This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  “We’ve already been exposed,” I breathe. I can smell it in the air—sulfur and wood smoke. The unmistakable notes of plague. No wonder Cartaxus hasn’t been able to contain the new strain of the virus. It isn’t just spreading through people anymore.

  It’s jumped to the pigeons.

  Now there’ll be no stopping it.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE PIGEONS ARE A WILD, swirling mess of cobalt light, circling down through the open blast doors and into the bunker’s atrium. Their cries are deafening, echoing from the curved walls, and the people gathered in the park are scattering, fleeing through a slow rain of black-and-blue feathers.

  I didn’t know that the end of the world would look so beautiful.

  Mato stands beside me, his face stricken, watching the pigeons arc through the air, the crowd below us fleeing for cover. But there’s no cover anymore, not really. There’s nowhere left to hide.

  If the virus is in the pigeons, then the vaccine may as well be dead.

  I close my eyes, gripping the staircase’s metal railing. There’s no way to stop the virus from evolving anymore. We could vaccinate every person on the surface, and the plague would continue to thrive and spread like wildfire. It has billions of new hosts now, and it’s just starting to move through them. No wonder the mutations in the new strain are so different. It’s a species jump. We’ve been fighting this virus with the best tools we have—vaccines and doses, bunkers and quarantine strikes—and it wasn’t even close to good enough.

  Nature leaped forward on her own, and now she’s laughing at us.

  “We should go,” Mato says, taking my arm gently.

  “Why?” I breathe. “It’s over. We’ve already lost.”

  “No we haven’t. Not yet. The patched vaccine still works.”

  “For how long?” I laugh bitterly, gesturing at the birds. “A week? A month? We lost Lachlan’s first vaccine, and now we’re going to lose this one. This is the end, Mato.”

  “You haven’t needed a vaccine to survive the last two years,” he says, his grip on my arm tightening. “We’re going to beat this. Lachlan isn’t the only person who’s capable of saving us.”

  I stare into his eyes, the roar of the pigeons washing over my senses, his words circling through me. He’s right. I survived the last two years without a vaccine, and this is no different. It’s a new threat, but it’s still just a virus. If the vaccine fails, we’ll write another. Or maybe we’ll get rid of our lungs, or alter our cells, or change our bodies in any of a thousand ways to beat this plague.

  There’s still hope as long as we’re alive. There’s a chance of a future.

  Voices rise suddenly below us, near a bank of elevators on the edge of the atrium. People are streaming out of them, flooding down from the surface. They’re dressed up for the party—smeared in glowing algae paste, but they’re also covered with feathers, and one man is carrying a wounded woman in his arms. Regina said thousands had traveled here to witness the flock’s homecoming, and they’re all in the desert right now. It’s going to be pandemonium up there, and they’ll all be trying to get back down here.

  This is going to turn into chaos, fast.

  Mato’s eyes glaze, glyphs flashing across his mask. He stiffens. “Shit,” he says, “we need to go. There’s an elevator this way.” He turns and runs down the stairwell.

  I tear my eyes away from the crowd streaming from the elevators and follow him, running down the stairs and into a tunnel that looks like it’s been blasted into the rock.

  “We should contact the others,” I say.

  “They’ll already be gone if they know what’s good for them,” Mato says, reaching a concrete room with a steel elevator cage in its center, a shaft cut through the floor and ceiling. He punches a button on it to call the cab. “I just received an alert from Cartaxus. They’re quarantining these outbreaks. They’ll be sending drones right now.”

  “What?” I spit, grabbing the cage to catch my breath. “That’s madness. The virus is in the pigeons. Trying to quarantine them is like trying to quarantine the ocean. Bombing us won’t do anything.”

  “I know that,” Mato says, “but I don’t think Cartaxus will see it like we do. They have protocols to follow, and the one they’re using now says to bomb an outbreak and kill as many of the infected as possible. They’ll probably see this as a good opportunity to kill a lot of the birds.”

  I draw my hand back from the elevator’s cage, still gasping for breath. My skin is slick with sweat, a couple of soft, downy feathers plastered to my arms. The elevator cables sing as the cab rises from below us. “They can’t bomb this place,” I say. “There are thousands of people here.”

