by Emily Suvada
“Yeah, sure,” I mutter.
Leoben looks at Cole. “We could really use you.”
“I’ll see,” Cole says, and Leoben heads out.
“Anna hates me,” I say, pacing across the room.
Cole sighs. “She’s just angry that she never managed to escape. She had it hard, maybe harder than any of us. She really needed to get out, and she never could.”
I look up at him. “What do you mean she had it harder? What’s her gift? What was Lachlan doing to her?”
Cole purses his lips. “That’s between you and her. It’s not for me to say.”
I tilt my head back, frustrated. “I want to come with you tonight. I really don’t think you can kill Lachlan.”
“We won’t kill him,” he says. “We all know he’s worth too much. He needs to be put back under control, the way he always kept us. You’ve already done enough. You found the patched vaccine. That’s huge, Cat. People are going to survive because of you.”
He makes a move toward me, as though he wants to pull me into his arms, but pauses as the door swings back open. Mato walks in, his black jacket streaked with glowing cobalt handprints. A buzz runs through me as I meet his eyes, but it’s just another blare of noise in the static from the argument with Anna, from Regina, from Cole.
“I just heard from Brink,” he says. “They’re running tests on the code you sent, and it looks like the patch is working. Brink said they should even be able to separate the Origin code from the vaccine faster now that they can compare the two versions. We might just be a few days from having the clean code in our arms.”
“Does that mean they’re going to send it out?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Mato says. “People are dying, but the last time Cartaxus sent out Lachlan’s code without understanding it, they ended up launching a drone strike on a city. Our orders are still to bring in Lachlan.”
I glance over at Cole. I know he won’t want to leave me here, but Lee’s right—they’ll need him to search the city. If they find Lachlan, then three of them might just be enough to take him down.
“Regina said I could go to her lab,” I say to Cole. “It’s guarded. I’ll be safe there. You should go with the others.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Mato says.
“Lachlan might be coming for her. She needs to be protected.”
“I can do that,” Mato says, “but Catarina is perfectly capable of protecting herself.”
I look between them. “I’ll be fine, Cole. I need to talk to Mato anyway.”
Cole glances at his rifle, torn. I know he wants to stay with me, but I also know he wants to be out in the city with Anna and Lee, hunting for the man who gave him the scars across his chest.
He reaches for my hand, squeezing it in his. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
I nod, letting his fingers slip from mine. “Good luck.”
He grabs his rifle, holds my eyes, and jogs from the room.
CHAPTER 23
“LET’S GO,” I SAY TO Mato, tugging on my jacket. I don’t think I can stay still right now—I want to pace, to fidget, to find something to do. I know the patched vaccine isn’t a real solution—Cartaxus still can’t read it and figure out what Lachlan is doing with the code—but surely it means that Brink will hold off on flood protocol. Even if the vaccine is dangerous, it can’t be as bad as killing everyone on the surface.
The only way we’ll really be safe is once Lachlan is captured and stopped, but at least the threat of the new strain is probably over.
Probably.
I grab my backpack and head out through the steel door and down the labyrinth of hallways that lead to the atrium, following the sound of the pigeons. Mato follows close behind me, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“I was hoping you could help me learn to control the implant,” I say to him. “I don’t know how to use it at all. Lachlan has access to my tech through it, and I don’t know how to shut that off.”
“Sure,” he says. There’s something in his hair and on his clothes—like golden dust, but it’s glowing. I didn’t see anything like it in the atrium when I went through earlier. Everything there was glowing in shades of blue, not gold.
“Where have you been?” I ask, eyeing the specks on his jacket.
He dusts his shoulders off. “I went to get something from the jeep. The elevators are crowded with people heading up to the surface to see the birds coming in, so I took a secret exit.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Secret?”
He shoots me a grin. “A maintenance tunnel. One of those things you find when you grow up in a place like this.”
We reach the end of the hallway and step out into the atrium. The park is packed full of people, the roar of the pigeons’ cries drowning out the bass from the speakers. Some of the genehackers are carrying instruments, playing as they wait around the elevators. They’ll all be heading up to the streets on the surface of the mountain to watch the pigeons come in.
The sky above us is dark, but cobalt bioluminescent paste has been streaked across every face, painted on clothing, and pooled into lanterns carried atop long poles by the crowd. Instead of a mass of bodies, the glowing points of blue turn Entropia’s people into an ocean of light splashing against the atrium’s concrete walls. The air hums with their voices, layered over the hailstorm of the pigeons’ cries.
Mato pushes into the crowd, and I follow close behind, grabbing a fold of his jacket to keep from getting separated. The air is thick and humid with the breath and sweat of hundreds of bodies, tinged with the scent of the algae paste.
“How did things go with Regina?” he calls over his shoulder, dodging a man whose back is covered with porcupine-like spines.
I shy away from the man, tightening my grip on Mato’s jacket. “Did you know?” I yell over the music. “About her being my mother?”
He looks back at me, his mask clearing so I can see both his eyes. “Yes, she mentioned you.” A woman wearing a dress made of black feathers tries to cut between us, and Mato reaches his hand back for me. I grab it, and he hauls me closer. “I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t my place,” he says, raising his voice over the crowd, “and I didn’t want to sway you to take the deal she offered.”
