This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “I glitched out.”

  “Yeah? That’s one hell of a glitch.”

  “How much time do I have?” He unfurls an IV from the medkit, holding the saline bag in his teeth. He slides the cannula into his arm. His panel is still flashing, resetting itself as the jump’s nanites race through his cells. He stares at his forearm, blinking repeatedly as though trying to turn it back on.

  “A few minutes,” I say. “You’re running on some seriously unholy tech. We’re almost at the doc’s. You just need to hang on a little longer.”

  “Who is this doctor?”

  “A friend.” I grab the steering wheel, trying to dodge the worst of the potholes.

  “Do you trust him?”

  I glance over at Cole. Marcus, the doctor, is a member of the Skies, and he hates Cartaxus even more than I do. Cole is clearly one of their soldiers, and we’re arriving in one of their jeeps, but I have to believe that Marcus will help us.

  “Yes,” I say, flooring the accelerator. “I trust this man completely.”

  The driveway rises, disappearing into a grove of towering cedars whose shadows race across the hood as Marcus’s house inches out of the trees. It’s a two-story log cabin, its windows boarded over. The yard is overgrown, littered with trash. Marcus’s car is gone.

  “Come on . . . ,” I breathe, scanning the house. We skid to a stop.

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. It looks . . .” I can’t bring myself to say it. It looks abandoned. Hopeless.

  “They’re gone,” Cole says. He closes his eyes. The color is already draining from his face. “It’s okay, Cat.”

  The calmness in his voice stuns me. Something inside me tightens. “No,” I say, swinging the door open. “I’m going to find them.”

  He grabs my wrist before I can get out. “They’re gone. This isn’t your fault, but you need to work fast. Go into the back and get some paper to mark down the route to the lab. You’ll need to cut my panel out and freeze it, or you’ll lose the vaccine. Then you just have to make it to the lab. You can do this.”

  “Cole, please,” I whisper. “Maybe I can stop the bleeding. Let’s go inside.”

  “There’s not enough time.” His eyes soften. “It’s important you keep going. Now get some paper, hurry.”

  I back out of the jeep, my eyes swimming with tears, stumbling blindly to the back. When I swing the rear doors open, something whistles past my ear, hitting a tree behind me with a crack.

  Cole swings around, staring at me. I notice with a shock that his eyes are blue. The jump rebooted his panel, which means his implants aren’t working yet. We could be surrounded by Lurkers, and neither of us would know. He’s running blind without his tech. He grabs his gun and lurches from the jeep, letting the blood-soaked bandage fall to the ground.

  “Cole, no!” I shout, but I have no plan, no options, just a dying man and a stranger’s gunfire from the trees. It could be Marcus, or it could be Lurkers. Either way, if I wait much longer, Cole is going to bleed out.

  “Marcus!” I scream, running into the driveway, my hands held high. “Marcus, please! We’re not with Cartaxus. Please, we need your help!”

  A moment of silence stretches out. Cole’s eyes are wide and frantic. He grits his teeth, scanning the trees.

  A figure steps into the driveway, staring down the barrel of a rifle. “Catarina? Is that really you?”

  “Yes!” I shout, laughing with relief. “I’m so glad you’re here, Marcus. I thought you were gone.”

  Marcus lowers the rifle, looking warily at Cole. His two daughters emerge from the trees behind him. The younger, Eloise, has pink ribbons in her hair, and her face lights up as soon as she sees me. Her older sister, Chelsea, watches Cole suspiciously. Deep shadows hang beneath her darting, cautious eyes.

  “I know how this looks, Marcus,” I call out. “The jeep, the gear, I know. But I need you to trust me. This man is a friend of my father.”

  Marcus looks down at Cole’s wound and gives me a tight smile. “Then he’s a friend of mine, whoever he works for. Let’s get him inside.”

  Marcus sends his daughters in to get his surgical bag, and he slips under one of Cole’s arms to help him into the house. Cole’s face goes ghostly white, his feet dragging as we haul him into Marcus’s kitchen. The wooden table is crosshatched with scratches, the windows splattered with blood that Marcus and his wife, Amy, must have given up cleaning long ago.

