This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  He blows out a sigh. “It was different for each of us. We all had different mutations. Your father called them gifts.”

  “Like superpowers?”

  His lips curl. “Not even close.”

  I pull my leg up slowly so my foot rests on the seat, keeping my wounded knee straight. “What were they?”

  “Well, we weren’t told what they were explicitly. Your father wanted to make sure that the experiments were pure, so we weren’t supposed to understand what they were testing us for. But some of us figured it out. Lee’s was obvious. They took blood and tissue samples from him for years, and after a while they started locking him in a room with Hydra doses and letting them blow.”

  I close my eyes, stunned by the brutality. I swallow it down. “So Leoben was naturally immune?”

  “Completely. He doesn’t even have the vaccine in his arm like Crick and I do, but your father was probably the only man in the world who could tell you how his immunity works. All we know is that it took almost eighteen years for him to translate whatever he found in Lee’s DNA into a vaccine.”

  “What about the others?” I lean down to grab my backpack and slide out the mold-spotted manila folders. Cole stiffens, but he doesn’t stop me. I open one folder to a picture of a little girl with shaved blond hair. Anna Sinclair. Her skin looks unusual—as though it’s covered with tiny bumps—but it’s hard to tell from the photograph. Her eyes are narrowed, staring at the camera as though she’d like to hurt whoever is behind it. “What about her?”

  Cole glances over and smiles. “Ah, Anna. She’d approve of that trick you did with your genkit to blow the airlocks. Anything with explosives, and Anna’s on board. We didn’t know what her mutation was, but she had a thing when she was younger where she’d get growths all over her. Her skin cells wouldn’t stop growing. You can see it in the picture. She couldn’t eat, either. She spent a lot of time in the medical ward, until Lachlan came up with an app that seemed to clear it up overnight. She’s down south now, in another Cartaxus facility. A civilian bunker. They firewalled us, and we’ve barely been able to talk for the last few months.”

  “Why is she there?”

  Cole looks surprised. “I don’t know. They don’t tell us that kind of thing in the black-out program.”

  “She’s in it too?”

  He nods. “Me, Anna, and Leoben. Anna probably has the most training. She was into the military stuff even when we were little. She wants to run Cartaxus one day.”

  “What about . . .” I flip through the files, opening the one with the bald girl. Her skin is so pale I can see the veins across her cheeks. She looks like a doll made of glass. “What about Ziana?”

  “Ziana . . .” Cole sighs. “Ziana’s gone. She escaped during the outbreak. She told us she was going to, and that she didn’t want us to find her. I still check for her every week, but I can’t get through. She was only really close to Jun Bei.”

  “Did you know what her mutation was?”

  “Yeah.” Cole’s voice goes hard.

  A chill creeps across my skin. “What was it?”

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this?”

  I tighten my grip on the folders. “I need to know, Cole.”

  He lets out a slow breath. “Ziana has . . . she has another sense.”

  “What, like . . . magnetoreception?”

  He shakes his head. “She can feel some of her body’s systems. They’re connected to her brain like our nervous system is. When I got shot, I felt pain, because that’s what my nerve endings were telling me. Ziana would feel that too, but she’d also feel her blood and her hormones, and a hundred other things just as clearly as the pain. She has too many neurons in her body—at least that’s what Jun Bei thought, but it took us a while to figure it out.”

  Too many neurons. My head spins with the implications. Every panel has a handful of blunt monitors to read data from its user’s body: blood sugar levels, histamine releases, hormone balances, the number of cells being shed inside your stomach every hour. The monitors add a feed to most people’s VR dashboard, but seeing the stats in your vision is different from actually sensing them. Someone like Ziana could grow up knowing more about the human body than any scientist ever had, just by listening to her own.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Lachlan seemed to think so. He worked with Ziana a lot, but she didn’t get along with the rest of us. She was always . . . strange. She barely spoke, and she spent most of her time in the medical ward.”

