This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  Dax just stares at me. “I don’t know what to tell you. These results are all coming up negative. Here, you can see for yourself.” He turns the genkit’s screen to me. A bright green banner glows at the top, and the words are there, as clear as day.

  Hypergenesis not detected.

  Every time I’ve plugged my panel in, the same banner has flashed red. I must have seen it a hundred times. This can’t be happening.

  “But my back,” I say, my voice shaking. “Dax, you were there that night. I hacked my panel, and half my back bubbled off.”

  “I know. Trust me, Princess, this is freaking me out as much as it is you.”

  I doubt it. My stomach is clenched like a fist, my heart pounding. I punch a command into the genkit, running the scan again. The green flashing banner reappears. I try another scan, running deeper this time, testing the behavior of every component of my cells.

  The result comes back. A jagged line, representing the way the sample Dax took from me responded to an array of test nanites. A hypergenesis-positive reading would look like wild, patternless static, and a negative reading would be almost flat. My line is like a ridge of mountains. Not flat, but not chaos, either. I stare at it, a chill creeping across my skin.

  It tells me I don’t have hypergenesis, but it doesn’t say that I’m normal, either.

  “Dax, look at this. I don’t know what it means. I’ve never seen a result like this before.”

  He leans in, then turns to me. “Didn’t your mother have hypergenesis?”

  “Yeah, that’s how she and my father met. He was running tests on her blood.”

  Hypergenesis is rare, with only a handful of known cases in the world, but samples from people with the condition are in high demand. Their cells don’t behave like they’re supposed to, and when that happens in science, there’s always something interesting to be learned. When my father was starting out at Cartaxus, my mother was the only living hypergenesis donor in the country. She saw him so often and for so long that she joked that they should get married. When he ran out of code to test on her, he proposed.

  She lived another five years, until a well-meaning doctor gave her a syringe of healing tech after a car crash. Most people with hypergenesis die young. The condition is a curse—something that nobody would ever wish upon their child. I haven’t thought about my mother since we left the cabin, but Dax is right to mention her. Hypergenesis is a non-Mendelian trait—it isn’t passed down by a parent’s chromosomes, but it is hereditary. Every child who’s ever been born to a mother with the condition has inherited it too.

  But none of them had Lachlan Agatta as a father.

  “Jesus, Dax. He did something to me, didn’t he?”

  Dax nods, staring at the jagged line on the genkit’s screen. “It appears so. He must have found a way to suppress the condition, but it isn’t gone completely. I don’t know what these readings mean, but they’re weak. I wouldn’t expect foreign code to even give you a rash, so I’m not sure what happened to your back. There must have been something else going on that hurt you when you hacked your panel that night.”

  Dax and I both turn to the mess of my panel at the same time. He jams the genkit’s wire into its side. It connects with a wet click. His eyes glaze over, flitting back and forth. “Here,” he says. “There’s something in one of your old modules.”

  He tilts his head, pulling it up on the genkit’s screen for me. It’s my healing tech’s code—four hundred pages of my father’s unique notation. From the installation log beside it, it looks like this was the app Marcus cut out of me. He thought it was neural code and that it could help his wife, but that’s ridiculous—this slow, clunky code took days to heal anything worse than a scratch.

  I flick my finger across the genkit’s touchpad, reading the commands. I’ve never sat down and actually read through most of this code. Back in the cabin, my father didn’t want me messing around with it, and ever since I hurt my back, I’ve been too scared to even jack into my panel. The code is complicated, but I find myself reading it easily, the way I’ve always done with my father’s work. But a few pages in, I hit a section that isn’t like the rest. I frown, scanning the comments.

  Unregistered code . . . Analyze . . . Epidermis . . . Corrode . . .

  My heartbeat slows. “This code was written to attack my skin.”

  Dax nods. “It would have run if you used any apps that weren’t registered to your panel. It’s vicious, but it wouldn’t have killed you. I think your father wrote this to make it look like you have hypergenesis, but you don’t.”

