This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  It’s auto-ejecting. The panel has realized that I’m trying to get it out, and it’s decided to help me.

  A dozen tiny black wires wriggle through the wound, coiling and squirming like snakes, dragging the soft pink plastic of my panel into the air. It squelches, wires flicking and coiling, shoving a scarlet-streaked flap directly out of the wound.

  The walls spin around me. I gag, managing to lurch over to the sink, spitting out a mouthful of acid and bile. My body shakes with adrenaline as I sink to my knees on the concrete, staring breathlessly at the wound.

  An army of squirming black wires fans out across my skin, stretching the wound open, trying to lift my panel out. But they can’t. It’s stuck. The incision isn’t long enough.

  I glance at the door. No one’s coming. I’m going to have to do this myself.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I whisper, groping on the floor for the scalpel I pulled out of the medkit. My fingers are shaking, slick with blood. They slide over the cold steel handle twice before I manage to pick it up. My hand shakes dangerously as I bring the blade to my forearm, trying to figure out the best way to open it. I could make it longer, or cut across it, or turn it into an L shape. I don’t remember which way is better, and I don’t want to cut a vein.

  “L shape, L shape,” I mutter, dredging up a distant memory of some kind of training with holoscreens, practicing on other kids. I close my eyes, pressing the tip of the scalpel to my skin, and draw in a deep breath.

  But I can’t do it.

  The invisible hands of fear are locked around the scalpel, keeping it frozen in midair.

  “Come on,” I growl, throwing my head back. I press the blade into my skin until it stings, but I can’t make the swift, clean stroke that could end this.

  So it can’t be swift, then. I grit my teeth, jabbing the blade into the edge of the wound. Blood wells up and my fingers clench, but I’ve started. Now all I have to do is drag it two more inches across my skin.

  The panel’s lights flash as I suck in another breath, steadying myself. It shivers and hums, the black wires writhing like a thousand tiny snakes, coiling closer to the panel’s body. They wrap around the strip of plastic, enveloping it completely.

  It shifts back into my arm.

  “No!” I shout. It’s changed its mind. It doesn’t think I’m trying to get it out—it thinks I’m hurt, and now it’s installing faster to help me. “No, no, no, please!”

  The lights blink on, racing up my arm, and I scrunch my eyes shut and drag the blade across my skin.

  The pain is like a firework. I feel it whistle as it rises, promising heat and light and fury, until it finally detonates. It shatters across my skin, and I let out a strangled cry, buckling, clutching my arm to my chest. The warmth of my blood trickles down my stomach. The panel is humming again, shifting, changing back to its ejection protocol. A fresh cry rips from my throat as it slides, warm and slick, straight out of the wound.

  I let out a gasp, shaking with relief. Tears drip from my cheeks, forming clear patterns in the sheen of blood that covers the concrete floor. I drop my arm, grabbing the warm bundle of wires that is my panel, but feel a tug of tension all the way up my arm. A single cable stretches into the wound, jutting from the back of the panel, the same thickness as my little finger. It’s black flecked with gold, marking it as one of the network of cables that pumps nanites through my body. Most are no thicker than a human hair, but this is the primary distribution cord. It runs to a socket in my shoulder that must have locked and stopped it.

  But that’s okay. I’ve bought myself a few more minutes before the panel tries to turn itself on again. This butchered thing is still hooked up to the cabling inside my body, but at least it’s out of me.

  I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and find myself swaying, a rush of heat creeping up the sides of my neck. The room blurs, and I throw my hand out for the wall, but manage only to slide down it, leaving a scarlet streak on the concrete.

  Somebody shouts outside, their voice punctuated with footsteps. The door whooshes open, and a hand slides around my head, cradling my face. I blink, expecting to see Cole but instead find bright green eyes, rogue strands of red hair plastered to a freckled forehead.

  “Dax,” I whisper groggily. He’s soaked, stinking of disinfectant. “You found me.”

  “Yes, Princess. It’s okay, I’m here.” He turns me to my back on the floor, pushing the hair from my face with his pale, slender fingers. I’m still just in my bra, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. Dax found me, and now everything is going to be okay.