  “Trust me,” Mato says. “This is my home—I don’t want this to happen any more than you do. We can try to stop it once we’re out of here.”

  The elevator doors swing open. The cab is metal and wide, sized for cargo. Mato drags the iron grating aside, ushering me in. I lean against the wall, flicking the feathers from my skin, picking one from a fold in my shirt. Mato hits a button on the side, and we begin to rise.

  “Will people be safe in the bunker if Regina closes the blast doors?” I ask.

  “It depends what weapon they’re planning to deploy. It won’t be the smaller drones, not now they know I’m here. There are two kinds they could use that they know I can’t hack—a nanite weapon that should leave the lower levels unscathed, or destroyers with artillery. If they send in the destroyers, there’s nowhere to hide. They carry payloads designed to destroy bunkers.”

  “Why the hell does Cartaxus have weapons designed to destroy bunkers?”

  Mato crosses his arms, his face dark. “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  The elevator rises, hurtling up through the rock, passing through open landings in a dozen higher levels. I close my eyes, trying to think, scanning through Jun Bei’s code for anything strong enough to take down a destroyer, but I don’t think it’s something she ever thought to try.

  An ache in my hand snaps me out of my session.

  “Shit,” I whisper, looking down. “Mato, we . . . we have a problem.”

  I lift my left hand. A yellow light is blinking on the pad between my thumb and forefinger. It’s aching, making the muscles in my hand twitch. It’s the weevil Regina’s drones shot me with. It was originally coded to keep me out of the city. Regina told me it was dead.

  But it clearly isn’t. She’s recoded it to keep me in.

  “Goddammit, Regina,” Mato snarls, looking up through the caged top of the elevator cab. The shaft above us cuts all the way to the mountain’s surface, a circle of cobalt light above us growing larger as we speed up through the rock. “I can’t get through to her. She isn’t responding to my comms.”

  “We have to be able to kill this thing,” I say, letting my eyes glaze, searching with my cuff for the weevil. A pulse ripples across my vision, lighting up Mato’s mask and countless open connections around us—appliances and tech in the apartments around the atrium. A tiny dot in the back of my hand is glowing white.

  A thud sounds against the top of the elevator, jerking me out of my session. “What was that?” Another thud sounds, shaking the cab. The weevil’s light has turned orange, which I assume is a bad sign.

  Mato looks up. “Pigeons. They’re in the shaft.” He narrows his eyes as though listening. A low roar is starting up in the distance, echoing from above us. “I think there’s going to be a crowd up there when we stop,” he says.

  “Great,” I say, closing my eyes, trying to shift my focus back into my cuff. The weevil glows in white in my wireless interface, and I try to hook into its controls, but it’s not coded like anything I’ve seen before. It has more firewalls than most of Cartaxus’s servers.

  Regina hasn’t designed her weevils to be easy to kill.

  “Let’s try it together,” Mato says. A request from him blinks in the corner of my eye, but it’s not a comm. It’s a shared coding session. A wall of
text flickers into my vision when I accept it, commands from Mato’s mask coming dazzlingly fast. He’s joining my attempt to hack the weevil, but it isn’t working. We’re not even getting close. The light in the back of my hand is growing darker, pulsing a deep orange. The pain rolling from it rises steeply, feeling like a needle pressed into my skin.

  I scrunch my hand into a fist, breathing through it. “This isn’t working.” I glance up. The roar of the crowd above us is getting louder. We’re almost at the surface, and the elevator is groaning, slowing down. “We have to be able to cut it out. It isn’t that big.”

  I sling my pack off my shoulder, flipping it open, digging inside it for something sharp. I’ve cut out my panel once before. This thing is smaller than a pea. My fingers slide over the files in my pack, and I grasp the end of a slender medkit. I yank it out, leaning back against the side of the cab.

  “Wait,” Mato says, grabbing my wrist. “She said not to remove it. I’ve seen tech like this that deploys a lethal dose when you try to cut it out.”

  “So we cut around it,” I say, unzipping the medkit. “There has to be a way to get this thing out.”

