This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “This is amazing,” I say. “Jun Bei, she . . . she’s incredible. Most viruses act like grenades. This is a goddamn sniper rifle.”

  Cole nods silently. Beneath the jealousy and shock at what I’ve heard about Jun Bei, I’m reluctantly amazed. She’s vicious but brilliant. The girl is a stone-cold genius. She might even be a better coder than my father.

  If I wasn’t driving to my death, I think I’d like to meet her.

  “This code,” I say, “it means that everyone in the world is vulnerable. Every panel has this same weakness that can be exploited. It’s incredible. People would freak out if they saw this.”

  “So what are you going to do with it?”

  I stare at the screen. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Well, you don’t have much time to figure it out. We’re almost there.”

  We swing off the freeway, taking a leaf-strewn exit ramp. The road dives into a valley, over an old bridge, and into a thick, wild forest. Through the trees I can make out the faintest hint of structures in the distance. The glow of a window. A wisp of smoke.

  We’ve reached Sunnyvale.

  The outskirts of the town are dark. It looks like an old mining hub, probably abandoned decades ago, judging by the state of most of the houses. As we get closer to the center, the yards grow cleaner, and the windows shine with airtight epoxy. I’d heard Sunnyvale mentioned on Skies forums, and I assumed it was some kind of shantytown, but it’s nothing like I pictured. This place is clean and pretty. We drive past suburban streets filled with flower beds and vegetable gardens. It’s like we’ve been transported back to a time before the plague. I didn’t even know places like this existed anymore.

  We roll past the town square and up to a warehouse, where guards in full hazard suits are waiting for us. Cole pulls the jeep inside and kills the engine. The guards wave their arms, ordering us to get out.

  Cole reaches for his door handle but pauses, his eyes landing on the black pendant around my neck. “The range of that thing is twenty feet. Remember that, Cat.”

  I nod. “Let’s just stay calm until we know what’s happening.”

  We climb out into the warehouse, our hands raised above our heads. The space is empty, except for two massive coils of steel cable suspended from the ceiling at either end of the room.

  Leoben’s jeep pulls up alongside us, its windows dark. Dax and Leoben climb out, their clothes still wet, their skin glittering.

  “I’ve gotta say,” Leoben says, looking around, stretching, “I thought you Skies guys were a bunch of idiots. I’m kind of impressed.”

  “We do our best.” One of the hazard-suited guards steps forward, and the warehouse’s doors roll shut, locking us in.

  Cole stiffens. His eyes flash to black.

  I grab his arm. “Hey, it’s okay. They have to kill the triphase.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “With an electromagnetic—” My voice cuts out as a humming fills the air. It’s coming from the massive loops of wire hanging from the ceiling, growing deafening, morphing into a towering wash of nonsound. It vibrates in my chest, then cuts out abruptly, leaving me shaking. “With . . . one of those.”

  Cole doubles over, coughing. Leoben lets out a hoot. Dax stands with his arms crossed, glowering at the guards.

  I swipe my finger across my arm. The dust on my skin is still silver and glittering, but it’s growing slowly clearer as the triphase gathers into harmless clumps.

  The guard who stepped forward pulls off his visor and unzips his hazard suit. He’s young, with alabaster skin and long black hair with a single streak of white at his temple, just like Dax used to have. He gives us a broad smile, revealing curved white incisors. Vampire enthusiast. I wonder if he’s had his stomach lined so he can digest blood.

  “Welcome to Sunnyvale,” he says. “We’re sorry to have brought you in like this, but we couldn’t risk letting you go, not with such precious cargo. We’ve set up quarters for you all, and you’re free to move about the town as you like. You’re not prisoners. We just want your help with the vaccine, and then you’ll all be free to leave.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Leoben mutters. “Very generous of you.”

  “You’ll want to shower and change,” the man continues, flashing his fangs. “My people can help you settle into your quarters now, but Miss Agatta will have to come with me to HQ.”

