This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  They just stare at me with wide eyes until Jun Bei pushes through the group and slides a scalpel from her sleeve. She spins it around deftly, holding the handle out to me. “Take this,” she says. “Don’t let anyone hurt you. At least one of us should get out of here.”

  I blink, stunned. In three weeks those are the only words she’s said to me. I thought her voice would be harsh and bold, but it’s soft. She’s almost shy. And she’s helping me. She looks too world-weary to be five years old, but I don’t think that’s an issue with the simulation. I think this is who Jun Bei really is, beneath her skills, her genius, and her plans.

  I think she’s a soft-spoken girl who’s suffered through a childhood that taught her to keep weapons hidden in her sleeves.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking the scalpel, holding her eyes until she looks away.

  Leoben’s eyes linger on Jun Bei, a strange look on his face. “Come on, squid,” he says, still watching her, holding the genkit’s cable. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I slip the scalpel into my pocket and hold out my arm, offering him my cuff, then pause. “Wait—if you’ve been kept away from Cartaxus’s networks, then how did you get through to me here? You’re accessing the implant remotely, right? You have to be doing this through a satellite connection.”

  “It’s complicated. I don’t have time to explain now.”

  I frown, drawing my arm back. I want to get out of here, but this still feels off. Leoben is here somehow, and he says he’s going to help me, but now he’s trying to jack a cable into my arm while clearly keeping something from me. “Why don’t you just tell me how to get out, and I’ll do it?”

  He tilts his head back, letting out an exasperated sigh. “Why do you always have to be so difficult?”

  I step away. He’s definitely holding something back. There are only a handful of people with the skills to be able to hack into this implant, and only a few even know it exists. There’s Lachlan, Jun Bei, and maybe some of the top people at Cartaxus. Leoben must be working with one of them. Whoever it is, he clearly doesn’t want me to know.

  I slide the scalpel back out of my pocket. “Tell me why you’re here.”

  Another rumble shudders through the lab, and Leoben shakes his head. “We don’t have time for this. You need to leave, now.”

  “No,” I say, my voice hardening. “Tell me who sent you here.”

  He scrapes his hand over his face. When he meets my eyes again, he doesn’t look like my friend anymore. He looks like a Cartaxus black-out agent, like someone who could kill me with his bare hands. It’s the same look I remember from when we used to spar. When he’d launch himself at me and send me to the ground, time after time. We’re in a simulation now—there’s no reason he should be faster or stronger than me—but the look on his face still sends a jolt of fear through me.

  His hand tightens on the genkit cable, and I turn and bolt across the room.

  “Dammit, squid!” he yells, racing after me. The lab’s floor is littered with broken pieces of equipment, and the children scramble away as I run toward them, weaving desperately through the mess. My foot slides on a shard of broken glass, and I lurch wildly for the door, but it’s too late.

  Leoben grabs my shirt, wrenching me back. I stumble, twisting out of his grasp, lifting the scalpel in a blur. He’s better trained than me, but he’s still wounded, and I aim the scalpel at his neck. My arm flies out, but he grabs my wrist and spins me around, throwing me off my feet and to the floor.

  The breath shudders from my lungs, the room tilting. A pain like lightning stabs through my stomach, arcing across my ribs. I roll to my side, my eyes scrunched shut, and let out a scream.

  The scalpel in my hand is gone, Leoben is standing above me, and there’s a jagged shard of metal jutting from my abdomen.

  “Goddammit,” he hisses, staring down at me. “Why’d you have to run?” He hauls me back to the genkit by my arm, dragging me across the floor. My vision is spinning, my lungs desperate for air. The pain in my stomach feels like bursts of fire rippling across my skin.

  “I’m sorry, squid,” he mutters, yanking up my panel arm. “I really didn’t want it to come to this.”

  “Lee, please!” I beg him, trying to wrench my arm away. But it’s no use. He’s too strong—too fast.

  I let out a scream as he jacks the cable into my cuff, and everything goes black.

