This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “I think these might be the notes we need to unlock the vaccine,” I say. “The other boxes were just junk. This is the only one that stood out.”

  Cole nods, staring at the photograph of himself as a boy, then flicks through the other folders, pausing for a long time on Jun Bei’s. “These are my family,” he says finally. “This is . . . this is her.”

  He hands me the file, open to a photograph at the back of a little girl glaring at the camera, her mouth twisted with rage. There are bandages across her chest, and scars creeping up her neck. The name below the picture reads Subject 1, Jun Bei Meng.

  “She was the strongest of us,” Cole says. “She escaped three years ago. I never found out if she made it or not until you showed me those server results. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me, why she didn’t ask me to come. We were together. I thought we were in love, but maybe she thought I’d slow her down.”

  He flips open the other files, arranging the five subjects in order on the table. Subject 2 is a blond-haired girl called Anna, and Subject 3 is Ziana, a bald girl with skin so pale that you can see her veins through it. Subject 4 is Leoben, and Subject 5 is Cole, whose young face has haunted me since I first saw his photograph.

  “Ziana escaped during the outbreak,” Cole says, rubbing his face. “And Anna’s been at another facility for most of the last year, with almost no contact. Leoben and I were the only ones left at the base in the end. We had nowhere to run, or we might have left too.”

  I close my eyes. “My father . . . ,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “What was he doing to you?”

  Cole sighs. “I don’t know if you need to hear this, Cat. There are things that can’t be unheard, and this is getting into dangerous territory.”

  “It’s already dangerous, Cole. My father was experimenting on children. If you’re worried that I’ll hate him for this—”

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

  “Why would that matter to you?”

  He reaches for my hand, taking it between his. “It matters because your father is the reason we’re doing this. We’re following a couple of his notes to do something we don’t understand, and it might put us all in danger. If you don’t have faith in the man he was, there’s no reason we should keep going.”

  “But you do? After all this, you still have faith in him?”

  Cole nods, his face solemn. “More than anyone else on the planet.”

  I pull my hand away and run it through my hair, leaning back against the lower bunk. “Cole, my father had secrets. I’ve always known that, and I guess maybe part of me didn’t want to know what they were. But I need to know now. I think this might be the key to unlocking the vaccine.”

  He holds my gaze for a long time, then lets out a sigh. “Well, the first thing you need to know is that we were all born at Cartaxus. I never met my parents. We were raised in a lab and had nurses when we were young, so that was all we ever knew, and I think that made it easier. We didn’t join the rest of Cartaxus until the outbreak, but we were soldiers from the start. That was the point of the Zarathustra Initiative.”

  The Zarathustra Initiative. The words send a chill down my spine. I glance at the files, but it’s not printed anywhere on them. I almost feel like my father mentioned it once, but I can’t dredge up the memory. Maybe something he was talking about with Dax that I overheard.

  “So were they making you into supersoldiers? Why would they need children for that?”

  Something in Cole’s expression makes me pause, and I remember the irregularities I saw in his DNA when I hacked into his panel. I thought my father had changed his genes somehow, splicing new DNA into his, but I should have known better than that.

  Splicing doesn’t work. Your cells reject the altered DNA, and it kills you. You have to be born with those genes.

  I flick through Jun Bei’s file. Her sequencing report and gene diagrams tell me she’s allergic to dairy and that her eyes are green, but they also tell me that several of her chromosomes differ significantly from the average human’s.

  “What the hell is this?” I flip open the other files. “You can’t change this sort of thing with gentech. You can’t rewrite this much of someone’s DNA without killing them.” I point to a circled area in one report. “This is the anthrozone—we don’t even have that part of the human genome mapped. This isn’t splicing, it wouldn’t be possible, it would . . .”

  I drift off, staring at the files. “They weren’t making soldiers, were they? They were making knockout kids.”

