This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  But I can’t afford to throw away one of the only weapons I have. Especially not now.

  I blow out a steadying breath. “At least we know the code still works. I thought Brink might have found a way to block it after I used it on that soldier.”

  Cole narrows his eyes. “That’s your response? Don’t you care that you killed them?”

  The question is like a slap. “How dare you ask me that? They were going to bomb us. I was trying to save you. Jesus, Cole. I lived through the outbreak—I’m not innocent, okay? If we’re going to stop Cartaxus from launching flood protocol, there’ll be a lot more blood on my hands by the time I’m done.”

  He goes still, staring at me, his face blanking with the wall I’ve seen slammed down so many times, but I’m sick of it. Sick of his judgments, of him looking at me like I’m something he needs to control.

  “You should go,” I say. “There’s no reason for you to wait here with me.” I pull up the cuff’s interface. It’s still scanning my hand, showing inflammation levels and details on the tech that’s running through my cells.

  “You don’t even know where the others are,” he says.

  “I’ll figure it out. I just want to . . . ,” I trail off as the results of the scan running in my cuff flash up in my vision.

  “What is it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” The results I’m seeing are comparing the DNA in my hand with that in the rest of my body. They match perfectly, but they’re showing an error. I push my focus into the cuff, digging through the results. Every chromosome has been sequenced and matched, accounting for minor mutations and changes. There are no toxins in my hand, no lingering effects from the weevil. No foreign DNA hiding inside my cells, waiting to attack me. My hand looks perfectly normal.

  Except for the fact that it has forty-six chromosomes, while my body has forty-eight.

  “What’s wrong?” Cole asks, his brow furrowed.

  I shake my head, feeling like I’m going to be sick.

  “Cat, what is it?”

  I blink the scan away, swaying. “This isn’t my hand.”

  CHAPTER 27

  COLE GOES VERY STILL. HIS eyes drop to my left hand, where bruised skin peeks out from beneath the gauze wrapped around my wrist. Dark crescents of dirt are caked beneath my fingernails, my thumbnail chewed down to the quick. There are familiar scars on my palm, a cut on my skin from where the weevil was.

  But it’s not really mine.

  It looks like it, but it’s missing two of my chromosomes.

  “What are you talking about?” Cole asks, his voice low.

  “Regina took my hand.” I close my eyes, seeing a sudden flash of the bodies in the tanks in her lab. The buckets of lungs. The twitching kilomeat at the market. They were all grown, not born. Built cell by cell in a tank. Anything can be grown with enough skill and time and the right piece of code.

  Even a hand.

  “Regina must have grown it,” I say. “It only matches my normal DNA—not the extra chromosomes. Not the part of me that lets me change myself.”

  The thought drags up another surge of nausea, but I swallow it down. I don’t even know how Regina could have organized something like this. Growing an entire hand would have taken weeks, even at the fastest rate. But weeks ago none of this was happening. Cole hadn’t showed up at the cabin, and Regina didn’t know that Lachlan had turned me into his daughter. There was no reason for her to start growing tissue samples of me, and certainly no guarantee that I’d show up here and cut my hand off.

  It doesn’t make any sense. But clearly it happened. The proof is sutured onto the end of my wrist.

  Cole stands swiftly, his eyes cutting across the room to the door. He drops his voice to a whisper. “Are you certain?”

  I follow his eyes. There’s a woman at the door with a gun in her hands. She looks away as soon as I glance at her, and the hair on the back of my neck rises.

  “Yes,” I whisper back. “I’m sure. She took my goddamn hand.”

  A muscle twitches in Cole’s jaw. He’s been saying all along that coming here was dangerous. He said Regina would hurt me, that I’d always be an experiment to her. I didn’t want to believe it, and I still don’t. She’s my mother. She cried when she told me the story about how I was created. She said I could make a home here.

  But she also said she wanted to study my DNA, and now she has a sample to keep alive in one of her tanks.

