by Emily Suvada
But the more I think about it, maybe that’s okay. Cole and I are both broken, but maybe we’re broken in the same way. Fractured along the same axis, two halves of a whole, both hurt by people who left us behind and never once looked back.
Maybe it’s time we turned away from them, too.
“I saw the broadcast. You did so well. . . .” Cole’s ice-blue eyes are creased with concern. It seems to hit him suddenly. “They didn’t tell you, did they? You didn’t know. You didn’t agree to be part of that farce.”
I shake my head, biting my lip. I don’t trust my voice enough to speak.
Cole’s hands curl into fists. “They’re using you, Cat. That’s what these people do. They use you, and they don’t care. But you don’t have to let them. We can leave here, right now. Just tell me what you need me to do.”
“No . . . ,” I start, not knowing what to say. I don’t even know why I’m here—why in my darkest moments my first instinct is to run into Cole’s arms. All I know is that there’s something inside me that feels like it’s hanging by a thread, that swings toward him every time he’s standing by my side. I know he’s the only thing that’s felt right in this plan, and that if I don’t tell him now, I won’t get another chance.
“Cat, what do you need?”
I chew my lip, summoning the courage, then step to him, letting my hands slide up his chest.
“I need you.”
A beat passes in silence, then understanding flickers in his eyes. He searches my face as though trying to decide whether I’m serious or not. A flash of something passes through him—a hint of doubt, of concern—then his gaze finally locks on mine.
It’s like lightning.
This is nothing like the awkward, fumbling moments Dax and I shared. This is power, raw and fierce, crackling in the air. My whole world shrinks and warps, racing down into a point that dances in the light reflected in Cole’s eyes.
He’s just watching me, so close, so still, waiting for me to cross the gaping chasm that lies between us. Gravity tilts again, nudging us closer, and I let the force fling me across the abyss. My hand trembles as I slide it behind his neck, close my eyes, and press my lips to his.
For a heartbeat it’s like kissing stone. He is immovable, a statue of pure resistance. I’m hit with a flare of horror—I was wrong; he doesn’t want me. The shock grips me like a fist, until he melts suddenly, his arms snaking around my waist.
His lips part with a low sound of yearning and desire, crushing against mine as he kisses me back, hard. He tastes like salt and sweat. His scent curls through my senses, reducing my circling, frantic thoughts down to a background hum.
This is right.
The touch, the taste, the very smell of him folds into a space in my heart that is his perfect size and shape. His chest against mine. His fingers pressed to the small of my back. The way my shoulders fit neatly inside the circle of his arms.
I break off the kiss to drag in a breath, and he brings one hand to my face. “Cat—” he starts, but I don’t want to talk. We don’t need words right now. All I want are his lips on mine and his hands on my skin. I grab his shirt and pull him to me, forcing his lips open with mine.
He yields for a moment, stunned, then lets out a growl in the back of his throat. He pushes me with his hips, guiding me to the bed, and we tumble into it together, my fists bunched in his shirt.
“I want you,” I whisper, tugging at the fabric. His shirt comes off in a blur, showering us with a cloud of sparkling nanites. The scars on his chest gleam, and I shove him onto his back, bringing my lips to each cruel line slashed into his skin.
A moan rises from his throat. He pulls me up to kiss him again, his hands sliding underneath my tank top.
“You’re so beautiful, Cat.” He drops onto the pillow, staring up at me. “You have no idea how beautiful you are.”
I close my eyes, arching my back, hooking my fingers under the hem of my top to pull it off just as a knock sounds on the door.
I freeze.
Cole is up in a blur, shirtless and flushed, sending me tumbling onto the bed. He has a gun in his hand and has angled himself between me and the door before I can even scramble to sit up.
A second knock sounds and then a flap at the bottom of the door swings open, and a paper-wrapped package slides through a metal slot. Footsteps echo down the hallway, disappearing slowly, and Cole sets his gun down on the desk and picks up the package.
He turns it over in his hands, then rips the paper open and scans the contents briefly before handing it to me. “It’s for you.”
