by Emily Suvada
I hear Cole’s voice calling my name over the whine of the engine. He’s bolting up the driveway now, shouting after us. The look of confusion is gone—I see it click inside him. That he knows I heard him. He looks suddenly hollow, but his jaw sets, and he runs back to the Comox.
We skid onto the highway as Cole flings open the Comox’s door and climbs inside.
“That thing you put on the Comox,” I say. “It isn’t going to hurt him, is it?”
Mato shakes his head, his eyes locked on the road. “No, it’ll just disable the engine.”
I grab the seat to turn around, staring through the foam-splattered rear window. Cole is climbing back out of the Comox, running down the road after us, shouting something I can’t hear.
Something twists inside me as his silhouette shrinks into a smudge on the road.
“What happened?” Mato asks. We speed north on the highway, leaving the house and Cole behind us.
“I . . . I don’t know if I can talk about it right now.”
Mato glances over at me, at my backpack. “You look cold.”
I look down. My bare arms are pale, covered with goose bumps, even though the air is warm. “I’m fine.”
He holds the wheel with one hand, shrugging out of his jacket. “You look like you could use this more than me.”
He meets my eyes, and for a moment I think I might cry, but I pull the jacket on instead, swallowing. “I don’t know what to do, Mato. I don’t know how to save us, but I don’t want to give up.”
“I’m not giving up either,” he says. “Just relax. I know a place we can go.”
We drive for ten minutes in near silence through a flat landscape of rocks and twisted shrubs. I can’t stop thinking about how I might have overreacted and misinterpreted what Cole was saying—how there might be some innocent explanation for what I overheard. But the explanation doesn’t come. His name pops up on my comm—calling over and over, sending messages telling me to come back, but he doesn’t say anything about Anna or what they were talking about at the creek.
He knows I heard him. He knows that’s why I left.
And he can’t think of a single thing to say to make me turn around.
Mato swings the jeep onto a dirt road. The hills in the distance are familiar, the low, rocky scrub stretching out for miles. A tingle of memory rises inside me—a low, insistent tug at my mind, like a scent in the air. Mato looks over. “You don’t have to talk if you’re not ready, but I’m here when you are.”
I close my eyes, forcing out a shaking breath. “I remember . . . I remember Jun Bei being with you.”
His hands tighten on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road. “I knew there was something different in the way you looked at me. How much do you remember?”
“Not much,” I say. “Just flashes. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shifts his grip on the wheel, stretching his fingers. “Lachlan gave you fake memories, didn’t he? I have memories like that from my childhood too. They’re a violation. Your own mind creates them when it’s lost a piece of its past. People tell you a story with pieces of something that could be true, and your mind fills in the details. Jun Bei made me promise once that I would never tamper with her past like that. I needed you to remember the truth on your own. I don’t expect you to remember or understand, or even feel the same way as she did, but I always knew we’d find each other again.”
Something in his tone makes me suddenly nervous. I don’t know how I feel about Mato—it isn’t really attraction, but I do feel a connection. There was clearly more than a single kiss between him and Jun Bei—whatever they had was far deeper. I know they were coding partners, and that’s a powerful bond. There’s nothing else quite like the feeling of two minds working in harmony—two people building things together, solving problems as one, truly seeing each other. That’s what kept me thinking about Dax for two full years after Cartaxus took him away, and it must have kept Mato thinking about Jun Bei in the same way.
But I’m not her anymore, and I don’t remember their bond.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“You’ll see in a moment—we’re almost there,” he says, pulling the jeep down a dirt driveway. There are mountains in the distance, their profile tugging at my memory. The ocean locked inside my mind swells, the wall inside me trembling as we pull over a hill and a steel rooftop appears in the distance.
The sight blazes through me like a flame along a fuse. Mato’s eyes fix on the rooftop, a low smile curving across his face. We roll down the driveway, crunching across a rocky, barren plain, and my breath catches as the lines of the house draw into view.
I know this place. I know this valley, these mountains, this desert. I know the curve of the rocky driveway and the slope of the steel roof. The windows catch the sunlight like mirrors, and the house seems to burn as we draw closer, shimmering in my memory.
This is where Lachlan changed me. We’ve been searching for him in a lab in Entropia, hunting for a window with a view of these mountains, but it was here all along.
We’ve been looking in the wrong place.
I turn to Mato, suddenly terrified. “Is Lachlan here?”
“No,” he says, pulling us in alongside the house. “It’s okay. Nobody’s here.”
My heart is still racing as we roll to a stop in the gravel driveway. This isn’t just a house—it’s a mansion. Stucco and steel and glass, sprawling across the desert, folding out into a geodesic dome around an overgrown greenhouse. Pots of wild, purple-streaked grasses sprout around the front porch, a rainbow of cacti filling gravel beds alongside the driveway. It’s beautiful. Wild and eccentric. It’s a house that Escher might have built, coiled into the desert like a lizard curled upon a rock. The sudden urge to jump from the car and run to the front door rises through me.
And that isn’t what I was expecting to feel when I saw it.
