This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  I rock back on my heels, but pause as I look down at Anna’s slumped form. Agnes stopped her somehow, the way I’ve only ever seen Brink and Mato do. She was the one who unlocked the door to this lab to get us in here too.

  “Who are you?” I breathe.

  Agnes’s blood-streaked face crinkles in a smile. “I’m your yaya, Bobcat. I always will be. Now go.”

  I scramble to my feet, my hands stained with Regina’s blood, and run to the floating platform holding the glass tanks. It sways as I step onto it, a cold breeze cutting up from the darkness below. There’s a chain strung from the center, as thick as my arm, suspending the platform above the lake beneath it. But there’s no lever, no lock to release it that I can see. I scan the room, then swing my backpack off my shoulders and dig through it, my fingers closing around a cold, segmented curve of metal.

  The last flash strip. I see a sudden flash of charred bone and blinding light as I lift it out. I grit my teeth and wrap it around the chain, looping it twice, looking back at Agnes and Regina. I won’t have time to cut the chain and run from the platform before it falls. I’ll go down with it, into the lake. Then I’ll have to make my way up the tunnel.

  And then I’ll have to face Lachlan.

  “Bobcat, now!” Agnes urges, color flushing her cheeks.

  My eyes drop to Regina’s body, my heart clenching. Then I yank the lever on the flash strip. The chain snaps with a sound like a gunshot, and the platform drops.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE METAL TABLE IN THE center of the platform screeches as it tilts, jars of pale, rippled flesh tumbling around me. They seem to float as we fall together, hurtling into the darkness of the cavern below. Time slows to a crawl, my hair rising in slow-motion tendrils around my face, my muscles tensing for the impact I know is coming. There’s a flash of green as we reach the lake, a blur of lights above me, then the roaring shock of the water as the platform slices through it.

  The sample jars smack against the surface, some hitting the edge of the platform, shattering with a crack that echoes from the cavern’s shadowed walls. The water hits me like a fist, the weight of the platform dragging me down through a roiling mess of dark water and shards of glass. The edge of a broken jar kisses my ribs, a puff of scarlet billowing through the bubbles, and a wave of pressure thuds hard against my ears. I manage to keep my hand locked tight around the memory chip, but the instinct to stop breathing comes a moment too late.

  A lungful of water burns my throat. I scrunch my eyes shut, choking, kicking against the pull of the sinking platform. My breath races away in a cloud of silver bubbles that float up in zigzags, converging an impossible distance above me. There’s no pain from my ribs, but I can taste rust in the water. There’s too much blood. The cut must be deep. I kick off my heavy boots and claw upward desperately, when something moves in the splintered light cutting down from the surface.

  Hands. Pale, slender, reaching down for me. Arms thrust through the water from above, urging me upward. I reach for them, but they slide away, and I break the surface, choking in a ragged breath of air, grabbing hold of the concrete lip of the lake.

  My muscles are shaking, alerts blinking in my vision. The air is thick with the glowing fungus wafting in spirals around me.

  Jun Bei is kneeling on the floor, soaking wet, staring at me through the clouds of glowing dust.

  “Come on,” she says, her voice thick. “We can’t let her die for nothing. We need to go.”

  “H-how—” I choke out, dragging myself up onto the concrete floor. My stomach churns and I collapse on my side, coughing up the gulp of water I breathed in. “How are you here?”

  “I figured out how to access our VR chip,” she says. “We’re hurt. Show me the wound.”

  I swallow, still gasping for air, and look down at my side. Four inches of skin are sliced cleanly in an arc beneath my bra, my T-shirt hanging open, its edges stained with blood. The sight makes my head swim, and I scrunch my eyes shut.

  “I can’t see it if you aren’t looking,” Jun Bei says. “We only have one set of eyes.”

  “Shit, right,” I breathe, opening my eyes, forcing myself to focus on the wound. The flow of blood seems to have slowed, but it’s deep. It’s going to take days to heal. It should be stitched or stapled, bandaged up, but we don’t have time.

  I look around, scanning the room. We’re in the hydroponics chamber with the rows of curling purple beans, a dark hallway on the far side of the room leading to the rest of the basement levels. I can see the plastic sheeting hung over the entrance to the maintenance shaft Cole and I ran up. It has to be where Lachlan is hiding now. Gunshots echo in the distance, an explosion shaking the floor.

