by Emily Suvada
“Why are we going underground?” I ask. “The lab I saw Lachlan in had a view of the desert. It would have been one of these buildings in the city.”
“Regina’s lab is in the bunker,” Mato says. “She’s going to be expecting you there as soon as we get in. If she agrees to help us, then we can search the buildings on the surface this afternoon. She might even be able to give us vehicles, or people to help. But we’ll need to see her first, and we might as well set up a base for the next day or two in the bunker. It’s a communal living space—there are apartments we’ll be able to use. It’s a good central location.”
I watch the skyscrapers and buildings on the side of the mountain inch out of view as we roll into the tunnel, yellow lights sliding across the jeep’s hood in a steady pulse as we drive. The tunnel branches off every few minutes to vast fluorescent-lit parking lots blasted into the rock, filled with vehicles.
“Let’s take this one,” Mato says, gesturing to one of the branching tunnels. Leoben slows the jeep, swinging us into a cavern filled with vehicles. Some are streaked with dust and foam from the market. We pull in beside a pickup truck with a crumpled door and shattered window.
Mato swings open the rear doors slowly, climbing out with one hand pressed to his ribs. I slide across the floor, grabbing my backpack, and follow him. The others climb out behind me.
“We need to go through the airlocks to get in,” Mato says. “They’re just showers, don’t worry.” He gestures to a row of doors lined up along the wall with airlock symbols above them. They don’t look like the Wash-and-Blasts at Homestake, though. They’re smaller and far less complicated-looking. “See you on the other side,” he says. “I’ll tell Regina’s team we’re coming.”
I sling on my backpack, heading for one of the airlock lines, but Anna grabs my arm. “Really?” she asks. “First thing you do in this place is go off on your own? You still have a tracker in your skull. Lachlan knows you’re here. You need to be more careful.”
“Oh, right,” I say, letting her pull me along with her, unease curling through me. I look back at Cole and Leoben, but they’re heading for another door across the other side of the parking lot.
“We’ll wait till one of them gets through so you can meet them on the other side,” Anna says, joining one of the longer lines. “You can’t be alone while you’re here.”
“Fine,” I mutter, swinging my backpack off, setting it down on the floor between my feet.
Anna looks around, crossing her arms. “This place looks old.”
“It’s a bunker, right?” I ask. “It can’t be that old.” Cartaxus only discovered the Hydra virus thirty years ago, around the same time that gentech was invented. Mato said this was one of the first bunkers Cartaxus built.
“I guess so,” Anna says. She runs her fingers through her long blond ponytail, flicking away shreds of foam from the detonation, her nose wrinkling. The door to the shower slides open, and a woman from the market heads into what looks like a small, gleaming white bathroom. The door hisses shut behind her. Anna looks me up and down, one eyebrow arched. “I see you’re back together with Cole.”
I scratch nervously at the foam plastered on my skin, avoiding her eyes. I still don’t know for sure what I overheard her and Cole talking about, but she didn’t seem happy about the idea of him and me being together. “We’re figuring things out.”
She groans, flipping her hair back over her shoulder. “He has no logic when it comes to you.”
I narrow my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She fixes me with a steely look that makes me want to shy away. “You don’t know how much you’ve already hurt him. You didn’t see him after you left. I didn’t know if he was going to make it. He barely ate, he barely slept. He told Lachlan to do whatever he wanted to him—cut him open, run experimental code. He didn’t care anymore.”
I drop my eyes. “I didn’t know it got that bad.”
Anna props her hands on her hips. “Maybe that’s because you didn’t stick around to find out. You turned yourself into the only thing holding him up, and then you disappeared. Lee and I were with him every goddamn minute to make sure he stayed alive. Lee only joined the black-out program so he could keep an eye on Cole—he should have been in the coding group, not in the field. But we had to put Cole back together after you left.”
I stand watching her, torn. She’s unloading on me, and part of me feels like I deserve it, but it wasn’t me who left Cole behind. I saw the footage of the night Jun Bei left. She wasn’t trying to abandon the others.
