by Emily Suvada
The crowd of Lurkers backs away as I walk closer. They’re still snarling, some crouched as though they’re getting ready to lunge at me, but they look more afraid than aggressive. And of course they are. They’re hurting. They must be confused. It’s hard to remember that they’re victims when their hands and mouths are streaked with other people’s blood. But they aren’t attacking anyone right now, and they aren’t running for me. The Panacea is working.
I slow my pace as the Lurkers’ faces loosen, their eyes growing clearer. They’re looking at one another and down at their filthy clothes and hands. I can almost feel their humanity rushing back to them. They’re cured. They’re not monsters anymore. This is why the Panacea was written—I know it. It wasn’t for immortality, or to make myself crueler and stronger.
I think I wrote this code for the frightened girl who just wanted to escape the nightmare of her past.
“You did it,” Mato says, walking to my side. He’s staring at the Lurkers in wonder.
“It really works,” I whisper.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. He reaches for my hand. “You can cure them all. And you can do so much more.”
The drone above us drops closer, its rotors whining. Voices lift from the crowd—confusion, elation, and shock. The same emotions are rising in me, too. The Panacea works, and that fact is like a firework inside me, but I wasn’t ready for how it would feel to see it working like this. The Lurkers are cured, but the way I did it was by flipping a switch inside their heads. I altered their minds. The power of it hums through me, making my hands tremble. The thought of anyone using this code on people against their will is horrifying. I can’t release the Panacea if there’s a risk that anyone else will weaponize this code.
“I hope they’re watching this,” Mato says, looking up at the drone. “I want Cartaxus to see the cure their scientists could never give them.”
“I don’t know if it’s finished yet,” I murmur. “It might need more protections. I need to keep full control over it.”
“It’s perfect,” Mato says. “It should be controlled by you. You’re the one who created it. Now it’s time for you to lead us into the world we’ve both dreamed of.”
The van’s engine whines behind us. It’s following us through the throng, heading for a checkpoint in the razorgrass border. The crowd parts before us, revealing a team of shocked, wide-eyed hackers watching from beyond the barricades. The van pauses beside us, and Mato swings the passenger door open for me.
“Come on,” he says, shooting me a smile. “Let’s go home.”
I climb into the van, reeling. The Lurkers are getting noisy now. Their confusion is turning into horror. They’re not monsters anymore, but they’ve lived like them for days or weeks. The Panacea has cured them, but there’ll be scars left behind. Maybe it would have been kinder to wipe their memories, too.
But that’s exactly the kind of thinking I have to avoid if I’m going to keep control over the Panacea. I can’t tweak people’s minds in whatever way I think will help them. That’s a dangerous road, and it’ll end with me controlling them more tightly than Cartaxus.
We roll toward the checkpoint, the jagged purple leaves of the razorgrass border glinting in the sun. The team of hackers pulls open the barricades to let us through, looking stunned.
“Welcome back, Jun Bei,” one of them says as we drive past. “You did it.”
I just nod. They don’t know what I’ve done. They think I’ve solved everything, but I’m not sure that I have. I’ve created code that shouldn’t be controlled by anyone, but which everyone in the world will want to control. It should be a cure for violence, but it could spark the most vicious, brutal wars humanity has ever seen. The Panacea offers us immortality, but it just might kill us all instead.
The checkpoint closes behind us, leaving the Lurkers on the other side. We reach the potholed, rubble-strewn road that cuts into the city, and Mato takes my hand. His touch sends a spark through me, but it’s followed by a sudden urge to pull my hand away. This is what I’ve been obsessed with—finishing the Panacea. Curing everything that’s wrong with the world. Now, though, the doubts inside my mind are whipping into a storm. And it feels far too late to turn back now.