  “We need to find her,” I say, pushing myself up, standing shakily. I’m in my dirty jeans and crumpled T-shirt, now coated with a fine layer of the glowing dust. “I want my hand back.”

  Cole grabs my shoulder, steadying me. “We’re not going to find her, Cat. I’m getting you out of here. We’ll get your hand back, I promise, but first we need to get you to safety.”

  “I’m not going into a bunker.”

  “That’s fine,” he says. “We won’t go to Cartaxus. We’ll find the others and regroup outside the city. Just let me get you out of here, please. I don’t think you’re safe.”

  I look down at my bandaged hand, and then around the room. There are dozens of other people in cots around me, sleeping or talking in hushed voices. A row of tables on the far wall is piled with clothes and blankets, a few people milling around it with steaming mugs in their hands. The only guard I can see is the woman at the door, and she’s talking to one of the other patients, gesturing to the blankets. I have no doubt she’s watching me, but she shouldn’t be hard to get past.

  “How can we get out?” I ask. “They’re not going to just let me out through the main entrance. Regina wants me here.”

  “The elevators are guarded,” Cole says. “People aren’t supposed to be leaving—they’re trying to quarantine the infected. There might be another exit, though. I saw a maintenance shaft near the agricultural section, but I don’t know if it leads anywhere useful.”

  I frown, looking down at the glimmering dust on the concrete floor. When I met Mato in the atrium, he was dusted in the same glowing fungus. He said he took a secret entrance to avoid the crowds waiting for the elevators. A maintenance shaft, like Cole said. A tunnel drilled through the rock. It must have come from the basement levels.

  “I think you’re right,” I say. “Mato mentioned something. He said he used a maintenance shaft to get up to the jeep.”

  “Perfect,” Cole says. He glances at the guard and reaches for my backpack, slinging it on, then slides his arm around my shoulders. I’m still angry with him, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to walk without his help. I wrap my good arm around his waist for balance, leaning into him. “You ready?” he asks, dropping his head to whisper in my ear.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The woman with the gun watches us as we leave the hospital ward, but she doesn’t try to stop us. Her eyes glaze, though, like she’s sending a comm. Cole pushes through swinging double doors that open into a vast, bustling room full of haphazard groups of people and piles of belongings. The space has almost the same footprint as the atrium in the bunker—it’s giant and circular, but the ceiling is only a couple of stories high. There are groups camped on the floor, some sitting in circles with humming genkits. Fenced-off pens along the closest wall hold sleeping animals. A dozen hallways branch out from the edges of the room, leading to what look like dormitories and bathrooms. It’s a miniaturized version of the bunker, packed completely full of Entropia’s citizens.

  “The shafts were this way,” Cole says, guiding me toward a hallway to our left.

  I let him lead me through the crowd, keeping my wounded arm lifted protectively against my chest. I’m feeling steadier now that I’m moving around, but I really shouldn’t be walking like this. There are special precautions people take when they lose a limb to prevent damage that even gentech can’t repair. If I move around too much before the nerves in my wrist are fully bonded, then my brain might stop listening to the nerves in my hand. Neurons could be lost and neve
r fully regained. Mato didn’t seem to think much of losing the ability to control his hand, but the thought makes me nervous. I’m not sure I like the thought of relying on an app to control the way I move any part of my own body.

  The hallway branches into an open, cavernlike space. The ceiling is higher here, and there’s a wide pool of dark water in the center of the room, pipes creeping out of it to rows of floor-to-ceiling trellises heavy with thousands of purple-black pods. The air is humid and heavy, and the glimmering dust floating through it hangs thicker here, forming swirls around Cole’s shoulders as he leads me past the pool. The water looks icy and deep, thin shafts of light cutting down from high above it.

  I crane my neck to look up, spotting a curved sliver of light on the ceiling. There’s a round hole cut into the concrete, a circle hanging above it.

  Regina’s lab. The hanging steel platform. It must be right above us.

