by Emily Suvada
I strain to focus, but the outlines diverge further, splitting into separate, distinct objects.
Not overlapping. New. Like the world has been doubled in front of me, occupying a completely new dimension.
“Mato,” I breathe, gasping. “It’s happening.”
I know what this is. This is what I was trying to do earlier, but it’s taken losing my hand and running for my life to push me to this place. The pain in my wrist has broken through my defenses and the wall of my conscious mind, and beneath the horror and the shock, the shuddering of my muscles, a lick of pleasure surges through me.
“I think I’m fractioning.”
Mato turns his head, slowing his pace. I feel his focus push into the cuff, testing, and then retract. “I can’t tell,” he says. “We need to keep moving.”
A pulse ripples out from my cuff unbidden, flashing across the desert and into the sky. The panels of the people around me glow in my vision and then fade. Vehicles hum in the distance. Entropia is a pounding, blazing fire of light behind me. My eyes lift to the pigeons, to the wash of cobalt light, and I pause.
There’s something strange about this flock. I scan the birds, trying to pinpoint it, but my focus slides past them to four blinding points of white light in the sky. They’re racing in from the north, high above the pigeons.
“The destroyers are here,” I gasp, stumbling alongside Mato as he hurries down the street. I let my mind surge past the flock, rising higher into the fleet. There are four destroyers, each with smaller drones whining in formations around them. My cuff locks in on their controls, their satellite interfaces, connecting seamlessly.
“I think I can hack them,” I whisper, feeling drunk.
“Not all of them,” Mato says, weaving us through a crowd of people. “They have unique firewall protocols. If you take down one, the others will go dark. We need to find a vehicle and get out of here.”
Vehicle. The word echoes in the chaos of my mind, and I drop my eyes from the fleet, letting another pulse roll out from my cuff. There are hundreds of vehicles around us, thousands of pieces of tech sketched into my vision, but somehow my eyes lock instantly on a racing point of light near the base of the mountain. It’s streaking closer, heading for us.
Cole. The jeep. He’s coming back for me.
“No,” I whisper, staggering to a stop.
“Come on,” Mato growls. A flash of something cruel and desperate passes across his face. “I’m not dying tonight.”
“The others are coming back.”
“Let them,” he urges, dragging me forward again. “They can see the destroyers too.”
“I can’t let them die.”
“That’s their decision. They’ve had time to get out.”
I shake my head, swallowing, fighting against his grip, but he has one of my arms, and my other hand is gone. The point of light that is Cole’s jeep is growing closer.
I can’t let them come back here for me and die.
I swing my gaze up to the destroyers, my mind splitting cleanly in two. A seam forms in my mind, and I throw myself at it until the world doubles again.
Four skies. Four horizons. Four separate points of focus are burning in my mind, and I latch them on to the hearts of the steel destroyers. Their controls unspool before me—hard, but not impossible to break. I could only hack one at a time without fractioning, but I have four consciousnesses inside me now. I draw in a breath, hurling myself against the gaping seam inside me, and force myself through it like a battering ram against a cracking door.
Jun Bei’s voice rushes back to me. My legs buckle, my vision wavering, but my mind is sliding into the destroyers’ systems like a hand into a glove. There is not one of me—I am no single voice in the darkness. I am a chorus. A symphony of code and violence, driving a knife into each of their hearts.
A virus unfurls from me, air gasping from my lungs.
“Catarina—” Mato starts, then he falls silent, his gaze lifting upward. The pigeons are splitting, their calls rising into a thunderstorm as the dark shapes of the destroyers hurtle through them from the sky. Their steel bodies arc and tilt, falling in curves to the desert, shattering into broken pieces when they hit the ground. Plumes of fire splash through the night, sending up columns of orange flame, forming gaping black whirlpools in the pigeons. I slump against Mato, my chest shaking, the scent of sulfur and smoke biting at my throat.
