This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  The bastard knocked me out, then cut open my arm.

  The thought makes me want to be sick. I press my fingers around the stitches, searching desperately, making out the soft edges of the silicone beneath my skin. I let out a sigh of relief. I don’t know what Marcus did to me, but at least my panel is still there.

  I stand up shakily, but my arm snags and I fall back to the couch, finding a cannula in my wrist with an IV curling out of it.

  “Marcus!” I yell, yanking at the IV, hissing as it slides from my vein. “Marcus, what the hell have you done?”

  “Shh,” he whispers, running in from the hallway. He makes a gesture with his hands, but the movement just makes my head spin.

  My brain isn’t used to following moving objects without my panel. My ocular tech is primitive compared to most people’s, but I never realized how much it streamlined my sense of reality. With my implants running, everything in my peripheral vision was sharpened. Now I feel like I’m looking through a narrow, blurry tunnel.

  “You’re fine,” Marcus says, dropping down beside me. “You’re more than fine, my dear. You’ve saved our family is what you’ve done. I’m sorry about the incision, but I had to take it. The firewalls wouldn’t let me transfer the code.”

  “What do you mean, take it?”

  It suddenly hits me, and my blood runs cold. My fingers slide to my wrist, to a divot in the silicone of my panel, right where one of my function cores is supposed to be.

  My healing tech. He took it. I stare at my arm, my stomach heaving. He cut out my healing tech’s function core to steal the code. There is no method of transferring gentech that’s more brutal than that.

  The grid of silicone that forms a panel’s body has spaces for thousands of apps, each kept separately in its own function core. The cores are designed to be removable, like cards in an old-school computer, but you can’t just cut them out like this. You’re supposed to eject them slowly, retracting the interconnecting wires, balancing the panel’s delicate operating system. Cutting one out like this could damage my tech permanently. My panel might never turn on again.

  I grab Marcus’s collar, yanking him closer. “What the hell have you done?”

  “Easy, easy,” he says, backing away. “I needed the neural code your father left you. I knew if there was anything that could help us, he would have been the one to write it, and might have left it with you. Turns out he did. It was just what we needed for Amy.”

  I drop my hands from his collar, speechless. This can’t be happening. There’s no such thing as neural code—apps that can change the brain—it’s just a myth. Gentech can’t do that, and it can’t turn Lurkers who’ve lost their minds, like Marcus’s wife, back into the people they were before.

  “I didn’t have any goddamn neural code,” I say. “You cut out my healing tech, Marcus. I only had six apps, and now none of them are working.”

  “They’ll be fine. Your panel will regenerate the core in no time.”

  “No it won’t,” I spit. “I don’t even have a backup node.” I press my hands to my face. A backup node is a compressed version of your panel’s code, backed up every day so you can regrow it if it’s damaged. Most people have one or two lodged somewhere in their bodies, but my father never designed one to work with my hypergenesis-friendly tech.

  That means my healing code is gone, forever. Maybe the rest of my apps will recover, but there’s a chance Marcus has damaged them beyond repair. He’s lost his mind. He drugged me, sliced me open . . .

  I look up suddenly. “Where’s Cole?”

  “He’s fine. He’s waking up now.”

  “Then we don’t have much time.” I look down at my arm, the fire of my anger quelled with a rush of fear. I don’t know how Cole’s black-out tech will respond when he finds out that Marcus did this, but I know it won’t be good.

  “Look, Catarina, I know you’re angry—”

  “You’re damn right I’m angry, but I happen to care about your daughters, and I don’t want them to get hurt. We need to cover these stitches.”

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  I grope around the couch for my jacket. “Didn’t you see Cole’s implants, Marcus? Did you see his leylines? He’s a Cartaxus black-out agent, and he’s been tasked with protecting me. You need to bandage my arm, and I’ll get him out of here before he realizes what you’ve done.”

  The color drains from Marcus’s face. He turns and hurries into the kitchen, leaving the door swinging behind him. I catch a glimpse of Cole—bandaged and bleary, rubbing his eyes, sitting up on the kitchen table.