  “The bullet was nanite rigged,” I say, helping Cole up to the table. “It’s interfering with his healing tech. I jumped his panel a few minutes ago. I was losing him on the way here. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Marcus rips Cole’s shirt open to pull the fabric from the wound. “That’s probably the only thing keeping him alive, but you’ve taken a hell of a risk. His healing tech has completely stalled. We’re going to have to fight to keep him stable until we can get the bullet out and get his tech running again.” He turns from the table and pours a bottle of disinfectant into the sink, then scrubs his hands up to his elbows.

  Chelsea runs into the kitchen with Marcus’s briefcase, a battered portmanteau filled with scalpels and a gleaming saw. She swaps out Cole’s IV, hooking a bag of anesthetic into his arm. “I’ll scrub up, Daddy,” she says, rolling up her sleeves.

  I raise my eyebrows. Chelsea’s just a kid. “Doesn’t your mom normally help with surgeries?”

  “She’s not feeling well,” Chelsea says, dunking her hands in the sink. She lifts them out slowly, scrubbing with the careful motions of a professional. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Yeah, I guess you do.”

  “I think we might get lucky.” Marcus pulls out a scalpel. “His tech is coming back online, and he looks like a strong lad.”

  “Good,” I say, swallowing. This kind of scene doesn’t usually bother me, but for some reason the sight of Cole on Marcus’s table is hitting me hard. His skin is pale, dotted with sweat, his blood trickling to the floor. He looks so weak, and so vulnerable. I can’t stop staring at his chest, watching it rise and fall, my stomach tightening every time there’s a pause in his breathing. Chelsea drives a long, gleaming syringe into his stomach, and the sight makes me sway, grabbing the wall for support.

  I dig my fingernails into my palm, trying to tell myself that my response is rational, that I’m just worried about Cole because I need him to unlock the vaccine. But I know it’s more than that. I’ve known him less than two days, but there’s already a bond between us, forged in blood and urgency. Part of me feels like we know each other now on some fundamental level.

  I guess seeing someone take a bullet to save your life will do that.

  Chelsea looks up at me, her hands still gripped on the syringe. “You don’t look so good, Cattie. You want to wait in the living room?”

  I pause. My instinct is to stay, but my stomach is turning over, and I don’t know if I can stand here and watch much longer. “I . . . ,” I start, but Marcus slides a pair of tweezers into Cole’s wound, and that’s it. That’s all I can take.

  “I’ll wait out there,” I murmur, backing into the living room. Cole is in Marcus’s hands now. There’s nothing I can do for him.

  • • •

  Two hours later, I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch with Eloise asleep with her head in my lap. A headache is pounding at the base of my skull. It’s the migraine that I’ve known was coming ever since I woke up in the cabin yesterday. They always build up slowly and then bring days of pain that I have no escape from, not since I ran out of painkillers. I sit as still as is humanly possible to minimize the spikes of pain that flood my senses with every beat of Cole’s heart.

  It’s all I can hear. My audio implants are maxed out, tracking every clink of steel in the kitchen, every word, every breath. Cole is still alive, and the bleeding has stopped. It sounds like he’s stabilizing. Marcus thinks his tech is taking over the healing process.

  It’s hard for me to admit to mysel
f just how relieved that makes me.

  Eloise murmurs in her sleep. I run one hand absently through her hair, watching her eyelashes flutter on her cheeks. She gets the occasional tremor, but they’re not nearly as bad as they used to be when I first met her, years ago. She’s the reason Marcus’s family joined the Skies, and she’s why they’re still out here, instead of in a bunker. She was born with nucleatoxis disease, a genetic disorder that has no cure, no treatment, and is essentially a death sentence. It’s so rare that Cartaxus and the other pharmacoders never bothered to develop a cure, even though the disease is easy to treat with gentech. Faced with no other option, desperate families like Marcus’s started writing cures of their own, pooling their knowledge. They built a database of open-source gentech code for thousands of rare diseases that eventually grew into the Skies.