I can’t decide if him not telling me the truth about Regina was thoughtful or reckless. I guess I can appreciate that he didn’t want to push me into making a deal with her, but it makes me wonder if there’s anything else about Jun Bei that he hasn’t told me. We push out of the thickest part of the crowd and Mato drops my hand, heading through the park for the concrete stairs that lead to Regina’s lab. My skin is slick with other people’s sweat, smeared with cobalt paste, and my hand is warm from being in Mato’s grip. The feeling sends a low, unwelcome jolt through me. I clutch my backpack straps and jog after him through the thinning crowd.
“So what’s with you and Regina, anyway?” I ask, grabbing the stairwell’s metal railing, climbing up after him. The stairs zigzag up through the side of the atrium, one side open to the air.
Mato shrugs, pausing at a landing, looking out over the park. “There are no children allowed in Entropia. It’s too dangerous for them here—hackers tend to get caught up in wild ideas like removing their stomachs or switching out their eyes, and they’d inevitably do the same thing to their kids. It’s one of the only rules here, but Regina broke it to let me in. I think she paid extra attention to me to make up for not being around for Jun Bei.”
I pause beside him on the landing, catching my breath. “Why did she let you in?”
He presses his lips together. “Would you believe it was because I was an immensely talented coder even as a baby?”
I raise an eyebrow. His mask has darkened slightly, a cautious look on his face.
“Uhhh, sure,” I say. “Talented baby it is.”
We climb up another flight of stairs to the steel door leading to Regina’s lab. It’s locked, the security scanner besi
de it glowing red. The pale-furred guard from before is standing outside it.
“Regina said I could be in here,” I say.
“She’s out,” the guard replies. “Nobody’s allowed in.”
“She gave me permission,” I say, but the guard just shakes her head.
“Here,” Mato says, leaning forward to swipe his panel over the scanner. It flashes green, and the door clicks open. “See? She gave me permission too.”
The guard doesn’t look pleased, but she steps aside to let us into the hallway that leads to the lab. The lights are off, and the cages hanging from the walls in the circular room are silent. The four tanks holding the twitching bodies are lit faintly, casting a cool glow over the hanging platform and the jars of floating lungs. Mato holds the door open for me, then closes it carefully behind him, a smug look on his face.
“How did you do that?” I gesture to the door.
“I told you I wrote the security protocols,” he says. “They’re not very good, I have to admit. I thought Regina would have fixed them by now.” He glances at the tanks. “Come on—there’s a less creepy room upstairs.”
He heads for a staircase leading off the hallway, climbing past what looks like a storage room and into a vast room shaped like a steep pyramid, a pale green light set into its apex. The walls are metal, studded with DNA archive tanks, and a round white table takes up most of the floor. I dump my pack beside the table and walk to the archive canisters on the closest wall. There are old-fashioned photographs below each of them showing different strains of the pigeons—some pure white, some black-winged, and some a brilliant gold.
“Is this whole room for the pigeons?” I ask.
Mato looks around. “It looks like it. The birds came after my time here, but the city seems to love them. They’ve turned into a symbol for genehackers all around the world. I’ve always found them kind of disturbing, myself.” He leans against one of the walls, crossing his arms. “So what did you really want to do here tonight?”
“I told you—I want to learn to use the implant.”
“That’s not what you want to do,” he says. He pushes off the wall and walks over to me. The same uncomfortable buzz I’ve felt every time I’ve been around him is back, growing stronger as he steps closer. He leans against the slanted wall beside me, a low smile on his face. “You want to learn how to fraction.”
The buzz grows stronger. “I just need to block the access—”
“Fractioning will help with that,” he says. “Any commands you can train into the implant will help you control it.” He slides the metal pen from his pocket and twirls it between his fingers. “I can teach you, but it might take time. Would you like to try?”
I chew my lip, nerves fluttering through me at the thought. “Yeah, okay.”
“Good.” He turns and looks around the room, then lifts two canisters at random from the archive tanks and sets them on the table. Two images suddenly appear in the air—VR animations of a green-feathered bird and a scarlet bird with purple wingtips. They hover above the table, still and silent.
“Okay, let’s see what I can do when I focus on each one individually,” Mato says. His eyes glaze, and the green bird responds. It suddenly flutters to life, flapping across the room, soaring in a circle above us. It’s not really there—it’s just a VR image, but I can’t help ducking when it swoops past my head.
Mato pauses, and the green bird goes still. He does the same thing with the red one—sending it in a slow, lazy flight around the room.
He shoots me a smile. “Pretty basic. Now I’m going to try fractioning.”
His mask brightens, glowing faintly as he stares at the birds. His eyes glaze, his body tensing, and the birds flutter to life again. Only now, both of them are moving. They soar in complex patterns through the air, dipping and banking on invisible winds. He’s controlling them both at the same time somehow. He blinks, his mask growing dim, and the birds go still.
“That was a fraction,” he says. “I was focusing on a different bird in two separate parts of my mind. Now it’s your turn.”