“For me?” I take the package. A white cotton bathrobe and slippers fall into my lap, along with a silver slip of fabric that feels like water when I touch it. A handwritten note is clipped to the back.
Wear this for the procedure. Change in the bathroom unless you want us watching.—Novak
My head snaps up, my eyes searching the corners of the ceiling. “Cole, are there cameras in here?”
He shifts uncomfortably. “Uh, yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I was about to take my shirt off!”
He scratches his neck. “Well, I was a little distracted by the fact that you were . . . you know, taking your shirt off.”
I just stare at him. I want to be angry, but there’s a flush on his cheeks, and dead nanites in his hair, and I’ve never seen anyone look so beautiful.
“Jesus, Cole.” I stand up from the bed, clutching the fabric and the bathrobe, my skin still tingling in the places he kissed me. A second ago this felt so right, but now all I feel is a lurch of confusion. I don’t know why I’m here or what I’m getting us into.
I’m about to die, and he’s about to lose me. Coming to his room was a mistake. I shouldn’t have let my weakness get the best of me.
“I should go.”
“Cat, wait.” He takes my arm. “I’m sorry. I should have told you about the cameras. I was going to, I swear.”
I shake my head. “It’s not that. It’s the procedure, my father, everything. I can’t think straight right now. I shouldn’t have come here. This was a mistake.”
“It didn’t feel like one to me.” He steps closer, bringing his hand to my face.
My eyes drop to the sketchbook on the floor. “Really? Then why were you looking at your drawings of Jun Bei when I came in?”
“I wasn’t.” He bends down and picks up the sketchbook. “I wasn’t looking at her, at least.”
He flips open the book to a page near the end, where a girl’s face with bright, sharp eyes stares back at me. Her mouth is tilted slightly, her jawline curved up elegantly into a mass of long, swirling dark hair. She looks beautiful and strong. But this face doesn’t belong to Jun Bei. This is a sketch of me during the broadcast. Every curve and plane of my features has been drawn so perfectly, so carefully, that it takes my breath away.
I tear my gaze from the drawing and up to Cole. Something trembles inside me at the look on his face.
It’s pure vulnerability. Pure, unrestrained emotion breaking through from a man built and forged to be a weapon. The look sends a jolt through me. A rising voice, an answer. A feeling so powerful it makes my hands shake.
He’s right. This is real. I can feel it between us like a shift in time and space, a distortion of the very laws of nature. There’s no turning back from this. We’ve already gone too far. I promised Leoben that I wouldn’t hurt Cole, but now he’s opened up his heart just in time to see me die.
I’ve lied to him. I’m still lying. He’s going to hate me for it.
There’s nothing so dangerous as an Agatta’s best intentions.
“Cole,” I breathe, my voice breaking. I want to leave, to run, to wind back the clock and give us more time together. Instead, all I can do is step into his arms and let him pull me tight against his chest.
This time when he kisses me, it’s not with the fire that was driving us before. It’s soft and gentle, the kind of kiss that makes the world shrink down. We hold e
ach other, and somewhere in the sound of his heartbeat, I find myself circling a tentative kind of peace.
If this is how I get to spend the last afternoon of my life, then maybe everything is okay.
Maybe I’m ready to die after all.
CHAPTER 34
NIGHT IS FALLING BY THE time a guard knocks on Cole’s door, telling us the Skies are ready to run the decryption. We’re led outside and into a black-windowed car to take us to Sunnyvale’s research laboratory, where Dax and Novak are waiting. Cole sits beside me in the back of the car as we roll across town, with one hand on his knee, the other in my lap, his fingers laced through mine.
“You look beautiful,” he says. “I like this outfit a lot.”
I roll my eyes. I’m dressed in a cotton bathrobe, but underneath I’m wearing the silver slip of fabric Novak sent me. It turned out to be a pressure suit, a swimsuit-shaped outfit made from a micron-thick layer of fabric designed to transfer nanosolutions into my skin. It feels like I’m wearing air, and it looks like it too, but it took some work to get into. The fabric is flexible and stretches almost infinitely, but I still needed Cole’s help to get it on.