There is no rush of horror as I look at the house’s windows, no flashbacks of torture and restraints. This is where Lachlan changed my face, but suddenly all I can remember is happiness. Bright days and long nights spent working and coding. I look over at Mato. His eyes are locked on mine, and I can see him here—sitting across a table, turning protein models in the air.
“You . . . you worked here together,” I whisper, “didn’t you?”
He nods as we roll to a stop. “Yes, we did. This was our home.”
Our home. The words spin in my mind, whipping up the ocean locked behind the wall inside me. A hurricane of meaning in two little words.
Not a prison. A home.
“We started to meet in VR when Jun Bei was still in the lab,” he says. “We were just kids. She never told me about the Zarathustra Initiative, not until after we met here. She’d known how to escape from the lab for years, but she was staying for the others. I understood. I have a brother, and we’ve been through a lot for each other.”
I stare at the house, my heart racing.
“But it was our work that connected us,” he says. “We were so good together. She was so wild and brilliant, and I’ve seen that brilliance coming back in you. I knew you’d remember if I brought you here.”
He swings his door open and steps out. I climb from the jeep slowly, my boots crunching on the gravel driveway. A thread inside me tightens as I look over the house, drawing my past back to me. It feels like the building itself is trembling with memories, waiting to be unleashed. The scent of jasmine flowers wafts from a trellis on the porch, palm leaves swaying in the rocky garden.
This is the house where Jun Bei ended and I began.
“I need you to remember your past,” Mato says. “It’s time to let the walls down, Catarina. You need to bring back the girl you used to be. It’s the only way to save us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I spoke to Brink,” he says. “They’re launching flood protocol. Troops are going to raze every major survivor camp and bring as many people into bunkers as they can. They’re going to try
to kill the pigeons. The flocks aren’t as scattered as they thought. Cartaxus has airborne weapons they can use to hunt them down. It might take years to get them all, but Brink has decided it’s time to clear the surface of all possible hosts of the virus in order to protect this vaccine.”
“That’s madness,” I say. “They’re birds—there’s no way Cartaxus can kill all of them, no matter what kind of weapons they have. The birds will spread. They’ll evolve. There’ll be no way to stop them, and millions of people will die. We’ll lose the vaccine anyway.”
“I agree,” Mato says. “Cartaxus isn’t thinking with reason right now. They’re thinking with their instincts. Fear, survival, hatred. That’s why I need your help to stop them.”
My breath catches. Instincts. He’s talking about the Origin code. He wants to do what Lachlan has been threatening this whole time—to forcibly alter people’s minds.
“You want to wipe the Wrath,” I say, shaking my head, stepping away.
Mato turns to me, the sunlight glinting off his mask. It’s crystal clear, his eyelashes dark beneath it, a line between his eyebrows. “I know you hate the idea of it,” he says, “but I’ve been searching for a way to stop Cartaxus, and I believe this is the only way to save us. Without the Wrath, Cartaxus will see that there’s nothing to gain from launching flood protocol. They’ll see the only way to survive will be to work together to defeat the virus, not hide from it.”
I turn away, pressing my hand to my mouth, torn. I’ve never agreed with Lachlan’s plan, and I still don’t, but Mato’s right—there might not be any other way to stop this. Brink wants to murder all of us because he’s afraid of losing control. His base animal instincts might be enough to destroy the world.
“I couldn’t help even if I wanted to,” I say. “Lachlan is in control of the Origin code, and I don’t know where he is.”
“We don’t need Lachlan.”
Something trembles inside me. I turn to Mato. “Wh-what are you talking about?”
“Do you really think that all this was Lachlan’s doing?” he asks. “Lachlan’s work lives inside the body’s cells, but he doesn’t understand the mind. He’s never worn an implant or rearranged his thoughts. He still uses a goddamn scalpel. Lachlan doesn’t just need your DNA to use the Origin code, Catarina.”
He steps closer, and suddenly I can’t breathe. The ocean inside me is raging, slamming hard against the wall in my mind.
Mato brings his hands to my face. “Lachlan needs your help with the code,” he whispers, “because you’re the one who wrote it.”
CHAPTER 31
THE AIR STILLS. I STARE into Mato’s eyes through the glass of his coding mask, feeling a crack in the wall inside me creak open.
The Origin code. You’re the one who wrote it. The words sound impossible, insane—and yet they feel like truth as they settle inside me.
“No,” I breathe, pushing away from Mato, stumbling across the gravel driveway. I brace my hands on my knees, my vision spinning, seeing the Wrath sweeping over Sunnyvale, the crowd tearing one another to pieces. We’ve been hunting Lachlan down since the decryption to force him to remove his toxic code from the world’s panels.
But he didn’t even write it.
“Come inside,” Mato says, following me. He reaches for my arm, but I shy away, and he lifts his hands, stepping back. “I know you’re dealing with a lot, but we don’t have much time. Brink is launching flood protocol, and I don’t intend to let him destroy my home. We need to come up with a plan to stop him. Come inside, and we’ll talk.”
I straighten, looking at the house. “I’m not going to help you use the Origin code.”