She was trying to kill herself.
“Anna, that wasn’t me—”
“How convenient,” Anna says, cutting me off. “It was all someone else’s fault, right? She ran away. She was the one who hurt us. She was the one who gave me this scar on my neck.”
She lifts her head, revealing a short, pale scar below her left ear. A jolt runs through me. A memory flashes back suddenly of Anna lying on the floor in a pool of blood, her eyes closed.
“She did that to you?” I gasp. Leoben said that Anna and Jun Bei used to fight—but the cut on Anna’s neck looks like it could have been a fatal injury. It’s right next to an artery. Fighting with the other kids is one thing—but this looks like a murder attempt.
“I can’t believe you don’t remember,” Anna says, smiling bitterly. “That’s so perfect. You just get to screw us all over and make a fresh start like nothing happened.”
I dig the fingernails of my left hand into my palm. “Anna, I’m trying to figure this out too. Lachlan changed my DNA. He overwrote my mind.”
“Yeah, like you keep saying,” she says, leaning over me. I can tell she’s using her size and her training to intimidate me, and I know she won’t hurt me, but I still feel an instinctive lick of fear as she looks down at me. “All I know, Catarina,” she says, “is that you have a cuff on your arm right now, you’re talking about screwing up your mind with Mato, and you seemed pretty willing to come back into this city even though Lachlan’s waiting here for you. You might say that you’re someone else, but it seems to me the person you are now is a hell of a lot like the one you used to be.”
The bathroom door swings open. Anna steps back, gesturing for me to go in. “After you,” she says.
I pause for a moment, realizing that I’m shaking, then pick up my backpack and head inside. The door swings shut behind me, a shower starting automatically in the corner. I drop my pack and press the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to get ahold of myself.
“Come on,” I whisper, forcing myself to breathe. I drive my fingernails into my palm again, drop my hands, and look around.
The bathroom is small, scuffed but clean, with a chute for contaminated clothes on the wall and a UV box to disinfect bags and belongings. I slide my backpack into it and peel off my foam-streaked clothes, then dump them in the chute. I kick off my boots and add them to the UV box, then head into the shower and lean against the wall.
The water burns when it hits my skin—it’s scalding hot and stinging with disinfectant—but I turn my face up to it and let it run through my hair, over the foam and blood dried on my body.
Anna’s words are echoing in my mind. She obviously doesn’t like me, and I understand why. Jun Bei almost killed her, and then she left all of them behind. It’s looking more and more like Jun Bei escaped from the lab that night and came here to Entropia on her own. She must have gotten away from Lachlan somehow and made it through the snow. I know she was desperate that night—she went out there to die and ended up killing fourteen people, so it makes sense that she would have panicked and run.
But she never told the others that she’d made it out, and I still don’t know why.
Part of me wants to go hunting for answers now, but I can’t let myself forget why we’re here. Lachlan is in this city. Cartaxus is going to kill us all if we can’t bring him in. I need to keep myself focused on the mission—if we can’t fix the vaccine, then getting answer
s about my past isn’t going to help me.
The disinfectant in the shower washes off the dried blood on my arms and neck, running down to pool on the tiles, rolling in scarlet streaks to a metal drain. This place really does look old. The floor is covered with patterned ceramic tiles and grout, the kind you don’t see much of anymore. Modern tiles are usually variations on plastene and deposited ceramic, grown like coral, fitting seamlessly into complex patterns. But these are pre-gentech materials.
The whole bathroom seems dated, and a little strange. I don’t know why a bunker that Cartaxus built would have showers instead of airlocks. I guess Entropia had no choice but to grow their razorgrass border and set up checkpoints if this is the extent of their airtight security. Virus particles can’t survive more than an hour or so without a host, so the foam across my skin isn’t really a contagion risk, but I don’t know why Cartaxus would go to the trouble of drilling an entire bunker into a mountain without putting proper airlocks in it. It’s almost like this bunker wasn’t even designed for an airborne plague.