  “Catarina,” he calls, his voice slurred. “Where are you?”

  Marcus darts back through the door, unrolling a bundle of gauze with fumbling hands. I snatch it from him and wind it around my forearm.

  “I’m okay!” I shout. “Marcus is bandaging my wrist.”

  “What’s wrong with your wrist?” Cole’s voice is suddenly sharp.

  “Nothing, just a scratch. I got hit by a chip of rock in the mines. Marcus cleaned it for me.”

  Marcus takes the end of the gauze to wrap it around my wrist, sweat beading on his forehead.

  “You were hurt?” Cole’s voice is softer now. He shuffles across the room and pulls the door open, leaning his shoulder against the frame. His torso is smeared with yellow antiseptic, and there’s a patch of gauze taped to his stomach. He looks thinner, somehow, as though his body has chewed itself up to heal his wound.

  “I’m fine,” I say, my teeth gritted. “It’s just a scratch.”

  Marcus ties off the gauze and steps back, his hands trembling. “Looks like you’re all set. Let me help you to your vehicle.”

  “Could we stay for a while?” Cole asks, rubbing his eyes. “I’m not sure I’m ready to get back on the road.”

  “No, let’s go,” I say, stepping to Cole, taking his arm. “I can drive. Don’t worry, I’ll get us to the lab. I feel fine.”

  It’s the truth. Despite the anger boiling inside me, I do feel fine. Whatever Marcus knocked me out with, it’s wiped away every last trace of my migraine. My head is clear, despite the fact that my eyes seem unable to stay focused without my tech.

  “What lab?” Amy emerges from the hallway, with Chelsea and Eloise on either side of her.

  My jaw drops. She looks lucid.

  Her scabbed, horned skull is wrapped in a towel, and a pink bathrobe hangs from her shoulders, covering the worst of her mutations. Her face is still strained and lined, her eyes horribly sunken, but there’s no trace of the Wrath I saw before. She walks up to Cole. “You’re Cartaxus, aren’t you? Are your people getting close to a vaccine?”

  “We’re very close, ma’am,” Cole says. “Catarina is helping us.”

  Amy nods, twitching. Her left arm hangs limp and bandaged by her side, which means Marcus cut my healing tech core out of me and sewed it straight into her. It’s a reckless, dangerous move, but as I watch Amy hobble into the living room, it actually looks like it worked.

  But that’s not possible. My healing tech core was barely strong enough to repair skin-deep scratches. Amy seems rational now, but it must be the placebo effect. She’ll turn back into a snarling monster soon, and Marcus will regret letting her out of those restraints.

  “We should go,” I say, nudging Cole. “Come on, we need to hurry. We need to get to the lab.”

  “The lab?” Amy asks again. Her eyes narrow. I can see her fighting back the Wrath, her teeth grinding with the effort to keep it under control.

  She steps closer. I stiffen, waiting for her to lunge, and for Cole to respond and unleash the carnage I’ve been trying to avoid.

  Instead, she just stares at me. “Please take the girls,” she whispers.

  “No,” Marcus gasps. “You’re not thinking straight, you’re—”

  “This is the sanest I’ve been in months,” she snaps. “They’re not safe here, not for long. You think you can protect them when a pack of Lurkers finds this place?”


  “Ma’am, I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Cole says.

  “Chelsea can shoot,” Amy says quickly, “and Eloise is helpful. They’ll do anything you tell them. Please, they’ll be safe with Lachlan.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Lachlan is dead.”

  Amy sucks in a breath, and Marcus’s face blanches. “If he’s dead, then God help us,” he whispers.

  Eloise starts crying. I grab Cole’s hand. “Let’s just go,” I say. “Come on, we need to keep moving.”

  “Okay,” Cole murmurs, eyeing Amy, as though he’s finally sensing the danger that lurks beneath her shaking facade.

  We head through the kitchen. Cole’s footsteps are slow and labored. Marcus follows close behind, offering suggestions. “Make sure he rests for the next few hours, and keep him warm,” he says.

  “I will,” I mutter, fighting the urge to yell at him.

