by Emily Suvada
“Okay, they’re locking weapons onto us,” Leoben shouts. “They’re pissed. It’s go time.” He hits a button beside the door, and it hisses open. A gust of icy air blasts in, almost knocking me off my feet, but a hand on my shoulder steadies me, and I look back into Ruse’s silver eyes.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, gripping my rifle.
“See you down there,” he says. “Good luck.”
Then he shoves me in the back and pushes me out of the Comox.
CHAPTER 40 CATARINA
I LAND HARD ON MY hands and knees on a cold tiled floor. I’m in the corner of a small lab with a genkit on the wall and a cabinet full of medical supplies. I recognize the room from Jun Bei’s simulation—it’s upstairs, near the dormitories. Voices echo from the soldiers outside, the sound filtering in through a window flung open to the night sky. I stand and spin around to scan the room, and bump into a metal operating table holding the body of a girl who looks just like me.
I stumble backward, my breath catching. Lachlan and Agnes are across the room, staring at me. The sight of both of them in the flesh rocks what little composure I’m still clinging to. The base of my skull is ablaze, and it’s taking all my energy to keep my focus in Veritas and not slip into the blackness calling to me from deep inside my mind.
The implant is hanging on by a thread. I don’t think I have much longer. It’s not helping that the body I’m sharing with Jun Bei is being ravaged by the Hydra virus. I look at Lachlan and Agnes, trying to keep my breathing steady.
“Goddammit,” I say. “I was hoping you two would have killed each other by now.”
“Hello, Bobcat,” Agnes says. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, dust streaking her skin. If she’s surprised to see me, she’s hiding it well. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Because I need your help—both of you.”
Agnes tilts her head. “I thought you’d be coming here to stop me.”
Something inside me aches at how normal she seems. I thought that seeing her in person, I’d be able to spot the difference between the Agnes I know and the coldhearted Viper. I thought there’d be some sign, some tell to reveal who she really is.
But there is no difference—the two are one and the same. The woman who made me lentil soup also infected Lachlan’s daughter to make him work harder.
“I am here to stop you,” I say. My eyes stray down to the body on the table, but I force myself to look away. “You’re going to end this war, and you’re going to delete the Panacea and help us finish the vaccine. I know what you’re planning, Agnes—I know you want to destroy Cartaxus and rebuild something new in its place, but I can’t let you do that. This vaccine has been manipulated for too long, and it’s almost destroyed us. Lachlan has almost destroyed us. We need to give the vaccine away to everyone. If you really want to save people, then you have to help me. This is the only way.”
Lachlan’s face is impassive, as though my words are washing over him but mean nothing. Part of me wants to yell at him and try to crack his facade. Because it has to be a facade. He can’t love Jun Bei as fiercely as he does without having a heart. And if he has a heart, then he has to feel something for me.
“It isn’t that simple,” Agnes says. “I wish I could help you, but the tensions in the world are too high. Too many people are calling for blood, and they won’t stop fighting until they have it. This war needs to happen, and it needs to be controlled. The people we lose now will ensure billions more survive. Everything I’ve done has been to save as many people as possible.”
“I know you believe that,” I say.
Agnes’s actions all make sense in a cold, twisted way. The pain she put Cartaxus’s scientists through. The games and torture and constant lies. When you’re working with a virus that could kill everyone on the planet, there should be no limit to the things you’re prepared to do to build a vaccine. Agnes asked me if I’d kill one person to save a million—and if I’m honest, I probably wouldn’t even think about it.
I’ve killed people for doses, or just for threatening me. I’ve been forced to do the math of life and death for the last two years of the outbreak, and I can only imagine the burden of making those decisions every day for the entire world. But that doesn’t make anything that Agnes has done anywhere close to right.
“We are facing a war,” I say. “There’s a way to stop it, though. We can forge an alliance, and bring the genehackers and Cartaxus’s civilians together.”
“And how would we do that?” Agnes asks. “Bobcat, think about it. These groups have nothing in common. They’ve been living in two different worlds, and they have no respect for each other.”
“So we give them something in common.” I step over to the metal table, looking between Agnes and Lachlan. “We give them a shared enemy. Two enemies, in fact. The man who turned the vaccine into a weapon, and the woman who founded Cartaxus. You can let billions of people fight among each other, or you can unite them all against the two of you.”
Agnes shares a glance with Lachlan. “That would be a good idea if they knew who I was. How are you going to turn the civilians against me?”
“I’ll tell them that you profited from the virus you were supposed to be curing. It’s time to tell the world that you based gentech on Hydra. The civilians will turn against Cartaxus the moment they learn that they can’t be immunized because their panels were built from the very virus that’s now threatening them.”
“How did you figure that out?” Lachlan asks, narrowing his eyes. “It took me years to understand why the vaccines kept failing.”
“I’m not as stupid as you think I am, but I had help. Jun Bei and I have figured a lot of things out for ourselves.”
“Nobody will believe you,” Agnes says. “This kind of news just confuses people. I’ve thought about a strategy like this before, but people don’t want to know the truth about how the code in their bodies works—they just want someone to blame when it doesn’t.”