  “Why?”

  Cole doesn’t answer, and it suddenly hits me why he didn’t want to tell me about Ziana. The easiest way to test someone’s awareness of their body’s functions would be to hurt and disrupt them. To push them to their limits. To bend them until they broke.

  The best way to test someone’s ability to survive is to try to kill them.

  I close my eyes. I’ve seen the scars on Cole’s chest, but I hadn’t really let myself think about how he got them. My father’s research wasn’t just brutal; it was intentionally brutal. He was trying to push these children as far as he could, to see what he’d learn when they fell apart.

  I open my eyes, fighting the rage coiling inside me. “What about Jun Bei’s mutation?”

  Cole glances over, but I don’t flip open Jun Bei’s file. I don’t want to see the look in his eyes when he sees her photograph. I’m in a storm right now—of anger, of disgust, of fear. I don’t need to add jealousy to that mix.

  “We didn’t figure out what her mutation was. Or, at least, she never told me. It wasn’t obvious, whatever it was.”

  “What about you?”

  He presses his lips together. “I have a mutation that makes me respond strongly to neural gentech.”

  “What, like memory blockers?”

  “No, like real neural gentech. Code that runs inside the brain.”

  “I thought we were still decades away from that kind of tech.”

  “Well, I guess Lachlan was just ahead of his time.”

  “Wow.” I lean back, watching the rain bounce off the windshield. Code that can affect people’s brains has been the obsession of conspiracy theorists since panels were invented. They figured that if you could change people’s skin, you could also change their minds, which meant our thoughts could someday be controlled.

  But after years of work and countless primate tests, scientists explained that it was just too hard.

  The problem is, the brain isn’t like any other organ. Our thoughts and memories are stored as billions of tiny circuits, which means it’s the structures of the cells that are important, not just the cells themselves. It’s the way they’re organized, the way they link up to one another. The rest of the body is far easier: If you tweak the gene for melanin, then your freckles fade. You want bigger muscles? Just grow some more muscle cells. Most gentech apps are as simple as that. The art of coding lies in finding the safest, most elegant way to do those tiny tweaks.

  But the brain is a mass of billions of neurons, and their structure is unique to every person. If you wanted to change someone’s brain, you’d need to map it first, and we can’t even do that. Mapping every neuron is a task that’s just as hard as building a brand-new brain, and I didn’t think we were even close to doing that.

  “So what are you saying?” I ask. “Do you have code controlling your thoughts?”

  Cole laughs. It’s a deep, full laugh, and the sound is jarring after the tense silence that’s stretched between us for the last few hours. “No, it’s not like that.”

  “What is it, then?” I shift, angling myself toward him, moving my wounded knee carefully. “Is there code for neural restructuring? How do they handle the computation?”

  “There’s no thought control,” Cole says. “Nothing like that. It’s pretty blunt. It started when Lachlan tweaked the unmapped parts of my genome and noticed some changes in my behavior.”

  I close my eyes, trying not to think about the risk my father took using cod
e that focused on the unmapped parts of Cole’s DNA. It could have killed him. It could have driven him insane. It’s the genetic equivalent of testing random chemicals by feeding them to a child.

  “So what did he find?”

  Cole looks over at me, and for the first time since we started driving, we hold each other’s gaze. “Tell me why you jacked into your knee to close those airlocks.”

  I run my fingers across the bandage on my leg. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “Did you think about it for a while, and weigh up the pros and cons? Or were you following an instinct?”

  I think back to Homestake, to when I jammed the wire into my knee before I could hesitate, to stop myself from backing out. “I guess it was mostly an instinct.”

  He nods. “You wanted to protect the people in that bunker. That’s instinctive, Cat, and it’s as deep as it gets. Protecting others is a universal instinct, and it can be overwhelming when it kicks in. We’re all born with it, which means that it’s coded somewhere in our DNA. Our conscious thoughts and memories are built up throughout our lives, but instincts are different. Instincts are genetic. And that makes them susceptible to coding.”