  Dax steps forward, his face paling. “You can’t just take her.” He thinks they’re going to do the procedure now, that I’m about to die. He doesn’t realize that the Skies don’t have the kind of programmers who could take my father’s file and translate it into a procedure this quickly. That’s what Dax is here for. That’s why my father made him part of this. He’s one of the few people on the planet with the skills to run the decryption.

  “What’s happening?” Cole asks, narrowing his eyes. He turns to Dax. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll talk to them,” I say, giving Dax a meaningful look. “I mean it. I’ll be okay.”

  Dax nods reluctantly, and Cole gives me a suspicious, lingering stare as I follow the guard.

  I hope I’ll be okay.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE GUARD TAKES ME THROUGH blocks of quiet, tree-lined streets filled with rows of clean, pretty houses. Some have gardens bursting with beans, herbs, and perfect-looking tomatoes that are probably genehacked to hell and back. We stop outside one of the larger houses, which looks normal except for the grid of metal welded over its walls. It forms a building-size Faraday cage that should stop any wireless transmissions from coming into or out of it. The guard leads me up the worn stone steps, through an iron door, and into the beating heart of Novak’s network.

  Inside, the floor is covered with wires snaking between banks of computers, with glazed-eyed technicians jacked into them. Almost everyone is clearly running a serious amount of what Cartaxus calls “nonstandard” code. Some of it makes the guard’s vampire teeth look tame. One woman has a lion’s mane that stretches down her back, another has three glossy lenses embedded in the back of her head, and a man carrying a roll of wire has a tail that twitches when he looks up and sees me.

  “Catarina.” Novak smiles and strides across the room, dressed in the uniform I recognize from her broadcasts: black pleather with glowing cobalt stripes across her shoulders. She looks younger in person, early thirties at most, and there’s something eerie about her eyes. One of them has a too-bright sheen that means the eye is probably synthetic—a tiny camera wired up to let her see in extra wavelengths. It’s sure to be useful, but it’s creepy as hell to look at.

  In fact, everything about her is kind of creepy.

  “I’m so happy to meet you after all this time.” She reaches out to shake my hand. A silver stud glints on the side of her nose, and a tattoo of a double-helix curls up her neck, disappearing into her scarlet hair. Her grip is firm, but her fingers are cold, matching the steeliness of her gaze. “I’ve been worried about you ever since you broke off our conversation last week.”

  I look down at the dead triphase still dusted across my skin. “You have a funny way of showing your concern for my safety.”

  She just smiles. “You’re my best hacker, Bobcat. Of course I was worried. I sent Agnes over to check on you, but I didn’t hear back. I thought about sending a search team, but we received an anonymous tip-off that you were traveling across the country with an encrypted copy of a vaccine. When we heard from Marcus, we decided we had to do everything in our power to find you. I’m so glad you agreed to join us.”

  I frown. An anonymous tip-off? It must have been Agnes. But if she got in touch with Novak, why didn’t she contact me?

  “I’m happy to help release the vaccine,” I say, “but I do have some demands.”

  Novak blinks. “Demands?”

  “I’m sure you’ve read the code that explains the decryption?”

  She nods, and something in her expression tells me my guess was right—she’s read th
e code, her people know it uses my body to unlock the vaccine, but they don’t know much more about it than that. Only Dax and I are familiar enough with my father’s style of coding to understand the intricacies of the procedure so quickly. That gives me an edge. If I play my cards right, I might be able to bluff my way to some kind of leverage.

  “Then you’ll know that the vaccine won’t be properly decrypted unless I allow it,” I say. “My father wrote it that way, so Cartaxus could never force me to decrypt it. I’ll only allow it to be decrypted to my specifications, and only if it’s going to be distributed freely, to every survivor on the surface and in the bunkers.”

  Novak’s eyes narrow.

  Everything I just said is a lie, but it has enough of a ring of truth to make it believable. I don’t need to be willing to decrypt the vaccine—I don’t even need to be awake. My cells are all that matters, but Dax and I are the only people who know that.