  I climb into the jeep, and Cole settles in beside me. My eyes cut to Marcus’s as I swing us around, sending out a spray of gravel. He looks guilty, as he should. He clearly thinks the function core he took from my arm will help Amy, but he doesn’t understand—my father wrote all my apps himself. Every app was as bland and generic as it could be to stop it triggering my hypergenesis. There was nothing in there that could help her. If Marcus had just asked me, I would have showed him that myself.

  The jeep speeds us back down the driveway. I keep my eyes on the rearview, where Marcus is watching us leave, with his broken, mutated wife at his side. Chelsea has her arms around Eloise, who’s crying into her hands. Marcus is a butcher, and his wife is a monster.

  Maybe we should have taken the girls.

  • • •

  Two hours later, a light starts blinking in the corner of the jeep’s dashboard. We’re in Wyoming, after taking a detour to avoid Homestake and its soldiers. Now we’re deep in overgrown farmland, surrounded by sprawling fields and the occasional herd of buffalo. Houses are few and far between, most of them boarded up or burned to the ground. It’s only been two years since the outbreak, but everything looks like it’s been abandoned for decades thanks to the acidic nature of Hydra’s corrosive clouds. Every building has paint hanging in strips from the walls or blistering off the concrete, and fingers of rust creep around the edges of the road signs. Even the highways are cracked. It used to make riding my bike difficult, but the jeep flies over the potholes as though there’s nothing there.

  Cole is asleep, his seat reclined as far as the boxes in the back will allow, and his eyelashes flutter every so often when a tremor shakes his body. He’s still recovering. The color is back in his face and his breathing is steady, but his body will take time to repair itself. Judging by the flashing lights on his panel, some of his tech needs repairing too.

  Those aren’t the flashing lights I’m worried about, though. The glowing symbol on the dashboard has blinked to red, showing me a picture of a lightning bolt. I scan the empty fields around us and pull the jeep to the side of the road, chewing my lip nervously.

  “What’s wrong?” Cole asks, waking as we crunch across the gravel. “Why are we stopping? Are you okay?”

  I kill the engine. The dashboard goes blank, but the blinking light remains. “I think we’re low on fuel. The jeep has a warning light.”

  “What?” Cole straightens, rubbing his eyes. “We should be on batteries, not fuel. We had a full cell this morning.”

  I flick the display, but the light keeps glowing. A cold feeling settles in my stomach.

  “We should have plenty of fuel, too,” Cole says. “Are you sure you’re reading this right?”

  “Wait here,” I say, swinging my door open. I grab the edge of the roof and haul myself up, but before I even see it, I know they’re gone. The roof feels too low, too flat.

  Marcus stole the solars while I was unconscious.

  “Dammit!” I throw myself back into the seat, punching the steering wheel. The jeep’s horn blares down the empty road.

  “They took them,” Cole says.

  I nod, my eyes scrunched shut, my hands pressed to my face.

  “But there’s more,” he says slowly. “Catarina, what did they do?”

  I let out a sigh, peering out through my fingers. “Marcus cut out one of my function cores. My panel isn’t working anymore, and I don’t know if it’s going to repair itself.”

  For a moment Cole is deathly silent, and then he swings his door open and jumps to the ground. “Out!” he shouts, striding around the jeep. “Out, Catarina, now!”

  “No!” I grip the wheel. “We can’t go back!”

  He yanks my door open, grabbing me around the waist, and hauls me out onto the road.

  “They stole our solars,” he shouts, “they cut you open, and you’re protecting these people? Get in the passenger seat. We’re going back there.”

  “No!” I yell. “We don’t have time. We need to keep moving.”

  “How?” he shouts, whirling around. “How do you propose we get to the lab? We’re out of gas and we have no solars. We can’t even make it there on what we have left, and we still need to find a clonebox.”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  His eyes blaze. “I’ve already figured something out. We go back there and we take our goddamn solars back.”

  I run my hands through my hair. He’s literally shaking with anger, his hands in fists as he stares back down the road. My eyes drop to his bandage, where a spot of blood has seeped through the gauze.

  Oh shit. He’s not shaking with anger. He’s torn his stitches, and now he’s going into shock.