The shower shuts off automatically, a high-powered fan switching on in the ceiling. I squeeze my hair out, leaning to the side, looking around for something to dry off with. A panel in the wall hisses open, revealing a folded white towel and my clothes, washed and neatly stacked.
Only, they aren’t my clothes. I pick up the gray T-shirt, stretching it between my hands. The top I dumped in the chute was low-tech cotton spun from genehacked crops, all-purpose and cheap. This top is made from a polymer thread, still warm from the printer that must have matched it to my clothes while I was in the shower.
At least, I’m guessing it’s a printer, and it must be one with open-access controls, because there’s a yellow squid stamped on the front of my shirt that wasn’t there before.
“Goddammit, Lee,” I mutter. I grab my boots and backpack from the UV box, then scrub off with the towel and tug on the clothes, checking the bathroom over one more time before pushing through the exit. The door opens into a vast room with a row of elevators along the far wall. The floor is tiled, the walls and ceiling unfinished concrete. Cole, Leoben, and Mato are waiting beside one of the elevators, and Anna steps out of the bathroom beside me, dragging her fingers through her long, tangled wet hair.
“That shirt is even better in person,” Leoben says, grinning.
I roll my eyes. “Seriously, Lee. You’re driving me crazy.”
“You ready to go in?” Mato asks, holding open one of the elevator doors.
I look between him and the elevator, suddenly nervous. Now that we’re here, it’s hitting me that I’m in the same city as Lachlan, and I’ve made a deal to walk right into the lab of a woman who might be working with him.
I should be frightened. I should be on the verge of panic. And yet all I can think about is what Jun Bei was doing here after she escaped. Who helped her get here—who sold her the cuff on her arm. I’ve felt something stirring in me ever since I glimpsed this city from the Comox, and it’s rising into a buzz now that we’re about to go into the city’s depths.
It’s not anxiety, though, and it’s not fear.
It almost feels like coming home.
“Jesus,” Anna says, pushing past me to the elevator. “Come on. Let’s go and get this over with.”
CHAPTER 19
WE FILE INTO THE ELEVATOR. The doors are steel and modern, but the cab is a metal cage that looks like it was left over from the bunker’s construction. A cold breeze rises through a metal grating on the floor, bringing up goose bumps on my still-damp skin. There’s enough room for all of us, along with a man with silver circuits printed on his skin and a woman with a coat of coarse gray hair, like a horse. The doors slide closed, and we drop into the mountain, the elevator’s cables groaning.
“Should we book a room here, or something?” Leoben asks.
Mato shakes his head. “That’s not necessary. I know a place we can use, and the empty apartments belong to everyone, anyway. The city is a commune—it’s shared. The food is bad, the power isn’t reliable, and the comm reception is spotty, but it’s a pretty wonderful place.”
I glance at him, surprised by the warmth in his voice. He seems more relaxed here than he did at Cartaxus, and he definitely fits in better. His mask made him look like a freak around the Cartaxus soldiers, but from what I’ve seen of Entropia’s residents so far, his upgrades are relatively tame.
The elevator slows, and the doors ping open to a concrete hallway. I step out, looking around, scanning for something to trip my memory. A hint, a clue, to tell me if I’ve been here before. But everything looks familiar, because it has the same layout as the other bunker I’ve seen—Homestake.
The doors on either side of the hallway are missing, and I catch the same glimpses into the rooms as I did into the quarters there. Tiny apartments built of concrete and steel, only these are unfinished. Bunches of wires hang from unpainted ceilings, and holes gape in the walls where ventilation ducts should be. Some of them have bathrooms, some don’t, some are empty, and some are overflowing with personal belongings.
Cole stays close to my side as we walk, his shoulder occasionally brushing against me. Part of me wants him to be closer, for his hand to be linked in mine, but another part wishes he would walk beside Anna instead. I don’t have room in my mind to process what I’m feeling about him, but whenever I feel him brush against me, I remember what Anna said—that he stopped caring after Jun Bei left. He let Lachlan run whatever tests he wanted. Back in the forest, he told me he joined the black-out program just a few months after she left, and that he let Cartaxus erase every VR clip from his childhood.