Mato lowers me to the ground. His hands grip my arms tightly, but I can feel that he’s trembling. The jeep screeches across the street, its headlights splashing over me. The doors fly open before it’s even come to a stop.
“Cat!” Cole screams, but I can barely see him. My vision is a blur of silver, the light of the pigeons shaking like a video on repeat.
But the sky isn’t shaking—I am. I’m having a seizure. My chest convulses, my vision fading in and out. Footsteps pound across the street. “Cat, what did you do?” Cole’s voice breaks, his eyes wild. “Mato, what did she do?”
“She saved us,” Mato says, kneeling beside me. There is reverence in his voice, but his gaze is an abyss.
I hold his eyes and tumble into them, letting the darkness swallow me.
CHAPTER 26
WHEN I WAKE, MY EYES are heavy, my vision still blurry with sleep. I’m lying on something hard and cold, my mouth dry and tasting of ash. I must be indoors, because the air is cool and humid, faintly stale, humming with the low murmur of hushed voices. The edges of my mind are a sea of dark and raging waters.
We’re losing the vaccine.
The light of the pigeons feels like it’s burned into my eyes, millions of them swarming through the air, carrying the plague. The patched vaccine might hold the virus back from infecting us for a while, but there’ll be no stopping its evolution anymore.
I force my eyes open. A bar of light shines above me, surrounded by a halo of what looks like floating specks of brightness. The fraction in my mind is gone, but I can still feel the echo of it—the seam to split reality along, the myriad dimensions I glimpsed when I brought down the destroyers. It feels like a new sense inside me, and the urge to pick at it and take myself back into that place is hard to resist, even though it must have almost killed me. Mato was right. I don’t know if I can bear the thought of living in just one dimension again.
A murmur of pain in my left arm brings back the memory of the flash strip taut around my wrist. The blinding cauterizing lasers. I try to clench my fingers, but all I can feel is a low, tingling numbness. It tugs at a thread inside me, and I try to stretch my hand out, but there’s only an ache in response. I force my head up, fighting a surge of dizziness, blinking against the light above me. Blankets slide from my shoulders. I’m lying on a creaking metal cot, a strap wrapped around my arm keeping it locked down to the frame. My heart rate kicks higher, and I shove myself up on my good arm.
“Don’t try to sit up yet.” Cole’s face comes into focus beside me. He’s sitting on a fold-out chair beside my bed, shadows beneath his eyes, lines etched into his cheeks. “You should try to sleep a while longer. You shouldn’t be moving.”
I just shake my head, craning my neck to look down at my wrist. There’s a crinkled silver blanket wrapped around my left arm, a cannula and genkit wire coiling out of it. The feeling coming from my hand is still wrong, but I can see through the folds of the material that it’s been reattached.
I let out a shaking sigh of relief, rubbing my eyes with my good hand. We’re in a vast, dim room the size of a basketball court. The low concrete ceiling is supported with pillars stamped with hexadecimal location codes. Metal cots like mine are lined around me in a rough grid, filled with the slumbering forms of Entropia’s inhabitants. Some are bandaged or bruised, and some have family sitting beside them on chairs like Cole’s. A makeshift hospital ward. We must have evacuated to a deeper level in the bunker.
There’s a strange haze in the air—glowing flecks of dancing light, like fireflies, but smaller. They form clouds around the l
ights and are dusted over every surface, gathered in glowing pools in the folds of Cole’s clothing, scattered through his tousled hair.
“You have nerve damage,” Cole says, looking at my bandaged arm, “and some of your ligaments are severed. The bones are stitched, but they won’t be fully healed for a while. Regina saved it.”
I swallow, shaking my head. “Regina is the reason I had to cut it off.”
“I know,” he says. “She said the weevil glitched, that it was an accident.”
“It didn’t feel like an accident,” I mutter. “Are the others okay?”