We pick up speed, following the crater-pitted road through the razorgrass border and into the city’s feather-covered streets. Mato steers us into one of the tunnels that dives into the rock. Steel security gates are locked across our path, but Mato’s mask flickers with light, and they roll back into the walls. He’s the one who built the systems that control this place. This could be our city now—nobody would oppose us with the Panacea under our control. Maybe managing the code would be easier if I didn’t have to do it alone. Maybe, together with Mato, I could turn the world into a better place.
I close my eyes and see a flash of Novak’s troops on the ground after Mato killed them with the scythe, and I know there’s no chance of that.
The van’s engine echoes off the tunnel’s curved walls. We finally pull up next to an elevator that takes us down into the bunker’s apartment levels. Mato guides me through a maze of hallways and out to the charred expanse of the park. It’s full of people, their eyes glazed or lifted to screens hung on the bullet-riddled walls. A few of them turn to look at us, but most don’t respond. They’re watching footage of the horde outside, and of me walking through it. The sight fills me with dread. Everyone knows the Panacea is finished, and they’ll be waiting for it. They’ll expect it to bring them the freedom I promised—not an armful of encrypted code. Everything about this is starting to feel so wrong.
The storm inside my mind builds into a hurricane.
A woman with flame-colored hair catches my eyes through the crowd. “Is it really true?” she calls out.
I just nod, not even able to bring myself to reply. I don’t trust my voice. Mato shoots me a curious glance, and a murmur ripples through the crowd, rising into a cheer. I should be floating on the applause, but all I can think of is the people I’ve turned against to get here. Leoben tied to his chair. Ruse, begging me to stop what I was doing before it was too late. Even Novak, dying so that I could live.
I was so obsessed with finishing the code that I thought it didn’t matter who I hurt. How can I trust myself with the minds of the entire world?
“Jun Bei?” a voice calls out. A girl with shining, armored skin is pushing through the crowd. There’s a crack running across her chest that’s held together with metal staples. My breath catches. Rhine. She must have gotten out of Cartaxus somehow. More hackers are following her, elbowing their way through the crowd. None of them have seen me yet, but they look furious. They must know I’m the reason that Rhine’s team was left behind.
“Shit,” I breathe to Mato, backing away. “The others from the lab are here. The ones we left behind. They look pissed.”
“So?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow.
“So? So they know I betrayed them. They’ll tell everyone.”
“You don’t need to worry about them anymore,” Mato says. He slides his fingers through mine. “You have the Panacea. Send it to them. If they can’t understand why you had to leave them, then you can make them understand.”
I freeze. “You mean…”
“Loyalty is an instinct,” he says. “You have the ability to invoke or suppress it with your code. You’re going to need a lot of followers to change the world in the way we’ve always dreamed of. Maybe you should start with them.”
I shake my head. “No, Mato. I don’t know if we should even release…”
But I can’t finish the thought. Everything I’ve done has been to finish the Panacea, and now I don’t have any choice but to release it—there’s nothing else I can do to stop the Lurkers. There’s no clean version of the vaccine to use instead. I made sure of that when I stormed Cartaxus. I put all my energy into the Panacea, and now I don’t know how I feel about it.
All I know is that Rhine is searching through the crowd for me, calling my name,
and I’m not ready to face her.
Mato looks at me, frowning. “You’re overwhelmed. You’ve barely slept. Let’s send the code out, and then we can talk about this. I’ll start getting the network ready—I need to head to the communications room. Why don’t you go to Regina’s lab? You can use her genkit to run another check on the code. Maybe it’ll help you feel better about it. When I’m done, we can fraction again, hack Cartaxus’s network, and send it out. Then this will all be over.”
“Okay,” I say, numb. He slips back into the crowd in the park, and I turn and cut through the hallways, taking the service tunnels, heading for Regina’s lab. I don’t know if I want to check the code again, but I know I want to be alone. The stairwell is empty, and the steel door to Regina’s lab is open. I walk in carefully, my hand resting on the gun at my hip. An old woman is standing beside one of the lab counters. She turns to me as I walk in. Gray hair, bright eyes, and a wide, genuine smile.