He must have been so hurt. Even though I’m mad at him, and I don’t know if he’s keeping something from me, it makes me want to hold him.
“So where’s our room?” Anna asks, peering into one of the empty apartments.
“This way,” Mato says, leading us toward a hum of voices. “It’s through the park. You should get something to eat if you want. Regina texted me. She said she’ll send someone down to get Catarina when she’s ready, and for us to make ourselves comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” Leoben asks. “What the hell is this, a social call? We should start searching for Lachlan. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“You’re quite a skilled hacker, aren’t you?” Mato asks, glancing at Leoben.
He shrugs. “I’m not into DNA, but I know a thing or two about tech.”
“I don’t give compliments often, Lieutenant,” Mato says. “I’ve seen your work.” He pauses in the hallway, his eyes glazing briefly. “I just gave you access to Entropia’s security systems—cameras, swipe doors, elevators. The firewalls are pathetic, in part because I was only eleven when I designed them. You could go and run around on the surface with a gun if you’d prefer, but this might be a more productive use of your skills.”
Leoben pauses next to Mato, his eyes glazing. When he snaps out of his session, he raises an eyebrow appreciatively. “You were eleven when you wrote this?”
Mato shrugs, his lips curling faintly. “I know a thing or two about tech as well.”
“Jesus, Lee,” Anna says, shoving Leoben’s back, pushing him down the hallway. “Will you please not flirt with every skinny nerd you meet? It’s disturbing.”
Leoben rolls his eyes, heading down the hallway with Anna, but there’s a faint blush on his cheeks. The rest of us follow, and I shoot a curious glance at Mato. He’s not blushing, but it looks like he’s trying not to smile.
The hallway branches into a foyer leading to an open area the size of a city block, its concrete walls stretching up high above us. It’s laid out like a park, with walking trails looping through groves of slender trees, a winding creek feeding a lake surrounded with picnic tables. It looks like a park I’d expect to find in a city, except everything here is the wrong color, the wrong shape, the wrong luminosity. The grass is a shade of royal blue, sprinkled with glowing white flowers. The tree trunks are cobalt, their
leaves yellow and white, shaped like stars. Bushes and shrubs in shades of vivid orange and gold line the walking trails, and a dozen species of different-colored pigeons are looping through the air.
It looks like a living painting. The air is tinged with perfume, rolling from patches of purple grasses dotted across the lawn. Everything here is hacked—every blade of grass, every leaf, every flower.
And definitely all the people milling through the park.
I thought that Novak’s team at Sunnyvale was extreme—but some of the people around the park make them look positively tame. One man in a top hat towers over the rest of the crowd with long, spindly legs and arms that stretch down to his knees. A group of three women at a table all have eyes twice the normal size and narrow jaws that make them look like living dolls. A couple walking along one of the trails have furred, prehensile tails that swing behind them.
I step out, staring at them, and lift my eyes. The park is a circle, ringed with walls of apartments rising up what looks like fifty floors. A giant circle of blue sky glows above us through a vast circular opening, sunlight slanting through at an angle, falling across the walls of apartment windows. Every few levels, I can see a ring of jagged, broken concrete and bent steel jutting from the walls. It looks like there used to be more floors above us, but Entropia’s residents broke through them, hollowing out a giant space in the center of the bunker. It’s completely open to the air—the pigeons are freely swooping in from outside.
There are absolutely no airtight protections at all.
“We call this the atrium,” Mato says, gesturing up at the empty space. “There are blast doors at the top, but Regina likes to keep them open. It helps the plants.”
I turn slowly, scanning the atrium. Some of the apartment windows are sprouting with plants, vines snaking across the concrete. One section of the wall has a dripping waterfall running down it, bordered with moss and lichen, splashing down into a pool in the park below.