  We don’t have much longer.

  “Not a lot I can do with the wound,” Jun Bei says, standing up. A chill spreads across my ribs. “I closed the veins and the nerves. Come on. We have to go.”

  Voices echo behind us. Boots pounding, weapons clicking. I scramble to my feet, lurching for the rows of plants, but a hail of bullets slams into the floor around me. I spin, frozen, as four visored Cartaxus soldiers race through from the hallway, their rifles aimed at me. I cast about wildly for somewhere to run, but there’s no cover—nothing near. Just trellises of beans and flowers, endless clouds of glowing dust. I’m unarmed, soaking wet, and wounded, with nowhere to hide.

  “Hands up!” one of the soldiers yells, cocking his rifle.

  I obey, lifting my hands, but the soldier lowers the barrel. He’s aiming for my leg. He’ll shoot me so I can’t run.

  I’ll never make it to Lachlan.

  “I don’t think so,” Jun Bei says, flicking her hand. A buzz passes through me, rippling from the base of my skull, and the soldier drops to the ground. The three behind him watch him fall, stepping back in shock. More voices echo in the hallway, footsteps pounding closer.

  Jun Bei tilts her head, and two of the remaining three soldiers fall, leaving one standing on his own.

  “Drop your weapon,” she says, her voice low and calm. “They’re not dead, but they will be—and you with them—if you don’t do as I say.”

  I blink, looking between Jun Bei and the soldier. He can see her too. She must be hacking his tech, appearing as a VR avatar in his vision as well. The soldier stares down at the other three and tosses his weapon aside, dropping to his knees, his hands raised. The voices in the hallway grow louder, and a group of genehackers run in, carrying rifles they must have taken from Cartaxus troops. They stare at the kneeling soldier, at Jun Bei and me, and stumble to a stop in the entrance to the room.

  “Good,” Jun Bei says to the soldier, stepping forward. She drifts into a blur of light, reappearing in front of him, tilting her head. The buzzing in my skull grows louder, prickling at the edges of my senses. Commands and scrolling output logs flash across my vision.

  She isn’t just hacking the soldier—she’s using his tech to stretch back into Cartaxus’s servers, sliding into their networks, taking control. The gunshots in the distance grow quiet, the explosions ceasing. She’s stopping Cartaxus’s assault all over Entropia. The soldier’s connection to Cartaxus is only local—she can’t stretch any farther—but she’s single-handedly stopped the entire attack in the space of a few seconds.

  The breath rushes from my lungs. I knew Jun Bei was smarter than me, but this is something else. Something higher. She’s taken down hundreds of soldiers, and she’s only using half a brain.

  I didn’t know someone like her could exist.

  She looks up, blinking out of her session, turning back to me. “Brink will know I’m here now. I don’t know if that will buy us time or cost it, but either way I don’t think we have much longer. We’re going to have to run.”

  I shove the sopping hair back from my face. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  Jun Bei looks back at the genehackers, who are watching her with wide, incredulous eyes, and gestures to the soldier. “He’s all yours.”

  She turns and lurches into a blur of light,
reappearing ahead of me, her dark hair flying out behind her. I drag in a breath and race after her, weaving between the trellises of beans to the far wall of the room where the plastic sheeting hangs over the maintenance shaft. I shove it aside and duck under the metal chain, wincing at a stab of pain from the gash on my ribs, then bolt up the curving dark tunnel and into the rock.

  It’s pitch-black, the air cold and musty. My clothes are soaked, my hair streaming down my back. The glow of my panel is muted through the cuff on my arm, but Jun Bei glances back at me, and a light blinks on the side of the cuff, splashing out across the tunnel.

  “Thanks,” I call out, my lungs burning.

  “Come on,” she shouts back, always staying just a few strides in front of me, urging me forward. We run for what feels like an eternity, the rocky floor jagged against the thin cotton of my wet socks.