It’s Agnes—Catarina’s friend. The old woman who took care of her through the outbreak. She seems to know who I am—like she’s been waiting here for me.
And there’s a gleaming scorpion on the counter beside her.
CHAPTER 32 CATARINA
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THIS isn’t Ziana?” Anna hisses. She whips her head around to stare through the open doorway into the loading bay. The gun-bots have retreated, and the soldiers are leaving too—some carrying their wounded, some bleeding and dazed, staggering away from the smoke. A woman is coughing, shouting orders to open the exits to the surface and jam the doors so they can’t lock if the self-destruct sequence starts up again.
“I think this is a copy,” I say, gesturing to the limp body on the stretcher. “I don’t think she has a brain—I think she was grown to use as a decoy. Agnes was doing everything I told her to when I said we had Ziana, but when she actually saw her, she didn’t care anymore.”
Cole leans over the stretcher, staring down at the pale, unmoving girl’s body. Her eyes are closed, her features slack, her limbs still lifeless. Without a panel in her arm, I can’t check her neural function or even run a scan on her DNA. “It looks just like her,” he says. “Are you sure?”
“Not sure enough to leave her behind,” I say, “but I really don’t think it’s her.”
“Either way, it’s time to get out of here,” Anna says, darting another look through the doorway. “Nobody’s coming for us yet, but they will be soon. We might be able to get to the Comox we came in on if we run.”
“I’ll see if I can kill the lights,” I say. I tilt my focus back into my cuff, searching through the bunker’s systems for the lights to this level. The soldiers here are still reeling from the self-destruct sequence, and I don’t think we’re high on their list of priorities right now, but I doubt they’re going to let us run past them and take a Comox. I need to give us some cover.
I open the lighting controls, navigating to our level, and switch off the flood lamps in the ceiling outside. The room goes dark, the soldiers shouting in confusion, and I start to close the security menu, but a warning catches my eye.
It’s from the civilian stairwell controls, blinking red. It doesn’t look like it’s part of the self-destruct sequence, and it isn’t a glitch. It says there’s a stampede on the bunker’s exits.
A rumbling starts up below us, the wall of tanks beside me trembling.
Cole’s brow creases. “What is that?”
My stomach tightens. I pull up a feed from the cameras in the ceiling of the emergency stairwells the soldiers just opened up. At first the feed looks glitched—it’s dark, pixels flashing randomly—but then it sharpens into a blur of bodies and wild, terrified faces. I check the feed from another stairwell, and it’s the same. All the elevators are rising, packed with people. The rumbling grows louder, the liquid in the tanks around us rippling.
Homestake’s soldiers just unlocked the civilian levels after the self-destruct protocol. Now eighty thousand people are all trying to get out at the same time.
I look up at Anna and Cole, my heart pounding. “You need to get out of here now. The civilians are coming.”
“Shit,” Anna says, ducking out to take another look through the door into the dark room beyond us. The soldiers are still scattering. A set of backup lights is flickering near the exit, casting a yellow glow over the loading bay. Nobody is paying attention to us. It’s time to get out of here.
Cole lifts Ziana from the stretcher and throws her over his shoulder. He steps out into the loading bay. “Follow me.” He scans the room, then runs for a hallway, sticking close to the wall. Anna runs after him, her hands clenching and unclenching as though desperate for a gun. I run with her, bolting down the dark hallway, and skid as Cole stops outside a black metal door blocking the exit to the Comox’s landing pad.
“What the hell?” Anna spits, her breathing fast and shallow. She scans the door. “Where’s the control panel? Why is it locked?”
“It must have closed in the self-destruct sequence,” Cole says. “Looks like it didn’t open back up when the others did.”
“We can’t get through this.” Anna runs her hands along the edges of the door, searching for a switch. I send a pulse out with my cuff, locking in on the door’s controls, but they’re wrapped up in more layers of security than I can crack.
“I don’t think I can hack it,” I say.