  The crinkled scar tissue along my spine prickles. I stare at the code. “But my father wouldn’t have—”

  I stop myself, digging my fingernails into my palm. He wouldn’t have hurt me—that’s what I was going to say, but now it sounds impossibly naive.

  Of course my father would hurt me. I’ve seen what he did to Cole. He cut open five children and ran experiments on them. What made me think he wouldn’t hurt me, too? How could I have missed this? I scrunch my eyes shut, blocking out the evidence on the genkit’s screen.

  “Princess,” Dax says.

  He touches my shoulder, but I flinch away. I don’t want to be comforted. I don’t want his sympathy. I want to break out of here, drive back to the cabin, and burn the whole place down.

  I open my eyes and stare at the genkit’s screen. The pain gripping me is shifting into anger, making my breath come fast, blurring my vision. My blood pressure is still low, and I should get an IV. I should lie down or bandage my arm, but I can’t focus on anything else right now.

  “But don’t you see?” Dax asks. “Whatever your father did to cure your hypergenesis, he’s gone to great lengths to cover it up. It must have been something illegal. This has to be why he left you behind. He needed to hide it from Cartaxus.”

  “I don’t care about Cartaxus,” I spit, stunned by the anger in my voice. “He hid it from me, too, Dax. He lied to me. He made me think I had hypergenesis, and hid code inside my arm . . .”

  My head snaps up, my blood freezing. I grab the genkit and yank it to me.

  “What is it?” Dax asks.

  The colors seem to fade from the room. My concentration shrinks my world down to the blinking cursor on the genkit’s screen. I jump through the folders of my panel’s operating system, kicking off a handful of scans.

  “Cole told me how Cartaxus started,” I say, still typing. “My father was trying to make a vaccine before the outbreak, wasn’t he?”

  “He’d been trying to make a Hydra vaccine for over twenty years.”

  “That means he had decades to think about how to release it, and make sure Cartaxus wouldn’t control it. He saw them encrypt the Influenza code, and he knew they’d do it with Hydra. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.” I punch a string of commands into the genkit with my good hand, setting off another batch of scans. “This plan we’re all following, I can see it now. It just goes back further than I thought.”

  Dax’s brow furrows. “What are you checking?”

  I look up at him. The movement makes my head spin. I pull in a slow breath, forcing myself to stay upright. “I’ve been thinking about this all wrong. I thought my father cared about me—”

  “He did, Princess. He loved you more than anything.”

  “Let me finish,” I hiss.

  Dax looks stunned for a second, then nods swiftly. I set off a scan on the genkit and meet his eyes. “I thought he loved me like most people love their children. But he didn’t, Dax, because he wasn’t like most people. When Cole showed up at the cabin, he didn’t want to follow my father’s plan, but I used his feelings for Jun Bei as leverage. I thought that was what my father wanted me to do, and I’m pretty sure it was, but it made me feel sick to manipulate Cole like that.”

  Dax nods slowly. My vision blurs in and out. I shift on the floor, trying to keep myself steady.

  “But that’s what my father did all the time. I see it now, Dax. He manip
ulated people, and used them as tools. This whole plan to release the vaccine is like a game of chess, and he’s still moving the pieces around, even though he’s gone. My only mistake is that I thought I was playing the game with him.” I swallow hard. “But I’m not. I’m just one of the pieces.”

  “What do you mean?” Dax’s voice is low.

  My eyes drop to the genkit’s screen. The last scan is still running, searching through the contents of my panel. “In his message, he told me to use the notes he left with me, but I don’t think he was talking about paper. He left a hidden note in Cole’s panel, and he left one in yours, and Leoben’s. But I never once thought of checking my own.”

  Dax freezes. I see the realization come over him as clear as day—he sees it now, what I’ve seen for the last few minutes. I’ve never checked my panel for hidden files. I had no reason to. But if my father’s plan goes back years, there’s no reason he couldn’t have left me with something—a password, a backup, a key. Something he would remember to build into his code when he finished the vaccine.

