This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “I’m okay,” I breathe, straightening.

  Cole’s brow furrows. In the dim light of the storm the leylines curled around his face look like slivers of pure darkness cut into his skin. Water trickles from his close-cropped hair, weaving down the planes of his face.

  I can’t stop staring at every pore, every drop of rain on his skin . . .

  I blink. “I think my ocular tech is waking up again.” I pull back the gauze wrapped around my forearm. A single dot of cobalt smiles up from my bruised skin. It blinks once every two seconds. That means the first wires have grown, linking up to the tech from my old panel. There’s still no battery, no function cores, no operating system, but it might explain why I just saw Cole’s ex-girlfriend in the rain.

  “It must have been a glitch in my tech when the wires connected,” I say. “I’m sorry, I screwed up.”

  He sighs, relieved. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get you out of the rain.” He takes me by the shoulder to guide me off the road just as Leoben’s jeep screeches to a stop behind us.

  “What’s happening?” Leoben yells out his window.

  “Nothing,” Cole calls back. “Let’s keep moving. Catarina thought she saw something, but it was a mistake.”

  “I don’t think it was.”

  Cole stiffens, turning around. “Why not?”

  Leoben’s door swings open, and he climbs out of his jeep with a rifle in one hand. “Because I didn’t hit the brakes. The jeep stopped on its own, and now it won’t start again.”

  Cole’s grip on my shoulder tightens.

  Dax jumps out into the rain. He stalks to the side of the road, sniffing the air. “Do you smell that?”

  Cole draws in a slow breath, narrowing his eyes. “Ozone. I thought it was the lightning.”

  Dax shakes his head, scanning the road. He drops to his knees, swiping one finger across the asphalt. It comes up coated with silver. His eyes glaze over for a second before cutting to me. “This is triphase. It’s all over the road.”

  I swallow, bringing up my own mud-streaked hands, inspecting them in the glow of the headlights. My fingers are shaking, dotted with rain, but there’s a strange glint to my skin that shouldn’t be there—tiny, iridescent specks of silver. A sheen of nanobots, just like the ones genkits and panels build, but these aren’t coded for healing.

  They’re coded for killing.

  Triphase is built to destroy, to chew up every organic molecule of every living thing it comes in contact with. I look at Cole and Leoben, seeing the same silver sheen on their feet, their hands, their necks.

  We’re all covered with it.

  “How did this get here?” Cole asks.

  “It’s in the air,” Leoben says, grimacing. “Shit, it’s everywhere. Why aren’t the little bastards eating us?”

  “They haven’t been activated yet.” Dax’s voice is distant. “They’re coded, waiting to be set off, and they haven’t been here long. It’s like they’ve just come down in the storm.”

  Cole and Leoben both freeze and lift their eyes at the same time. I follow their gaze up into the rain, squinting through my fingers. Dark clouds cover the sky, still dropping rain in lashing sheets, but through the storm I can make out a hint of something else.

  Something dark, moving in a loose formation.

  Drones.

  Leoben steps instantly closer to Dax, shouldering his rifle.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Lieutenant,” a voice booms from the sky. Sharp, female, cocky. I know the voice from somewhere, but I can’t quite place it. “In the event of their destruction, these drones are programmed to send out a pulse that will activate the triphase. Our scientists estimate that it will take you approximately fourteen seconds to die.”

  “What do you want?” Cole shouts up. “We don’t have anything of value.”

  “Quite the contrary. You have an end to this hideous nightmare.” Spots of light flicker on across the sky, revealing a network of at least a hundred drones hovering above us. They drop slowly, until I can pick up the whine of their propellers, then pause and splash down pinprick beams of light onto the road.

  The beams dance through the rain, catching the droplets as they fall, gradually intersecting to form the life-size shell of a woman. She floats in midair, her torso dropping away into vectors of light that glitter on the silver-sheened road. Her face is distorted, rippling as the rain rushes through the rudimentary hologram, but I’d still recognize that trademark smile anywhere.