At least, that’s what I said, loud enough for anyone spying on Cole’s room to hear before we retreated into the tiny bathroom. It was cramped and musty, but when Cole checked for cameras, his sweep came back clean. He helped me pull the silver fabric over my skin, and the embers of the fire between us sparked back into flames.
“I’m just saying you look good.” He gives me a low smile that makes my stomach prickle with heat. “I like what you did with your hair.”
“It isn’t as neat as Agnes does it.” I reach my free hand up, touching the fishtail braid I’ve knotted my hair into, just like Agnes used to do. I still haven’t heard from her. I sent her an email from a terminal when I was working on the trapdoor code, but it just sat in her inbox, unread. Part of me knows it’s naive to think she’s still okay. She’d never ignore me like this. Logically, I know something bad must have happened to her.
But just for now, I’m forgoing logic. It isn’t enough to get me through this. I’m sitting in a car that’s taking me to my death, about to submit my body to lethal code my father crafted for me. I have no guarantee that it will work, or that it’s even the right thing for us to do.
Instead of logic, I’m choosing the light I see in Cole’s eyes whenever he looks at me.
I’m choosing hope.
Every touch from Cole, every glance and smile is a burst of warmth that chases the shadow of the decryption from my mind. When he looks at me, I can almost believe that I am the girl in his drawing, with her head held high and her eyes ablaze. He is like a drug, and a powerful one. The strength of my feelings frightens me—I don’t know how my heart entwined with his so quickly. Maybe it’s what we’ve been through, or maybe we really are broken in the same way, our jagged edges aligning perfectly. I wish we had more time together. I wish I could tell him the truth.
I hope he’ll understand, after I’m gone.
“They’re making a bonfire,” I say, looking out the window as we get closer to the lab. A pile of logs has been set up in the high school’s football field. A crowd has formed around it, coming out to witness history. I can feel their excitement, and I can sense it in Cole, too. The thrill of knowing that we’re just hours away from ending this nightmare, from defeating the virus, and rebuilding the world.
For the price of one life, I can give these people a future again.
How many people get to say that?
The car pulls into a parking lot beside a three-story building that was once a school but is now a research lab. Silver snakes of ductwork hang haphazardly from the windows, and the lawn is overgrown, littered with trash.
“You sure these guys can handle this?” Cole asks. “This place looks like a dump.”
I smile. “That’s what you said about my father’s lab, remember?”
He snorts. “I guess I did. Are you ready to do this?”
I nod, squeezing his hand. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Cole and I keep our hands locked together as a guard leads us through the school’s rubber-lined airtight doors and into a long, dimly lit hallway. The doors along it open into old classrooms that I peer into as we walk. There are chalkboards on the walls and chairs stacked haphazardly. I expect to be hit by nostalgia for my time at boarding school, but all I can think about is Cole.
His fingers are laced through mine. His scent clings to my skin, and I can’t stop glancing at him to see if he’s looking back at me. I should be terrified, but I feel brave as long as I’m beside him.
This isn’t just a crush. This is more.
It might be love.
I squeeze Cole’s hand as we turn a corner, and he squeezes it right back, bumping his shoulder into mine. A rush of heat prickles my cheeks.
I can’t believe I’m falling in love on the last day of my life.
The guard leads us through a pair of scuffed double doors and into the school’s gymnasium. Cluttered lab benches stand in rows across the floor. It smells like disinfectant—the same sharp vanilla scent that I’ve come to associate with Cartaxus. Dozens of white-coated scientists mill around the lab benches, tending to humming genkits, checking the equipment. The walls are covered with screens and charts, maps and genetic reference tables, and a snake pit of power cords is duct-taped to the floor. It’s just like the cabin’s lab—haphazard, messy, organic. The thought is strangely comforting.
“Novak sure likes cameras,” Cole says, dropping his hand from mine.