  “Yes,” she says finally, “I’m aware of that. But there are some things you should be aware of, Miss Agatta.”

  “Like what?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Things that your father, perhaps, should have told you long ago.”

  • • •

  Novak says she needs to prepare something, so she leaves me to wait in a room filled with photographs documenting the last two years. One image is blurred at the edges, taken from an ocular implant, showing a riot in a busy downtown street. I’ve seen the picture before. It was taken when a bus carrying a dozen second-stagers to quarantine broke down in Chicago. Someone panicked and opened the door, and the scent washed into the street, triggering one of the largest documented occurrences of the Wrath. The madness gets worse in crowds. Normally it drives you toward the infected, but in a crowd, the hysteria grows, and people turn on each other blindly.

  By the time the Wrath wore off that day, more than a hundred bodies littered the streets.

  I chew my thumbnail, staring at the wild eyes of the people in the photograph. There’s no worse feeling than catching the scent and knowing you’re slipping into the Wrath—that you’re about to hurt people but can’t stop yourself. I can’t help but wonder if it’s the same way Cole feels when his protective protocol kicks in.

  “Miss Agatta?”

  I jump, spinning around. A leylined guard is waiting by the door. “We’re ready for you. Just this way.”

  I nod, dropping my hand from my mouth. I’ve chewed my thumbnail down to the quick, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I force myself to keep my hands at my sides, following the guard down a stairwell at the rear of the house.

  We reach the basement, and pass through a hissing airlock into a room with soundproofing spikes lining its walls. Novak is waiting inside with two people—a man with bright yellow hair, and a woman with slick, transparent skin that looks like it’s been hacked with frog DNA. I’ve never seen anything like it. The glassy layers of skin show patches of muscle and dark streaks of veins.

  The glass-skinned woman stares blankly as I enter, one side of her mouth twitching up. The yellow-haired man is drooling, his head tilted to one side. I look between them warily, raising an eyebrow at Novak.

  “These are two of the world’s leading experts on the Hydra virus,” she says. “Or at least, the best we could do on short notice.”

  The man gives me a slow, deliberate nod, and his whole face twitches.

  “Wait,” I say. “You’re using puppets?”

  The puppet connection is one of gentech’s most dangerous apps, one of the few that the UN agreed to make explicitly illegal. It uses a map of thousands of tiny wires grown throughout its user’s nervous system to allow a puppeteer, a person in a distant location, to remotely take over the puppet’s body. Anyone can be a puppeteer; they don’t need any special tech. Their brain activity is captured like it always is, by their skullnet. That activity includes the mental commands that control their voice and movements, and that’s what gets transmitted directly into the puppet’s muscles.

  Usually, it works quite well. Most people’s brains and bodies are similar enough that a puppeteer’s mental command to nod their head should work on the puppet’s muscles too. It’s not perfect, though. Puppets tend to twitch, and sometimes their speech is garbled, but it’s still the most secure connection possible. Anyone hacking your transmission will just see a stream of unintelligible muscle impulses. Translating them into words would require a machine almost as complex as the human body.

  But it’s dangerous. Puppets have been known to go into cardiac arrest when their hearts were hijacked by leaked signals from the puppeteers. Sometimes the wires don’t grow properly and paralyze the puppets. Sometimes they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do. The puppets are supposed to be conscious, and able to cut off the session at will, but I’ve heard of hacked versions of the code locking people inside their minds. Keeping them trapped inside a body that moves with another’s will, unable to escape. I can’t imagine anything more terrifying.

  I never thought I’d see the app in action, and looking into the strange, blank eyes of the two puppets, I hope I never do again.

  “This is the safest way for us to talk,” Novak says.

  “Who are we talking to that requires this level of secrecy?”

  Novak raises a scarlet eyebrow. “Cartaxus, obviously.”

  I blink, looking between the scientists and back to Novak. “Cartaxus? Are you crazy?”