Voices rise behind us, gunfire cutting the air. I look back over my shoulder. At the other end of the hallway, I can see a slice of the vast, dimly lit loading bay. The soldiers are still running through it, trying to open the exits that lead to the upper levels, but they’re not the only ones there anymore. People are swarming out of a door, spilling into the room. Just a few at first, then dozens of them, then hundreds. The civilians have reached our level. This place is going to be overrun.
“We need to get through,” Anna says, her eyes wide. “They’ll come down this hallway and crush us.”
“I’m trying,” I say, focusing, my mind spinning for a virus I can use to break through the door’s security.
“I’ve got this,” Cole says, setting Ziana down on the floor. His jacket is still draped across her chest. He flips the collar up, then pulls a thin, glimmering piece of metal from a slit in the fabric. It’s flat and silver, shaped like a diamond, the size of a thumbprint.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Anna asks. She stares at the blade. “No, Cole, it’s too dangerous.”
“We don’t have a choice.” He lifts the left strap of his black tank top and slices through the fabric. It falls away, exposing his shoulder and the leylines cutting across it, as well as the top of the shiny patchwork of scars across his chest. Four black leylines run up from his panel and across his bicep, flat streaks of darkness laid into his skin. They glide up the sides of his neck, branching under his chin and at the outer edges of his eyes. They’re flat tubes, just microns thick, carrying nanites that are too dangerous to pump through his body. I barely looked at the code behind them when I was healing him, because they were so well protected that Jun Bei’s toxic nanites weren’t attacking them. He lifts his arm, looking down at his panel, and my stomach clenches. I don’t know what he’s planning, but something tells me it isn’t good.
Anna shakes her head. “Cole, if it breaks—if even a drop gets on you…”
He looks over his shoulder at the civilians still streaming up through the stairwell. They’ve swarmed into the loading bay, shouting and screaming, searching for an exit. “There’s no other way to get to the Comox,” he says. “My tech is ruined anyway. Don’t try to get me out if I’m hurt—I’ll be fine here. Cartaxus will send someone for me.”
Fear prickles through me. “Cole, what are you doing?”
“I’m getting us through this door.” He touches the knife to the edge of his panel, near the crease in his elbow, where one of the leylines terminates. His eyes glaze momentarily, and he tilts the blade, sliding the tip beneath his skin.
Horror jolts through me. He�
��s cutting out one of his leylines. I don’t even know what that would do, except that Anna’s right—whatever’s inside that black line is probably more dangerous than Jun Bei’s toxin. He tugs the blade back and forth, the metal flat against his arm as though sliding it beneath a bandage—only it’s not a bandage he’s lifting away. It’s his own skin.
The black dot at the end of the leyline flips up, freed. Cole holds the blade in his teeth, then grips the tip of the leyline between his thumb and forefinger. A trickle of blood rolls across his panel, scarlet sliding over the flickering cobalt glow, and he starts to tug at the flat black line, ripping it away from his skin.
“Whoa,” I say, my stomach turning. “What are you doing?”
“I charged these nanites to be used as explosives,” he says, his voice muffled by the blade gritted between his teeth. The leyline has been torn out to halfway along his bicep, leaving behind a raw, bleeding channel in his skin. “We have twenty seconds until they blow.”
Anna shakes her head, dragging Ziana’s limp form back from the door. “Yeah, and if that thing snaps, the explosive is gonna be splattered all over you.”
Cole just grunts, wrapping the black, skin-flecked line around his fingers, yanking it higher, tearing across the skin of his shoulder. It tugs at his neck, and I scrunch my eyes shut, turning away.
Voices echo from the loading bay, followed by a burst of gunfire. The shouts of the civilians spilling from the stairwell ratchet into screams. I open my eyes, watching in horror as fighting breaks out between the civilians and Cartaxus’s soldiers. The civilians are running across the loading bay, panicked and wild. Some have weapons, others have children in their arms, and some are wounded. And now a group of them is headed straight for us.