  CHAPTER 5 JUN BEI

  I KNOW SOMETHING IS WRONG as soon as I wake. There are no sounds, no voices near me—just a throbbing in my forehead and an ache in my jaw that feels like needles being driven into my skin. I grope for my panel’s interface, the edges of my thoughts fuzzy with sleep, and pull up my home screen. I’m in Entropia, and my vitals are normal, but my healing tech is in overdrive.… And I’ve been unconscious for the last two hours.

  I jerk awake, my eyes blinking wide. I’m lying on a steel-framed bed in a small laboratory. A pounding, splintering pain in my head is blurring my vision. The ceiling above me is smooth concrete, and the air is laced with the scent of nanosolution. There’s a metal door to my left and a pile of bloodied bandages on the floor, but no sign of who brought me here. The last thing I remember is the caves—we found the Lurkers and the wounded woman. I touch my forehead, feeling gauze and metal clips, the tender swelling of a bruise. A faint memory circles through me of being hit by falling rocks. There’s another bandage on the left side of my face. I prod carefully at the injury beneath it, feeling shredded flesh and a smooth curve of exposed bone.

  Pain rockets through me. I freeze, gasping, trying to remember what happened. We were in the caves; we blew the roof to stop the Lurkers, and I healed Matrix’s wife. There was gunfire, and we tried to get away.

  Then Matrix turned wild and attacked me.… And Cole showed up and shot her.

  “Shit,” I breathe, my heart pounding, and roll to my side. The pain in my jaw erupts into a blaze that takes my breath away. Cole’s here, in Entropia. Cartaxus must have sent him. They’ll want to drag me into a lab, or a cell, or kill me for running the wipe. I look around for my holster, spotting it on the floor, my gun gleaming in the fluorescent lights. The walls blur, and my head spins as I swing my legs over the side of the bed to get to it. I push myself to my feet, swaying, and the door flies open.

  “Jun Bei.”

  I freeze. Cole is standing in the doorway. There’s dust caked into the creases around his eyes, blood crusted on his skin, but it’s him—in the flesh. Dark, curling hair, ice-blue eyes that light up as he sees me. A breath catches in my throat, and suddenly I’m a child again, bandaged and wounded, desperate for the comfort of his arms. For a moment it’s us against the world, bound by our wounds, by our pain, and by the burning promise to each other that we’ll both be free one day.

  Then my gaze drops to his black armor and the antlers on his chest. I see the leylines stretching across his skin, the weapon at his side. He’s not the Cole I grew up with. He’s the boy who stared into Catarina’s eyes and never heard me screaming back at him. He whispered words to her that he once whispered to me.

  He wanted to hurt me. He lied to me. He’s my enemy.

  “I still can’t believe you’re really here,” he whispers. His eyes are wide, his breathing shallow, his face completely open. I can see every flicker of sadness and affection passing through him. It makes me aware of my own features, and I force my expression to be neutral. I don’t ever want to look as vulnerable as he does now.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask. “Did Cartaxus send you to drag me back?”

  “No,” he says, his voice soft. He has a bundle of medical supplies tucked under his arm, and he sets them down on a counter near the door. “I’m here to talk.”

  Talk. I almost snort. There’s no way Cartaxus sent a black-out agent here to talk to me. Talking isn’t exactly their specialty. He’s here to spy on me and the other genehackers. I glance down at my holster, but it’s too far away to grab without Cole stopping me. If I’m forced to d
efend myself from him, I’ll have to do it with code.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” I say. The pain in my jaw surges with every word. I close my eyes, breathing through it. He shouldn’t be here—not wearing armor, not carrying a gun. Cartaxus almost destroyed this city just a few weeks ago, and if Entropia’s citizens see him here, they’ll tear him apart. I can’t be seen with him either. Nobody will trust me if I’m caught talking to one of Cartaxus’s black-out agents.

  Or maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way.

  My eyes snap open, moving over his body, zeroing in on the dark blood staining his shirt. Cole could be just what I’ve been waiting for. He’s a Cartaxus soldier, but he’s also one of the Zarathustra subjects, and his DNA is part of the Panacea. I wasn’t able to learn anything from Matrix’s wife, so I’m no closer to finding the missing piece of the code, but there’s a chance I can start to figure it out if I run some tests on Cole. His cells could help me parse the parts of the Panacea that I still can’t understand.