  The elevator shudders to a stop at the top of the shaft where a rocky cavern leads out to the winding streets on the mountain’s surface. The cavern is completely packed with people, their voices frantic, their bodies pressed against the elevator cage. I jump away from the cab’s steel wall, slinging my backpack on again, moving closer to Mato. His eyes widen as he looks out at them. The air is humid and scented with sulfur, ringing with shouts and the cries of the pigeons. There are feathers plastered to the skin of most of the people in the crowd.

  They could be infected. As far as I know, Cartaxus still hasn’t updated the vaccine.

  “Stay close to me,” Mato says, gripping my wrist, moving to the front of the cab. The bell rings and the elevator doors grate open. The crowd rushes in, hitting us like a wave of flesh and heat. Mato lurches out through them, shoving people aside, his hold on my wrist like iron. My backpack catches and tears on the hooks jutting from someone’s implants, the crowd pressing so tight against us it’s hard to breathe.

  We make it halfway out of the elevator, but the crowd keeps coming, surging in, desperate to get away from the pigeons. But it’s useless—they’re just panicking. They’re already exposed, and there’s no safety from the virus waiting downstairs for them.

  “Get out of my way!” Mato shouts, shoving a man aside. The crowd ahead of him parts just enough for him to push through with his shoulder, dragging me with him. We stumble to the edge of the cavern, the crowd thinning out around us, and Mato grabs the wall, heaving in a breath. His skin is soaked with sweat from the crowd, feathers plastered to his neck. The opening that leads outside is thick with people, but I can make out a circle of sky and glowing pigeons, like a wall of starlight beyond it. The weevil has turned red, the pain pulsing from it like a cigarette pressed into my skin.

  “Shit,” Mato gasps, going still suddenly. His mask flashes with glyphs. “Cartaxus has sent destroyers. I can feel them. I can’t take these down.”

  My blood runs cold. I look back at the crowd. Their voices are a roar of frustration and confusion. We should tell them to get out of here, but they’re lost in panic. They’re practically crushing one another to get into the elevators. The entire city will be in chaos.

  I look down at the red spot on my hand. “How much longer?”

  “A few minutes,” Mato says. “We need to get that weevil out.”

  I drag my backpack off my shoulder and yank it open, searching for the medkit again. One of the pockets is ripped open, the fabric shredded by the hooks in the genehacker’s skin. I glance back at the crowd, my stomach dropping. “I can’t find the medkit. It must have fallen out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod, scrambling desperately through the backpack, yanking out clothes and nutriBars, dumping them on the floor. All that’s left inside is a packet of wipes and a crumpled folder of Lachlan’s notes. I shove my hand into the bottom, and my fingers brush the sharp end of a long, segmented strip of metal, and the breath rushes from my lungs.

  The box of flash strips is still in here. Leoben used one to cut the cable holding down the Comox. I close my eyes, locking my fingers around one of the strips, my hands already shaking. I yank it out of my backpack. The black metal is scratched, but intact. My eyes rise to Mato’s, a chill creeping down my spine. I’ve seen one of these things cut through steel chains.

  It can definitely cut through my arm.

  Mato’s eyes flare. He looks back at the crowd, then nods swiftly. “You’ll need to get the top of the cuff off first. Go into your settings and unlock sections one through five.”

  I fall to my knees, dropping the backpack, and close my eyes, logging into the cuff’s settings, unlocking the wrist section. It shifts on my skin, a whirring noise cutting the air, and five sprockets around my wrist fly open, leaving the section of glass covering my forearm in place. I yank at the edge of the black glass, wincing as it pulls away from my skin. Wires tug out of the cuff, coiling back into a row of black ports that have grown across the top of my hand. Underneath the glass, the skin is pale and soft, the ports glistening with nanofluid.

  And now my wrist is exposed.

  I look up at Mato, wrapping the flash strip around my wrist, my hands shaking at the weight of what I’m about to do. This is no easy gentech fix. Reattaching a limb is possible, but repaired nerves grow differently—once neural pathways are disrupted, they’ll never be the same again. I don’t even know if we’ll be able to save my hand. The weevil might kill it.

  But if I don’t do this, we’re going to be trapped here when the destroyers arrive.

  “We don’t have much time,” Mato says, kneeling beside me. “Do you want me to do it?”

  I hold his eyes and shake my head, steeling myself, hearing the whine of jets in the distance.