  “Back here,” Cole says, guiding me between two of the trellises. The wall beyond them is hung with plastic sheeting, but there’s a cold breeze here that forms a dark channel in the floating clouds of dust. Cole slides his arm from my shoulders and pulls aside one of the plastic sheets, revealing a gaping entrance, a chain hung across it at waist height.

  “This cold air is coming from somewhere . . . ,” he says, trailing off as footsteps echo in the hallway behind us. He turns, his eyes flashing to black for a split second, then he lifts the chain and ushers me through, gesturing for me to be quiet.

  The tunnel is raw stone, roughly circular, the floor littered with pebbles and chips of rock. It’s cold and dark, but my ocular tech sketches out a dark curve ahead of me, curling to the left, sloping gently upward.

  “Do you think you can run?” Cole whispers, slipping under the chain, letting the plastic sheeting fall behind us.

  I nod, lifting my wounded arm with my good hand, pressing it to my chest. “I can try.”

  His arm slides around my waist to steady me as we break into a run, his panel held up as a makeshift flashlight. I keep my audio tech dialed up, searching for a hint of the footsteps behind us. Voices echo faintly and the plastic sheeting crinkles, but nobody seems to be following us.

  The tunnel rises at an easy gradient, curving constantly to the left. It must be cut in a spiral around the bunker. It’s big enough for a vehicle, partially blocked by the occasional rockfall or pallets of concrete mix and excavation equipment. The muscles in my legs feel weak, but my tech compensates, sending oxygen into my muscles, sharpening my reflexes. After what feels like an eternity of running through the dark, a yellow light glows ahead of us, and the tunnel widens. Cole slows us to a jog as we reach a fork.

  “Which way?” I ask, gulping for air, leaning against his side.

  “That’s where the breeze is coming from,” Cole says, pointing to the right. “My tech thinks the parking lot should be that way too, but I don’t have a map to check.”

  I look up at him. “Didn’t Mato give you guys access to maps of the bunker and the city?”

  He nods. “Yeah, but this shaft wasn’t on them. That’s why I noticed it earlier. It wasn’t in the search grids we’ve been using.”

  A flutter of unease rolls through me. I look between the two tunnels, then send out a pulse from my cuff. It seems to run sluggishly, my tech focusing its energy on my wounded arm. Ripples of light splash across the tunnel’s walls, sketched in my vision, but they’re just a mess of reflections. Something’s blocking the scan.

  “What is it?” Cole asks.

  I hesitate, staring at the wavering patterns of light. The scan is probably screwed up because we’re underground. We don’t have time to waste checking both these tunnels. Regina’s people are already looking for me. “Nothing,” I say, following the breeze along the tunnel to the right of the fork. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  The last section of the tunnel rises sharply, the cold breeze growing stronger until we round a corner and step into a dimly lit room cut into the rock. There are crates stacked against the walls, along with a pile of scrap metal and a broken drilling machine. The air is humming with the distant calls of the pigeons. We must be getting close.

  “The parking lots are this way,” Cole says, weaving through the crates to a hallway.

  I follow him, breaking into a run. The hallway branches into the cavern we first drove into with the showers along one side, the rows of trucks and cars lined up behind them. The jeep is waiting in a space near the back, covered with dust and feathers, but it’s there.

  Cole jogs for the jeep, slinging off my backpack. The doors open automatically, the headlights splashing on.

  “Where are the others?” I ask.

  “They took one of Regina’s vehicles,” Cole says. “I told them to leave this here in case I needed to get you out.” He tosses my pack into the back of the jeep and pulls out his rifle. “Let’s hope they don’t have barricades at the entrance. Come on, let’s go.”

  I climb carefully into the passenger seat, cradling my wounded arm to my chest. Cole climbs in, revving the engine, and swings us out of the parking lot and into the tunnel that leads up to the surface. It’s empty, the fluorescents in the ceiling dim. Feathers are scattered across the floor, along with the occasional splash of scarlet from one of the pigeons detonating.

  Cole slows the jeep as we approach the exit, the tunnel brightening, daylight slanting in from the surface. The roar of the pigeons grows louder until it’s deafening.

