This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  It’s too late. They’re readying to strike. A weapons warning blazes across the dash, and my heart lurches into my throat. Cole takes my hand, clutching it in his. I brace for the impact, for the shockwave that will incinerate us. . . .

  But it doesn’t come.

  “Holy shit,” Anna says, looking back at Mato. I follow her eyes, still clutching Cole’s hand. Mato’s mask is glowing white, his lips moving faintly, and in the sky beyond the window, the fleet of drones following us has stopped. They’re hovering. Motionless. Mato’s mask pulses, and they suddenly tilt and fall, tumbling through the air. Their steel bodies smack into the razorgrass border, exploding in thick clouds of smoke.

  The breath rushes from my lungs. “H-how?” I stutter.

  That’s impossible. I saw their controls—they weren’t networked. I’ve never even heard of code that could do that.

  Leoben slams the brakes, staring over his shoulder at Mato, the cars and trucks speeding down the road screeching around us. Back at the marketplace, an explosion flashes, light splashing across the desert, and a shockwave of sound and pressure rocks the jeep.

  The other four drones just bombed the marketplace, and now they’re tilting, pivoting to come after us.

  “Another four,” Leoben says, “coming up fast.”

  Mato makes a grunt of acknowledgment, his eyes still scrunched shut, the tendons in his neck tight. The last four drones whine closer, and Mato shudders, a muscle in his jaw tensing.

  His mask pulses again, and the last four drones twist in the air, spiraling down, falling like stones.

  “Holy shit,” I whisper, staring at Mato.

  My mind is spinning, Cole’s hand still clutched in mine. I have no idea how Mato did that. Four simultaneous hacks, twice. It shouldn’t be possible, even with a mask. Each drone should have taken all his focus. Maybe he could have handled two with years of practice, but not four. That’s like singing four different songs at the same time, navigating four mazes simultaneously.

  It’s not something the human brain is capable of, but I just saw him do it. Something wavers in me as I stare at him. That was like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. Every arrogant thing he’s said suddenly seems inadequate.

  He’s absolutely and utterly incredible.

  “How did you do that?” I whisper, but he doesn’t answer. His mask is black, his eyes still closed, his body rigid.

  “Mato?” Anna calls back, wrenching off her seat belt.

  Cole drops my hand, grabbing Mato’s shoulders. “Guys, he’s not breathing.”

  CHAPTER 17

  ANNA LAUNCHES HERSELF OUT OF the jeep and races around to the back, flinging open the rear doors. Smoke billows in from the wreckage of the drones. Cars and trucks are still racing in from the bombed-out marketplace, veering wildly around us.

  “His heart’s stopped,” Cole says, kneeling over Mato.

  “Out of my way!” Anna says. “I know what to do.”

  I scramble back against the crushed boxes of supplies to give them space, pulling myself into the gap between the front seats. I don’t understand how Mato’s heart stopped from hacking the drones, but there’s nothing else that could have done this—the circle on his wrist is blue. He’s not infected. There are scratches on his face and streaks of blood across his skin, but no wounds.

  He shouldn’t be dying in front of us.

  “It’s the goddamn implant,” Anna says, climbing into the back of the jeep.

  I blink, staring at Mato in horror. He said the implant was dangerous and that he’d been hurt before, but I didn’t realize he meant like this—that it could be lethal.

  Anna pulls a silver canister from her pocket, a scarlet light blinking on its cap.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Adrenaline,” she says. “It needs to go into his heart. This happened in Alaska.”

  Cole stops the compressions and pulls open Mato’s foam-splattered jacket, tearing open the crinkled fabric of his shirt, revealing his chest. A circle of five black ports is built into the pale skin over his heart. Anna slams the canister down in its center, hard enough to shake Mato’s body.

  His mask flashes white again, his body arching. He lets out a gasp, one hand hitting Anna’s chest, throwing her back across the jeep. Her head smacks into the window, the vial flying from her hand, out into the desert. She grabs the side of the jeep for balance, dazed, but her lips curl in a smile.

  “Welcome back, asshole,” she says.