  “You have to understand,” Novak says. “Even though our methods might be different, both the Skies and Cartaxus are trying to defeat the virus and save as many lives as possible. We’ve fought each other in the past, there’ve even been casualties, but we know when to put aside our differences and work together.”

  “You’re working together?”

  “Of course we are. Without the vaccine, humanity is doomed. Your father was the only person capable of writing code like that. Maybe some of our younger generation would eventually grow talented enough, but by then the virus could have wiped out everyone on the surface.”

  The yellow-haired man coughs. “And now that the virus is growing stronger, the bunkers aren’t safe either. No airlock is foolproof, and our buffer zones are all but useless now, as you saw when you left Homestake.”

  I shift uneasily. “So if you’re working together on this, why did my father think you were going to hold back the vaccine?”

  The glass-skinned woman smiles. “Because we were.”

  Novak flicks a strand of hair from her eyes. “Honestly, Catarina, I thought you would have figured this out by now.”

  I look between them, lost. The female Cartaxus scientist smiles. “You may have noticed, Miss Agatta, that we haven’t been securing our servers as well as we could. Your attacks were quite marvelous, but very few of your friends in the Skies shared your talents, and they were still able to steal our medical code. That’s because we let them. When we designed the bunker system, we knew the population would inevitably split into two factions—those in the bunkers, and those on the surface—and that if we broadcast medical code on our satellites, very few people on the surface would trust it.”

  It starts to make sense. “But if it was stolen . . .”

  Novak smiles. “Exactly. If Cartaxus gave away code, people wouldn’t trust it, but if it was stolen and decrypted by us, they would. The same goes for the vaccine. If Cartaxus were to broadcast it freely, it would make people suspicious, and they might not download it. Nobody wants a repeat of the Influenza tragedy. However, if you stole it and released it to the Skies, they’d snatch it up in a heartbeat.”

  My head spins. “So this whole time we’ve been running from you . . .”

  “When all we want to do is help you unlock the code,” the yellow-haired man says.

  My suspicion flickers. “Then why won’t you let us follow my father’s instructions? We’re supposed to go to a lab—”

  “Yes, and run a procedure. We know,” Novak says. “But what then? How are you going to re
lease the code? How are you going to convince billions of people to download it? There are no clinical trials, no long-term studies. Your father was the only person who could even explain how the vaccine worked, but now he’s gone. You’re asking billions of people to download a mystery. How are you going to do it?”

  I shift my weight from my aching knee. I’d barely even thought about releasing the vaccine. All my focus had been on how to unlock it. “I . . . I don’t know,” I say. “My father didn’t mention that in his notes. I thought people would just want it.”

  “You’d think so,” the man says, “but Cartaxus watched millions of people die of Influenza X after your father’s vaccine was freely released. The Hydra code is brand-new, it’s been rushed through testing, and some people are going to want to wait and see how it works. If that happens, we’re doomed. The virus is evolving dangerously fast. You saw the blowers detonating at the same time outside Homestake—that’s a three-gene mutation. This code could be obsolete within weeks if we can’t get everyone on the surface vaccinated.”

  “Well, we’ll never get everyone,” Novak mutters. “Not everyone out there is still rational. There are people who roam around in packs, eating each other.”

  I swallow. The Lurkers. She’s right—they’re insane. I doubt they’re even lucid enough to control their download settings.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I ask.

  “That’s the thing,” Novak says, sighing. “We don’t know how to do this. We were hoping your father had figured it out.”

  “But you both have satellite networks,” I say.

  “Yes,” the glass-skinned woman says, “and we control the panels of everyone in our bunkers for this very reason. We can simply give them the vaccine without asking their permission. But we can’t do that with the people on the surface.”

  I nod slowly, bringing my hand absently to the black lozenge hanging around my neck. An algorithm is forming in my mind, the spark of something wild and terrible. Something that might just explain why my father left Dax a copy of Jun Bei’s kick simulation.