  I chew my lip as I start to see what Cole is getting at. If our instincts are genetic, one day we might be able to rewrite them. But first we’d need to find the genes that control our instincts, which could be impossible. Even knockout kids could only take you so far. If a child was afraid of the dark, would that be because of a hard-coded instinct, or because they’d had experiences that made them afraid? Splitting apart the influence of genes and experiences on our personalities—nature versus nurture—has been a problem in science for centuries.

  “So your protective protocol, is that an instinct?”

  Cole nods. “Protection was the first instinct Lachlan noticed in me. He activated one of my genes with a piece of code when I was eight years old, and I tackled a nurse who was trying to sample Jun Bei’s blood. The code didn’t change anyone else’s behavior, but it made my brain light up like a firework. He figured out that if he tweaked genes that were associated with instincts in me, I would feel those instincts in response. He activated a set of genes in the cells inside my brain, and I was suddenly afraid of water. He deactivated them, and the fear disappeared. It didn’t work on anyone else, but for me it was like flipping a switch. He could make me feel fear, or protectiveness, all by running a few lines of code.”

  “Remotely controlled instincts.” My head spins. “That’s incredible. But . . . that means he could use you to build a map, to figure out which genes controlled which instincts. Nobody’s been able to do that before. You’re like the Rosetta stone for the human brain.”

  A brief, unreadable look crosses Cole’s face, like a cloud drifting over the sun. “That’s exactly what he used to call me. He mapped out hundreds of instincts in my DNA, everything from protectiveness to cravings for sugar. The urge to hunt, to kill . . .”

  It suddenly hits me. “He made you feel all those things? But how did he test them? You were a child, you couldn’t explain what you were feeling properly, and he’d have to test them in different settings, with different environments, different strengths. He’d have to make sure you weren’t faking. . . .”

  Cole drops his eyes.

  “He made you kill people, when you were just a child?”

  He nods. I stare at him and then force my eyes away. A tear drops from my nose before I know I’m crying, and I bite down on my lip, trying to hold it in.

  “Cat, please don’t cry. It was a long time ago. I’ve dealt with it.”

  “But it was wrong,” I say. My voice is thick, and the effort of keeping it level hurts my throat. “He was my father, and you were a child. He treated you like lab rats when he should have been looking after you.”

  “If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. Maybe a few years later, maybe decades, but it was inevitable.”

  “No,” I whisper, though I know he’s right. If my father hadn’t done it, another scientist would have eventually. That’s the problem with animal testing. It’s so easy that it becomes the only thing people know how to do. When they learn all they can from rats, there’s only one way to move on—to rabbits, dogs, monkeys, bonobos. It was inevitable they’d turn to humans.

  But that’s still no excuse for what my father did.

  Cole sighs. “Look, Cat, I’ve been through a lot, but so has everyone. You think the kids who’ve lived through Hydra are happy? Some of them have eaten their parents. This a hard world, and your father made me hard enough to survive it.”

  “Stop defending him.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “He was looking after me while he was hurting you. It’s not right. He locked you up—”

  Cole cuts me off. “He created the vaccine. That’s all that matters. There’s no such thing as right anymore—that ended when the plague hit. Sometimes we need to do awful things to stop worse things from happening. You’re still thinking in terms of right and wrong, but this is war, and the rules have changed.”

  “I know,” I say, rubbing my eyes again. I know what he’s saying, and I felt the same way myself when I read the vaccine’s decryption code. He gave up his childhood, and I’m giving up my life, but that doesn’t mean I want to. It doesn’t make any of this okay.

  The jeep’s dashboard flashes red all of a sudden, and I’m so angry and confused that I don’t see the girl until we’re almost on top of her.