  “You did it,” he breathes, lifting my wounded arm carefully. “Oh, good girl, you got it out.”

  Cole appears like a ghost behind him, every muscle in his body tense, his eyes wide and haunted as he stares down at my arm. “I . . . ,” he whispers, his eyes flashing to black. “I can’t be here. I’m sorry. . . .” He stumbles back out of the room.

  “Some hero,” Dax mutters, turning the panel’s body in his hand. “What’s wrong with the primary cord?”

  “Shoulder socket. It’s jammed, like when I hacked my panel. The cord won’t retract.” I clench my good hand into a fist, trying to draw my mind back into focus. If we can’t disconnect the panel in the next few minutes, its emergency fail-safes will try to turn it on again. That might prompt a surge of emergency healing tech to race up the cable and into me. With my hypergenesis, that’s a death sentence.

  “We have to get it out, Dax,” I say. “We need to yank it.”

  “I’m not yanking anything. That socket branches into your spine. It’s too dangerous.”

  “But the cord is graphene coated—we can’t cut it.” I glance at the blood-streaked mess of the panel and force my eyes to the ceiling. “We’ll have to reboot the socket.”

  Dax’s face darkens. Rebooting the shoulder socket is risky. It means turning the panel on again, which is what we’re trying to avoid. But once it’s on, the shoulder socket’s clamps will unlock for a split second, giving us a chance to pull the cable out. If we get it out in time, I’ll be safe.

  “I don’t know about this . . . ,” Dax says.

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “I know, but I’m not sure if I can code and pull it out at the same time.”

  “I can do it.” I roll to my side, my arm angled awkwardly behind me. “You pull when I tell you to. I’ll run the command.”

  Dax grabs the genkit and unfurls its reader wire, jabbing it into the bloodied mess of my panel. Silver connectors emerge to grab it, clicking into place. The genkit’s screen flashes, and Dax holds the gold-flecked cable tight. I can feel the tension of it underneath my bicep, running all the way up my arm.

  “Okay,” I whisper to myself, navigating through the genkit’s files. One-handed typing has never been my strong suit, but I still manage to tap out a few commands, leaving bloodied smudges across the keyboard. I navigate through the panel’s installation system to the scripts controlling the shoulder socket and force a clean reboot. The screen flashes, code scrolling rapidly as it relays the commands.

  “It’s rebooting,” I say, wincing as it burns in my shoulder. “Get ready to pull. Once the clamp unlocks there won’t be much time.”

  Dax nods. Code flashes across the screen, and something clicks inside my shoulder.

  “Now!” I yell, and Dax yanks the cable out.

  CHAPTER 22

  I LET OUT A SCREAM, arching on the floor. The cable tears through my shoulder, then twists and curls out of my arm. Dax drops the wire-covered, bloody strip of my panel on the concrete. The gold-flecked cable attached to it retracts, coiling up like a snake.

  It’s out.

  I tilt my head back, letting out a cry of relief, my body still shaking with adrenaline.

  “That’s it,” Dax gasps, reaching out to grip my blood-smeared fingers in his own, staring at me. His face is as white as the disinfectant-soaked lab coat hanging from his shoulders. The relief pounding through me is
so intense it makes me giddy. I want to laugh; I want to scream. I want to grab the lapels of Dax’s lab coat and drag him down to kiss me.

  But my limbs feel like they’re made of stone. I’m so exhausted I can barely move. The sound of my breathing fades, and my vision starts to swim. Something hot trickles down my arm, pooling in my upturned palm. I look down and swallow. “Dax, I’m bleeding.”

  “Oh shit. Hang on.” He unhooks his belt. He slides it from his pants and slips it around my shoulder, cinching it tight enough to cut off the flow. Pain lances through my arm, but the trickle slows, and my vision starts to clear. Dax rummages through the medkit, pulling out a roll of black thread and a curved needle. “Let’s get this closed up so I can bandage it.”