  Novak was their leader, even before the plague. She had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and hacked a Cartaxus concussion app into a cure to save her own life. It was a brilliant piece of code, but Cartaxus sued her for copyright infringement. She fought them for the right to keep using it, and the community rallied around her. A group of ordinary people who refused to watch helplessly as their loved ones died. Self-taught, self-tested, self-financed. Some of them started writing impressive code and giving it away for free.

  They scared the hell out of Cartaxus.

  That was before Hydra. In the pre-outbreak days it seemed like almost everyone had at least one amateur app on their panel. An aesthetic tweak, a stimulant. But Cartaxus wiped that code from the panels of everyone who entered their bunkers, so if Marcus and his family showed up at Homestake, they’d have to delete the hacked code keeping Eloise alive. It’s a ridiculous requirement. What use are airlocks and protection from the virus when your ten-year-old daughter is dead?

  I look up as my audio tech picks up Amy stirring in her bedroom down the hall. Footsteps pad across her room, and something heavy scrapes the floor. Her door creaks open, and her figure appears in the hallway, hunched and trembling.

  “Hello?” she calls out, her voice low and rasping.

  “Amy?” I ask. “It’s Catarina Agatta. Chelsea said you weren’t feeling well.”

  She shuffles closer, her face hidden in shadow. A thick gray blanket is slung over her shoulders. She’s shivering, her breath coming in painful gasps.

  “Amy?” I shift Eloise off my lap. “Amy, are you okay?”

  “Voices,” she says. “I heard voices.”

  “That’s Marcus and Chelsea. They’re doing a surgery. . . .” I trail off, stunned into silence as she steps into the light.

  Her eyes are sunken, her mouth twisted down horribly on one side, her skin dotted with open, weeping sores. Her scalp is almost bare, a few stringy white strands falling from a scabbed, bleeding skull that sports rudimentary horns.

  She looks like a monster.

  “Amy?” I choke out. The mutated wraith in the hallway is nothing like the laughing, pretty woman I remember. Her spine is twisted, her hands stretched and curved horribly by some butchered chimpanzee gene shoved in the wrong place. My eyes race across her body, spotting the signs of at least a dozen rogue genes. Python, rat, bovine—all hacked and shoved together without any understanding of what they’d do to her.

  In all my life, all my time with the Skies, I’ve never seen anyone so mutated.

  Eloise scrambles up. “Mommy, you’re not supposed to be up. You’re sick.”

  “I heard voices,” she says. She steps forward, and the blanket slips from her shoulders. Iron manacles gleam around her wrists, chained to a ring around her waist.

  “Amy,” I whisper. “What happened to you?”

  Her eyes snap to mine, and I step back instinctively. She looks wild suddenly. She stalks closer, her mouth curling up in a sneer.

  “Amy?”

  She lunges for me, snarling, revealing a mouth of yellowed fangs.

  I skitter back into the couch, scrambling over it to the wall. The chain around her waist snags tight, jerking her body back. She growls, twisting in the restraints like an animal caught in a trap. Her eyes are flat and inhuman, locked on my neck.

  “Stop it, Mommy!” Eloise shouts.

  “She’s a Lurker,” I gasp, grabbing Eloise’s shoulders. “You can’t keep her here. It’s not safe, sweetheart. This is the Wrath.”

  “No, Mommy’s just sick,” Eloise says. “She’s getting better, but she needs to rest.”

  “Stay away from her, Eloise.” My eyes dart to the heavy chain slung between Amy’s hands. “Who did this to her?”

  Marcus swings open the kitchen door. His face gleams with sweat, his plastic apron splattered with blood. “Your friend has stabilized,” he says, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist. “I removed the bullet and cauterized the wound.” His eyes cut to his snarling wife. He stiffens. “Chelsea, Eloise,” he barks. “Get your mother back into her room and lock the door.”

  The girls guide their mother back down the hallway. Somehow Amy doesn’t seem to want to attack her daughters like she did me. She’s still talking, so she hasn’t lost herself completely to the madness yet, but the slide is inevitable. It won’t be safe to keep her here for long, even chained up and locked away.

  Marcus wipes his bloodied hands on his apron. I just stare at him, my heart pounding. “Did you do that to her, Marcus? Mutate her like that?”