  CHAPTER 29

  “STOP!” I SCREAM, WRENCHING THE steering wheel, sending us flying off the road. The jeep bounces through a barbed-wire fence and slams into a tree. Momentum carries me forward until an airbag hits my chest, bringing up a burst of shimmering stars in my vision.

  “Catarina!” Cole shoves the airbag away. His eyes are black and terrified. “What the hell? Are you okay?”

  “The girl!” I yank my seat belt off and kick the door open, jumping out into the rain. The dark storm clouds above us make it look like twilight, even though it’s the middle of the day. The ground is muddy and slick, and the air smells like lightning. Every time I blink, I see the girl’s emerald eyes in my mind, her ash-black hair flying across her face, lifted high on the wind.

  What was she doing in the middle of the road?

  “We didn’t hit her, did we?” I shout, squinting, one arm held above my eyes to block the constant assault of the rain. “What happened to the jeep?”

  Cole just stares at me from his seat. “What are you talking about?”

  “The dashboard, Cole! It went red, and we almost hit her. I have to find her—she might be hurt.”

  I crouch down to search under the jeep, wincing as pain shoots through my knee. Part of me knows we can’t have missed her. I didn’t see her until it was too late, and if we hit her at that speed, there’s no way she’s still alive. I limp around the jeep, scanning the hood. The black metal is slick with rain and barely scratched, though the tree we hit is now a splintered wreck. There’s no sign of blood on the bumper, no hint of the girl at all.

  “Cole, I need your help. I can’t hear anything without my tech.”

  His door swings open, and I turn in a circle, squinting through the rain. All I can see are empty wheat fields stretching into the haze of the storm. We’re miles from civilization, deep in abandoned farmlands.

  That doesn’t mean there aren’t families still hiding out here, though.

  “Maybe she’s okay,” I say. “Maybe we didn’t hit her.” My boots sink into the mud as I limp back along the skid marks and up to the road. The highway to the north is empty, the asphalt glistening in the rain, and the only movement to the south is the distant headlights of Leoben’s jeep.

  “Catarina . . .”

  “She was here,” I say, staring into the rain. But there’s no sign of her anywhere. No footprints, no blood. Just empty fields and shuttered houses. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere she could have run to. “Doesn’t the jeep have a recording or something?�
�

  Cole frowns. “It’s not responding. I think the crash rebooted it.”

  “Well, I saw her, I swear, but it’s like she just disappeared.”

  Cole watches me carefully, the rain trickling down his arms, glistening on his eyelashes. “There are no human life signs or bodies around us. Maybe you saw a bird.”

  “A bird?” I choke out. I scrub my eyes. I only saw the girl for a second, but it was enough to know she was real. Standing like a statue in the road, staring at us as we hurtled closer.

  “There’s nobody here, Cat.” Cole looks more troubled than I’ve seen him, like I’m hurt and he doesn’t know how to protect me. “What did she look like?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, shivering in the rain. “She was little, just a kid with green eyes and black hair, and she was wearing a white . . . gown, or something. Like a . . .” I trail off. A hospital gown. That’s what I was going to say. But that sounds completely insane. What would a child in a hospital gown be doing in the middle of the road? A jolt runs through me as it comes together in my mind.

  Cole is right. She wasn’t real. The little girl wasn’t a child lost in the rain; she was a hallucination of Jun Bei, looking just like she did in my father’s file. I was thinking about the Zarathustra kids just before the crash. I can’t believe I just hallucinated.

  “Oh shit,” I whisper, bending over, pressing my hands to my mouth. I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m starting to see things.

  We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I just crashed us into a tree. How am I going to hold it together long enough to unlock the vaccine?

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Cole says. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  I scrub my hands over my face, scanning the road. Maybe I did see a bird, something my brain caught hold of and turned into one of the Zarathustra kids. But there’s no sign of an animal. Just a face burned into my mind that’s quickly joined by the other four children. I rub my eyes again, over and over, until all I see is the empty road. Just the rain, the fields, and Cole’s troubled eyes.