  I look away as he pulls through the first stitch, glancing at the mess of my panel on the concrete. The dripping heap of wires is still twitching and squirming, a few stray black coils searching blindly for somewhere to plug themselves in.

  “It’s so ugly,” I whisper.

  “It’s out, that’s all that matters.” Dax tugs on my arm, tying off the first stitch. “You were brilliant, Princess. God, I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Dax.”

  He pauses, one hand on my arm, the other holding the needle. “You’re probably wondering why I never called.”

  I look up at him. His face is tight. He can’t even look at me. “I’m wondering a lot of things, but that’s definitely one of them.”

  He pulls through another stitch, hunching over my arm. Drops of the airlock’s disinfectant drip from his hair, falling on my arm in stinging drops of fire. “When Cartaxus came to take us from the cabin, I was so relieved they didn’t find you. They were awful. They shot Lachlan, and I thought I was going into hell, right up until we got to the lab.”

  I close my eyes. He tugs on my arm again, tying off the second stitch.

  “When we got there, they took Lachlan into the medical ward, and I met the rest of the team. There were thirty of them, all coders. They were brilliant, though you would have blown most of them out of the water, and everyone else was happy to be there. They’d all brought their families. We were safe and comfortable. I realized Lachlan had it wrong. I couldn’t believe that we’d left you behind.”

  He tightens another stitch. “I went to the medical ward to tell Lachlan we needed to get you. The virus was in California, the infection rate was soaring, and we were working on a draft vaccine that Lachlan had written years before. You knew Lachlan’s code better than anyone, so you should have been second-in-charge of the work, but he told me you could never come. He made me swear not to contact you.”

  My heart stills. “Why?”

  “He was adamant that you would die if they ever took you, that it would be a catastrophe, but he wouldn’t tell me why. He was so firm about it that I believed him. I’ve never seen him so deadly serious about anything in his life. The only theory I could come up with was that maybe you had a condition, something fatal he’d cured with nonstandard tech. I thought it might have something to do with your hypergenesis.”

  A fatal condition? My hypergenesis? My head swims with the thought. Marcus’s daughter, Eloise, flutters into my mind. Her blond eyelashes and soft cheeks. The nucleatoxis disease destroying her brain, held at bay by nonstandard code.

  If I did have a condition like that, something my father had cured with nonstandard code, it would make sense for him to hide me from Cartaxus. He’d make me promise to stay out of the bunkers. He wouldn’t send anyone to find me.

  If they did, they might wipe the code from my arm and kill me.

  “But that can’t be right,” I say, opening my eyes. “He never mentioned anything, and he’d never keep something like that hidden from me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  This time Dax meets my gaze, his emerald eyes troubled. “None of this makes any sense, Princess, and that’s what frightens me. Whatever Lachlan was planning, whatever his motivations were, I think we need to figure them out if we want to unlock the vaccine.”

  I look down at my arm, blood-smeared, swollen, raw. Dax ties off the last stitch and spins the genkit around. The reader wire is still plugged into the ruins of my panel, which has ceased twitching and now lies in a limp mess on the floor.

  “The first thing to figure out,” Dax says, “is why your panel just broke through five layers of hypergenesis security protocols. I’m going to run a full scan of the architecture, and see if I can find out what the hell just happened.”

  I nod. His eyes glaze over and the genkit’s screen flashes as he logs in wirelessly, using the VR connection in his panel. The genkit starts to hum, and Dax’s face goes slack as he shifts his focus into a virtual space I can’t share.

  The genkit’s screen flickers with a constant blur of text and equations, showing the files he’s calling up with his mind and reading through at a dizzying speed. I prop myself up on my good elbow and watch his glassy eyes skip back and forth as he works.

  Of all the apps I wish I had, VR is the most painful to be without, especially since I already have most of the implants required to use it. Like practically everyone with a panel, I have a basic skullnet—a web of microscopic wires fanned out in a lattice across the inside of my skull. The net picks up the electrical activity of my brain, translating my thoughts into commands that my panel’s processors can read and understand.