  My hands curl into fists. “Novak.” The leader of the Skies. The woman I’ve spent the last two years working for. “What the hell are you doing?”

  She spreads her hands. “We’re here to help you, Catarina. You’ve had a difficult journey, what with Lieutenant Franklin being shot. We’ve been impressed by your determination, but we think it’s time you got the help you need to complete this mission.”

  I shiver, staring at her, my clothing soaked through. How does she know Cole was shot? How does she know anything?

  It suddenly hits me. “Marcus.” I turn to Cole. “Marcus put them onto us.”

  “Yes indeed,” Novak says. “It seems that his wife spontaneously developed hypergenesis after installing an app from your arm. Unfortunately, her body was already running a considerable amount of code. From what Marcus told me, it was a miracle they were able to save her.”

  My breath rushes from me. Amy. I hadn’t even thought about her. I was so angry that I didn’t realize the code he took might do the same thing it did to me: bubble the skin off her back. It would only have taken a few hours to install; it must have kicked in just after we left.

  “Marcus was furious, naturally,” Novak continues, “so he sent me everything he’d downloaded from both of your panels, to make sense of what had happened.”

  My stomach lurches. Cole stiffens, his eyes darting to mine.

  “What we found in your panel, Catarina,” Novak says, giving me a cold smile, “was so complex that it would take our best coders years to unravel. But the message in your arm, Lieutenant, told me everything I needed to know. It looks like Miss Agatta is the key we’ve all been waiting for.”

  CHAPTER 30

  NOVAK’S HOLOGRAM DOESN’T LISTEN WHEN I tell her that we need to get to the lab in Canada, to use the equipment my father left for us. She doesn’t understand that the procedure we’re going to run is so complex and specific that it could go wrong countless different ways. She doesn’t believe Leoben when he tells her that Cartaxus is monitoring the Skies network, that even talking to her has now given them our position.

  She doesn’t listen at all, and since she’s the one controlling the triphase on our skin, there isn’t much we can do about it.

  “We’re screwed,” I say to Cole as we climb back into the jeep, our clothes soaked through from the rain, glittering with the triphase. It’s all over us, and there’s no scrubbing it off. It’s in our lungs now, wedged between our cells. The faintest blip from one of Novak’s drones will activate it and chew us into dust unless we follow her demands. We have to follow a route she gave us to Sunnyvale, the secret Skies HQ I’ve heard about but have never actually seen. The drones will follow us. They will watch our every move, ready to send a signal on Novak’s command and activate the triphase. When we get to the Skies base, she wants to unlock the vaccine live, in one of her broadcasts.

  Of course she does.

  I pull my door shut, shoving the wet hair from my face. “If Leoben’s right about Cartaxus spying on the Skies, they probably heard that whole conversation. We just stole one of their cloneboxes. They’re going to come after us.”

  “I’m sure they will.” Cole’s voice is low, furious. He grips the steering wheel until his knuckles bloom white.

  “We could run,” I whisper, glancing through the window at the drones. “We could call their bluff.”

  “No.” He shakes his head, starting the engine. “Not like this. We can’t do anything until we get this stuff off our skin.�
�� We roll back from the splintered tree and swing back onto the highway. Leoben’s jeep follows us, a few car lengths behind, its headlights forming coronas of light in the rain. “Besides,” he says, “I’m not so sure they’re bluffing.”

  “They won’t kill us,” I say. “They need the copy of the vaccine that’s in your arm, and they need me to decrypt it.”

  Cole’s eyes lift to the rearview, his jaw tightening. “It’s not us I’m worried about.”

  I follow his eyes, gripping the side of the seat to turn around and stare back through the rear windows. Behind Leoben’s jeep, a handful of drones remain hovering above the spot on the road where we just stood. One of their lights flashes red. I can’t see the pulse it sends, but the effect on the triphase is instantaneous.

  Sparks of light rise from the ground, forming glittering silver clouds that rise and spread, swallowing the road, coming dangerously close to Leoben’s jeep. The cloud rolls over the grass, consuming everything in its path, leaving only black, charred earth in its wake.