  That way, if Cartaxus forced him to encrypt it, he would have someone beyond their control waiting to unlock it. Even if they tried to withhold its release. Even if they killed him.

  He left me in the cabin because he needed me for this.

  The genkit’s scan returns, and the screen flashes to black with a list of hidden files in blazing white text. I expect to see the system logs and lists of updates, but not a giant procedural file stored in its own repository. It was saved to my panel on the morning of the outbreak, the last time my father ran a software update for me.

  PROCEDURE_NOTES.txt, 184MB

  The words glow, white and cold. This is the key to the vaccine. I feel it as an itch in the base of my skull. My hand shakes as I click on it, and the screen flashes, bringing up the first page of text. At first it looks like pure, unreadable quaternary, but as I scroll down, I realize it’s my father’s code. The file is thousands of pages long, but a quick search brings up all the comments, and I lean closer, fighting my swimming vision to read them.

  “This is a program,” Dax says, reading it wirelessly through his panel. “But I don’t know what it’s doing.”

  The air hangs still as the math and chemistry spin through my mind, weaving into a single algorithm. This code wields a million variables, a million cell types and separate genes, all unfolded and then sewn together in a staggeringly complex dance. It’s a genetic ballet, with each dancer part of a larger, massive pattern, so beautiful and elegant that I can barely breathe.

  “I do.”

  The logic snaps together in my mind. I scan through the code, stunned by what my father has created. I expected a decryption algorithm—something to unlock the source code that’s hidden in Cole’s panel, but this ignores the panel’s architecture completely. Instead, it’s aimed at the vaccine’s synthetic DNA—the ribbons of proteins swimming in Cole’s blood.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. The nanites that run gentech code are designed to build strands of DNA that are coiled up in complex knots, like balls of twine. Those knots are shaped so they can only ever uncoil and wrap around specific parts of your natural DNA. We could take a sample of Cole’s blood and distill it down to the knot of DNA that is the vaccine, but it would be almost impossible to untangle and sequence it. Too small, too soft, too unpredictable. The calculations could take years.

  But that’s exactly what this code is doing.

  It uses a clonebox to draw the vaccine out of Cole’s arm, making a copy of the encrypted code like his panel does when backing up his apps. That’s still useless on its own, but then the procedure branches into something new, and the equations ignite, tracing fractured lines of logic through my mind.

  It’s wonderful and terrible. It’s my father’s masterpiece. He’s used my DNA as the key to the vaccine—my own body as the object that will break the encryption. We need only to hook me up to the clonebox and run the procedure in this file, and then the vaccine will bleed through my cells and unfurl like a flower, one petal at a time.

  Catarina can unlock the vaccine.

  That’s what my father was saying all along.

  “It’s me,” I breathe.

  “You’re right.” Dax’s face pales. “It’s you. You’re the key.”

  I nod, staring at the screen, my vision blurring in and out. My muscles are growing weaker, and I know I should lie down. We should call a doctor and bandage my arm. There are a dozen things we should do, but I can’t stop staring at the endless lines of code my father left for me.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. If this procedure’s code is right, then the password that’s being used to encrypt the vaccine is its own synthetic DNA. All we need to do is untangle the knot. This code will drag the vaccine out of the clonebox and force it into every cell in my body. The procedure will use my DNA to unravel the tangled coil of the vaccine, but a sample of my blood won’t be enough. This needs to be run through my skin, my muscles, my blood and neurons, all living and working in unison. Every cell in my body is part of the key. Each will unwind the knot a little more, and when it’s fully unraveled, we can unlock the source code, and we’ll be able to release it.

  The code will be free to broadcast. People will be able to live without fear. They’ll come out of the bunkers; they’ll rebuild the world.

  But I won’t be around to see it.

  The realization pushes the air from my lungs. There are too many entry points in this procedure’s code. It’s not just using my cells to unravel the vaccine—it’s tearing them apart, shredding my DNA to pieces. A few minutes after this code starts running, my body will disintegrate.