  The red dot pulses in the back of my hand, and I yank the flash strip’s lever.

  CHAPTER 25

  A SINGLE HEARTBEAT OF TIME that feels like an eternity passes. I open my eyes and catch the starlight of the pigeons through the tunnel leading out into the city. Mato’s shoulders are tight, his eyes locked on mine. Something tugs hard at my arm, and a flash of white light splashes through the air.

  There is no pain. No sound. Just a sensation of wrongness, like I’ve made a choice that’s wrenched the path of my life off course. A sudden desperate urge to go back and change my mind surges through me. I blink, swaying, and feel my cheek hit the cavern floor.

  “Don’t look. It’s over now.” Mato’s voice is calm above the screech of the pigeons, the shouting of the crowd, the desperate thud of my own pulse. My hand feels cold, my fingers are burning, and some part of me knows that they’re not there anymore, but the thought is still too foreign and violent for me to process it.

  “You did it,” he says, grabbing my shoulders, turning me on the floor. His face comes into focus above me, flecks of cobalt feathers plastered to his cheeks. A group of people swarm into the cavern, screaming, rushing in from the city outside. Mato angles his body over mine protectively as they race past, shouting and stinking of infection.

  He reaches out and picks something up, putting it in my backpack. Distantly, I know it’s my hand. He grabs my shoulder, squeezing it. “The weevil is out. It turned off when you severed it.”

  I nod, trying to choke out a response, but all I can do is gasp for air.

  Something clamps down on my upper arm. Mato jerks at something. His belt. A tourniquet. I glance down without thinking, and my eyes dance over the wound.

  There’s nothing there. Charred bone and burned flesh. I choke back a sob, scrunching my eyes shut, turning my face into the floor.

  “Shhh, you did good.” Mato lifts my head, gripping my face. “You need to get up now. We need to get out of here. The destroyers are only a few minutes away.”

  I try to reply, but my tech has sucked the ene
rgy from my muscles, trying frantically to heal my arm. My vision is rippling with warning messages. Blood pressure, infection, adrenaline. My panel wants to know where my hand is, if there’s any way it can be reattached.

  It’s gone, I tell it, my thoughts fuzzy with shock. My hand is gone, and I don’t know if it’s coming back.

  A pinching feeling starts up in my wrist as the tech in my arm responds, starting the process of closing the wound. Mato slings my good arm around his shoulder, lifting me. I struggle to my knees, but the rush of blood from sitting up has brought my nerves back to life, and the pain takes me like a bullet.

  I gasp, doubling over. Mato tightens his grip on my wrist. “Come on,” he says, grabbing the backpack, but his voice is tinged with static. The pain is a weight crushing down on me, and I can feel myself shifting beneath it, rearranging the pieces of my mind to escape its grasp. But it’s more than just the injury. More than my glitching tech.

  I feel something pulsing, tearing in the base of my skull.

  “Come on, Catarina.” Mato heaves me forward, taking my weight, pulling me down the tunnel.

  I swallow, trying to walk, but my legs just kick uselessly at the ground. My muscles are twitching, spasming. My nervous system is on fire. The crowd is still streaming in from outside—people screaming, plastered with feathers, trying to get down into the safety of the bunker. I should be telling them to turn and run, but my voice is gone, and my focus with it. Mato drags me through the crowd, weaving between the throng, and we stagger out into the street.

  It’s chaos. The pigeons are a constellation above us—impenetrable and infinite, their glowing wings forming an ocean of moving light across the sky. They’re magnificent. My breath catches, and I feel Mato’s catch too. We jerk to a stop together, spellbound, staring up at the wild explosion of light.

  The flock’s cries are more than clicks and whirrs—they are a symphony rolling through the night. Complex streams of percussive sound, layered and melodic, as beautiful as the waves of light rippling across the sky. The sight tugs at something inside me—a thread coming loose in my mind. Flashes of memory pelt my vision, rearing through the light of the pigeons. Jun Bei’s face seems to ripple across the sky, painted by the glowing wings, and snatches of her voice fill my mind as Mato heaves me out into the street. Now that we’re on the mountain’s surface, the houses are sparse, wide roads cutting between them. We weave through the crowd, heading for vehicles parked in the distance. The people split before us, their faces doubled in my vision.