  Mato rolls over, coughing, curling up on the jeep’s floor, one hand pressed to his chest. His jacket is twisted around his neck, his shirt hanging open, his eyes scrunched shut in pain. “Jesus, Anna. You broke a rib.”

  “I saved your goddamn life.”

  “He saved all our lives,” Leoben says, staring back through the window at the wreckage of the drones. A pickup truck races in from the market, swerving around us, its back crammed full of people. They stare at us as they pass, their faces coated with blood and dust. I doubt that everyone survived the bombing of the marketplace, but a lot of us are still alive because of what Mato did.

  “Now we need to call Regina,” Leoben says, his voice suddenly hard, “and tell her to let us into this goddamn city. We can’t waste any more time playing games. We need to find Lachlan tonight.”

  “Lee—” Cole starts, but Leoben cuts him off.

  “I saw that blower,” he says, his eyes blazing. He slams his hand against the steering wheel in frustration. “She wasn’t much further along than Dax is. He might not have much longer, and I’m not going to sit and wait here while he dies. We have a Comox. There are weapons in that safehouse. I could burn down half this city tonight on my own, and I’m ready to do it.”

  The air around him seems to shimmer. I haven’t seen Leoben like this before. I don’t think he’s kidding about attacking Entropia.

  Mato shakes his head, his cheeks flushed, coughing. “Regina still won’t let us in.”

  “You called her?” Anna asks.

  “She called me,” Mato says, his eyes glazed. “She wanted to check if I was okay, and then she hung up.”

  “I can arrange for you not to be okay again if it’s going to help,” Anna says.

  Mato closes his eyes. “If taking down those drones didn’t convince her to let me come home, then I don’t know what will.”

  Come home. The words echo in my ears. I look between Mato and Leoben. This isn’t just about finding Lachlan and fixing the vaccine for either of them. This is personal. Leoben said he wasn’t in love with Dax, but now he’s threatening to burn down a city to save him. Mato says this is his home, and it’ll be destroyed if Brink launches flood protocol. I don’t know what his past with Regina means—why she acts like his mother—but it makes me think of Agnes, and the thought tugs at my heart.

  “Tell Regina I’ll make the deal,” I say.

  “Cat—” Cole starts, but I hold up a hand.

  “Mato just died to save us. I think I can handle being someone’s experiment for a little while.”

  “Thank you,” Leoben says.

  “I should have made the deal when she first offered it,” I say. “I just hope this is enough.”

  Mato’s eyes glaze again. “Catarina says she’ll come in.”

  His eyes stay glassy, smoke still curling from the wreckage of the drones behind us. All of us are silent for a moment until Anna lets out a yelp, clutching her arm. A bump is rising through her tattooed skin.

  “Oh, thank God,” Mato says, pulling back his sleeve. A lump is forming on his forearm. I lift my hand, staring at the puncture wound, but it’s not doing anything. Cole’s tricep twitches as the wound on his skin swells, metal antennae unfolding from it, the weevil slithering out. Mato’s falls from his arm at the same time, clinking against the floor of the jeep. Anna’s and Leoben’s slide from their skin.

  But mine doesn’t move.

  “That . . . that is truly disgusting,” Leoben says, watching his fall.

  “Sh
e’s letting us back in,” Mato says. “She’s going to help us too.”

  “About time,” Anna says, dragging off the elastic around her hair, fixing her ponytail. “We just saved a ton of her people.”

  “We?” Mato asks.

  “What?” Anna shrugs. “I just brought you back from the dead. Give me a little credit.”

  “All right, all right,” Leoben says. “Are we good to go in?”

  I lift my hand. “Mine hasn’t come out.”

  Mato’s brow creases. “Maybe it’s dead.”

  Cole just shakes his head. “We need to start treating this like a goddamn trap already. It’s not Regina who’s in that city waiting for us—it’s Lachlan, and this is all over if he gets to Cat.”

  Mato presses his lips together, looking at me. “What do you think, Catarina?”