“They’ll believe it because it won’t be me telling them,” I say. “It’ll be Dax and Novak. They’ve both agreed to stand together on this again.”
Lachlan shakes his head. “Catarina, think about what you’re threatening. Do you have any idea of the destruction an announcement like that would bring? Of how many people would reject their panels and die unnecessarily? They’d delete the vaccine. The virus would spread like wildfire. I’ve worked for decades to build code that would stop infection, and you could throw that all away in a single broadcast.”
“I know,” I say, “but making decisions about what’s best for other people is what’s brought us to the brink of annihilation. We can’t keep building societies based on lies. The truth will come out eventually—it always does. Let’s use it now to stop this war.”
Gunfire echoes from outside, the roar of a Comox swooping past the lab. Agnes steps toward me. “You don’t understand how complicated this is, Bobcat. Don’t you think I haven’t considered coming clean before now? I’ve weighed every possible way to save us—I’ve been working on this vaccine for more than forty years.”
I frown. “Forty? I thought the virus was discovered thirty years ago.”
She pauses—a hint of a crack in her composure. “Forty, thirty. It doesn’t matter.”
But it does. My mind spins back to the blueprints I saw in the cabin. There were pages dated from forty years ago with designs for what looked like an early version of a bunker. But why would Agnes design a bunker if she hadn’t discovered the virus?
“No, it’s important,” I say. “When did you really find Hydra?”
“It was forty years ago,” Lachlan says. “The early research wasn’t fruitful, though.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone about it? You kept those ten years a secret—why?”
“Why not?” Agnes asks. “We were embarrassed that we hadn’t developed a vaccine, but we shouldn’t have been. I had a world-class team searching for
a cure, but we couldn’t find one. We were developing cutting-edge treatments. If you think the government could have done better—”
“That’s not what I think,” I say. “I’m sure you did your best to find a cure. But you were also busy using the virus to create gentech.”
“Plenty of treatments are based on viruses,” Agnes says. “It was standard procedure to see if the genes of any newly discovered organisms could be used to save people’s lives.”
“Yes,” I say, the pieces falling together in my mind. “And you saw potential in Hydra—enough potential to try to create an entire technology based on it. But it wasn’t working, was it? Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken you ten years to come up with a simple gentech starter kit. Hydra was an effective vector, but you decided to make it better.”
Lachlan turns to Agnes. “What is she talking about?”
But Agnes doesn’t reply. The cracks in her composure are spreading. I stare at her, thinking of Entropia’s blast doors, of pre-gentech materials in the showers. “The original bunkers you built were prototypes, weren’t they?” I ask. “You knew the threat the virus would pose if it got loose, so you built two bunkers in Nevada, near each other. Neither of them worked, though—they had structural issues. But they also didn’t have airlocks.”
Lachlan stares at Agnes. “No. Tell me you didn’t…”
“The original strain wasn’t airborne, was it?” I ask. “It was a good virus, though—something you knew you could use. You worked with it for ten years, and eventually your team tweaked it to make it a better vector. You made it faster, more efficient. You made it tear through every cell in the body and be able to trigger coordinated, instantaneous reactions. You created gentech, but to do it you took a frightening virus and made it into the worst plague this world has ever seen.”
Lachlan steps back, staring at Agnes. “Tell me it isn’t true.”
Agnes drops her eyes, and for the first time, I can see what I’m looking for. A difference between the Viper and the woman I know and love. The cracks in her composure are growing wider, and my Agnes is waiting underneath. The years we spent together—the friendship, the lentil soup, the disgusting licorice candy—none of it was a lie. Relief swells through me, enough to threaten the last of what little strength I’m hanging on to.
“It was a mistake, Lachlan,” she says, her voice wavering. “The virus mutated unexpectedly—we didn’t try to create a pandemic. We were just tweaking the tools we’d built from the virus, but then it took a leap none of us expected, and there was no going back. There were investors. The government was involved. I was young and naive. I thought we’d be able to write a vaccine with the technology we were developing, but then we never did.”
Lachlan just shakes his head. “You made it airborne. You turned it into the nightmare that it is.”
“And that’s why I’ve had to work so hard,” Agnes says, her eyes flashing. “You think I wanted to hurt you all like I did? That I wanted to become a monster? Someone had to do it—and I was the one responsible for the virus. I was the one who had to keep pushing, fighting, and forcing us to do things we never should have, because I was the one who’d created the threat. I didn’t sleep properly for forty years. I turned myself into the villain that Cartaxus needed in order to create a vaccine. And it worked—we wouldn’t have been able to do it if it wasn’t for the Zarathustra Initiative.”
Lachlan looks between us. “But the vaccine still isn’t strong.”
“It will be,” I say. “Jun Bei is coming here now with the others—all of them. They’re all willing to walk back into this lab and jack into a genkit for you to finish this. Jun Bei is going to meld the vaccine with my DNA so that it doesn’t rely on gentech’s Hydra vector. That’s what Agnes is here for. She’s figured out how to merge my DNA with the vaccine so that no strain of the virus can stop it.”
Lachlan turns to Agnes. “Is that true? Is that why you were living near Catarina through the outbreak? You were studying her?”