  A light gleams ahead of us, the tunnel branching. The sound of voices echoes from the path that leads to the parking lot, the scent of smoke and plastic explosives choking the air. I follow Jun Bei down the other tunnel, the one Cole and I ran past when we were here. Fear kicks inside me. If this really is Lachlan’s lab, he might be waiting for me, holed up in there, trying to stop the attack on his own. I don’t have any weapons. I don’t even have shoes. I’m exhausted, aching, and out of time.

  But I have Jun Bei.

  We reach a door set into the rock. Steel, riveted, reinforced. There’s a security scanner beside it, but it blinks green when I reach for it. I don’t know if it recognized my panel and approved the ID or if Jun Bei hacked it, but I shove my shoulder into the metal and force it open, stumbling inside.

  The room is small and cluttered. Messy, like the lab in the cabin’s basement. Black counters wrap around the edges, stacked with glassware and nanosolution. There are papers pinned to the walls, sketches and notes, scribbled gene diagrams, and a coding terminal on the far wall with the symbol for Cartaxus’s satellite network glowing on its screen.

  Lachlan is standing behind a table in the center of the room. He looks haggard and skinny, with shadows etched beneath his eyes. A chrome cuff gleams over his panel, and there’s a body lying on the table in front of him.

  A girl with a bandage around the stump of her left hand.

  She looks exactly like me.

  CHAPTER 41

  I STARE AT LACHLAN AND the girl. She’s unconscious, limp, her mouth slightly open. There’s a black glass cuff on her forearm that looks just like mine. Lachlan’s gray eyes cut to me, then move to Jun Bei, and a lurch of fear rushes through me.

  This is no puppet. This is Lachlan—alive and in the flesh, waiting for me. He’s holding a body with my face, my hair, my clothes.

  I think I have her hand on my wrist.

  “Darling,” he says, his eyes lighting up as he looks at Jun Bei. “You made it here. I knew you’d survive.”

  My heart is pounding, but he’s not even looking at me. He’s just watching Jun Bei’s VR projection as she steps past me and into the room.

  “You,” she growls, shaking with barely controlled rage. Her clothes are still wet, like mine, her hair soaked and slicked to her neck. There’s a murderous glint in her green eyes as she stares at Lachlan. “You did this to me.”

  “I know you’re angry,” he says, his voice eerily calm, “but there isn’t much time. Cartaxus will find this tunnel soon. They know you’re here. You can stop this attack, but you’re going to need to stay out of their control.”

  I look from him to the girl on the table, reeling. She has my skin, my face, my hair. She’s a perfect replica. “Who the hell is that?” I ask.

  “She’s nothing,” Lachlan says, looking down at her. There’s a strange tone in his voice as he talks to me, and it feels like he’s avoiding my eyes. It makes me think of the walls that close down over Cole’s face when he’s in pain.

  But that isn’t how Lachlan sounds when he’s talking to Jun Bei.

  He knows we’re two people. He’s treating us as separate entities. But that means he must have known that Jun Bei was alive inside my mind.

  So why the hell was he keeping her locked up in there for years?

  Lachlan strokes the face of the girl on the table, brushing her hair back from her forehead. She’s identical to me—right down to the pale scars etched on her cheek from when I fell out of a tree at the cabin. He looks up at Jun Bei. “I had Regina grow this body as a decoy in case Cartaxus ever discovered you during the outbreak. Her people could have switched it for you and brought you into hiding here. This body doesn’t have a proper brain—it’s even using a chip to breathe. It has the same normal DNA as you, though, so when I’m taken by Cartaxus with it, they’ll think they have you and stop looking. It won’t fool them for long, but you’ll have enough time to end this attack.”

  Jun Bei tilts her head. “You’re turning yourself in?”

  “It’s the only way,” he says. “I’m no help to you here. You need to use this terminal to stop flood protocol. I can’t get the Origin code to run properly without your DNA. It needs to be activated through your body like it was in the vaccine’s decryption. You coded it that way to control it, and I haven’t been able to alter it enough to run it on my own. You’re the only one who can stop this.”

  Jun Bei shakes her head, stepping into the room. Her hip passes through the edge of the table. “No, Lachlan. We’re not using the Origin code to lobotomize the planet. That’s not why I wrote it. It’s a gift, not a weapon.”