  Leoben’s jeep speeds up until it’s almost touching us. I can’t see Leoben or Dax through their windshield, but I’m sure they’re terrified. Novak’s message is clear: The triphase is real, and the Skies aren’t afraid to use it. Not on Cole or me, perhaps.

  But they’ll use it on our friends.

  I turn back, falling into the seat, my hands bunched into fists. I’m already frightened enough about the decryption, and now I’ll be doing it at gunpoint. The thought makes me want to scream. I’m giving up my life for this. At the very least, I want to die on my own terms.

  But maybe I still can.

  My eyes slide to the handgun holstered at Cole’s belt. We don’t have much leverage here—not with triphase on our skin and drones above us—but there is one final card I can play. My father’s code made it clear that whoever wants to release the vaccine is going to need me alive. I can’t turn a gun on a hundred drones, or a troop of Cartaxus soldiers, but I can turn one on my own head and hold myself for ransom. I don’t know what I’d ask for, or what good it would do, but it’d give me some semblance of control over the last hours of my life.

  “You should give me a gun,” I say.

  Cole glances over. “For what?”

  “To . . . protect myself. This might turn into a firefight between Cartaxus and the Skies. What if you get hurt again?”

  “Can you shoot?”

  “I got that Lurker in the head in the mines.”

  “At five yards, sure. I’m asking if you could take him down with a nonlethal shot at twenty yards, while it’s raining, and he’s running in zigzags.”

  I blow out a frustrated sigh. “Of course I couldn’t.”

  “Then a gun isn’t going to help you, but I can give you something better. I just need a few minutes to get it out.”

  Lightning crackles in the distance, revealing the silhouette of mountains on the horizon. “Sure,” I say. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  Cole checks the rearview, his eyes glazing over momentarily. The jeep’s headlights glow brighter, and a warning flashes up on the dash, telling me that it’s switching to full autodriver mode. Cole turns and reaches over the seat, dragging his backpack closer, and digs around in a zippered compartment. He pulls out a knife.

  I roll my eyes. “Are you kidding me? A knife is clearly not better than a gun.”

  “I never said it was. Just give me a minute.”

  He tilts his seat back, letting the jeep drive on its own, and pulls the bottom of his shirt up over his chest. The gunshot wound from the mines is now a tiny silver dot on his taut, muscled stomach, beside a trail of black hair that dives down to his belt. Heat prickles on my neck at the sight. I fight it down, forcing my eyes away.

  “What exactly are you doing?” I ask.

  Cole has the knife clutched in one hand and is prodding around his ribs with the other. “Looking for something.”

  “For what?”

  He spins the knife so the blade juts toward his chest. “For this.” He stabs the blade between his ribs.

  I fly back against the window, my heart pounding. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He twists the blade, wincing. “Uh, it’s tight. Haven’t used it in a while.”

  “Used what?” I throw one hand over my eyes, squinting between my fingers. “Oh shit. It’s in your chest, isn’t it?”

  He nods, grunting, dragging the blade back out. It scrapes against something inside him, letting out a metallic shriek. The incision is clean and strangely bloodless. He presses his fingers to it, and a swarm of white wires unfurls from his chest, dragging something out with a squelch.

  “Oh hell no.” I turn to the window, pressing my forehead to the glass. Heat is rushing up my neck again, but this time it’s because I’m going to be sick. “You did not just do that.”

  “These wouldn’t be very useful if they were outside my body. The whole point of these vials is that I can’t lose them in an emergency.”

  He drags a little black pendant from the incision between his ribs, slick and capsule shaped, like a polished stone. The wires in his chest shrink back inside him, dragging the incision closed as they recede. He digs around in his backpack, pulls out a silver chain, and slips the black pendant onto it, then hands it to me. “This is nightstick. Keep it around your neck at all times, and just twist the ends to use it. Since you don’t have a panel yet, it’s probably the best weapon you could have.”

  I take the pendant carefully and slide the chain around my neck. It’s warm. Warm from being inside Cole’s chest. The thought should disgust me, but for some reason it doesn’t. “What does it do?”