  The vaccine will be decrypted, but this code is going to kill me.

  My vision dims. I rub my eyes and feel a trickle of heat weave down my arm. Blood is still running from the stitches where my panel used to be. I’ve been bleeding this whole time. My blood pressure is plummeting, and now I can barely keep my eyes open.

  I should have made Dax bandage my arm. I should have gotten an IV, but we both got swept up in the secrets hidden in my arm. Now it’s too late. I feel myself swaying. The floor is opening up and swallowing me whole.

  “Dax,” I breathe. He doesn’t hear me. He’s pacing the room, coding, his eyes glazed over. He’s about to read what the code will do to me, and I know he’ll turn to me when he figures it out, but I need his help now, before I pass out. “Dax . . . ,” I say louder, but he doesn’t even blink. I’m slipping to the floor, drifting into the darkness, and either Dax can’t hear me or is too distracted to care. There’s only one person who can help.

  I just pray he’s close enough to find me in time.

  “Cole,” I cry out with every ounce of strength left in me. A chill is creeping across my skin, my teeth starting to chatter. I try to prop myself up with my good arm, but my hand just slides over the bloody puddles on the floor.

  My head falls back. The room goes black. The door whooshes open.

  “Crick!” Cole yells. “Dammit, she’s going into shock!”

  Strong arms lift me from the floor, a warm chest against my side. “I’m here now,” Cole whispers, lowering me to the bed.

  My eyes flutter open. Dax stands behind Cole, staring. “Shit,” he whispers. “Oh shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice . . .”

  “What the hell were you doing?” Cole grabs the medkit.

  “Here, use this.” Dax pulls a vial from his pocket. It’s filled with glistening silver fluid—emergency healing tech—raw nanites that don’t need a panel to run them. It’s not hypergenesis-friendly, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

  Nothing matters anymore. I’m just a chess piece in my father’s plan.

  “She can’t use that,” Cole says. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “No,” Dax says, uncapping the vial. “It’s okay, she can use it.” He presses the silver canister to my neck. Cole watches, stunned, as the nanites surge into my body. They spread down my neck and in
to my chest like slivers of ice scratching through my veins.

  I feel them hit my heart. It skips a beat, then my back arches on the bed as they explode inside me, racing through my cells.

  “Why can she use the tech?” Cole asks, his eyes wide. “Crick, what did you just do?”

  “I healed her,” Dax says. “She doesn’t have hypergenesis. Lachlan faked it, and she’s going to be fine, but we need to keep working. She’s the key to the vaccine—we found the procedure to unlock it. I need to get samples, and run tests, to figure out the rest of the plan—”

  “No,” Cole says, cutting the air with his hand. “We don’t need to figure anything out right now. Catarina needs to rest.”

  “But the vaccine,” Dax says. “We’re supposed to leave in a few hours.”

  “It can wait until morning.”

  “You don’t understand,” Dax urges.

  Cole’s head snaps around, and he stands fluidly. A steel spring coiling. A blade drawn from a sheath. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” he growls, the very air around him rippling with his anger. “She was on the verge of death when I came in, while you were standing right beside her. You say she’s the key to the vaccine, and you talk about this plan as if it’s something separate, something intellectual. But it’s not. She is the plan, and Lachlan sent me to protect her. My job is to make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and I intend to do it. That means she’s going to rest now, and you’re going to leave.”

  Dax glares at Cole. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “No, I can’t,” Cole snarls, “but if you don’t get out of my sight, I’ll break your neck for letting her bleed out like that.”

  Dax and Cole stare at each other, the air humming with anger, and then Dax’s eyes cut to me, hard and cold. He gives me a sharp nod, then sneers at Cole and turns on his heel to stride out of the room.

  It takes a full minute until Cole’s hands unclench, and then he turns back to me, dropping to his knees beside the bed. “Are you okay?”