“They’re fine. A lot of people here got infected, though. Hundreds are showing symptoms, but Regina is circulating the patched vaccine, and it’s working on the people who’ve received it so far. It’s curing the infection, but it’s taking time to distribute. It needs to be manually installed on everyone’s panel, like you did with mine.”
“Cartaxus hasn’t sent it out yet?”
“No, not yet, and morale here isn’t good. Everyone knows what this means for the vaccine.”
I nod, trying to clench my left hand, but the muscles don’t respond. Unease prickles through me. I tug at the silver blanket wrapped around my arm. It tears off in pieces, revealing my dirty fingernails, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around my wrist. The cylindrical forearm segment of my cuff is still gleaming and unharmed, an IV tube jacked into it, curling from a stand beside me. There’s a clean incision in the back of my hand where the weevil was removed, and a crosshatch of scars across my palm and fingers.
My hand is swollen and bruised, but it looks intact. Still, something feels wrong.
I pull up my panel’s menu, invoking a scan. The muscles in my wrist are still mending together, a carbon-fiber lattice knitting the edges of my bones. It’ll take weeks to heal, and even after the nerves are repaired, it might never feel the same again. But according to my tech, the reattachment was successful, all traces of the weevil removed.
“I want to check my hand,” I say, pushing myself up on my side. “Something feels wrong.” A waterfall of the glowing dust falls from my shoulders. It looks the same as the specks of light I saw on Mato’s jacket when I met him in the atrium. “What the hell is this stuff?”
“It’s a fungus,” Cole says. “One of Regina’s designs. This is the bunker’s basement level. It’s supposed to be a backup bunker in case the top section is breached, but there’s not much air circulation down here because they didn’t finish building it. I think the fungus is supposed to be keeping the air breathable.”
I grimace, feeling tiny dustlike flecks coating the inside of my mouth. I reach for the strap around my arm to pull the reader wire from my cuff, but the movement makes my head swim.
“Whoa,” Cole says, grabbing my shoulder, steadying me. “Wait a minute. It probably feels wrong because of the nerve damage. Just take it slow, okay? You’ve been through a lot.”
I let him lower me back in the cot, blinking against the spinning in my vision, my tech disoriented by the swirling clouds of dust. He looks exhausted, like the last few days have hollowed him out from the inside.
“Here.” He reaches for a canteen on the floor beside the cot, passing it to me. I lift my good hand to hold it, but my movements feel slow and staggered, my hand jerking wildly.
“Easy,” he says. “I’ll hold it.” He watches me as I draw in a long sip of the water, the liquid soothing my throat.
I swallow. “How long have I been out?”
He sits back down on the fold-out chair. “Almost a day.”
I blink. “A day? Where are the others?”
“Leoben and Anna are out looking for Lachlan, and Mato went into the desert to try to contact Cartaxus. He thinks the pigeons might be interfering with our comms. We’ve been sending reports, but nobody is responding. They’ve gone quiet since you brought that fleet down.”
“What’s Novak saying on her broadcasts?”
“She says there’s a small outbreak, that it’s under control. They haven’t mentioned the pigeons, and there’s no chatter about the updated vaccine. She’s calling for survivors to come into the bunkers as a precaution while this outbreak is controlled. She said the bunkers will be locking down in the next twenty-four hours.”
I sit up. “But flood protocol is off, right? This outbreak is in the pigeons—killing the people on the surface won’t solve anything.”
“You’re assuming Cartaxus is listening to reason right now.”
I shake my head. “That’s madness. They can’t kill every bird on the surface.”
Cole’s face darkens. “I’m not so sure. The bunkers are designed to last for over a hundred years. They have triphase clouds they could use to scorch the surface of the planet and kill this virus if they have to. If there’s no hope of creating a vaccine that will last, then they’ll find another way to stop the plague.”
The breath rushes from my lungs. “They couldn’t . . . ,” I start, then trail off, because of course they could.
