she transformed herself into a brand-new species. Every alteration she’s made is seamless and perfect—her scales are smaller around the edges of her eyes and mouth in a natural-looking pattern that must have taken months to code. The two guards flanking her stop by the entrance of the room as she walks in. They’re wearing gray uniforms, but they don’t look anything like Cartaxus’s soldiers. One is a woman, covered in pale tufted fur, with claws instead of fingernails, and the other is a man wearing a coding mask similar to Mato’s, except it covers his entire forehead and both his eyes.
“Somata,” Regina purrs, walking over to us, her movements eerily smooth and graceful. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. But I hope you haven’t forgotten that you’re a wanted man in this city.”
Mato’s face darkens. “What did you shoot us with, Regina?”
“Nothing that will hurt you as long as you behave.” She walks to one of the lab counters and lifts the snake from her shoulders, easing it into one of the cages, cooing at it. “The pellets are called weevils. Tiny things, but very effective. They’re geographically activated—if you try to come into the city without permission, they’ll kill you with a lethal dose of neurotoxin.” She turns, lifting the raven from her shoulder, balancing it on her wrist. “I wouldn’t try to remove them, either. It might be the last thing you ever do. As long as the weevils stay dark, you’ll be fine, but if they light up, you’d better go back the way you came.”
“We’re here to ask for your help,” Mato says.
“Always straight to the point with you, Somata,” Regina scolds. “That isn’t how deals are made, my dear. And if you want to come into my city, then we may be able to make a deal. We’ll see.” Her black eyes drift to me. “I haven’t even met Catarina. Is that the name you prefer?”
I exchange a glance with Mato. “That’s my name.”
“I know who you are,” she says, stroking the raven’s beak with one scaled finger. “I know more about you than you think. The Zarathustra Initiative and Lachlan’s work on you and the others is one of the cruelest things I’ve heard of—using people for experiments like that.”
I glance at the bodies in the tanks, and she follows my eyes.
“Oh, they aren’t experiments,” she says. “I saved them. Cartaxus created them, but the experiment went awry, and these poor dears were born without proper brains. They can think a little—reflexes mostly, and they sometimes move to music, but they can’t do much on their own.”
A shiver creeps down my spine as I watch the bodies in the tanks. One of them twitches, its leg kicking out,
and I look away, shuddering. I don’t know what kind of existence it would be to live like that—trapped in a glass prison, unable to move—but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t know any better.
Regina scratches the raven’s neck, staring absently at the bodies. “I find them to be a good reminder of why I founded this city. Cartaxus’s scientists love to experiment on other people, but they don’t like it when people experiment on themselves. Entropia’s philosophy is the exact opposite. Cartaxus wanted to use these children for experiments, so I took them with me when I left.”
“Wait, you worked for Cartaxus?” I ask.
Regina looks between me and Mato. “Yes, of course. Somata didn’t tell you? I joined straight out of college and worked with Lachlan for years.”
I look at Mato. He didn’t mention anything about Regina working with Lachlan. If she’s allied with him, then this plan is ruined. We’ve already lost. There are drones hovering above us and a lethal weapon buried in my hand.
We might have already walked into the trap I’ve been frightened of.
Regina takes in my shock, waving one hand dismissively. “Oh, don’t worry, child. I’m not part of what he’s doing now. Lachlan and I fell out back at Cartaxus and haven’t spoken properly in a long time.” She leans back against the lab counter, tossing the hair from her shoulder, shifting the raven back to it. It flaps its dark wings as it settles into place, fixing Mato and me with its small black eyes. “I take it you’re not here for the birds?” she asks.
Mato tilts his head. “Birds?”
She beams. “Haven’t you heard? Homecoming’s tonight. There should be a few million pigeons coming in—the lovely ones with the glowing feathers. We’re holding a party to watch them. Everyone’s dressing up, everything’s glowing. They’re the prettiest flock we’ve ever had, and we didn’t even design them. They evolved the luminescent gene all on their own. Isn’t nature marvelous?”
I exchange a glance with Mato, confused. He said Regina was out of touch, but I didn’t think she’d be like this. She clearly knows something about Lachlan’s plan, and surely she’s heard about the new outbreak—but she’s talking about planning a party for the pigeons.