I follow his eyes up to the ceiling and pull the bathrobe tighter around me. At least a thousand minicopter drones are swarming through the rafters, most no bigger than a fly. They swoop through the air like passenger pigeons, moving in a flock across the room. Each one carries a tiny, black-eyed camera. Now that I’ve seen them, the high-pitched whine of their propellers is all I can hear.
The doors click shut behind us. Novak’s voice cuts through the air. “Cameras, sound check. Clean language, people. Future generations will study today’s footage in school.”
I frown. That’s unsettling. I shuffle closer to Cole as the ceiling lights grow brighter and the swarm of drones falls like rain. They whiz past my face, looping in frantic circles around me, building a three-dimensional map of my body.
“Welcome, Miss Agatta,” Novak says, striding across the room to greet us, speaking in the warm, confident tone she always puts on for the cameras. The drones dart around her as she walks, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her scarlet hair has been pulled back into a Mohawk-like braid, and she’s swapped her uniform for mirrored stilettos and a lab coat. Leoben and Dax are standing across the room with a team of scientists beside the clonebox. Dax is watching me through the whining cloud of drones, but I ignore him.
“We have everything set up for you, Catarina,” Novak says. “I’ve followed the decryption procedure’s code right down to the letter.”
“Have you?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. I know she’s lying. I doubt she’s even read the code. If she had, she wouldn’t be so excited about filming this. Once the vaccine hits my cells, my body is going to dissolve. That’s not exactly appropriate footage for humanity’s future schoolchildren.
“We’ve made every preparation,” she replies. “We’ll be using a chamber to keep you comfortable.” She gestures to a shoulder-high vat made of thick curved glass. It’s filled with a blue liquid, the same color as a cloudless sky, that casts an eerie, rippling light on everything around it. An immersion chamber. I’ve seen them in movies. The fluid is laced with nanites that will help my body accept the decryption procedure. It’ll have painkillers, beta-blockers, and a hefty dose of healing tech, but it won’t be enough to keep me alive, not by a long shot.
I step closer, looking the chamber up and down. This bubbling glass box is where I’m going to die. In this room, surrounded by cameras and people I don’t know. It’s suddenly real, it’s right in front of me, a
nd there’s no avoiding it anymore.
“Are you okay?” Cole asks.
I look up, realizing that I’ve frozen mid-step. I try to move, but my feet are glued to the floor, my voice trapped in my throat.
“Cat, what’s wrong?” Cole asks, concerned. “Is everything okay?”
“I-I’m fine,” I say, swallowing the panic, trying to push the fear from my mind. Be brave, I tell myself, but the words ring hollow. I search for the warmth I felt just minutes ago, but I can’t find it.
Cole’s eyes aren’t shining anymore; they’re cold and worried. He’s frightened, and his fear is forming a feedback loop with my own. I’m scared, and he can see it, and there’s nothing I can hold on to. I’ve been keeping the decryption in the back of my mind, but now it’s here, and it’s real. The last minutes of my life are ticking down, and I’m still not ready.
I’m not ready to die.
I close my eyes, forcing the panic down. I’m stronger than this. I’m brave, and I don’t need Cole’s light to see it. I’ve fought, survived for two long years in this nightmare of a world. I’ve been strong, and now that same strength of will is going to help me die.
“It’s just the disinfectant,” I say, clearing my throat. “I always hated the smell.”
Cole nods, searching my face. He knows something is wrong, but there is no waver in my voice, no sign of the storm raging inside me.
Novak looks between us. “Okay, let’s get started. Lieutenant Franklin, since we’ll be cloning the vaccine’s core from your panel, there’s a chance that your tech might glitch.”
Cole nods, his eyes still on me. “I’m willing to take that risk.”
Novak smiles, revealing a row of bright, sharp teeth. “It’s not the risk to you that I’m worried about. I’ve seen your panel’s code, and it’s my understanding that a minor glitch could be quite . . . problematic.” She gives him a meaningful look and gestures to a chair a few yards away, with white leather restraints riveted to the arms.
Cole glances at it, then back to me. He looks reluctant, but he nods. “That’s probably a good idea. Okay, Cat, let’s do this.”