  “Cole,” I say, reaching for his arm. “You’re—”

  He yanks his arm away. “We need the solars. We have to go back.”

  “Cole, listen to me. You’re bleeding.”

  Scarlet spots seep through the cotton. A sheen of cold sweat glimmers on his chest.

  “I’ll be fine,” he says.

  “No you won’t. You’re not invincible.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says again, then blinks, another tremor racing through his body. His face pales and he stumbles back, falling against the jeep.

  “Oh, no, no,” I breathe, lunging for him, slipping beneath his arm. His skin is cold and clammy, covered in sweat. “You’re freezing, Cole. You shouldn’t be moving.”

  “But we need to—”

  “Get in the damn jeep,” I say, grabbing his face. “You need to rest. I need you. I won’t make it there alone.”

  He glares at me a moment longer, and then the anger fades from his face. “Okay,” he whispers finally.

  We shuffle to the back with the bulk of his weight on my shoulder, and I somehow manage to pull open the rear doors. He climbs in, swaying, and I shove the boxes aside so there’s enough space for him to lie down. He collapses on his side, letting out a grunt of pain. The spots of scarlet on his bandage have spread into a terrifying wash of blood.

  “I-I need to get warm,” he stutters. “My tech is heat boosted. I need to keep my temperature up for it to heal me.”

  “Okay.” I grab one of the Cartaxus sleeping bags and yank it out of its sack, then climb in behind him, crushing the boxes against the side.

  “Just hold still.” I throw the sleeping bag over him. “You’re going to be fine.”

  But the calmness in my voice is a lie. Cole’s hands are freezing, and his face is white, his pupils narrowed down to specks. I need to warm him up and get his tech running again. Judging by the way he’s shaking, I need to do it fast.

  “Okay, close your eyes.” I yank my jacket and tank top off.

  “W-what are you d-doing?” His teeth are chattering so badly he can barely form the words, but he still turns his head to look at me.

  “I told you to close your eyes.” I lie down on the floor beside him, slipping underneath the sleeping bag in my bra, pressing my chest to his back.

  “Y-you have to buy me a drink before you g-get me into bed.”

  “Shut up,” I whisper, wrapping my arm a
round his chest.

  “A-after this is over, I’m telling C-Crick you came on to me.”

  I snort, pressing my cheek to the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, just don’t tell your girlfriend. It sounds like she’d kick my ass.”

  He pauses for a moment, still shivering. “I-I don’t know, it’s been years. She never sent a message, she—”

  “Shh,” I say, tightening my grip on him. “Don’t think about that, okay? Just try to relax.”

  He nods, sliding his hand up, lacing his fingers through mine. I feel his pulse in his hands and in his neck, where our skin is pressed together. We lie in silence until his tremors slow. His body heat rises, his breathing settling into a slow, steady rhythm that tells me he’s asleep.

  I keep my cheek pressed to his neck, a hum of pressure rising in my ears. Sparks of electricity seem to dance through me in the places our skin touches. There’s nothing romantic about us lying like this, it’s simply life and death, but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about the way he’s holding my hand.

  I know it doesn’t mean anything. We both have other people, and he’s so drunk on anesthetic he probably doesn’t know what he’s doing. I tell myself this, but all I can smell is his aftershave and the raw, musky fragrance of his skin.

  It tugs at something inside me, building like a fire.

  Deep breaths, Catarina.

  This is going to be a problem.

  CHAPTER 16

  I FELL ASLEEP BEHIND COLE, but we must have moved in the night, because I wake up pressed against his chest, entangled in his arms. His breath is soft on my hair, one hand brushing the back of my neck, and the bare skin of his chest is warm against my cheek.

  It’s absurdly intimate, but waking like this shouldn’t mean anything. It’s cold and cramped in the back of the jeep, and it’s normal for people to huddle for warmth in the night.

  At least, it would be normal if I hadn’t woken with a sense that some deep, lost part of myself had finally found its way home. It would be normal if I didn’t wake up wrapped in Cole’s scent, pulling him closer, breathing his name.

  His name.