  The thing with genetics is, there’s no map to explain how it all works—you just have to figure it out through trial and error, learning along the way. Back when we first sequenced the genome, it was an unintelligible mass of data that scientists broke into smaller chunks—genes—like the words in a sentence. But nobody knew what the words meant, or what the genes did, so they’d knock out one gene at a time in mouse DNA and grow a mouse without it—a knockout mouse. If the mouse was blind, the gene they knocked out must control vision. Maybe it wouldn’t grow cartilage properly, or its fur would be curly. They made thousands of them, slowly mapping out the mouse genome, and since humans and mice have similar DNA, we learned a lot about ourselves.

  But it got messy, like language—if you move the words around in a sentence, you get a different meaning, and that’s how genes work too. Eventually, we reached a limit of what we could learn from mice, and we were left with parts of the human genome we still didn’t understand. They moved on to rabbits, chimps, bonobos, zeroing in on the anthrozone—a set of gene combinations which are unique to humans. It’s against the law to knock genes out in babies, and for good reason. They might be born with horrific mutations or be unable to survive at all. It’s the worst kind of ethical violation. The anthrozone is off-limits for experimentation, and it holds thousands of combinations of genes that we still don’t understand.

  But someone at Cartaxus must have done it anyway.

  The Zarathustra Initiative is a line of knockout kids.

  “What was my father’s role?” I whisper. But I already know. I can see it in the notes—the passion, the possessiveness about the research.

  “Lachlan was in charge of the project,” Cole says, confirming my fears. “He started it. He was there from before we were born, up until he quit Cartaxus.”

  I stand up and sit down again. I want to respond, but I don’t trust my voice, and I don’t know what to say. I thought I could handle the truth, but I didn’t think it would be anything like this. This isn’t the work of a scientist—this is the work of a monster.

  “You haven’t asked why he did this,” Cole says. “Lachlan always had a good reason for his work.”

  “A good reason to torture children?” I stand and pace to the sink, bracing my hands on the counter. “To experiment on them? To cut them open and see what they looked like inside?”

  “That was part of it,” Cole says, stepping up behind me. “But he was looking for something specific, something he could only figure out by mapping the parts of us that make us human. Think about it, Catarina. What separates humans from animals?”

  I let out a bitter laugh. “We’re the only species who would do this to children, for one thing.”

  “No,” Cole says, his voice gentle. He reaches for my shoulder. “Right now, what’s the biggest difference? You’ve been out in the wild. What have you seen?”

  I close my eyes, thinking of the flocks of passenger pigeons, the way they blacken the skies for days when they fly overhead. I think about deer growing fat on abandoned crops, of the blast craters littering the empty, trash-strewn cities.

  I open my eyes. “The biggest difference is, we’re dying.”

  “That’s right. Hydra only affects humans.” Cole takes my shoulder, turning me to him. “Your father had a reason for his work, Catarina. He was trying to make a vaccine.”

  My heartbeat slows. “No, Hydra wasn’t discovered yet. . . .”

  But
that’s more naivety. More willful ignorance. I’m standing in a bunker that holds eighty thousand people, perfectly designed to keep them safe from an airborne pandemic. It opened just a few weeks after the outbreak.

  “You’re telling me . . . ,” I breathe. “You’re telling me they knew.”

  “For thirty years. Cartaxus has been studying Hydra since before you were born.”

  “Thirty years?” I press one hand to my forehead, my head spinning with the weight of everything I’m hearing.

  “Just come and sit down.” Cole gestures to the bunks.

  “I don’t want to sit down.”

  “Please,” he urges. “I can’t relax with you hurting yourself like that.”

  I drop my eyes. One hand is in a fist, my fingernails digging half-moons into the skin of my palm. I unfurl it slowly, and a thin line of blood runs down my little finger.

  Cole sits down on the lower bunk, and I perch myself on the edge beside him, my head dropped, my elbows on my knees.