  I look down at the weevil in my hand and up at Cole. I can tell he doesn’t like this. Neither do I, but we’re all covered in foam from a detonation, and if we don’t find Lachlan soon, Cartaxus is going to launch flood protocol. The best hope we have is working with the woman who rules this city, even if it means taking the risk that she’s our enemy.

  I rub my hands over my face, trying to think. I have foam drying on my skin and scratches on my arms. Part of me just wants to get clean, to get indoors, and to regroup.

  And part of me knows I have a weapon hidden inside my panel in case we need to get out.

  “It’s fine,” I say, dropping my hands. “It doesn’t change anything. Let’s go in.”

  Cole sits back, crossing his arms, his face dark as Leoben revs the engine, pulling us down the last stretch of the dirt road that cuts through the razorgrass border. Once we’re past it, there’s still a couple of miles of barren desert to cross until we reach the fields at the mountain’s base. The city towers ahead of us, houses and skyscrapers bristling from the rocky slopes.

  “This place is huge,” Anna says, staring through the windshield.

  “The buildings on the surface are just a fraction of it,” Mato says. “Most of Entropia is actually underground, in a bunker. The desert gets too hot in summer to spend more than a few minutes in the sun without dermal hacks. A lot of that mountain has been hollowed out and rebuilt into living spaces. It’s huge.”

  “Who built it?” I ask.

  “Cartaxus, actually,” Mato says, rubbing his ribs. “This was one of the first bunkers they ever built, but they mistook the limestone beneath this mountain for shale. They hollowed out a core for the bunker, drilled maintenance shafts, and built the steel frame, then poured most of the concrete before they figured it out. The lower levels started slowly sinking into the ground, and they decided to abandon it. Regina made a deal to move her people here a couple of decades ago. They got hold of a few drilling machines, and ever since, they’ve been chewing up the rest of the mountain, carving out new living spaces.”

  Leoben raises his eyebrows. “Cartaxus gave her a bunker? That’s a hell of a deal. What did she trade for it?”

  “She designed the first panel bud almost on her own thirty years ago,” Mato says. “Honestly, I think they owed her.”

  I blink, staring at him. I knew that Cartaxus made the first panel buds, but I didn’t know it was Regina who created them. People had been implanting themselves with the precursors to panels for years before that, but they were bulky implants they had to cut themselves open to insert. Writing gentech code to create skin or bone tissue is easy, but getting the body to grow a piece of silicon is hard. There’s no precedent in nature, no script to copy and adapt. The self-growing panel bud was a lightning strike that changed gentech’s history, taking it out of hospitals and into ordinary people’s arms.

  No wonder Regina’s people worship her. She didn’t just design my cuff—she’s the reason there’s a bar of cobalt light glowing beneath it.

  Mato zips his jacket over his torn shirt, leaning back against the side of the jeep.

  “How did you do that, earlier?” I ask. “Those drones weren’t networked—I saw their controls. They all had to be hacked individually. Were you running some kind of code the implant helped with?”

  Mato glances at Anna and Cole. “It wasn’t special code, but yes, it was the implant that controlled it. It’s something you can probably learn to do.”

  Anna groans. “We don’t need her dying on us too.”

  “It’s only dangerous when it’s rushed,” Mato says.

  “What’s dangerous?” I ask.

  “It’s called fractioning. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Fractioning. A flicker of recognition tugs at me, but I don’t remember what the word means. Mato’s eyes glaze, and a VR request blinks in my vision. When I accept it, the brain animation that he showed me back in the lab appears again, with the forest of scarlet wires curling through it from the implant.

  “Every thought you have activates different regions in your brain,” he says. “Your thoughts are a combination of your memories, your senses, and the brain’s processing centers. Logic, emotion, mental models of the world. It helps to think about it as a computer with different apps running in different regions, all networked to help us navigate the world.” The image of the brain flashes with different colors—patterns of green and yellow spots glowing across it.

  “Most of our thoughts are broad, though,” Mato continues. “We might think of three or four things at once, but the signals from the different areas of our brain get blended, and our thoughts get jumbled too. It’s hard to carry two separate thoughts in our minds without them merging into one. But with the implant, we can.”

