by Emily Suvada
I smile, trying to lift my hand from the terminal to reach for her, even though I know I’ll pass right through her, but my arm won’t respond. I try again, but the muscles stay frozen.
I can’t move it at all.
“What are you doing? I can’t move my arm.”
“I’m not ready to let go just yet,” she says. “This might be the last time I have access to Cartaxus’s systems at this level. I can’t leave them like this.”
Fear flutters through me. “What are you talking about? We’ve done what we came here for. We’ve stopped the attack. We’ve even brought down Brink.”
She tosses the lock of hair from her eyes. “For now, maybe, but they won’t stop. There’ll be another Brink. Do you seriously think that Cartaxus is just going to give up this kind of power? Can you imagine them letting their civilians file out of those bunkers with full control over their panels?”
Her voice grows sharp, and my resolve wavers. Of course I don’t believe that Cartaxus is going to fall this easily. The outbreak has given them access to the bodies of every one of their civilians. Brink won’t be the only one who sees those people as their property. There’s no way Cartaxus will relinquish their power because of a single hack.
But I don’t know what Jun Bei could be planning to stop them permanently.
“I only had to live through a few days of the outbreak,” she says, turning, “but what I saw already scarred me. This outbreak is an open wound on humanity that we can’t possibly move beyond. How can we heal and step into a new world after what we’ve done to survive?”
I try to lift my arm from the terminal again, but it still won’t respond. “People are resilient,” I say. “We’ll find a way to move past this. Break the connection, Jun Bei. Let me go.”
“No,” she shakes her head. “I need to do this. I understand now. I never really knew before why Lachlan used to wipe our memories of the experiments. I thought it was to control us, but it wasn’t—he did it to keep us functioning. He knew that after enough pain and enough misery, it would consume and define us. The pain of this outbreak is defining all of us now—we’ve lived through things that our species was not designed to experience. We’ve killed—we’ve eaten each other. How can we come back from this?”
Fear ripples through me. “Jun Bei—whatever you’re doing, stop. We can find a way to come back from this. We can’t overwrite humanity.”
“I know,” she says, her voice distant. “I don’t want to overwrite them. I just want to take their pain away.”
The fear inside me grows sharper. I don’t know what she’s doing, but she has complete control over my body. I can’t move, can’t get my panel to respond to my thoughts. All I can do is speak, breathe, and watch in horror as Jun Bei paces across the room.
“Please, Jun Bei, whatever you’re thinking—”
“This world is barely surviving,” she says, ignoring me. “Brink almost killed millions of people out of desperation—that’s what this plague has done to us. That’s not just the Wrath. It’s years of pain layered over us, and I don’t think we can find a way to live together if it isn’t washed away. I can’t give people the gift of immortality if it means living forever with the horror of the outbreak inside them. What kind of species would we be? We’d be bitter and violent forever. There’s a new world waiting for us, but we need to wash ourselves clean of this one first.”
Her eyes glaze and the terminal blinks. She’s linking up with the satellites—but she isn’t running the Origin code. I don’t know what she’s trying to do—what commands she’s running. I can’t move, can’t force my focus back into my panel or my cuff.
Her lips move silently, and code flickers across my vision—commands lifted from a piece of code that’s stored in our panel. It’s generating what looks like a memory suppressant.
No, not a suppressant. It’s a chemical to erase memories. That’s how she wants to take the pain of the outbreak away from everyone.
She’s going to wipe them all.
“No!” I gasp, struggling against her control. “Jun Bei, listen! You can’t do this—you can’t erase people’s memories.”
“They’re hurting,” she says, her green eyes glassy. “I won’t take more than I have to. Just the outbreak—just the pain. Once it’s washed from them, we can start moving forward again. We can fix this world. We’ll go back to how things were before the outbreak.”