  I also have an optic feed—a coil of wires leading from the graphics chip in my panel into my optic nerve. Together, those implants should have been enough to let me use VR, but the graphics chip in the custom-coded panel my father gave me is ancient and clunky. It can’t keep up with the computations required to run VR—it could barely handle the text in my vision when I sent comms to Agnes. All it could do was run built-in filters and draw text and icons. I spent months researching ways to upgrade it, but every other chip I found needed a different power source, a more sophisticated operating system, and a heat-transfer chip to stop it burning a hole right through my arm. None of the code I found was hypergenesis-friendly, so eventually I gave up, but I never stopped wishing that I could launch myself into an immersive VR world.

  Lying here, watching Dax, I want nothing more than to join his session and code with him side by side. There’s no denying that his face holds an austere beauty, but it was never his looks that attracted me to him. It was this—his concentration, the flitting of his eyes as he casts his thoughts effortlessly into blocks of perfect code. When I’m working, I need to type each word letter by letter, but Dax throws down whole blocks of logic in every thought. My code grows like a house, rising slowly from foundations, each brick laid carefully before the design becomes clear. But with Dax, when he codes through his panel, entire rooms and structures fly together in a whirlwind. I can see it on the genkit’s screen—a hundred files open, multiple pages selected and transformed in a heartbeat. With a single thought, he can summon algorithms and rules, rearranging them in a flurry before snapping them into place. It’s magical to watch the way his mind spins pages of code like puzzle pieces, splitting and weaving them together with the merest thought.

  His eyes bounce back and forth, his breath quickening. The urge to join his session is so strong I can barely hold it in. I want to entwine my consciousness with his, let our minds meld together, and turn blocks of code into towering masterpieces. Together, we’d be twice as fast. Two minds working in harmony.

  Dax and I would be something special if we could work together.

  I reach out for him instinctively, tracing my blood-spotted fingers along the side of his face. They leave tracks of scarlet across his pale, freckled skin, but he doesn’t flinch away. He doesn’t even seem to feel it. I draw my hand back again just as he snaps out of his session, yanking the cable from my ruined panel.

  “What the hell?” he gasps. He reaches for my arm. “I need a tissue sample, something live. I need to run a scan.”

  “What’s wrong?” I hold my arm out, and he slides the needle-tippe
d cable straight into the freshly-stitched wound in my arm. I hiss as the metal pushes into the incision, producing a fresh trickle of blood. The cable twitches, drawing back a sample of my cells for the genkit to run an analysis on. He pulls it back out, his eyes glazing briefly.

  “Dax, what’s happening? Is something wrong?”

  “You have a backup chip.” He looks stunned. He looks terrified.

  “No, I don’t. That’s why I was so worried when it was damaged.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, but you have one in your spine. It’s masking its access, but it looks like a standard setup. I don’t understand this.”

  I stare at him, my head spinning. If I had a backup chip, I could regrow my old panel instead of getting budded with a new one. All my hypergenesis-friendly apps would be back and functioning in a matter of days instead of the weeks it normally takes to grow a panel from scratch. But I’ve never seen anything about a backup in my panel’s code. If Dax has found one in my spine, that means my father put it there and never told me about it.

  A cold feeling settles in my stomach, and then the rest of Dax’s words catch up with me.

  “Wait, did you say a standard setup? Like a normal panel?”

  Dax nods, his eyes glazed again. “I can’t see what’s in it, but it’s definitely not hypergenesis-friendly. I’m checking the tissue sample.”

  “What do you need the tissue sample for?”

  “I’m checking, but . . .” The blood drains from his face. “But it’s the same result.”

  “What’s the same result? Dax, what do you see?”

  His eyes refocus, and he looks down at the stitches in my arm, swallowing. “I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t think you have hypergenesis.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE AIR STILLS. DAX’S WORDS echo through my mind.

  I don’t think you have hypergenesis.

  “That’s ridiculous.” I push myself up with my good arm until I’m sitting cross-legged on the blood-splattered concrete. The movement makes my vision blur. I rub my eyes, shaking my head. “I was born with hypergenesis.”