  “It started thirty years ago,” he says. “Researchers found a body frozen in the Arctic permafrost. It was prehistoric, and when it thawed, it gave off a cloud of gas. The researchers got sick, the CDC moved in, and then the sick people started blowing. That was the first outbreak. The world’s governments controlled it, but they recognized the threat Hydra posed. A research group was formed to study it, and that was how Cartaxus started. Your father joined when most of the work was genetic research, but Cartaxus eventually split into two groups: those who were trying to make a vaccine, and those who were preparing for the inevitable outbreak. They started building airtight camps and decided that all ethical considerations needed to be put aside.”

  I rub my forearm where the bandage over my panel is starting to itch. “So the Zarathustra Initiative, the knockout kids . . .”

  He nods. “They were an attempt to find a vaccine. It had been ten years, and they still weren’t any closer, so they were ready to try anything.”

  “And it worked?”

  Cole nods. “Leoben’s genome was the basis for the vaccine’s code. If it wasn’t for your father’s research, we’d all be doomed.”

  I let out a slow breath, scratching my arm, dropping back to my knees to pick up Leoben’s file. His young face has dark skin, shaved black hair, and stitches winding up his neck. His genome is like none I’ve seen before.

  My hands are shaking, but somehow my mind is steady. Everything is starting to make a twisted sort of sense.

  My father hated Cartaxus because he hated himself. He knew the work he’d done for them on this project was wrong. Did he tell me to stay away from them for my own good, or was he just afraid of what I’d think of him if I found out the truth?

  “I know this is a lot to accept,” Cole says.

  “I don’t know why he never told me,” I say. My arm is starting to burn, and I rub it against my thigh.

  “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  My vision grows dark for a moment, then blurs before snapping back into focus. “The guard said my panel was regenerating. I didn’t think it could, but I guess it can. I think my ocular tech is restarting.”

  “Let me look at it.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, but he reaches for my arm, his movements unnaturally fast. He rips back my sleeve, revealing the bandage underneath.

  The breath leaves my lungs in a single, terrified gasp.

  “What?” Cole’s hands fly back as though I’ve burned him. “Did I hurt you? What happened?”

  “Oh shit,” I whisper, ripping at the bandage, unwinding the bloodstained gauze. Underneath, my skin is pale around the incision, where ugly black stitches trace a three-inch line along my arm.

  The incision is healing nicely. The wound is neat and clean.

  But there are twenty-four cobalt dots glowing beneath my skin.

  I look up at Cole, my heart racing. “Get the medkit. Hurry, Cole. I need you to cut out my panel.”

  CHAPTER 21

  COLE STANDS UP, HIS EYES wide. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “This isn’t a hypergenesis-friendly installation. This thing is going to kill me.”

  The flashing stripe of cobalt light on my forearm casts an eerie glow over Cole’s face. The way it’s flashing tells me it’s installing, which means the hypergenesis protocols have already been overridden. Marcus must have done something to it while I was unconscious. Corroded it, added new code—I don’t know how he screwed it up this badly. I close my eyes and see a flash of Amy’s twisted mouth and scabbed, disgusting horns.

  Marcus’s code is inside me right now, rampaging through my cells. I clutch one hand over my mouth, fighting the urge to vomit.

  “Can you turn it off?” Cole asks.

  “I don’t think so.” I close my eyes, trying to focus, but none of my mental commands are working. I can’t control my ocular tech or even pull up my comm. It’s a brand-new system—it could take weeks to set up, to monitor my brain patterns until it knows how to respond to my thoughts. Trying to turn it off like this is going to be impossible.

  The only way to stop it is to cut the whole thing out.

  “Shouldn’t it check for hypergenesis?” Cole asks.

  I grab my backpack and pull the medkit from it, flipping it open on the floor. Scalpels, stitches. I’ll need a tourniquet. “It’s supposed to, but this thing is already installing. It’s flashing, can’t you see that?”