“That’s okay,” Mato says. “It’s your code. All I want is to save Entropia and stop this attack. I know that’s what you want too. We’ll figure out something together. Let’s just talk, okay?”
I shove the hair from my face, drawing in a steadying breath, and nod. Mato steps toward the house slowly, as though I’m a frightened animal that might bolt if he makes any sudden movements. He swipes his panel over a scanner beside the front door, and it swings open into a large, bright living area. I follow him inside cautiously, my arms wrapped around my chest. The living room has white couches arranged around a circular fireplace, with white-and-purple orchids painted on the ceiling. Everything about the house is familiar, but I don’t remember it properly.
“This house is where Jun Bei wrote the Origin code,” Mato says, walking through the living area toward a slate gray kitchen behind it. “Well, it’s where she finished it, at least. She started with a draft she’d written with Lachlan, but I don’t think much of his original code remained in the final version. She’d been working on it with him for years at the lab. He noticed the instinct for the Wrath in Cole and saw a chance through her to build a suppressor for it, or even erase it permanently. He gave her a copy of it to keep working on when she left the lab.”
“She talked to him after she left?”
“Regularly,” Mato says, walking into the kitchen, testing the tap in the sink. It sputters for a moment before the water runs smoothly. He pushes back his sleeves and washes his hands. “Lachlan was the one who got her out of the lab. She said she killed a group of guards, and then he walked her to the road and called her a vehicle. He told her to come here, to this house—Regina’s house—so she did.”
Regina’s house. I look around, scanning the walls, pacing across the floor to a picture hanging near the kitchen. It shows a young woman who looks like Jun Bei, only she’s in her mid-twenties, standing with a group of people. It must be Regina before she remade herself. The group is holding a giant snake stretched out, supported between them. She’s laughing. One of the men in the picture looks like Brink, and another has a shock of red hair. His nose is different, his jaw is changed, and his eyes look like they’re green, but it’s clearly Lachlan. Brink wasn’t lying when he said he changed his appearance.
Mato steps up behind me and slides his jacket from my shoulders. “Regina gave Jun Bei this house when she arrived. Jun Bei couldn’t live in the city—it was too dangerous, and she didn’t want to change her face, but she didn’t want to be found by Cartaxus, either. So she stayed here. We’d been talking for years by then, so I started coming to work with her, and she quickly asked me to move in. She’d had four other people around her for her entire childhood, and she hated being alone more than anything.”
I turn to him. “But she was fifteen. You were living together? How old are you?”
“I was sixteen,” he says, “but it wasn’t like that. We had a different connection. We were two minds working as one.”
“Mato, I remember kissing you.”
His cheeks redden. He turns away, folding the jacket. “Well, I never said we didn’t kiss.”
He sets the jacket down on the kitchen counter. “Jun Bei became the person she was meant to be in this house. She began to heal from her childhood, and she found a strength that even Lachlan didn’t know she had. Her code was already spectacular, but it became truly extraordinary.”
I turn to him, walking to a stool near the kitchen counter, sitting down unsteadily. I’m still reeling, but my focus is drifting back to me. These are the answers I’ve been searching for ever since I learned the truth about myself. I draw in a slow, steadying breath, leaning my weight into my good arm on the counter. “What happened to her? How did she end up as me?”
Mato leans back against the kitchen counter beside me, drawing the metal pen from his pocket, spinning it between the fingers of his left hand. “I’m not entirely sure what started everything, but I think she went too far. We were rewriting our minds together here, learning to fraction, and building algorithms into sections of our brains nobody had touched before. Regina gave Jun Bei the cuff, but I installed the implant. I’d had one put in years earlier, but I hadn’t made much progress in using it until I started working with her. Her mind was so flexible, and she always wanted to keep going—pushing to bigger and bigger part
s of her mind, trying to dedicate more memory for fractioning.”
He looks around the room, wistful, as though remembering her here. “There were almost no bodily functions she hadn’t relegated to the chip. Breathing, digestion—every muscle control she could find an algorithm for. She even clipped her optic nerves and had her vision run through a VR chip for processing so she could free up space in her visual cortex. She was wonderful, but she was reckless, too. She lost memories constantly when she was trying to organize them in her brain. Sometimes she’d forget what trees were, and there was a week when she had to listen to music in order to speak. I urged her to move her essence—her memories and personality—into a section of her brain that she could close off and protect so that she’d be able to recode the other side completely. But that was the mistake.”
A chill runs through me. Mato crosses the room, spinning the pen in his hand, staring out the window. “I don’t know exactly what happened the day Lachlan came. I was at the marketplace, and when I came home, she was in a coma. She was running code to erase her memories—she was wiping herself. I saw that she’d called Lachlan just before she started, but I don’t know what he said to her. Whatever it was, it frightened her enough to make her erase every memory of the time she’d spent here. Everything in her panel was freshly encrypted, and she’d deleted every piece of code she’d written since she came to this house. I couldn’t wake her, and Lachlan was on his way in a Comox. There wasn’t enough time to get her to Regina.”
He drops his eyes. There’s suddenly a hint of shame in his face—like he’s begging me for forgiveness. But I don’t even know what he’s done.