  “Shit,” Cole says, slamming the brakes. “They’ve closed the gates.”

  I follow his eyes to a lattice of steel bars locked over the mouth of the tunnel, blocking the exit to the surface. There are no chains or bolts holding the gates shut. They must be controlled by Entropia’s security system. Cole grabs my headrest to twist in his seat, starting to reverse back down the tunnel, but I grab his arm.

  “I might be able to open the gates,” I say.

  He glances back down the tunnel, then nods. “Okay, but be quick. Regina’s people are going to be here any minute.”

  I close my eyes, slipping my focus into my cuff’s interface. A pulse rolls from it instantly, lighting up the jeep’s dash, Cole’s panel, and a row of cameras set into the ceiling. A security port beside the gate glows white in my vision, and I lock on to it, feeling my way into its controls.

  Mato was right—Entropia’s security is lax. A single firewall crumbles before me, yielding me access to the gate, the lights, to everything in the tunnel. I send a command to open the exit, and the steel bars let out a screech of metal as they roll back into the wall.

  “Nice work,” Cole says, revving the engine. He starts to pull us forward, but brakes suddenly.

  A rumbling starts up from outside. Shadows flicker in the light cutting through from the exit as people spill through the newly opened gates, rushing inside.

  It’s a mob.

  Dozens of people are running down the tunnel from the surface, some armed with guns, some carrying bags clutched to their chests. They must have been waiting outside the gates. The jeep’s headlights splash across them as they race down the tunnel toward us, blocking our path. They all look like they’re in shock—their eyes wide and glassy. Some are staggering, clutching the walls, their skin covered with bruises.

  They’re all infected.

  “Holy shit,” I breathe. There are thousands of people in Entropia—maybe tens of thousands, including those in the settlements outside the city, and they were all watching the pigeons come in last night. There are only a few dozen people here, but even if the infection rate is only a few percent, it’d mean there are hundreds more out there. This crowd looks desperate, terrified. They must have come here for help from Regina. And she can give it to them—she has the patched vaccine.

  So does Cartaxus, but obviously they still haven’t sent it out.

  “There has to be another way out of here,” Cole says, staring behind us, swinging the jeep back down the tunnel. The crowd is bolting after us now, yellin
g, waving for help. More are pouring in from the entrance, following the others. An engine sounds behind us, echoing through the tunnel. Regina’s people have come to chase us down.

  “Goddammit,” Cole says, slamming the brakes, turning back to the crowd.

  We’re trapped.

  The crowd surges, surrounding the jeep. None of them are trying to hurt us, but they’ve formed a throng around us, making it impossible to move. Cole’s eyes lift to the rearview as fresh headlights splash across the tunnel’s walls. His knuckles bloom white on the steering wheel. “Get your seat belt on,” he says, his voice grim.

  “No,” I beg him. “We can’t just drive through them. Hit the horn, tell them to get out of the way!”

  He slams the horn, but the crowd doesn’t shift. A woman is knocking on my window, her eyes wide and glassy, bruises covering her face.

  “They aren’t going to listen,” Cole says. “They’re feverish and desperate. Regina’s people are almost here. I need to get us out.” He jerks the jeep into gear. The tires spin, the jeep pressing into the crowd. A man near the hood starts screaming, and I grab Cole’s arm.

  “Stop it!” I shout. “We have to help them.”

  He hits the brakes, staring at me. “Help them? What are you talking about? What the hell do you want from me, Catarina?”

  “I have the vaccine in my arm,” I say, staring through the windshield as the crowd swarms around us, angry faces pressing against the glass. “Maybe I can hack their panels and install it.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” he growls.

  “Just give me a second.” I drag up my cuff’s menu again, searching for a virus I can use to force the patched vaccine into these people’s arms. The engine behind us is getting louder. A man slumps against my window, leaving streaks of blood across the glass. I flinch away. His face is swollen, slick with blood, gashes open on his cheek and forehead.

  My breath stills as he looks in at me with glassy eyes, his body twitching.