Jun Bei’s voice is lifted and unwavering. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time. She is Lachlan’s daughter, truly—standing at a terminal and making choices for the entire world. Her brow furrows, and something flutters in my mind, rising into a storm. She’s fractioning. I don’t know how many splits she’s reached, but it feels like a whirlwind. My vision flickers with text—network data from the satellites. Brink’s credentials slide past every firewall like a blade.
She’s sending code to erase memories into every panel in the world.
“Stop it!” I shout. “This is wrong. Can’t you see what you’re doing?”
She’s not listening to me. I have to find a way to stop her. I close my eyes, summoning my focus, trying to wrench my hand from the terminal, but it won’t move. I turn my mind to my panel, but it’s locked from me. No access to my files, my viruses, my cuff. I can’t even form a single command.
She lifts an eyebrow. “You think you can fight me?”
“I’m part of you, Jun Bei,” I say. “I know you don’t really want to do this.”
Her eyes refocus, locking on me, steely and cold. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Footsteps echo in the hallway outside the lab. Jun Bei’s concentration wavers, and I surge my focus into my panel, trying to break her control. It almost works. Her attack halts, spinning in my vision, but I can’t wrestle the focus I need to stop it completely.
“Cat?” A voice shouts from outside, and a figure pushes through the door, stumbling into the room.
Cole.
His face is smeared with ash, blood streaming from cuts on his shoulders, his arms, his neck. A patch of dark, wet blood is blossoming on his pants above his knee. He’s been shot. He grabs the wall to steady himself, looking up shakily.
His face goes white as he sees Jun Bei.
“C-Cole,” I choke out, struggling to speak. Jun Bei is fighting against my breathing now, wrestling to take full control of our body. She’s like a wave against me, clawing at my mind, and I can already feel the cracks in my control spreading.
Cole blinks, staring between us, the gun loose in his hands. He’s shaking, his pupils narrowed to specks.
“Jun Bei?” His voice breaks. “You’re alive?”
“Cole, y-you have to shoot me,” I gasp, barely able to form the words. “She’s trying to wipe people’s memories. I can’t hold her back much longer.”
His brow creases as he looks around the lab. “I came here to . . . to . . .” He trails off, confused.
The memory code must already be running. We don’t have much time. “Please, Cole!” I shout. “You have to do it! Shoot me, please!”
His finger tightens on the trigger, but something flashes in his eyes, and I realize with a sickening thud that he won’t do it. He doesn’t understand.
“Please!” I urge him. “You have to stop me!”
But he just blinks, looking between Jun Bei and me, and something cracks inside me. The abyss that creaked open when Lachlan told me the truth about why I was created. I didn’t fall then, but I can feel myself swaying now as Cole’s eyes pass over me.
He’s looking at me like I’m a stranger.
“Who are you?” he whispers.
“No!” I cry. The abyss inside me roars open, darkness tugging at my heart. I fling myself against Jun Bei’s control, thrashing wildly against the steel of her mind.
“He doesn’t know who you are anymore,” she murmurs, stepping to my side. “The wipe is already running—it’s eaten away weeks of the outbreak by now. He hasn’t known you long en
ough to remember you.”
“No.” My voice comes out as a sob, my chest shuddering. “Please, Cole—you have to remember me!”
But I can see it in his eyes as he looks between me and Jun Bei. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t recognize me. He loved me. He said he wanted to run away with me. Whatever there was between us was strained, but at least it existed.
Now it’s gone.
Jun Bei has taken him from me like I took him from her.
“This was really Cole’s idea,” Jun Bei says, leaning against the terminal. “He was going to erase me to stop me killing people. He said ‘Sometimes memories aren’t worth the pain they hold.’ He’s right, and you know it. Humans weren’t designed to live with this amount of pain. It will take us centuries to move past the outbreak if we don’t forget it now.”
I choke back another sob, shaking my head. “Then we’ll take centuries,” I beg. “Please, Jun Bei, I know you don’t want to do this. You heard Lachlan—you’re the one who’s supposed to save us, not control us like him and Brink.”