  “You don’t understand,” he says, frustrated. “Cartaxus won’t just kill the people on the surface. They’ll reverse engineer the Origin code. They’re almost finished. Once Brink figures out what it’s for and what it can do, he’ll come looking for you so that he can use it however he wants. They’ll turn it into a weapon far worse than what I would use it for, and they’ll keep you prisoner until they figure out how to run it without your DNA. I just want to erase the Wrath, but they’ll use it to turn people into tools. You’ve seen how they treat their black-outs. Imagine if they could alter the minds of the civilians in their bunkers. Your code will let them do that, darling. It’s time for you to assume responsibility for it and take back control. You were supposed to wake and do this after the decryption, but you were hurt instead. I had to give you time to regain your strength for this plan to work.”

  My heart stops. Regina was right—she thought that Lachlan was waiting to finish his plan while I healed from the concussion. But this isn’t the plan I was expecting. He’s turning himself in to Cartaxus to stop them from looking for us. He’s leaving Jun Bei and me to stop the attack.

  This all feels wrong.

  “Is that what you want from us?” Jun Bei asks, striding closer. “You did all this—changing my body, suppressing me, adding the code to the vaccine. What has this all been for? Was this all to erase the Wrath?”

  Lachlan looks surprised. “This has all been for you, Jun Bei. Can’t you see that?” He looks at me, and then away again, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. There’s a note of affection in his voice when he talks to Jun Bei, but not when he talks to me. I step into the room, staring at the body on the table, confusion whipping through me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, darling,” he says. “The code at the end of the vaccine’s decryption was designed to handle the transition for you, but that butcher cut your panel open and ruined everything. The walls inside your mind were cracked instead of brought down smoothly. I never meant for it to be this difficult for you to come back.”

  Come back. The words roar through me. So Jun Bei really was supposed to wake up during the decryption. But instead, she was already awake. She said she woke up on Marcus’s couch after he cut my healing tech core out.

  “But why did you do all this?” I ask, swaying.

  “I had to hide you, my darling girl,” he says, but not to me. He’s talking to Jun Bei again. He’s barely even acknowledging me. “I knew the attack on that signal tower was a mistake, but it w
ouldn’t go unnoticed. People were going to start looking for you, but you were hurt. You’d wiped too much of yourself when you erased your memories. You lost crucial patterns in your brain that had to be painstakingly regrown. I tried keeping you in a coma, but it was taking too long, and your neural pathways were beginning to atrophy. Your brain needed to be working while you recovered. That’s why I created Catarina.”

  A crack opens inside me. An abyss, dark and violent. I feel myself sliding toward it.

  “What do you mean . . . created me?”

  “It’s not as difficult as it sounds,” Lachlan says. His gaze finally turns to me, but it’s dark somehow, threatening. The abyss inside me grows wider at the cold look in his eyes. “Seeds want to grow, hearts want to beat, and brain tissue wants to think. The implant kept Jun Bei’s essence locked in her left frontal lobe, but the rest of her brain was a mess of altered sections that I didn’t know how to repair. So I overwrote it—I wiped it back to a clean slate and waited. It took you just two days to open your eyes.”

  “You . . . you created me to help Jun Bei recover?” I whisper. I grip the edge of the metal table, feeling my blood draining.

  “I had no choice,” Lachlan says. “It was the only way I could think of to keep her alive.”

  I close my eyes, my mind whipping into a storm. I want to be sick—to scream, to drop to my knees. I’m not an experiment. I’m a tool.

  Lachlan created me just to save Jun Bei’s life.

  “There were teething issues,” he says. “You had to learn to talk, to move your body. But that development was fast, and it wasn’t long until you thought you had a past and memories. With you awake, the neural damage began to repair much faster. It took almost a year for it to heal completely, though. I had to keep you in the cabin in the woods, away from noises and people. I blocked the wireless signals—everything I could do to help you heal. I couldn’t even let you use VR or it’d strain the fragile pathways that were being regrown inside your mind.” He lets out a breath of bitter laughter. “And then when you were finally ready, when I knew it was time to wake Jun Bei up, I got a call from Cartaxus. There’d been an outbreak in an Argentinian glacier that had spread through a group of tourists before they contained it. I knew there’d be more. I waited, and it took just three weeks for the global outbreak to begin.”