  He presses a blue bandage to his ribs and pulls his shirt back down. “It knocks people out, probably the same way you knocked me out in the cabin. It’ll work on anyone with a panel in a twenty-foot radius, including the person who sets it off. It’s good for hostage situations, or when you know you have backup coming. It only lasts a few minutes, but that’s plenty of time for you, because you’ll be immune to the effects.”

  “Because I don’t have a panel.”

  “Exactly.”

  I nod, impressed. “That’s actually brilliant.”

  He smiles, raising his seat, taking the steering wheel again. “I have my moments.”

  I sink back into my seat, my fingers sliding over the black lozenge. It won’t help me hold myself for ransom, but it might end up being more useful than a gun. The spark of an idea is forming in my head—not something I can use to protect myself, though. Something bigger. Something I can’t quite understand. “How does this work on every panel? Does it use an EMP?”

  “I don’t know. The code is top secret. Actually . . .” Cole’s eyes glaze over briefly. “Since you unlocked my panel, we have access now. You can read it for yourself.”

  The smooth curved glass of the dashboard flashes. Lines of white text appear on it in a mix of languages: backslash and DNAssembly. Gentech code. I lean forward, running my fingers across the dash to scroll, unfolding the algorithms in my mind.

  The code is precise and devoid of comments, military style, but I’d recognize the attack pattern it’s using anywhere. It kicks off a wireless blast to throw itself at the power management system of every panel in a twenty-foot range. It’s exploiting a weakness in gentech batteries that’s almost identical to the code I wrote to break into panels. That’s how I hacked into Cole’s arm—I focused my efforts on that one, microscopic weakness. I’ve never targeted it as precisely as the nightstick does, but the general method is the same: smash the power connection, wedge yourself into the cracks, and hurl commands through.

  This code sends just one command. It uses another notation, but it has the same effect as when I knocked Cole out with recumbentibus.

  I look up. “Are you sure this works on every panel?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  My eyes drop back to the code. “Because it’s exploiting a weakness in gentech batteries. If Cartaxus
wrote this code, that means they know about the weakness. Why wouldn’t they fix it?”

  “Maybe they want it there, like a back door.”

  That makes sense—every panel in the world is built on the same basic Cartaxus framework, and I’m sure they’d want a back door to control people’s panels without their permission—but this weakness isn’t big enough. It’s not even a door. It’s a window, a crevice. Hardly enough to send one command through.

  But still, it’s so elegant, so simple. It’s hard to believe more people haven’t tried to exploit it.

  Or maybe they have.

  I turn to Cole. “Do you have a copy of Jun Bei’s kick simulation?”

  “I think so, but it’s built for Cartaxus systems. It’s not going to help us get out of a Skies base.”

  “It’s not for getting us out. I just need to see it.”

  Cole gives me a dubious look but flicks it to the dash. I strain against my seat belt, rubbing my wounded knee as I read through Jun Bei’s code. It’s beautiful. Full of comments, full of wild variable names and references to her own library of custom apps. It would have taken years to write. My stomach twists with jealousy. She’s smarter than me. She’s ruthless.

  She’s completely terrifying.

  And just as I suspected, Jun Bei has used the same attack method as the nightstick code. I couldn’t understand how she took over Homestake so quickly when every server was protected, and every system was firewalled. It should have taken hours, but she did it in minutes. But that’s because she wasn’t hacking the systems.

  She was hacking the people, instead.

  Jun Bei’s kick simulation is boosted wirelessly, just like the nightstick, but it reaches every panel in a mile-wide radius. She’s given the tiny hidden entry point a name: the trapdoor. Just the sight of the word makes me shiver. A tiny, hidden portal that her code, my viruses, and the nightstick all exploit. Her simulation slips two lines of code through the trapdoor—two perfect, flawless lines that take root and give her access to the user’s panel.

  From there, she has their files, their comm-link, their logins. Why hack through a firewall when you can get the password straight from an engineer’s arm?