For a heartbeat her gaze flickers to mine, her mind brushing closer. I know she can feel what I do, because I can feel her emotions in the same way, stretching through the wall between us. She is desperate and wounded, lost and betrayed, but she is not a monster, and she knows that this is wrong. She can see the horror, just like I do. I let the feeling rise through me, swallowing me, taking me down into the abyss.
Horror at what has been done to her. At the people who mistook her strength for darkness, who didn’t see the gifts she brought, and tried to control her instead. Horror at the man who tortured her for years and somehow made her love him.
Her grip on me falters, and I fall to my hands and knees, gasping on the floor, dragging in a choking breath as my control surges back to me. Cole steps closer, and I feel Jun Bei tighten. She’s not going to stop. She’s too angry. And maybe she’s right. Maybe humanity is too broken to survive, too monstrous to live forever. Maybe we need to change our minds, to cut away our pasts, to wipe the legacy of our brutal history from our very DNA.
But I’m not going to be the one to do it.
I won’t become a weapon turned against billions of people. I grab at one of the cables coiling out from the wall and yank it from the terminal. It sparks, popping with electricity, and I pull it closer before Jun Bei understands. She screams, wrestling for control.
But it’s too late.
“I’m sorry,” I say to them both, then press the sparking cable to the socket in the back of my skull.
CHAPTER 43
THE DARKNESS FADES SLOWLY. A single spark of light growing into an ember, blossoming and multiplying across the dark city of my mind. My senses crawl back to me—whispers of sound, air on my skin, and the steady thump of my own heartbeat deep inside my chest.
I’m awake. I’m alive. The thought rises like a flock of birds. My breathing is rough and foreign, but it’s mine, sending a lurch of pain through my ribs with every inhalation. Dark fabric blinks into view above me, hot desert air drying my lips. I’m lying on a cot somewhere. I try to sit up, but the world sparkles into silver diamonds.
“Easy, now.”
A girl’s face ripples into view. Smooth brown skin with segmented joints at her neck like a porcelain doll. The hacker from the market. Rhine.
I lift my head, looking around. I’m on a cot in a canvas medical tent, lying between rows of wounded, bandaged genehackers and soldiers. The tent’s doors are open, letting in the distant cries of pigeons and the hot, dry air of the desert. There’s something taped around my head. A plastic bandage, plastered over most of my face. I lift my hands to touch it, but Rhine grabs my arm, her fingers sliding over my cuff.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she says. “Your face has been all over those screens.”
I try to sit up, but my vision spins, nausea rolling through me. After a moment I manage to straighten, swinging my legs off the side of the cot. A screen is set up in the corner of the tent, Novak’s face splashed across it. Video feeds are playing beside her—cobalt triphase clouds, drones swooping over cities around the world. One of the feeds is showing footage of Brink, another showing Lachlan being marched through Entropia’s tunnels, an unconscious girl held in his arms. Her face looks just like mine.
“You’ve been out for a while,” Rhine says. “Two days, by my count. I’ve been checking in on you.”
“What happened?” My thoughts are scattered and wild. I remember the hack, the electric cable, the blackness that followed the shock. I lift my hand to the back of my head to check for a wound, but there’s a pad of gauze taped over the socket.
“You were hurt pretty good,” Rhine says. “Took a few of us to stabilize you. We figured it was best to keep you hidden. Things are dangerous right now.”
“What’s happening?”
“Well, we have a vaccine,” she says. “Who knows how long it’ll last—the plague is in the birds now—but the code’s working on people as far as we can tell. That isn’t stopping the bunkers from revolting, though. There have been attacks on both sides. They’re calling it a war. Some people think this is all the genehackers’ fault, and some think it was Cartaxus. Nobody trusts anyone anymore, not after the wipe.”
“The w-wipe?” I ask, coughing. My throat is dry from the desert air, my voice shaking with the effort it takes to speak.