  “So stop it.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I told you, it’s installing. It’s not responding to commands. By the time it does, I’ll already be dead.”

  Cole still doesn’t seem to understand. He’s looking at me like I’m a child jumping to an extreme solution without thinking it through. Normally, he’d be right. Panels have dozens of layers of security to stop this kind of thing from happening, but mine must be broken. I can’t explain it. The only thing I can do is pick up a scalpel and start this myself.

  “Whoa,” Cole says, his eyes widening as I slide a gleaming blade from the medkit. “The nanites aren’t deploying yet. We can find a doctor.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” I snap, yanking my navy Homestake shirt off. I hurl it across the room and spin around in my bra to show him the patchwork of crinkled scars along my spine. “The last time I hacked my panel, it took thirty-seven seconds for this to happen. There were holes in my skin, you could see my spine through them, and that was just from a single app. I have twenty-four in my arm now. Even if we cut this out, there’s still a good chance I’m going to die.”

  Cole’s face pales, but he doesn’t respond. I have a sudden urge to punch him. It’s hard enough to keep myself from panicking, I don’t have the energy to argue with him about this. I step to him. “You have to do this. I can’t cut it out of my own arm.”

  “I-I can’t,” he says. “I can’t hurt you, the protective protocol . . .”

  “Your protective protocol is a pain in my ass.” I unfurl a roll of gauze from the medkit and squat down on the floor, holding my arm out. “Okay, we’ll start at the base. Use the incision Marcus left, that’s a start, but it’s still going to hurt like hell when it opens up.”

  I look up to find Cole leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, his hands bunched in fists at his sides.

  “You learned how to do this, right? Cartaxus had to teach you panel maintenance.”

  “No . . . yes,” he whispers. “I don’t know. There has to be another way.”

  “We’re running out of time. We need to do this now.”

  “But I can’t,” he breathes, his eyes flicking between my arm and the scalpels on the floor. “Catarina, I’m sorry, I just can’t. . . .”

  “Get Dax, then—he knows how to do this.”

  “Crick isn’t responding. I think he’s in the airlock.”

  “Jesus, Cole!” I shout, launching myself from the floor. I thrust my forearm across his neck and shove him back against the wall. The bunk beds shudder with his weight, his eye
s perfect circles of surprise. “Get Dax!” I yell into his face. “I’m dying, do you not understand that?”

  He blinks, an unreadable expression on his face, then throws the door open and bolts down the hall.

  I drop back into a crouch, sucking in a breath. The stitches I can handle, but maybe it’s better to use scissors. I find a tiny, razor-tipped pair in the medkit and sit cross-legged on the floor. My hands tremble as I force one blade under the closest stitch.

  Okay, this is hurting a lot more than I thought it would.

  A trickle of blood runs down my arm, curling around to drip from my thumb. I kick away the Zarathustra files and pop the next stitch, breathing deeply to clear my head. Two down, ten to go. And I still need to pull them out. The curled black thread is hanging from one side of the cut, glistening with blood. I snip the next five as quickly as I can, snagging the scissors on my skin, adding more trickles of blood to the spatter on the floor.

  I close my eyes, fighting a surge of nausea, a throbbing pain radiating from my forearm. The memory of the flesh on my back bubbling and splitting rears up through my mind, and I force my eyes open. If Cole doesn’t hurry, we won’t have time to do this properly.

  Maybe we should just amputate my arm.

  I pop another stitch, and the thin film of new tissue along the incision tears apart with a rush of sparkling pain. The wound stretches open, revealing bloody bubbles of fat in a three-inch diamond along my arm. I bite my lip and work through the rest of the stitches, my eyes brimming with tears, when something shifts under my skin.

  A humming starts up, and the lights on my forearm flicker off. The incision stretches wide like a bloody, unseeing eye. I wince, gritting my teeth against the pain as my forearm bulges, the panel vibrating under my skin.