“That . . . that sounds impossible,” I mutter, stepping around the table to stand where he was. I can barely even imagine how to do two things at once. I open my cuff’s interface to connect wirelessly with the DNA canisters and look between the birds one at a time. Each responds individually when I focus on it, urging them to move. The red bird swoops, then the green one. But when I try to focus on both at once, my eyes darting between them, they just fly in short alternating bursts.
Mato moves to my side, standing so I can feel the fabric of his jacket against the back of my shirt. “You’re not trying to look at them both,” he says. “You’re trying to think about looking at them both. The images are responding to the net of electrodes in your skull, not your eyes. Try to hold the idea of looking at both in your mind.”
I let out a slow breath, staring at the birds, trying to conjure up the thought of looking at both of them. They flutter to life, moving faster, but they’re still flying one at a time, and I don’t feel anything unusual in my mind.
“Push harder,” Mato says. “You can do this, I know you can.”
I press my fingertips into the table, trying to focus. At first, all I can think of is the two images overlaid across each other, but then the thought starts to blur in my mind. I can almost feel a wall rising like the one I glimpsed back at the lab, but pain blossoms in the base of my skull, and I step back, shaking my head.
“I can’t do it,” I say. It seemed like I was close to something there, but it felt like it was hurting me. Regina said I wasn’t fully healed yet. I probably shouldn’t be risking myself with a fraction right now. I rub my temples. “Maybe I should wait. That felt weird.”
“You can practice anytime,” Mato says. “It’s easier after the first. Just don’t go above two fractions. I didn’t go above two for years. If you rush too fast into learning this, you can hurt yourself.”
I blow out a sigh. “Everyone is so concerned with me hurting myself,” I mutter. My eyes drift across the room, landing on a canister for the glowing strain of the pigeons on an otherwise empty shelf. I pick it up and set it on the table. A VR image of one of the cobalt-and-black birds appears alongside pages of sequencing reports and gene diagrams that hover in the air. I scroll through them, curious about the birds’ DNA. Entropia created the other birds, but Regina said that this flock had simply mutated on its own.
“What are you doing?” Mato asks.
“I’m just looking.” I scan through the gene report on the glowing strain, skimming over the mutations in its DNA. Most of it looks normal, but there are enough tweaks and quirks that I could spend years studying them. There are genes from rodents, from jellyfish, and even bacteria spliced into the birds’ avian DNA. “I just don’t believe that this strain is a natural mutation,” I say, “but I can’t see any reason here why it wouldn’t be.” I pull up the map of the glowing birds’ spread. It looks like this flock first appeared in Canada. They’ve been thriving. There are millions of them, streaking across the country, crossing Alaska into Russia, across Greenland and into Europe.
“They’re everywhere,” Mato says. “All over the world.”
I nod, frowning, looking at the map, something tugging at my memory. A crack echoes faintly, making the canisters wobble on the table. It’s followed by another, then a string of smaller, fainter explosions in the distance.
I look back at Mato. “Fireworks?”
He tilts his head, listening. “I think so, but those first two sounded close.”
“Could it be drones?”
“No, there’s no Cartaxus activity near here. Those sounded like improvised explosives. Something small, but powerful. It’s funny . . .”
I look up. “What’s funny?”
He purses his lips. “They almost sounded like Hydra clouds. But they were too small.”
Another crack echoes faintly, sending a shiver up my spine, but Mato is right—it’s t
oo small to be a blower. It must be fireworks celebrating the arrival of the pigeons.
I draw my focus out of the DNA canister’s connection, and the map of the glowing flock’s population disappears just as its shape tugs at my memory. A jolt runs through me.
“Wait,” I say, throwing my hand out. The map reappears, hovering in the air. It shows scarlet lines streaking around the world, tracking the flock’s spread. The population is getting bigger as they fly, breeding out of control.
But I’ve seen this pattern before.
Back in the Comox when Dax arrived at the lab, he showed me a map like this, only it wasn’t pigeons he was tracking. It was the spread of the new strain of the virus. That was days ago, but the match is still uncanny.
“What is it?” Mato asks.
I grab my pack and push past him, pressing my shoulder against the door, jogging back down the stairwell to Regina’s lab. Mato’s footsteps echo above me, the door to the pigeon archive slamming shut. I hurry down the hallway as another crack echoes through the room, then pull open the lab’s steel door.
The guard is gone, the music raging, a crowd still gathered in the park. I step across the stairwell’s concrete landing and grip the metal railing to look out into the atrium. We’re four floors up, high enough to see the people queuing for the elevators and the dark cylinder of the atrium. But it isn’t really dark. The glowing flock is sweeping in from outside, painting streaks of light in the air above the park. The birds are circling, calling, swooping down into the bunker, their cries echoing from the atrium’s curved walls.
A crack cuts through the music, and my grip tightens on the railing. I lift my gaze, searching through the flock, spotting feathers puffing through the air. It looks like a glowing firework, sending streams of frantic pigeons racing away from it.
Mato reaches my side and looks up, confused, until another bird detonates in a glowing puff of blue. Screams rise from the crowds of people gathered in the park. Mato grabs my arm, staggering back, covering his mouth.
“Catarina, get back. We need to get inside now.”