  I don’t think he’ll be a willing experimental subject for me, though.

  “You’re hurt,” he says. He unrolls the bundle of medical supplies, picking up a silver vial of healing tech. “I’ll explain everything—just sit back down. You need to rest.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, sending out a pulse from my cuff to test his tech. It’s firewalled more fiercely than any panel I’ve seen before. There’s a chance I could hack it, but I won’t be able to do it remotely, not without him realizing what I’m doing. That means either using a wire or pressing my cuff against his panel to run a short-wave hack.

  He isn’t just going to let me hack him, though. I need to make him feel comfortable so that I can get close to him.

  I nod at the bloodstains on his clothes. “How about you? Are you hurt?”

  “It’s a scratch. Your cheek, Jun Bei—”

  “Show me,” I say, walking stiffly to his side, reaching for him. He flinches as I step closer, but he doesn’t back away. His skin is streaked with dust, his eyes narrowed as I lift the hem of his black, blood-soaked shirt, revealing a three-inch gash in his stomach.

  The sight hits me harder than I thought it would. A wave of memories rolls through me—gleaming laboratory tables, scars and stitches and jagged wounds. I’ve seen Cole hurt so many times before that it shouldn’t move me like this, and I definitely shouldn’t let it move me. The roiling ocean inside me is swelling, crashing against my self-control. When I look up, Cole’s eyes are locked on mine, and I can feel him trembling. Everything I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to forget is written in his face. The pain and misery of our past, the shared desperation.

  I swallow hard and drop my eyes from his, forcing my feelings down.

  “You’ve been stabbed.” I take his arm, guiding him toward the bed. “Let me check your healing tech.”

  “My tech is fine.”

  “Let me optimize it, then.”

  A flicker of suspicion passes over his face, and he draws his arm away. “Let’s focus on your injuries.”

  “Okay,” I say. That was too blunt, too obvious. I’ll have to be smarter if I’m going to hack into his panel.

  He reaches for the bundle on the counter. “I brought—”

  “I can handle it.” I run my hands over my jeans. My clothes are streaked with dust and blood, but the emergency masks are still in my pocket, crinkling as I pull one out. I bring my hand up to check the bandaged, ruined mess on the side of my face, and the pain that blooms at the slightest brush of my fingertips is enough to make my breathing stutter. It’s not a new pain, though. I’ve been enduring worse than this every time I’ve tried to burn away the rogue patch of Catarina’s DNA. Every day I’ve injected myself with a toxic blend of nanites to chew away the flesh, and every day it’s grown back just the same—Catarina’s stubborn DNA filling the cells in my cheek instead of mine.

  I walk to a scratched mirror on the wall and tug down the bandage taped over my cheek. My skin is bruised, my eyes are bloodshot, and the bite wound on my face is horrific. I peel back the clear film from the mask, laying it flat across my palm, and suck in a breath to brace myself.

  Cole’s eyes widen with horror as I lift my hand and press the silver gel to the wound.

  The pain is an avalanche. I was wrong; this is new. The shredded skin and nerves on my cheek are more sensitive than I’m used to. The jolt of agony that rockets through me as the gel seals against my skin takes my breath, my sight, my consciousness with it in a blinding flash of white.

  “For God’s sake, Jun Bei!” Cole rushes forward in a blur. He’s at my side, catching me before I realize I’m falling. His voice is tinged with static, my senses fading in and out as he takes my shoulders, lowering me until I’m sitting on the floor. “Why are you always so stubborn?”

  I lean back against the side of the bed, drawing in a shaking breath. “Why are you always so surprised?”

  The gel is melting against my face, bonding to the wound, but through the haze of pain I’m lucid enough to grasp Cole’s arm as though I need him for support. I scrunch my eyes shut, shaking with pain, and press the black metal of my cuff to his panel. A script to hack his tech starts running automatically.