  “No,” he says, his face falling. “No, child, I didn’t do that. She downloaded the code herself when she realized she was slipping. It worked, but the cost to her body was too high, and the Wrath started coming through anyway, so I turned the damned cure off and chained her up to keep us safe. Now I’m just trying to heal her, waiting for safer code.”

  My head spins. “What code? There’s no cure for the Wrath.”

  “There are several,” Marcus says, “but none are guaranteed, and as you can see, they have their side effects. People are working on this all over the world, Catarina. We’re not the only family that’s seen a loved one slip.”

  “But that’s crazy.” I rub my forehead, wincing through the migraine. “The Wrath is a neurological condition—you can’t cure it with code. Gentech doesn’t change people’s brains.”

  “Not yet,” Marcus says, “but it will one day. You of all people should know that. People said it was impossible to code robust antivirals until your father did it. It just takes time and research. We’re getting closer every day. The code Amy downloaded was written by thousands of families, all trying to save their loved ones from the Wrath.”

  I slump back down on the couch, letting my head drop into my hands. This kind of coding is the essence of the Skies—no rules, no trials, no safeguards—but I haven’t seen it mutate anyone as badly as this before. Science has a long history of self-experimentation, and I’m sure Amy knew the risks she was taking, but the sight of her scabbed horns sets my teeth on edge.

  It’s butchery. It’s inhumane. But Cartaxus is no better. The photograph of a five-year-old Cole with scars on his chest is proof of that. Did my father really do that to him? My skull pounds with pain. I just want to wake up and start this day over again.

  “You have a migraine, don’t you? Are you still getting them?”

  “Yeah,” I say, rubbing the back of my head. I visited Marcus a while back when I ran out of painkillers. He didn’t have any pills, only gentech code I couldn’t use. “It’s probably just stress, but it’s the worst I’ve had in ages.”

  “Seeing someone get shot tends to be stressful, yes,” Marcus says, swinging open a cupboard beside the couch. “Chelsea and I did a supply run recently, and . . . Ah, here we go.” He pulls out a tray of syringes, lifting one up triumphantly. “Analgesic, basic dose. I only have the injectable kind, because it’s formulated for arthritis, but it should take the edge off your migraine.”

  I eye the syringes warily, but pull my sleeve up over my shoulder. With painkillers, I’ll be able to drive. The jeep can do most of the work, and Cole can sleep in the back. We mi
ght not make it far, but we can get on the road tonight.

  “Thank you, Marcus. You don’t know how much this is going to help.”

  He slides the needle into my shoulder. It kicks in instantly—a bucket of water tossed over a fire, extinguishing the blaze in my skull. I close my eyes, tilting my head back, lost in the sudden joyous weightlessness that comes with the absence of pain.

  “That’s great . . . ,” I murmur, sinking into the couch. All over my body, my nerves are flickering off, falling silent, like a blackout spreading through a city. My lips tingle, my eyelids strangely heavy as I try to open them, to push myself up from the couch . . .

  But I can’t move.

  “Marcus,” I breathe, confused, my vision growing foggy. I see him standing over me, his two daughters appearing at his side.

  “This is what we’ve been praying for, girls,” he murmurs, his voice growing distant.

  “Good work, Daddy,” Chelsea says. “I’ll go and get a scalpel.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I WAKE DRENCHED IN SWEAT, staring wildly around me. My breath, rushing from my lips, sounds rough and unfamiliar. Everything looks blurry and strange. My eyes flit around the room, my heart rate pitching higher as I realize what’s different.

  I’m seeing the world through natural, unfiltered eyes.

  My lungs empty in a gasp. My sensory tech is gone. It’s been years since my implants have been switched off like this. I’ve always had their base levels in the background, fine-tuning my reality.

  Now everything feels wrong.

  My breathing sounds rasping and foreign, and my skin is a vague, blurry tan. I’m used to glancing at my hands and seeing every pore, but now my brain has to scramble to recognize them as hands. It’s like seeing the world upside down, with all the colors switched around.

  What the hell did Marcus do to me?

  My eyes drop to my forearm, my vision spinning. All the glowing dots of my panel are gone, with a row of stitches in their place. A three-inch gash throbs along my arm, swabbed with yellow antiseptic.