  The image changes. A red wall of light appears, cutting through the brain, slicing out from the implant. It looks like a barrier constructed inside the person’s head—wavering and bright. The glowing colors on either side of it separate, forming two smaller patterns instead of one.

  “When I say fractioning,” Mato says, “I mean fractioning your mind—literally splitting your thoughts into two or more sections. The effect is based on research on people who had the two halves of their brains physically separated. Some of them were able to do two things at once effortlessly, like drawing a shape with one hand while writing a word with the other. Regina studied those experiments, trying to find a way to safely replicate them. She thought that maybe we could focus more if we broke down the noisy links inside our minds.”

  The glowing wall inside the image of the brain seems to pulse in my vision. I can’t help but think about the wall I’ve felt holding back Jun Bei’s memories. I thought maybe it was psychological—something I could overcome if I tried to face my past.

  But if it’s coming from the implant, it might be a literal, physical wall.

  “These barriers are created by weak electric fields,” Mato says. “They make it difficult for the impulses of your thoughts to stretch between them, so the implant can allow you to temporarily isolate or split away any part of your mind. If you train yourself to think in a way that’s aligned with the implant’s wiring, you can learn to do two things at once. Or even four, or eight.”

  “Or you could die,” Anna says. “Don’t forget to mention that.”

  “Only if you rush into a fraction,” Mato says, “or if you let a wall drop too quickly.”

  I look up. “How is dropping a wall dangerous?”

  “It causes an electrical storm inside your mind—your neurons can overload when they try to reconnect.”

  I stare at the image of the implant hovering in the air. When I sensed the wall inside my mind starting to split, I felt like I was going to lose myself somehow. I thought it was just the fear that Jun Bei’s memories would overwhelm me, but if the implant is running like this, then there’s a chance that breaking down that wall could be physically dangerous too.

  “Is that what just happened to you?” I ask. “You had a . . . a stroke?”

  Mato nods. “It was minor.”

  “A minor stroke?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Anna roll
s her eyes. “That’s the second one I’ve seen him have. Last time, in Alaska, he was out for three days. Nobody could figure out how to wake him up.”

  Mato shrugs. “It’s easy to push yourself too far. Fractioning is addictive. It’s hard to live in one dimension when you know how it feels to split your mind into as many as you want. It’s a feeling that’s impossible to describe.”

  A rash of goose bumps rises across on my skin. I look back through the window at the smoke rising from the ruined drones. Something inside me stretches, pressing against my senses, too blunt and shapeless to put into words. I feel like I’ve done this before—I’ve worn this cuff and used this implant. I’ve fractioned before, or at least Jun Bei has, and part of me desperately wants to do it again.

  The strength of the urge frightens me, because I’m not sure the urge is mine. It feels like it’s coming from the same part of me that makes me bite my fingernails and that killed the soldier in the lab. The ocean of memories locked inside me. Cole said I needed to take control of it before it took control of me, but I can already feel the reins starting to slip.

  There’s so much I still don’t understand, though. It’s becoming clear that both the cuff and the implant are weapons, and that it wasn’t Lachlan who gave them to Jun Bei. Mato was right—the cuff isn’t the kind of thing you’d give to a prisoner.

  But if Jun Bei wasn’t a prisoner during the six months after she escaped, then what was she doing here?

  I glance through the windshield at the city looming ahead of us. I don’t know why Jun Bei was in Entropia, and I don’t know how it relates to Lachlan’s plan.

  But I think I’m about to find out.

  CHAPTER 18

  MATO DIRECTS US PAST THE edges of the sprawling farmlands and onto a heavily worn road that dips into a ridge between two hills. The city’s buildings are sparser near the base of the mountain—most of them down here are wooden shacks built against one another, climbing up the slopes, their roofs a patchwork of steel and plastic. Skyscrapers rise above them, higher up on the mountainside, with winding streets cutting between them. The road we’re following veers into a gap in the rock, entering a rough-hewn tunnel, wide enough for a truck, that dives into the mountain’s side.