Rhine reaches for a canteen beside my cot, unscrewing it for me. I take it in one trembling hand and lift it carefully to my lips.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned if you can’t remember much from the last few months,” Rhine says. “None of us can. I don’t know who did it, but everyone with a panel in their arm just found out that they weren’t as in control of their tech as they thought.”
I let out a slow breath, my focus still scattered and foggy. My memory is intact, but it seems like a bad idea to tell Rhine that.
“Where are we?” I ask instead.
“Amnesty zone,” Rhine says. “An hour from Entropia.” She presses a black memory chip into my hands. “This’ll unlock the controls of a Comox waiting for you on the edge of this camp. I’d get into hiding quickly if I were you. You won’t be able to wear that bandage forever.”
“Thank you,” I say, locking my fingers around the chip, trying to clear my thoughts. “Why are you helping me?”
Rhine smiles sadly. “I owed your mother a favor that I never had a chance to repay before she died.”
The words fall heavily inside me. I clutch my hands into fists, trying to quiet the ache that rises through me at the memory of Regina’s death. I barely had time to get to know her. There was so much I could have learned from her, but I wasn’t strong or fast enough to save her.
I won’t let it happen again.
I look back at the screen. It’s showing footage of a flock of pigeons soaring over the desert, leaving a trail of feathers below it. The virus is still wild, and there are billions of hosts for it now. I don’t know how long we’ll have before it mutates through the birds and finds its way back to us.
“Rhine,” I say, “who made this strain of the birds?”
She looks at the screen. “They evolved all on their own from another strain. That’s what people are saying, at least. I worked on a few of the early flocks myself. Nothing this good, though.”
“Do all the strains have panels?”
She gives me a quizzical look. “None of them have panels. They’re birds, not people.”
“Of course,” I say, clutching the memory chip in my hand. I force myself to my feet, fighting a wave of dizziness. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Thank you again for your help.”
She stands with me and gives me a tight smile. “Good luck.”
My footsteps are clumsy and slow as I weave between the cots in the tent, ducking through the flaps to step outside. The sunlight is blinding, and it takes my ocular tech a full second to respond, drawing the lines of the camp into focus.
A dozen more medical te
nts are spread out across a grassy plain, surrounded by a rough circle of vehicles and smaller camping tents set up on the ground. People are milling through the grass, walking in groups of two or three. There’s a mix of genehackers and what looks like Cartaxus soldiers, but they’re not wearing their visors or armor. They’re dressed in black tank tops and pants, bandaged and dazed. There are no weapons in sight, no drones hovering above us. A flock of pigeons circles in the distance, a shifting mass of cobalt and black.
I let a pulse slip from my cuff, sweeping across the camp. It traces light around the arms of the hundreds of people around me, around the vehicles and humming genkits in the medical tents. Every wireless connection within a mile is lit up in my vision, open and waiting for me to hack in and control it.
Including the pigeons soaring through the sky.
Someone gave them panels. Someone created them. They let them loose on the world, and now the birds are covering it, swarming over every continent. The most successful iteration so far.
And the pigeons happen to be carrying a mutated strain of the virus that’s resisting the vaccine.
I draw my focus out of my cuff, forcing myself to turn away from the flock, scanning the edges of the camp for the Comox. My eyes slide across the battered trucks and cars, landing on a dusty black vehicle with badly fitted solar panels on its roof.
Cole is sitting on the hood of his jeep, a bandage on his shoulder. He’s scanning the camp, his brow creased. A girl in a baseball cap is walking through the crowd toward him, carrying two plates heaped with rice. Anna. She says something to him, setting the plates on the hood of the jeep, and slides up beside him.
My hand rises to the bandage that’s taped across my face. It covers my cheek, my forehead, and most of my nose, but both my eyes are clear. Cole picks up one of the plates, and Anna’s gaze drifts across the tents, landing on me, but she barely pauses before looking away. No flash of recognition flickers in her eyes. I’m bruised and bandaged, but there’s a yellow squid printed on the front of my T-shirt.