Agnes blinks, the cracks in her facade still crumbling, her gray eyes locked on me. “That’s why I found her, yes. I hunted her down in the first weeks of the outbreak to use her DNA to fix the very first vaccine, but I was too late. The virus evolved, and the vaccine was useless. I didn’t end up studying her at all.”
“But you stayed,” I say, my voice small. “Why?”
Her eyes crinkle at the corner as she smiles. “I’d spent decades hurting people, and it felt good to help someone instead. It scared me how quickly I started caring about you. When I took Ziana, I thought I could force myself to finish the work I’d set out to do, but it only got harder. I started to care about Ziana, too, and I had to let her go.”
A lump swells in my throat. I knew it wasn’t a lie. Agnes might be the only person in my life who’s truly cared for me—not the girl who used to be Jun Bei—but me. Catarina. She may have found me because of my DNA, but that wasn’t what held us together.
She loves me. I know it. There has to be a way for me to reach her.
“Please, Yaya,” I beg. “If you’re serious about saving as many people as possible, then you know this is the only way. It’s time to face what you’ve done and tell the truth. I’ll stand by you if you do.”
For a moment it seems like Agnes is wavering, but Lachlan crosses his arms. “No,” he says. “She can’t. If we tell people the truth about gentech, they’ll never trust us again. We’ll lose decades of treatments and research. Thousands, maybe millions, will die because they’ll be afraid of the code that could be saving them.”
“But billions have already died,” I say. “If we don’t tell people the truth now, then this mistake is just going to be repeated, and maybe we won’t survive it next time. Maybe the virus will leap again and become something entirely new. Maybe Agnes will use the Panacea to control people’s minds, and end up destroying them instead. We can’t keep lying to people under the guise of helping them. Your lies are what has broken the world, not the virus. It’s time to trust that people still have the drive to put it back together again.”
“You mean it, Bobcat?” Agnes asks. She searches my face as though she doesn’t believe me. “You’d stand by me if I did this? You don’t hate me for what I’ve done?”
“I don’t hate you,” I say. “I don’t agree with the things you did, just like I’m not proud of everything I’ve done, but I’m trying to make it right. If you do the same, then I’ll find a way to understand. You’re my yaya. You’re family.”
Lachlan looks between us, frustrated. “Agnes—she’s not even a real person. She’s a creation I made to stabilize Jun Bei. Don’t let her manipulate you.”
“I’m not manipulating her, and I’m not your creation.”
“Of course you are,” Lachlan says.
“No, I’m not. Didn’t you ever wonder how Jun Bei grew my DNA inside her?”
Lachlan frowns. “She was interested in her… her sister. She’d always wanted to know more about her, but I couldn’t let her find out that I was her father. It would be too painful for both of us.”
“That’s why you changed the way you look,” I say. It suddenly hits me. I knew Lachlan had altered his appearance to stop Jun Bei figuring out the truth, but I didn’t understand why he had chosen the features he has now. The gray eyes, the dark hair. The chin and cheekbones and slender nose that perfectly match my own. He didn’t just choose his new face at random. He based it on the DNA of the other daughter that he lost.
All this time I’ve been thinking that I look like Lachlan. But it’s him who looks like me.
“You made yourself look like the other test subject,” I whisper. “Why would you do that?”
His face darkens. “I didn’t want to forget her. I wanted to look into the mirror every day and see what I’d lost. She was important to me, just like Jun Bei is, but I had to keep her a secret. If Jun Bei had found the DNA of her sister, she could have figured out that I was her father. I hid every sample, but she must have foun
d one and stolen it from the lab.”
I shake my head. “She didn’t steal a sample. She wanted to know what her sister’s DNA was, so she went looking for it. And she found it—not in a file, but in her own body. Just a handful of cells, but enough to cultivate, to try to create a sample of her own.”
Lachlan goes still. “You mean…”
“She grew me from inside herself,” I say. “But she didn’t understand how my DNA worked. She didn’t know that it was invasive, and that one of my cells was in her brain. By the time she realized what she’d done, I’d already taken over half her mind. She wiped herself because she found me, Lachlan. She wiped her mind because one day, I woke up.”
The blood drains from his face. “No.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m your daughter, just like she is. I’m not a tool. You didn’t create me—I created myself. I suffered through everything—the outbreak, the decryption, and your lies. You convinced yourself that you’d created me like some kind of god, and you missed what was right in front of you. I’m the child you thought you lost. It was me all along, and all you ever did was hurt me.”
He shakes his head. “No, it can’t be.…”
Another blast rocks the building. I grab the metal operating table for support, gritting my teeth against the pain in my skull. The implant is growing weaker by the second. If Jun Bei doesn’t hurry, then I don’t know if we’ll be able to do this.
“You were wrong,” I say. “Both of you. You’ve almost destroyed this world, and you’ve hurt everyone that you care about, but you have a chance to face what you’ve done and try to make it right. You’re both my family, and I don’t want to have to keep fighting you. There’s been too much fighting, too much death, and too many lies already. There’s a new world waiting for us, but it isn’t one of immortality or even peace. It’s the only world that’s right, though. It’s one that’s finally built on the truth.”