  Cole’s eyes lock on mine, but there’s no sign he’s aware of the code pulsing through my cuff to test the limits of his tech. So far, all it’s hitting is firewalls that I don’t know how to break through. The mask’s anesthetic kicks in slowly, spreading prickles of icy numbness across my cheek. Cole starts to move away, but I grip his arm tighter, straightening.

  “What happened to Matrix?” I ask. “The woman you shot.”

  His eyes lower. “I’m sorry. She didn’t make it. Her wife survived, though. Your friend Rhine, she helped me get in and bring you back here. She’s dealing with the wounded right now, but she said she’d come by soon. There’s a medical bay being set up in the park.”

  “A medical bay?” I frown. “How many people are wounded?”

  “Dozens. There was another attack in the southern tunnels with more Lurkers.”

  A chill creeps across my skin. Dozens of wounded. Another attack. This is more serious than I thought. The hack on Cole’s tech has almost finished running, but it hasn’t found a single weakness. I could still run the tests I want to with a wire, but that would mean getting him jacked into a genkit. There’s one in Regina’s lab that would work. Industrial grade, loaded with custom scripts. I could probably sneak Cole through the back hallways.…

  But maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about this right now. The city is in crisis, and I could help with the wounded, but all I can focus on is finishing the Panacea. The code has me by the throat. I don’t know how to stop thinking about it, shuffling the pieces of the puzzle in my mind. If there’s a chance that studying Cole’s DNA can help me solve it, then I don’t know if I have the strength to resist.

  The hack on Cole’s panel finishes, unsuccessful. I slide my hand from his arm. “Did anyone see you bring me here?”

  “Just Rhine,” he says. “We took the service elevator.”

  I nod, pushing myself up. The pain in my cheek has dulled into a low, pulsing throb. Cole stands with me, watching warily as I snatch my holster from the floor and swing open the door to check the hallway. We’re on the same level as Regina’s lab. I could easily take Cole there and figure out a way to hack his tech.

  Or I could take the stairwell down to the park and see if Rhine needs my help with the wounded.

  I look up and down the hallway, torn. Going to the park is the right thing to do. I came here to join this city and become a part of it, and now its people are hurting. I could probably save some lives. Ruse would be proud of me. But where’s the logic in saving half a dozen people when a few hours of work could save millions?

  I tug my jacket on, looking back at Cole. “I’m going to take you to a lab where we can talk without being disturbed. You need to keep out of sight unless you want to get yourself killed. Everyone here hate
s Cartaxus—they really hate them.”

  “I’m not the one they should be worried about,” he says, following me as I head down the hallway. “More of those Lurkers are on their way. I saw them when I was driving in.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I say, heading toward the lab, sending out pulses from my cuff to check for people who might see us. The hallways are empty, and so are the rooms on either side. Everyone must be gathered in the park. We reach the back entrance to the lab, and I pause at the door to scan it.

  “You don’t understand,” Cole says. “There are more Lurkers coming. I saw some on my way here. It looked like hundreds. You’re not going to be able to handle them on your own.”

  My focus snaps to Cole. “Wait—how can there be hundreds of them?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” he says. “That woman in the caves wasn’t the only person to turn like that. It’s happening everywhere, even in the bunkers, and Cartaxus doesn’t know how to stop it.”

  Ice prickles across my skin. I should be hurrying into the lab and out of sight. I should be trying to hide Cole, but all I can do is stare as his words spin in my mind.

  It’s happening everywhere.

  People turning into Lurkers. People losing control. I touch the silver gel on my cheek, tracing the outline of the missing flesh. Matrix was normal one minute, maybe a little jittery, but then she just snapped. She sank her teeth into me and ripped out a chunk of my face. She wasn’t hurt; she wasn’t sick. There wasn’t a hint of the scent around us, but she still lost herself in the Wrath.

  “What the hell is going on?” I ask.

  But as soon as I ask the question, I know. I’ve seen people turn like that before. I was trapped inside the Zarathustra simulation, watching on a screen as Catarina ran through the streets of Sunnyvale. I watched as hordes of people fought and killed one another, their panels glowing orange.

  Every person in that town looked like Matrix did today—snarling and vicious, lost in the Wrath. They’d been turned into monsters by my code.