The bunkers are underground, their civilians kept under perfect control, but Cartaxus has never done anything to protect the surface—they’ve never guarded any territories, never staked out forests or rivers or kept the cities from burning. All they did was protect their bunkers and their exclusion zones. It’s like they thought that protecting the surface would be a waste of time.
“They’ve always planned for this.” I close my eyes, seeing clouds of triphase crackling across the planet. Swallowing fields and mountains, chewing up every living thing and leaving ash and dust behind.
Erasing an entire planet’s worth of creatures. Every flicker of life, every coil of DNA.
“They’ve prepared for it,” Cole says. “It was always a possibility. It would take a long time to rebuild, but it’s possible. They have seed vaults, genetic libraries. They’d know how to start again. At this point, I don’t know if there’s any way to stop them from using flood protocol.”
“What are you saying?” I ask.
He lets out a slow breath. “I think we should go back to Cartaxus. We might be able to convince them to stop, and if we can’t, then there’s nothing we can do anymore. Finding Lachlan won’t help us. This has gone beyond our mission guidelines. I think it’s time to check in to a bunker.”
“What? How could you even suggest that?”
“I don’t think there’s any other solution, Cat. They’ve made up their minds.”
“No,” I say, yanking the strap from my arm. “They can’t scorch the goddamn planet.”
“We can’t stop them.”
“Yes we can,” I say. “They’re not all-powerful. I’ve been hacking their systems for years. Lachlan is still hacking them. They’re just people, Cole, and they have panels in their arms too. We can stop this.”
Cole’s brow furrows. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying that if flood protocol is still on, then Brink is the one we should be going after.” I pull the cannula out of my cuff and sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
“Just slow down,” Cole says.
“I’m fine,” I say, ejecting the reader wire from my cuff. It coils out of the glass, and I push the needle-tipped end into the back of my hand to kick off a scan. “I just want to make sure there’s no traces of the weevil left.”
“You’re not fine.”
“You need to stop worrying about me, Cole.”
“You died.”
The glowing specks of dust floating through the air seem to still. “What are you talking about?”
He steeples his fingers and presses them to his forehead, drawing in a long breath. There’s a new line of tension in his shoulders—a nervous energy, like he wants to break something. Like he can barely keep himself in the chair he’s sitting in. “Your heart . . .” He pauses, tilting his head back. “Your heart stopped after the fraction. You died for over a minute.”
I stare at him, not breathing.
“Your brain activity cut
out,” he says. “You were gone. Mato revived you, but you’re definitely not fine, Cat.”
I shake my head, confused. Even with gentech, a minute is a very long time to die.
“You can’t take risks like that,” Cole says, leaning forward in the chair. “We almost lost you.”
His voice is rough. I can’t tell if he’s angry or hurt, but the intensity in his gaze holds me in place, guilt plucking at the edges of my thoughts. I knew there was a risk the fraction would hurt me, but I couldn’t see another way to stop the attack.
“I had to hack the destroyers. I didn’t have a choice.”
Cole’s eyes drop. “You didn’t hack the destroyers. They were flying dark on manual flight controls specifically to avoid getting hacked.”
“But . . . but I hacked them,” I say, confused. “I broke into their systems—that’s how I took them down.”
Cole’s hands curl into fists. “No you didn’t,” he says gently. “You hacked the pilots.”
His words circle through my mind, taking my breath away. I grip the side of the bed with my good hand until my knuckles bloom white. “How many?”
“Four. One pilot in each. Mato said it was the same scythe code you used in the Zarathustra lab. They were dead before they hit the ground.”
I swallow hard. Four lives. That’s the second time I’ve unleashed Jun Bei’s scythe code without truly knowing what I was doing. Horror grips me. It’s not the act of killing that’s rattling me—I took down those destroyers to save the city—it’s the fact that I’m carrying a lethal weapon I’m not in control of. What if I launched it wirelessly without meaning to? With my cuff’s range, I could kill everyone within a mile. I want to delete Jun Bei’s scythe from my arm, to scrub it from my panel.